Cable film on JFK draws flak
NEW YORK, Feb. 17 (UPI) — Producers of a planned miniseries about former U.S. President John F. Kennedy deny a critic’s charge the project is “political character assassination.”
Producer Joel Surnow, best known as a creator of the Fox TV action hit “24,” is developing the Kennedy project for the History channel, with a script by Stephen Kronish, who identifies himself as a liberal Democrat, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
Liberal filmmaker Robert Greenwald, who has received copies of the script from other entertainment industry professionals, has produced a video featuring critics of the script — including former JFK adviser Theodore C. Sorensen — in which the panel argues the script contains factual errors.
“It was political character assassination,” Greenwald told the Times. “It was sexist titillation and pandering, and it was turning everything into a cheap soap opera of the worst kind.”
Greenwald’s video includes an appeal to viewers to “tell the History channel I refuse to watch right-wing character assassination masquerading as ‘history’” and directs them to a Web site, stopkennedysmears.com.
Producers say the scripts are not complete. Kronish said criticism is premature.
“Next year, when it’s done and it’s on the air, if people want to criticize it, so be it,” he said.
History’s Kennedy series stirs controversy
By Matea Gold at Los Angeles Times
Controversy is already dogging “The Kennedys,” a miniseries about the iconic political family that marks History’s first original dramatic project, according to the New York Times. Liberal documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald got hold of some early scripts and has shown them to historians, who say the screenplays are inaccurate. The fact that the series comes from producer Joel Surnow (”24″), who is known for his conservative political views, appears to have fed skepticism about the series.
History Channel goes rogue: Fact-starved bio links JFK’s sex life to migraines
By David Byrne at The Raw Story
An upcoming biopic on former president John F. Kennedy has liberals and erstwhile advisers fuming mad.
Like the 2003 biopic, The Reagans, most of the outrage comes from conservatives, but liberals fought their own battle over a controversial 9/11 miniseries which aired on ABC a few years ago. But the miniseries biography — commissioned by The History Channel and produced by Joel Surnow, an outspoken conservative who created the hit Fox show “24″ — is more than a little loose with the facts.
Surnow’s Kennedy bio appears to depict Kennedy as a sex-maniac, according to a liberal filmmaker who describes some of the scenes in an interview with The New York Times. Filmmaker Robert Greenwald called the scripts he’d seen a “hatchet job.”
In one scene, the former president from Massachusetts is caught in a pool having sex with a young associate, who the Times gently describes as “a young woman who is not his wife.”
In another, JFK is seen asking his brother and onetime Attorney General, Robert, “What do you do when you’re horny?”According to the script, the president then informs him that if he doesn’t sleep with unfamiliar women “every couple of days I get migraines.”
There are other factual inaccuracies in the film under development.
“The scripts invent scenes that never occurred, like an exchange that suggests Kennedy came up with the idea for the Berlin Wall,” the reporter notes.
Kennedy adviser Theodore Sorensen, who is quoted in a video attempting to kill the project, says, “Every single conversation with the president in the Oval Office or elsewhere in which I, according to the script, participated, never happened.”
Other boo-boos: “the scripts refer to exit polling for the 1960 presidential election when exit polling had not yet been invented; and that President Kennedy introduced the Peace Corps during the Bay of Pigs crisis in April 1961, when in fact he signed an executive order creating the corps one month earlier.”
The Times, which broke the story, seemed to shrug off the depiction of Kennedy as a roving philanderer. A 1984 Kennedy bio which The New Yorker called “riveting and well-documented” detailed several of Kennedy’s more randy sexual misadventures, including an alleged encounter with an underaged cheerleader on the 1960 campaign trail and instances of inviting prostitutes to White House pool parties while his wife was traveling.
“Like a similar controversy over a 2003 television film about Ronald Reagan, the dispute over the embryonic Kennedy series seems to say as much about the enduring place of the Kennedys as a battleground in the culture wars as it does about history itself,” The Times’ Dave Itzkoff writes.
Kennedy Miniseries Stirs Controversy
By David Itzkoff at New York Times
A new mini-series about John F. Kennedy’s presidency that is being prepared by the History channel does not yet have a cast or a premiere date. Not a frame of footage been shot. It does, however, have prominent critics who want it brought to a halt.
The critics, including Theodore C. Sorensen, a former Kennedy adviser, say they have read the scripts for the project and that those contain errors of fact and emphasis. But like a similar controversy over a 2003 television film about Ronald Reagan, the dispute over the embryonic Kennedy series seems to say as much about the enduring place of the Kennedys as a battleground in the culture wars as it does about history itself.
The miniseries, called “The Kennedys,” is the brainchild of Joel Surnow, a creator of the Fox action show “24” and an outspoken political conservative. That raised alarms among Kennedy partisans when the History channel said in December that it would pick up the project.
Now, a documentary filmmaker who makes no secret of his liberal politics is releasing an Internet video in which a group of Kennedy scholars says the scripts for the miniseries offer a portrait of the president and his family that is, at best, inaccurate, and at worst, a hatchet job.
“It was political character assassination,” the filmmaker, Robert Greenwald, said of the screenplays in a telephone interview. “It was sexist titillation and pandering, and it was turning everything into a cheap soap opera of the worst kind.” Mr. Greenwald said he is hoping that his 13-minute video and an accompanying petition, at stopkennedysmears.com, will take on lives of their own on the Web. A title card at the film’s conclusion reads: “Tell the History channel I refuse to watch right-wing character assassination masquerading as ‘history.’ ” The charges come as a surprise to the production team behind “The Kennedys,” who say that the scripts for the eight-part series are still being rewritten and that any criticism of the project is premature.
