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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III. Will It Play In Peoria?

SMITH: If you assume that, according to the most optimistic polls, Bush’s approval rating is in the high 30’s, more than 60 percent of the country thinks, “Enough of this guy. Get him offstage already.” Or should that be, “Get him off the screen”?

PIERSON: If you look at documentary performance since Fahrenheit 9/11—which came out at the perfect crest of the wave, when people wanted a rallying point for feelings of anti-Bushism—anything that has remotely had some sort of anti-Bush position as a starting point has essentially had no audience.

DOWD: How much of a fatigue factor is there? Does this movie really have an audience?

RAPP: I don’t know that it does.

BRINKLEY: It has an audience, and it’s Bush haters and Oliver Stone lovers. The reason I came here tonight, even though I never talk about a movie if I haven’t seen it, is Oliver Stone. Oliver Stone is Robert Rauschenberg when he put a tire around a goat’s midsection. Or Allen Ginsberg in the middle of the Eisenhower conformity saying, “America . . . go eff yourself with your atom bomb.” Or Norman Mailer telling off Lyndon Johnson at a rally over Vietnam. I’m glad we have people like Stone in our society. They fail a lot, they create a lot of bad movies and bad poetry and bad art, but it’s exhilarating. There aren’t that many other filmmakers who would move us to be here.

SMITH: If this were Mike Leigh’s George W. Bush movie, I suspect we would not be having this dinner.

KELLY: I would be here for that. But I still think we’re underestimating Oliver Stone. You’re talking about an artist who’s capable of taking information that everyone knows and transforming it into an utterly transfixing, entrancing three-hour movie that, every time it’s on HBO, I sit, stop, and watch. The rest of my evening’s finished.

DOWD: I’m wondering if the timing for a film about Bush missed it by about two years.

KELLY: I agree with you, except I think there’s a ten-year miss in the opposite direction. I want to see Oliver Stone’s version of W. ten years from now.

BRINKLEY: You could make an argument from Stone’s point of view that in a decade the film won’t have the visceral effect that it will today. When presidents leave office, we tend to give them upward revisionism—even Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford. Nixon has not experienced this because of the tapes on which he makes anti-Semitic slurs, but by and large, we get a little nostalgic. I think Stone is giving Bush a big boot before he leaves office. “You’re not warm and fuzzy. We’re not going to give you a free pass into the Hall of Ex-Presidents. We’re going to remind people of what a menacing little weasel you are.”

DOWD: It’s very unusual for a president not to have a rise in the polls by now. Reagan’s numbers started rising at the end. Clinton’s numbers rose. Basically, the nominees for the next election are chosen, and the voters think, “Okay, we didn’t like what this guy did, so we’re going to start thinking, ‘Goodbye. It was nice knowing you and all that.’” Bush is stuck. He hasn’t moved for two years.

BRINKLEY: He has a chance at revisionism because his biggest foreign policy accomplishment is going to be, “After 9/11, I created Homeland Security and we weren’t attacked on my watch.” You don’t want to say that now, because it’s a knock-on-wood situation, but they’re going to try to sell it.

IV. Does It Tell the Truth?

SMITH: I don’t think we’ve answered the question of factual accuracy. Anne, as a screenwriter, how much license is it permissible for Stone to take in the telling of this story?

RAPP: Oliver Stone has already set his precedent, and we accept it. I don’t think we’re going to hold him to the same standard as another filmmaker. I don’t know if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but we could write down twenty great directors right here who could have done this movie and I might not see it. I’ll go see it because Oliver Stone did it.

KELLY: Isn’t he like Michael Moore in that everything he’s put in every movie has some basis of truth somewhere?

RAPP: I think so. I think he’s operating from some honest place in his own gut.

BRINKLEY: The whole time we’ve been talking, I’ve been staring at a picture of Tom Mix on the wall. Now, is that really what a cowboy was? Don’t you read the real history of Texas, with the slaughtering of Comanches? Yet we accept Tom Mix movies or John Wayne movies.

RAPP: Every western.

BRINKLEY: So why can’t we have room for movies that dissent against presidents with literary and artistic freedom?

RAPP: There’s a movie that I’d like to have seen Oliver Stone make, and I’m sorry Robert Altman’s not here to make it. Did you guys see Secret Honor? It was Nixon, after the fact, back home. He walks into his office one day in the middle of all this paranoia, with monitors everywhere, and he sets up a microphone and a tape machine—he didn’t even know how to work it. It’s as if he’s recording his memoirs. And he just regurgitates every ounce of hatred and anger, and then he falls on his knees and cries and talks to his mother and plays the piano. And it’s ninety minutes. Philip Baker Hall did it onstage first, and Altman put the material on film. To me it was the perfect bookend to Oliver Stone’s Nixon, because it’s almost like watching a sequel, but it’s a completely different style. I would love to see somebody get into Bush’s head like that. I would like someone to do Bush in his office and in Crawford for an hour and a half walking around and talking to himself and recording his notes to whoever’s going to write his memoirs. That would be interesting.

DOWD: I would love to believe that a movie like that could be made about Bush.

RAPP: Yeah.

DOWD: He’s not that type of individual. He’s not the type who has hours and days of self-doubt. That’s not him.

SMITH: What about the trailer for W.? I actually think that Bush 41 comes across, to the degree that we can judge his character on the basis of that clip, as rather sympathetic.

RAPP: I was shocked at that trailer. It’s almost like somebody else did it. I can’t imagine that that is the core of this movie.

DOWD: The trailer looks like a made-for-TV movie.

RAPP: It looks like a Judd Apatow movie.

KELLY: There are some very serious actors here. Jeffrey Wright is playing Colin Powell. Thandie Newton’s playing Condi Rice. For the most part, these are actors who wouldn’t get involved in some sort of drive-by hit job, who want to play characters that are a little more complicated.

PIERSON: But it doesn’t seem to be master thespian time.

BRINKLEY: Based on the trailer, I think the movie is meant to embarrass the Bushes. Matthew, how do you believe the White House will respond to it?

DOWD: If the movie mistreats people that the public loves, they’ll make it about that. “We hate the movie, we hate the liberal left, this is what they think.”

RAPP: I think the movie’s going to be as much about Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld as it is about George Bush.

SILVERSTEIN: There’s a chance that the film will attempt to be a tongue-in-cheek celebration of the journey Bush has taken from drunken, humble origins.

KELLY: Stone is genuinely fascinated by that journey.

SILVERSTEIN: There’s a way that that arc could be presented that is not inherently negative but sort of fascinating.

BRINKLEY: There are a lot of people in America who have drinking problems and are trying to lick ’em. I grew up in Ohio, and my friends in Ohio might say, “I kind of relate to that. I relate to Bush.”

KELLY: But the Friday it opens they’ll all be watching Intervention on A&E, not going out to see this movie.

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