In many popular narratives of the period, it was the Baby Boomers (born 1943-1960) who “ruined” the movies. Here’s the pretentious film snob summary of the death of Hollywood’s alleged second Golden Age, as popularized by Peter Biskind. The seventies were filled with bold, dark art and transgressive intellectualism. Then the greedy Baby Boomers – like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas – made “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and “E.T.” All of a sudden Hollywood did not want to make serious, grown-up pictures. Now it was the age of blockbusters so simple that 3-year-olds can summarize them.

It was the 1980s when Boomer Blockbuster filmmaking would arrive in the event pictures of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson. We see this tendency further in the films of arch-Boomers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. For a definition of Boomer cinema just look at the output of their company Imagine Entertainment. These aren’t the New Wave-influenced pictures of Roger L. Simon’s generation.

It was the Boomers who also gave us our most strident and simpleminded cinematic leftists: Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, and Michael Moore. Think about these three careers. Over the past 30 years have any of them shifted an inch in their political thinking? Of course not and neither have most Boomers who are still arguing over sex, race, and the Vietnam War as though it were still 1975.

If I speak with some hostility about the Boomers’ failings and excesses it’s partially because that’s my nature as a Millennial/Gen Yer. According to William Strauss and Neil Howe’s books each generation acts as a check on the excesses of its parent generation. As young adults in the ‘60s and ‘70s the Baby Boomers declared war on the cultural institutions of their GI Generation parents. The GIs (born 1900-1924) are what Howe and Strauss describe as a “civic” generation; they were driven toward creating social harmony. The Boomers (an “idealist” generation) were a check on that, fomenting greater individualism in the 1970s and culture wars in the 1990s. That our electoral maps are so split today is their fault. When the Civic GI President Ronald Reagan won in 1984 it was almost a solid red map. My generation – also a Civic generation – is a reaction against Baby Boomer extremes and will seek to create greater social harmony. This will become much more apparent as the younger Gen Yers in junior high and high school now start to make waves in 10 years.

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet (born 1957) has been emblematic of the divisive Boomer paradigm for his whole career. His plays and films are famous for the “Mamet style” of short bursts of memorable dialogue and the mainstreaming of casual profanity.

And so in his book detailing his rightward shift away from a “Brain-Dead” Hollywood leftist, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture, the reader finds this same mindset applied to the political essay. The need to divide the world into clear cut categories of Liberalism and Conservatism pervades the text. Mamet even capitalizes them to Emphasize the Great Importance of the Political War between Boomer Liberalism and Boomer Conservatism. Gone is Simon’s sense of skepticism in Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine.

The Secret Knowledge is a collection of 39 short essays. Mamet has crafted an experience like the signature Boomer film “Forrest Gump.” Life is like a box of chocolates – and devouring the delicious morsels of Mamet’s book is an addictive treat, filled with surprises. Who cares if it’s just a political sugar rush? Most conservatives are familiar with the bibliography Mamet cribs his ideas from: Sowell, Hayek, VDH, Friedman, etc. Thus they won’t learn anything life-changing but will still enjoy the thrill of Mr. Mamet’s Wild Ride. And if that sentiment doesn’t summarize the Boomer cinema of Lucas-Spielberg-Bruckheimer-Moore-Stone then what does?

The endowment of the Baby Boomer Hollywood Apostates is the call to fight, the drive to confront with big special effects, and the need to divide ourselves from the intolerable. This makes for satisfying blockbuster popcorn films and effective (James Carville-Karl Rove style) political warfare. While there is plenty to critique in the failings of the Boomer presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush credit must be given: the Boomer political strategists were masters. Too bad they wasted their brains on winning the electoral fights while ignoring (and sometimes exacerbating) the more vital policy fights.

In Part 4 of the Hollywood Revolt, we’ll see how the Gen X leader Andrew Breitbart is reinventing this confrontational spirit – what he calls Righteous Indignation — and redirecting it in a more pragmatic, effective way than the Boomers ever could.

—–

“Fair Game” is based on a book written by Plame and former ambassador Wilson. It begins by introducing Plame, a CIA operative, who is on a secret mission in Kuala Lampur. She eventually returns home to her husband and the two spend an evening out to dinner with their friends. Her friends don’t know that Plame is working for the CIA and the couple want to keep it that way.

According to the film, the Vice President’s office soon requests that someone should travel to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein sought uranium from that country. At the time, the Bush administration was reviewing intelligence reports about Iraq’s leader and the threat that he posed to the United States. Plame supports sending her husband to Niger to investigate the reports. After his trip, Wilson returns to the United States and reports that a sale of uranium didn’t occur.

