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There has been some speculation over the last 24 hours that Andrew Breitbart will be making an appearance as himself in Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming HBO project “More As This Story Develops,” and that is indeed the case.  “More,” which will star Jeff Daniels, is a dramatic pilot based on the world of cable news.  Originally, Breitbart was to be in a debate scene opposite MSNBC anchor Chris Matthew, but MSNBC has squelched Matthew’s participation.  New York Magazine reports (emphasis mine):

Vulture hears that plans for Matthews to shoot a roundtable debate scene in Develops alongside conservative muckracker/ Weiner-eater Andrew Breitbart have had to be scrapped because, according to a production insider, Matthews’s bosses at MSNBC nixed the idea.

It’s not like MSNBC has a blanket no-scripted-programming order for their anchors: Matthews played an MSNBC reporter two years ago in the Russell Crowe pic State of Play. And a guest spot on Sorkin’s show would likely be good for publicity; assuming it goes to series, Develops will likely boast an audience filled with the sort of left-leaning smarties targeted by the news-and-opinion network. So what was the problem? Our spy speculates that even though Sorkin’s ideology meshes with MSNBC’s, the network’s brass may have taken issue with the way More portrays the world of cable news and its corporate culture.[...]  (UPDATE: Our source has further elaborated to us that MSNBC also didn’t like the fact that parts of the show seemed to be skewering left-leaning media.)

NY Mag describes the lead character, an anchor to be played by Daniels, as “a passionate, liberal Keith Olbermann–esque character.”

Sorkin won an Academy Award for the Social Network last year.

More as this story develops….

Obviously, it means everything we’ve ever believed is absolutely wrong.

The free market just doesn’t work. Every conservative really is a secret dog-whistle racist. America is no more exceptional than North Korea. The earth really is barreling towards cataclysmic destruction because of you air conditioner. True equality and justice comes from redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. Wait–

*brakes screech*

*spit take*

*jaw drops*

*pants fall*¹

Redistribution of wealth? Lucky for Aglialoro and his partner at Atlas Films, Harmon Kaslow, they’re located smack dab in the middle of millionaire country; and Los Angeles’s rich filmmakers all agree that redistribution of wealth is the right path for America! So, here is my plea to some of Tinseltown’s most beloved left-wing filmmakers. We’ve seen the light, and now we need your help.

Aaron Sorkin:  Your screenplay for The Social Network, a deconstruction of a modern-day captain of industry, was a runaway hit. It more than recouped its $40 million production budget with a global take of over $200 million.  Surely you can spare 50% of your Social Network royalties for a struggling production company for whom the free market has failed. Oh, I see; you’d resist because Atlas Shrugged doesn’t deserve this money, right? The writing was stilted and didactic? It skimped on marketing? That, Mr. Sorkin, is what we call blaming the victim. These hard-working people, who put their heart and soul into this film, are like an innocent Alaskan caribou shot and butchered by apathetic moviegoers– witless bullies destroying the potential to finish a historically important film adaptation. Mr. Sorkin, surely you have the moral courage to take a stand against this injustice, to give your hard-earned money to those less fortunate artists, cruelly maimed by the dog-eat-dog world of capitalism.

James Cameron:  What more is there to say about the success of Avatar? Yeah, you may have only surpassed the gross of Titanic by jacking up ticket prices, packaging them with little plastic sunglasses, but by gum, you surpassed Titanic, almost earning $3 billion. Now, at the very least, you can help offset the carbon footprint of your film, its DVD sales (remember, DVDs are wasteful), and Atlas Shrugged’s production.

Now, I know this is a touchy subject, but I think it’s a great opportunity for you. We’re quickly coming up on the five-year anniversary of Al Gore stating we only have 10 years to prevent a “tipping point” in our climate’s destruction. Since then, the only thing Al’s cut back on is his number of wives, and things aren’t looking so great for your own efforts against nothing less than the destruction of worldwide ecosystems. This is a crucial moment, Jim; this is your chance to turn the tide. Do you really need the money from DVD sales of your films? Please, Mr. Cameron, stand in solidarity with endangered species and donate 100% of this year’s royalties to Atlas Productions on the condition that 25% of them will be used for carbon credits. You’ve had a taste of the thanks you can receive from the world’s indigenous populations; why would you hold onto transient wealth and prevent yourself from receiving this thanks from the very fauna and flora of the Earth? Remember, you can’t take it with you, Jim. Not even the submarines.

