Me: So, I found this article by Secretary of Defense Gates: “China Could Undermine U.S. Military Power in the Pacific.”  China is expanding its navy in the Pacific to secure disputed territories in the South China Sea with lots of oil and gas.  A Tom Clancy/Harrison Ford thriller.  I’ve followed the Chinese military since the nineties and it’s a central plot of my novel, “Stealing Thunder.” (Shameless Plug! 600 pages long; waiting for Amazon jerks to come through with the darn discount price…).   Think “Clear and Present Danger,” “Hunt for Red October”…

Executive: Liked ‘Sum of All Fears.’

Me: Yes, but the terrorists in the book become cliched neo-Nazis in the film, remember?  Gates said that we should be concerned with China’s “… cyber and anti-satellite warfare, anti-air and anti-ship weaponry.”

I studied “Unrestricted Warfare,” a book written by two Chinese colonels. Their strategy won’t bankrupt their Free-Enterprise-as-long-as-The-Generals-Get-Their-Cut Economy like the Socialist Soviet Union under Reagan’s brilliant strategy.  They said, “One war [1991 Gulf War] changed the world. [Look at] all the new words that began to appear after 17 January 1991. It is only necessary to cite the former Soviet Union, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, cloning, Microsoft, hackers, the Internet, the Southeast Asian financial crisis, the euro, as well as the world’s final and only superpower — the United States.”  New technology, a big canvas, a huge VFX trailer!

Executive: But, well, that implies that the socialist Chinese officials are, well, bad guys.  Just because they use North Korea as a proxy against Japan and the U.S. for nuclear weapons development, claim territory in the South China Sea disputed by a dozen nations and shot down hundreds of democracy activists in Tienanmen Square doesn’t really mean they’re bad guys.  Just a different…lifestyle.

Me: Okay, how ‘bout a Tienanmen Square angle? A few dozen activists morph into thousands hungering for freedom.  They even build a “Goddess of Democracy.”

Executive: Bit too much Statue of Liberty rah-rah, if you know what I mean.  Might be construed as supporting the troops.  That can’t fly.

Me: Ooooookay.  See, the demonstrators are crushed by Communist tanks and soldiers in a brutal crackdown that claims hundreds of lives. Thousands more go to jail.   Drama, and––

Executive: The DVD division is struggling for market penetration with the Blu-Rays, so can we call the country…oh, I don’t know…Mushamar, or Sinesia?  Gotta have that market.  How can democracy activists really be against a socialist government?

Me: Gotcha.  Let’s not focus on an event that might anger Beijing when it bids for the next Olympics and bans athletes and former athletes who’ve spoken out on behalf of Tibet, democracy activists — in a generic way of course – and minorities.  Consider a general human rights angle?  Small story, village in China having an election…

Executive removes shoe and plucks at string on his sock.

Executive: Small is good, small is lower budget.

Me: The village people are suppressed by the local left-wing Party Boss in Free speech, Free press, property rights, Freedom of Religion, etc… When local elections are held in these outlying areas in a “democracy experiment,” communist party cadre are invariably voted out.  We have our Hero and…

Executive: There’s that government angle!  And you said, “Village people.”  You’re thinking about a soundtrack deal?   Instead of “YMCA,” maybe something like, “Why My Blu-Ray…”

Me: No, not the Village People band but real village people.  Workers,  families, even people persecuted for their beliefs like the Falun Gong, and Christians.

Executive: Nobody ever believes that Christians have been persecuted…

Me: Only outside of Hollywood. Well, you can get into trouble for just distributing Bible’s for God’s sake. We could even include some Tibetans who walk around in saffron robes and get stun guns shoved in their mouths during interrogation–-

Executive: No Tibetans. That will kill our DVD sales in Shanghai.

Me: Okay, corporate?

Executive: Love it!  Corporations are always evil, always, always, always.

Me: But…don’t you work for a corporation?

Executive: Except mine.

Me: I see.  So this corporation censors Free Speech, working in collusion with an evil government.  And this company “has been assisting the Chinese government to censor and monitor its citizens’ Internet usage. It has removed web sites and articles that the Chinese government bans from its results.”  I even read an article  that  Jiang Mianheng, the son of the former President Jiang Zemin, wanted a demonstration of high-speed Internet searches.  So the engineer put his father’s name into the Google search engine. Shock!  Horror! Three of the top ten stories spelled out crimes committed by the senior Jiang during his socialist reign.  And ”Evil Jiang Zemin” came up as top hit! Jiang Mianheng ordered the website censored.   Favorable responses only! Media manipulation!  High stakes corporate shenanigans. Like Clive Owen and Julia Roberts in “Duplicity 2,” called “Duplicitious About Google.”

Executive: Google!  And damage our ad campaigns!!! Not to mention all the links we’d probably lose!

Me: But Google has a motto, “Do No Evil,” so it’s corruption between an all powerful dominating corporation with a despotic government. No?!  Okay, how about a reporter. Yahoo supplied the whereabouts of a Chinese journalist, Shi Tao, to the authorities.  Tao worked for Contemporary Business News. He got ten years in jail for violating a state secrets act: emailing the Chinese propaganda department guidelines for writing about the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre on its 15th anniversary.