To publicize his discovery and to undermine President Bush’s rhetoric about the threat that Hussein posed, Wilson submits a column to the New York Times. In the article, he notes that such a deal had not occurred. The publication of that article occurs halfway through “Fair Game” and the rest of the story focuses on the war that the Bush administration waged against Wilson and his wife, whose identity was eventually leaked to columnist Robert Novak. The filmmakers argue that the Bush administration orchestrated the leak and sought to undercut the credibility of Wilson and Plame.

Unfortunately, many of the arguments in the film are undermined by the facts. Richard Armitage, a deputy secretary of state, was the real source who revealed Valerie Plame’s identity to Novak. That simple undeniable fact is seen in the scroll at the very end of “Fair Game.” As John Nolte noted in his review of the film, a damning Washington Post editorial clarified many of  the allegations that are presented in “Fair Game.” The liberal newspaper’s editorial  noted:

One of the most sensational charges leveled against the Bush White House — that it orchestrated the leak of Ms. Plame’s identity to ruin her career and thus punish Mr. Wilson — is untrue.” The editorial later noted that “it now appears that the person most responsible for the end of Ms. Plame’s CIA career is Mr. Wilson.

These ideas have no place in “Fair Game,” a story that targets the truth as much as it targets the Bush White House.

Naomi Watts does a great job in her role as Valerie Plame. Despite the liberties taken in the story, Watts shows vulnerability as a woman whose life changed forever when her identity was publicly revealed. However, most of the other characters in the story are one-dimensional. For instance, Joe Wilson is “indignant” during many of his scenes. At a dinner party with his friends. Meeting a critic of his wife’s. At home. He’s always angry about something and many of his scenes end with him getting aggravated. On the other side of the aisle, Karl Rove is portrayed as “calculating” and Scooter Libby is “manipulative.” These characters are simple caricatures of what the filmmakers think these people are like.

“Fair Game” is a disappointing movie on many different levels. From the film’s shaky camerawork to the simplification of the characters to the lifeless story, “Fair Game” tells a one-sided account about the leak of an operative’s name.

This movie isn’t fair but more importantly, it isn’t well done either.

From 2000 to 2008, George W. Bush was the “dumbest president ever,” a man who whom the left first derided as having attained places of power simply because of his father’s name, and whom they later criticized for having succeeded only because of Karl Rove’s political strategies. As a matter of fact, the pin-the-blame-on-Rove game continued even after Bush left the White House (it continues to this day in some circles).

No wonder the possible release of Wes Jones’ “College Republicans” as a feature film seems like an attractive option to students of postmodern politics.

This film chronicles Rove’s attempts to secure the chairmanship of the College Republican National Committee in 1973. Along the way, it attempts to communicate Rove’s ideas, personality, and methodology to viewers.

From what I’ve seen of the script, the aspects of Rove’s life highlighted in the film will not provide the left with as much red meat as they probably want. In other words, while the film casts a bad light on Rove in more than one instance, its enduring focus on Rove’s pragmatism actually seems to justify his misdeeds by showing that he stuck to his guns instead of abandoning ship when the going got tough.

For different reasons, the Religious Right will likely not enjoy the focus on Rove’s pragmatism either. My guess is that if (or when) this film hits theaters, large swaths of evangelicals will see Rove as a man who will do or say anything to promote himself or get his candidate elected.

This point comes through clearly as Jones’ script chronicles the early days of Rove and Lee Atwater’s relationship: a relationship “College Republicans” depicts as one based on pulling out all stops to undercut opposition to Rove’s chairmanship and elevate him to a position of national notoriety that would open the door to running a successful presidential campaign (as he did with George W. Bush).

Throughout the script, Rove and Atwater handle opposition to Rove by any means necessary. This entails Atwater operating from a Sun Tzu point of view (“The Art of War”) and Rove from a Machiavellian one (“The Prince”). As I read the script, I couldn’t help but think that Rove’s approach dominated based on Machiavelli’s views of “taking power.” For as Machiavelli clearly held that people who rose up against the prince ought to be put down in such a way as to show that the prince’s power ought not be challenged, so too Jones’ depiction of Rove is one of a man willing to deal ruthlessly with his opposition.

Jones brings this out in depicting Rove and Atwater attacking the character and intelligence of Rove’s opponents as he sought the chairmanship. From floating rumors about the sexuality of his opponents in the South, at a time when Southerners were decidedly anti-homosexual, to using rules of order and other technicalities to undercut (and replace) the delegates who wouldn’t support Rove’s chairmanship, Jones’ presents Rove as man who both outsmarted and outmaneuvered those who opposed him.

Machiavelli would be proud.

