Weintraub first managed musical acts ranging from The Four Seasons to The Moody Blues, then promoted artists such as Led Zeppelin, John Denver, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Kiss, Aerosmith and Queen. He also promoted the “comeback” tours for Elvis Presley, then Frank Sinatra. Weintraub’s movie producing credits include “Nashville,” “Oh God!,” “Diner,” “Cruising,” “The Karate Kid,” “National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation,” “The Karate Kid” (2010), and the 2001 remake of “Ocean’s Eleven,” as well as “Ocean’s 12″ and “Ocean’s 13.” He appeared in all the “Ocean” films as well as “The Firm.”

“His Way” is the first documentary feature film directed by Douglas McGrath. McGrath is an actor/writer/director whose past directing credits include “Emma,” “Nicholas Nickleby,” “Infamous,” and “I Don’t Know How She Does It.” In my opinion, “His Way” is pound for pound and frame for frame the most entertaining and inspirational documentary of this past year. “His Way” was shot and edited for nearly ten months and culled from approximately seventy hours of interview footage.

KW: You took an autobiography and turned it into a documentary film. That doesn’t seem like it is usually done very often.

DM: It wasn’t quite as direct as that. Graydon Carter [Managing Editor, Vanity Fair] had called me and asked if I was interested in making a film about Jerry and Jerry’s book was not out at that point. So I read Rich Cohen’s piece that he had done for Vanity Fair and said, “Boy, this guy sounds like quite a character.”

I was going out to L.A. and I said to Graydon … I should meet him. I said, “you know, it would be great if I could read it [Jerry’s book] and then we could meet.” But, Jerry always being Jerry, thinking what is the best way for things to work and what is the right order for them to work in… he brought the manuscript to me himself. Meeting him first and hearing his own speaking voice allowed me to read the book in a more informed way. Meaning I could really tell what kind of person it was that was writing that book. So when I was making the film … I wrote out all the kinds of questions I wanted to ask him, but I didn’t really use the book in the way that I’ve had other films of mine and adapted novels for the screen. I used it sort of as a springboard for conversations.

KW: And what was that experience for you, moving from narrative film into documentary for the first time?

DM: Well, I cheated a little bit in that. I kind of knew the structure I wanted. By which I mean I had this idea early on that I would ask everyone early on to finish the sentence, “Jerry Weintraub is…“ And so I wanted to start the movie with a lot of people saying what they thought Jerry Weintraub was. So everybody I interviewed, the Bushes, Brad Pitt, didn’t matter… I said I want you to finish this sentence for me however you can. “Jerry Weintraub is…” and we got a lot of great stuff. I knew I wanted to start that way and then I knew I wanted to get into his personal life, where he was from, what world produced him. I just wanted to kind of follow that arc. So, I just kind of asked questions knowing that was my shape. It wasn’t kind of an outline, but it gave me a general idea. When we were out at his house in Palm Desert, the thing that knocked my socks off were those moving glass doors that open at the beginning of the film.

KW: It’s an amazing shot.

DM: I just thought, “That is how the movie has to start.” Because I noticed that he had all these monograms. And I thought we’ll do a series of monograms and then we’ll end and reveal him at these doors which are opening without his touching them. And which reveal what appears to be the whole world at his feet. I thought that is a good way with just pictures to tell us, that this is a guy if you don’t know him, who might have an interesting story. So in that way, I had that much narration in my head. And then, I knew that people would speak to certain sections of his life.

KW: Were there some particular challenges with this type of story that maybe, you wouldn’t encounter with narrative or even a different type of non-fiction subject?

DM: Well, that’s a very good question. Compared to narrative … with a documentary you have to be careful. Because it’s like quicksand if you’re not careful. You can think deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into a subject depending on what you are writing about. You think of those guys who did that wonderful “Hoop Dreams” or obviously, bigger things like “The Civil War” or “Shoah”… you think, “Oh my God, I know how to get into it, but I don’t know how to get out of it.”  I wanted to tell the story of this guy, whose greatest job of salesmanship was selling himself. And I could see that pattern early in his life. He just talked his way into jobs, he talked his way into relationships. He was successful doing that because he had a very appealing personality and a very astute understanding of other people’s personalities and I saw that there’s a journey there.

