That's their asserted reason. They cite their "CNN affiliation," which would supposedly interfere with their presentation of a movie that was being executive produced by MSNBC.
The HBO movie would have been based on the upcoming manuscript by media writer Gabriel Sherman who has written two cover stories for New York magazine on Ailes and Fox News, including his mammoth article “The Elephant In The Green Room” which prompted complaints from the Fox News CEO.
How can the reason be true? It it were true, they wouldn't have started the project in the first place.
The news of dropping the project comes after Nikki Finke revealed that it existed, saying:
HBO appears obsessed by GOP Conservatives. There have been movies about the 2000 Bush vs Gore election standoff and Sarah Palin and most recently a TV series featuring George W Bush’s severed head. Now HBO has done a secret deal for an Untitled Roger Ailes Project....
"... a fate met by a couple of million dogs each year in the United States. A half-dozen dogs are set into a large metal box. They seem eerily resigned to this moment; no snapping, no squirming, no escape attempts. The lid is shut and sealed, and a worker twists the gas valve. The screams from inside the box are ghastly."
A description of what are probably the most harrowing minutes of the new HBO documentary "One Nation Under Dog." I say probably, because there are also scenes of dogs serving their presumably last days in cages in the shelter — with one dog frantically trying to dig his way under the gate, his paws scraping over the blood-stained concrete. And, in the first segment, covering the law of dangerous dogs, we see a young girl's detached ear and the surgery-prepped site on the side of her head where it will be reattached. By the way, the dog's owner was himself a surgeon, a man who devoted a disturbing amount of time and money to defending his various Rhodesian Ridgebacks from the neighbors they terrorized.
This is an excellent documentary that rolls out the information (and the ultimate message) in a dramatic and compelling way. Simply put, people need to be responsible with their dogs. The ending strongly promotes rescue dogs, and I learned something about where rescue dogs come from. I had thought that it was mostly sick or elderly people getting in touch with the rescue folks and sorrowfully surrendering their beloved pets. Apparently not!
WALLACE: What one of the things it says is that for all of your talk about putting country first, that your decision to pick Sarah Palin was pure politics. And here is a clip from the show.
WOODY HARRELSON (as Steve Schmidt): We desperately need a game changing pick. None much these middle aged white guys are game changers.
ED HARRIS (as John McCain): So find me a woman.
WALLACE: "So find me a woman." Simple question, Senator, did that ever happen?
MCCAIN: Of course not.... I thought that she was best qualified person. I thought she had the ability to excite our party and the kind of person that I wanted to see succeed in the political arena. She is very effective and successful governor of a state....
I get the feeling that neither the movie nor John McCain was perfectly accurate.
Maher waltzes onto "The View" and delivers a prepared line that is obviously structured to reach out to the female daytime-TV audience. Joy Behar prompts him to talk about Sandusky, and Maher begins:
You'd like this...
(Because you're a woman.)
... Any institution where there's no women around — like The Church, like football, like the Middle East, like fraternities — it just goes to hell. You do need women as a moderating influence.
You? There's a feminist faux pas right in the middle of his effort at feminism. The audience is female, and he's saying "you" to them, but they are not the "you." Worse than that, seemingly without realizing it, he's dishing out old-fashioned male chauvinism: Women exist to moderate men. Men are the primary force in the world, but too much of that roiling, spewing masculine energy, and there's trouble. Come in, ladies, ground us, soothe us, care for us, tone us down, so our intensity doesn't boil over into destruction.
But Maher assumed — "You'd like this" — that female TV audience would feel flattered and not notice the message of subordination. And he assumed they'd enjoy hearing an insult to men. Quite aside from whether women appreciate negative stereotypes about men, underneath the insult was great pride in male achievements. Some men go too far, but maleness is central, even as femaleness is needed for moderation.
Nevertheless, Maher intended to appeal to women, to embed himself in the context of feminist values. He failed, even before Hasselbeck lit into him, but he did not realize that. He was perched in the center of the curved turquoise sofa, pleased at having presented himself as an admirer of women.
