Kinnear’s Feet to Fire
Two days ago I wrote that Gregg Kinnear‘s decision to play President John F. Kennedy in an allegedly right-wing-friendly History Channel miniseries called The Kennedys “means [he] isn’t all that worried about liberal Hollywood establishment types frowning at this decision, and is willing to risk offending those (like documentarian Robert Greenwald and former Kennedy confidante Theodore Sorenson) who’ve sounded alarms about the tone and political leanings of the forthcoming epic.”
Sure enough, Greenwald went public yesterday with a challenge to Kinnear and Katie Holmes (who’s signed to play Jackie Kennedy) to “insist on a historically accurate and politically unbiased script.” Translation: “You’re already being looked at askance, Kinnear and Holmes, for agreeing to star in a piece of right-wing revisionism about a beloved liberal president, but your reputation with the Hollywood community might be salvaged if you can bring pressure upon those fucks you’re working for to eliminate the wildly fictional and salacious aspects that we read in an early draft of the screenplay.”
Greenwald began squawking about The Kennedys last February, claiming that it does “everything in its power to demean and make them quite disgusting figures.”
The forthcoming eight-hour miniseries is being produced by 24 producer and avid conservative Joel Surnow, and it’s Greenwald’s belief that Surnow intends to paint Jack Kennedy with a morally conservative brush by depicting him as a womanizing sleazeball, and by portraying him as more of a conservative-minded type than his mostly liberal reputation has indicated thus far.
But within the realm and reality of the early ’60s, Kennedy was a centrist and at times center-right. He was pro-free market (although he once got into an angry fight with U.S. Steel over the hiking of steel prices), and was committed to a strong defense, and was fiercely anti-Communist, of course. I doubt if he’d been born in the late 1940s or early 50s and been elected to the Senate or to the White House that he’d be much different than Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton philosophically, but he was hardly a flaming lefty by the standards of his time.
And his womanizing was, of course, legendary…c’mon. He was arguably the randiest U.S. President of the 20th Century. Greenwald is reportedly pissed about a scene in The Kennedys in which JFK asks his brother Robert, “What do you do when you’re horny?” and tells him that if he doesn’t have sex with unfamiliar women “every couple of days I get migraines.” Well, no offense but that sounds an awful lot like the Jack Kennedy I’ve been reading about for years. I can’t remember the source, but I remember an account claiming that Kennedy once remarked to a friend that he didn’t feel he’d really had a woman unless he’d had her all three ways. Hah!
HE Double Standard: High-larious when a Kennedy character says it, but gross when a commenter ever implies as much.
I would love to see what a “historically accurate and politically unbiased script” would look like that was acceptable to Greenwald. The Kennedy’s were so interesting because of how not perfect they were. While Joe Sr. was a pure monster(Nazi sympathizer, criminally connected, forced his daughter to have a lobotomy), JFK’s was a womanizer, and though RFK worked closely with Joe McCarthy and was the one who gave J Edgar Hoover the authority to wiretap MLK. Teddy killed a woman! They are all of course much more than that, but if you want a real history of the family, you really have to leave the bad stuff in.
Kennedy sympathisers rewrite his actions so he appears as some mythical, untarnished liberal ideal. He wasn’t even close.
Greenwald’s a rabid left-winger who is not and never will be interested in the “politically unbiased” and your last two paragraphs emphasize Greenwald’s being a tool. You really make Hollywood sound like a nightmarish Orwellian world.
“Just once I would like to be a puppet-master and have nothing go wrong. Is that too much to ask?” – Dwight Schrute
Sorry to change the subject. But Kennedy was known to some as the last gunslinger. Soooooo, you have an opinion on The Dark Tower movie news?
During the Cold War, I don’t believe any President could afford to be a full-fledged liberal like Obama. It was a massive propaganda war & there’s no doubt that the right will win the tough talk fight ever time out of the box. Jimmy Carter was probably the most liberal President of the Cold War era & he was completely & totally failed.
This is kind of why I think that this country wants its President to be conservative & its legislatures to be liberals.
Oh yeah…great post too Jeff. Have you actually read the script for this? It sounds like a fair shake of Kennedy, so why is everyone up in arms?
I’m sure it won’t be nearly as controversial as people expect/hope. Just like Oliver Stone’s ‘W’ was fairly tame in the end.
At least the ’24′ guys know how to make exciting TV. I imagine the Cuban Missile Crisis episode will be quite good.
Well done, Meegosh.
Well, one thing’s for sure now: Greg Kinnear is totally OFF my holiday card list!
If the History Channel is right-wing — they’re the “Fox News” of historical documentarians — and doesn’t get audiences of millions, only those who have already drunk their KoolAid… is this a big deal either way? I consider myself a pretty avid film and TV buff… but I don’t know if I ever would have heard of this project were it not for you posting about it, Wells. Can’t remember ever watching the History Channel before…
1) Kennedy was not a liberal, 2) a focus on philandering and family squabbles would be historically accurate, it would just be silly to give it supreme emphasis. Whatever, they went apeshit when the shoe was on the other foot. INcidentally, I thought THE REAGANS with James Brolin was okay.
>a full-fledged liberal like Obama.
He doesn’t seem *all* that full fledged to me. On foreign policy he’s essentially a hawk (but then most presidents end up being hawks, it seems). Domestically he pushed through Obamacare, but it’s almost laughably watered down compared to the national healthcare systems of most other industrialized nations.