He wasn’t poverty-stricken, but he was not wealthy. He started out in a comfortable life, but then only built up from there. And he learned from his Dad. And I thought, I want to trace that journey and then I want to take … what most people knew about him, which was his professional success and I wanted to show how there was an application to his personal life as well. That he had some impossible successes in his professional life and then he managed to do the same thing in his personal life with Jane (his wife) and Suzy (his girlfriend). And you know, I have a section of the film where a lot of other guys go … “I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it.”

KW: I love the one of Barbara Bush and President Bush. It’s classic…

DM: Barbara Bush is practically the funniest person in the movie.

KW: Really?

DM: Sometimes, when we first showed the film … when it first came out … the line she says, “I’d kill George Bush if he did that” gets possibly the biggest laugh in the entire movie. .

KW: It is a good mix of people and when you go to the Bushes, they are like the grandparents in that situation. I thought it was hilarious too.

DM: I loved having the Bushes in the film and, what I really knew I wanted to do once they had agreed to be in it was… unlike everyone else who I knew I was interviewing as single subjects. I never wanted anybody coupled up because I wanted their individual thoughts about Jerry, except in President and Barbara Bush’s case. They’d been married for 65 years. I knew they would have the give-and-take and the push-and-pull of an old married couple. And by our standards the standards of “His Way”… that’s an action sequence for us. That’s as much explosive power as we’re going to get. And their dynamic between the two of them just killed me.

Stay tuned for Part II, in which Douglas talks about the rest of the film, including the amazing segments on Jerry’s experiences with Elvis Presley, Colonel Tom Parker, and Frank Sinatra.

On the other hand, Lincoln Heights resident Chris Strompolos spent his teen summers being shot at, dragged under a truck, and chased by a giant boulder. He had his first kiss, fought off Arabs and Indians, and eventually saved the planet from Nazi domination. The best part is, he captured it all on video and for the past five years, people all over the planet have been clamoring to see the footage.

—–

If his adventures sound familiar, that’s because Strompolos was starring in a remake of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” reenacting the adventures of Indiana Jones. The difference is “Raiders” was directed by the biggest director on the planet, Steven Spielberg, while Strompolos was taking orders from his best friend, Eric Zala, who is only a year older than he is. They were also hindered by the difference in their budgets ($18 million for Spielberg’s, $5000 for the boys’), and having to shoot their entire movie on the fly over seven summers in the backwoods of Mississippi.

On May 14, 2008,  nearly 20 years after they finished production in 1989, Strompolos and Zala reunited with their friend Jayson Lamb, who served as editor/cinematographer and effects whiz on the film, to present the Los Angeles debut of “Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation” on Hollywood’s ultimate big screen at Mann’s Chinese Theatre. The event was a benefit for the Festival of Children Foundation, but it followed five years of whirlwind screenings at film festivals all over the planet and a personal letter raving about the film from Spielberg himself.

And perhaps the most amazing thing of all is, Strompolos and his buddies never even thought anyone outside their small town of Ocean Springs, Mississippi would ever care about what even they saw as rambunctious summer fun.

“My parents didn’t know what was going on. We kept them in the dark. There was one bit where we set Eric on fire, my mom saw it, and we got in trouble and agreed to have adult supervision,” Strompolos recalls in an exclusive PW interview. “We kept our parents separate from it. We made it sound innocent, just saying ‘We’re going off to shoot ‘Raiders!’’ and mom would say ‘OK!’ It wasn’t until the 1989 premiere that my mom saw me go under the truck.”

