In a recent article entitled “Washington-Set Films May Fudge Facts, But Good Ones Speak To Larger Truths,” the Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday discusses how D.C. audiences composed of political insiders scrutinize Hollywood’s D.C.-based historical dramas for fidelity to the facts. “Myth or reality?” she asks. “That’s the question posed by movies based on true events, and it’s a conundrum that Washington officialdom seems to have a perennial problem in reconciling.” As examples, she references such films as Charlie Wilson’s War, Thirteen Days, All the President’s Men, and of course, Oliver Stone’s controversial oeuvre: JFK, Nixon, and W. (I can’t tell you how long I’ve been wanting to use the word “oeuvre” in one of my blogs).

History buffs and D.C. insiders may nitpick about such films, but as Ms. Hornaday writes, “You don’t have to support Stone’s signature brand of revisionism to agree that overweening literalism can sometimes obscure a larger truth.”

Actually, the problem isn’t that adhering to the facts obscures the truth. The problem is that “overweening literalism” bogs down the storytelling. Bringing a fact-based story to the screen necessitates all sorts of manipulation of messy and inconvenient facts in order to compose a compelling, well-ordered tale: compressing time and events, creating composite characters and/or omitting others, putting imagined dialogue in the mouths of historical figures, etc. The trick, and the goal, is to manage all these creative techniques in a way that might “fudge facts,” as Ms. Hornaday says, but stays faithful to the truth.

She quotes The West Wing screenwriter Aaron Sorkin as calling nonfiction drama “a tricky needle to thread. When an audience sits in a theater having been told that ‘The Following is a True Story,’ they should look at it the way they’d look at a painting and not a photograph.” Exactly so, and I believe most audiences do view nonfiction dramas, or docudramas, that way. I believe most people understand that what they’re seeing is not a documentary or an exact record of facts, but an “artist’s rendition” of historical reality. (Even documentaries are not strictly collections of facts, of course; they too are carefully pieced together and shaped to tell an entertaining story from a particular point of view).

About All the President’s Men, which Hornaday says is considered the masterpiece of political drama, she notes that “it barely matters that the film’s most iconic piece of dialogue – ‘Follow the money’ – was never spoken in real life”:

Contrast this with the Left’s response to the 2006 ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11, which dramatized the chain of events that led to the Islamic attacks of that terrible morning almost exactly nine years ago (a morning the Left would like us to “get over”). As I’ve written about before, and as John Ziegler’s documentary Blocking the Path to 9/11 brilliantly depicts, Democrats hallucinated that the $30+ million miniseries was a hit job on the Clinton administration, concocted by a cabal of conservative filmmakers and somehow financed by a non-profit, Christian (gasp!) relief mission.

Without having seen a frame of The Path to 9/11, Democrat pit bulls like Senators Harry Reid and Louise Slaughter went into pre-emptive attack mode to protect their legacy, claiming that the miniseries was a pack of libelous lies, and threatening to pull ABC’s license if the show aired. Meanwhile an internet-fueled smear campaign spearheaded by the unscrupulous character assassin, blogger Max Blumenthal, ramped up a mob mentality among the lonely and the impotent in the blogosphere. Ultimately, Bill Clinton himself boiled over about it in his infamous interview with Chris Wallace.

They pulled out all the stops not only to censor The Path to 9/11, but to bury it, because the Left knows how critical it is to control the “consensus history,” that “usable past” that Ann Hornaday mentioned. In the end, none of their threatened lawsuits materialized, because the miniseries was faithful to the larger truth and they knew it. But the damage had been done – the show aired only once, and it remains unavailable on DVD.

This is the third time I’ve written about Fair Game for Big Hollywood. Why bother to devote so much space to a movie that’s fated for box-office oblivion anyway? Because it’s important to call out the Left’s persistent efforts to establish their ideologically correct narrative when the historical evidence doesn’t conform to it. Facts may be stubborn things, to paraphrase John Adams, but they don’t stop the Hollywood Left from spinning a “larger truth” out of a lie.

But you will look in vain for a DVD of the extraordinary and controversial Disney/ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11. 

