--- Begin Message --- Title: Insider Report
Nov. 3, 2003 Insider Report from NewsMax.com
Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories):
1. Jewish Actress Proud to Be Mel Gibson's Virgin Mary
2. 'Bias' Author Goldberg Blasts Liberal Media Again
3. Streisand 'Tight' With Reagan Biopic Producers
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1. Jewish Actress Proud to Be Mel Gibson's Virgin Mary
She's Jewish, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and she says she's proud to be playing the Virgin Mary in Mel Gibson's "The Passion of Christ."
Though some critics charge that the film is anti-Semitic, Romanian actress Maia Morgenstern insists it is anything but.
And even though one of the villains is the Jewish high priest Caiaphas, she told the Jewish Journal in the film he clearly represents the regime and not the Jewish people. "Authorities throughout history have persecuted individuals with revolutionary ideas," she said.
"The Passion" opposes such oppression. "It is about letting people speak openly about what they think and believe," she said. "It denounces the madness of violence and cruelty, which if unchecked can spread like a disease."
And she knows about anti-Semitism firsthand. Her family members were victims of violence during World War II, she explained, recalling that her grandfather disappeared after being arrested and her father survived Nazi and Stalinist labor camps.
She herself experienced her own share of anti-Semitism while growing up in Bucharest, Romania. But today she is a devout Jew who started frequenting the Bucharest synagogue when she was 15. "I fell in love with the sound of the Hebrew language," she said.
Her role as the Virgin Mary is not her first playing a Jew who is now a Catholic saint. In Maria Meszaros' "The Seventh Room," she played St. Edith Stein, the Jew who died as a Catholic nun in Auschwitz and was canonized in 1998.
According to the Jewish Journal it was Morgenstern's performance as Stein that drew Mel Gibson's attention.
Called to Rome by Gibson, her first impression of him, she said, was "of a man who was utterly enthusiastic and confident of his artistic vision." He didn't ask Morgenstern to read from the script, which was written in Aramaic, Latin and Hebrew, but rather chatted with her about another of her roles.
"We started a conversation like two actors, and we were talking and talking until the casting director interrupted and said, 'I have to know, what is your decision about Ms. Morgenstern?'" she said. "And Mel Gibson replied, 'Of course I'll take her - now please keep telling me, Maia, how was your opening?'"
She said that Gibson agreed with her interpretation of her role as "essentially the question of a mother losing a child."
Morgenstern stressed that not a single scene in "The Passion of Christ" struck her as anti-Semitic. Instead, she said, characters such as Mary and St. John are sympathetic Jews, and Gibson "allowed me to make suggestions based on my Jewish culture." In the scene in which Mary learns Jesus has been arrested, for instance, it was Morgenstern's idea to whisper "Why is this night different from all other nights?" - the question asked during Passover suppers.
When reporters asked her why a Jewish actress was portraying Jesus' mother, she replied, "I played Clytemnestra in 'Oresteia,' and it didn't mean I killed my husband. And as far as I know, Mary was a Jewish lady, so I think it is very normal."
After finishing her role, she read a New York Times article about the "Passion" controversy but remained relatively isolated from the conflict. She was unaware of charges that Gibson's father was a Holocaust denier, for example, or that Gibson told the New Yorker that "modern secular Judaism wants to blame the Holocaust on the Catholic Church."
She said she never heard Gibson make such remarks and she is worried that the media scourging of Gibson and the film amounts to a kind of "censorship" that will prevent the movie from finding a distributor. "I'm very worried about that, because I want this film to be seen by many, many people," she said. "Despite the blood and the violence, it's a beautiful film. I believe it brings an important message, a peace message."
As NewsMax.com has reported, however, Gibson will handle distribution himself.
Editor's Note: Make sure you get a copy of the book with the insider story about Mel Gibson's "Passion" -- James Hirsen's "Tales from the Left Coast" -- Click Here Now.
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2. 'Bias' Author Goldberg Blasts Liberal Media Again
"Very, very few of them have an ounce of introspection. They don't look inward," Goldberg told RatherBiased.com in a wide-ranging interview in which he pulled no punches about liberal media bias.
"By nature, they always look outward because they're always investigating somebody, whether it's somebody in the military or somebody in the church, or somebody in politics."
He came out swinging at so-called journalism magazines "which bill themselves as media criticism organs" but are, he charged, willfully irrelevant.
"A lot of these magazines are written and edited by people who are part of the problem and not part of the solution," Goldberg told RatherBiased.com.
"It's all bulls**t as far as I'm concerned. Let's take one case in particular: abortion. A number of years ago, quite some time ago, David Shaw of the L.A. Times ran a big series on how abortion is treated by the mainstream media and came to the conclusion ... that mainstream journalists do not treat anti-abortion people well.
"John Leo, who writes a column for U.S. News and World Report, said this would have been a great subject for one of those magazines you just mentioned, the Columbia Journalism Review. Why not take David Shaw's piece and do a piece about that? Didn't devote a sentence to it."
Also in his sights are such targets as:
Books from left-of-center authors who allege that the media actually are conservatively biased:
"I'm not saying they don't believe it. I'm saying they're delusional if they really do believe it. This is crazy. This is what they point to make their case: They say, 'Well, there's a Fox News, there's the Washington Times, there's talk radio, there are all these conservative commentators.' And I say, you know what, you're absolutely right. In the world of opinion, conservatives do have clout. But, in the world of opinion, liberals have clout, too."