Strompolos and Zala were two bored movie buffs who were utterly obsessed with the original “Raiders” when they met at ages 10 and 11, respectively. They hit it off immediately and decided to see if they could remake the original film, shot-for-shot. Since “Raiders” had not been released on video yet at the time of their meeting in 1982, a year after the film’s release, they had to track down a copy of the film’s script and rely on their memories in order for Zala to draw more than 600 storyboards for the film’s intricate costumes, sets, and action scenes.

Their slavish devotion to the cause led them to bringing in fellow dreamer Lamb and his Betamax camcorder onto the project. Soon there were plenty of other things that the young trio’s parents were unaware of, such as the fact that they staged the original’s big gunfight in a bar, complete with raging fires and flame-engulfed stuntmen, in Zala’s mom’s basement.

“We did it safely, and Jayson had learned in a magic book from library that if you use rubbing alcohol it lights nice but doesn’t consume,” explains Strompolos, who is now 37. “All the fire sets were built underneath the kitchen of Eric’s mom’s house. We were pretty lucky. We built our own sets from plywood and other kinds of breakaway wood that could smash or burn easily, plus there was lots of cement in the basement that kept it under control.”

Other tricks employed along the way included building the six-foot-tall boulder that chased “Indy” out of two fiberglass halves that were then glued together. As the boulder rolled rapidly after them, cameraman Lamb crouched inside a shopping cart and shot Strompolos as the star’s offscreen hands pushed the cart in a mad dash for safety.

The film had its hometown premiere back in 1989 as it was finished. The boys drifted apart as adulthood set in, with Zala taking the final-edit videotape with him to college at New York University’s prestigious film school and showing it for fun to friends on occasion. But it was one of those friends who got the ball (or in this case, the boulder) rolling for the film’s eventual discovery and cult-classic status.

That unknown friend told another young filmmaker named Eli Roth about the adaptation, and Roth was determined to see it. When Roth met with Spielberg at his Dreamworks studio while preparing the release of his own debut film “Cabin Fever” in 2003, he told the master director about the adaptation and Spielberg insisted on tracking it down to watch. Once he saw it, Spielberg wrote the filmmakers – and later worked out an arrangement allowing them to show it as long as they couldn’t profit from it, such as at festivals and for fundraisers. Soon Vanity Fair magazine commissioned a ten-page story on the history of the adaptation.

And, in a crazy, almost metaphysical loop of fate, Warner Bros. studio bought the rights to the Vanity Fair article and has been developing a film on Strompolos and his friends’ youthful adventures ever since. Someday, if the cards fall right, he’ll have the surreal experience of watching someone else reenact his reenactment of his favorite film.

While he and Zala are still working together as Rolling Boulder Films, putting together a package for their film “Where the River Ends,” Strompolos already has the satisfaction of having achieved the impossible as a youth.

“We estimated we spent $5000 total, we still don’t know, and we found stuff, built stuff, shopped at Salvation Army and Goodwill while Jayson studied library books to see how magicians did effects and Eric plotted how to coordinate birthdays and holiday to get gifts like hats and bullets just in time for our next shots,” says Strompolos. “There was a lot of planning on the stunts, but we just went for it. And it still gets us meetings to this day.”

Vanity Fair:

One of the biggest surprises in the book is that, in 1980, you had to convince interviewers you were not just following George’s direction. Obviously no one thinks that today. What was the biggest argument you and George had over a particular scene?

There was really only one disagreement. It was the Carbon Freeze scene when Princess Leia says, “I love you.” Han Solo’s response in the script was, “I love you, too.” I shot the line and it just didn’t seem right for the character of Han Solo. So we worked on the scene on the set. We kept trying different things and couldn’t get the right line. We were into the lunch break and I said to Harrison try it again and just do whatever comes to mind. That is when Harrison said the line, “I know.” After the take, I said to my assistant director, David Tomblin, “It’s a wrap.” David looked at me in disbelief and said something like, “Hold on, we just went to overtime. You’re not happy with that, are you?” And I said, yes, it’s the perfect Han Solo remark, and so we went to lunch. George saw the first cut and said, “Wait a minute, wait a minute. That’s not the line in the script.” I said ““I love you, too’ was not Han Solo.” Han Solo was a rebel. George felt that the audience would laugh. And I said, that’s wonderful, he is probably going to his death for all they know. We sat in the room and he thought about it. He then asked me, “Did you shoot the line in the script?” I said yes. So we agreed that we would do two preview screenings once the film was cut and set to music with the line in and then with the line out. At the first preview in San Francisco, the house broke up after Han Solo said I know. When the film was over, people came up and said that is the most wonderful line and it worked. So George decided not to have the second screening.

