W.

[Gold Trumpet]

He should have played Rove, given that he pretty much played him already in Silver City. Still, a good man to have on board. I'm so intrigued by this film: it's either going to be absolutely fascinating or one of the most embarrassing movies ever.

I'm worried about the film myself. The problem is that Stone is making a biography film about a man that so many people already have preconceived ideas about that he's going to have go beyond the general story. Critics of the screenplay already say the film is too comedic and just makes Bush look like a frat boy, but Stone wants this film to exist between the confines of a comedy and a drama. He'll make the portrait of Bush schewed between the idea of  him being a goofball and a man chosen by God. Stone's best films have been about dual personalities that exist in people, but I fear Stone may under sell the Bush we know by not representing his huge errors and missteps enough. Stone will argue his outlook of Bush is strictly personal, but he'll need to convince people that the personal outlook he shows also signifies the public and political Bush we know. I'm worried Stone's Bush will not have enough representation of the real Bush.

It's good to make comedy out of political figures, but I always feel the issue is how you balance the comedic elements with the real life associations. Kubrick did excellent work with Dr. Strangelove. He knew he was taking liberties with ideas in the film, but he understood the nature of generals was that they were extreme characters of distinct insanity. It later became documented that politicians had to continually argue generals out of declaring war because it was their first instinct. Kubrick tapped into a real problem with his gross exaggeration. Then there is what Chaplin did with The Great Dictator. He took exaggerations of Adolf Hitler so far that there was no recognition of Hitler at all. It wasn't a subversive comedy because Hitler's real personality wasn't taken into account. I hope Stone is able to do what closer to what Kubrick did in W. (And the film is called W. Just the W on the thread looks weird.)

[Alexandro]

Duvall was such a perfect Cheney that Dreyfuss almost feels like a let down. However he's an awesome actor and I'm hoping he gets a chance to do something substantial, as Paul Sorvino did with Kissinger.

I didn't like Stone defining this story as "almost capraesque". But I'm glad everything is pointing in a direction more in Stone's usual vein: risky. No one really know what to expect this time, and the topic is so unfriendly with audiences that there's no way he's gonna jump the shark and do another WTC.

Who's making the score to this?

[MacGuffin]

Interview: Oliver Stone 
Source: Mike Goodridge; Screen Daily

"America has defined itself in the early 21st century as a cowboy state. George W Bush has hyperbolically expressed all the cowboy mentality the world holds of America."

So says Oliver Stone from Louisiana, three days before he starts shooting W, his serio-comic look at the 43rd president of the USA and one of the most controversial figures of our time.

Sold internationally by QED International, W looks at the president from the age of 20 to 58, after the start of the Iraq war. Although the time periods will be mixed up throughout the film, it is, says Stone, a "three-act film" starting with Bush as a young man "with a missed life", then his transformation and "an assertion of will which was amazingly powerful" as he emerged from his father's shadow, and finally his invasion of Iraq. "He achieved what his father did not by getting re-elected," says Stone. "What he does with that is the question."

Stone says the tone of the film is "ideally in the vein of Network or Dr Strangelove. I was a young man when I saw Dr Strangelove and it still stays with me. It took a very grim subject and turned it into a serio-comic story and it worked. So those would be great models for the movie to live by."

Stone and his writer Stanley Weiser developed the project in early 2007 and Weiser worked on the screenplay while Stone prepared Pinkville at United Artists (UA). But when UA pulled the plug on Pinkville, Stone immediately switched his attentions to W, securing Josh Brolin to play the title character in December.

"He is one of the great characters of this time and I think he has had enormous impact on the world and our generation as well as future generations," says Stone, who points out that Bush's popularity in America's heartland remains enormous.

"I am sitting in the Bible belt and frankly there is a lot more affection for him than you think. Americans voted for him in quite big numbers in both elections. As someone told me the other day: he liked Bush because he doesn't try to pretend and try to be something he isn't; he tells it like it is."