The late Lee Atwater

Yet, while the left may not think Rove is depicted as evil enough and the Religious Right that he is depicted as a man lacking a moral compass, “College Republicans” should be a hit with those who see that politics are ultimately about power. In other words, those who see politics as a vehicle to implementing one’s agenda, or the agenda of one’s party, will probably be more than happy to overlook the means Rove used (fictional or not) to attain power in exchange for knowing that such attainment opened the door to implementation.

“College Republicans” held my attention from start to finish. On the one hand, it presented Rove’s successful rise to the Chairmanship of the College Republican National Committee in a way that did not place Rove on a pedestal: it opened with him in dire need of a man like Atwater and ended with the realization that Rove’s hard sought position in the College Republicans made him but the veritable gopher of the Chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), among other things.

But the film also demonstrates the genius behind being such a gopher at a time when the Republican National Committee Chairman was a gentleman named George H. W. Bush, and one of Rove’s occasional duties included carrying the Bush family car keys from Chairman Bush to his son, George W. Bush, who waited outside the office of the RNC on one of DC’s bustling sidewalks.

While Jones’ gives us Rove as the right man, in the right place, at the right time, he also gives us Rove as the man who knew where he had to be in order to be in the right place. For this reason, “College Republicans” ought to be a dream-come-true for political junkies the world over.

The contrast in what resulted from these two cinematic call to arms is as stark as it is revealing.

Paul Haggis and Julie Christie wear orange ribbons to the 2008 Oscars on behalf of the terrorists held at Gitmo.

In 1941, Hollywood both figuratively and literally went to war. Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Mickey Rooney and many of the biggest stars of the day would eventually serve in the military and do so with great distinction. With the help of others, Bette Davis and John Garfield worked tirelessly to organize and run the Hollywood Canteen to bring Hollywood directly to our servicemen. And when they weren’t selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of war bonds here at home, too many movie stars to count went overseas to give our boys a firsthand taste of celebrity glamour and home. 

And then there were the films… literally hundreds of them meant to boost stateside morale, meant to remind us Why We Fight, meant to help America win the war.

In every sense of the word, this was Hollywood’s finest moment, where a community that was largely run by conservatives willingly set aside their political differences and united to rally around their commander-in-chief for the cause of America and the defeat of tyranny. 

Fast forward to today…

Never has an industry been more cravenly political and morally blind than Hollywood during our present struggle to defeat Islamic extremism. Tinseltown’s response to President Bush and America and our troops has been nothing short of the middle finger of betrayal. 

Though it remains the finest example of exactly what this country needs more of from our entertainment community, ”24″ was greenlit prior to 9/11. And yes, there was the safely sterile “United 93,” Oliver Stone’s  narrowly and safely focused “World Trade Center,” and ABC’s “Path to 9/11″ miniseries (which, for purely left-wing political purposes, the network refuses to rebroadcast or release on DVD). Regardless, these are the few exceptions that only prove the rule.

In January 1942, actress Carole Lombard died in a plane crash. She was on her way home to husband Clark Gable after selling two-million dollars worth of war bonds at a rally in her home state of Indiana.

In the darkest days of the War on Terror and during the worst of it in Iraq when our soldiers and Marines and the Iraqi people could’ve used any help they could get, the anti-American Leftists who currently infest the film-making community sided with our enemy through the production of one propaganda piece of moral equivalence after another; a celluloid flood of dishonest, divisive and morally illiterate films each created with the obvious intent of undermining America’s resolve to defeat terrorism and to create an ally in the Middle East through the righteous (and costly) liberation of the Iraqi and Afghan people.  Furthermore, through a number of insidious documentaries, one of the freest and wealthiest industries in all of human history spent millions to produce and promote the worst of America through the creation of cinematic mountains based on conspiratorial mole hills.  

To further their nihilist agenda, Leftist Hollywood would see 25 million innocent Iraqis abandoned into a meat grinder of terrorism and death squads. Most unforgivably, in film after film after film, these moral degenerates have attacked our troops as dupes, victims, monsters, and no better than the enemy.

This hasn’t been the work of just edgy, indy outsiders either. Some of the biggest names in the business are behind this assembly line of artistic embarrassments that – at best, by default — give aid and comfort and side with the most vicious, imperialist, racist, sexist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and theocratic enemy we have ever faced. And even with each of these cinematic disgraces bombing at the box office, our fat and privileged “Patriots Through Dissent“ have even more planned. 

There are certainly exceptions, those like Gary Sinise whose efforts on behalf of our service men and women have been classy, apolitical and tireless. But again, these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Despite the tireless efforts of Leftist Hollywood (and their media allies), Iraq is now closer to success than ever, America hasn’t been attacked again, and the president they worked so hard to elect has held tight to the policies of his ”evil” and/or “stupid” predecessor, including rendition, Gitmo and the Patriot Act. 