George was the best producer I ever worked with. He left me alone and only came to England a few times. I told George at one point that I was behind schedule, not that it was anyone’s fault, but because it was so complex. Many of the special effects that were done on set often did not work at all. His answer was, “Keep doing what you are doing. Just keep shooting.” This was the greatest thing for a director to hear from a producer.

Much more here.

Vanity Fair:

“I got so obsessed with [C-SPAN] that it was kind of interfering with my life. Sarah Palin came on, and I thought, Oh, fuck, this is the end. Because a dumb woman is a dumb woman.” On the subject of Arizona governor Jan Brewer, Cher says, “She was worse than Sarah Palin, if that is possible. This woman was like a deer in headlights. She’s got a handle on the services of the state, and I would not let her handle the remote control.”

To soak in the genius that is the Sonny-made Cher, read full article here.

He won’t though. Take his Vanity Fair interview when he is discussing the re-release of “Avatar.” He also said of “Piranha 3D”: 

“You’ve got to remember: I worked on ‘Piranha 2’ for a few days and got fired off of it; I don’t put it on my official filmography. So there’s no sort of fond connection for me whatsoever. In fact, I would go even farther and say that … I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus, but that is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like ‘Friday the 13th 3D.’ When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip. And that’s not what’s happening now with 3D. It is a renaissance – right now the biggest and the best films are being made in 3D. Martin Scorsese is making a film in 3D. Disney’s biggest film of the year – ‘Tron: Legacy’ – is coming out in 3D. So it’s a whole new ballgame.” 

First of all, knowing Cameron, the fact that he got fired is a big issue here, and he’s holding it against the piranha films. 

Second, while I haven’t seen “Piranha 3D,” I know that it is based off of a spoof of “Jaws.” Look at the posters and you’ll see that this one is also supposed to be a ridiculous B-movie. So Cameron’s attack was an effort to hold a film clearly meant to be a cross between the ridiculously absurd and the horrific to the standards of epic films. I think that’s a little unfair. 

The film’s producer, Mark Canton, was pissed. I received his statement today from a Hollywood marketing agency: 

“Mr. Cameron, who singles himself out to be a visionary of movie-making, seems to have a small vision regarding any motion pictures that are not his own. It is amazing that in the movie-making process – which is certainly a team sport – that Cameron consistently celebrates himself out as though he is a team of one. His comments are ridiculous, self-serving and insulting to those of us who are not caught up in serving his ego and his rhetoric.” 

Fiery, but fun. The excerpts I’ve included here are just portions – his complete response was over 1,300 words long. Almost an epic, but again, wrong genre. 

“Jim, are you kidding or what? First of all, let’s start by you accepting the fact that you were the original director of ‘Piranha 2’ and you were fired. Shame on you for thinking that genre movies and the real maestros like Roger Corman and his collaborators are any less auteur or impactful in the history of cinema than you. Martin Scorcese made ‘Boxcar Bertha’ at the beginning of his career. And Francis Ford Coppola made ‘Dimentia 13’ back in 1963. And those are just a few examples of the talented and successful filmmakers whose roots are in genre films. Who are you to impugn any genre film or its creators?” 

And Canton is one who can talk. While his films by and large aren’t the stuff that win Oscars, he did produce “300,” and horror master George Romero’s “Land of the Dead.” And what’s wrong with being a genre producer? Plus, isn’t “Aliens” a genre film? 

