Leaked: Sneak Previews of Upcoming Valerie Plame/CIA Hollywood Film!
Like everyone who covered extensively the CIA leak case, Judy Miller and the Scooter Libby trial, I am anxiously awaiting, with appropriate skepticism, the pending release of the first Hollywood treatment, which has the wonderful title, if you remember the scandal, Fair Game.
Casting seems swell: Naomi Watts as Valerie Plame and Sean Penn as Joe Wilson, for starters (among my favorite actors and reasonable lookalikes, to boot). Director: Doug Liman, who has helmed everything from Swingers and Go to the first three Bourne films. He also has a tantalizing connection, being the son of former Iran-Contra hearings chief counsel Arthur Liman (remember him?).
Very little has leaked out, so to speak, about the film (maybe because Robert Novak is gone), and the publicity machine has hardly been beating any drums. It's based on the Plame memoir, of course. Lists of cast members online seem to suggest not many real life figures are portrayed, although David Andrews plays Scooter Libby, and Ari Fleischer and a Cheney secretary show up as characters.
But now there are a couple of reports, including a review from one of those infamous "test screenings." Let's hope this film doesn't get sadly buried like the fictionalized Rod Lurie version, Nothing But the Truth, inspired by the Judy Miller case.
First, let's go back five weeks to a posting by Liman at the popular blog which he directs, 30 Ninjas. It's gotten surprisingly little play. And I quote:
I auctioned off a preview of Fair Game at a celebrity auction and got the funniest collection of people together to watch the movie. It wasn't your standard audience for a movie. Only six people attended the screening. Of those six, one was a contract employee of the CIA and one was Scooter Libby's appeals lawyer, Alan Dershowitz! It was kind of funny, given that we are trying to be as factual as possible on this film, and these are some of the people who can best judge how closely our film adheres to the facts.
As much as it's obvious to me what the White House did, we don't show it in Fair Game if we don't have facts to support it. I think Oliver Stone takes a different tack, in which, if he believes something to be true, even if he doesn't have the facts to support it, he'll go ahead and put it in his movie as though it's fact. I know in my heart that Dick Cheney orchestrated this whole thing, but I don't know that for a fact, so I'm not going to say that in the film. I'm going to make this a strength of the movie. In Fair Game, when they take on the White House, it's scarier because you don't really know what's going on inside. Just as Spielberg lucked out in Jaws because his shark didn't work and he discovered that the less you saw it the scarier it was, we feel that the less you see of the workings of Cheney and Bush, the scarier they will be.
So it will be interesting to see if he successfully "shows" that Cheney was behind it all without really showing it -- or perhaps it will fall flat. Stay tuned. Liman has said this is not an "art" film but aimed at a large audience.
Just this week arrived an anonymous review of the film from that test screening, which naturally must be taken with a grain of salt (for one thing, films are often changed after getting feedback at such events). But the attendee calls it "a tremendous, thought provoking film," a 9 on a scale of 10, with great performances by the leads.
As for plot: "We're led to believe that the order of the leak was made by Karl Rove to Scooter Libby (played by a hilariously serious David Andrews), and the rest is history. Plame's career is destroyed, her marriage (and life) nearly go along with it, and a major investigation into corruption in the Bush White House is launched, ultimately leading to the fall of Libby." More:
"The film clocked in at roughly 1:50, and paced tremendously well. There was a side-plot they spent a bit too much time on involving an Iraqi family and Plame's valiant efforts to save them from the invasion, but that was really the only downfall of the film. Watts is excellent, at least as good as she was in Eastern Promises, and Penn is as good here as I've seen him. It's directed by Doug Liman who did an excellent job of it, and I believe he also served as DP, so kudos to him as I often forgot the camera was even rolling. Truly a wonderful human drama with political suspense that should interest anybody no matter how they vote."
Interestingly, in an earlier blog post, Liman wrote about the new challenges, since he made Bourne Identity, of people attending test screenings who then go out and blog about the unfinished film, perhaps putting its fate in the hands of some random 17-year-old.
He concluded, "There's no built-in audience that we're going to lose if some teenage boy blogs that it wasn't cool enough. In this case, just as the blogs could hurt us, they could help us. But at the end of the day, the people who finance movies would be much happier if there was a way for nobody to write about an unreleased film because the scary thing is that you just don't control what gets written. But 'buzz' aside, marketing aside, I'm still trying to make Fair Game the best movie it can possibly be, and it's my judgment that learning from a live audience's reaction to the movie will help me do that."
Greg Mitchell wrote about the Plame case extensively in his book "So Wrong for So Long." His latest book is "Why Obama Won." He is editor of Editor & Publisher and can be reached at: gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com
Follow Greg Mitchell on Twitter: www.twitter.com/GregMitch
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A Preview
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For another Box Office Bomb from those in film that lean to the Port side no doubt!