And so we can only hope that the appeasers who make up today’s Vichy Hollywood live long enough to see the history they are on the wrong side of forever document them as the disgraceful cowards they are.

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.

Spencer “call them racists” Ackerman

It’s exactly what that d-bag, from that private leftwing group Journolist, said. If you remember, Spencer Ackerman wrote:

Instead, take one of them – Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares – and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

Yeah, deja vu.

Look, this guy is a toolbag, but he’s on the money. He knew that if you falsely accuse someone of something – especially racism – they explode. And to him – and the media – it rarely matters if that rage is righteous. Because all they want is an angry mob.

And that’s what sucks about worms like Ackerman, Media Matters, and the left in general. The Tea Party began as a group of average folks who stepped out of their living rooms for the first time. And what happened Chuckleheads at MSNBC point out how white they are, Janeane Garafalo painted them as Aryan offshoots, and the NAACP drafted a silly resolution.

To blame them, or anyone, for reacting to the NAACP’s silly attack on the Tea Party, is essentially blaming the victim.

And if you disagree with me, you’re a racist homophobe fan of country music.

This is gunna be a whale of a show! (no offense to whales)

["none taken," says whale] 

Ann Coulter!

Professor Marc Lamont Hill!

Alfonzo Rachel!

And, Andrew Breitbart

Snippets from the article below, but make sure to read the whole thing at the Daily Caller and return to Big Journalism early and often as we unpack the details that emerge and track the fallout from this seminal event in the history of left-wing media bias. It’s unclear exactly what the Daily Caller has, but there’s certainly no indication from this article they’ve already laid all their cards out on the table.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”

***

Jeremiah Wright was back in the news after making a series of media appearances. At the National Press Club, Wright claimed Obama had only repudiated his beliefs for “political reasons.” Wright also reiterated his charge that the U.S. federal government had created AIDS as a means of committing genocide against African Americans.

It was another crisis, and members of Journolist again rose to help Obama.

Chris Hayes of the Nation posted on April 29, 2008, urging his colleagues to ignore Wright. Hayes directed his message to “particularly those in the ostensible mainstream media” who were members of the list…

…Katha Pollitt – Hayes’s colleague at the Nation – didn’t disagree on principle, though she did sound weary of the propaganda. “I hear you. but I am really tired of defending the indefensible. The people who attacked Clinton on Monica were prissy and ridiculous, but let me tell you it was no fun, as a feminist and a woman, waving aside as politically irrelevant and part of the vast rightwing conspiracy Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita,” Pollitt said.

“Part of me doesn’t like this shit either,” agreed Spencer Ackerman, then of the Washington Independent. “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”

Ackerman went on:

I do not endorse a Popular Front, nor do I think you need to. It’s not necessary to jump to Wright-qua-Wright’s defense. What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

And I think this threads the needle. If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

***

Read the full article at the Daily Caller.

The Sean Penn-Naomi Watts “starrer” (hey, it’s fun using unnecessarily awkward Variety-speak!) revisits the Valerie Plame Wilson scandal, an episode I’m not even going to bother recapping, because to do so would simply be coma-inducing for all of us. Besides, I already summed up the affair and dissected the screenplay’s political slant for Big Hollywood here. Suffice it to say, it’s a tale the Hollywood Left is hell-bent on getting Americans to care about.

As are its water-carriers in the media. In a deceptive puff piece an article last week for the Los Angeles Times, Rachel Abramowitz discusses the film and interviews its director Doug Liman. The first clue that we’re about to be sold a crockpot of hooey comes when she describes Valerie Plame as “the undercover CIA operative whose name was leaked to the media by the Bush White House in an effort to discredit her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.”

Notice how matter-of-factly those lies are delivered. Matter-of-fact because the left-dominated entertainment industry clings to its anti-Bush narrative about the affair as received wisdom: courageous patriot Joe Wilson dared speak truth to power by exposing the lies neocons used to promote a “war of choice,” and then the wicked Bush and his flying monkeys Rove and Cheney plotted vengeance against him from their White House lair.

Once again, people: there is no evidence that the “Bush White House” conspired to leak Plame’s name to the media, or that it was done to discredit her husband or expose her identity. Even the Obama Justice Department dismissed the Wilsons’ attempt to sue Rove, Cheney, and Libby, stating flatly that Joe Wilson had provided no evidence that the three officials had caused him harm.