Now, Cameron has a point. Should a movie be made for movie’s sake? No. I don’t like movies that are filled with excessive violence and nudity just to earn an R-rating and bring in horny teenage males. I’m sure that’s what “Piranha 3D” is. In that respect, I’m not a fan, though I originally wanted to see it because of the “Jaws” tie. But Cameron basically did the same thing in “Avatar” by continually ushering scantily clad blue alien women across the screen. He kept the PG-13 rating, but there’s not much left to the imagination. 

“Piranha 3D,” for any faults it has, is redeemed because it gave Canton the opportunity to say something that Hollywood has been way too quiet about: 

“To be honest, I found the 3D in ‘Avatar’ to be inconsistent and while ground breaking in many respects, sometimes I thought it overwhelmed the storytelling. Technology aside, I wish ‘Avatar’ had been more original in its storytelling.” 

Thank you! 

Pretty pictures don’t cover up an average story. I’m sure “Piranha 3D” isn’t going to win any awards for storytelling, but when a film is as critically acclaimed as “Avatar,” faulty dialogue and flat characters should be acknowledged. 

Based on the re-release’s poor performance at the box office, I’d say a few of the film’s fans recognized the fact.

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?

Blogging is easy!

Such was the case with my analysis of  The Hurt Locker. I loved the film. After watching it, however, the thing that bothered me was the quote at the beginning, “War is a drug.” In the end, it serves as the theme of the film, but I found it to be way off the mark, and not even supported by the film itself. To me, The Hurt Locker seemed to be clearly not about addiction, but about purpose. What would motivate someone to return to a horrific war zone, to face death and dismemberment on a daily basis? A sense of purpose. That is what motivates people, not “a rush.”

I set to writing. Then I read Walter Owen’s piece in Vanity Fair, who put it together better than I would have:

But the director of The Hurt Locker brings you close. Which makes all the more baffling the epigraph that fills the screen, a line of slipshod poesy by the respected war correspondent Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” That might have served as profound insight in Avatar, but in The Hurt Locker it only raises the question of how a director who could conceive such a spare and unremitting movie could also fall for such facile hokum.

I love that. And I wish I said it, because I love using phrases like “facile hokum.” But it bears repeating: The Hurt Locker is a great film, but it’s stated theme is way off base. Did the director and writer really believe this? I often find myself watching movies and saying, “I love this! But these filmmakers don’t seem to know what this film is about!”

That, I believe, is not the case with The Hurt Locker. I think that Katherine Bigelow and Mark Boal knew exactly what film they were making, and they knew that the quote was facile hokum, too. So why open the film with it? O.K., here’s where I get to have an original thought: The quote is marketing. It is there to give reviewers permission to praise the film. Just think what would happen if they made the exact same film, but opened with a quote from, say, Walter Owen:

As long as men still feel they are nothing without a call to duty, they will look for a place in the world where they find themselves excellent at something. One of those places is, and has always been, battle.

Critics would have hated it. It does not buy into their worldview, that soldiers are dumb rednecks who are forced to fight for their country because of lack of education and economic opportunity. They are victims. They are addicts.

The Hurt Locker does not portray these men as victims, but the quote at the beginning gives the critics cover – “It’s not their choice- it’s an addiction. They can’t help themselves.” That explains everything, including the film’s almost universal (and deserved) praise.

So kudos to Bigelow and Boal. They not only made a very watchable film, they played the press and Academy voters like a fiddle, which is, for me, even more fun to watch.

Vanity Fair:

Despite setting a domestic box-office record of $10.6 billion in 2009, Hollywood is on edge. The oceans of easy, eager money that once flooded the industry from foreign investors, hedge funds, and private-equity pools have all but dried up. And with actual attendance still off sharply from its 2002 high and DVD revenues in retreat, fewer and fewer movies are getting made. Worse still, from a talent point of view, where once studios were happy to reward stars with lavish back-end deals siphoning money straight from the studio’s share of the box-office gross, they are now reining in such deals, forcing many stars to collect only when all of the film’s costs have been recouped. In Hollywood, then, as in most of the country, people just aren’t getting paid what they used to. But for a select group the money is still rolling in.

