There is now a trailer for the film, W., up on Youtube – which you can stream below. The film also has a website, Wthefilm.com. There isn’t anything on it right now, but I’m sure as the release date nears there will be.

The Dish Rag recently caught up with Elizabeth Banks, who plays first lady Laura Bush in Oliver Stone’s controversial new George W. Bush film, “W.”

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

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 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

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.

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

The first teaser ad for Oliver Stone’s biopic of George W. Bush isn’t what you would expect from the director.

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.

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