Hasselbeck begins: "That sounded very supportive of women." That is, she could see what he was doing, trying to seem feminist, though she doesn't say that it really was supportive: it sounded supportive.
"And I just want to go back to a time that bothered me... not for my own personal reasons... Forgive this idiotic Republican for bringing this to your brilliant mind..."
Talk about a moderating influence! She's stirring things up.
"In February of last year, Laura Logan was in Egypt and she was brutally attack by a mob there. She came back and said: 'There were hands raping me over and over again, tearing my body in every direction, trying to tear off chunks of my skull. I was in no doubt in the process of dying.'
"Now, prior to her coming back, Bill, you on your show said: 'Now that Hosni Mubarak has released Lara Logan, he must put her intrepid hotness on a plane immediately. In exchange, we will send Elisabeth Hasselbeck.'"
Hasselbeck sums up: "That wasn't that funny."
I'm virtually positive that Maher wasn't ambushed here. I think it was planned that Hasselbeck would read that indignant bit — it's all on paper, with 2 verbatim quotes — and sum up with an attack on the comedian's funniness. She did not cut more deeply. She could have said: You made a joke out of rape and you specifically thought it was funny to say that I should be raped. Is rape funny when it happens to a woman whose ideas you object to? You stood there on TV and named me as a person you'd want to hand over to a mob to be raped to death? That's your show, Bill?!
But she had it on paper, and it had her ending with a simple that's not funny. There's a female stereotype for you! It's the punchline to the old how many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? joke. The "ambush" was gentle, and Maher was prepared:
"We do a comedy show for an audience that's perhaps different than your audience. You are a public figure. It was not aimed at you personally, but when you are a public figure, you are out there and you're fodder for comedians to make comments on."
Asked "Do you draw the line ever?" he responds, elegantly, "I do draw the line, but I also live on the line." He's a male, bursting with creativity and cutting recklessly, unmoderated by females, late at night, on HBO. "You have to be out on the edge to know where that edge is."
Hasselbeck scoffs, "Thanks for being the hero." That is: You're bragging about yourself. She's playing that moderating role assigned to women, dragging him down to earth. She demands an apology. The others on the sofa frame her complaint as a personal affront, because she was named, not a more general attack on Maher for making a joke out throwing a woman to a brutal mob to be raped to death.
If you had it to do over again, would you used that joke, Hasselbeck asks, "if you're so supportive of women"?, and Maher deflects her glibly, but still without acknowledging the gravity of wishing rape on his political opponent. He says: "If I had a crystal ball and knew I was coming here and had to spend my whole segment talking about it, no, I wouldn't. It really wouldn't be worth it."
That is, he still likes his joke, but it's such a pain having to fritter away his book-pimping spot dealing with her that it's not worth it. He brushes her off: "Worse things have happened to people." Worse than hands raping me over and over again, tearing my body in every direction, trying to tear off chunks of my skull? Yeah, it is true. Worse things have happened to people. Thanks for the info, Bill. And here you are, talking to the women daytime TV has been explaining feminist issues to for decades!
Barbara Walters butts in to talk about herself. "I went through years of Baba Wawa. I survived." What a survivor! The message from Walters — who promotes feminism on most occasions, I think — is that Hasselbeck shouldn't take herself so seriously. She needs to learn to take a joke. Gilda Radner's delightfully charming imitation of Walters's speech defect is pretty much the same as Maher snarking about throwing Hasselbeck into a gang rape. Yeah. It's all comedy!
Hasselbeck claims some dignity in the end. She clarifies that it's not about her personal feelings, that she's "speaking on behalf of women," and that accountability is important. It's what she teaches her kids. Yeah, she's a mom. She's nice. She's folded back into the group, properly in place as one of the women on the turquoise sofa, arrayed sweetly around the man... moderating him.
