Pre-order “Zack & Miri Make a Porno”
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Included In This Package:
A Signed Poster from Oliver Stone, Josh Brolin, Elizabeth Banks, James Cromwell, and Ellen Burstyn
A Hand Signed Letter from a Lionsgate Executive

You can bid on the auction at Ebay until October 20th! Good luck!

LOCATION: The Oval Office

THE SKINNY: So the trailer for Oliver Stone’s W. wasn’t that unbearable, with the whole cast walking around looking like they were on some alternate, dramatic version of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE. The teaser poster has an equally surreal quality to it, spotlighting Josh Brolin’s George W. Bush getting his hair teased…

From iF Magazine

DR: What’s the secret to playing a believable Republican first lady?

EB: “It’s all about the hair. Hair speaks volumes about every politician’s wife. And I think you’ll be impressed with my version of Laura Bush’s very Republican hair. I did meet Laura once, in 2003, long before I knew I’d be playing her.”

DR: What do you think about the film’s portrayal of the Bush family?

EB: “The film really presents both sides. People who like George Bush will find many things in the movie to like and people who don’t like George Bush will have their opinion validated as well. It’s a fairly fair portrayal.”

From the Los Angeles Times

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 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.

Now another chapter is being written. Down in Louisiana, Oliver Stone has been shooting “W.,” his very personal take on the psychological evolution of George W. Bush, the movie everyone in Hollywood is dying to see but no one was willing to fund (Bill Block’s QED International ultimately bankrolled the movie’s $30-million budget and Lionsgate will release it this fall). It stars Josh Brolin as Dubya, with Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney and Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush.

Our film reporter John Horn has just returned from steamy Shreveport, La., where he watched Stone filming a father-son scene between Bush Sr. (played by James Cromwell) and Bush Jr. set during Dubya’s tenure as owner of the Texas Rangers, with a local football stadium standing in for the Rangers’ home field (John’s story will run Sunday).

All too often these days, especially when the crisis management PR folks are on the case, a visit to a Hollywood set feels a lot like a trip to Los Alamos in the ’40s during the development of the atom bomb. That goes double when it comes to the set of Stone’s “W.,” especially after all the ruckus caused earlier this year when a bootleg version of the film’s script showed up on the Internet. It sounds like John got the “I Spy” treatment, to the point where he couldn’t even read the “sides” — the pages of the script that are being shot that day.

If John had only stopped by my house before he went to Shreveport, he could’ve gotten a pretty decent idea of what the script (written by Stanley Weiser) was like. Someone in the Stone camp slipped me an early version of it months ago. While there have been considerable revisions made since, I can guarantee that if you think “W.” will be an earnest, respectful rendering of the Bush years — sort of like Stone’s “World Trade Center” take on 9/11 — you would be . . . wrong!

As John put it after returning from the set, the film “is heavily focused on the president’s relationship with his father, so the best analogy that Oliver Stone came up with was: ‘Henry IV.’ Like Shakespeare, there’s a little bit of history, a little drama, a little comedy — anchored by a story about a king (George H.W. Bush) and his sometimes ne’er-do-well Prince Hal (George W. Bush).”

That’s a fair description of the script I read. It hits nearly all the high points of the Bush ascension and presidency, from his youthful frat house antics and religious convergence (we even get a scene where he claims God wants him to run for president) to Bush and Co.’s mishandling of the Iraqi postwar effort. But as John pointed out, the meat of the story involves the complicated 41-43 father-son relationship and how it impacted Dubya’s insistence on invading Iraq.

From the LA Times

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.

Now another chapter is being written. Down in Louisiana, Oliver Stone has been shooting “W,” his very personal take on the psychological evolution of George W. Bush, the movie everyone in Hollywood is dying to see but no one was willing to fund. It stars Josh Brolin as Dubya, with Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney and Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush.

Etbpstone

Our film reporter John Horn has just returned from steamy Shreveport, where he watched Stone filming a father-son scene between Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. set during Dubya’s tenure as owner of the Texas Rangers, with a local football stadium standing in for the Rangers’ home field. John’s story will run this Sunday, but here’s a sneak peek at some of his interview with Stone.