Casting the cabinet

Joining Brolin in the cast is a rich ensemble of well-known movie actors including Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, James Cromwell as George Bush Sr, Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush, Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell, Thandie Newton as Condoleezza Rice, Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld, Toby Jones as Karl Rove and Ioan Gruffudd as Tony Blair. Richard Dreyfuss is in talks to star as Dick Cheney.

"It's about his inner workings and his people," says Stone, who adds that Saddam Hussein is characterised in the movie "in a pretty funny way".

Meanwhile Stacy Keach plays a composite of evangelical ministers, including Billy Graham and Jim Robison, who influenced Bush in his conversion to Christianity.

"Richard Nixon very much invoked the silent majority and the friendship of Billy Graham, but Mr Bush has taken (religion) further than ever (into government) and so we have to dramatise that," says Stone. "We must on the surface take his conversion seriously. It is the centrepiece of his change. At the age of 40, he was a drinker and he changed quite radically over a period of four years, so something happened to him. Whether he became the same person on the other side of the coin is an interesting issue and I examine that too. Some of the characteristics, however, never disappeared such as the temperament, the anger and the impatience."

The film, however, won't be an intense three-hour drama like Stone's 1995 biopic of Richard Nixon. "It's not as psychologically heavy," says the director. "I don't perceive George Junior as troubled or as psychoanalytical as Richard Nixon although there is a remarkable similarity in their presidencies. Nixon was more ambitious in scope and time. This is more of a souffle. You have to laugh a little bit at (Bush's presidency) because there are so many sad things in this. It's tragicomedy."

Stone seems more blase than he was earlier in his career about criticism. He is determined to make films which attempt to understand events and people from this era.

"I am still trying to understand America myself," he says. "I was born the same year as Bush and we went to Yale at the same time. I am of his generation and these are questions that concern me. As you know from my body of work, I love this country, I love what it stands for and what it's done. At the same time I have been critical of many of its policies publicly and in my films and I've taken my share of heat for that. I have been so trashed for JFK, Nixon and others that I just pass on and say, OK, I am just going to do my perception of what happened. I am flitting through my time and all I can do really is to reflect what I see of that time."

Inside the president's mind

Assumptions are that Stone and Brolin will be critical and mocking of Bush, but Stone begs to differ, arguing the actor is putting aside any personal political differences in an attempt to understand the character.

"Josh is professional and is trying to understand how (Bush's) brain works," says Stone. "Whatever you say about him as a human being, he has had his share of problems and obstacles to overcome. In the south, one of the reasons they like him is for his sense of family and his commitment to his faith. Those factors make him a very decent human being in the eyes of many people. Tony Blair for one fell for him and liked him a lot. Blair was a very sophisticated man who had traveled the world and look what happened, he was a big fan of George Bush. In fact, he has since declared his Catholicism."

Meanwhile Stone is pleased that Lionsgate has picked up rights in North America (as well as UK and Australia) to the film after a unanimous rebuff from all the major studios.

"It's ultimately better for the film because they won't be as pressured or intimidated by the corporate concepts," he says. "It was always a very good script but people would rather not be bothered. It is easier not to be bothered: 'Why should I make it because I work for a giant corporation and maybe in three months' time someone is going to come down and nail me for it.' It's really sad. It's a risk-free environment now. It used to be an environment where the studio chiefs were bosses and made up their own mind."

Instead, producers Jon Kilik, Moritz Borman and Bill Block assembled a complex financing structure for the $25m film consisting of Block's QED, Australia's Omnilab Media, China-based Emperor Group, Thomas Sterchi's Condor Films and Hong Kong's Global Entertainment Group.

Lionsgate plans to release the film on October 17 to coincide with the last few months of Bush's presidency, and Stone is confident that international sales will be strong on the back of fascination with the controversial Bush.

"We will do better overseas than people think. You think he will be done in January. Bullshit. His influence will be felt for many years. We will never forget him. He is not going to be a forgotten president."

[Gold Trumpet]

Teaser poster:

http://themovingpicture.net/teaser-poster-for-oliver-stone%e2%80%99s-w

[72teeth]

Havnt they been selling posters like these at Spencer's Gifts for years now...?