"He was trying to find a way to simplicity, a way to live truthfully and compassionately. It was never a straight line, but that's not the point. I think he found an understanding: that there's no such thing as 'success' - there's just the path."
Well, you know… Yes. “Tentative” is the operative word, though. But Michael [Patrick King] and I can’t help but talk about it whenever we’re together, and as I said, we keep coming up with “Wouldn’t it be funny if she was doing this, this, and this” ideas. And then at some point, we start wondering, “Is it a special that we ask to do? Or is it a limited series that we ask to do? What are we asking to do? What is it that we want to do? What do we have time for? What would you be willing to do?” So that just keeps going back and forth. And Michael truly has no time right now, that’s for sure.
If you don't know "The Comeback," it was a 1-season HBO show that, I guess, was a little challenging for viewers. Some say people had trouble watching the main character get into humiliating difficulties. (Were we more sophisticated back in the 1950s when we had great fun watching Lucille Ball get stymied at every turn?)
Speaking of continuing great Lisa Kudrow things, the linked article also says there's a possibility of a sequel to "Romy and Michele's High School Reunion."
She "articulated the 'n' word all the way out — more than one time." She wasn't calling anyone the epithet or adopting the word as her way of speaking, only referring to the way other people talk: "black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is n*gger, n*gger, n*gger." It was really weird to use the word on the radio, and I suspect her of doing what Rush Limbaugh calls the "Media Tweak of the Day," a remark designed to get his adversaries talking about him.
Now, Dr. Laura has apologized, both for saying the word all the way out and for not helping the caller. The caller, Jade, was a black woman married to a white man whose friends and family make "racist comments" in front of her, which her husband ignores. Voicing her suspicion that "sometimes people are hypersensitive," Dr. Laura asked Jade to giver her 2 good examples of these "racist comments." Jade says:
OK. Last night -- good example -- we had a neighbor come over, and this neighbor -- when every time he comes over, it's always a black comment. It's, "Oh, well, how do you black people like doing this?" And, "Do black people really like doing that?"
Of course, Laura didn't think that was racist, but instead of inviting Jade to contemplate why a well-meaning person might say something like that or how Jade might take a more active role to get the neighbor to stop addressing her that way, Laura opened up the stream-of-consciousness:
... Well, listen, without giving much thought, a lot of blacks voted for Obama simply 'cause he was half-black. Didn't matter what he was gonna do in office, it was a black thing. You gotta know that. That's not a surprise. Not everything that somebody says -- we had friends over the other day; we got about 35 people here -- the guys who were gonna start playing basketball. I was going to go out and play basketball. My bodyguard and my dear friend is a black man. And I said, "White men can't jump; I want you on my team." That was racist? That was funny.
Jade then says: "How about the N-word? So, the N-word's been thrown around..." Here, Laura needed to determine whether the husband's friends and family are saying the word. Laura keeps riffing about general things happening out there in the culture:
Black guys use it all the time. Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is n*gger, n*gger, n*gger.
The friends and family in question aren't black guys (and neither is Jade), so what is the point? That Jade should put up with the n-word, said in her presence? People on HBO say "fuck" all the time too, but if the neighbors come to your house and say "fuck" all the time, you have a legitimate complaint. "Don't be so sensitive" is like saying "Be a doormat." But that lapse of Laura's — the failure to recognize what is special about a person's home — hardly gets any attention, because her saying the word "n*gger" was such an immense distraction. Why on earth would Laura do that? Media tweak.
Yeah, that makes me a tweakee. But there's no tweakee defense for the blogger. We bloggers live on tweaks. Mmmm. Yum.
I thought it was quite good. Though the story was mainly told from the Gore side, the Bush point of view was represented fairly, and there was a good overall balance to it. Complicated legal issues were explained surprising well without belaboring through through the use of various actors playing characters shown working out their next moves and real TV reporters seen in old video clips, telling us the news as it happened 8 years ago. It was especially exciting to see those old news clips, because, perfectly edited in, they stirred up the emotion that I felt when I saw them the first time. And the acted-out material really worked on me — as I was yelling at Al Gore not to concede and laughing at you don’t have to be snippy about it.