But back to the media sleight-of-hand. Ms. Abramowitz then refers to “the eventual trial and conviction of ‘Scooter’ Libby, a top aide to then-Vice President Dick Cheney,” without clarifying what he was convicted of. Her phrasing, and the screenplay itself, suggest that Libby was guilty of the leak (and Cheney as well, via guilt-by-association). No, Libby perjured himself to investigators by concealing what he knew and when he knew it; it was State Dept. official Richard Armitage, by his own admission, who leaked Plame’s name. And he did it not in retaliation for her husband’s criticism of the administration, but inadvertently, claiming he didn’t realize she was covert. But as I wrote before at Big Hollywood, his name does not appear in the script. That’s because it would utterly suck the wind out of the movie’s already limp sails to admit that “the Bush White House” did not conspire to punish the Wilsons.

Abramowitz says that, according to Liman, “events in the movie follow the facts.” Yes, if after “the facts” you add “according to the anti-war Left’s willful delusion.” Having thus established for her readers that the film is “true-to-life,” Ms. Abramowitz then gets to the article’s astonishing central claim: that in Fair Game, “ Liman pushed the politics of the events into the background.”

Yes, if by “background” she means “foreground.” The Valerie Plame story is political in its very essence. The whole point of the Wilsons’ story is their claim that they were targeted for retaliation for challenging the administration’s justification for war. Removing that linchpin by “pushing the politics into the background” would simply cause the entire story to vanish.

Armitage: left on the cutting room floor

The filmmakers “leave the political debate largely off screen,” Abramowitz continues, “and much of the activity of the Bush White House officials is presented in news clips.” True, as I noted in my previous piece, top figures like Bush and Cheney are presented in Fair Game only in film footage; but those clips are carefully selected to suggest a White House cover-up, and the script itself hammers that theory home. The scenes that do fictionally depict White House officials show Rove’s and Libby’s characters conspiring to “out” Plame’s CIA identity.

Liman chimes in, describing how producer Janet Zucker “was particularly impassioned about the behavior of the Bush administration… It was actually very helpful to have this incredibly strong-willed, liberal-minded producer in the mix because it put me in a very reactionary mood, which ultimately drove the politics out of the movie.” (A liberal-minded producer in Hollywood? Who knew?!)

Drove the politics out of the movie? Not the movie I read. Liman is claiming that he and Zucker balanced each other out and created a compromise in which politics is merely a walk-on character. I find it impossible to believe that an “incredibly strong-willed, liberal-minded producer,” whose driving motivation for pursuing this story was to expose Bush wrongdoing, would accept such a compromise. I also find it impossible to believe the Wilsons themselves would be happy having the crux of their story redacted from the film (the real Valerie Plame, by the way, went to Cannes to promote it).

Politically neutral?

And what about the star Sean Penn? Raise your hand if you believe that the openly far-left activist Penn would cheerily go along with a politically neutral take on this affair… Uh huh. As I expected, not a single hand.

In all fairness, I haven’t yet seen the movie, so perhaps it now bears little resemblance to the openly partisan script I previously examined on Big Hollywood. But based on that screenplay, to say that the movie is about the Wilsons’ strained relationship and only marginally about politics is, well, let’s be charitable and call it disingenuous. After all, no sooner does the Times article claim that Fair Game is a politics-free zone, when Liman contradicts himself with a revealing analogy to Spielberg’s Jaws: “The shark is a lot scarier when you see less of it. I decided to apply that approach to the White House.” Sounds like the politics hasn’t so much been driven out of the movie as elevated to a central, ominous presence.

The Bush White House

Lest one question why we shouldn’t take Liman at his word, he helpfully points out that “I’m used to manipulating people. That’s one of the main criteria of making it as a director in Hollywood… You have to be a con artist.” With this in mind, one can’t help but wonder if he and L.A. Times enabler Rachel Abramowitz are trying to pull off a con themselves: to reassure readers that Fair Game isn’t just another leftist, politicized attack on the Iraq War – because they know, as I have written before, that that would be met with even greater audience indifference than was Matt Damon’s dud The Green Zone (Abramowitz herself raises the fearsome specter of that movie’s failure.)

Audience indifference except at Cannes, of course, where international cinema sophisticates gather to congratulate themselves on their anti-Americanism, and among the media leftists like reviewer Jeffrey Wells, who giddily predicts Cannes-and-Oscar glory for a ”film which exposes right-wing scumbaggery.” 

They eagerly embrace Fair Game’s political slant – a slant the L.A. Times denies the movie has.

The truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage – a Bush critic, not an evil neocon – who leaked Plame’s name. Yet Armitage’s name never appears in the script. And how could it? That would defuse the filmmakers’ intent to demonize Rove and Bush and to condemn the war as shameful, unjust American aggression.

