Oliver Stone's Bush biopic plays it for laughs, but it's every bit as controversial as JFK and Nixon
You have to admit it’s a great question: “How did George W Bush go from alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?” That’s what the American film-maker Oliver Stone says he wants to explain in his forthcoming movie biopic, entitled, simply enough, W.
Not surprisingly, Texas-sized dust storms have already blown up in Hollywood and Washington over the film, which is being rushed through production so it can be released in America on October 17, just three weeks before the presidential election. Starring Josh Brolin as George W Bush, James (Babe) Cromwell as former president George HW Bush, Richard Dreyfuss as vice president Dick Cheney, Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush and Ioan Gruffudd as Tony Blair, the film will be the first big Hollywood biopic of a sitting president since PT 109, the 1963 hagiography about the heroic wartime exploits of John F Kennedy. The most recent president to be subjected to the Hollywood movie treatment was Bill Clinton, in a thinly veiled way, in Primary Colors.
Although Stone insists that he intends to paint “a fair, true portrait of the man”, many doubt that the director of extremely controversial films about the lives and deaths of two previous presidents — JFK and Nixon — and an avowed Democrat who is fiercely opposed to the war in Iraq, has any intention, or even the ability, to be objective. “His saying he is going to be fair to Bush is like Donald Trump saying he is going to be modest,” says Jacob Weisberg, author of The Bush Tragedy. Some believe Stone, 61, may even have a deep-seated personal animus against Bush. Born in the same year, he and Bush were briefly classmates at Yale, although they didn’t know each other there. Stone dropped out to fight in Vietnam, a battle-scarred journey that eventually led to his radicalisation and to two Oscar-winning films born of the experience, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. Bush, of course, managed to avoid going to Vietnam by somehow winning a cushy noncombatant job at home with the National Guard...
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Not surprisingly, Texas-sized dust storms have already blown up in Hollywood and Washington over the film, which is being rushed through production so it can be released in America on October 17, just three weeks before the presidential election. Starring Josh Brolin as George W Bush, James (Babe) Cromwell as former president George HW Bush, Richard Dreyfuss as vice president Dick Cheney, Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush and Ioan Gruffudd as Tony Blair, the film will be the first big Hollywood biopic of a sitting president since PT 109, the 1963 hagiography about the heroic wartime exploits of John F Kennedy. The most recent president to be subjected to the Hollywood movie treatment was Bill Clinton, in a thinly veiled way, in Primary Colors.
Although Stone insists that he intends to paint “a fair, true portrait of the man”, many doubt that the director of extremely controversial films about the lives and deaths of two previous presidents — JFK and Nixon — and an avowed Democrat who is fiercely opposed to the war in Iraq, has any intention, or even the ability, to be objective. “His saying he is going to be fair to Bush is like Donald Trump saying he is going to be modest,” says Jacob Weisberg, author of The Bush Tragedy. Some believe Stone, 61, may even have a deep-seated personal animus against Bush. Born in the same year, he and Bush were briefly classmates at Yale, although they didn’t know each other there. Stone dropped out to fight in Vietnam, a battle-scarred journey that eventually led to his radicalisation and to two Oscar-winning films born of the experience, Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. Bush, of course, managed to avoid going to Vietnam by somehow winning a cushy noncombatant job at home with the National Guard...