Movies

W Gets Another Croney

In the News We’re Required By Law To Care About section today, the final piece of the W puzzle fell into place as Toby Jones joined the cast of Oliver Stone’s Bush Biopic.
By  · Published on May 14th, 2008

In the News We’re Required By Law To Care About section today, the final piece of the W puzzle fell into place as Toby Jones joined the cast of Oliver Stone’s Bush Biopic. According to IGN, the Brit will play Karl Rove, a political strategist that many labeled a genius, but who many also blame for the deterioration of the Republican Party.

Jones, who fans remember best as Truman Capote in Infamous, was cast despite seventeen phone calls I made to the production office demanding they hire Paul Giamatti. This is the kind of pull I have.

In honor of the news, I’d like to pitch a movie to the FSR audience:

A lone man. Fists clenched. Head hung low against his desk. Flashback to a childhood on the capes of Connecticut, a youth in a small Texas town, cheerleading in high school. The story goes dark in college as our subject joins a secret society. He graduates and stands around a lot on an air force base doing clerical work. He drinks heavily and gets arrested. A slurred speech given on a lone stretch of Connecticut highway. He goes back to school for an MBA to offset his DUI. He moves back to Texas, wearing short-sleeve button-ups and managing business poorly. He meets the love of his life, sparklers go off, a symphony erupts, somewhere – an armadillo keels over and dies. Our subject buys a house, a baseball team, loses the baseball team, and runs for Governor. It’s all downhill from there.

It sounds like the rejected script to a Lifetime Movie of the Week. The only reason this thing will be remotely interesting is because of who the subject is, not how interesting the subject’s life has been. Plus, Stone has an uphill battle to humanize someone who has become a cartoon clown in the eyes of the public. When Bush gives a drunken speech about turning his life around, I’m only going to see him doing a jig in front of the press corps while waiting for John McCain to show up.

Since all the principles are now set, and filming started Monday, we’re awaiting news that W will wrap by Sunday and somehow be entered into the Cannes Film Festival. Whether that happens or not, it’ll be released here in the States in October.

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Movie stuff at VanityFair, Thrillist, IndieWire, Film School Rejects, and The Broken Projector Podcast@brokenprojector | Writing short stories at Adventitious.