Duplicity Lessons, II

Is there anything more pathetic than the temper tantrum over the Ronald Reagan docu-drama, now pulled from the CBS network’s November sweeps schedule? Let’s see if Worldwide Pablo has this right:

The subject is a former actor, who portrayed no small number of real-life persons, in a dramatized style.

The critics have seen just eight minutes of the rough-cut, and worry that the final product wouldn’t be complimentary enough.

The owner of the project is vying for special favors from a Republican Congress.

Stinks, doesn’t it?

Ever wonder why Howard Dean is so hopping mad? Ever wonder if the American public will awake from its political coma?

WWP does.

Comments

[Lindsay Thompson]

As Alfred Hitchcock once said to Kim Novak, "it's jost a moooo-vie." What's interesting about the Reagan movie flap is how the left has tried to portray themselves as McCarthyite victims just because people don't like what they read about the movie and complain about it. As The New York Times noted yesterday, there have been plenty of movies (Mel Gibson's biopic on Jesus, for example, that plenty of people didn't have to see to dislike.

As WWP points out, Reagan played fictionalized versions of real people in movies. That's factually correct but doesn't really say anything about the merits of the Reagan biopic fuss. My read is that people are upset for a number of intersecting reasons:

1. There are those who think ex presidents are entitled to some respect and deference while alive.

2. There are some people who think it's kind of cheap going after a 92 year old man with Alzheimer's Disease who can't answer back.

3. There are others who think it's one thing to fill in bits of a biopic with fictional material for dramatic interest or whatever reason, but that it's crossing a line to attribute views and statements to the public figure family, associates and biographers say he didn't hold or express.

4. And there are people who hear Brolin and Davis moralizing about how the movie turns up the seamy underside of a presidency and that she hopes it will make Americans more careful about voting, and the whole thing begins to look like a hit job from the start.

The real lead on this story should be how craen CBS has been, caving in to pressure like they have, and then getting to have it both ways by shifting the viewing to Showtime.