Executive: Can he be from the Post?  We could get great lead coverage.

Me: Okay, go with financial manipulation?  The two Chinese colonels maintain that, “…that the financial attack on East Asia… represent(s) semi-warfare, quasi-warfare, and sub-warfare, that is, the embryonic form of another kind of warfare.” A greedy international capitalist predator crushes the Malaysian economy for personal gain!  George Soros!

Executive: And lose all my dinner invitations?!  We have eight graphic novel comic book movies in the pipeline.  Where do you think we get our merchandise from? China!

Me: “Okay, forget it.  I’m going to write it on my own.  Somebody will buy it.  Somebody will make it.

If…only….I can…..  Why didddd the Inter…net get so slowwww? But….I hav to writ that sc…ipt…  My made hard drive is…buzzing loudly…now smoking…   Damn, it’s Made in China.

My movie won’t be.

David N. Bossie, President Citizens United

The movie in question is “Hillary the Movie” and as a low budget documentary it bills itself as providing the untold story of who Hillary Clinton is by presenting nearly “40 in-depth interviews with experts, opinion makers, and many of the people who personally locked horns with the Clintons.”  Regardless of one’s perspective on the electoral merits of Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, it should be seen by industry insiders as truly remarkable that such a movie is subject to federal government regulation.  

The case began when a conservative non-profit group, Citizens United, announced plans to show the movie at theaters and to make it available in households with TV-on-demand access on cable TV.  Rather than let consumers decide for themselves whether to bring this movie into their home the FEC declared that it was in violation of the BCRA. 

The legal issues in this case should have nothing to do with the movie’s political point of view because even though the movie includes a mix of facts and opinion regarding the actions and behavior of Senator Clinton throughout her political career, such presentations are constitutionally protected.  The question is therefore whether the government should be able to re-categorize the packaging of this visual product created by Citizens United, i.e. the movie, and declare that it is a campaign ad subject to regulation under the BRCA.  If so, what else could be subjected to this form of “neo-blacklisting?”    

Remember this is a documentary being sold to the public and not affiliated with any campaign.  Unfortunately it is the position of both the FEC and the Obama administration that the government does have the authority to regulate such videos and that they properly used it when the FEC prevented “Hillary the Movie” from being distributed by cable on demand. 

Either the BCRA is being misinterpreted or the act is facially unconstitutional.  Either way the decision by the FEC was a clear and direct unconstitutional restraint on free speech – speech that is protected by the First Amendment and speech that is the foundation for artistic freedom relished by every writer and director – nay all members of the artistic community. 

The movie never formally encourages anyone to vote for or against Hillary Clinton or any other candidate for that matter, but it certainly presents an unflattering perspective of the former First Lady.  But unless all political viewpoints – including unflattering ones – are going to considered campaign projects in the future the fact this one was “slanted” shouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.  In fact Citizens United has previously produced several movies focusing on controversies of the day including the War on Terror, the United Nations, and illegal immigration.  These other movies have been shown in movie theaters and the DVDs are sold by many retailers and Amazon.    

Unfortunately if the FEC standard is upheld by the Supreme Court any of these topics could potentially be subject to government regulation. Moreover why stop with Citizens United?  Neo-blacklisting could just as easily be used to silence Michael Moore or Oliver Stone – two individuals whose political agendas are readily apparent in their movies. Where does a movie cross the line from art to campaign advocacy?  Would Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” pass the government’s campaign test – it is clearly advocacy as are many other films and documentaries.    

Instead of accepting Citizen United’s argument that the communication of its points of view on various topics – just like the communications by producers and directors all over the world – are a valuable contribution to the political process, the federal government and the FEC in particular believe that they can protect the American movie viewing public from the wrong kind of material.   

This isn’t just dangerous; the difficulties of such an approach are obvious.  In this very case, the government went so far as to argue that even the commercials promoting the movie, i.e. the movie trailer constituted “political electioneering.”  Follow this closely – since the movie is a “campaign ad.”  The ad for the “campaign ad” must also be considered a “campaign ad.”   Where does this stop? 

It is pretty apparent that the government has overreached.  In fact, political discourse is precisely the reason we have the First Amendment.  Regulating, delaying or preventing the outright distribution of political ideas is the very behavior of the government that the First Amendment was intended to prevent and just imagine what the movie industry would be like if this guarantee of freedom didn’t exist.  

If upheld this type of regulation will prove to be a double-edge sword.  Today its “Hillary the Movie” but tomorrow it will be Moore’s “9/11″ and Stone’s “W” or any number of movies that have a “political” bent.  Government should never have the power to decide for adults whether political commentary is too persuasive, caustic or unbalanced nor should it decide whether it can be viewed at home or at theaters.    

Horace Cooper is a legal commentator and an adjunct fellow with the Institute for Liberty. (www.horacecooper.com)