Writer of 9/11 Film Compares Critical Backlash to the Salem Witch Hunt

[sabra]

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003124178

Writer of 9/11 Film Compares Critical Backlash to the Salem Witch Hunt

NEW YORK Not content with comparing a New York Times story about him to "McCarthyism," Cyrus Nowrasteh, who wrote the screenplay for the recent ABC docudrama "The Path to 9/11," has now, in an interview with Foreign Policy magazine, compared the critics' reaction to the film to a "witch hunt," a "book burning" and "Salem all over again."

...

He defended his screenplay, saying, "I had to collapse the events of eight and a half years into five hours. I don’t know any other way to do it except collapse, conflate, and condense." He caleld a "conflation" the quite fictional scene where Clinton aide Sandy Berger calls off the seizure of bin Laden by a nearby CIA team. As for trimming the climax of that scene -- when Berger cuts off the phone line -- Nowrasteh admitted it "wasn’t actually in the script. But I liked what the director had done with that sequence because I thought it symbolically represented what was going on."

Critics, he continued, "take everything literally. They don’t know how to watch a movie. What happened after the most powerful group of political power brokers and their lawyers tried to stop this from airing—the Clinton Foundation, et al? Seventy seconds were taken out of a five-hour movie."

The intervieweer, citing obligation to truth and history -- and the fact that a large number of Americans, for example, still think Saddam was involved with 9/11 -- asked if he thinks he misled people. "No," he replied, "I think the hubbub is because we got to the truth. ABC was anticipating an attack from the Republicans. No one expected an attack from where we got it."

[atreides1]

1. Salem Witch Hunt?

Can we see if he floats or sinks when thrown into water?

[leftofcool]

2. Puhleeeeeeeeeeeze

The witch trials..........burning at the stake? What a fucking moron! I think he should be water boarded.

Left of Cool

[Sequoia]

21. Arthur Miller would not agree

In 1953, Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible" ran on Broadway at the Martin Beck. Despite being a box office success and acclaimed by critics and audiences alike, it was considered second-best to his prior "Death of a Salesman." As Brook Atkinson for the New York Times reported the day after the opening, "he theme does not develop with the simple eloquence of 'Death of a Salesman.'"

Although the events of the play are based on the events that took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, Miller was liberal in his fictionalization of those events. For example, many of the accusations of witchcraft in the play are driven by the affair between farmer, husband, and father John Proctor (Arthur Kennedy), and the Minister's teenage niece Abigail Williams (Madeleine Sherwood); however, in real life Williams was probably about eleven at the time of the accusations and Proctor was over sixty, which makes it most unlikely that there was ever any such relationship. Miller himself said, "The play is not reportage of any kind .... obody can start to write a tragedy and hope to make it reportage .... what I was doing was writing a fictional story about an important theme."

The "important theme" that Miller was writing about was clear to many observers in 1953 at the play's opening. It was written in response to Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee's crusade against supposed communist sympathizers. Despite the obvious political criticisms contained within the play, most critics felt that "The Crucible" was "a self contained play about a terrible period in American history."

<snip>

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/SAL_CRU.HTM

[underpants]

3. Oh whoa is he how will he and his people* evah be able to rise up?

"They" have been persecuted for so verah verah loooong.

* "people" and "They" should be read to mean the massively weathly white industrialist establishment who for reasons based solely on paranoia and cartoonish rhetoric quaked in fear at the mere shadow of a guy who was always going to give them everything they could have ever dreamed of.

[mikeytherat]

4. Foreign Policy Magazine?

Foreign Policy Magazine?

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

mikey_the_rat

[struggle4progress]

37. Here's an abridged version of the interview

... FP: ... Don’t you feel a responsibility for avoiding inaccuracies or conflation? ...

CN: No ...

FP: How many parts truth and how many parts fiction is the movie?

CN: I’m not going to answer that ...

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3584

[Mz Pip]

5. Big difference

There never were any witches.

Mz Pip
:dem:

[AX10]

6. What utter BS!

You LIED! You made up events that NEVER OCCURED in the real world!

[Whoa_Nelly]

7. Going after Clinton while in office was a witch hunt

What ABC chose to do is defamation of living persons.

Cyrus Nowrasteh gives echo to the Brownie defense. Bush touts personal responsibility, and the neocon version of that is, "It wasn't me, Mom!"

[RaleighNCDUer]

8. "ABC was anticipating an attack from the Republicans. No one expected an

attack from where we got it."

You see, they cut the scene which had the hero stare straight at the camera and scream "It's all Clinton's fault! They did it! The Democrats! They're here! They're HERE!"

I mean, WTF!!!???

[RedSock]

9. what a hack

"... I liked what the director had done with that sequence because I thought it symbolically represented what was going on."

Critics, he continued, "take everything literally. They don’t know how to watch a movie."

Ummm, you guys said it was all factual. That means what you see = what happened. Look it up in the dictionary some time.

Is this pile of shit the best excuse he can muster?!!

[The Deacon]

10. "Every Docudrama I've Done"?