[MacGuffin]

Oliver Stone vs. George W. Bush
Source: Los Angeles Times

It feels like moviedom's version of an Ultimate Fighting grudge match--Bush vs. Stone.

The two men were born into wealth and were briefly classmates at Yale, but since then, the twain has hardly met. One ducked out of military service, boozed and brawled until he found God, ran a baseball team and turned to politics, ending up as governor of Texas and a two-term president, though the last years, thanks to a disastrous war in Iraq, have been pretty much of a fiasco, with his party losing Congress and his popularity ratings at historic lows. The other earned medals in Vietnam before emerging as a bigger-than-life Hollywood filmmaker, tackling the Big Issues of the day ("Platoon," "Wall Street" and "JFK") before seeing his own career take a downhill slide of its own, the bumps in the road smoothed over with booze and psychedelics.

Now another chapter is being written. Down in Louisiana, Oliver Stone has been shooting "W," his very personal take on the psychological evolution of George W. Bush, the movie everyone in Hollywood is dying to see but no one was willing to fund. It stars Josh Brolin as Dubya, with Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney and Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush.

Our film reporter John Horn has just returned from steamy Shreveport, where he watched Stone filming a father-son scene between Bush Sr. and Bush Jr. set during Dubya's tenure as owner of the Texas Rangers, with a local football stadium standing in for the Rangers' home field. John's story will run this Sunday, but here's a sneak peek at some of his interview with Stone.

Horn writes: "Racing to film, edit and release the film before the November election, Stone was not always getting even five hours of sleep a night. Even though it was nearly midnight and the crew was just finishing its lunch break, the 61-year-old director grew increasingly animated talking about 'W.'

" 'I love Michael Moore, but I didn't want to make that kind of movie,' Stone said of 'Fahrenheit 9/11.' It ["W"] is not an overly serious movie, but it is a serious subject. It's a Shakespearean story ... I see it as the strange unfolding of American democracy as I have lived it.' "

Later on, Horn gets Stone to offer his own armchair psychoanalysis of the president:

"Stone, who was briefly a Yale classmate of Bush, is clearly no fan of the president's politics, but says he's amazed by his resilience and ambition. 'He won a huge amount of people to his side after making a huge amount of blunders and really lying to people,' the director said. What further fascinates Stone is Bush's religious and personal conversion: a hard-drinking C student who was able to become not only Texas governor but also the leader of the free world.

" 'We are trying to walk in the footsteps of W and try to feel like he does, to try to get inside his head. But it's never meant to demean him,' Stone said. 'We are playing with our own opinions and our own preconceptions of him. This is his diary--his attempt to explain himself in his own words.' "

[MacGuffin]

Oliver Stone and 'W.,' a story of President Bush
The openly political director goes where some fear to tread.
By John Horn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

SHREVEPORT, LA. -- IT'S A conversation any father and son might have -- a quick chat about baseball, families and world affairs. But when the speakers are President George H. W. Bush and his son George W. Bush, even a seemingly innocuous conversation can suddenly carry great weight, especially when Oliver Stone is at the controls.

With sweat cascading down his face on a steamy June night in Louisiana, the Oscar-winning director was directing James Cromwell (playing the elder Bush) and Josh Brolin (starring as President Bush) through a critical moment in "W.," Stone's forthcoming -- and potentially divisive -- drama about the personal, political and psychological evolution of the current president. Although the father-son patter was ostensibly friendly, the subtext was anything but, hinting at the intricate parent-child relationship that Stone believes helps to explain George W. Bush's ascension.

While the Bushes in this scene from 1990 were talking about the Texas Rangers (of whom George W. once owned a share) and Saddam Hus- sein (against whom George H. W. was about to go to war in Kuwait), there was much more at stake, as Stone and screenwriter Stanley Weiser saw the fictional conversation unfolding.

"You need to back him down and take him out -- like you did Noriega," George W. tells his father about Hussein. The elder Bush wasn't sure he was going to be that rash. "You know I've always believed in leaving personal feelings out of politics," the 41st president told his son. "But Saddam -- this aggression cannot stand. Not gonna allow this little dictator to control 25% of the world's oil."