Coming soon to a theater near you: a movie starring Sean Penn as a great American patriot taking a courageous stand against a tyrannical power. No, it’s not a biopic about Penn’s South American idol, Hugo Chavez, facing down the imperialistic Goliath of the United States. It’s a dramatization of “Plamegate,” the affair of the CIA operative whose identity was outed in the run-up to the Iraq War, ostensibly by a vindictive Bush administration. Fair Game, based on Valerie Plame Wilson’s autobiographical book of the same name, stars Naomi Watts as the aggrieved Plame and Penn as her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, in a role apparently already gaining Oscar buzz.

(By the way, what Oscar voters in recent years refer to as “buzz” is actually the sound of audiences all across this country snoring – such is the disconnect between Oscar winners and what Americans usually like to see).

But the thought of bringing Fair Game to a theater near you or anyone else must have the producers quaking in their Kenneth Coles. After all, they’re facing the almost certain prospect of their political thriller going down in flames a là the recent cinematic Hindenburg known as The Green Zone, which many are claiming is the final nail in the coffin of Iraq-war-themed movies. The Plame project is a joint production of Abu Dhabi’s Imagenation Entertainment and Participant Media, which describes itself as focusing on “socially relevant, commercially viable” projects.

I think they need to adjust their focus. Fair Game not only is socially irrelevant to everyone except obsessive Bush-haters, but isn’t commercially viable either, since American moviegoers have rejected Hollywood’s anti-war propaganda over and over again. Actually, “anti-war” is a misnomer, since if the Hollywood Left were truly anti-war, they would denounce the actual aggressors like bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas et al. But they’re usually too busy heaping moral condemnation on the U.S. and its allies to protest against real evil in the world.

And the concept of evil is too simplistic anyway for the Hollywood Left, which believes the world is more nuanced than conservatives are capable of comprehending, much less admitting. “There are no bad guys or good guys,” say writer/director Stephan Gaghan and George Clooney about their 2005 movie Syriana, in which Americans are clearly the bad guys and radicalized Muslims are the moral center. That’s the hypocrisy of Hollywood’s morally inverted view of the world, in which leftists are pillars of truth and integrity, bad guys are simply misunderstood, and conservatives are utterly Satanic. “Bush lied, people died” – you know, nuance.

This isn’t the place for a thorough re-examination of Plamegate or of the justification for going to war with Iraq, which have been written about exhaustively elsewhere: check out Kenneth Timmerman’s book Shadow Warriors, for example, in which he discusses the scandal and eviscerates the Wilsons in the process, or Party of Defeat, in which David Horowitz and Ben Johnson concisely lay out the reasons for going after Saddam. But in case you didn’t keep up with the mainstream media’s four-year, off-and-on front-page obsession with the Plame scandal, here’s a quick recap:

In 2003, the White House sent former ambassador Joe Wilson to follow up on a lead that Iraqi maniac Saddam was trying to purchase fissionable materials from Niger. Wilson reported back that the rumor wasn’t credible; but when the Bush administration proceeded to put forth the suspicion as part of the case for going to war, Wilson wrote a controversial editorial entitled “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” in the wake of which journalist Robert Novak revealed that Wilson’s wife Valerie Plame was a CIA operative. The Wilsons believed that Novak’s White House source was Karl “The Architect” Rove and that her identity was leaked as revenge for Wilson exposing the administration’s “duplicity.” The anti-war Left and the left-leaning media latched onto this affair and milked it throughout the early years of the war, undermining morale and the war effort, although a Senate investigation ultimately discredited the Wilsons’ accusations.

Not to be dissuaded by the facts, Hollywood is dipping into the well again in Fair Game. My own undercover source deep in the belly of the Hollywood beast (okay, it’s Big Hollywood editor John Nolte and his Whistleblower) has slipped me a copy of the script, written by Jez and John Butterworth. I don’t know whether this is a first draft or the final shooting script or some version in-between, but based on what I’ve read, the movie is more than just a desperate attempt to turn this already overblown scandal into a nail-biting political thriller; Fair Game is a full-out assault on Bush’s “war of choice” and on what Roger Ebert, whose career has degenerated into making petty insults toward decent Americans, calls “neocon evildoing.” (There’s that nuance again).

Must I issue a spoiler alert for this one? Would it really come as a surprise to hear that the script paints the entire Bush administration as power-mad schemers, and the Wilsons as courageous patriots putting themselves on the line to save the lives of American soldiers and defend our Constitutional rights? That it asserts that Bush’s abuses, not Saddam Hussein’s central role in international terrorism, constituted the real threat to this country? That a whole slew of critical CIA operations was abandoned, thanks to the vengeful outing of Valerie Plame, leaving many agents exposed in the field? And that as a result, Iraqi nuclear scientists (“the real WMDs,” as Watts/Plame says) defected to a welcoming Iran instead? If so, then I have some property in Death Valley I’d like to sell you.