“Next year, when it’s done and it’s on the air, if people want to criticize it, so be it,” said Stephen Kronish, the screenwriter of “The Kennedys,” who says he identifies himself as a liberal Democrat. “But at this stage of evolutionary development, it seems that Greenwald’s agenda becomes all the more obvious.”
Given the résumés of the players in the debate, it is understandable why everyone sees agendas everywhere. On one side is Mr. Surnow, an Emmy Award-winning producer and friend of prominent conservatives like Rush Limbaugh. During Mr. Surnow’s tenure as executive producer, his hit series “24” was criticized for its seemingly permissive attitude towards torture.
On the other side is Mr. Greenwald, the founder of the advocacy media company Brave New Films, who has created documentaries like “Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism,” a condemnation of the Fox News Channel, and “Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers.”
Before turning to non-fiction films, Mr. Greenwald was a director and producer of made-for-television movies. From his contacts in that industry — agents, managers, casting directors, location scouts — he said he began receiving copies of “The Kennedys” scripts earlier this year. He then recruited a group of historians to appear in his video, including Mr. Sorensen and Nigel Hamilton, whose 1992 best-seller “J.F.K.: Reckless Youth” was criticized by the Kennedy family.
They say the “Kennedys” screenplays contain many factual errors, some benign and others less so. For example, they say the scripts refer to exit polling for the 1960 presidential election when exit polling had not yet been invented; and that Mr. Kennedy introduced the Peace Corps during the Bay of Pigs crisis in April 1961, when in fact he signed an executive order creating the corps one month earlier.
Beyond this, they say the scripts invent scenes that never occurred, like an exchange that suggests Mr. Kennedy came up with the idea for the Berlin Wall. As Mr. Sorensen bluntly says in the video, “Every single conversation with the president in the Oval Office or elsewhere in which I, according to the script, participated, never happened.”
Kennedy Series For ‘History Channel’ Called Inaccurate, Vindictive
By Sam Stein at Huffington Post
A television series on the Kennedys that is nearly a year away from official release has already spurred heated debate and aggressive pushback over its treatment of the iconic American family.
On Tuesday progressive filmmaker Robert Greenwald released a short video preemptively calling into question the accuracy of “The Kennedys,” an eight-hour miniseries which will air on the History Channel and is being produced by Joel Surnow, the creator of the series “24″ and a well-known Hollywood conservative.
In on-camera interviews, a set of renowned Kennedy historians, including Ted Sorensen — a one-time aide to John F. Kennedy — trash the script, which was obtained in advance by Greenwald. Charging that it is littered with easily documented falsehoods, they insist that the production team drafted a “cartoon” and “caricature” of the former president — downplaying weighty historical episodes in favor of tawdry and salacious material.
WATCH “Stop The Kennedy Smears” — Brave New Films makes the case against the miniseries.
Historians Challenge Joel Surnow’s “Kennedys”
The History Channel recently announced its first scripted miniseries, “The Kennedys,” to be produced by Joel Surnow, the conservative co-creator of Fox’s “24.”
While this is the umpteenth Kennedy project to come before cameras — a few years back, there was even a pilot for a Kennedy series, about JFK’s rise to power, called “Camelot” — this project has become a political flashpoint, not just because it’s Surnow involved but because of the successful effort among conservatives to get “The Reagans” miniseries pushed off CBS to Showtime.
The New York Times highlights the latest volley, from progressive activist Robert Greenwald, whose Brave New Films has in the past taken on health insurers, Afghanistan escalation and Iraq contractors, as well as Fox News, where Surnow once had tried a late-night comedy series with a conservative bent.
Greenwald has gathered comments from a number of historians and biographers, who have read the script have have spotted a number of inaccuracies, as well as what they call flaws in the depiction of the Kennedys. Ted Sorenson, the Kennedy speechwriter, calls it “character assassination.”
One of the more tawdry portions of the script comes when a Secret Service agent tries to get JFK’s attention when he’s having sex in a pool with a young woman.
Karl Eikenberry Papers: US Afghan Ambassador's report warned against troop escalation
By Nicholas Graham at Huffington Post
Many people are skeptical of President Obama’s escalation of the war in Afghanistan, sending an additional 30,000 troops there in an effort to boost US counterinsurgency efforts. One of the most prominent skeptics is the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry.
In November he contributed two reports to the Obama administration’s policy debate regarding the escalation, both of which argued against General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy and questioned whether Afghan President Hamid Karzai could be counted a reliable partner:
“Sending additional forces will delay the day when Afghans will take over, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to bring our people home on a reasonable timetable,” he wrote Nov. 6. “An increased U.S. and foreign role in security and governance will increase Afghan dependence, at least in the short-term.” [...]
“Yet Karzai continues to shun responsibility for any sovereign burden, whether defense, governance or development. He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest further,” Mr. Eikenberry wrote. “They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending ‘war on terror’ and for military bases to use against surrounding powers.”
Eikenberry feared that sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan would only serve to make America “more deeply engaged here with no way to extricate ourselves, short of allowing the country to descend again into lawlessness and chaos.”
He has since said that his concerns have been alleviated, but it is unclear how. (Read more about the reports HERE.)
David Bromwich wrote of Eikenberry’s diplomatic cables:
It is as if we had been offered a long look at several pages of the most disturbing prognosis in the Pentagon Papers; as if we could see the president reading them with us, and then deciding in spite of everything to go ahead with the war.
For more on the significance of the Eikenberry cables, watch the Rethink Afghanistan video below.