As the architect of the outspoken dramas "Platoon," "Salvador," "Wall Street," "Born on the Fourth of July" and "JFK," Stone stands apart as one of the most openly political filmmakers in a business where it's usually the actors who wear their beliefs on their sleeves. A longtime backer of Democratic candidates (recent donations include a gift to Sen. Barack Obama), Stone is either the oddest person to chronicle the life of the current president or the most inspired.

Whatever the verdict, the marriage of director and subject has left nearly as many people running for the sidelines as wanting to be a part of the director's undertaking.

Indeed, "W.'s" combination of story and filmmaker and the poor track record of recent biographical movies scared off at least three potential studio distributors and any number of actors, including, initially, star Brolin, and even Major League Baseball, which declined to cooperate with the production.

Yet as Stone guided Cromwell and Brolin across Shreveport's Independence Bowl stadium, doubling for the Rangers' home field, it was possible to see that "W." could be, in a complicated way, sympathetic.

The father was belittling a son, George H. W. cautioning George W. to stick to simple things: "Maybe better you stay out of the barrel," the senior Bush told his son, and leave the family's political legacy to younger brother Jeb. "Well, son, I've got to say I was wrong about you not being good at baseball," the father ultimately said, tossing him a scrap of a compliment.

The future president didn't quite get what the reproving "barrel" idiom meant, but he realized his father didn't respect him. Brolin took in the snub, but then his bearing grew determined: George W. would have to prove himself beyond anyone's imagining.

Stone said it's part of what drove the younger Bush into the White House: to show his doubters wrong. "Someone who could step into that path and out-father his father," Stone said in his air-conditioned trailer during a break in filming. Racing to film, edit and release the film before the November election, Stone was not always getting five hours' sleep. Even though it was nearly midnight and the crew was just finishing its lunch break, the 61-year-old director grew increasingly animated talking about "W."

"I love Michael Moore, but I didn't want to make that kind of movie," Stone said of "Fahrenheit 9/11." "W.," he said, "isn't an overly serious movie, but it is a serious subject. It's a Shakespearean story. . . . I see it as the strange unfolding of American democracy as I have lived it."

Stone, Brolin and the filmmaking team believe they are crafting a biography so honest that loyal Republicans and the Bushes themselves might see it. Given Stone's filmmaking history, coupled with a sneak peek at an early "W." screenplay draft, that prediction looks like wishful thinking.

Still, it's a captivating challenge: Can a provocateur become fair and balanced? And if Stone is, in some way, muzzling himself to craft a mass-appeal movie, has he cast aside one of his best selling points?

Locating an inner voice

DRESSED IN a suffocating Rangers warmup jacket earlier on that scorching June day, Brolin kept running into an outfield wall, trying to make a heroic catch as part of the film's baseball-oriented fantasy framing device.

Stone worried the leap wasn't quite athletic enough and chose to add the baseball's falling into Brolin's mitt through visual effects -- allowing the "No Country for Old Men" star to throw himself into doing everything else.

Brolin spent countless hours studying the president's speech patterns and body language but said he wasn't trying to concoct a spitting-image impression, which ran the potential of becoming a "Saturday Night Live" caricature.

"It's not for me to get the voice down perfectly," the 40-year-old Brolin said, even though he came close. More important, the actor said, was to unearth Bush's inner voice -- "Where is my place in this world? How do I get remembered?"

Like other actors approached for the film (including Robert Duvall, who was asked but declined to play Vice President Dick Cheney), Brolin had more than vague misgivings about starring in "W." He was, in fact, dead set against it. "When Oliver asked me, I said, 'Are you crazy? Why would I want to do this with my little moment in my career?' " Brolin recalled. Then, early one morning during a family ski trip, Brolin read Weiser's original screenplay, which covers Bush from 1967 to 2004. "It was very different than what I thought it would be," Brolin said, "which was a far-left hammering of the president."

