Dubya

Filming for Oliver Stone's new movie W starts in two weeks, and they still don't have an actor for Cheney. If they want to get it out by November, they're going to be in a full-on sprint. So it's not surprising to hear that despite his protestations, Stone's movie may be less than accurate. From one article:

Stone insists that every scene in W will be rooted in truth, and that he and Weiser drew from more than 20 diverse books — although, it should be noted, some accounts may have come from disgruntled former staffers. The director acknowledges that he had to speculate on some of the dialogue and delivery. ''You take all the facts and take the spirit of the scene and make it accurate to what you think happened,'' he says. ''But if you take one speech from Cincinnati and one speech from the U.N. and turn them into one scene, who cares?'' A few people, it turns out. Even before actors have arrived on the set — even before there are any sets — debate over the movie's accuracy is already heating up. The Hollywood Reporter even asked historians, including Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, to vet the early script. ''My quarrel with the script isn't that it departed from factual reality here and there, but that it just misses the guy,'' Draper tells EW. ''You come away with an even more hyperbolized caricature of Bush the Cowboy President than is already out there.''

I've said it before - Stone's king when it comes to conspiracy theory and propaganda filmmaking. I look forward to seeing his take on this administration, but I'm so deep into diminishing returns from "hyperbolized caricatures of Bush the Cowboy President" that I can't say I'm all that excited either. It'd be nice for a really radical filmmaker to come along, and dare say it, actually try to present something that tried to understand the world from the perspective of this Administration, rather than always playing the role of outsider, angry critic. Maybe we should get Errol Morris to do one.