Horn writes: “Racing to film, edit and release the film before the November election, Stone was not always getting even five hours of sleep a night. Even though it was nearly midnight and the crew was just finishing its lunch break, the 61-year-old director grew increasingly animated talking about ‘W.’

” ‘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.’ ”

Later on, Horn gets Stone to offer his own armchair psychoanalysis of the president:

“Stone, who was briefly a Yale classmate of Bush, is clearly no fan of the president’s politics, but says he’s amazed by his resilience and ambition. ‘He won a huge amount of people to his side after making a huge amount of blunders and really lying to people,’ the director said. What further fascinates Stone is Bush’s religious and personal conversion: a hard-drinking C student who was able to become not only Texas governor but also the leader of the free world.

” ‘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.’ ”

From the LA Times

Instead of a nefarious image of our current president, or a more sinister rendering of Vice President Cheney, there is a simple mimic of a dictionary entry: “W,” a noun defined as “The Improbable President,” followed by a long list of some of Bush’s great malapropisms: “They misunderestimated me.” “I can press when there needs to be pressed; I can hold hands when there needs to be … hold hands.” “I hear there’s rumors on the Internets that we’re going to have a draft.”

And on it goes …

It’s probably good that the ad for Stone’s “W” — which ran in trade publications and was aimed at drawing international distributors — wasn’t in any way pedantic. If there’s one dicey prospect at the multiplex, it’s politics in heavy doses, and the more recent the history, the worse the movies seem to do.

Cable news networks and broadcast news divisions may be enjoying record ratings for their coverage of the election, but Hollywood views this reality as a risk. One after another, movies with Iraq or war on terror themes sputtered at the box office in the past year. Just about the only bright spot was “Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay,” which raked in $37 million, more than making up for its modest budget.

The spotty market extends to recent documentaries. There was success in Michael Moore’s “Sicko,” but many, many others have struggled. “Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains,” grossed just $108,807, according to BoxOfficeMojo.com, and the heavily anticipated “Chicago 10,” a novel attempt to mix protest, history and animation, collected just $174,264.

Even HBO’s heavily promoted “Recount” — a sometimes irreverent take on the 2000 post-election fight for the Florida vote — failed to draw huge numbers of viewers on its initial debut: a modest 1 million subscribers, on a par with its last film, “Bernard and Doris.”

So you can’t fault Stone for a satirical flair. It may be the only workable way to get moviegoers to the multiplex.

“With the film still in production, we have not settled on any final approach,” says Tom Ortenberg, president of Lionsgate, which will market and distribute the film domestically. “We have worked with politically themed and politically charged films before, … and, without question, it is going to be very important to position the film as a broad-based entertainment and not as a political broadside, because the more overtly political the film is made to appear, not only does it turn off certain potential audiences, but that also begins to make the movie feel like homework or medicine.”

Lionsgate picked up the movie project in April, after it went out to all the studios, but it has experience with such politically charged fare: It released Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” in 2004, after the Walt Disney Co. refused to distribute it, as well as “Crash,” which won the Oscar for best picture.

As with “Fahrenheit,” Lionsgate is counting on timing. “W” is being released on Oct. 17, just weeks before the general election, after which the public may be so satiated by politics that any political movie would be as stale as selling Hillary and Rudy merchandise at full price now. “Fahrenheit” became such a hurricane in the political sphere that political strategist Chris Lehane was brought on board to help in its positioning—and it’s not inconceivable that a high-profile consultant will be hired for “W.”

What they gained from “Fahrenheit,” Ortenberg says, is the wisdom that the political debate “will take care of itself.”

“W” will star Josh Brolin as George W. Bush, Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney, and an extensive cast of well-known actors filling out the Cabinet and the Bush family.

“We are going to have a lot to work with in terms of marketing what I expect to be a terrific and entertaining movie, and we will leave all of the politics and all that to others,” Ortenberg says.

When Stone first revealed that he was making “W,” many just assumed that it would be a slightly conspiratorial rendering on the order of “Nixon” or even “JFK.” After all, there are an ample number of proposed projects already out there, in various stages of development.

