JFK

http://www.jonathanvankin.net/1/post/2011/11/jfk-excerpt-from-based-on-a-true-story-but-with-more-car-crashes.html

Excerpt From BASED ON A TRUE STORY (BUT WITH MORE CAR CRASHES)
(1991)

Directed by Oliver Stone. Screenplay by Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar.
Starring Kevin Costner, Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Oldman.

JFK, it could be said, is the movie that gave birth to this book. There have been a lot of films based on actual events, and more often than not, journalists and academics greet these releases with knives sharpened and fangs bared. Justifiably, in many cases. Nothing unusual about that – but there’s never been a movie as viciously and unrelentingly flayed as Oliver Stone’s JFK. That sorry episode is what got the debate about history and Hollywood rolling for real.

Regardless of how you felt about Oliver Stone or the Kennedy assassination itself, the torrent of media bile directed at this movie had to be a little unsettling. And puzzling. There had been films about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy before. In 1973, the Dalton Trumbo-written Executive Action had a cabal of right-wing industrialists and oilmen, alarmed by Kennedy’s dangerously progressive policies, contracting a hit (“executive action”) on the president, carried out by mercenaries who station three different riflemen in Dealey Plaza and set up Lee Harvey Oswald as an innocent “patsy.”

The Executive Action conspiracy is not far removed from the plotline of Stone’s three-hour epic 17 years later. Yet Executive Action, despite its release only a decade after the actual event, when the memory was still raw, generated no controversy worth mentioning.

The blitzkrieg on JFK commenced long before the Warner Brothers-backed movie ever threaded through a projector. Before, for that matter, the movie finished filming. The media got hold of an early draft of Stone’s script and began exenterating it while Stone was still re-enacting the Kennedy Assassination in Dallas, with Dealey Plaza now dressed up as a movie set. The rancor toward the movie and, as former Kennedy aide Frank Mankiewicz pointed out, the very idea that such a movie could exist, was savage and merciless.

The New York Times in particular dedicated almost 30 articles (including letters and op-ed pieces) to shredding the film. The Washington Post published an article by its longtime intelligence correspondent George Lardner Jr. skewering Stone’s movie for its many “errors and absurdities, large and small,” a full seven months (almost to the day) before the film’s release. Around the same premature period, a writer for Chicago Tribune-owned Dallas Morning News (hometown paper of the home of the Kennedy assassination) decried Stone’s then-unmade film as “morally repugnant.” In fact, the same article also branded as “morally repugnant” Time-Warner corporation and, indeed, “anyone who pays American money to see the film.” (Presumably foreigners spending their own currency are fine.) The week of JFK’s release, Newsweek (owned by the Washington Post) put the controversy on its cover, announcing, unambiguously, that “Oliver Stone's New Movie Can't be Trusted.”

The Times’ longtime Hollywood reporter Bernard Weinraub filed a “story” (more of an opinion piece, actually) denouncing Warner Brothers for releasing the film at all, espousing the viewpoint that movie studios have a “responsibility” to suppress politically controversial subject matter. The paper’s distinguished liberal columnist Tom Wicker produced a particularly vehement hit piece.

Says Mankiewicz, “the New York Times and its allies in the major commercial media set out – and nearly succeeded – not just to discredit Oliver Stone and his film, but to destroy it.”

The media assault was bizarre, and unprecedented – except perhaps (as Stone himself pointed out) by the Hearst newspapers’ attack on Citizen Kane 50 years earlier. In that case, the media’s motive was plain. Kane was an unflattering character study of Hearst himself. With JFK, the question is the same as the question asked by Stone’s hypothetical “Mr. X” character, about the assassination itself.

Why?

What was it about this movie that posed a clear and present danger? In the minds of the major media, at least.

The assailants’ motives are many and varied. As Mankiewicz notes, the most adamant attackers, including Wicker and Lardner, were “directly involved in reporting the events of November 22, 1962,” but in the ensuing three decades “hardly gave the event a backward glance.” The movie indicts not only the overly credulous reporting of those journalists at the time, but the course of their entire careers and more than that, their whole view of American politics – a view which holds that the assassination, while certainly a personal tragedy and a “loss of innocence” for the American public, was insignificant in political terms. Absurd as it seems, in their view the murder of the president was a pop culture event, not a political one.

There’s also the jealousy factor. A Hollywood movie reaches far more people than a piece in the New York Times could ever hope to.

Another brand of jealousy: Some of the film’s opponents had written conspiracy books of their own. Journalist Anthony Summers and early Warren Report critic Harold Weisberg were among that number. It was Weisberg who obtained the purloined first-draft script that served as the basis for the way-early articles tearing into Stone’s project.

Whatever the psychology or hidden agendas of the pilers-on, on a superficial level they all attacked JFK for the same alleged crime: Stone “twisted history.” This is the only legitimate criticism of the film (other than aesthetic criticisms, of course). The motion picture in question, sayeth the sages, distorts historical facts to make a political point.

Does it? It would take a book of its own to address the facts in the film. There’s no way to confirm this, but JFK must be the most fact-heavy film in Hollywood history. The screenplay is a triumph of expository dialog. There’s hardly any dialog in there that doesn’t explicate one point of fact or another. Heck. We’d write that book if it hadn’t already been written. One year after JFK came out, Stone and his collaborator Zachary Sklar published JFK: The Documented Screenplay. They included 340 notes, citing the source of every major or controversial assertion of fact in the script. In the months before and after his movie came out, Stone spent plenty of time rebutting his critics, but the book was the ultimate comeback. For every time he’s accused of inventing, warping and spinning facts to suit his own ends, he can always point to research in the book. The sources can then be judged on their own merits.

The real problem was that people still bicker over the sources. For every fact cited as gospel by a conspiracy “buff,” there’s a Lone Assassin Loyalist who’ll bust a blood vessel screaming that it’s not true. And it works the other way, too. Which does not mean that the entire history of the assassination is a Rorschach blot. It means only that establishing veracity in this case has already been the subject of hundreds of books on both sides of the issue, with hundreds more to come, undoubtedly. When they say that Stone warps the historical record, they’re really saying that his facts that don’t fit their theory.

The most glaring example was Stone’s choice of a hero. He needed some central character to tie together the multifarious threads of assassination conspiracy research into something resembling a narrative – and he sure wasn’t going to use Earl Warren. That left only one choice, the only law enforcement official to ever prosecute a trial in the assassination case, New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.

From 1966 until 1969, Garrison chased a New Orleans connection to the Kennedy assassination. Garrison’s investigation culminated in the arrest and trial of a prominent New Orleans businessman, Clay Shaw, whom Garrison believed was somehow involved in planning the assassination.

Of all the JFK assassination “conspiracy theorists,” the only one who’s received worse public pillorying than Stone is Earling Carothers “Jim” Garrison. He’s been vilified as a charlatan, a political opportunist, a mafia stooge and a lunatic. The Most Trusted Man in America himself, Walter Cronkite, denounced Garrison as “evil” for his persecution of the “innocent man,” Shaw.

By the time Stone’s movie reached screens, Garrison was terminally ill. In one of his final interviews, for a documentary entitled Beyond JFK, he is shown flat on his back in a hospital bed. He died in 1992. But his frailty and impending death did not temper the renewed verbal assault directed at him then by, well, many of the same commentators who assaulted him the first time around.

They found it especially galling that Stone cast the role of Garrison with Kevin Costner. Costner was still polishing his Oscars from Dances With Wolves just a year earlier. In 1991 he was the biggest movie star in the business. Not only did Costner bear no physical or temperamental resemblance to the jocular-yet-bellicose, six-foot-six Garrison, worst of all as far as the anti-JFKers were concerned, Costner came with an onscreen persona besst described as “heroic everyman.” Kind of an updated Jimmy Stewart. The Costner likeability was at direct odds with their picture of Garrison as a reckless, ruthless, grandiloquent self-aggrandizer.

Stone’s perception of Garrison couldn’t have been more different. To him Garrison was a Capraesque figure, which was exactly the reason he cast Costner.

“I’ve never found Garrison to be the ‘kook’ pictured by a hostile press,” Stone wrote in Premiere magazine. Instead, says Stone, Garrison is a literate, eloquent and patriotic military veteran, former FBI agent and appellate judge. As to Garrison’s much publicized personality flaws (“arrogance and paranoia among them,” wrote Stone), the director chose to omit them from his portrayal because, “either you had to make Garrison the issue or make Kennedy the issue. I chose Kennedy.”

What was quite clear from the voluminous op-ed critiques of his film (though not from reviewers, who generally admired JFK), the film’s detractors would have preferred him to choose Garrison.

Stone acknowledged (in the same Premiere article) that he used Garrison as a vessel through which he channeled four decades of assassination research. Other researchers, before Garrison and after, formulated many of the ideas that issue from Costner/Garrison’s lips.

“It is typically Capraeqsue that private citizens have done the work while government bodies stagnated,” remarked Stone. Stone also invented the aforementioned “Mr. X,” supposedly an ex-military “black ops” man who meets secretly with Garrison in Washington and spells out the reasons why Kennedy was killed – on a purely anonymous basis. No such person existed, much less acted as a “Deep Throat” for Garrison. The character is based largely on Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, who was indeed an ex-military man once involved in covert operations. Many of the assertions in Mr. X’s lengthy soliloquy are Prouty’s. Far from anonymous, Prouty expresses his views in two published books and countless on-the-record interviews.

Nonetheless, in its broad outline anyway, JFK followed the course of Garrison’s investigation. It begins in 1963, shortly after the assassination, when Garrison learns that Oswald (Gary Oldman, in the movie) lived in New Orleans through the spring and summer of that year. He arrests David Ferrie, a strange-looking man and possible acquaintance of Oswald who for reasons unknown had driven to Texas through a torrential rainstorm the night of the assassination. But the FBI sets Ferrie free without charges.

