Hooray for Right-Wing Hollywood

By Max Blumenthal
Created Nov 17 2006 - 8:39am

- from The Nation (posted here with permission) [1]

Hollywood is replete with awards ceremonies of all sorts, but during the
weekend of November 10, it was the location of a novel one--the Liberty Film
Festival [2]. Inside the gleaming new Pacific Design Center on Melrose
Avenue, conservative activists devoted to advancing their agenda within the
film industry presented ABC's vice president of special projects Judith
Tukich with their Freedom of Expression Award.

Tukich was the ABC executive in charge of producing The Path to 9/11 [3],
the factually challenged "docudrama" that was broadcast for two nights in
September to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Tukich
not only brought the program to the air but also helped mobilize right-wing
groups to rebut criticism that it had fabricated stories and distorted
events to smear the Clinton Administration from former counterterrorism
chief Richard Clarke, President Clinton and members of the 9/11 commission,
among others. It was for her enterprise and tenacity that Tukich earned her
award at the festival.

Accepting her prize before the assemblage of Republican consultants,
conservative film producers and members of the far-right website Free
Republic [4], Tukich radiated gratitude. "It was really my honor to work on
such an important project," she chirped.

I approached Tukich after the ceremony in the theater lobby and asked her if
she thought it was appropriate for ABC to accept an award from an
organization openly pushing an ideological conservative agenda inside
Hollywood. After attempting to cover my voice recorder with her hand, she
said, "ABC is a nonpartisan network." When I repeated my question, she
replied, "You should really talk to our media relations department."

When I asked why she didn't want to explain her involvement in producing and
promoting The Path to 9/11, she bristled. "Accountable? What do you mean I
have to be accountable?" Then she hustled toward an exit.

While Tukich can claim that ABC is "nonpartisan," she can hardly say the
same of herself. Indeed, Tukich is a right-wing evangelical described in a
newsletter for the Foursquare Church as "radical about reforming political
endeavors...especially in television and other areas of popular culture. She
believes it is the grace of God that has allowed her as a conservative
Christian Evangelical in the television and film industry, to influence
projects that are released on the air today." In 2000 Tukich told [5] the
newsletter of the National Religious Broadcasters Association, the Christian
right's media lobby, "The single greatest way to evangelize the world is
through the media." In 2004, Judith Tukich donated $1000 to George W. Bush's
campaign.

But before I could ask Tukich about her ulterior sectarian agenda, the
screenwriter of The Path to 9/11, Cyrus Nowrasteh, rushed to her aid. "What
are you going and harassing Judith for?" Nowrasteh demanded angrily. "Why
don't you come talk to me?"

Earlier that evening, Nowrasteh had stood beside Tukich to receive his own
Freedom of Expression Award. "Cyrus is such a friend to this festival and to
so many conservatives in Hollywood," Liberty Film Festival co-founder Jason
Apuzzo said in giving Nowrasteh the prize. Indeed, Nowrasteh is an outspoken
conservative who claimed [6] in an interview with the right-wing
FrontPageMag.com, a month prior to the airing of The Path to 9/11, that
Clinton's "lack of response" to terrorism "emboldened bin Laden to keep
attacking American interests." Even as ABC denied requests from members of
the Clinton Administration and even from the former President for advance
DVDs of the film, Nowrasteh's friend Govindini Murty, the other festival
co-founder, was given an advance screening (thanks in part to Nowrasteh) and
wrote the first review of it a week before critics from the New York Times
and Los Angeles Times

were able to view it. ("The Path to 9/11 is one of the best, most
intelligent, most pro-American miniseries I've ever seen on TV, and
conservatives should support it and promote it as vigorously as possible,"
Murty wrote in FrontPageMag.com.)

In articles for the Huffington Post [7] and The Nation [8] this September, I
reported on Nowrasteh's political agenda, his fabrications of the history of
9/11 and his ties to right-wing promoter David Horowitz and the Liberty Film
Festival. Now, live and in person, Nowrasteh vented his anger at my
reporting. "You're a complete liar!" he shouted just inches from my face.
"You were wrong across the board! You made it all up! You're pathetic!"

I challenged Nowrasteh to explain the fabricated scenes in The Path to 9/11,
particularly his fantasy depiction of Clinton's national security adviser
Sandy Berger vetoing a fictitious CIA raid to capture bin Laden. "Buzz
Patterson told me about five instances exactly like that. He was right
there!" Nowrasteh replied.

Who is Lieut. Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson? A former low-level military aide
to Clinton who exploited his brief White House experience to ingratiate
himself with the right, Patterson wrote a book, Reckless Disregard (released
in 2004 by the conservative Regnery Publishing house), that baselessly
claimed that terrorists wanted Democrats to win the 2004 elections. His book
became a centerpiece of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth campaign against
Senator John Kerry. Patterson's 2003 anti-Clinton polemic Dereliction of
Duty (also published by Regnery), filled with errors and falsehoods, was, as
Nowrasteh admitted, the sole source of ABC's attacks on Clinton's record.

"You guys better quit calling the guys who were hiring me, including the
studios and the networks who were hiring me, and telling them not to hire
me," Nowrasteh warned me. "The blacklist came from you guys!"

