Thread: Staging a Bush 'Assassination'

The Los Angeles Times reports on how the director of "Death of a President" staged the assassination scenes and deceived authorities in order to get footage of President Bush for the movie.


Staging a Bush 'Assassination'
Patrick Goldstein talks with Gabriel Range, the British filmmaker behind the explosive new drama, "Death of a President."
By Patrick Goldstein, Times Staff Writer
6:47 AM PDT, September 12, 2006

TORONTO -- When I spoke with Gabriel Range on Monday, the 32-year-old British filmmaker behind the explosive new drama, "Death of a President," looked a bit shellshocked. His phone buzzed so often that he finally turned it off.

As is often the case, his film (billed here simply as "DOAP") has been denounced by all sorts of people who haven't seen it yet. If they had met Range, they would have been in for a surprise.

He is studious and carefully spoken, pretty much the polar opposite of a bomb-thrower like documentary filmmaker Michael Moore. Having given up medical school for journalism, Range has spent a considerable amount of time in the United States, including a stint in Los Angeles in 1998 doing TV news pieces about the juvenile justice system.

"DOAP", which debuted at the Toronto Film Festival on Sunday night, has been the subject of breathless media speculation for several weeks. Although most of the film — shot in fictional documentary–style — deals with the aftermath of the shooting and the search for an assassin, the film portrays Bush as the assassination victim, and that has caused an uproar.

Those of us who saw the film at the Paramount theater waded past a thicket of TV news cameras. After the screening, news teams were still there, cajoling moviegoers to offer opinions about the film, whose U.S. rights were acquired late Monday by Newmarket Films, an independent distributor best known for such films as "The Passion of the Christ" and "Memento."

Range is known in England as the filmmaker behind two similar speculative documentaries, most notably "The Day Britain Stopped," a TV film about the collapse of the British transport system. But his latest project has hit a raw nerve. When I spoke to filmgoers after the screening, even some liberals who had little love for Bush seemed unsettled by the idea of showing a real president murdered.

"I can understand how some people will find the premise offensive," Range told me in one of only three interviews he's given so far. "But I think it's absolutely justified. The whole point is for the film to be about America today. And it couldn't be about America today — not the real America — if it didn't involve the real president. You just react differently to this as an audience than you would if it were, say, the president on '24.'"

Range pointed out that "The Sentinel," a Hollywood thriller released this spring by 20th Century Fox, features archival footage of the assassination attempt on former President Ronald Reagan.

"I can't see any justification for that at all, to use real assassination footage purely for entertainment. It completely trivializes a serious event. I don't believe that our portrayal of an assassination will incite anyone to do it. In our film, there's a real sense of horror to the event — it's not trivialized at all."

For Range, the movie's real subject is not the assassination, which happens in the blink of an eye. The clear point of the film is that the war on terror has undermined liberties in the United States by giving the government increased secret powers. As the wife of an alleged Muslim assassin, who is imprisoned without charges, says in the film, "We came here for freedom and this is the freedom you give us?"

"While I think that the intent of a lot of the responses to 9/11 was clearly good, the execution of it has had a really corrosive effect in America," says Range. "The NSA wiretapping is very alarming — for a lot of regular people, not just ACLU types."

Apparently, this scrutiny doesn't extend to filmmakers. I was astounded to discover that Range and his crew received official White House press credentials to film Bush simply by proving they were affiliated with a legitimate foreign media organization, in their case Britain's Channel 4, which will air the film this fall.

When President Bush spoke earlier this year to the Economic Club of Chicago, dozens of news media outlets recorded his visit. But what the White House apparently didn't realize was that Range filmed Bush's arrival on the tarmac and subsequent speech in downtown Chicago.

The director also spent six months in the city, where he filmed antiwar rallies and staged other rallies himself without attracting press attention. The footage was stitched together in the film using everything from Super 16 to digital video, with some scenes even filmed on cell phone cameras.

He staged a 14-car presidential motorcade sequence with hundreds of extras posing as protesters shouting antiwar slogans. I couldn't help but ask: Didn't anyone know what you were doing?

"We called the film 'DOAP' and very few people ever asked us what it stood for," he replied. "To those who did ask, we said it stood for 'Death of a President' and it was a fictional film, the small distinction being that the president wasn't exactly fictional."

