The Screengrab

Oliver Stone, who as a Hollywood director has largely turned away from a string on movies on recent American history and contemporary political themes during the last decade, and who mostly has a handful of noisy bombs (U-Turn, Any Given Sunday, Alexander) to show for it, seems to have decided to get back to his plow. He spent part of last year preparing a movie about the My Lai massacre, Pinkville, but now that project has been cancelled by its studio. Now Stone has gone way topical with plans to make a biographical picture about the current White House resident to be called, simply, Bush. The film will be written by Stanley Weiser, who worked on the script for Stone's 1987 Wall Street. (More recently, he was responsible for the hagiographic 2003 cable-TV film Rudy: The Rudy Giuliani Story.) Bush will be played by the very hot-at-this-moment John Brolin, of whom Stone says, "Josh is actually better looking than Bush but has the same drive and charisma that Americans identify with Bush, who has some of that old-time movie-star swagger."

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You really have to hand it to Oliver Stone; whatever you might think of the quality of his movies, he sure does know how to rile people. He virtually invented Vietnam revisionism with Platoon, pissing off all the people who wanted to buy into the Rambo vision of a mighty America sold out by craven politicians; he irritated pretty much everybody with JFK and was practically elevated to Satanhood with Natural Born Killers; he drove conservatives batty with his sympathetic portrayal of Fidel Castro in Comandante; and his World Trade Center irked people of every political stripe. After returning to Vietnam for Pinkville (a dramatic retelling of the My Lai massacre), his next rumored project will be a documentary biography, in the Comandante mode, of the hugely controversial Iranian president Ahmadinejad. It’s a move likely to enrage conservatives in the U.S., but right-wingers in Iran are already furious — they’ve hated Stone since he directed Alexander, a film about the Macedonian emperor who is reviled by Persians as a hated conquerer. As the Guardian reports, conservative newspapers in Tehran are already going buggy at the idea of their beloved leader being immortalized on film by a man who already directed The Doors, a film about "one of America's perverted and half-mad singers; someone who urinated on the head of his fans during his concerts and enjoyed doing so." (The article also provides a helpful side-by-side comparison of the careers of Ahmadindejad and Jim Morrison.) — Leonard Pierce

David M. Halbfinger reports that the uncertain state of the political thriller State of Play may offer some insight into how the game is being played this minute in a movie industry driven half-nuts by labor difficulties. Brad Pitt, who was locked in to star in the movie, pulled his Hamlet act and waltzed away from the project last week, just as it was about to go into production. Like many high-level productions, State of Play was all set to go so as to complete shooting by next June, when Hollywood may face an actors' strike. Now Universal, if it decides to proceed on schedule, will have to re-cast the lead quickly before other fully-booked-up actors in the cast start dropping out to make their other pre-June committments. On the plus side, they can consider any number of leading men, such as Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp, who are suddenly available because the projects they were about to start work on have been put on hold until after the writers' strike ends, because it's been decided that the scripts still need work.

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