Everybody Must Get Stoned

On October 17—three weeks before Election Day—Oliver Stone’s much-anticipated film about the life and presidency of George W. Bush arrives in theaters.

October 2008

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PIERSON: I didn’t say negative/positive. I said satirical or serious. That’s a different question.

SMITH: Talk about that.

PIERSON: Nixon was a very serious movie. Many people would think that Nixon was an easy target to satirize. That’s not what Oliver Stone happened to do in that case.

RAPP: I think the Bush movie is far harder for Stone to do well. My guess is that it won’t be as good. Bush has been spoofed and satirized from every angle. No leaf goes unturned in our culture today. Every moment will be like, “Oh, I’ve already heard that one. I’ve already seen that one.” You know they’re going to have the Bushisms we’ve all heard.

PIERSON: The fact that “misunderestimated” is in the tagline would suggest that there’s something fundamentally satirical here.

DOWD: It’s going to be one of two things. It’s either going to make you laugh at Bush or be pissed off at Bush. It’s going to make you say, “This is a joke, and I’m laughing at this guy,” or “It really pisses me off that this guy’s sitting in the Oval Office doing this kind of crap.”

KELLY: What was so affecting about Nixon is that you had neither of those reactions. I don’t think Nixon’s a perfect movie, but the character generated unexpected pathos.

PIERSON: He was played by a real actor, Anthony Hopkins. Josh Brolin’s great—I don’t want to trash-talk him—but he’s not Anthony Hopkins.

DOWD: Nixon was a tragic figure, and the movie portrayed the tragedy of him personally and as president. I think most people had a view of Nixon that way.

KELLY: Nobody expected a tragic treatment of Nixon from Oliver Stone.

DOWD: But I wouldn’t have walked in and said, “I’m going to laugh at Nixon.” I would be shocked if you don’t walk out of the Bush movie laughing at him.

II. The Political Effect

BRINKLEY: When Nixon came out, we had already had All the President’s Men. There had been serious movies that had a kind of dramatic effect. Nixon was Oliver Stone trying to make a Shakespearean story in a modern context. Whereas the Bush movie’s timing cannot help but be seen as Stone trying to have an influence on the election. My fear is that he’s just like Dan Rather: “We’re going to get him with the letter!” For all the accolades he gets, Stone has high negatives with a lot of Americans, and I’m not sure people are going to be excited about seeing this movie. I think a lot of swing voters are going to be angry that the Hollywood left is interfering with an election and trying to demean a sitting American president.

DOWD: The movie is being released three weeks before Election Day. That decision is not accidental, and that’s its importance. Depending on how it turns out, it could have a positive effect for McCain. Laura Bush is actually a key part of that, because the American public loves her—she’s a great woman. If the movie goes off on her, you could have a real backlash.

BRINKLEY: It’s not accidental. He may be thinking he’s helping defeat McCain, but it could boomerang on him. Look how the Ronald Reagan miniseries boomeranged terribly on CBS. When you’re showing an American president, a symbol of our country, in a deeply negative light, there are negative consequences. The hard left and hard right are often blind to that reality.

PIERSON: The release date is not his choice; it’s his distributor’s. Even though it’s a lower-budget movie for him, Stone is not that bankable right now. It’s a $30 million film, and they’re going to spend $30 million releasing it. Obviously, from their point of view, the release date is timed to make the most money. They assume that it will make more money by coming out three weeks before the election. That may or may not turn out to be true.

BRINKLEY: Why would you run it in February or March? The window is now.

PIERSON: This is the hot moment. No debating that. You brought up Michael Moore earlier. The timing of the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 couldn’t have been better in terms of its commercial success. But its impact in mobilizing and catalyzing certain elements of the other side was at least equal to whatever it did to mobilize Democratic voters. That’s why, in the end, the only credit you can give it as a political factor is one that was sort of zeroed out.

KELLY: Michael Moore flat-out said, I have made this movie to get George Bush out of office. Oliver Stone said nothing of the sort.

PIERSON: Right, but his entire career led him to a point where he believed that he was having an impact that he now knows he doesn’t have.

DOWD: If I were Barack Obama and I presented an argument at the end of this election that was similar to what Oliver Stone was saying, it could be easily dismissed. It doesn’t necessarily help Obama to have a movie that makes his argument less substantive.

BRINKLEY: I agree 100 percent. This movie has the potential to ultimately do damage to Obama.

SMITH:Why?

BRINKLEY: Because there’s still a reverence for the office of the presidency in this country. When you start taking a sitting president’s family apart in the way that I saw in the trailer—the drinking, that fratness, the caricature of Bush—people will be upset. The left will love it, but a lot of Middle America will say, “This is disgusting.”

SMITH:So it’s not that Bush is necessarily sympathetic but that the office of the presidency is.

DOWD: Members of his family are sympathetic.

SMITH:Bush the elder.

DOWD: And Laura.

RAPP: Laura’s very sympathetic.

DOWD: What would be interesting or surprising to me is if the movie actually conveys what some people, especially the liberal left, don’t understand about Bush, which is that the guy is a lot smarter than they think. He’s not just some doofus who bumbles around, someone created by Dick Cheney and Karl Rove to do their bidding. If the movie presented a guy who is smarter and more manipulative in his relationships, that would be news to a lot of people. And there would actually be an element of truth to it. The idea has been that you either like Bush or you don’t, that everybody around him is going, “We like him because he’s a simple guy,” or “We hate him because he’s a simple guy.” There’s much more nuance to him than that.

RAPP: I don’t think Oliver Stone will do that.

KELLY: Neither one of you seems to think he’s capable of making that kind of movie, when everything he’s done before would seem to suggest that he is.

DOWD: I don’t think he would have had access to anybody who could have told that story. Everybody he had access to would have been peripheral, would have repeated the talking points.

RAPP: Everyone knows every bit of dialogue in there. He’ll say “nukular” ten times. We’re bored with that. I think the movie flirts with insulting a certain segment of our society: the middle, the on-the-fence voter. “You don’t have to show me Bush chugging vodka at a fraternity. Let me have my own opinion. Let me figure it out myself. I’m a smart person. I can judge this man by what I’ve seen.”

DOWD: It’s interesting you say that, because in order for Barack Obama to win, he’s got to win people who voted for Bush and liked Bush and respected Bush at one point in time, if not twice. Obama has to get to a place where he can say, “I can understand why you would’ve done that and there’s some good things about him, but he took the country in a bad direction.” As opposed to, “You’re an idiot for having voted for this guy. This guy was just a fraud.”

SILVERSTEIN: So if you’re advising Obama, how do you tell him to handle questions about the movie?

BRINKLEY: “I didn’t see it.”

DOWD: I would say, “It’s entertainment. It’s a movie. It’s not a documentary on the presidency. I haven’t seen it. I don’t have time. I’m running for office.”

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