Variety reports that Warner Brothers is at work on a film of the Valerie Plame-Joseph Wilson story. Reader William Katz comments:
As we all know, America is demanding this film. There are already lines at the box office.
Who will play Joe, devoted public servant betrayed by his government? Who will play Valerie, beautiful and valiant undercover
agent, placed in danger by the nefarious Cheney machine and its Halliburton stooges?
In the golden age, this would have been Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson, with Broderick Crawford as Dick Cheney. But in the golden age, an idiotic film like this would never have been made.
And how did the “filmmakers” and the Wilsons meet? Why, according to the story, they’re all involved in stem-cell research. Natch.
The story makes a whopping era right up front – claiming that the White House revealed Plame’s status. We now know that it was Richard Armitage, operating out of Colin Powell’s shop at the State Department. But, hey, it’s Hollywood. Creative license, you know.
The Variety story does not report on the title of the Wilson-Plame film, but the story does note:
WB has secured the life rights of Plame and Wilson. Studio also will use Plame’s memoir, “Fair Game,” if the CIA permits her to publish it. Plame made a reported publishing deal in the $2.5 million range last year, and Simon & Schuster is expected to publish late this year.
For a title, how about “The Politics of Cashing In”? Or borrowing from the current project of screenwriters Jez and Jon Butterworth:
The Butterworth brothers recently completed “Superbad,” a James Brown biopic that Spike Lee will direct for Universal and Imagine.
James’s “Super Bad” came in two parts. Here the Wilson-Plame story could be the sequel to the JB biopic. And “Super Bad” could also work as the theme song:
Watch me … watch me!
I got it!
Watch me…I got it
HEY!
Indeed.
JOHN adds: I suppose there’s not much point expecting accurate reporting from Variety, but this sentence no doubt offers a preview of the movie’s perspective:
While it would be ironic for Plame’s story to be illegally leaked by the White House, only to have another government branch deny her the right to tell it herself, the CIA has the latitude to silence Plame.
We now know, as William Katz notes, that the White House didn’t leak Plame’s name, the State Department (Richard Armitage) did. And the leak evidently wasn’t illegal, since no one was prosecuted for it. And the CIA, far from being a right-wing bogeyman, has been complicit in the Wilson/Plame farce from the beginning: sending the unqualified and politically-motivated Joe Wilson to Niger at his wife’s urging, not signing him to a confidentiality agreement, not even getting a written report from him, referring the “outing” of desk employee Plame for criminal investigation, etc. No doubt the truth about the Plame matter will be as AWOL from the movie as it is from Variety’s blurb. On the bright side, the idea that any substantial number of people want to sit through a movie about Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson strikes me as a fantasy.
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