Adam McKay:  Surely, sir, you see how the example of Atlas Films versus your own Gary Sanchez Productions is a textbook example of income disparity– the same disparity you handily reminded us of in the infographic credit sequence of your blockbuster hit The Other Guys, which cost $100 million to make and grossed $170 million worldwide.  That and your three previous films have all been profitable because you found ways to repackage Will Ferrell’s schtick in wildly different settings and situations, attracting a large, enthusiastic audience and making you a very, very, very, very, very, very, very rich man. You’ve stated in the past that executives in other industries make too much money and should keep less of it for the good of everyone.

So, let’s review some economic facts here (I can’t afford to hire animators for an infographic):  your theatrical films alone have earned a collective $453,190,451 in box office receipts, though their production budgets only add up to an estimated $263,500,000. That’s $189, 690,451 in profit, a profit margin of almost 42% (obviously those figures don’t include marketing costs, but they also don’t factor in DVD sales or money from product placement through multinational corporations). Atlas Shrugs still hasn’t recouped $15,659,145 of its production budget after a month in theaters. That loss could be covered by 8.2% of the profits of your films (and this isn’t counting the profits of Funny or Die or your income as head writer of Saturday Night Live).

Now, obviously, the lion’s share of that money goes to the production companies who fund your theatrical films, so I have no idea how much of this money is actually yours. But I still have no doubt that you could fill the deficit of Atlas; at the very least, you could convince your good friend and collaborator Will Ferrell to donate that much from the $20 million he demands per film, leaving him with $4,340,855 to live on until his next project– a sum that many Americans would kill to earn for a few months of work. If that’s too unreasonable, surely you have enough millionaire friends that 16 of you could donate just under a million dollars for those whom the free market has forsaken?  Or are we gonna have to introduce more strenuous regulations to counteract your greed?

The Rest of Hollywood: Should these men fail to abandon capitalistic avarice and refuse to help out peers in need, this is an open call to make President Barack Obama proud of you and spread the wealth around. Remember, you pledged.

¹ They were actually already down.

—–

Yeah, okay NBC, except that in the movie the Michael Douglas character didn’t get all sanctimonious about serious issues and then trot off to do an appearance on Oprah.

Anyway, let’s add complete lack of imagination to Obama’s growing pile of failures. After all, who plagiarizes the worst part of a movie?

Jonathan Strong at the Daily Caller:

In a press conference announcing the release of his long form birth certificate, Obama denounced the “silliness,” the “sideshows and carnival barkers” that forced him to release a completely unremarkable document after years of speculation on the issue had metastasized into a political phenomenon he could no longer ignore.

“We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do. We’ve got big problems to solve,” the president said.

Minutes later, he boarded a helicopter, bound for Chicago where he will interview with Oprah, the queen of daytime TV talk shows who recently launched her own network.

Full piece here.

Imagine my surprise upon hearing that AOL/Huffpo’s editorial policy is the following: 

Andrew Brietbart’s ad hominem attack on Van Jones in The Daily Caller — right down to calling him a “commie punk” and “a cop killer-supporting, racist, demagogic freak” — violates the tenets of debate and civil discourse we have strived for since the day we launched. As a result, we will no longer feature his posts on the front page.

He is welcome to continue publishing his work on HuffPost provided it adheres to our editorial guidelines, as the two posts he published on HuffPost did — guidelines that include a strict prohibition on ad hominem attacks. Our decision today recognizes that placing posts on the front page is an editorial call that elevates some posts over others, and is an indication of how seriously we take these judgment calls.

Good enough. As a website editor myself, I appreciate the idea of wanting to elevate the debate. Admittedly, I do find it more than a little creepy and totalitarian for AOL to include in that “ad hominem standard” what someone says or does elsewhere. But when you’ve been studying the Left for as long as I have, you come to expect the default setting of them wanting to control what people say. (See: Jon Stewart.) What I don’t understand, however, is what Arianna Huffington and AOL are going to do now. I can’t imagine AOL intends to take the actionable position of singling out Andrew Breitbart — discriminating against him because he’s Andrew Breitbart or conservative or something.

But herein lies AOL’s problem…

It’s just a fact that the same Bill Maher who just last week called Sarah Palin a “dumb twat” on national television is also a front page AOL/HuffPo contributor. It’s just a fact that Alec Baldwin, who once called for the death of a sitting congressman’s children is a front page AOL/HuffPo contributor. And who will ever forget Sean Penn’s desire to see his critics get “rectal cancer?” Will AOL/HuffPo allow Penn to continue to enjoy his front page status?

As Mr. Maher himself might say: New Rules!

