-Caveat Lector- As Dan says below, hopefully this movie will inspire someone in the current regime to do us all the favor of a similar act of whistle-blowing. It has the potential of saving many lives if they do.
Posted to one of my lists: Hi All, Thought you might want to watch this tonight, if you are somewhere you can. Below are Dan's own comments on the movie, and an independent reviewer. www.ellsberg.net Tonight (Sunday March 9th), the made-for-TV movie "The Pentagon Papers," starring James Spader as Daniel Ellsberg and Claire Forlani as Patricia Ellsberg, premieres on the FX cable TV station, 8 PM Eastern/Pacific. The movie is not based on "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers," (the script was written before "Secrets" came out), and oddly, FX never contacted Dan about the film or consulted him in any way. (The only contact, an impersonal one, was to send Ellsberg.Net--along with hundreds of other websites--a mass email after the film was made, asking that we place their banner ad on the site, in exchange for a link from theirs, which we did). Someone with access to the film, who thought Dan should be able to see the film that portrays him before it airs, "leaked" Dan an advance copy of the film (FX never gave it to him and was dismayed he had seen it before tonight). One would think, with so little interest in contacting Dan or using him as a source for the movie, that the film would be negative. Surprisingly, it is a respectful (though unnecessarily fictionalized) and sympathetic portrayal, with a timely and important underlying message. Here are some of Dan's thoughts on the film: "Every bit of dialogue is completely fictional (with the exception of a dozen lines or so, mainly in my interview with Cronkite), nothing happened very closely to the way it is portrayed, and there are errors in almost every minute of the film. In fact, the script often has me saying things that I not only didn't say, but I never would have said; in many cases they are the opposite of what I believed. The same is true for most of the dialogue associated with other named characters; they obviously weren't consulted any more than I was. You could say that everything is wrong, in some degree: and yet, the overall story is true to the underlying feeling of the events. "They have made a good movie, with an important message--in favor of whistleblowing-- that I would endorse; and the timeliness of the message, undoubtedly by accident, is uncanny. The inaccuracies of the script are somewhat frustrating to me but they won't be noticed by many others, and every other aspect of the production is unusually well-done: the casting and acting, direction and editing, the photography. It was fun for Patricia and me to watch it together; we relived the start of our romance. As in the rest of script, the circumstances are all wrong, but James Spader and Claire Forlani show the electricity of our attraction, and Forlani conveys "behind her eyes"--as one reviewer put it--Patricia's intelligence as well as her beauty. We found it a gripping film, and I think others will too: one that is true to the spirit and feeling of the events, if not the letter. "There's a chance this film could encourage more whistleblowers, which is what makes it so timely right now. It shows that it's possible for someone with the background and values that I shared with many current officials to change perspective and to decide to tell the truth to those outside the Executive branch, and it shows that in unforeseeable ways that can be effective. It shows that the personal costs of doing this can be worthwhile, in terms of the possibility of saving lives. "I've been using every opportunity in the last five months to convey a message to current officials who know--as I did in 1964-65-- that the president, and their bosses, are lying us into a wrongful, reckless, unnecessary war. The message, which I think is implicit in this movie, is that they should consider doing right now, before the bombs are falling, what I wish I had done at a comparable point, in the months before the onset of the Rolling Thunder bombing: going to Congress and the press with documents that undercut official lies. There is still time to avert this war with sufficiently comprehensive truth-telling, though there's only a week or two left before the bombing may begin. That's why I'm particularly happy this film is coming out at this moment. If one individual in Washington gets that message by seeing this movie, and unloads a file-drawer of revelatory current documents to the press and Congress, it could make a great difference. A war’s worth of lives is at stake." "The Pentagon Papers" FX Sunday, March 9, 8:00 PM Eastern/Pacific (If you miss it tonight, it will be playing five or six more times throughout the month. Check out www.tvguide.com or FX's page for the movie, http://www.fxnetwork.com/shows/originals/pentagon/ for listings of future showings this month.) ---------------------------------- New York Magazine's reviews of "The Pentagon Papers": Top Secret By John Leonard Does Fox News know about this TV movie on its cable sibling? I mean, The Pentagon Papers not only valorizes Daniel Ellsberg, the rogue researcher at the Rand Corporation’s Santa Monica think tank who leaked 7,000 pages of a top-secret Department of Defense report on what went wrong in Vietnam, but also celebrates the New York Times, which published articles based on that leak; the Supreme Court, which voted six to three against prior restraint of such publication; and even the antiwar movement of the permissive sixties (all those pot-smoking weenies). Casting James Spader as Ellsberg was inspired. From sex, lies, and videotape to Crash to Secretary, something else is always going on in Spader’s head while his body stands around in our world. When his impersonation of Ellsberg joins Rand colleague Anthony Russo (Paul Giamatti) for hard rock, soft drugs, kinky sex, and soul shriveling, you almost expect him to spank his car. Alan Arkin is rather wasted in the underwritten role of Harry Rowen, Ellsberg’s indulgent boss at Rand, and so is Jonas Chernick as Times reporter Neil Sheehan. But Claire Forlani (Basquiat, Meet Joe Black, AntiTrust) makes Ellsberg’s second wife, the socialite heiress Patricia Marx, more radically interesting on camera than she seems to be in the screenplay. As with Spader, there is activity behind her eyes. To this mix add a director, Rod Holcomb, who has specialized in slam-bang pilots for television series like Wiseguy, The Equalizer, China Beach, and ER. And I also notice a credit to “consulting producer” John Sacret Young, who was the executive producer for China Beach, the best American artwork to emerge from the war in Vietnam this side of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers. All the President’s Men appears to be the movie model The Pentagon Papers had in mind: heavy breathing, hold the mayo. Only the underground parking garage is missing; Ellsberg is his own Deep Throat. This is sometimes hokey, though the nighttime Xeroxing of so many thousands of pages by Ellsberg and his children—surely a bad idea, that one—had to have been fraught. Omitted are Ben Bagdikian, who collected volumes of the Pentagon Papers from Ellsberg for the Washington Post and told us so engagingly about it in an unassuming memoir; and Sidney Zion, who fingered Ellsberg as the source of the papers, for which Zion was reviled at the time by people like me who should have known better; and quite a lot of Ellsberg himself, who was much more erratic than the film hints at, and whose diva-based dramaturgy persists to this day. Still, it’s refreshing to be reminded by a well-made entertainment that once upon a time there were consciences to be stricken, newspapers with some adversarial jumping beans, and an appreciation of the fact that—of course!—governments would rather we didn’t know classified secrets about themselves and their wars, because if we did know, a hitherto obedient demos might actually question policy instead of parroting it. <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at: http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html <A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]</A> http://archive.jab.org/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="http://archive.jab.org/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Om
