Oliver Stone takes on Bush

What happened

Oliver Stone is planning on making a biopic about President George W. Bush, according to Variety.com. The director has been shopping around the script for Bush—which was written by Stanley Weiser, who co-wrote Wall Street with Stone—and has approached Josh Brolin to play the title role.

What the commentators said

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Great, a George Bush biopic by “the director that gave us the completely fabricated film on the Kennedy assassination, JFK, and the almost laughably over the top profile of Richard Nixon,” said Rick Moran in the blog American Thinker. Stone is “the only filmmaker to make up scenes not for dramatic effect but because he believes they reveal the true nature of the subject,” and this “drives most historians—left and right—up the wall.”

Actually, Stone “insists that his portrait will be a fair one,” said the Times Online, despite the fact that he “once described the president as making ‘Richard Nixon look like St. Augustine.’” Stone says “he is not looking to make an anti-Bush rant but rather to use major events in the president’s life to explain his rise to power.”

How Stone portrays Bush should be the least of our current president’s concerns, said the blog Power Line. “Bush has more to fear from the academic historians who will set out to work distorting his record before he’s finished moving out of the White House.”

Why is Oliver Stone rushing to get this film made “just in time for the fall election”? said Monika Bartyzel in the blog Cinematical. “You would think Stone might have wanted to do this last time around, when Bush was looking at a second term.”

What’s even more confusing is that Stone wants Josh Brolin for the lead, said the blog The Top Socialite. “Brolin seems kind of an odd choice to play Bush.” But on the other hand, who would make a good Bush? Brolin is “an extremely hot actor, coming off of performances this year in American Gangster and No Country For Old Men,” so he could really help Stone’s film.