That impression is changing.

“I don’t know the tone of the movie, but from the [initial] one sheet, the surprising thing is that it uses humor,” says Martin Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication. He notes that the ad is, “in a strange way, kind of goofy, and I think it even means to be endearing.”

In fact, when details of the script leaked to the press, it was hard to even tell if it was a comedy or a drama. According to ABC News, an early draft of the script depicted Bush’s youthful days of partying, his rivalry with his father, his obsession with invading Iraq and his zealous faith. But there’s also Bush parachuting into the White House pool and sinking to the bottom, and Bush playing sophomoric jokes on Colin Powell, and Bush choking on a pretzel while watching a football game. It’s as if Will Ferrell were cast in the part. (In fact, the comic once kicked around the idea of a movie called “George Bush.”)

Stone described his project to Screen Daily as something not quite so comedic but “ideally in the vein of ‘Network’ or ‘Dr. Strangelove.’”

“I was a young man when I saw ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ and it still stays with me. It took a very grim subject and turned it into a seriocomic story, and it worked. So those would be great models for the movie to live by.”

“’Nixon’ was more ambitious in scope and time,” Stone said. “This is more of a soufflé. You have to laugh a little bit at [Bush’s presidency] because there are so many sad things in this. It’s tragicomedy.”

Even then, there are still inherent land mines in depicting a presidency that has yet to end. Anything can happen, and not always for the better. Shortly after Bush took office, Comedy Central tried to satirize the Bush White House with the weekly series “That’s My Bush!” There was talk of a feature version of the series, but it fell by the wayside after the Sept. 11 attacks. In 2006, ABC aired “Path to 9/11,” loosely based on the 9/11 Commission report, but the network ended up running the miniseries without commercials. It generated a torrent of criticism from Clinton administration officials for its depiction of the lack of action during their watch.

One of the best-known examples of the perils involved in depicting a sitting president came in 1998, when Universal released the Mike Nichols-directed “Primary Colors,” based on the novel by Anonymous, aka Joe Klein. The well-reviewed satire mimicked Bill Clinton and his penchant for women, with John Travolta as Gov. Jack Stanton, made to look and sound like the incumbent president. The film earned positive reviews, but the build-up to its release was precarious, coming just as the Monica Lewinsky scandal was dominating the news cycle.

At the time, The New York Times asked the head of a rival studio what he would do if he were releasing the film. He replied, “I would hang myself.”

The film grossed $52 million worldwide — considered a disappointment at the time.

It was a good lesson for anyone attempting to make a movie as real-life events continue to unfold.

Yet it doesn’t mean that a hit can’t be made out of a political event seared in the public’s memory, even if it is something that they would rather forget. “All the President’s Men” grossed more than $70 million at the box office in 1976, creating a political thriller out of Watergate even as full details of the Nixon administration continued to trickle out.

“It is true that some movies have been successful on the principle of ‘Will it outrage me?’ Those have largely been documentaries like ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and Michael Moore’s ‘Fahrenheit 9/11,’” Kaplan says. “But by and large, I think people spend their dollars on the principle that they will be entertained.”

What people want, he adds, is “a chance to feel what is being portrayed has a decent claim on what actually happened but also a vantage point that makes it fun, gripping or scary.”

In that regard, “W” should be in good hands, for Lionsgate also has distributed all of the “Saw” movies.

From Politico

Oliver Stone is flinging open French doors inside an enormous brick mansion in Shreveport, La., inspecting locations for his new film about the 43rd President of the United States. ”This one is too small,” he says. ”This one looks like George Tenet’s bedroom. Where did we decide to put Bush’s bedroom? It’s around here somewhere, isn’t it?”