President Bush and other top level White House figures appear in the movie only in actual news footage, selectively chosen to suggest that they are conspiring in a “coordinated” coverup. But lesser players Rove and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s Chief of Staff, are more central to the script, which shows Libby intimidating CIA analysts so intensely that they burst into sweat and waves of nausea. He and Rove are also shown engaging in backroom manipulations to “bury” Plame and Wilson (the title itself comes from a quote which Hardball host Chris Matthews attributed to Rove, about Valerie being “fair game” – a phrase Rove says came from Matthews).

But the truth is, it was State Department official Richard Armitage – a Bush critic, not an evil neocon – who leaked Plame’s name, and who hid his involvement for many months while Rove and others unfairly bore the brunt of the investigation and of the public excoriation. In other words, as Horowitz writes in Party of Defeat, “the entire affair was concocted out of whole cloth by opponents of the war.” Rove, Libby, Cheney, Bush – the whole criminal pantheon of the Left’s fevered imagination – were not responsible for Plame’s outing (Libby was found guilty, though, of perjuring himself during the investigation). Yet Armitage’s name never appears in the script. And how could it? That would defuse the filmmakers’ intent to demonize Rove and Bush and to condemn the war as shameful, unjust American aggression.

Penn and Watts play the Wilsons as a couple whose only character flaws are their unshakeable professional integrity, love of country, and willingness to risk everything to speak truth to power. The script highlights the personal cost to Valerie Plame; even her friends turn on her for the “betrayal” of keeping her CIA job secret. “You lied to me for 20 years,” says her best friend in the script. “Who are you?”

Except that this isn’t what happened. Valerie says in her own autobiography that her close friends, without exception, were generously supportive and understanding, and that even old friends, distant relatives and long-lost acquaintances came out of the woodwork to offer their support. But hey, in fairness, the filmmakers have to ramp up the drama somehow.

Meanwhile, Penn’s worldly-wise Joe Wilson is busy speculating about government lies, fending off vicious “right-wing reporters” and lecturing captive audiences about having fearlessly confronted Saddam himself. “Have you met Saddam?” Wilson snaps at dinner guests casually discussing the Iraqi threat. “Have you looked him in the eye? Did he threaten to kill you? You don’t know Saddam. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Later, Penn/Wilson complains to the press that “those in the Highest Office sought to destroy the career of a public servant to punish me for speaking the truth.” If Penn, an actor who says journalists should be jailed for criticizing Hugo Chavez, can deliver a line like this with conviction, then perhaps he should get another Oscar.

To make sure we get the message that Penn’s Joe Wilson is a true American hero, one character tells him, “You’re a true American hero.” And modest too: “The real heroes,” he replies, ”are in Iraq right now fighting a war which was prosecuted on lies and falsehoods.” He got that half-right – the real heroes are fighting in Iraq (and Afghanistan), not here in the comfort of home undermining the war effort.

The anti-war Bush-bashing (yawn) continues to pile up. While driving Penn/Wilson in a taxi to the White House, a West African immigrant expresses his gratitude at being in the “Land of the Brave, Home of the Free” and out of war-torn Sierra Leone: “Over there we have no truth. Just power. Over here it’s a different world.” Apparently this praise for America wasn’t “nuanced” enough for Penn/Wilson, who tells the driver, “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.” Leave it to an immigrant from an anarchic hellhole to appreciate America’s freedoms, while the comfortable leftist broods about the “threat” of “right-wing reporters” and speechifies about imaginary Republican abuses of power. In a later scene, Valerie’s father tells her, “One day this country is gonna look back on these years, and it’s gonna hang its head. It’s gonna weep. Then it’s gonna stand up straight and walk on.” That “stand up and walk on” bit feels tacked on, considering that the Left seems to think America should be in a perpetual state of shame and apology.

Coincidentally, Valerie Plame Wilson is back on the fringes of the news again, thanks to the release of politico Rove’s memoir Courage and Consequence. This prompted terrorist sympathizer and Code Pink founder Jodie Evans to attempt to handcuff Rove at a recent book signing, shouting, “Look what you did! You outed a CIA officer! You lied to take us to war!” (Um, if Evans is going to attempt citizen’s arrests of war criminals, perhaps she could start with her associates in the Taliban and Hamas). Rather than just trashing the book with a one-star Amazon.com review, the Wilsons actually released a statement, dismissing Rove’s book as

a pathetically weak defense of the disastrous policies pursued by the Bush administration, involving our country in a war of choice based on false intelligence and badly tarnishing the good name of the United States of America.

Yes, very nuanced. But ultimately it’s hard to see the real-life Wilsons as victims. They ended up as the toast of the elitist, anti-war Left, with a glamorous Vanity Fair spread, a $2.5 million book deal for Valerie, and a feature film glorification starring Hollywood A-listers – albeit a film that seems destined to sputter and die right out of the gate.