Brolin said many friends still weren't buying it. "There were a lot of people I tried to get involved, who were very, very reluctant to do the movie," Brolin said. In addition to Cromwell, the cast includes Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush, Richard Dreyfuss as Cheney, Toby Jones as Karl Rove and Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld.

While noting Bush's low approval ratings (23% in a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll released this week), Brolin, like Stone, said "W." isn't intended to kick the man while he's down. "Republicans can look at it and say, 'This is why I like this guy,' " Brolin said. "It's not a political movie. It's a biography. People will remember that this guy is human, when we are always [outside of the movie] dehumanizing him, calling him an idiot, a puppet, a failed president. We want to know in the movie: How does a guy grow up and become the person that he did?"

Stone, who was briefly a Yale classmate of Bush, is clearly no fan of the president's politics but said he's amazed by the man's resilience and ambition. The movie is basically divided into three acts: Bush's hard-living youth, his personal and religious conversion, and finally his first term in the Oval Office.

"He won a huge amount of people to his side after making a huge amount of blunders and really lying to people," the director said. What further fascinates Stone is Bush's religious and personal conversion: a hard-drinking C student who was able to become not only Texas governor but also the leader of the Free World.

"We are trying to walk in the footsteps of W and try to feel like he does, to try to get inside his head. But it's never meant to demean him," Stone said.

The movie has hired a former Bush colleague as an advisor, and labored to get the smallest details right. For all the historical accuracy, though, "W." is clearly a work of fiction.

"We are playing with our own opinions and our own preconceptions of him," Stone said. "This is his diary -- his attempt to explain himself."

A project gains priority

THIS wasn't the movie Stone was supposed to be making. Instead of "W.," the film was going to be "Pinkville," a look at the Army's investigation into 1968's My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

Only days before filming was set to begin, with many sets already built and department heads in place, "Pinkville" star Bruce Willis pulled out of the film last fall, unhappy with a script that couldn't be rewritten because of the writers strike. Stone flirted with casting Nicolas Cage in the lead role, but enthusiasm from United Artists -- whose war movie "Lions for Lambs" had just flopped -- had waned on fears that "Pinkville" was too violent.

At the same time, Stone had been working on the "W." script with screenwriter Weiser, the author of Stone's 1987 hit "Wall Street." Stone was at first worried the topic was almost too timely -- "When I made 'Nixon,' " the director said, "he had died."

Said "W." producer Moritz Borman: "He wasn't sure. He worried, 'Is there enough material about Bush? Or will there be more once he's out of office?' But then a slew of books came out."

Soon after "Pinkville" imploded, Stone returned to "W.," and by early 2008 he was convinced it was not only the right time to make the movie but also imperative the movie hit theaters before the next presidential election, because its impact would be greatest then, when everybody was obsessing over our next president. But that early release date created a post-production timetable that would be half of Stone's most hurried editing schedule. Before he could set up his cameras, Stone and his team first had to answer a key question: Who in the world was going to pay for it?

"You put the two names together -- Bush and Stone -- and everybody had a preconceived notion of what the film would be. But look at 'World Trade Center,' " Borman said of Stone's commercially successful 2006 movie about two Port Authority policemen rescued from Sept. 11 rubble. "There was an uproar when it was announced and then, when the movie got closer to release, the very people who protested it preached from the pulpit that it was a film that had to be seen."

Still, Borman and Stone knew few studios would commit to the movie, especially given the desired October 2008 release date, because studios often plan their release schedules more than a year in advance. What they needed was an independent financier, someone not afraid of challenging material -- a person like Bill Block.

Block had formed QED International in 2006 as a production, financing and sales company interested in the kind of highbrow drama that studios increasingly shun. Block saw in "W." not a troublesome jeremiad but a crowd-pleaser, and QED colleagues Kim Fox and Paul Hanson quickly assembled the "W." deal.

"What Oliver is making is a splashy, commercial picture," Block said. "This is not a static biopic. It's kinetic."