Garrison picks up the investigation again in 1966, after a conversation with Louisiana Senator Russell Long. Long surprises Garrison with his cynical view of the Warren Commission Report: “That dog don’t hunt!” Garrison zeroes in on Ferrie once again, only to have Ferrie die suddenly as soon as his name surfaced in the press as a suspect. (Oddly enough – and this Stone does not include – the last known person to see Ferrie alive was journalist George Lardner Jr., the same Lardner who wrote the above-mentioned Washington Post attack piece in 1991.) At that point, Garrison decides to arrest Clay Shaw. After a month-long trial in which Garrison and his assistants went to great lengths to show that there was a conspiracy, Shaw was acquitted. Jurors late said that Garrison had persuaded them that Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy, but not that Clay Shaw was part of that conspiracy.

That is the basic outline of JFK’s plot, and of the real-life Garrison investigation. Stone took many of the boilerplate dramatic liberties common to historical films. He used composite characters. The convict “Willie O’Keefe” (Kevin Bacon) was an amalgam of Garrison’s star witness Perry Russo and several other lesser figures. He melodramatizes the mundane roles of real characters. For example, Garrison’s assistant D.A. Lou Ivon did not quit his job, as does the “Lou Ivon” character in the film. Stone even invents a female member of Garrison’s investigative team, presumably to make the cast more palatable to a 90s audience. In reality, Garrison had no distaff staffers.

Naturally, he invents most of the dialog. But not all of it. Warrren Commission testimony is quoted verbatim as is testimony from Garrison’s trial of Clay Shaw. One speech that was only partially invented was Garrison’s lengthy closing argument in which he exhorts jurors to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” and calls for the opening of sealed assassination files that were mandated closed until 2039.

Curiously, some of the film’s attackers scoffed that Garrison never made a closing argument, leaving the chore to his assistants. To the contrary, he manifestly did make the statement, and his wording was very similar to the speech delivered by Costner in the film -- including the Kennedy quote and the call to open secret files.

The merits of taking such dramatic license are debatable, but there are films discussed in other chapters of this book that take far greater liberties than Stone took. So why is JFK the most vilified historical film of all time? There are probably as many reasons as there are vilifiers, but they all can be boiled down to one thing: they hated what Stone had to say. This wasn’t a matter of prettying up some celebrity’s messy life for a bio-pic, or adding a few car crashes to ratchet up the action quotient. To its critics, JFK was a film that offended their deeply held view of the world. Stone questioned their religion.

Most Hollywood movies aim for quite the opposite, to comfort and reassure their audience. JFK doesn’t ask its viewers to leave feeling good. It asks them to think. To question. Apparently, judging by the assault on the film, that is the last thing some in the media want you to do.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING

Garrison, Jim. On the Trail of the Assassins. New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1988.

James, Rosemary and Jack Wardlaw. Plot or Politics? New Orleans, Pelican Publishing House, 1967.

Stone, Oliver and Zachary Sklar. JFK: The Documented Screenplay. New York: Applause Books, 1992.

After Wall Street II Oliver Stone should do JFK II

http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2010/10/28/after-wall-street-ii-oliver-stone-should

After Wall Street II Oliver Stone should do JFK II
The last key witness has finally been found
October 28th, 2010
Roland Michel Tremblay

The last key witness that Oliver Stone mentioned in the film "JFK" (1991), the one who could have solved and proved the conspiracy surrounding JFK's assassination, has finally been found. Her name is Judyth Vary Baker and her 606 page testimony titled "Me & Lee, How I came to know, love and lose Lee Harvey Oswald" has just been published at Trine Day Press. Jim Marrs, the long-time investigator and author of the New York Times bestseller "Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy", upon which the "JFK" film was based, asked in the afterword of Baker's book how she can still be alive today. Good question.

It has not been easy. Baker decided to talk after 36 years of frightened silence, but after being confronted with death threats she had to leave the United States. She returned to the US twice, only to flee overseas due to ongoing stalking, harassment and several hospitalizations caused by what Marrs termed "freak accidents." In 2007 she was accepted as a political asylum seeker in Europe, the first ever non-combatant American woman to succeed in gaining asylum seeker status in the world. She is still struggling with character assassination over the Internet by people intent on destroying her as a credible witness, but her book is out now, and it changes everything. So much so that Oliver Stone could finally do a final and less static version of his film. Instead of telling us about what might have happened, he could now show us what really happened in 1963 in New Orleans and Dallas.

What happened is far more impressive and sinister than anyone could have imagined. Beyond the facts that the death of JFK opened the way to more wars, such as in Vietnam, ostensibly to fight communism while enriching the war industry, with the Mafia free of Bobby Kennedy's pesky presence countering corruption, we now know there is now a whole new angle to the story. And it is perhaps more important and worrying than even the assassination of a beloved President. Behind it all was the development of a biological weapon capable of killing anyone by injecting virulent cancer cells. Any such murder would, of course, look like a natural death.

This is what Lee Harvey Oswald, a US government agent, was working on with Judyth Vary Baker in the summer of 1963 in New Orleans, along with David Ferrie, Dr. Mary Sherman, and Dr. Alton Ochsner from the Ochsner Clinic, with the government and the Mafia waiting in the wings. That fact alone warranted that many witnesses had to be eliminated. If you check carefully, two of these witnesses died of a powerful cancer that spread quickly, without detection, that death ensued soon after its diagnosis -- the assassin of Oswald, Jack Ruby, who claimed to have been injected with cancer cells, and Clay Shaw, the central figure in the Garrison trial in Stone's movie, "JFK", who died in Ochsner's Clinic and was buried within 24 hours. Part of the whole story had been previously published in another significant book -- "Dr. Mary's Monkey" -- written by Edward T. Haslam. "Dr. Mary's Monkey" has become an underground bestseller. Haslam, the son of a prominent New Orleans doctor, wrote the foreword to Baker's book.

The extraordinary story of Judyth Vary Baker certainly came as a surprise to all main investigators, who had never heard of her before, although there are actually many oblique references to her in the extant body of evidence, as well as living witnesses who have verified that she was Oswald's close companion and lover in the months before the JFK assassination. Some still insist she made it all up, while others have concocted see-through lies to discredit her, preferring to protect their own theories and book sales. Strikingly, after nearly 50 years, new evidence and witnesses such as Baker are still being largely ignored in favor of well-financed TV specials and YouTube presentations. Foremost in these efforts is Vincent Bugliosi, who received a million dollars for his book, "Reclaiming History", which supports the Warren Commission's findings, and Gerald Posner (recently indicted for blatant plagiarism). Close at their heels is Gary Mack, whose robust six-figure salary at the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas depends on defending the so-called "sniper's nest" theory despite overwhelming new evidence that Kennedy was assassinated by a bullet from the Grassy Knoll. To this day, witnesses such as Baker are still not safe or free to talk, just like most significant classified information about the matter has still been kept from the public.

"How many authors do not dare have book signings?" Baker asked. "For my own safety, I'm unable to do so." Baker has turned down countless requests for interviews: in the past seven years since the History Channel presented Baker's story in a documentary ("The Love Affair"), only Dr. James Fetzer has managed to get an interview with her. Now that Baker's book has been published, it will become evident to all that no one could possibly make this up, especially when it answers and brings together all the pieces of a puzzle that so many have tried, unsuccessfully, to solve over the years. Those who read the book will also understand why so many witnesses died mysteriously, one by one, following the double assassination of JFK and Oswald, and why the various official investigations conducted were charged to convince the public that a demented lone nut -- Lee Harvey Oswald -- was Kennedy's assassin. If Jim Marrs, Edward T. Haslam, Fetzer and the producers of "The Love Affair" were convinced that Judyth Vary Baker was telling the truth, it was because she has told her story with striking candor, with a large amount of evidence supporting her testimony.

Judyth Vary Baker had only one wish when she was a young and promising lab researcher hired by Dr. Ochsner -- to discover a cure for cancer -- and everyone believed then that she could do it. She and her fellow research associates were led to believe that the New Orleans Project -- developing a biological weapon designed to assassinate Fidel Castro -- could have prevented the death of JFK and World War Three. Then, after Kennedy was killed, she was told to keep her mouth shut and to never again work in cancer research. But the little girl from Bradenton Florida still has up-to-date knowledge of the research being done today. "I still believe I could cure certain kinds of soft tissue cancers inexpensively," she says, "within five years, using modified bacteriophages." Bacteriophages are simple viruses that literally 'eat' bacteria, Baker explained, but they could be "genetically altered" to seek out certain cancers and literally eat them alive. "Bacteriophage therapy could also be applied to fight bacterial diseases such as tuberculosis," she said. "Resistance to antibiotics is becoming a problem that bacteriophage research could very possibly solve."

But Baker fears that as long as so much cancer research is financed by private pharmaceutical companies, that expensive chemotherapy will continue to be the center of research efforts, since bacteriophage therapy would be much cheaper and therefore less profitable. "We could have cured cancer decades ago," Baker insists. Because of the "profit factor," Baker believes that "if we ever develop an inexpensive cure for cancer, it will be due to independent research at universities, or in government-funded labs. An inexpensive treatment, such as one involving the direct use of bacteriophage, will not come from Big Pharma."

Me & Lee: How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald by Judyth Vary Baker (http://www.judythvarybaker.com/) and Dr. Mary's Monkey by Edward T. Haslam (http://www.doctormarysmonkey.com/) and Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs, offer the big picture --and finally link together -- all the major players in the conspiracy surrounding JFK's assassination. It is time for us to appreciate what transpired then and draw parallels as to what is happening today. Oliver Stone should produce "JFK II" so we can be aware and move on to real and tangible change and a durable peace. Such was, after all, the main dream of John F. Kennedy.