But the most confusing part of this AOL/HuffPo editorial rule (that no one knew about until now), is Mr. Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin is infamous for smearing Sarah Palin, but unlike the various ad hominem attacks unleashed by Baldwin, Maher, and Penn — Sorkin unleashed one of his most famous ad hominem attacks against Palin on — wait for it, wait for it — the Huffington Post! But wait, it gets better. Sorkin’s ad hominem attack was published on HuffPo’s — wait for it, wait for it — front page (if memory serves)!

Who will ever forget AOL’s own HuffPo gracing its storied front page with the following… [emphasis mine]

The snotty quote was posted by Sarah Palin on (like all the great frontier women who’ve come before her) her Facebook page[.] …

I can’t make a distinction between what you get paid to do and what Michael Vick went to prison for doing. I’m able to make the distinction with no pangs of hypocrisy even though I get happy every time one of you faux-macho shitheads accidentally shoots another one of you in the face. …

So I don’t think I will save my condemnation, you phony pioneer girl. (I’m in film and television, Cruella[.] …

And you didn’t just do it for fun and you didn’t just do it for money. That was the first moose ever murdered for political gain. You knew there’d be a protest from PETA and you knew that would be an opportunity to hate on some people, you witless bully. …

I eat meat, there are leather chairs in my office, Sarah Palin is deranged[.]

Those are just pull quotes. If you read the whole thing it is in total a flaming piece of ad hominem. And so we are now left to wonder…

Does AOL have a different definition of ad hominem than, say, the rest of the planet?. Or do they have some explaining to do as to why a foul mouthed, ad hominem flame-throwing 9/11 truther like Van Jones is dictating their editorial policy?

When BH editor John Nolte asked me if I wanted to take a peek at the pilot script for Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming HBO series about the drama behind the scenes on a cable news network, I said “Yes!” without hesitation. Word on the street was that the main character was based on MSNBC’s recently dethroned Keith Olbermann, and I was curious: Would “Olbermann” be raked over the coals or treated as a media icon?

I’ll get to the answer in a few.

The show, which is as yet unnamed, takes place behind the scenes of News Night with Will McCallister, a show broadcast by the fictitious United Broadcasting Systems. Will McCallister is the pseudo-Olbermann clone who knows a lot about sports, can’t be bothered to remember the names of his staffers, and can’t seem to hold on to an executive producer (E.P.) for longer than 14 weeks. In fact, in the show’s opener, Will is given the unhappy news that his current E.P. Don has elected to join Will’s protégé, who has just been given his own show, and Don is taking most of the production staff with him.

Amongst the few junior staffers who are still on Will’s team are Maggie, Steve and Neal. Maggie and Steve are involved romantically, even though such fraternization amongst co-workers is discouraged, and the relationship is not going well.

Even worse is the news that Will’s boss Charlie Skinner, who is the president of the cable news division, has gone behind Will’s back and replaced Don with Mackenzie MacHale, a top-notch producer whose own chance at on-air stardom at a rival network fizzled and who is now in need of a job.

The twist here is that MacKenzie is Will’s former lover, with whom he parted ways on a sour note several years before. And when Will and MacKenzie come face to face for the first time in three years on her first day on the job, we are treated to Will’s famous temper a la Olbermann. “How dare you SIR!” (No, Will doesn’t actually say that. I just couldn’t resist.)

So far, so good. All typical fodder for this type of television drama: love triangles, stars with inflated egos and sneaky bosses. Then there’s the gratuitous liberal jab at certain big corporations in the guise of entertainment – Sorkin hearkens back to the BP oil well explosion for the big news of the day and Halliburton’s use of faulty cement to seal the well’s bottom. Whatever.

But let’s get back to my original question: Is “Olbermann” raked over the coals or treated as a media icon? The answer is, a little of the former and a lot of the latter. Yes, the Will McCallister character seems highly unlikable. It’s surprising that his head can fit through the front door, let alone fit within the confines of a television screen. Nobody seems to like working with him and they exit stage right as soon as they get the opportunity. In fact, Charlie Skinner tells Will that he’s probably “nicer to work for than Bin Laden.” Talk about damning with faint praise. Yet despite all of Will’s foibles, the most important thing we discover about him is that he’s a newsman who’s been wronged.

Yes, wronged. MacKenzie bemoans the fact that “they baited” Will into going into an on-air rant about how there aren’t any statistics to support the claim that America is the greatest nation in the world. (Who are “they?” It’s not mentioned, but it doesn’t exactly need to be spelled out.) As a result, Will’s lost his nerve, lost his edge, and the network has been forced by his insurance company to hire a body guard due to his receiving death threats.