In addition to footing the film's $30-million budget, QED also raised money to underwrite its prints and advertising costs upon release. Any distributor committing to "W.," in other words, would have no money at risk: It could release the film, take the distribution fee of about 15% and move on. "I think it's a no-brainer," Stone said. All the same, "W." could spark a potential inferno inside the White House. "You never know exactly why" a studio rejects a movie, Stone said, while noting that all the major studios are small cogs in global conglomerates. "But at the highest levels, it didn't pass. Some would say it's too much of a risk and too much of a hot potato politically." Stone declined to name names, but two people close to the film said among those considering but passing on the film were Paramount, Warner Bros. and Universal.

Harvey Weinstein's Weinstein Co. aggressively pursued the "W." deal, but QED, Borman and Stone picked Lionsgate Films in part because of its strong balance sheet. Also, because it's not part of a larger studio, Lionsgate is one of the only truly independent distributors left.

Lionsgate worried about fitting "W." into its October schedule and has discussed a post-election release if the film isn't ready in time. But whenever it comes out, the company is ready for any backlash -- after all, it's the distributor of the "Saw" and "Hostel" films.

"To the extent there is going to be heat," said Joe Drake, president of Lionsgate's motion picture group, "we can take the heat. That won't be a problem."

[MacGuffin]

Brolin, Wright, others in film crew arrested

Actors Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright, along with members of a crew filming an Oliver Stone movie, were arrested during a bar fight Saturday morning, police said.

Shreveport police Sgt. Willie Lewis said Brolin, Wright and five others were arrested just after 2 a.m. at a club called the Stray Cat bar.

A call to deal with a rowdy patron drew interference from other patrons, Lewis said.

The Times of Shreveport reported that Brolin was booked and posted $334 cash bond to be released. Police could not say Saturday night whether he or the others had been released. The paper said they are part of the crew on an Oliver Stone film, "W," about President George W. Bush.

A call to Brolin's publicist was not immediately returned Saturday night.

"W" began filming in May in Shreveport. Brolin plays President Bush and Wright plays former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

The cast also includes Elizabeth Banks as first lady Laura Bush, Ellen Burstyn and James Cromwell as the elder Bushes and Thandie Newton as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Brolin appeared in three films last year, "In the Valley of Elah," "American Gangster" and "No Country for Old Men," which won the best-picture Oscar.

Wright won a Tony Award for "Angels in America" on Broadway and a Golden Globe for the same role in the television miniseries. He also has appeared in "Syriana," "Ali" and "Casino Royale."

"W" is Stone's third presidential film, following "Nixon" and "JFK." He also directed the Vietnam sagas "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Platoon," which won four Oscars including best picture and director.

The Academy Award-winning director only began shopping his script for financing in January, but has quickly captured the interest of investors and Hollywood.

Stone has said the film, which will focus on the life and presidency of Bush, won't be an anti-Bush polemic, but, as he told Daily Variety, "a fair, true portrait of the man. How did Bush go from being an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?"

[Stefen]

This threads hilarious. Someone saying Frank Caliendo should have been cast as W and being serious about their suggestion, the teaser poster being a Spencer's poster, the fact that some people can't wait for this movie.

I hope it's a comedy.

[picolas]

teaser:

[Gold Trumpet]

Oh man, giddy is the right word for me. Looks like it strikes a great tone.

[Stefen]

haha wtf? no.

[cron]

my favorite moment of the trailer is richard dreyfuss doing whatever the hell he's doing with his face.

anyone knows who sings that version of what a wonderful world?

[SiliasRuby]

Oh man, giddy is the right word for me. Looks like it strikes a great tone.

Wouldn't it be hilarious if you LOVED it and the rest of us write scathing reviews of the film, just to spite you for writing your negative deconstruction of 'There Will Be Blood' and 'The Dark Knight'? Or maybe it will be just Modage and Pete who will do that.

Just joking, my prediction is that you'll enjoy huge sections of this magnificent film but not the film as a whole.
I'll LOVE it and buy it right away when comes out on Blu-ray next late february early march.

[Kal]

trailer is gone

edit: here i found it again