One has to wonder if Sean Penn simply doesn’t care whether this movie does well at the box office – after all, how could he expect it to?  Back when anti-war activist Robert Redford directed the 2007 talky bore Lions for Lambs, it was still possible for Hollywood to delude itself into thinking that America would flock to see such superstars as Redford, Cruise and Streep in a sanctimonious plea for pacifism.

But Lions for Lambs fizzled, as did every other Hollywood attempt to flagellate America for the supposedly pointless waste of Bush’s wars, all the way up to last month’s disastrous The Green Zone. (Meanwhile, the 2006 movie 300, an unabashed celebration of warrior virtues and love of country, has racked up $457 million without a single bankable star). If the American people can’t be lured into cinemas to sit through Hollywood’s leftist morality tales even by a Bourne-style thriller featuring proven action star Matt Damon, then what chance at box office success does another smug, elitist, anti-war diatribe featuring the unlikable Sean Penn have?

Americans aren’t buying it. They simply aren’t the morally unsophisticated, uninformed dullards that a condescending Hollywood believes them to be. Or is that too nuanced for the Hollywood Left to grasp?

Dick Wolf

The last episode was “Fed.” It’s a story about an ACORN-like community organizing group called “Rights Alliance.” The founder of the Rights Alliance has a conservative infiltrator murdered to “cover up a cover-up.” The cover up is an affair the founder was having with one of its members. The “cover up of the cover-up” was the money being paid by the founder to his mistress’s husband to keep the affair quiet. The right-wing infiltrator was murdered because he had been secretly video taping a sting he was arranging unrelated to the affair–clearly meant to be reminiscent of the O’Keefe/Giles real life ACORN investigation. The founder feared this tape would open the organization up to scrutiny, thus exposing his affair and the subsequent monetary extortion to his girlfriend’s husband. We are not supposed to be shedding too many tears for our murder victim, given he was “tricking a few dumb kids in an ambush video.”

The victim was found with the words “Fed” printed on his chest, apparently to throw our eagle-eyed detective team of Bernard and Lupo off the scent. You see, “right wingers” hate government so much we murder government employees all the time. Of course, Rights Alliance is a non-profit group, not a Government agency, but the writers assume dopey murdering “right wingers” might think Rights Alliance are government agents. This makes scrawling the word “Fed” on the victim’s chest a great ruse. Get it?

But the real action is how “conservatives” are portrayed and characterized. As implied above, the show makes more sense as a parody of the left-wing view of the right than it is effective propaganda for the left. This is now its entertainment value. The first suspect for the infiltrator’s murder is a “Patriot Ranger,” a crazed group that is stated to be linked with “last summer’s Tea Party Movement.” The Patriot Rangers look like casting rejects from the movie “Deliverance.” They carry rifles in Manhattan, are unshaven, uncouth, and it looks like you could smell them from 50 feet. The suspect, who is innocent, is still made to appear repulsive. He calls the detectives “Obamabots,” which they reacted to with shock and anger.

Our erstwhile “O’Keefe” style infiltrator is said to be a “militant conservative.” What makes one a militant conservative? Our murder victim is “militant” because in college he ran a student group supporting George W. Bush’s reelection. His roommate from college tells the detective Lupo the O’Keefe character “hated liberals.”

Of course, Jack McCoy has to get in his two cents. He states how he has always been a supporter of Rights Alliance, which “has worked across party lines.” He proceeds to tell his DAs to “go the extra mile” before “blowing up” up the Rights Alliance group because of its historical good works like “predatory lending reform,” “housing reform,” and “minimum wage reform”–the heart of the left’s financial reform agenda. (The first two were instrumental in helping take down our financial system in 2008.)

In a “town hall” meeting held by McCoy for Patriot Rangers (read: Teabaggers) and Rights Alliance, both groups get unruly, but the worst epithets naturally emanate from the Rangers. One exclaims: “Socialist Scum!” McCoy is genuinely pained when the Rights Alliance group does not believe his plea for patience because he supported their work for years. He made no such assertion to the “Deliverance” styled Patriot Ranger/Tea Party crowd.

This episode also comes on the heels of an “SVU” show earlier in the week where some character refers to various Fox opinion show hosts and Rush Limbaugh as “cancers” in society.

There is a “Last Days of Pompeii” feel to Wolf’s “Law and Order” empire. He has become very wealthy delivering prime time crime drama to television, and the truth is his shows have been high quality. But it’s time to hang it up. These shows have become message delivery machines. When drama is subordinated to politics, it’s no longer popular art, but cheap propaganda.

Dick should get out while it’s only a little too late.