There’s a money quote in this scene, uttered by MacKenzie, where he tells Will he’s not a liberal, he’s a newscaster and therefore needs to be himself — that’s his brand.

See? Newscasters are not liberals, they are themselves. And people like MacKenzie are needed to help them broadcast the right information to the hoi polloi because, as we’re also told, the great unwashed are uninformed and need people like Mackenzie and Will to give them information. Such nobility…

Get that? Maybe I’m nitpicking, but note she doesn’t say false or incorrect information, but wrong information. Who decides what’s right? Who decides what’s wrong?

Who watches those who make those decisions? That’s where we come in, my friends.

“Inception” Cinematographer Wally Pfister with Christopher Nolan

From ABC News:

Backstage he went further, expressing shock at Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposal, which would limit union’s collective bargaining powers…

“I think that what is going on in Wisconsin is kind of madness right now,” Pfister says. “I have been a union member for 30 years and what the union has given to me is security for my family. They have given me health care in a country that doesn’t provide health care and I think unions are a very important part of the middle class in America all we are trying to do is get a decent wage and have medical care.”

Yes, nothing like an Academy Award winner who can afford to send his three children to whatever school he wants coming to the aide of the unions that have destroyed the public schools.

Regardless of your perception of unions, comparing Hollywood unions to the Wisconsin teachers union is hardly apples to apples.  Hollywood unions bargain with corporations that have money they have earned by making movies like “Memento,” “Batman Begins,” “The Prestige,” “The Dark Knight,” and “Inception” (just to name a few Pfister has worked on personally), and unions collectively bargain to get a greater share of the revenue.  Governments, on the other hand, don’t earn anything; they extract taxes from citizens, many of whom have fallen on tough financial times.  Pfister’s union crew bargains with the capitalists that have a stake in the outcome of the negotiation, a vested interest in reaching a reasonable agreement with the unions – their bottom line depends on it.  Governments, on the other hand, have no such bottom line to worry about (see: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act).  In Wisconsin, the unions are trying to strong-arm politicians (many of whom are bankrolled by the unions come campaign time) in order to pad their pension fund with tax dollars, all at the direct expense of the state’s fiscal health.

Hollywood unions bargain with corporations for the corporations’ money; in Wisconsin, they’re bargaining with union-backed politicians for the taxpayers’ money.  It’s one thing to add to the Warner Brothers’ tab; it’s quite another to add to the citizens’.

Yet, the way Pfister understands things, it’s the taxpayers, sick and tired of getting pick-pocketed by the teachers unions, who are responsible for the “madness.”

Still, we saw awards go to left-leaning Hollywoodists like Aaron Sorkin, Colin Firth, and Natalie Portman, among others, without many sucker-punches for us to highlight, so we thank Mr. Pfister for the content.

I will say, though, that after watching every film nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, that Aaron Sorkin certainly deserved his nomination. Obviously, I have an awfully low opinion of Sorkin as a human being, but the brilliance of the “Social Network” script can’t be denied. The dialogue is sharp and keeps the story moving, the characters are well defined, but most impressive is a structure that effortlessly leaps from one lawsuit deposition to another to a series of linear flashbacks. The flow of information is non-stop and yet thanks to some extremely well written exposition and a seamless structure, the audience is still able to keep track. That is no small achievement. And while the overall feel of the film might be stand-offish and emotionally detached (by design, I’m sure), it is a thoroughly engrossing story from opening scene to close, even if you’ve already seen it once before.

I do not, however, believe Sorkin deserves to win. The ‘Toy Story 3″ screenplay is far more impressive, a hands-down masterpiece of storytelling filled with more imagination than any film in recent memory. “Magic” feels like too small a word to describe the final and best chapter in Pixar’s beloved toy series, but it’s the only word that does the story justice. Sorkin’s going to win the Oscar and no one can say that his work wasn’t Oscar-worthy, but it was not the most Oscar-worthy amongst those nominated this year.

From my original review:

Directed with skill and precision by David Fincher and impressively scripted by “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, “The Social Network” is tightly told, well paced, and quite brilliantly structured with a story that unfolds through the inter-cutting of two different lawsuit depositions and flashbacks. The acting is impeccable, especially Eisenberg’s performance as the world’s youngest up and coming billionaire and Justin Timberlake as Napster founder Sean Parker, a craven party-boy genius whose unerring sense of the big picture is frequently undone by a dark nihilistic streak. His Svengali-like influence on Zuckerberg, who like himself is driven beyond reason to settle old scores, real or imagined, will prove the old adage about gaining the world at the cost of your soul.