Fidel Castro fascinated by book on Bilderberg Club

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100818/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/cb_cuba_castro_bildenberg
Fidel Castro fascinated by book on Bilderberg Club
WILL WEISSERT, Associated Press Writer
Wed Aug 18, 2010

HAVANA – Fidel Castro is showcasing a theory long popular both among the far left and far right: that the shadowy Bilderberg Group has become a kind of global government, controlling not only international politics and economics, but even culture.

The 84-year-old former Cuban president published an article Wednesday that used three of the only eight pages in the Communist Party newspaper Granma to quote — largely verbatim — from a 2006 book by Lithuanian-born writer Daniel Estulin.

Estulin's work, "The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club," argues that the international group largely runs the world. It has held a secretive annual forum of prominent politicians, thinkers and businessmen since it was founded in 1954 at the Bilderberg Hotel in Holland.

Castro offered no comment on the excerpts other than to describe Estulin as honest and well-informed and to call his book a "fantastic story."

Estulin's book, as quoted by Castro, described "sinister cliques and the Bilderberg lobbyists" manipulating the public "to install a world government that knows no borders and is not accountable to anyone but its own self."

The Bilderberg group's website says its members have "nearly three days of informal and off-the-record discussion about topics of current concern" once a year, but the group does nothing else.

It said the meetings were meant to encourage people to work together on major policy issues.

The prominence of the group is what alarms critics. It often includes members of the Rockefeller family, Henry Kissinger, senior U.S. and European officials and major international business and media executives.

The excerpt published by Castro suggested that the esoteric Frankfurt School of socialist academics worked with members of the Rockefeller family in the 1950s to pave the way for rock music to "control the masses" by diverting attention from civil rights and social injustice.

"The man charged with ensuring that the Americans liked the Beatles was Walter Lippmann himself," the excerpt asserted, referring to a political philosopher and by-then-staid newspaper columnist who died in 1974.

"In the United States and Europe, great open-air rock concerts were used to halt the growing discontent of the population," the excerpt said.

Castro — who had an inside seat to the Cold War — has long expressed suspicions of back-room plots. He has raised questions about whether the Sept. 11 attacks were orchestrated by the U.S. government to stoke military budgets and, more recently suggested that Washington was behind the March sinking of a South Korean ship blamed on North Korea.

Estulin's own website suggests that the 9/11 attacks were likely caused by small nuclear devices, and that the CIA and drug traffickers were behind the 1988 downing of a jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, that was blamed on Libya.

The Bilderberg conspiracy theory has been popular on both extremes of the ideological spectrum, even if they disagree on just what the group wants to do. Leftists accuse the group of promoting capitalist domination, while some right-wing websites argue that the Bilderberg club has imposed Barack Obama on the United States to advance socialism.

Some of Estulin's work builds on reports by Big Jim Tucker, a researcher on the Bilderberg Group who publishes on right-wing websites.

"It's great Hollywood material ... 15 people sitting in a room sitting in a room determining the fate of mankind," said Herbert London, president of the Hudson Institute, a nonpartisan policy think tank in New York.

"As someone who doesn't come out of the Oliver Stone school of conspiracy, I have a hard time believing it," London added.

A call to a Virginia number for the American Friends of Bilderberg rang unanswered Wednesday and the group's website lists no contact numbers.

Castro, who underwent emergency intestinal surgery in July 2006 and stepped down as president in February 2008, has suddenly begun popping up everywhere recently, addressing Cuba's parliament on the threat of a nuclear war, meeting with island ambassadors at the Foreign Ministry, writing a book and even attending the dolphin show at the Havana aquarium.

Oliver Stone and the politics of film-making

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/jul/18/oliver-stone-chavez-wall-street

Oliver Stone and the politics of film-making
There's no let-up for Hollywod's most controversial director – the sequel to Wall Street, a documentary about Hugo Chávez and his most ambitious and personal project to date, the secret history of America
Carole Cadwalladr
The Observer, Sunday 18 July 2010

Oliver Stone is a man's man. Of this I have no doubt before meeting him. Not just because of his status as a sort of latter-day Ernest Hemingway, an action man with a reputation for women and drugs who won the Purple Heart for bravery in Vietnam, and then an Oscar for reproducing his experiences on celluloid. But because the most compelling sequences from his latest film, a documentary called South of the Border, show him hanging out with Venezuela's president, Hugo Chávez, chewing the cud about politics and war, talking very much mano a mano.

It's an impression that's reinforced moments before I meet him in his Los Angeles office when the photographer appears and shows me some of the portraits he's taken. They're slightly startling because Stone has a new moustache, a big, bristling, Zapata number, and in the tiny digital frame on the back of the camera, he looks like it's him who really ought to be dressed in military fatigues and running his own small South American regime.

Then he ambles in, distractedly. "Suzie!" he calls to his assistant. "Where are my glasses? I think I've lost my glasses."

We both look at him. He has one pair of glasses on the top of his head. And another pair on a piece of cord around his neck.

"They're on your head," says Suzie.

"Do you think you could go and look for them? They're very valuable to me."

Suzie hesitates and then, having seemingly witnessed this sort of situation before, says: "OK!" and disappears out the room. Two minutes later, Stone puts his hand to his head. "Suzie! I've found them! They were on my head!"

Suzie reappears at the door. "I know," she says. "I told you."

"Did you? Jesus! What, now I can't even hear?"

It's a rather nice surprise, this. The bumbling, the self-accusation, the absentmindedness. On paper, he's so much the alpha male that, as one interviewer put it: "One expects to find antler stubs under his thatch of suspiciously too-black hair." As well as his war record, there are his various arrests for possession of drugs, as well as his well-rehearsed views on monogamy ("unnatural"). But, mostly, there's the work.

There seems an almost hyper-masculinity to Stone's oeuvre. He's the director of Platoon, one of the most highly rated Vietnam films of all time, a film that was based on his experience. The war spawned a further two films, Born on the Fourth of July and Heaven & Earth. He made one of the most violent and controversial films of the 90s, Natural Born Killers. And he's had a fascination with some of the most powerful men on earth, having made films about no fewer than three American presidents: the Oscar-winning JFK, Nixon and, most recently, W, about George W Bush.

In the flesh, however, he's more like an amiable professor. There's a sort of otherworldly air of distraction and he reminds me of one of those old-fashioned Marxist academics who have now all but disappeared. Although he's not a Marxist, he has a strictly Stoneist view of the world and to this end he has facts, figures, theses, arguments, names, dates, an entire view not just of contemporary politics but also history.

But one of the most appealing aspects of Stone is the sheer depth and breadth of his interests and ambition. In addition to tackling socialism (and how Chávez has fanned its flames across South America) in South of the Border, he has also, this year, taken on capitalism in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, the much-awaited return this September of Gordon Gekko to a Wall Street where greed isn't just good, it's legal. Two films, two ideological systems, and yet this pales in the face of his next project: a 10-part documentary series for HBO, Oliver Stone's Secret History of America.

He's right in the throes of it. "It's my big project. It's something I want to leave behind. And we're now in the third fucking year of it," he says. "It's a war. They're in that room next door working on it right now. It's an ongoing odyssey."

It's a truly massive project, a personal mission, the encapsulation seemingly of all that Oliver Stone has thought and read and felt in the 63 years of his life so far, and by the end of the interview I feel slightly anxious about it on his behalf. After all, Stone's passion projects haven't always ended well. Platoon did. It was the film that he had to make, a heavily autobiographical account of his Vietnam war, "a grunt's-eye view", and won him his second Oscar (his first was for writing the screenplay of Midnight Express). But Alexander, his magnum opus, a biopic of Alexander the Great that he at one point calls "his life's work", was savaged by the critics.

The reception of South of the Border in the States is, I imagine, a small taste of what is to come. If Platoon was a grunt's-eye view of war, South of the Border is a leftie's-eye view of South America and he's spent the last few weeks fighting off criticism: that he's a patsy; a Chávista; that he didn't speak to any of the opposition figures. "But that wasn't what we set out to do!" says Stone. "I let him talk. That way you see him as he sees himself. It's a psychiatrist's technique."

It's interesting that he brings this up. He's been in analysis three times, he tells me later. But the biggest surprise about Oliver Stone, and perhaps his greatest contradiction, is that for somebody who is such a doer, who has such a relentless drive to work, who has done and accomplished so much, who started his career writing scripts for Scarface and Midnight Express and has gone on to direct nearly 20 feature films and several documentaries – is that he's also an introvert and a self-critical one at that.

He can quote, verbatim, unfavourable reviews he's received years after the event. More than this, there's an introspective aspect to his nature that is quite at odds with the macho persona. And, for all the argument and theorising, it becomes apparent that Stone is a creature of his emotions. He makes the films he does because he feels he has to. Many of his career decisions seem to be motivated not by good sense, money or the esteem of his peers – he's driven by something far more internal than that.

In an old interview, Stone once said that his films are an "emotional barometer" for him. The violence of Natural Born Killers came out of the anger and sadness he felt when his second wife and mother of his two sons, Elizabeth, left him. So, I wonder, what attracted him to the competing issues at stake in South of the Border and Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps?

"My father was a Republican. And he hated Roosevelt. And that's sort of been the battle of my life, I think. You have to understand that I grew up a Republican conservative. I hated Castro. And I put my money where my mouth was because I went to war, but I understood pretty quickly that this was another place, another culture, and we would never fit in there.

"It's the same story in Afghanistan, Iraq and South America. It's white people meeting people who they think they are better than. And I feel that this war is the war of my life. I've seen it over and over again and if I can do one thing with what's left of my remaining years, it's just to cry it out and say it, I hope, with enough entertainment that people will want see it."

