Expect the American right to go nuts over Oliver Stone's W. The trailer for the breathlessly awaited insta-biopic leaked this week and offered toothsome glimpses of the proto-prez's halcyon bachelorhood: drunk-driving, strip joints, dive bars and poker parties, nights in the slammer, going mano-a-mano with Bush 41 - all to the sarcastic accompaniment of What a Wonderful World. It's years since I said this about an Oliver Stone movie, but I can't wait. It looks like Dallas, or Dubya Does Dallas, with a hefty dose of Animal House, Urban Cowboy and Eagle Pennell's Last Night at the Alamo. And I think it might be a comedy, more like Dick or The Great McGinty than All the President's Men or Nixon. Oliver Stone has a sense of humour? Who knew?
The trailer de-emphasises the post-2000 years, but offers tantalising flash-forwards to W's cabinet, staffed by the likes of Richard Dreyfuss (harrowingly Cheneyesque), Scott Glenn (Rumsfeld), Thandie Newton (Condoleezza Rice, previously played - twice! - by Penny Johnson Jerald, 24's Lady Macbeth), Ellen Burstyn (Barbara Bush, the Bette Davis role here) and James Cromwell as Bush the Elder. Some of the casting is pretty provocative. Laura Bush is played by Elizabeth Banks, remembered by countless millions for masturbating in a bubblebath with a showerhead in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, and Karl Rove is played by Toby Jones, best known in America for his pissy-queen Truman Capote. And some of it achieves a weird meta-ness: witness short-fused Josh Brolin wearing the role of the youthful hellion like a tailored suit, and Method acting his way into a real-life barfight on the movie's location in Shreveport, Louisiana, last month. And his own dad played Reagan! Talk about Oedipus Tex.
But is the film evidence of liberal bias in the mass media? Is it, my ass. Dubya's is the most filmed administration ever. Woodrow Wilson got his biopic two decades after he died, FDR's still waiting, and only JFK had a major film made about him while he was still president (PT 109, starring Cliff Robertson). Bush's lot, by contrast, have strutted across the screen in such revisionist propaganda as DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, and The Path to 9/11. To be sure, there have been dozens of satirical and largely hostile depictions of the administration's already cartoonlike gargoyles - from Lil' Bush to Saturday Night Live to two Cheney-related projects I've not seen but badly want to, called Birdshot Mountain and Don't Go Nuclear! - but these two were, respectively, a prime-time network TV movie and a Showtime cable movie, and they were made by hard righties. Richard Nixon dreamed of this kind of media adoration.
DC 9/11 came from expatriate British rightwingers Brian Trenchard-Smith and Lionel Chetwynd, who also wrote Hanoi Hilton but did so without ever mentioning a feller named John McCain (himself played by Shawn Hatosy in the adulatory Faith of My Fathers, with Stone's Rumsfeld, Scott Glenn, as his Pops). Bri and Li have a long history of whining about the US media's supposed (and entirely fanciful) liberal bias, but no one stymied them here.
David L Cunningham, director of the widely condemned The Path to 9/11 (alternate title: "It's All Clinton's Fault!!"), turned out to be a member of Youth With a Mission, a fundie-religious outfit founded by his dad Loren (shades of Mel Gibson). Alumni of that group are active in Hollywood, trying to squeeze Jesus in through the back door.
And yet, despite the hagiographic overload on the right side of the scales, Stone's movie - even with the preemptive alibi that was World Trade Center - will be taken as evidence that moviedom should immediately be targeted as the next front in the global war on terror.