Aaron Sorkin is up for an Academy Award this year for his “Social Network” script, a film many on the left have criticized for its demeaning portrayal of women. Here at Big Hollywood, we’ve also documented at length Sorkin’s raging obsession with Sarah Palin, a dark anger with a life all its own that likely goes well beyond partisanship and says something about Sorkin himself. After all, he never criticized the former governor based on any kind of substance, never says here’s where she’s wrong on this issue or that — which would be perfectly fine. Instead, we’re aways treated to this nasty but revealing streak of name calling and personal attacks. What drives this? What drives a man who has everything to demean women in such a public way, both onscreen and off?

Well, we’re not psychiatrists and coming to any kind of conclusion regarding whatever Sorkin’s troubling personal issues are would only be speculation. So we thought, why not ask you? When the American people chime in, they usually get it right, so please do take our poll and help us to understand where this bizarre behavior might come from.

Take the poll below the fold:

The furor has has since died down, but immediately after the Oscar-nominated film was released more than one critic pointed out that the female characters in “The Social Network” are mostly beautiful sluts, beautiful crazies or barely-clothed set dressing always getting high or drunk and more than willing to give it up on their knees in a men’s bathroom.  There’s also the main character, Facebook Co-counder Mark Zuckerberg, who’s portrayed as a insecure man seething with hostility towards women, especially after he’s dumped by his girlfriend in the opening scene. Sorkin would have us believe that what drove Zuckerberg to create Facebook was a desire to prove himself to that very same girl, while in reality Zuckerberg claims he was with the same girlfriend he has now during that time — an Asian girl named Priscilla Chan (and it’s a couple of Asian girls who take the worst beatings in Sorkin’s film).

 Defending his work, Sorkin wrote the following:

I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80’s. They’re very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren’t women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)

You can read a devastating response to that here.

But in other words, Sorkin punts and blames all of Harvard for what many perceived as the film’s disturbing misogyny (but I thought Harvard was a progressive school?). You see, it’s not Sorkin who has hostility issues towards women, he was simply portraying reality, portraying how intellectuals are bitterly angry that all the pretty girls still want nothing to do with them even though they perceive themselves as Masters of the Universe. Insert: record scratch.

In light of Sorkin’s seethingly vitriolic personal attacks on Governor Palin, does that sound a little close to home?

Since October Sorkin has launched three (that we know of) rages against Palin, none of them based on substance, all of them deeply personal. In the flurry of Sorkin’s anger, ad hominem, and frustration, it’s not hard to conclude that this goes well beyond partisanship. For whatever reason, Sorkin has some psychological need to hurt and demean the former Governor, to get to her, to have her pay attention to him: 

Oct 4th: “Sarah Palin’s an idiot. This is a remarkably, stunningly, jawdroppingly incompetent and mean woman.”

Dec. 8th: “I get happy every time one of you faux-macho shitheads accidentally shoots another one of you in the face.”

And just this past weekend: “I think that we have big problems right now,” Sorkin said. “And Sarah Palin? She needs a therapist, okay? We need the smartest guys, the best Ph.D.s around to be solving these problems. I don’t have any patience for the glamorization of dumbness.”

Sorkin is likely to win an Oscar for his screenplay, but in light of all that we’ve learned since about the mangling of the facts creative license involved in portraying both Harvard and Zuckerberg, it’s probably safe to say that ”The Social Network” is less about the creation of a social phenomenon and more about the tour of a troubled man’s decaying soul.

Father of the Year?

“And I want to thank all the female nominees tonight for helping demonstrate to my young daughter that elite is not a bad word, it’s an aspirational one. Honey, look around, smart girls have more fun, and you’re one of them.”

Because we all know how grounded and at peace with himself the elitist Aaron Sorkin is.

Yep, if we were handing out life advice to impressionable young children, you can bet Mr. Sorkin would at the top of the list. No demons or bitterness or mercenary impulses there. Just the kind of sunshine and gumdrop elitism that turns you into the kind of person who, during misogynist rants undoubtedly crafted while wearing elitist eyeglasses that have been conspicuously absent during awards season (self-conscious much?), wishes hunters would accidentally shoot one another.

Sorkin’s Golden Globes shout out to all those actresses is likely nothing more than a cynical plea to the Academy to forgive a screenplay many criticized as — like his sexist rants against Palin — anti-woman:

 Missing from what critics are calling the defining story of our age are female characters who aren’t doting groupies, sexed-up Asians, vengeful sluts, or dumpy, feminist killjoys[.]

Sorkin wants that Oscar so bad he can taste it like the cool, round edges of a glass pipe.