In this context, South of the Border is simply another variant on this, his life's work. What the film makes clear is how much of a bogeyman Chávez is in the United States. The first half of the film, a not-altogether-successful Michael Moore-esque homily, features clips from the US news media (or "the missile shield", as Stone refers to it) with Fox News declaring that Chávez is "as big a threat as Osama bin Laden".

It's in the second half that the film comes to life, though, where Stone meets Chávez. "I liked him. He's very warm and very gracious. And he's a bear. I've always said that if he looked like Woody Allen he'd play a lot better with the world press. I think men are threatened by his physicality."

The affection seems to be mutual. At one point, standing on a runway in the dark, Chávez points to a building where he was imprisoned during a coup and where some of his men lost their lives. "As an ex-soldier I understand," says Stone and Chávez rests his hand upon his shoulder.

Making a documentary "was the last thing I wanted to do," says Stone. "It was Fernando Sulichin who I worked with on Comandante [the 2003 documentary of Stone interviewing Fidel Castro] and who is funding Secret History who suckered me in. And we went and we talked to Chávez and he said, 'Don't just take my word for it; go and talk to these other presidents.' So that's what we did, we went on this road trip." He jaunts off and chews coca and talks socialism with Bolivia's Evo Morales and meets Brazil's Lula da Silva, Paraguay's Fernando Lugo, Ecuador's Rafael Correa and Cuba's Raúl Castro. "The result," says Stone, "is this weird little thing. What is it? It's not a documentary."

It is, just not an entirely sane one, with two halves that don't quite fit together, but it's still a fascinating glimpse of Chávez and an overview of a massive popular movement on one of the largest continents of the world.

"I'm not an interviewer, I'm a director. And I go to these places and take advantage of the status that I have as a film-maker and can treat the person like an equal. And I'm not hostile. I give them face time. We don't even know the names of these guys in the United States."

Fundamentally, Oliver Stone is doing it his way because he can and because he's spent his life doing things his way. He's as idiosyncratic as they come, jumping from genre to genre, from indie documentaries to studio blockbusters. Hitting spectacularly with some (he's won three Oscars), missing spectacularly with others (Nixon, like Alexander, was brutally panned). He's always been impossible to pigeonhole, to predict quite where he'll go next.

There are high hopes for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. I rewatch Wall Street on the plane over and enjoy it as much as I did when I first saw it years ago. It's completely of its time – mobile phones the size of breeze blocks, an array of kitchen equipment so dazzling it gets its own special sequence (I give you the microwave and the hand-held blender). But it has stood the test of time.

Released in 1987, it was a brilliant, prescient taste of what was to come: the crash later that year; the insider trading scandals. I also spot Stone in a cameo I hadn't noticed before. He's plays a moneyman, a financier.

"I was playing my father, Lou," he says. And, had the 60s and Vietnam not blown him off course, it's what Stone might very well have become. It was what he was born to. His father was a stockbroker, who met Oliver's French mother in Paris during the second world war. Stone had a privileged, if emotionally austere, upbringing at an east coast boarding school. His mother was often absent and then disappeared altogether: aged 15, his headmaster called him into his office and informed him that his parents were getting divorced.

He went to Yale – he was in the same year as George Bush – and it's here that his conventional, bourgeois upbringing breaks down. He dropped out, deciding first to try to write a novel and then to enlist.

I read a quote, I say, where he says that he felt he wouldn't be properly human if he didn't know what war was. "There was something bugging me," he says. "Yale was a problem for me. I was not a happy young man. I didn't feel good in my skin. I'm glad I left but it was very painful at the time. My father thought I was pissing away my life. I was becoming an infantry soldier and I was going to become one of life's unfortunates. I wasn't going to amount to much. He was worried. And frankly so was I."

You've spent the rest of your life proving him wrong? "In a way, although it took me years. Coming back from Vietnam was extremely difficult. My father did, towards the end of his life, believe that Vietnam was a mistake, but we had many, many fights about it."

What would your father have made of the Wall Street of the last few years? I ask. "Look, he was pissed off when we left the gold standard in '73, although'73 is actually very interesting. It's a really crucial year, because the income of the average working man flattened out in '73 and never went up in spending ability. But meanwhile the productivity of America went up like this. Where did that money go? It went to CEOs and stock holders. It went to the banks."

The most remarkable aspect of Wall Street was that the villain of the piece, Gordon Gekko, became a hero to a new generation of moneymen. Michael Douglas claims that he's unable to go out for dinner in New York without having a hedge fund manager slap him on the back and thank him for inspiring him to enter Wall Street.

But if the first film was an old-fashioned, rite-of-passage story about a young man, Bud Fox, corrupted by greed, is there a take-home message from Wall Street 2?

"It's a fun movie, an entertaining movie. The first one I think you'd say is a morality tale and I think this one is too. In the sense of what is important? Are there more important values than money?"

Were you wary of glamourising it, given what happened to Gekko?

"It's 23 years on and greed will go on for the rest of times. And envy. Envy plays a big role in this film too. If you pass all the regulations in the world, they'll try and get around that. I have no problem with people wanting to make money. But don't make the banks into hedge funds, which is what they did.

"There's something Douglas says in the movie. He says that in 2008, of the corporate profits in the US, 47% were from finance-related companies. In the old America, it was 17%. It became the main business of America. We became a giant casino."

There is a father and son at the heart of the first Wall Street, as there is in much of Stone's work. It's a relationship that has clearly preoccupied him. But Lou Stone was perhaps not your standard, uptight New York stockbroker: he paid for Stone to lose his virginity to a prostitute at the age of 16. Stone has raised two sons himself now – Sean, 26, and Michael, 18. Has that made him see his father differently?

"Sure, but even before I had my sons, I was very father-oriented. He was a very powerful man. But you must remember my mother was very powerful too."

Ah yes, his mother. Jacqueline Goddet met Lou Stone when he was working as an aide to Eisenhower. She does sound like an extraordinary character, I say. "She still is – she's 88 and a party animal. She loves people and they love her. She called me the other night and she'd been out on the 4th of July weekend until two in the morning."

Perhaps Stone's greatest exploration of his relationship with his mother is in his novel, A Child's Night Dream. He started writing it when he was 17 and returned to it at 50, a period that he refers to as his midlife crisis. "I'd been criticised and loved, and criticised and loved, I mean, really, extremely… Nixon had just come out and had flopped. And I loved Nixon. I thought it was one of my more mature works and it had not been well-received. But it didn't matter. I returned to the book. I knew that it would never have a big circulation, but it mattered to me and I got it out. I just stopped making films for two years and basically did that. I think I lost my way and I felt like the book was putting me back."

Was writing the novel a way of reckoning with the past and in particular his mother? After all, there is a character called Oliver Stone who is sexually obsessed with his mother… "Yeah, well, there were two Stones, William and Oliver; they were two sides to me. But, yes that's correct. There was no incest, but my mother was very French and very free. It wasn't a big deal to walk around naked in the house and stuff like that."

I tell him about an extraordinary quote I have found from her a few years ago, where his mother says" "Oliver didn't just love me. He was in love with me."

"Is that right?" he says. "Ha, ha, ha. Well, she was a great tease. If that's the case, it's a classic Freudian case, the frustrations of an Oedipus complex. The son wants the mother but never gets her because she's the first woman in his life."

"Does that make sense to you?" I ask. "The Freudian explanation?"

"Absolutely. Your mother's body is the first thing you know and, frankly, it's very attractive and it turns you on. But you don't know what to do so it's a tremendous puzzle."

Usually, when an interviewer discovers something interesting about a subject, it's repeated in every article thereafter, but I find only one piece from the mid-90s, an interview with Elizabeth Stone, in which she claims that it was his mother who initiated him sexually. She says that Jacqueline had told her: "He couldn't relax and I had to show him."

"It's not clear," the interviewer goes on, "from detailed interviews with Elizabeth, Oliver and his mother, Jacqueline, what actually occurred. Elizabeth claims that Jacqueline Stone touched her teenage son's genitals and masturbated him. Jacqueline heatedly denies it."

So, I ask him straight out: "Did your mother teach you how to masturbate?"

"Well, I can't live with denial – sure."

"She physically showed you?"

"It was no big deal. It's not English. It's French. It was no big deal. I wasn't attracted to her. You have to understand. After a certain point, I grew up and I moved on. And I've had successful relations – with everybody!"

He says this a joke, but it's also true. He is a self-confessed womaniser. Elizabeth, his second wife, (his first, Najwa Sarkis, was Lebanese ) is said to have left him after having finally run out of patience with his extramarital dalliances. "It's on the record," says Stone. "And I don't like to lie. That's bullshit. It's not a big deal… I'm not running for office."

The Asian mentality is very different, he says, to the Anglo-Saxon one. "That's why I loved Asia when I was young. When I went over there, it was a revelation. I could never quite come back. I always had difficulties readjusting to the Anglo-Saxon mentality with women."

It is why his third wife, Sun-jung Jung, understands him, he says. "She's cool. She's Korean. Different mentality. Mutual respect… she laughs and trills and she sings when she speaks. I love the sound of her voice."

Their daughter, Tara, is 14. "She's part of that new generation, Asian-American. We're really going through it now. I mean, she's 14 – she does respect me but she does give me a hard time. But it's fun. She's smart. We go to the movies. She loves talking about movies."

Has having a daughter changed his attitude to women? "Yes it has. It's harder to be blind. Sometimes, you have to be blind to jump into some of these things, but when you see your daughter in some of these women… you see the human side more clearly than before."

I wonder aloud whether his relationship with his daughter will inform his female characters. His films have always seemed to me to be explorations of masculinity, of male relationships, in one form or another, but then his world, for years, was male. He was an only child and incarcerated for years in an all-male boarding school, before going to an all-male Yale. Discovering women in Vietnam, he says, he felt like Gauguin in the South Seas. "They were these ripe fruits."