Disney President and CEO Robert Iger

A $30+ million project that aired without sponsors on two September nights in 2006, The Path to 9/11 dramatized the historical thread that connected the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Islamic attacks on American interests throughout the ‘90s, and the terrorism of that fateful morning in 2001. 

Prior to its premiere, the producers at ABC were so proud of the impending project that they had high hopes of airing Path every 9/11 anniversary and showing it in schools across this country as an engaging educational tool – until an accusation of “conservative bias” (horrors!) on the part of the filmmakers quickly spun into liberal hysteria that the project was actually a “well-honed propaganda operation” on the part of a secretive, right-wing network-within-a-network. 

(Honestly, how divorced from reality must one be to believe that a supposed stealth cabal of conservatives could conspire to get a $30+ million miniseries green-lit in Hollywood? That’s damn near impossible for liberals to achieve. The whole outrageous story is narrated in John Ziegler’s inimitable style in his riveting documentary Blocking the Path to 9/11.) 

Clinton administration alumni, fearing the miniseries would highlight their flaccid response to the growing threat of Islamic extremism and tarnish their political legacy, pulled out all the stops to suppress it. The show very nearly wasn’t aired at all – Robert Iger and Disney were pressured by the Senate Democratic leadership, led by Harry Reid – it hasn’t aired since, and today you cannot even obtain it on DVD.

And why not? Disney President and CEO Robert Iger explains without elaboration that it’s a “business decision.” Oh, well then, case closed. Not only does he refuse to re-air The Path to 9/11 or release a DVD, but he has no intention of even selling the DVD rights to another company. I’m no financial wizard, but I can recognize that, as business decisions go, willfully taking a $30+ million bath on your product when there is a vast audience hungry for it and distributors making offers, is not one of the more lucrative marketing strategies I’ve ever heard of. 

Tom Borelli, however, is not baffled by this business plan. Director of the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project and a Disney shareholder, Borelli knows that this has less to do with a “business decision” and more to do with an ABC television project that drove former President Bill Clinton to near-apoplexy in his infamous interview with Chris Wallace, and which by extension is perceived to be a threat to the political future of Mrs. Clinton. Borelli has pointed out that Iger has been a steady Clinton donor since before the former first lady was elected to the Senate, and has accused Iger of protecting Hillary’s presidential campaign at the expense of shareholders. (Path screenwriter/producer Cyrus Nowrasteh himself was told privately by an ABC executive that “If Hillary weren’t running for President, this wouldn’t be a problem.”)

Borelli has publicly pressured Iger at shareholders’ meetings and twice made formal offers to purchase the DVD rights, only to be ignored. He has become such a thorn in Iger’s side over this apparently touchy issue that, after Borelli finished a presentation at one shareholders’ meeting, the Disney chief responded to Borelli’s outstretched hand with an obscenity that would have set Mickey Mouse’s bow tie spinning. Borelli promptly returned to the podium and announced what had just happened, to the astonishment of the shareholders. A publicly cursing Disney head honcho more closely resembles a South Park parody than the squeaky-clean image Walt’s company has cultivated for many decades. 

And how has this corporate self-sabotage and political favoritism affected Mr. Iger’s standing in the industry? Well, this Saturday night, the Directors Guild of America will honor him with their Honorary Life Member Award at the 62nd Annual DGA Awards. The Award is given “in recognition of outstanding creative achievement, leadership in the industry, contribution to the DGA or to the profession of directing.” Past recipients have included Walt Disney, Darryl F. Zanuck, Barry Diller, and Jack Valenti. 

Tom Borelli

I can’t speak for how Mr. Iger has “contributed” to the DGA or to the profession of directing, but “leadership in the industry”? I would think that the most basic requirement of business leadership in the entertainment industry would be to ensure the highest possible profit for your company and its shareholders, not to suppress a product with significant market potential to protect your political friends. Above and beyond that, real leadership would be to stand behind one of the finest docudramas in television history, and to assert the primacy of free speech in the face of an hysterically politicized campaign for censorship. As Mr. Nowrasteh wrote in the Wall Street Journal: 

Corporate timidity is preventing millions of Americans from finding The Path to 9/11 on DVD – though other politically controversial movies are readily available, such as Loose Change, which argues that the Bush administration targeted American citizens for death in an elaborate and sinister plot; or Michael Moore’s unabashedly biased Fahrenheit 9/11. These highly-charged movies, which don’t even offer a pretense of balance, and others can be found online or in retail outlets and DVD rental stores across the country.

