Hollywood irony

While the left throws a massive hissy fit over inaccuracies in The Path to 9/11, the hot ticket at the Toronto International Film Festival is a fake documentary in which President Bush is murdered:

I’m guessing there are a couple of things Americans, no matter what their party affiliation or political ideology, really don't want to see in a movie. One would be the assassination of a sitting American president, and the other would be a black man getting pinned for his murder just to make a point about anti-Arab sentiment since Sept. 11.

But that hasn’t stopped British filmmaker Gabriel Range and his team from Film Four in Great Britain. Their film, “Death of a President,” which will air on television tomorrow night in the UK, was such a hot ticket last night in Toronto that publicists at the Paramount theater had to make a human chain to block out gate crashers. Weeks of hype had caused a frenzy, and there was talk of scalped tickets.

[...]

Maybe it’s me, folks. Maybe I’m not hip enough for “Death of a President.” I know there’s a point to this thing. As the writer and director said during the Q&A after the screening, they wanted to show our “rush to judgment” and how Arabs have been treated in the U.S. since the World Trade Center disaster. But this really sounds to me like stuff people who don’t live in New York and didn’t actually experience Sept. 11 might say from a safe distance.

If an American cable network (I think we can safely assume no broadcast network will touch Death of a President) or film distributor picks up the movie, don't expect the Kossacks and HuffPosters to launch any boycott campaigns against it. Mind you, the two aren't exactly the same: The Path to 9/11 is a docudrama that takes dramatic licence to show the Clinton Administration's (and Bush Administration's) missed opportunities to take down Osama bin Laden, while Death of a President portrays the murder of a sitting President, and the framing of an innocent Arab for his murder (of course!) to criticize post-9/11 American "paranoia." Big difference.

(The anti-Path crowd is also trying to draw a distinction between a docudrama shown on network television - the public airwaves - and in movie theatres. I'd have some sympathy for this view if they weren't trying to stop iTunes from making The Path to 9/11 available for download, too. I suppose they'll boycott Netflix when it comes out on DVD.)

Still, I have to defend Range's right to make Death of a President, which is not the first movie (or book, or stage production) which portrays the murder of a real, living person. The most prominent example is probably The Naked Gun, which involved a failed attempt on the life of Queen Elizabeth II (foiled at the last minute by Enrico Palazzo, of course).

Maybe Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker should have made the assassination attempt successful and used it to criticize the monarchy and the British class system. Surely the Brits wouldn't have minded, right?

Damian P.

Posted by damian at September 11, 2006 12:11 PM