He starts reciting his female characters, finishing with Olympias, Alexander's mother. It is abundantly clear from everything he says that Alexander was the project of his life. "It was. That's why I went back three years later and did a third version of it. If you could ever see it – it's the right version of it. The editing was rushed… I was never able to… frankly it's a complicated vision and I'm fighting to get it recirculated. In England, there is a release of it, but it's very little known because it was so slagged at the time. It was very painful to me."

Of all the films, it's his most autobiographical, he says. That's a strange statement given that its subject concerns the greatest emperor who ever lived, but then he is also the vulnerable son of all-powerful parents. He first dreamt of making it as a film student, he says, and it was during that midlife period of reflection that he came back to it again.

"I remember feeling like I had lost my way. The book was important and so was Alexander. I do think that there is the idea what you are when you're young, you must stay faithful to something in there."

This is one of his core beliefs. His teenage years are still the crucible of Oliver Stoneness on which he draws. They were so extreme, in almost every way. From the emotional barrenness of boarding school ("For years, I thought it was a disaster; it had taken the love out of my life; there was no sense of humanity"), those odd experience with his parents and sexuality, through the privilege of Yale and finally, apocalyptically, Vietnam. You really don't need to be a Freudian to read something into this. His ex-wife, Elizabeth, has put it more bluntly: "That little boy didn't stand any chance of any normal sort of life."

He's an assiduous diary-keeper and regularly rereads ancient entries to check up on himself. In 2000, he even decided to relive the acid trips of his youth. Under the supervision of three psychoanalysts, he sat on a mat, put an eyemask on and took LSD. It lasted nine hours and was, he says, because he wanted to relive past experiences with the drug "under more scientific conditions".

He's gone through various stages of taking drugs, mostly psychedelic ones. "Heavy trips," he calls them – in Oliver Stone there's a small part of the 60s that never died. He tells me about being "frightened to death" on one of them. So why did he do it? "Because of the adventure."

Ah yes. The adventure. That other Oliver Stone hallmark. His cousin James says that Stone went to war because: "Anything he could do to be at the edge, and to experience more than other people had experienced, and to shock, he was likely to do. It was consistent for him to want to experience the most intense thing that was going on then in the world."

Even now, there seems to be no letting up. The hell-raising days may be over – although I wouldn't bank on it – but there still seems to be this lust for experience, as evidenced by South of the Border. At an age where most men might start thinking about golf, Stone is chasing socialists across South America.

He's as committed as he ever has been, if not more so. Politically, workaholically. There's still a relentless drive to work, work, work. It's coming up to 9pm by the time I leave his office and nobody seems to be making a move to go home. His film editor has been waiting patiently for him in the room next door, ready to attack yet another section of Oliver Stone's Secret History of America. There's another documentary on Castro to come – the third part of his trilogy. He'd like to do an update to his novel, he says, some sort of epilogue. There are the final edits on Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. And then there's South of the Border to launch in London. And defend from attacks all over again.

I fear for Oliver Stone's Secret History of America. Oliver Stone will do it Oliver Stone's way, whatever the critics think. He exhibits an artist's singlemindedness, an ideologue's obduracy. If his ambition occasionally exceeds his talent, it's not because his talent is small, but that his ambition is so very, very large. The Alexander comparison is really not as far-fetched as it might seem: he really is trying to remould the world according to his vision. Watch out, world.

Oliver Stone: US should nationalize oil resources

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100720/ap_on_en_mo/eu_oliver_stone_bp_1
Oliver Stone: US should nationalize oil resources
RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press Writer
Tue Jul 20, 2010

LONDON – The Gulf of Mexico oil spill shows that the United States should follow the example of South American socialists in nationalizing its energy industry, filmmaker Oliver Stone said Tuesday.

The Academy Award-winning director of "Born on the Fourth of July" and "JFK" said that America's country's natural wealth was too important to be left in private hands, telling journalists in central London that oil and other natural resources "belong to the people."

"This BP oil spill is typical" of what happens when private industry is allowed to draw revenue on what should be a public good, Stone said.

"We shouldn't make this kind of profit on oil or on health or on war or on prisons. All these industries should be public industries."

Stone, 63, is in the British capital to promote his documentary, "South of the Border," which tells the story of firebrand Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and his left-wing Latin American allies.

The 75-minute film is meant to draw attention to the social improvements ushered in by Chavez, who has nationalized vast swaths of Venezuela's economy, including important parts of the oil sector and big chunks of the banking, electric and steel industries. Bolivian leader Evo Morales, also interviewed by Stone for the documentary, has similarly expanded the state's control over the country's energy infrastructure.

Critics of the film accuse Stone of painting a fawning portrait of the Venezuelan leader, saying the documentary ignores Venezuela's opposition — which human rights groups say is being squeezed by Chavez's increasingly authoritarian leadership and a crackdown on private media.

Stone accused critics of "nitpicking."

The director occasionally wandered off-topic during the press conference, discussing Latin American history, sharing his thoughts about President Barack Obama (who he dismissed as "Bush not-so-lite") and musing about the possibility of making a film about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.

"I don't know, that's a hot potato for me," Stone said when asked whether a movie about Ahmedinejad was in the works. "Obviously he's got bad press in the West."

"South of the Border" had its U.K. premier Monday at the Curzon Cinema in central London.
___
Online:

http://www.southoftheborderdoc.com/

The buffoonization of Hugo Chavez

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_6031.shtml

The buffoonization of Hugo Chavez
Sean Fenley
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Jun 23, 2010

“We were always cautious about the triumph of President Obama. Early on, we began to take note of the truth, that the empire is here, alive and more threatening than ever.” --Hugo Chavez Frias

It is said when you can’t beat ’em, that you might as well make common cause with them, but in the case of President Hugo Chavez and the government of Venezuela this doesn’t seem to be the logical choice of the U.S. State Department, and the corporate ‘mainstream’ media at all.

Since, the Obama State Department and its auxiliaries are incapable of debunking the unequivocal success of the Bolivarian revolution, and since the CIA’s forays into the Bolivarian Republic have been far from a success, the corporate MSM seems to be employing the strategy, that if you can’t beat ’em, then you might as well throw a whole bunch of mud in their eye.

Craven, and seemingly incapable of a fair fight, the corporate ‘mainstream’ media egregiously goes for the low blow, each and every time. The propaganda and half-truths, levied against the sitting Venezuelan president, at times veers into the realm of classifying Chavez as a dictatorial strongman -- which has never stopped the U.S. government before -- but I think the lion’s share of the effort to impugn and delegitimize Chavez, is to make him out to be playing with something far short of a full deck.

Perhaps most recognizably, we have seen the baseness of the coverage of President Chavez in colorful remarks that he has made about George W. Bush being the devil, or in his referring to Sarah Palin as a confused beauty pageant contestant. These comments have been made out to be the zenith of President Chavez’s intellectual powers. And although the Venezuela leader, may -- at times -- make these sort of flip, off the cuff remarks and comments, his raising of serious and incisive points about the United States empire and belligerent ‘hegemonic’ power generally go unnoticed by a media seemingly looking to do nothing other than lampoon and skewer the Bolivarian president.

Presumably, anyone who opposes -- and has a coherent critique -- of U.S. neocolonialism and imperialism is some kind of a buffoon or imbecile. History, of course, ended long ago, and anyone opposing the straitjacket that the wealthiest countries want to affix upon the rest of humanity must be hopelessly misinformed and/or wildly out of touch. Never do the so-called mainstream media’s ‘reliable sources,’ focus on figures like a drop in poverty from 71 percent in 1996 to 23 percent in 2010, or that Venezuela, long ago, met its UN Millennium Development targets. Instead, slander, invective, and a generalized muddying of the waters are the tools of the ‘diligent reporting’ of the ‘venerable’ corporatist press.

Time Magazine, for example, in an article in 2007, referred to Chavez as a budding movie mogul for funding a project on Toussaint L’Ouverture with the veteran American actor and activist Danny Glover. Time opined, in that piece of incomparable ‘journalism,’ that this would probably be just the beginning, of Chavez’s forays into socialist propaganda films. One would think that the apropos question for Time’s reportage, would be why would such a seasoned and respected actor of Hollywood need to go outside of the U.S. to fund this kind of project of such an important figure of Haitian history and even the history of the world? And one can only imagine the coverage of L’Ouverture, by the Western media of his day; he was probably the Hugo Chavez of his era, and almost undoubtedly accused of being something like an inciter of riots for realizing that people born in chains might want some modicum of freedom.

The Los Angeles Times devoted critical resources recently to informing their audience that Hugo Chavez had opened a Twitter account. The Times -- in a testament to their abilities of ‘objective’ news-making -- said they were glued to Chavez’s tweets, because of the man’s “sometimes unpredictable actions.” Moreover, they erroneously reported that Chavez had a tight grip on the media in his country; when the fact of the matter is that the vast majority of Venezuelan media is rabidly anti-Chavez and firmly in the hands of the Venezuelan elite.

Progressive commentator Mark Weisbrot, has even likened the Venezuelan private media’s coverage of Chavez to Fox News’ coverage of Barack Obama in the United States. Though Weisbrot went even further, saying that the Venezuelan private media is more politicized, more prone to hyperbole, and less rooted in facts compared to Rupert Murdoch’s virulent propaganda operation in the U. S. In concluding the LA Times article, unequivocally a Pulitzer level, erudite piece, the Times talked to U.S. State Department spokesmen Philip Crowley. Crowley, soberly told the Times reporter he spoke with that he simply couldn’t resist being a Twitter follower of President Hugo Chavez’s numerous tweets.