The idea that people were more conservative back in the day seems odd when you look at Nixon, a Republican president whose policies were in some ways quite “liberal” by today’s standards (creation of EPA on his watch, for instance).
But the truth is, history is too complex to fit into a simple left-right axis as such is defined circa 2010. Kennedy was a hardline cold warrior, got us in Vietnam and risked nuclear war with Krushchev, talked the talk but didn’t walk the walk on civil rights, etc. LBJ’s New Deal-style rhetoric seems pretty darn lefty to me compared to anything Obama would dare say. There are a lot of political cross-currents and fashions of the day and personalities involved in all this.
Fugue beat me to it, so instead I’ll just say this:
How can any movie which casts Katie Holmes as Jackie Kennedy even pretend to be interested in accuracy?
I’m not 100% against the Katie Holmes idea. Sure she took the kook path becoming Mrs. Cruise, but she did some okay work before that. I think she capable. And have you ever actually SEEN interviews with Jackie from her White House days? She comes off as a vacuous sorority pledge mother. I don’t say that as a hater, either. Granted some of it was the era and she was society but, yeesh.
As for History Channel being conservative……. Really? You mean the History Channel that ran a series based on the work of Howard Freaking Zinn?
I’m sympathetic to where Greenwald is coming from, but this is a dick move. Bitching about the movie before it comes out because it makes the character human (and thus flawed) and wringing hands because some of the people involved might not vote like you is, ironically, out of Big Hollywood’s playbook. C’mon, Robert, you’re better than that.
Apparently Surnow is nominally conservative. Whatever. It’s NEVER shown up in anything but his crappy Daily Show ripoff, and even that was pretty tame. Right-wingers loved to point to “24″ as a pro-Bush thing because of the “torture works” stuff, but the show’s politics were almost nonexistant… it’s like when the Breitbart goons whine about Law & Order and miss that it’s ALWAYS “not who you’d have thought.”
I never saw “24″ as being a big “pro-Bush thing”.
To me (and many others) it was vicarious fantasy.
Who, (besides DeeZee), DIDN’T fantasize about grabbing some smarmy would-be terrorist and pounding the crap out of him for information while telling his namby-pamby ACLU lawyer to suck your America-lovin’ balls?
Sure, the real world is more comlicated, but it was nice for one hour a week to pretend it wasn’t.
As for the guilty party on “Law and Order”? It’s the smug, rich, snobby guy. It’s always the smug, rich, snobby guy.
“She comes off as a vacuous sorority pledge mother.”
And Katie Holmes still, even after having a kid, comes off as the sort of vacuous person who’ll pledge a sorority just as soon as she gets to college. Not this fall, but next fall.
fugue: “But the truth is, history is too complex to fit into a simple left-right axis as such is defined circa 2010.”
Well, except for the Bush and Newt years.
but somehow the Bourne experience seems to have tricked Liman into thinking he wants to make that type of movie (even Fair Game sounds like a more developed version of Bourne’s “serious” side, though obviously it’s aiming a bit higher).
mouse trap
Links of London Jewellery on Sale! Buy Cheap Links Of London Bracelet, Links Of London Charms,Links Of London Necklace, Links Of London Bangle,
links london
links of london
links of london Bracelets
the best Links of London jewelry provider. You can find the wholesale links of london jewellery here. There are Links of London Sweetie
links of london Charms
links of london Sweetie Bracelets
Friendship Bracelets
links of london Necklaces
links of london Rings
Links Of London,Fast Delivery!linksoflondon silver range for 2009 including linksoflondon necklaces,Links Of London Earrings,Charms,and Bracelets.links of london
The cost for P90X is about three months of a paid gym membership but you get to keep the program forever
Doomsday 2012 Nibiru Planet X: Judgment Day Doomsday 2012 End of the World Predictions
Apocalypse 2012 Prophecy in the News End Times Prophecy Last Days on Earth
Catholic Saints Names, Catholic Saints List, Patron Saints, Holy Saints
Imagenes de Santos Catolicos, Santos Catolicos, Santos Religiosos,
Immodest Dress, Vanity Clothing, Vanity Clothes, Immodest Dress
Which brand shoe is popular this summer? That is MBT, welcome to our store and we recommend MBT Changa to you, they are all in best quality with low price and we do mbt shoes clearance. Welcome
replica gucci bags
coach bags
As the most professional video converter,iPod Touch Converter can easily convert all the video formats to iPod Touch, including
MPEG,MPEG2,SWF,FLV,VOB,MOD,MP4,H.264,M4V,AVI,WMV,3GP,MOV,DivX,XviD,QuickTime Video,DV,MJPG, MJPEG,MPV,etc,even the High Definition video files
(HD/AVCHD videos),such as TS,MTS,M2TS,HD MPEG 2,HD MEG4,HD WMV,HD MOV,HD H.264,HD RM etc.
iPod Touch Converter
AVI to iPod Touch Converter
MP4 to iPod Touch Converter
Divx to iPod Touch Converter
YouTube to iPod Touch Converter
DVD to iPod Touch Converter
MKV to iPod Touch Converter
iPod Touch to PC Transfer
Transfer Music From iPod Touch to Computer
iPod Touch Video to PC
Backup iPod Touch to Computer
iPod Touch to PC Copy
iPod Converter Suite