Oliver Stone's Next Target: Bush

Posted by Adam Howard, AlterNet at 11:11 AM on January 21, 2008.

Oliver Stone is planning to do a film about the life and presidency of George W. Bush, entitled unsurprisingly, "Bush":

Director Oliver Stone, a vocal critic of the Bush administration's handling of Iraq, is putting together a feature film project about the current president, and has tapped Josh Brolin (No Country for Old Men) as his George W.

Stone, who's shopping around a script completed pre-strike by his Wall Street co-writer Stanley Weiser, told Daily Variety that he does not intend to make a stridently anti-Bush movie, but instead wants to use a style similar to that of The Queen to explain Bush's motivations and rise to prominence. ''People have turned my political ideas into a cliché, but that is superficial,'' Stone told the trade paper. ''I'm a dramatist who is interested in people, and I have empathy for Bush as a human being, much the same as I did for Castro, Nixon, Jim Morrison, Jim Garrison, and Alexander the Great,'' he said, referring to the subjects of his previous films. Stone also asserted that his film will aim to offer a ''fair, true portrait'' of Bush, and will contain surprises for both fans and detractors of the president.

Filming on Bush could start as soon as April. As for Stone's other recent project, a movie about the My Lai massacre called Pinkville, UA has pulled the plug, citing reasons related to the writers' strike — but Stone told Variety he hopes to get that script back and revive it.

I've always been a fan of Oliver Stone's and I'm excited to see him rip into Bush. Stone has been on a rocky road lately. I never saw Alexander, which was a massive failure critically or commercially or World Trade Center which I heard was a disappointment mainly because it was so safe and when you go to an Oliver Stone movie you don't want safe. JFK is one of my all time favorite films and I'm also a big fan of Platoon, Wall Street and Nixon just to name a few.

Unfortunately, despite Stone's warning that it will not be an outright anti-Bush movie, ever since JFK, Stone is vilified constantly in the press and no matter how the film comes out it will likely be portrayed as crazy Hollywood liberals smearing American yet again. I don't care though. As long as Stone gets the facts right, I'll be among the first in line to see it. Brolin is a great actor and I think a good choice to play Bush, although he's too handsome to really look like the chimp-in-chief. Anyway, it's nice to see Hollywood is still not afraid to start commenting on our current state of affairs in spite of the box office failure of films like Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah.

Adam Howard is the editor of PEEK.