HE to that self-amused New York “Vulture” writer who tapped out yesterday’s item about how Stanley Weiser‘s script of W, the basis of Oliver Stone soon-to-shoot George Bush biopic, sounds like the comedy hit of ’09 that perhaps should costar Will Ferrell and Seth Rogen, etc.
Have you read Weiser’s script or merely Stephen Galloway and Matthew Belloni‘s 4.7.08 Hollywood Reporter story about the reaction of four Bush biographers to it, and perhaps also that link to the first four pages of an October draft of the W/Bush script?
If you’ve read Weiser’s script then I don’t know what to say to you. Your reaction suggests an incredibly thick head and an oafish sensibility. If you haven’t read it but would like to, send me an e-mail and I’ll fire it off to you. Keep in mind, naturally, that the draft is about six months old and has since undergone the usual revisions and refinements.
I ran my reactions to the script on 4.2.08. I didn’t see any comic aspects except for the darkly comedic, bordering-on-demonic ones that go with the territory of the Bush presidency. It is, as I said, “tightly written and clear of mind — everything is very choice and precise, and it never wavers from its focus of delivering a well-honed portrait of who this guy is, what’s driven him, what he’s always wanted, how he’s gotten to where he is, and what the central themes of his life seem to be (i.e., the drag-downs and the uplift).
“It seems,” I wrote, “to have its ducks in a row and is carefully shaped and ordered, because the dialogue is very tight and pruned down, because Weiser seems to have captured Bush’s speech style perfectly. Not once did I sense the presence of Hollywood far-left liberals getting off on skewering Bush because it’s in their blood. I sensed a real submission to documented or reliably sourced fact.
“Boiled down, W is a cogent dramatic summary of the significant chapters and stages in the life of an aw-shucks, smart-but-dumb, silver-spoon fratboy who, like all of us, has had his issues and limitations and hang-ups and challenges to deal with, but nonetheless managed to grow into a donkey demagogue of the first order.”