Kevin Spacey was the main character, Ron Klain. You either like Spacey or you don't. He seems to use dullness as his technique, and at this point, for me, it seems hammy. But his fleshy face was kind of subtly fascinating on the HDTV screen and I enjoyed him well enough.
We loved Laura Dern as Katherine Harris. It's so easy to mock the vain and exaggerated Harris, but Dern did a good job of getting inside the character. I could laugh and feel some reasonable sympathy for her.
The best actor was Tom Wilkinson, who, playing James Baker, mainly had to state legal positions and strategies. One thing I really love to get from an actor is the feeling that this person is thinking of the words he is saying — I want to lose the sense that there was a script — and Wilkinson really hit that spot for me with lines that must have looked dull on paper. After all, Baker was mainly about standing his ground, while the other side was scrappily fighting for every vote. But Wilkinson made this stolid intransigence damned exciting.
Of course, I got a kick out of seeing actors play the Supreme Court Justices. The Stevens and O'Connor were particularly good. The Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn't speak — maybe she wasn't even an actress — but she looked the part — amusingly.
That's my opinion. Take into account that: 1. I voted for Gore and rooted for Gore throughout the recount, 2. I accepted the Supreme Court's determination from the beginning (and continue to accept it after writing about it in depth and teaching it in detail numerous times), and 3. I didn't want Bush to become President, but I never hated him, and I voted for him in 2004.
IN THE COMMENTS: Somefeller writes:
I saw the film at a premiere last week at the Baker Institute at Rice. It was a lot of fun, and watching James Baker and Kevin Spacey elbowing each other every now and then when a good line in the film came on certainly added to the atmosphere. At one point, the sound went out on the film in a point when Spacey's character was having a big scene, to the horror of the Baker Institute staff, but it turned out great because Kevin Spacey jumped up and said his lines live, to the enjoyment of the audience, who basically got a free one minute live performance from Spacey. I spoke with Laura Dern at the reception after the film and asked her about her portrayal of Harris. She said the lines that Harris spoke in the film came from Harris's own book and from interviews with other GOP people involved in the Florida recount, so they weren't just created by the writers. She also said she tried to portray Harris (who she thought was basically someone in over her head and in many ways used cynically by other Republicans) sympathetically and not just as a cartoon character or villain, and she hoped that came through to the audience.
Warren Christopher, the former secretary of state who served as the public face of the Gore team in the early days of the recount effort, said this week that he believed the film, “Recount,” was “pure fiction” in its portrayal of him as a weak strategist unprepared to stand up to the aggressive tactics of James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state who was the chief Republican adviser.
Oh, look at the bright side, Warren. Democrats are just too darned kind-hearted to be evenly matched to those bastard Republicans.
Even Mr. Baker questioned the portrayal of Mr. Christopher. “I don’t think I was as ruthless as the movie portrays me, and I know he was not as wimpish as it makes him appear,” Mr. Baker said.
*adds "masculinity" tag*
“I think a lot of the strategizing in the script that I saw was somebody’s hindsight rather than what we had to deal with in the immediate aftermath of the election,” [said William M. Daley, Gore’s campaign chairman]. He added: “The perception that Warren Christopher was some wuss who got hoodwinked by Jim Baker is absolute fantasy in the mind of somebody who is trying to make themselves out to be bigger than they were.”...
“I was stunned by the [screenplay] excerpt,” [Warren Christopher] said in an interview. “Much of what the author has written about me is pure fiction. It contained events that never occurred, words I never spoke and decisions attributed to me that I never made.”
Oh, enough already. Deal with it. You don't hear James Baker bellyaching that they portrayed him as a big meanie, do you? Don't be such a .... wuss.
Hey, I'm really psyched about this movie. Here, watch the trailer.
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