A preview of an upcoming piece in the LA Times appeared last night, with excerpts from an article slated to run on Sunday. I won’t be around nest week, so might not get the chance to post much until after the holiday.¬† Thanks to Markku for bringing this to my attention, and maybe this can serve as a bookmark reminder to check out the full feature this weekend.
It feels like moviedom’s version of an Ultimate Fighting grudge match–Bush vs. Stone.
The two men were born into wealth and were briefly classmates at Yale, but since then, the twain has hardly met. One ducked out of military service, boozed and brawled until he found God, ran a baseball team and turned to politics, ending up as governor of Texas and a two-term president, though the last years, thanks to a disastrous war in Iraq, have been pretty much of a fiasco, with his party losing Congress and his popularity ratings at historic lows. The other earned medals in Vietnam before emerging as a bigger-than-life Hollywood filmmaker, tackling the Big Issues of the day (“Platoon,” “Wall Street” and “JFK”) before seeing his own career take a downhill slide of its own, the bumps in the road smoothed over with booze and psychedelics.
No comment, except: I’m glad I didn’t say it. Have already been pummeled enough. Instead of me trying to guess what Oliver Stone is up to, I should just let him speak for himself.
” ‘I love Michael Moore, but I didn’t want to make that kind of movie,’ Stone said of ‘Fahrenheit 9/11.’ It [“W”] is not an overly serious movie, but it is a serious subject. It’s a Shakespearean story … I see it as the strange unfolding of American democracy as I have lived it.’ ”
” ‘We are trying to walk in the footsteps of W and try to feel like he does, to try to get inside his head. But it’s never meant to demean him,’ Stone said. ‘We are playing with our own opinions and our own preconceptions of him. This is his diary–his attempt to explain himself in his own words.’ “
We’ll have to wait for October to see how The Diary of George Bush plays out on screen. There’s the script some of us have seen, but it didn’t read like a diary to me, so maybe that indicates there’s been a major alteration in the concept?¬† I’m still a little shocked that the draft screenplay would even attract this kind of talent, so I’m more and more mystified by what Stone’s scattered quotes can mean.¬† Mystified, and intrigued. So “W” is going to help us “try to feel like Bush does, to try to get inside his head.” Mmm… I feel tingly already.
