sleazy disco, part psychedelic Radio Shack—where citizens seek solace and Anderton tries to “download” Agatha’s visions. And most fascinating is the bitter knowledge of its final mystery: If you can only create the right movie, you can get away with murder.7
Anticipating the commercial totality inherent in social networking, Minority Report can be seen as a prescient expression of the new social-real. At the time, it was clear that we had entered the Age of Bush. In late July, New York Times political commentator Maureen Dowd began a column, datelined “Los Angeles,” with the hilarious news that “Hollywood agents now advise budding screenwriters how to pitch scripts by using a political analogy.”
“You’re in the Oval Office,” they bark. “You’re briefing President Bush. He’s got no attention span. He doesn’t care about details. Sell him the movie.” If you can tell the story vividly and simply enough to appeal to the curiosity-challenged chief executive who likes his memos on one page, the agents figure, you might be able to win over busy, bottom-line-oriented studio executives.8
The WTC cast its non-existent shadow over the year’s holiday releases. Martin Scorsese’s much-anticipated Gangs of New York was for most a terrible disappointment although, like other movies that opened at the close of 2002, it could not be seen apart from the events of 9/11. Scorsese’s concluding image was a stunning matte shot of smoky Lower Manhattan as viewed from a Brooklyn graveyard, followed by the inevitable time-lapse dissolve to the skyline as of September 10, 2001.
Scorsese’s fellow New Yorker Spike Lee specifically set his in-your-face paean to ethnic vaudeville and urban lowlife, 25th Hour, in post-9/11 Manhattan. Although the Event has no bearing on the narrative, Lee’s movie opens with aerial shots of the city that include the memorializing twin columns of light beamed up from the Trade Center site and ends with Bruce Springsteen’s 9/11 anthem, “The Rising”; another scene is shot in a high rise apartment above Ground Zero, which is distractingly visible through the window.9
25th Hour opened in New York on the same day as The Two Towers, which might have offered Lee an alternate title. Not only notable for featuring the first convincing human-digital cyborg performance (Andy Serkis, radically modified, as the pitiful Gollum), The Two Towers was a key component in what would prove Hollywood’s top-grossing year of the ’00s. Four out of the five worldwide top-grossing movies released in 2002 were sequels: Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets; Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones; and Men in Black II. The fifth was Spider-Man, which would go on to spin off sequels in 2004 and 2007. All were essentially animated movies created from photographic material.
CHAPTER NINE
2003: INVADING IRAQ
The winter of 2003 was the run-up to the Iraq War—its beginning was protested, to no avail, by hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers marching in the streets.
On March 14, George W. Bush made a televised speech to the nation maintaining that “intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.” War came on March 21, two days before Oscar Night. Continuing a trend that began during the Clinton presidency, movie stars had come to serve the Democrats as talk radio personalities served the Republicans. Political dissidence was a matter of celebrity.
Titled “When Doves Cry,” the following article was the Village Voice cover story for the issue of March 25.
NEW YORK, MARCH 25, 2003
A cast of Bill Clinton’s cronies, a vaunted 1 billion viewers in 150 countries: there were some who imagined that Oscar Night ’03 might be the most widely seen peace demonstration ever beamed into the universe.
As the Desert Storm sequel drew nigh, the right-wing media shifted their enemies of choice from those The Simpsons calls “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” to bigmouth movie stars. Could Shock and Awe really be upstaged by Stupefaction and Narcissism? The New York Post suggested that the Academy Awards be canceled. Meanwhile, the Internet crackled with reports that activists like Susan Sarandon and Martin Sheen were on a blacklist and that acceptance speeches would be monitored for political content. Insiders warned a UK daily that failure to award Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature would be proof that Hollywood had reverted to “the witch-hunting 1950s.”
What was appropriate—and what should people wear? The group Artists United to Win Without War was handing out green peace buttons; other members of the Academy sported a more abstract silver squiggle apparently meant to represent a dove. Monitoring the stars’ entrance on the foreshortened red carpet from her E! Channel aerie, fashion arbiter Joan Rivers wondered what they meant. “Peace,” her daughter explained. “Every idiot in the world wants peace,” Joan snorted, suggesting that the morning after, the pins will wind up for sale on eBay. But what the buttons and squiggles really meant was that, for those of us who cared, the stars were making a statement—or not.
The Hollywood left had devolved to this. But then, the movies encourage semiotic readings. The green semaphore seemed more radical, if less chic, than the silver squiggle. It was less surprising to spot a green button affixed to the lapel of Michael Moore’s tuxedo than Harvey Weinstein’s. Salma Hayek, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Adrien Brody all wore the squiggle but not their fellow nominees Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep (although it had been reported they would). Presenter Richard Gere was besquiggled, surprise loser Martin Scorsese not. Susan Sarandon sauntered confidently out with her pin and held up two fingers in a goddessy peace sign. A shell-shocked-looking Barbra Streisand was unsquiggled, although she did make a statement in praise of protest music. There were some who devised other accessories—Matthew McConaughey’s lapel had sprouted a peculiar mélange of red, white, and blue flowers—but only Jon Voight seemed to be wearing an American flag pin.
Where were movieland’s macho men? Who would defend Bush’s war? Mel Gibson, Charlton Heston, Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, Bruce Willis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger all seemed conspicuous by their absence. Had they driven their Humvees into lockdown? Were they stockpiling Poland Spring and boycotting the hippie love-in? Was it the hall? The Kodak Theater’s outsize, quasi-pagan Oscar statues and the Babylonian deco splendor had the look of an Iraqi presidential palace. Had the terrorists won? There was an elephant in the room, but it wasn’t Republican.
“What is a movie star?” Oscar host Steve Martin riffed. “They can be thin or skinny. They can be Democrats or … skinny.” Throughout his presidency, Bill Clinton was identified with a “cultural elite” as personified by his Hollywood cronies Steven Spielberg and Barbra Streisand; when he ran for re-election, Variety calculated political contributions from the fabulous 90210 zip code went Democrat by more than two to one.
Clinton and Hollywood were one. The president befriended, co-opted, and ultimately hid behind movieland activists. They responded by imagining his better self. One prime Clintonian legacy was the virtuous virtual presidency of Martin Sheen (perhaps to be embodied by the actual Howard Dean, the Vermont governor who, as an anti-war candidate, was briefly the Democratic frontrunner). The Clinton saga—as well as the histories of the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League and the Hollywood Democratic Committee, not to mention the 1968 McCarthy and 1972 McGovern campaigns—suggest that stars excel as fundraisers and campaign surrogates. Under the current Bush regime, Hollywood actors have filled a vacuum. They are themselves stand-ins without a star. The silence of elected officials combined with the exegeses of entertainment news insured that Martin Sheen and Jessica Lange, George Clooney and Janeane Garofalo would be drafted as media spokespeople to speak in opposition to Bush’s war.
The Oscar producers were scarcely unaware of Hollywood’s current role as America’s most visible opposition. Nor did they negate it. The organizers