And so they should be – just as The Path to 9/11 should be.

“We will write our own future, and the future will be what we want it to be.” – Barack Obama

In a quiet and seemingly innocuous gesture, President Obama has designated 9/11 as “The National Day of Service and Remembrance.” Personally, I liked the ring of “Patriot Day,” and what does “service and remembrance” mean, precisely ? The idea is to get Americans to “engage in meaningful service to create change…in four key areas”: education, health, energy/environment and community renewal. None of these seems to have anything to do with honoring 9/11, but that seems to be the point: in the Huffington Post, Muslim-American playwright Wajahat Ali wrote, “In the US, we are trying to move away from focusing on 9/11 as a day of horror, and instead make it a day to recommit ourselves to national service.” An excellent Spectator article provides a blunter translation: “Nihilistic liberals are planning to drain 9/11 of all meaning.” Why? ”They think it needs to be taken back from the right.”

In other words, they resent the surge of patriotism and righteous outrage stirred up by the attacks, sentiments that empower the political Right. In order to advance the leftist agenda of dismantling American exceptionalism and recasting ourselves as the villain in our history books, they need Americans to put 9/11 behind us, forget the victims, forget that our enemy danced in the streets in celebration, forget that Islamic terror plots on our very shores continue to be disrupted, and forget that our rights and freedoms are under assault by a subversive civilizational jihad.

It seems impossible to believe that that morning could be forgotten – just as it was once impossible to believe that our government could erase “jihad” and “Islamic” and “terrorism” from our national lexicon, preventing us from even naming the enemy, or that an American President could proclaim us no longer a Christian nation, but rather one of the world’s largest Muslim countries. There was a time when screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh’s extraordinary 2006 ABC miniseries The Path to 9/11 was going to be shown in schools across this country and be aired every 9/11 anniversary – until the Clinton administration, wanting you to forget their flaccid response to the growing threat of Islamic extremism, and fearing the show would tarnish their political legacy, pulled out all the stops to suppress it; it very nearly wasn’t aired, and today you can’t even obtain it on DVD.  (This whole story has been related fascinatingly in John Ziegler’s must-see documentary Blocking the Path to 9/11). It’s impossible to forget that morning only if we fight to keep its memory alive.

Americans can commit themselves to public service any or every other day of the year; 9/11 should be reserved for solemn remembrance and renewed commitment to preserving American security, values and sovereignty. A day of greening your neighborhood? I’m all for planting trees, but what does “green” have to do with 9/11?  Only that it’s the color of Islam. But if the President insists, allow me to suggest some service appropriate to the day: 

Education? How about this: educate yourself and your children about 9/11 and about the continuing Islamist threat – not only of overt acts of terrorism, but the insidious dangers of “stealth jihad” and “creeping sharia.”

Environment and community renewal? Okay, beautify your block by flying the Stars and Stripes. It sends a simple but unmistakable message to the enemy and their useful idiots that, unlike our post-American President and his fawning media, you are proud to be American; you believe in American exceptionalism; you believe that making this day about installing fluorescent light bulbs trivializes the memory of 9/11’s victims; and you will never let their deaths be in vain or erased from history.

Eight years ago, nineteen fanatical Muslims turned hijacked aircraft carrying hundreds of terrified passengers into missiles targeting symbols of American might. Nearly 3000 innocents died horribly that day, including hundreds of courageous, selfless first responders making a superhuman effort to rescue their fellow citizens. The hijackers are regarded by their fellow Islamists as heroes and martyrs in the cosmic war against the Great Satan America. That war is by no means over, and thus, in the Faulknerian sense, neither is 9/11. We owe it to the victims to keep this day alive in our hearts and national consciousness - and not allow the Left to bury it.

Directed and co-written by Cyrus Nowrasteh, “The Stoning of Soraya M.“ is based on Freidoune Sahebjam’s novel and stars Jim Caviezel and Shohreh Aghdashloo. According to a press release, it opens June 26th “in New York, Los Angeles and other key markets, with a national roll out to follow.”

More information is available at the official website.