The corporate media are, of course, replete with this kind of shoddy, trivialized, and half-baked ‘journalism.’ And apparently one needs to be a highly celebrated and Academy Award winning filmmaker to get any kind of substantive, reasonably fair coverage of Venezuela in the U.S. corporatist fourth estate. A recent piece on Oliver Stone’s newest documentary, in the New York Daily News, actually raised some sober-minded points about Venezuela -- things that are regularly redacted from most of the mainstream accounts. Things like that the ‘bad guys’ in this narrative are really the U.S., the International Monetary Fund, and colonial powers, such as Britain and Spain. And also that there is widespread popular support for Hugo Chavez in his home country; he’s not just some clownish Svengali who has a nation by the horns.

The article also quotes Stone’s accurate contention that there’s been virtually no change whatsoever emanating from the administration of Barack Obama. Reading this sort of information in the American mainstream media is almost not to be believed, because it is just the kind of thing that is perennially missing from the one side of the issue that the ‘mainstream’ choose to support. And as George Orwell famously noted in his seminal work of fiction, 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” It’s no wonder Venezuela could surely be just another potential territory ripe for invasion, and the spreading of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ and ‘nation-building’ one day on the not all too distant horizon. Especially, when considering a media that succeed in redefining up as down, and rewriting history according to the worldview that it is self-referentially operating from.

One would think, if s/he puts any stock in the MSM’s egregious, slanderous actions, that a dictatorial, oafish, president controls the state of Venezuela. The truth of the matter is, undeniably, that making progress there -- on the fronts where President Hugo Chavez has been successful -- would, of course, be impossible if Venezuela were being shepherded by just another one of the stewards of U.S. imperial mandates. And it would, irrefutably, be nothing more than a vassal, wholly-owned subsidiary of the United States.

Sean Fenley is an independent progressive, who would like to see some sanity brought to the creation and implementation of current and future, U.S. military, economic, foreign and domestic policies. He has been published by a number of websites, and publications throughout the alternative media.

YouTube Video of the Week

Oliver Stone and Jesse Ventura kicking ass on Larry King
Part One:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYSmb3ZaMTM

Part Two:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XACSElgWQKg

"When You're Strange": The real Jim Morrison

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2010/04/08/when_youre_strange/index.html

Thursday, Apr 8, 2010
"When You're Strange": The real Jim Morrison
Almost 20 years after Oliver Stone's legendary "The Doors," Tom DiCillo's doc takes on the Lizard King
Andrew O'Hehir

During a concert recording heard on the soundtrack of Tom DiCillo's trippy, fascinating documentary "When You're Strange," Doors lead singer Jim Morrison demands of his audience, "Would anybody in here like to see my genitals?" When the response to that rhetorical question has died down, Morrison continues: "I don't think there should even be a president, man. I think we should have total democracy."

It would be easy to conclude that the Lizard King was massively wasted on booze or hash or acid or some other drug cocktail of choice on that occasion, and that moreover he was kind of a self-important idiot. Both things are very likely true, but the intellectual thread that connects Jim Morrison's cock to the White House is not as flimsy as it appears. However you feel about the Doors and their music -- and DiCillo's generous and substantial film leaves room for varying interpretations -- the band had an outsize cultural impact, embodying the Dionysian macho-rebel spirit of late-'60s white (male) American youth with psilocybin intensity.

At this point, documentaries about '60s rock bands constitute their own genre, and it's frequently a tiresome one: Clips of civil-rights protests and Vietnam firefights, a highlight tour of assassinations and campus uprisings. There's a little bit of all that in "When You're Strange," but the film stands out for several reasons. There's the total absence of talking-head interviews with grizzled scenesters (or any other present-day footage); the cool and measured narration by Johnny Depp (clearly the perfect choice); the direction by DiCillo, a hard-luck indie veteran making his first documentary. "When You're Strange" is also free of the "fair use" copyright restrictions that plague so many rock docs. All the surviving band members signed off on the project, and you'll hear all the major Doors hits (from "Break on Through" and "Light My Fire" to "L.A. Woman" and "Riders on the Storm") in this film, which has been timed to accompany a 13-song soundtrack release from Rhino Entertainment.

"When You're Strange" consists almost entirely of archival material: home movies and photos, concert and rehearsal footage, period TV broadcasts, even clips from a UCLA student film in which Morrison appeared before he became famous. Especially since we're talking about a band whose entire career spanned less than five years (from early 1967 to Morrison's death in the summer of '71), this strategy collapses the historical distance between us and the Doors, and spares us the morass of maudlin pseudo-Proustian reflection into which many such pop-nostalgia films tumble. Furthermore, this underscores the ways that Morrison, in all his confusion and self-contradiction -- reclusive poet, leather-clad sex god, reluctant celebrity, abusive drunk, pop star with limited musical gifts -- remains a vital cultural force, the conscious or unconscious model for many rock stars, actors or rappers who came later.

While it's entirely true that nobody's made a Doors documentary before, the band has already been the subject of a quasi-legendary film. Oliver Stone's 1991 "The Doors," featuring a mumbling, incoherent Val Kilmer as Morrison, is the ne plus ultra of fictional '60s films. It transcends the so-bad-it's-good genre in a lysergic, sweat-lodge cloudburst. It's not even quite accurate to say that "The Doors" is so bad it's a masterpiece, although that's close. It's more like a risible mass of clichés and a visionary masterwork of cinema at one and the same moment. Even though Doors guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore served as "technical advisors" to Stone's movie, they were irritated by its portrayal of Morrison as a drug-addled, death-obsessed shamanistic babbler. Keyboardist Ray Manzarek (who refused to help Stone) has long vowed to help produce an "anti-Oliver Stone" movie that would tell the band's real story. Almost 20 years later, "When You're Strange" is that movie.

Certainly the historical Morrison we see in DiCillo's film is a long way from Kilmer's debauched rock idol, and more a nuanced, confused human being. The son of a career Navy officer -- an admiral who commanded a fleet during the Vietnam War -- Morrison grew up infatuated by Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake and Elvis Presley, which is almost all you need to know about him in one sentence. The band's name came not from Aldous Huxley's drug memoir "The Doors of Perception" but from Huxley's original source, Blake's poem "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."

Morrison reportedly disliked his own singing voice (he preferred Frank Sinatra's) and told a friend he was afraid he had nothing to say. As Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol could have told him, none of that mattered: Morrison's brooding, let's-fuck persona and unpredictable stage behavior sent their own message, for which the Doors' music, and even his own droning baritone and portentous lyrics, sometimes seemed like context or background.

That said, DiCillo does an outstanding job of explaining the Doors' musical oddness: They were a rock band with no bass player to keep the beat, whose members had little rock experience. Morrison had never sung before (outside the shower) and Manzarek was a classically trained pianist and organist. Densmore was a big-band and jazz drummer, and Krieger a flamenco guitarist. They weren't aping either Chicago blues or Merseyside pop, they didn't sound quite like anyone else and there genuinely was something elliptical -- something symbolic or even spiritual -- behind the sex-and-drugs double entendres of their songwriting.

"When You're Strange" offers a mesmerizing, behind-the-music glimpse at a crucial and bizarre moment in rock history, and maybe in American cultural history, period. Certainly all the legendary episodes are here: the Doors' sudden lurch from third billing at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip to a three-record deal with Elektra; their acid-trip forays into Joshua Tree and marathon recording sessions with Paul Rothchild and Bruce Botnick; Morrison passing out on stage in Amsterdam, antagonizing cops in New Haven and (apocryphally) exposing himself in Miami. (The wacky witch-journalist girlfriend, played by Kathleen Quinlan in Stone's film, is reduced to an unnamed parenthetical here.)

Still, even though this authoritative and often mesmerizing film provides a crucial counterweight to Stone's "The Doors," it could use a little of the latter film's bogus Nietzsche-Blake-Huxley babblequest. To grasp what Jim Morrison and the Doors were all about, you need to watch both movies one after the other, consume a whole bunch of drugs and beer and sugar and then drive out into the American desert half-dead from hangover. And then maybe you'll understand it all for a split second, or understand that there was never anything to understand in the first place, or that you already understood it as well as you ever will. I'm sure Doors fanatics already know this, but DiCillo's movie blew my mind in revealing that "Mr. Mojo Risin'," the repetitive chant from the end of "L.A. Woman," is an anagram for "Jim Morrison." Whoa. Damn! This shit is powerful, dude.

"When You're Strange" is now playing in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Madison, Wis., New York, Nashville, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle, with more cities to follow.

Oliver Stone suggests Hitler is 'easy scapegoat'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/celebritynews/6962475/Oliver-Stone-suggests-Hitler-is-easy-scapegoat.html

Oliver Stone suggests Hitler is 'easy scapegoat'
Oliver Stone, the controversial film director, is facing another backlash after suggesting that Hitler was made an "easy scapegoat" by history.
By Nick Allen in Los Angeles
10 Jan 2010

Stone, who has previously been accused of promoting conspiracy theories and glorifying violence in his films, has made a new documentary series which he says will place historical figures including Hitler and Stalin "in context".

In the trailer for "The Secret History of America" the director says: "You cannot approach history unless you have empathy for the person you may hate."

He told a press conference at the Television Critics Association in California that "we can't judge people as only 'bad' or 'good'".

"Hitler is an easy scapegoat throughout history and it's been used cheaply. He's the product of a series of actions. It's cause and effect," he said.

The director claimed many people in America did not understand the connection between the First World War and the Second World War and said his intention was to broaden minds, delving into the funding of the Nazi party and how American corporations were involved in it.

Stone said he did not want to make an "easy" history programme and talked about trying to understand people he despises. His series will aim to uncover little reported facts that shaped the modern United States.

Professor Peter Kuznick, the lead writer on the series, said the programme would not portray Hitler in a more positive light, but would describe him as a historical phenomenon rather than "somebody who appeared out of nowhere".