You've done exactly ONE other "docudrama" you pompous little fuck. And it was slammed for blatant inaccuracies as well! Instead of having the scene "vetted by lawyers and advisors" perhaps you should have had it vetted by someone with a passing knowledge of the events you claimed to portray - changing the airline Atta first boarded & which airport he boarded isn't "fictionalizing" or "compressing" or literary license - its simple dumbfuck incompetence.
Citing "Rashomon" is worse than insulting - its libelous (as your whole wasted, pathetic "career" is.)
Worthless little PNAC shit. Why aren't you in the Army?

[The_Casual_Observer]

11. Who told him he had to do this thing at all? God? The guy makes

it sound as if some order had come down from heaven for him to do this movie and it had to be 5 hours long. The narrative was false, if he had used more time he would have simply made up more stuff.

[glitch]

16. Good question. The answer to who told him to do this film would be very

interesting indeed. Apparently he didn't come up with the idea and market it to investors.

[NanceGreggs]

12. I get it now - this guy is a COMEDY writer!

"I think the hubbub is because we got to the truth. ABC was anticipating an attack from the Republicans. No one expected an attack from where we got it."


:rofl:

[intheflow]

13. Just the same.

I remember reading how those witches got free, national, uninterrupted commercial air time to talk about how to turn Goody Smyth into a pig for looking sideways at your cow. :eyes:

[xxqqqzme]

14. OMG! He's playing the Salem/mccarthy card!

whiney ass rethugs. I am sooooo f*cking fed up 2 here w/ self righteous bullshit from these lying bastards.


FED UP!

[Ezlivin]

15. He was on a $30 million budget - 3 times what it cost to investigate 9/11

He has no excuses. If anything, the information he provided should have been of a higher quality than that churned out by the 9/11 Commision.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

17. Salem Witch Hunts, eh?

I had my money on Holocaust victims.

[DemoTex]

18. Nothing but a vile revisionist, wannabe "historian." AKA: Liar.

"Fabricator", "Propagandist", and "Apologist" all fit, too. But, overall, Cyrus Nowrasteh is just another disingenuous, paid, GOP stooge. It is as plain as the nose on Pinocchio's face. He is now lying about his lies.

[sinkingfeeling]

19. Boo-hoo. Your 15 seconds of 'fame' is over. Go back to your GOP

sponsered think tank and plan for the new and improved American Empire.

[Supersedeas]

20. symbolic RW interpretation standing in the way of historical fact

[NorthernSpy]

22. Nowrasteh, so nast-eh!

"Waaaah... I got caught making shit up, and people called me on it! This is just like being accused of withcraft by 17th century religious fanatics and then having my house and land confiscated and my family forced to testify against me and then getting hanged by the neck until dead!"


:cry:

[Tempest]

23. The difference is, he's guilty

The women burned in Salem were not.

[NOLADEM]

24. SOMETIMES, you find a witch

[Rex]

25. Shows the guy don't know jack about history.

That's why Rove tapped him for the job, the guy don't know shit from shinola. How embarrassing for America. Can you sue someone for being a moran?

[Kelvin Mace]

26. If you are not dangling by the neck from the end of a rope

then you can't compare your treatment to a "witch trial".

[Vogon_Glory]

31. How About Trial By Immersion?

How about trial by immersion or "water-boarding"?

[jamesinca]

27. Just curious

How did this mini series do?

[warrens]

28. Some cheese with that whine, naziboy?

Poor little lying scumbag nazi victim. Waaaaaaah!

[BrokenBeyondRepair]

29. why isn't this in the dungeon yet?

[Vogon_Glory]

30. No Sympathy for Revisionist Nowrasteh

I have no sympathy for revisionist Nowrasteh. He set out to write a propaganda piece for Dubya Bush's Duck Soup Posse and got caught. Unlike other writers and directors who did write propaganda pieces Shakespeare (Richard III), Sergei Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin, Ivan the Terrible), and Leni Reiffenstal, Nowrasteh produced a piece of crap--shot full of distortions and inaccuracies and rightly trashed by television critics and professional historians alike.

I hope he sobs all the way to bankruptcy court, and that the sitting judge denies his petition to file.

:evilgrin:

[Monkeyman]

32. Poor Baby now where my dunking chair

[Habibi]

33. Geez, what a wuss.

Micheal Moore got attacked for *his* "9/11 film" and he didn't whine all day and night about it.

[MetaTrope]

34. I'll bet the biggest disappointment for him

is that given the venue, it was unfeasable to seek publicity for this film by calling in a bomb threat a la the premiere of his directorial debut, VEILED THREAT.

[Downtown Hound]

35. GOP=Giant Obtuse Pansies

What a fucking crybaby!

[Malikshah]

36. OMG-- he's right. HETSARWON...it's the name of the Devil

Just spell the name backwards... Beazlebub's brood, he is!

He's a witch, I tell you. He turned me into a newt!

[yorkiemommie1]

38. i don't give a good gd about him, his opinions

or his vile creations.