Shooting begins in less than two weeks on W (or dub-ya, as it’s spelled out in the initial sketches for the poster), but not everything is exactly where it should be, and not only here in the house where the First Family’s residence will be re-created. The 32,000-square-foot soundstage the production is renting across town stands empty, waiting for the Oval Office and Cabinet Room sets to get trucked in from Los Angeles. The screenplay still needs work too. It’s gone through two rewrites since an earlier draft leaked to the press last month (some skeptics took it as an April Fools’ joke), but Stone would still like one more pass at it (”It’s evolving,” he says). And while most of the cast has been assembled and outfitted with prosthetic noses and hairpieces — Josh Brolin will play President George W. Bush and Elizabeth Banks will star as Laura — there is one major character still in search of an actor: a heavy named Dick Cheney.

Stone is famous for courting controversy with dramas like JFK (1991) and Nixon (1995). But with W, the 61-year-old filmmaker isn’t merely courting it — he’s grabbing controversy by the lapels and giving it a big wet smacker. For the first time, he’s turning his cameras not just on a living president but on one who’ll still be knocking around the White House when the movie premieres late this year. As if that weren’t provocative enough, Stone could end up releasing the film as early as October, at the height of a presidential campaign in which one of the major issues will undoubtedly be the legacy of the guy on the screen. The movie has become a lightning rod before Stone has shot a single frame. If that bootlegged script is any indication, the film will feature such flag-waving moments as the Commander-in-Chief nearly choking to death on a pretzel while watching football on TV and a flashback of him singing the ”Whiffenpoof” song as a frat pledge at Yale, not to mention scenes in which he refers to his advisers by dorky nicknames — ”Guru” for Condoleezza Rice, ”Turdblossom” for Karl Rove, ”Balloon Foot” for Colin Powell — while discussing plans for the invasion of Iraq with the coolness of a late-night poker game.

Stone has publicly promised W will be a ”fair, true portrait of the man,” but already there are those accusing him of the politics of personal destruction — and, worse, of trying to influence the election by painting the current Republican administration as reckless doofuses (although presumptive Republican nominee John McCain makes no appearance in the script). Naturally, Stone vehemently denies all charges. ”Bush may turn out to be the worst president in history,” he declares as he peeks into room after room. ”I think history is going to be very tough on him. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t a great story. It’s almost Capra-esque, the story of a guy who had very limited talents in life, except for the ability to sell himself. The fact that he had to overcome the shadow of his father and the weight of his family name — you have to admire his tenacity. There’s almost an Andy Griffith quality to him, from A Face in the Crowd. If Fitzgerald were alive today, he might be writing about him. He’s sort of a reverse Gatsby.”

As it happens, Oliver Stone went to school with George W. Bush. They both attended Yale in the mid-1960s — until Stone dropped out and served in Vietnam — although they didn’t mix in the same circles. ”If I met him there, I don’t remember,” Stone says. ”But I do remember John Kerry. He was big man on campus, head of the Political Union. I definitely remember him.” Thirty years later, in 1998, Stone had a closer encounter with then governor Bush at a Republican breakfast. ”I don’t usually go to breakfast with anybody,” he says, ”but I wanted to prove that even though people thought I was a leftist I wanted to hear what they had to say. It was funny, though — the minute I walked in the room the sound of the silverware kind of died. People were like, ‘What’s he doing here? Satan has walked in.”’ He laughs. ”But I met George Bush and I remember thinking that this man was going to be president. There was just a confidence and enthusiasm I’d never seen in a candidate before, especially in a Republican.”

It was another conservative — Bruce Willis — who inadvertently pushed Stone into making W. Originally, the director was planning on spending this spring in the editing room splicing together Pinkville, an ambitious drama about the notorious My Lai massacre of 1968. But last December, three weeks before shooting was set to start in Thailand, Willis pulled out of the film, and a jittery United Artists shut the production down. Suddenly jobless, Stone turned his attention to a scrappier script he and his Wall Street coscribe Stanley Weiser had been working on. Stone concluded that W could be made fast and relatively cheap (for around $30 million), with no need for unpredictable above-the-title stars or difficult international locations (Louisiana tax breaks shaved millions off the budget). ”Some movies are symphonies,” Stone says. ”This one is a concerto.”