Stone has courted controversy before, most notably in his film JFK which suggested a high level conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.

He has also polarised opinion with controversial films about President George W Bush, and Fidel Castro, the former Cuban leader.

Stone said his latest series would show history from an internationalist, rather than an American, point of view. That included a "complete other story" about how Stalin had fought against the German war machine more than anyone.

The director said he fully expected to face a backlash from conservative pundits.

He said: "Obviously, Rush Limbaugh is not going to like this history and, as usual, we're going to get those kind of ignorant attacks." Stone, 63, who won Oscars for directing Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, also won a Purple Heart for his own military service in Vietnam.

Oliver Stone revealing 'Secret History of America'

http://www.thrfeed.com/2009/08/oliver-stone-presenting-secret-history-of-america-.html

August 18, 2009
Oliver Stone revealing 'Secret History of America'

Oliver Stone is making his most ambitious stab at American history yet.

The controversial director is creating a 10-part documentary series for Showtime titled "Secret History of America."

Narrated by Stone, the series promises to focus on events that "at the time went under-reported, but crucially shaped America's unique and complex history of the last 60 years," according to Showtime.

Subjects will include President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, the origins of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, to "the fierce struggle between war and peace in America’s national security complex."

The project includes "newly discovered facts and accounts" from the Kennedy administration, the Vietnam War and the great changes in America’s role in the world since the fall of Communism in the 1980s.

“Through this epic 10-hour series, which I feel is the deepest contribution I could ever make in film to my children and the next generation, I can only hope a change in our thinking will result," Stone said in a statement.

The director of other historical dramas like "JFK," "Nixon" and "Platoon" is currently working on "Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps" and couldn't be reached for further comment. The sure-to-be-discussed project will premiere on the network in 2010.

"We are very happy that Oliver Stone has chosen Showtime as the home for his provocative series about key unknown moments of American history,” Showtime programming president Robert Greenblatt said. “Not only has his name become synonymous with visionary filmmaker, but Oliver is also a fascinating storyteller always striving to shed new light on the human experience. His continuing curiosity about real events of the 20th century has now led him to a documentary series unlike any other, which is why it's perfect for our premium audience."

Zinn: “I Don’t Care” If 9/11 Was An Inside Job

http://www.prisonplanet.com/howard-zinn-i-dont-care-if-911-was-an-inside-job.html

Howard Zinn: “I Don’t Care” If 9/11 Was An Inside Job
Another gatekeeper illustrates the intellectual cowardice of the establishment left
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Tuesday, November 18, 2008

World renowned peace activist and left-wing anti-war icon Howard Zinn recently told an audience that he didn’t care if 9/11 was an inside job, echoing the disdainful and apathetic rhetoric of fellow liberal gatekeepers Noam Chomsky and Alexander Cockburn in dismissing the efforts of the 9/11 truth movement.

Buddy Moore, Independent Candidate for US Senate in Colorado, asked Zinn if he would join him in voicing doubts about the official 9/11 story and in particular the demolition of the twin towers and Building 7.

Zinn said he was skeptical of the official story but then stated, “I don’t know much about the situation and the truth is, I don’t care that much about it, that’s passed….that’s a diversion from what we really have to do,” adding that debating who was behind 9/11, “gets in the way of dealing with the immediate situation”.

Moore attempted to ask Zinn a follow up question about allowing the perpetrators to go free but was largely shouted down by Zinn’s fawning army of left-wing sycophants.

Zinn’s comments echo similar sentiments expressed by fellow left-wing luminary, Noam Chomsky, who has repeatedly expressed arrogance and contempt towards the 9/11 truth movement while invoking apathy towards the contention that there was government complicity in the attacks, despite the fact that the 9/11 attacks happening exactly as the government maintains was key to launching the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the massive rollback in civil liberties that has occurred over the last seven years.

During a 2006 Internet forum event, Chomsky claimed that the 9/11 truth movement peddled “arcane and dubious theories” and had distracted activists from pursuing “crimes that are far more serious than blowing up the WTC,” presumably belittling the deaths of around 2,000 Americans, along with hundreds of thousands of Afghanis and Iraqis, as well as thousands of U.S. troops in the wars that followed that could not have been launched without the pretext of 9/11.

When a critic asked Chomsky why he was so dismissive of the supposition that 9/11 was a false flag event, pointing out numerous other examples throughout history including the bombing of the Maine, the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Pearl Harbor, Chomsky merely reiterated his insolence, stating, “The concept of “false flag operation” is not a very serious one, in my opinion. None of the examples you describe, or any other in history, has even a remote resemblance to the alleged 9/11 conspiracy. I’d suggest that you look at each of them carefully.”

Chomsky actually dismissed U.S. government complicity in 9/11 a mere four months after the event, and over a year before it was again invoked as a reason to invade Iraq, when he told an audience at a FAIR event at New York’s Town Hall, 22 January 2002, “That’s an internet theory and it’s hopelessly implausible. Hopelessly implausible. So hopelessly implausible I don’t see any point in talking about it,” in response to a question about U.S. government foreknowledge.

Note that Professor Chomsky also vehemently maintains that Lee Harvey Oswald was the long gunman in the JFK assassination, even despite polls showing that around 80 per cent of the American public believe otherwise.

Chomsky was presented with convincing evidence for a wider plot by JFK assassination experts as far back as 1969 and according to Selwyn Bromberger, an MIT philosophy professor who had sit in on the discussion, Chomsky indicated that he believed there was a conspiracy, but has failed to voice his conclusion for nearly 40 years.

It’s painfully clear that the likes of Zinn and Chomsky are intellectual cowards who, despite being abundantly aware of the fact that both 9/11 and the JFK assassination represent far wider conspiracies than the official version of events dictates, they are afraid of using their prominent soapboxes to bring either subject to wider attention for fear of whatever reprisals might ensue. As Vincent Salandria enunciates, this makes them worse than disinformation agents.

“I agree that Professor Chomsky is not a CIA agent,” states Salandria, “But with respect to his pronouncements on the JFK assassination he is worse than a CIA agent. Without being an agent, with his enormous prestige as a thinker, as an independent radical, as a courageous man, he does the work of the agency.”

Indeed, at the time of the release of Oliver Stone’s JFK movie, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and another liberal luminary, Alexander Cockburn, went on a seemingly orchestrated media campaign in an attempt to convince the public that the JFK assassination was not a wider conspiracy and also that it didn’t matter even if it was.

“When cornered themselves, Chomsky and Cockburn resort to rhetorical devices like exaggeration, sarcasm, and ridicule. In other words, they resort to propaganda and evasion,” notes one blogger.

The same rhetoric was utilized when questions about 9/11 reached a crescendo. Cockburn, Zinn and Chomsky not only dismiss clear evidence that the official story is demonstrably false, but in addition attempt to generate apathy around the whole issue, classic gatekeeper behavior in preventing the left from becoming active in pursuing the truth about 9/11.

Above Top Secret

Remember, Remember
The fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

— Traditional English Verse Recited for Guy Fawkes Night

Contrary to an old adage, what you don’t know CAN harm you. You want to know all about those conspiracies you hear about, but don’t want to spend your life digging through books or surfing the Internet? Here’s the book for you!

New York Times best-selling author, Jim Marrs, has done it again, this time with a collection of the most controversial conspiracy theories and cover-ups of recent years. In his new book, Above Top Secret: Uncover the Mysteries of the Digital Age, Marrs does all the legwork for his vast audience of faithful readers. Every government, finance, paranormal and terrorist cover-up we’ve been wondering about is explored and vetted in his usual superbly researched and highly entertaining style.

Is The Supply Of Oil Peaking?

Is The Federal Reserve A Scam?

What Hovered Over Chicago's O'Hare Airport?

Is Alternative Energy Being Kept From The Public?

Do Road Signs Contain Hidden Codes?

Are Chemtrails For Real?

Is God An Alien?

Now, Marrs has allied with the web's most popular conspiracy forum, AboveTopSecret.com, to investigate everything from Roswell to the Nazis' Antarctic base, moon landing hoaxes to the mysterious spidery drones, time travel to the end of the world in 2012.

AboveTopSecret.com is the Internet's largest and most popular discussion board community with more than twelve million page views per month. It is dedicated to the intelligent exchange of ideas and debate on a wide range of "alternative topics" such as conspiracies, UFO's, paranormal, secret societies, political scandals, new world order, terrorism, and dozens of related topics.

Available for Interview: JIM MARRS

Marrs served in Military Intelligence with the U.S. Army before becoming an independent journalist and author. He is considered the world's leading conspiracy author with multimillion bestsellers such as Alien Agenda, Rule By Secrecy and the book that Oliver Stone used as a basis for his JFK movie, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy.

Marrs is a frequent guest on national radio and TV programs, including all major TV networks; the Discovery, Learning and History Channels; Good Morning America, Geraldo, Montel Williams, Today, Tech TV, Larry King Live and Coast to Coast. An award-winning author and TV/video producer, Marrs is also a teacher on the subjects of JFK and UFOs at the University of Texas at Arlington.

About the Book:

ABOVE TOP SECRET: Uncover the Mysteries of the Digital Age by Jim Marrs
Published in December 2008
The Disinformation Company Ltd.
Trade Paperback * US$19.95 * 304 pages

W

http://wsws.org/articles/2008/oct2008/bush-o22.shtml

W: A crude approach is not good for grasping much of anything
By David Walsh
22 October 2008

Directed by Oliver Stone, screenplay by Stanley Weiser

W. is veteran American director Oliver Stone's film about the life and career of President George W. Bush. It was shot and edited rapidly for release while Bush was still in office. The November 4 election was no doubt a consideration as well.