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Posish!
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R/ PRONESE
Valerie Plame should be heading the CIA !!
I was certainly hoping that she would be Obamas pick !!
Really?
All this movie will do is remind us that Bush and Cheney exposed an undercover CIA agent during a time of war and nothing happened to them.
I think that national security breach and accountability failure is worth a reminder. Maybe the country will continue to be wiser in the future when we choose a president. We got a good start with Mr. Obama.
We did not choose Bush, as I recall the Supreme Court did.
I think you mean Richard Armitage don't you?
Armitage might have been unwitting spoiler...but the larger plot was in place, and unfolded, yes?
Let's all hope that Plame and Wilson receive some coin of the realm from this film!
From the title, I thought we were going to get to see a trailer!
Darn!
.
i been waiting for this movie forever, mostly cause of the way they butchered her book
Not Jennifer Anniston? Oh darn! It'll be a flop!
Personally, I can't wait to see the film and hope it's a hit, it for nothing else than to help Valerie and Joe pay their legal bills. What a tragedy; the government she risked her life to serve slaps her in the face because her husband, also a true servant of the people, speaks out about the absence of truth in the "weapons of mass destruction" lie. I think everyone who is a PATRIOT should fork over the money to view this film. It's my way of getting back at Cheney.
If this film is as faithful to the facts as the recent "Bourne Identity" movie was to the original Robert Ludlum novel, it will have been rather pointless to have made it.
The right will never admit that the Bush White House deliberately outed an agent in retaliation, and Bush did nothing. He either knew from the beginning when the news broke, or he didn't want to know.
The obviously didn't want Plame finding out about Cheney's nuclear proliferation strategy... or how much money he was making from it.
All available information points to a collusion between the CIA and Pakistan, with A.Q. Khan doing the actual selling of nuclear weapon information.
Can't wait to see it. In the meantime SIGN the PETITION calling for Prosecution at http://ANGRYVOTERS.org
I know I can wait. What a nothing story.
It doesn't seem like there is enough of a story. Say she was actively involved in clandestine matters and not simply a lackey in front of the computer, I might enjoy it. Nobody will go see it and yet again the studios will be left asking themselves, why do we finance this garbage?
There are a lot of people who will go see it, including me. Sean Penn's films almost always do reasonably well, and enough people are angry about what happened to Plame to fill a few theaters.
Honestly, there really isn't.
She did travel overseas in an undercover status.
Doug Liman, the guy that turned the Bourne series around so the U.S. was the villain?
Not surprising then that he turned the villain from Armitage to Rove.
Liberal fantasy.
novak himself said he does not print without confirmation. most of us ( i am sure Rove included) know that stories dont get printed unless they are confirmed. so who is it that did the last act leading to the actual printing of the story? i know the right has their story and are sticking to it. remember rove didnt even bother to ask the cia if giving out the information could be harmful to any operations. didnt even bother to ask. says it all about what Rove cares about.
Under the security oath he signed, Rove was obligated to find out if her identity was declassified before even discussing it. It wasn't and he should have had his clearance removed. The fact that Bush kept him and Libby in the White House puts the lie to the "he kept us safe" fantasy. Rove,Libby, and Novak are traitors.
If you ever had read Novak's article you would know he said the story was confirmed by two people. One not a political hack and one high ranking white house aide. So both were included right from the start but the most interesting part was who at the white house was leaking about the CiA. I know this is confusing, which may be a big hurtle for the movie, but try and keep up.
At least three Oscar nominations are set:
Best Actor
Best Actress
Best Picture
Oh, no doubt about that. Hollylib will be drooling all over themselves to decorate this movie. Probably win a Nobel Peace Prize too.
This might be a good movie.
Too bad it won't be a documentary, with the real actors. Who, in Hollywood, could better portray the Wilson's, Dick Armitage. 'Scooter'. Cheney.......?
Fred Thompson, before he became a US Senator and candidate for the presidency, made a movie about himself, as an attorney. "Marie" was a true story, but Thompson would like to be remembered as an actor on 'Law and Order', Try to find a copy of 'Marie"on DVD. Good luck with that.
You can still see ole Fred as the really mean boss on reruns of Roseanne.
I'm a good boss.
Readily available at amazon.com should you take your own advice and try.
There was a story arc on the CBS show, "Wiseguy", where Thompson played a guy named Knox Pooley, who made his money stirring up racial hatred. He was far too convincing in that portrayal for me to ever trust him in real life, but, if you get a chance, those episodes are definitely worth watching.
He was quite convincing in the "Hunt For The Red October" but I don't think of him as a navy admiral.
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