First, a definition: this list of Hollywood elite is limited to creative figures—producers, directors, stars—in film. (We include no moguls, agents, or people who work primarily in television.) Calculating their earning power is an inexact science, but we interviewed scores of people with access to actual numbers and deal terms: agents, lawyers, studio executives, and, occasionally, the stars themselves. Worldwide box-office figures were taken from Box Office Mojo and Box Office Guru. Revenue numbers for DVDs—for the first three quarters of 2009—were supplied by Adams Media Research; we came up with our own revenue estimates for DVDs released in the fourth quarter by applying a conservative multiplier to a movie’s domestic box-office. …

1 Michael Bay
Estimated 2009 earnings: $125 million

2 Steven Spielberg
Estimated 2009 earnings: $85 million

3 Roland Emmerich
Estimated 2009 earnings: $70 million

4 James Cameron
Estimated 2009 earnings: $50 million

5 Todd Phillips
Estimated 2009 earnings: $44 million

6 Daniel Radcliffe
Estimated 2009 earnings: $41 million

7 Ben Stiller
Estimated 2009 earnings: $40 million

8 Tom Hanks
Estimated 2009 earnings: $36 million

9 J. J. Abrams
Estimated 2009 earnings: $36 million

10 Jerry Bruckheimer
Estimated 2009 earnings: $35.5 million 

Full list and a lot more detail here.

–

Levi is the Kevin Federline of American politics, a good-looking, not-too-bright guy catching a break by impregnating a rising star, or at least one’s daughter, then basking in the reflected glow.  When things went south with Bristol Palin, he found, in a mainstream media eager for anything that might derail the Sarah Palin express, an opportunity to go farther than he ever thought he could.  Movies, modeling, memoirs – anything was possible, they assured him.  Just tell us what we want to hear, Levi – the good stuff, the juicy stuff, the stuff too good to fact check.  Oh, and hand over your dignity while you’re at it.

But Levi’s antics are about more than just manufacturing ammunition to fire at Governor Palin.  The minstrel shows of the past were calculated to demonstrate white superiority through the employment of the most degrading stereotypes and the ritualized humiliation of the African-American performers.  This shameful circus is no different.  Levi’s mindless brand of masculinity, his dropping out of high school, his troubled home life – these are all the hyper-exaggerated cultural touchstones the bicoastal liberal elite imagines define the rest of our country. 

Levi Johnston is what they want to see when they look at Middle America.  They don’t want to see the young heroes like Track Palin, an Iraqi Freedom vet.  They don’t want to see Americans whose commitment to a better world is manifested by their putting their lives on the line instead of pasting a “Hope & Change” bumpersticker to the back of their Prius.  They want – and need – clowns, and Levi is only too happy to oblige them.

Most young people today, looking on the things they did in their youth, will have only an ill-considered tattoo to regret.  But Levi’s kid needs him, yet Daddy is busy far away performing like a court jester for people who will slam the door on him the second he stops being useful. 

Can he really be so dumb as to think they actually care about him?  Does he really expect to get a call from Kathy Griffin to accompany her to next year’s Teen Choice Awards?  He’s like the nerd in one of those high school movies who the bad kids make-over as part of a bet – except there’s no happy ending here unless Levi comes to realize that this is all a big joke to them and he’s the punch line.

Despite the fervent desire of some, like the bloggers at the circulation whirlpool called Newsweek, that “as long as there is Palin, there’ll be Levi Johnston,” they have to concede that “Levi’s 15 minutes are almost up.”  Neither GQ nor Vanity Fair will be calling him back for another photo spread anytime soon.  Larry King and Tyra Banks have wrung him dry of slime.  He’s off CBS’s speed dial.  The Celebrity Dysfunction Complex has moved on.