The film is a collection of episodes, broadly written and performed, following Bush from his student days at Yale to the disastrous turn that the Iraq war took for the US in 2003-2004. W. contains two time frames—the first treats Bush's earlier life impressionistically, offering glimpses of him over the course of several decades; the second, dealing with his first years in the White House, dwells at greater length on the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.

The pivot of the film occurs in 1986, around the time of his 40th birthday, when Bush "sees the light" and becomes a reborn Christian. The film takes seriously the notion that he conquered his inner demons and made something of himself.

A theme throughout is Bush's conflict and rivalry with his father, George H. W. Bush, congressman, CIA director, vice president and, ultimately, president from 1989 to 1993. We first see the youthful Bush (Josh Brolin), 20 or so, when he's being hazed at a Yale University fraternity house. Later, Bush phones his father (James Cromwell)—now a congressman—from jail, and receives a warning that this had better be the last such incident.

Intercut with that material are scenes of the Bush White House, and in particular, the debate over a prospective war with Iraq following the events of September 2001. Vice President Dick Cheney (Richard Dreyfuss) and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz (Dennis Boutsikaris) are the most ardent advocates of an invasion, countering the skepticism and reluctance of Secretary of State Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright).

The young Bush carries on, from one escapade to another, eventually meeting his future wife, Laura (Elizabeth Banks), in 1977. Defeated in a run for Congress by a populist Democrat, Bush promises "never to be out-Texased again." In 1986, he moves to Washington, and experiences his conversion. A huckster evangelist, Earle Hudd (Stacy Keach), presides over Bush's change of heart.

Switching once again to the more recent past, Stone's film presents Cheney delivering a lecture on Iraqi and Iranian oil reserves, pointing to the region and the Straits of Hormuz in particular as the "chokepoint of civilization."

The film cuts back in time again, and we see Bush senior presiding over the Gulf War in 1991, making the decision, with which his son disagrees, not to march on Baghdad. George W. announces his plan to run for governor of Texas in 1994, much to his family's consternation.

In 1999, he tells his preacher-advisor, "God wants me to run for president." We jump to 2003 and the fraudulent claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and the Hussein regime's efforts to get hold of "yellow cake" uranium ore from Niger. Finally, the invasion occurs and Bush announces "mission accomplished" in May. The fiasco then unfolds.

Oliver Stone has never been a subtle director. He perceives himself, it seems, as someone who strives to treat a given subject in broad strokes. Stone told an interviewer from GQ magazine that, like George W. Bush, he has the tendency not to want "to pay too much attention to details."

The director possesses a lively vulgarity, which he applies to glaringly public and intimate moments alike. Occasionally, this is effective and attractive; here, more often than not, however, it is not.

The references to Bush's fascination with baseball and his aspiration to become the professional sport's commissioner seem about right. He and the world might have been happier. A final scene, in which now-President Bush is unable to answer a simple question from a reporter, as to whether he had made any mistakes or done any soul-searching, is telling. These moments are exceptions.

Malice doesn't seem the clue to the problems in W. so much as great confusion, and ignorance of American social realities.

It is a fallacy to imagine that a crude approach can adequately grasp a crude subject. In general, a crude approach is not good for grasping much of anything. Because Bush is an extremely limited human being doesn't mean that his life and advancement are not bound up with complex questions, or even that his own psychology is an open book. Stone, unhappily, seems most at home with moments of drunkenness, backwardness, unconsciousness. He revels in and savors them.

Stone's and screenwriter Stanley Weiser's Bush is an eternal frat boy, living in the shadow of his father. He's essentially well-intentioned, if unevolved, amiable, but prone to angry outbursts, impulsive. Brolin does an effective impersonation of the public Bush, but it's not clear that we are much further in the direction of understanding the man who would become America's 43rd president.

The film catches largely at externals, in its look, feel and social perceptions. As always, a good deal of effort has gone into making certain that hairdos, clothes, automobiles and furniture correspond to the respective eras.

To explain Bush's trajectory, as W. does, largely on the basis of his unresolved conflict with his father begs the question. Many people have such battles, many, alas, also "find Jesus" at present, many leave off drinking—very, very few are elevated to the White House.

It's true that W. makes obligatory reference to other questions: the pursuit of Iraq's oil reserves, for example. In relation, however, to the significance of that issue and its consequences—1 million or more Iraqis killed, thousands of Americans dead and wounded, a country ruined, a region driven to the brink of a wider war—the scene is relatively perfunctory and formulaic. Cheney is filmed from a distance, and the moment is not likely to linger in the memory.

This isn't what Stone feels most deeply or what interests him, in the end. What's placed in the foreground, in almost perpetual, warts-and-all close-up, are Bush the younger's relations with his father and family. The sequences in the White House, the discussions of war and torture, are fairly flat and unevocative. The film gets its adrenaline pumping almost exclusively during the intra-family squabbles.

Neither element is entirely convincing, because a deeper grasp of the relation between Bush's personality, his family and the larger world of American politics social life eludes the director and screenwriter.

Stone framed his film to an interviewer from the Guardian in the following manner: "How did Bush go from an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?" He continued: "He had tremendous personal problems, and I have to give him enormous credit—he did overcome them, through willpower. Whether he solved them is another issue, but he overcame certain states of mind."

This, to put it politely, is inadequate. To put its shallowness in context, one must consider Stone's background.

Born to privilege in a staunchly Republican family, and a fellow student of Bush's at Yale in the 1960s, Stone enlisted in the military and volunteered for combat in Vietnam. The experience shattered and changed him. To his credit, he translated that into two films hostile to US imperialism's intervention in Southeast Asia, Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989).

Vietnam and related events knocked Goldwater Republicanism out of Stone and propelled him toward the "counter-culture" and various strands of protest and liberalism, and hedonism, but it did not equip him with a coherent and profound understanding of American class society. This is not entirely his fault. The intellectual laziness and evasiveness of the New Left and the anti-war protest movement could not have provided such an insight, nor did they have any desire to.

Stone is something of a lost soul, alienated from his social and ideological roots, but never finding his way to a more substantial and politically informed opposition to American capitalism. He is congenitally all over the place; indeed, one might say, that is his life's vocation.

His comments about W. wander here and there, and few of them indicate any grasp of the questions involved in the effort to bring Bush's life accurately and meaningfully to the screen.

"It's not a political film," Stone told Maxim magazine, "but a Shakespearean one. It's a film about George W. rebelling against his father, doing better than his father, believing that he's stronger than his father, and outdoing his father...and it's about the colossal mistakes he made and the lies he told. In a way it's Oedipal. One can say he did kill the father because he did destroy the legacy, the name. It's a big thing with the Bushes."

In passing, the same interviewer can note that Stone "has little sympathy for Bush, who he says is responsible for tens of thousands of needless deaths abroad and the corrosion of civil liberties at home and the fortune of future generations squandered." The director, however, tells the interviewer from GQ that the film is "light," prompting the question, "Wait, are you saying this movie is a comedy?," to which Stone replies: "Well, it has to be done with an ebullience and a certain fun, because the guy is goofy. He's a goofball!"

The inconsistency and unseriousness are not Stone's alone, they are shared by a wide layer of pragmatic middle class iconoclasts and critics in the US, who lament this or that feature of American life, even warn histrionically about incipient "fascism," and then go about their daily business complacent as clams.

That George W. Bush is an empty vessel would not be disputed by many thinking people. But how, the filmmakers might have asked themselves, is it possible that American capitalism placed its fortunes in the hands of such a lowlife?

No serious reference is made to the ultra-right forces that pushed Bush forward, the same forces responsible for the Clinton sex scandal and impeachment drive. Stone, in a peculiar manner, takes the Bush "success story" at face value. No doubt Bush junior had his conscious or semiconscious motives, but what driving forces, as Marxists know to ask, stood behind those motives and by what social elements was he picked up?

A more plausible explanation than the time-worn Oedipal story is that Bush was merely a front man for more conscious and politically motivated forces, with a wide-ranging and reactionary agenda at home and abroad. Painted as amiable and down-to-earth by the media, partial to vague "values," supposedly conservative but "compassionate," with a well-known family name, Bush was directed toward the White House; he had relatively little to do with the matter. No doubt, if he had not stopped drinking and carousing, the opportunity would have been closed to him, but that is about the most one can say of his "overcoming" his "personal problems."

The deterioration in the political representatives of the ruling elite is a function, in the final analysis, of the decline in its fortunes and prospects. George W. Bush's ascension to prominence speaks to the terminal crisis of American capitalism. Now a cosmetic change may be necessary, but Bush was no accident: he represented accurately the dominant section of the US establishment—arrogant, shortsighted and criminal to the core.

Some of those same forces, chastened by the experience, are now endorsing Sen. Barack Obama in an effort to compensate for their sin.

Stone and Weiser sacrifice art and truth to narrow political concerns. Scandalously, they make no mention of Bush's presiding over 153 executions as governor of Texas, in one case mocking a woman's pleas for mercy. The deep sadism of the man is missing. Nor is the hijacking of the 2000 election treated. In both cases, no doubt scenarist and director sought to avoid "partisan" and "controversial" issues, which would have brought the right-wing media down on their heads. As a result of Stone's ideological blindness or, not to mince words, political cowardice, the full picture of the man and his period is not here.

Along the same lines, Stone portrays Bush the elder as a stern and honorable figure, when, in fact, he was (and is) a corrupt, greedy representative of the ruling elite, and as CIA director, up to his elbows in blood. The filmmakers also, in passing, canonize Colin Powell as a voice of moderation, entirely undeservedly. The chief diplomatic liar for the Bush administration and a war criminal in his own right, Powell developed public differences only after he saw that the Iraq war was going badly.

All in all, Stone and Weiser have no historical or sociological purchase on Bush. Such an understanding wouldn't preclude individual psychology; on the contrary, it would create the context in which those private relations would take on real, full-bodied life. That opportunity was not taken.