John Cusack: Bypassing the Corporate Media

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted July 12, 2008.

It's not uncommon for a big-budget Hollywood flick to get mixed reviews and then go on to do gang-busters at the box office. Movie-goers' desires when looking for a little escapism on a Saturday afternoon don't always mesh with the critics' tastes. But it's almost unheard of for scrappy, independent films to do well without critical raves. Low-budget films live or die according to their reviews, and a so-so write up is usually a quick ticket to the video shelf.

That's the rule; War, Inc., John Cusack's dark parable about the rape and pillage of the Iraqi economy -- what Antonia Juhasz calls Bush's "economic invasion" of Iraq - is the exception. While the film wasn't exactly panned by critics -- overall, its writing and acting were well-received -- quite a few mainstream reviewers were dismissive of its premise. For many in the commercial media, Iraq, and the rampant war-profiteering that's marked the adventure from the beginning, is old news, and they greeted it with a collective 'ho-hum.'

Time called the film, "a great excuse to call up your old liberal pals and relive that dreamy time when war as business was an idea worth satirizing." The New York Times' David Carr wrote, "Those who suggest that the movie's core premise - war as a profit engine - is so five years ago are right in a way" (not that Carr would suggest anything of the sort himself). Reuters' Frank Scheck predicted that "the First Look release is unlikely to counter the commercial malaise for war-themed films."

That wasn't a surprise to Cusack and his production team. "We knew this would be considered an incendiary political statement," he told me this week from Bankgok, where he's shooting his next project, Shanghai. "We knew that we'd get some push-back." Cusack decided to bypass the gate-keepers of the corporate media altogether. "From the beginning we decided to leverage the alternative media -- to take the film directly to the anti-war Audience that would support it not only for its subversive entertainment value, but also for the statement it made -- for the truth it tries to tell through its absurdist lens."

War, Inc. was the first theatrical release to have such a marketing strategy. "We did some of the usual interviews to promote the project," Cusack said. "But we also did dozens of interviews with alternative outlets and leading progressive bloggers. We started a My Space page that has some rabidly active folks down for the cause.... I posted diaries on DailyKos; we did live chats with readers of blogs like Crooks and Liars. The progressive community really got behind the film and any success we have had and will have for the life of the film is due to these sites and the online community." The film's advertising budget was next-to-nothing; Cusack said "the project had no corporate backing." In June, when the release expanded to Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, Connecticut, Washington and Illinois, indy journalist Larisa Alexandrova noted that it was "thanks to word-of-mouth, the alternative press and the blogosphere."

Cusack was playing to a receptive audience. The gap between the dismissive snorts from commercial outlets like The Washington Post and the film's reception in the alternative media was a mile wide. The Nation's Jeremy Scahill called the film "this generation's Dr. Strangelove and "a powerful, visionary response to the cheerleading culture of the corporate media and a pliant Hollywood afraid of its own shadow." Arianna Huffington wrote that the film found "a savage reality-altering humor amidst the tragedy of Iraq. It delivers a wicked punch in the gut, making you laugh, wince, and get outraged all at the same time." Naomi Klein, whose work Cusack and his co-writers followed closely while working on the script, told Huffington that the film "cranks up the dial on the state of privatized war just enough that we can finally see our present clearly. As you're watching it, you can't help wondering: can these guys really get away with this?"

War, Inc.'s opening weekend -- in a limited New York-L.A. release -- came in second only to Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in average take per screen (the only way to compare smaller independent films with their big-budget cousins). Now showing in 20 cities and towns, the flick continues to hold its own; in its seventh week of release, it came in 31st in average take per theater last weekend (among films in at least ten theaters), beating block-busters like Iron Man, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and Speed Racer. Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! has grossed about three hundred times what War, Inc. has raked in, but its per-theater average was about a quarter of the indy film's take last weekend.

It's an impressive showing for a film that almost didn't get made. Cusack started shopping the project around just as Dixie Chicks' CDs were being thrown onto bonfires, and not long after White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer warned that "nowadays you have to be careful what you say and do," and nobody was biting. For the major studios, it was too "anti-corporate"; they feared it'd be seen as "anti-American." The film was eventually shot on a shoestring budget in Bulgaria, financed with European cash.

See more stories tagged with: iraq, movies, war profiteering, cusack, war inc., alternative media

Joshua Holland is an AlterNet staff writer.

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