Judging from that early script, W can also be a lighthearted minuet one moment and a sobering dirge the next. It’s not an entirely unsympathetic portrait. Toggling back and forth between Bush’s hard-partying youth and his current stint as leader of the free world, it hits the high notes of the president’s rise to power, but also lingers with deadpan detachment (or is that amusement?) on many of his lows. There’s a scene of 26-year-old Bush peeling his car to a stop on his parents’ front lawn and drunkenly hurling insults at his father (”Thank you, Mr. Perfect. Mr. War Hero. Mr. F—ing-God-Almighty!”), while another scene set a few years later finds Bush nearly crashing a small plane while flying under the influence. Some of the bits inside the White House are even more harrowing. ”Just keep your ego in check,” Bush snaps at Cheney during one chilly exchange. ”I’m the president. I’m the decider.” In one Strangelove-like moment, he tries to sell Tony Blair on the idea of provoking war with Iraq by flying a U.S. plane painted with U.N. colors over Baghdad, baiting Saddam to shoot it down. ”Plan B is assassinate the sonofabitch,” Bush informs the horrified prime minister.

Stone insists that every scene in W will be rooted in truth, and that he and Weiser drew from more than 20 diverse books — although, it should be noted, some accounts may have come from disgruntled former staffers. The director acknowledges that he had to speculate on some of the dialogue and delivery. ”You take all the facts and take the spirit of the scene and make it accurate to what you think happened,” he says. ”But if you take one speech from Cincinnati and one speech from the U.N. and turn them into one scene, who cares?” A few people, it turns out. Even before actors have arrived on the set — even before there are any sets — debate over the movie’s accuracy is already heating up. The Hollywood Reporter even asked historians, including Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, to vet the early script. ”My quarrel with the script isn’t that it departed from factual reality here and there, but that it just misses the guy,” Draper tells EW. ”You come away with an even more hyperbolized caricature of Bush the Cowboy President than is already out there.”

It’s no secret in Hollywood that Oliver Stone movies have a knack for stirring up trouble — even his 2004 pansexual epic Alexander was threatened with a lawsuit by Greek lawyers claiming it damaged their national heritage — and not a single major studio wanted anything to do with W. ”When push comes to shove, all these media companies are chickens—,” Stone says. ”They’re all part of conglomerates.” There may be other reasons: Movies about politics and the Iraq war have proved box office poison, and with Bush’s approval rating hovering at 28 percent, there’s not much reason for the studios to think the president will draw moviegoers to the multiplex. And despite Stone’s three Oscars, he doesn’t exactly rake in record grosses. His 2006 Nicolas Cage drama, World Trade Center, earned a respectable $70 million, but his films seldom top that domestically. In any case, W is being financed independently, with Chinese, German, and Australian funds and Lionsgate is rumored to have struck a deal to distribute it.

W didn’t just make studios nervous; the script gave lots of movie stars cold feet, too. Stone denies rumors that Robert Duvall turned down Cheney. And he won’t comment on reports that he’s talking to Paul Giamatti about the part. But casting has clearly been challenging. ”You’d be amazed how many male stars of a certain age in Hollywood are Republicans,” says Bill Block, CEO of QED, one of the film’s producers. ”I’m not going to name names, but a lot of them just didn’t want to have anything to do with it.” According to Stone, even some of the town’s young Democrats couldn’t be persuaded. ”They hate Bush so much, they can’t understand why I’d want to make a movie about him,” he says. ”They hate him so much, they can’t even imagine themselves playing him or playing anybody around him.”

Luckily, Josh Brolin got over his qualms — after all, his father, James, managed to play Ronald Reagan in a TV miniseries, and he’s married to Barbra Streisand. ”When Oliver approached me about George Bush my initial reaction was ‘Why would I want to do that?”’ says the 40-year-old actor, lately on a career roll after performances in American Gangster and No Country for Old Men. ”But Oliver pointed out certain similarities I had with the character. We both have well-known fathers. We both grew up in the country. We both have strong mothers.” Stone’s pitch worked like a charm, and for the past couple of months Brolin has been driving his wife, Diane Lane, crazy, struggling to master the president’s inimitable vocal style. ”I’m talking to myself all day long,” Brolin says. ”Sometimes I’ll call hotels in Texas and talk to the people at the front desk just to listen to their accents. And I’ve been watching a lot of video of Bush walking. It changes over the years, how he walks in his 30s, how he walks in foreign lands, before 9/11 and afterwards. People hold their emotions in their bodies. They can’t fake it. Especially him.” Elizabeth Banks, best known for turns in The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Spider-Man 3, takes a more straightforward approach to portraying First Lady Laura Bush. ”I don’t want to do an impression,” she says. ”I just want to honor her voice, her stillness, and her hairstyle.”