Range said he chose Chicago, in part, because of the historical resonance of the city, which had been the site of protest clashes at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Some of the film's footage is reminiscent of Haskell Wexler's "Medium Cool," which blended fictional and real footage that was shot at that convention.

"We do much the same thing with our film, putting our characters into real demonstrations," Range said. "Chicago has had a lot of huge antiwar protests, so it gave us a lot to work with."

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment...-entertainment

Kill Bush mania
By Michelle Malkin
Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Let me sum up in two words how the unhinged Left copes with the threat of global jihad: "Kill Bush!"

On the fifth anniversary week of the September 11 attacks, the anger of entertainment industry liberals and anti-war zealots is directed not at Islamic terrorists telling us to convert or die. Not at American al Qaeda operative Adam Gadahn smirking at our country's pain and praising the throat-slitting, children-incinerating hijackers as "strong-willed men."


No, their thoughts are not focused on killing jihadists. Their dreams lie with killing George W. Bush. The mainstreaming of presidential assassination chic is on.

In her new book, "Peace Mom," Cindy Sheehan confesses on page 29 that she has imagined going back in time and killing the infant George W. Bush in order to prevent the Iraq War. It's the moonbat version of pre-emption. Sheehan admits she has entertained this infanticidal fantasy "often." That ice-cream-and-coffee hunger strike is getting to her head.

Meanwhile, our friends in Canada celebrated the screening of a new kill-Bush fictional documentary at the Toronto International Film Festival. "Death of a President," a British mockudrama, is set in the fall of 2007 and looks back at the impact on America after President Bush is assassinated as he leaves the Sheraton Hotel in Chicago. The 90-minute feature explores who could have planned the murder, with a Syrian-born man wrongly accused of the crime.

The movie director, Gabriel Range, produced a similar tinfoil hat retrospective fake documentary about a terrorist strike that turns out to be an inside job wrongly blamed on a Saudi trader.

Range stalked the president to gather footage for the movie, according to the Los Angeles Times, and gained access to film Bush's arrival in Chicago earlier this year for a speech at the Economic Club of Chicago. He also filmed anti-war rallies, faked others and staged a 14-car presidential motorcade sequence with hundreds of extras posing as protesters, shouting anti-war slogans. The film crew hid behind the acronym "DOAP," Range explained. "We called the film 'DOAP' and very few people ever asked us what it stood for. To those who did ask, we said it stood for 'Death of a President' and it was a fictional film, the small distinction being that the president wasn't exactly fictional."

Right. What are a few white lies when you are creating a murder-Bush masterpiece? Tastefully done, of course.

While blame-America Brits and Canadians munch their popcorn and soak in President Bush's fake blood on the silver screen, no one can top our own homegrown moonbats in their hatred of George W. Bush. Malachy McCourt -- Green Party candidate for the New York governorship and brother of author Frank McCourt -- earned "Hardball" loon Chris Matthews' praise for voicing his anti-Bush assassination fascination on national TV (thanks to NewsBusters.org for the tip-off):

Matthews: "Look, let me ask you this. Where are you on capital punishment?"

Malachy McCourt: "Capital punishment? I think that if, if I've got to find that guy in Spain who indicted Pinochet and get him for war crimes, and I get him to do the same thing for Bush. And in that case, I would be for capital punishment. Otherwise, I am against it . . . "

Matthews, at the close of the interview, guffawed: "Well, I had to tell you, I hereby make my stand, I like you already. Malachy McCourt, Green Party candidate."

Bloody Bush Derangement Syndrome isn't new. But September 11 and the campaign season do seem to have exacerbated the symptoms. And the commercial success and social acceptability of "Kill Bush" literature, talk radio rhetoric and art on the Left is on the rise. From Sarah Vowell's best-selling murder travelogue of assassinated Republican presidents, "Assassination Vacation," to Nicholson Baker's "Checkpoint," a novella conversation between two people about the advisability of assassination Bush, to mock stamp art exhibits depicting Bush with a gun to his head, to anti-war placards featuring a decapitated Bush with blood dripping from his neck, acute BDS underscores the complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Left in America and around the globe.

Jihadists are gunning for Bush, our troops and innocent civilians at home and abroad. But when it comes to how they would combat the true menaces to the West, all the kill-Bush crowd can shoot are blanks.


http://www.townhall.com/columnists/M...ill_bush_mania

Imagine how this would play out had the subject of this "art piece" been BO ??