"They don't make the distinction between news and commentary.
"What I'm saying is, I don't care if the big-city papers are all liberal, and I don't care if the Washington Times is conservative, or talk radio is conservative. These are opinion forums; that's fine with me.
"What bothers me is when news people have this liberal slant, this liberal outlook on life and they don't even get it. They think that they are the only species on planet Earth that can put their biases aside and simply do their job."
On Andy Rooney, who originally supported Goldberg's charge that the press and CBS News anchor Dan Rather were "transparently liberal," but later said he shouldn't have said anything:
"Andy Rooney is better than most. Andy Rooney acknowledged on worldwide television that, in his view, yes, there is a liberal bias."
But Goldberg was less than laudatory speaking about Rooney's apparent cave-in after being criticized by CBS News management.
Asked why he thought Rooney recanted his statement of support, Goldberg thought it was because the "60 Minutes" commentator chickened out under pressure from Rather.
"One possibility is that, ultimately, he, Andy Rooney, is like a bad boy. He does things and then when they reprimand him, he says, 'Oh, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done it.' And that was really my point. 'You know, Andy, if you're going to be courageous, dammit, be outrageous. Don't wuss out at the end. Don't wimp out at the end.' Which is what he did, as far as I'm concerned."
On Dan Rather, Goldberg commented:
"Dan, rightly, I want to emphasize this, rightly had a lot of power at CBS News as the anchorman and managing editor of the flagship broadcast, the CBS Evening News. Rightly. Power comes from numbers in broadcasting. Since his numbers have gone down, I know for a fact that they've showed him what might be considered disrespect.
"There are certain things that are on the news that Dan doesn't want on, certain features, that they ram down his throat. And I know for a fact that he's not happy about that. And frankly, I don't blame him. ... And I'm not talking about for ideological reasons," Goldberg said.
Dan Rather "has got physical courage. I do think that doesn't mean a whole bunch to the people in charge compared to ratings. And if they had someone to substitute for Dan, he'd be out before the news tonight."
Editor's Note: NewsMax has a special FREE offer for Bernard Goldberg's sensational new book "Arrogance" -- Click Here Now.
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3. Streisand 'Tight' With Reagan Biopic Producers
CBS entertainment chief Les Moonves insists that Democrat diva Barbra Streisand didn't have anything to do with the insulting portrayal of President Reagan and his wife Nancy in his network's upcoming biopic "The Reagans."
But only four months ago the anti-Republican songstress was described in mainstream press reports as "tight" with the Reagan-bashing film's producers, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron.
On Thursday Moonves said that neither he nor Streisand had anything to do with the idea of casting Streisand's husband, James Brolin, in the lead role. "It was the producers. ... There were a number of names bandied about and they came to us and they suggested it. It was not having anything to do with his political bent or who he is married to."
Back in July, when plans for "The Reagans" were first announced, Moonves similarly insisted that his network "hasn't asked Barbra Streisand what she thinks about James Brolin playing Ronald Reagan."
At the time, however, the Washington Post's Lisa de Moraes called Moonves on the carpet for the fib:
"That was being a bit disingenuous; 'Reagans' producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron are this tight with Streisand, having worked with her Barwood Films on the NBC movie 'Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story,' about an Army colonel who was kicked out of the service for acknowledging she was a lesbian."
De Moraes noted that Streisand had also teamed up with Zadan and Meron on the Lifetime flick "What Makes a Family," about "a lesbian who has to fight to get custody of a baby born to her artificially inseminated partner when said partner dies after giving birth."
"So we're betting that Meron and Zadan cleared this bit of casting with Streisand before signing on the dotted line," the Post reporter surmised.
And it's probably no accident that Meron and Zadan tapped Australian actress Judy Davis to portray Nancy Reagan. Davis, it turns out, had also worked for the Hollywood duo before, playing the lesbian love interest in their aforementioned "Serving in Silence." Zadan and Meron also used Davis in a TV film about the life of Judy Garland.
Three years ago the crusading producers caused something of a splash when they won the bidding rights to produce "The Dana Rivers Story," a docudrama about a high school teacher who was fired from his job after undergoing a sex change operation and telling the student newspaper that he was ready to begin teaching as a woman.
Meron and Zadan's focus on gay themes could prompt some to wonder whether their interests have anything to do with the portrayal of President Reagan as an unabashed homophobe who believed that gays deserve to get AIDS.
"They who live in sin shall die in sin," the film has Reagan proclaiming, a sentiment those who know him say he never voiced.
"[Zadan and Meron] recognize a 'gay sensibility' in their work but say they have no particular agenda," reported Variety earlier this year, before the duo nailed down the Reagan project.
"I think who we are as people informs what we want to do," Meron told the Hollywood paper. "Being gay men, you can't help but have that there in terms of the choice of our material."
Editor's Note: NewsMax first warned that Streisand was out to smear Reagan in our special investigative report in NewsMax Magazine. Click Here for details.
...And don't forget:
The book on Mel Gibson's "Passion" -- Click Here. The FREE offer for Bernard Goldberg's "Arrogance" -- Click Here Now.
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