But what, exactly, is Stone honoring with this film? What’s his agenda? ”Listen,” he says with a groan, ”I’m tired of defending the accuracy of my movies. I’m past that now. JFK was a case to be proven, Nixon was a penetrating biography of a complex and dark man. But I’m not bound by those strictures anymore. Bush is not a complex and dark man, so it’s different. This movie can be funnier because Bush is funny. He’s awkward and goofy and makes faces all the time. He’s not your average president. So let’s have some fun with it. What are they going to do? ‘Discredit’ me again?”

This, apparently, is the new happy-go-lucky Oliver Stone. Or at least a more go-with-the-flow, maturing one. The old war wounds over Nixon and JFK still flare up on occasion (”You know, JFK is a lot more solid than people make it out to be in the press”), but clearly the man has mellowed. Or maybe it’s getting back to a seat-of-your-pants production like W that’s putting the director in such a good mood. ”It’s like my Salvador days,” he says cheerily. ”It’s good for me. It’s reinvigorating.” Even his attitude about politics sounds shockingly low-key, especially when it comes to the current election. ”I don’t follow the details,” he says. ”It makes me sad.” In short, Stone hardly seems like a man looking for a fight.

Still, he’s about to find himself in a doozy, especially if he manages to complete and release W before November’s election. His producers insist the film will be ready by then; they’re already planning to run TV spots opposite McCain’s ads this fall. Stone hedges, but agrees it’s theoretically possible. ”I could have it in theaters before the inauguration without a problem, but October?” he says as he wanders into a large, airy room with an ornate fireplace and several floor-to-ceiling windows shaded by flowing drapery. ”It depends on how fast an edit I do. It would cost money to rush it, but I’ve done that kind of thing before. This would be the fastest of my life, but it’s not impossible. I can do it.” Especially now that he’s finally found George Bush’s bedroom. (Additional reporting by Adam B. Vary)

TALES FROM THE SCRIPT
Stone and co-writer Stanley Weiser are still polishing the W script. Judging from an early draft, though, the movie will be darkly funny — at Bush’s expense. Highlights:

Oedipal Wreck After his father is elected president, Bush tells Laura, ”I’ll never get out of Poppy’s shadow…. I wish he’d LOST…. No matter what I do, it’s never going to be good enough.”

Tough Talker Bush, 26, drunk-drives his car onto the lawn of his parents’ D.C. home, and challenges his dad to a fight, ”Let’s go mano a mano! Right here. Right now!” Then, in 2003, when France fails to back the U.S. on its invasion of Iraq, Bush says of French president Jacques Chirac, ”I’d like to stuff a plate of freedom fries down that slick piece of s—’s throat.”

Practical Joker During a prep meeting on Iraq, Bush playfully locks Colin Powell out of the room. He then steals a mint from Condoleezza Rice and tells Paul Wolfowitz to trim his ear hair.

Man of Faith In 1999, Bush confesses to a televangelist, ”The truth is, I really don’t want to run [for president]…. But I feel that God wants me to do this, and I must do it. I MUST.”

Brother in Arms In a 2003 sit-down with Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar, Bush explains that he has given up sweets since the beginning of the Iraq war. ”This is my personal sacrifice to show support for our troops,” he says.

From Entertainment Weekly

W would come as a farewell gift to Mr Bush who could view it from the comfort of the White House before he leaves office next January. This is Stone’s third film about a US president, following Nixon and JFK.

“The director has been an outspoken critic of President Bush’s policy in Iraq. Mr Bush will be played by Josh Brolin (see photo above), who starred in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. Laura Bush is being played by Elizabeth Banks, who starred in The 40-Year-Old Virgin,” reports The Independent.

