John McTiernan used to be best known as the director of Die Hard and its second sequel, The Hunt for Red October, and (shudder) Last Action Hero. The last ten years have not been kind; his 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair had its modest, reheated charms, but the other movie he released that year, The 13th Warrior, sank like a stone, and the two films he's released since then, Rollerball (2002) and Basic (2003), both hit with a splat. McTiernan would of course love to redeem himself by getting back to work and turning out a new string of hits, but McTiernan says that his career has been sidelined by his legal problems stemming from the Anthony Pellicano case. In 2006, two years before Pellicanos was convicted on charges of illegal wiretapping and racketeering, McTiernan pled guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about the case. Sometime after that, he entered into a prolonged legal battle over whether he had the right to withdraw his plea, and last February, his request was granted. According to McTiernan, the FBI, which has indicated that it will continue to pursue its case against him, has stuck him in a position of legal limbo that has rendered him insurable, and therefoere unemployable, by Hollywood studios.

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Oliver Stone still hasn’t gotten over all the criticism he faced from Kennedy assassination scholars after the release of JFK. Once it was made clear that the film was based more on wild conspiracy theories than factual evidence, Stone was quoted as saying, “"I believe the Warren Commission Report is a great myth. And in order to fight a myth, maybe you have to create another one, a counter-myth.” This always sounded just a tad defensive (and, of course, convenient), especially when the release of Nixon was accompanied by a published screenplay annotated with hundreds of footnotes citing sources. There’s your “facts,” buddy! He’s done the same with W., his new George W. Bush bio, but there’s no need to purchase the screenplay to get the footnotes. They’re available online!

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As I write these words, a black man is running for President of the United States.  Not only running, but in fact, leading by several points in the polls; his opponent is an older white man firmly rooted in the Republican establishment.  Somewhere, in one of the crustiest corners of Hell, the flames that constantly lick up around the feet of Lee Atwater are being extinguished by his copious tears.

Atwater was one of the founding members of the modern conservative movement.  Perhaps best known for the Willie Horton attack ad, in which he implied that if Michael Dukakis were elected president, Negro criminals would roam the streets of America raping and stabbing good citizens of virtue true, he was one of the G.O.P.'s foremost dirty tricksters, and the mentor of an earnest young fellow named Karl Rove.  He's also the subject of a fascinating new documentary called Boogie Man:   The Lee Atwater Story, described ably by the New York Times as "neither encomium nor hatchet job...a Gordian portrait of a man whose ability to do the splits exceeded the physical".  

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