His big achievement is a 19-second TV spot selling some obscure brand of pistachio nuts.  They don’t even let him talk.  He’s also going to go nude in Playgirl – providing fantasy fodder for lonely cougars and randy gay men.  Levi, pinch yourself cuz you’re living the dream.

But Levi is a symptom, not the disease.  Levi’s being a fool, and it’s sad to see him put a discount price tag on his dignity and his family.  Considering his background with a mother who is allegedly involved with drugs, one can see why he does these things, though a lot better folks came from a lot worse.  His background is an explanation, not an excuse. 

The ones exploiting him are the real villains.  People, even dumb ones, aren’t to be used up then discarded like garbage when you’re done with them.  Those pulling his strings ought to be ashamed of themselves, but they aren’t. This minstrel show is too delightful, too much fun, as it promulgates the most condescending stereotypes imaginable of those unworthy wretches living outside the bi-coastal elite bubble. 

And what of Levi?  He’s burned the one bridge that could lead him home to people who might actually still care about him when he finds himself on the wrong side of the velvet ropes again, when the only opportunities he has left are reality kickboxing matches with Vanilla Ice and bit parts in Skinemax epics about horny stewardesses.  He’s a father who, if he ever sees his son again, is going to have to answer one of the most brutal, heart-rending questions a child could ask:

“Why did you choose them over me, Daddy?”

Levi Johnston’s weakness of character will lead him to sorrow after those who are using him today have moved on to other victims.  It’s not too late to make amends – I suspect the Palins would forgive him if he sincerely asked them to - but he won’t do it.  He can’t.  He thinks the elite loves him.  He thinks he will never wear out his welcome.  So he will keep on dancing, playing the fool, the minstrel, for the transitory amusement of those who hold him in nothing but contempt.

While some narrow-minded philistines complained, the artistic establishment heaped praise (and money) on these and works like them. The National Endowment for the Arts was so impressed with Serrano’s work they granted him $15,000 courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. For his effort, Ofili was awarded the Turner Prize, Britain’s most prestigious art award.

Other recent Turner Prize honorees include Damien Hirst, whose works feature livestock suspended in formaldehyde, and Tracy Elmin, whose nominated work was an unmade bed. The Turner Prize is named in honor of J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), renowned as the original “painter of light” (pace Thomas Kinkade). (One of the Stuckists, a group of anti-conceptual figurative painters who demonstrate annually against the Prize, puckishly said, “The only artist who wouldn’t be in danger of winning the Turner Prize is Turner.”)

Art and Popular Culture defines “transgressive art” as: “art forms that aim to transgress; i.e., to outrage or violate basic mores and sensibilities.”

The French, naturally, have a phrase for it: “Epater la bourgeoisie,” or to shock mainstream sensibilities. Or as Andy Warhol put it, “Art is what you can get away with.”

Hirst, the formaldehyde artist, said early in his career, “I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say ‘f off.’ But after a while you can get away with things.”

And oh boy, did he. Hirst holds the record for the most expensive work of art by a living artist. His Lullaby Spring, a medicine cabinet filled with pills (and not even real ones with pharmacological effects), sold at auction for $19.2 million to the Emir of Qatar. And in two auction days in 2008, Hirst sold $198 million worth of, well, stuff.

The key phrase, however, is “what you can get away with.” And this is determined by the artistic establishment. Shocking the middle classes is one thing. Shocking the art establishment is quite another. And when those sensibilities largely overlap, as they do in these early, halcyon days of the Obama administration, then woe betide anyone who dares to draw outside the lines set by the media-education-government complex.

A year after 9/11, Hirst said, “The thing about 9/11 is that it’s kind of like an artwork in its own right. It was wicked, but it was devised in this way for this kind of impact. It was devised visually… You’ve got to hand it to them on some level because they’ve achieved something which nobody would have ever have thought possible, especially to a country as big as America. So on one level they kind of need congratulating, which a lot of people shy away from, which is a very dangerous thing.”