“The new film, W, portrays George Bush as a foul-mouthed, dried-out drunk with a baseball obsession and a difficult relationship with his father. The film will cover Mr Bush’s obsession with invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein – which Stone suggests is to avenge the Iraqi leader’s much ballyhooed assassination attempt on Bush Snr.

“It will also look at Mr Bush’s desperate hunt for WMDs in Iraq and his well known mangling of the English language. The script gives the impression that the White House is Mr Bush’s very own fraternity house where discussions about going to war sound like the staff are betting on a football game.”

William Oliver Stone was born in New York City. He grew up wealthy and lived in townhouses in Manhattan and Stamford, Connecticut. His father was a Jewish stockbroker and his mother a Roman Catholic of upper class French birth. He was raised an Episcopalian as a compromise but has since converted to Buddhism.

Stone’s famous quote: “I make my films like you’re going to die if you miss the next minute. You better not go get popcorn.”

From The Moderate Voice

A. No; Stone, who has ventured into presidential films before with JFK and Nixon, is making a film about Bush, but it’s about his formative years, not his presidential ones. Josh Brolin has been chosen to portray W., with Elizabeth Banks as Laura, Ellen Burstyn as his mother, Barbara, and James Cromwell as George H.W. Bush. The film starts shooting later this month, and Stone has promised to have it in theaters in time for the election.

From Journal Now

W, the highly-anticipated Oliver Stone biopic on America’s 43rd president, has been making a slow march toward its April 21st production start date. Josh Brolin (a dead ringer who can act!) has been slated to play Dubya for months, but in recent weeks, producers have continued to flesh out the cast list. Ellen Burstyn and James Cromwell, of Requiem for a Dream and Babe, respectively, are slated to play Barbara and George H.W. Bush. Thandie Newton of Crash and Elizabeth Banks of…uh…will play Condi Rice and Laura Bush. (First thoughts: too hot!) Welshman Iaon Gruffudd is in talks to play Tony Blair, and Jeffrey Wright is being floated as Colin Powell.

ABC News and Politico, both apparently in possession of a draft copy of the screenplay, offered separate rundowns last week of the father-son dynamic that has filled pop psychology regarding Bush 43. Key scenes include the drumbeat to war in 2002, the “Mission Accomplished” landing in 2003, as well as the softer side: college-age W guzzling garbage-pail vodka; leader-of-the-free-world-age W choking on a pretzel. The tendentious Stone summed up his film in one sweep: “How did Bush go from being an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?”

Of course, the Hollywood treatment could detract from the film’s political credibility. (Judge/read the first page of the script yourself here [pdf].) But in the end, its success rests squarely with the talent. So, Talkbackers: Who are your picks for the rest of the Bush gang (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rove, Powell, Chalabi, Miers–Perino)? I nominate this guy for VP.

Seriously, is MTV News just punking us? Is this an April Fool’s Joke that just got left out in the rain? Because casting hotter-than-hot Elizabeth Banks as dowdy automaton Laura Bush is weird, casting hotter-than-hot Thandie Newton as cruel-and-calculating Condoleeza Rice is even weirder, but throwing Rob Corddry into the mix makes this the weirdest cast since, like, The Towering Inferno (and, guys, that movie had both Fred Astaire and O.J. Simpson in it).

Yeah, sure, Corddry could be this amazing dramatic actor that none of us know about. It’s possible. But when you’re a guy who’s just getting started in a comedy career, why would you star in a movie about a President no one likes? And why play a guy who helped convince journalists that the President no one likes was leading us into a war that was worth fighting? OK, OK, I know I shouldn’t be getting into politics, but I’m just that confused.

FYI, the roles of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have yet to be cast. Since they’re virtually identical fat white men, and there’s only a few fat white men in Hollywood to choose from, let’s start predicting. Alec Baldwin could gain weight! John Goodman could lose weight! Hell, Sarah Silverman could play Cheney with the right prosthetics. With Corddry in the mix, anything is possible. You too could play a neo-con!

From Cinema Blend