Indeed, the post-9/11 era produced a veritable flowering of transgressive political art, most of it directed at one particular individual hated by the artistic establishment: George W. Bush. When it came to Bush, to go from Warhol to Cole Porter, “anything goes.” No depiction was too grotesque.

Since most artists are highly constrained by political correctness of the leftist sort, when it came to depicting Bush, the constraints fell away, and an almost ecstatic cruelty was unleashed. Years from now, the art it produced will be an embarrassment to its creators (if it is remembered at all — never underestimate people’s ability to forget their mistakes).

Much has been made of the recent poster popping up around Los Angeles depicting President Obama as the Joker.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson, president of the Los Angeles Urban Policy Roundtable, said: “Depicting the president as demonic and a socialist goes beyond political spoofery, it is mean-spirited and dangerous.”

My own quibble with the poster isn’t the subject-matter, but that the depiction is a bit stale (the Joker is so 2008) and the caption is too on-the-nose. I would have liked a little more wit or wordplay in the caption. (Perhaps we should have a caption contest?)

Nevertheless, anybody who’s subscribed to Vanity Fair or watched The Daily Show has no standing to express outrage at the Obama Joker poster (or to object to any fatuousness). And whatever you think of the poster, its creator has more cojones than all of the anti-Bush comedians, artists and columnists put together. Because artists and other cultural figures today are more like the sheep preserved in that Hirst glass case pictured above than they care to admit.

So what follows is a refresher course on the level of respect artists held for the office of president during Bush’s tenure, a rogue’s gallery of bad taste:

Here’s the illustration (done by Drew Friedman) that Vanity Fair posted on their website, almost exactly one year before the Obama version appeared:

And here are some comments on the Vanity Fair site:

“Great stuff from the talented Friedman (as always).”

“Very good!!!”

“Brilliant and profound.”

(Unbelievable as it seems, I don’t think they were being sarcastic.)

Then there’s the ultimate online insult, so heinous it has its own law (Godwin’s). Search “Bush as Hitler” on Google images and you get more than 1.6 million results. One of many:

And remember the ever-popular “Bush as chimp” caricatures? (These were the very height of Shavian wit.) So many to choose from, here’s just one:

Speaking of “on-the-nose,” a Google image search of “Bush as devil” turns up more than 3 million hits. Here’s one:

And if a single evil metaphor isn’t enough for you, there are numerous mix-and-match combinations, such as this mash-up of Bush as Hitler and Satan:

And let’s not forget this tastefully done portrait. It first appeared as a cover for the Village Voice and then popped up on countless T-shirts, posters, and even an episode of HBO’s “True Blood”:

If you prefer a healthy dollop of racism in your mockery, you don’t have to look further than this cartoon, which oh-so-cleverly tweaks Bush’s Secretary of State:

The LA Weekly didn’t much care for the Obama poster (despite their past championing and displaying of similarly tacky anti-Bush propaganda). Their blogger commented (weirdly), “The only thing missing is a noose.” Of course, when the noose was on Sarah Palin’s (boo! hiss!) neck, they thought that was just (and I quote) “Super!”

One of the cardinal sins a leftist can commit is to “Other,” which is “the demonization and dehumanization of groups.” Postmodernists like to make much of this, blaming the West for “othering” minorities, foreigners, and Asians, among other people. (Of course, they never mention that the reverse is usually even more virulent.)

As the pictures above demonstrate, in the past eight years, what the left has done to Bush, and to Republicans in general, is to “other” them: to demonize them, to treat them like some alien entity that is less than human, undeserving of common decency.

And what the left experience, when they see the Joker posters pop up, is what psychologists call “projection” — the tearing-down process they subjected Bush to, they fear will happen to their hero. They fear that Obama’s opponents will succeed in reducing their icon to a laughingstock like Bush was (and is — for now).

To paraphrase Obama’s erstwhile spiritual advisor: The cultural establishment’s chickens have come home to roost.