Founded in 2004 by Murty and Appuzo, a couple of young right-wing film
buffs, the Liberty Film Festival is an annual event designed to premiere and
promote conservative films supposedly too "politically incorrect" to gain
acceptance at mainstream film festivals. This year David Horowitz absorbed
the festival into his political empire, showering it with funding from his
financial angels (Scaife, Olin et al.), and lending the assistance of his
cadres. With Horowitz's assistance, the Liberty Film Festival has become a
spearhead of the right's campaign against the mainstream film industry,
which the right routinely accuses of producing what Apuzzo has called [9]
"films [that] are anti-American or otherwise demoralizing to the war
effort."

Besides Horowitz, the festival boasted the participation of Myrna Sokoloff
and David Zucker. He produced much of the Scary Movie, Naked Gun and
Airplane! series; he and Sokoloff screened several slapstick attack ads they
had created for the Republican National Committee during the recent midterm
election campaign. Also on hand was Joel Surnow, executive producer of the
television series 24. Surnow unreeled a pilot version of his forthcoming
series, This Just In, a right-wing version of the fake news segments made
famous by Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show. According to Variety,
Surnow is in talks with Fox CEO Roger Ailes about airing his series next
year on the Fox News Channel.

David Bossie, a veteran conservative operative and self-described
"accidental filmmaker," provided one of the event's most memorable
offerings. "We need to use all the political tools available to us," Bossie
told me. "Whether it's a thirty-second TV spot or a full-length feature, we
need offensive political tools."

In 1998 Bossie was fired from his job as chief investigator for the House
Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, which was investigating
alleged Clinton White House campaign finance abuses. Bossie was caught
selectively editing tapes of former Clinton Administration official Webster
Hubbell's prison conversations in a false effort to implicate Hillary
Clinton for overbilling his law firm. Bossie has since returned to his
right-wing group, Citizens United [10], which produced the original racial
scare ad about convicted rapist Willie Horton during the 1988 presidential
campaign. Now Bossie has begun applying his tape-doctoring skills to film,
installing editing equipment in the basement of Citizens United's offices
and funneling millions of dollars from his group's coffers into producing
full-length "documentaries."

Bossie's recent creation, Border War, is calculated to propel the Republican
Party's embrace of nativism in anticipation of the 2008 elections: Call it
Willie Horton, en Espanol. The film portrays illegal border crossers as a
dangerous, swarthy element mounting a concerted invasion of the United
States. Once in the American interior, they overwhelm public services,
hysterically advocate for the return of the Southwest to Mexico and commit
heinous crimes against suburban white women like Teri March, who appears in
Border War to describe the murder of her husband, Dave March, by an
undocumented immigrant. Like so many right-wing political commercials, while
March gives her tearful testimony over an ominous soundtrack, the camera
zooms in on the menacing mug shot of her husband's killer, Armando Garcia.

Perhaps the most striking protagonist of Border War is Lupe Moreno, a Latina
who testifies about a childhood destroyed by "illegal aliens." While growing
up in a safehouse her father ran for migrants, Moreno says she was raped,
abused and ultimately coerced into a marriage with an older man who used her
to gain his citizenship. Embittered by her experience, Moreno began
attending meetings of an anti-immigrant group, the California Coalition for
Immigration Reform. After placing a call to the group's leader, Barb Coe--"I
don't want you to hate me," Moreno said to Coe upon introducing
herself--Moreno was promptly enlisted as the movement's Latina poster child.
Today she speaks alongside Coe (who declared [11] at a 2005 anti-immigrant
summit, "We are suffering robbery, rape and murder of law-abiding citizens
at the hands of illegal barbarians, who are cutting off heads and appendages
of blind, white, disabled gringos," a detail omitted in Bossie's film) and
members of the Minutemen at their rallies.

"I was just trying to undo the damage my dad did," Moreno explains. Her
image in the film's closing credits elicited a hearty cheer from the
festival's almost exclusively white audience.

Border War also portrays Republican Congressman J.D. Hayworth during the
final days of his recent losing campaign. (Hayworth's defeat to Democrat
Harry Mitchell, an advocate of legislation containing a path to citizenship
for undocumented immigrants, was one of the GOP's most stunning losses on
November 7.) In Border War, Hayworth appears riding shotgun in a pickup
truck along the border, far from his district in suburban Phoenix. As he
tours trails of migrant refuse and holes in haphazardly constructed border
fences, he grows increasingly grim. Finally, he predicts his own martyrdom.

"The Democrats are going to take the House in November," Hayworth exclaims.
"And they are probably going to take the Senate, too. The first thing
they're going to do is move to pass amnesty." The Republicans, Hayworth
says, will sign on to providing "amnesty" to undocumented immigrants in
order to appear bipartisan. And President Bush, whom Hayworth repeatedly
criticizes in Border War, will sign the bill, thus creating what Hayworth
calls "a permanent underclass."

"It's a perfect storm," the square-jawed Congressman grumbles. "Republicans
want cheap labor and Democrats want cheap votes."

Hayworth's defeat in a solidly conservative district symbolizes the
repudiation of Karl Rove's plan for a permanent Republican majority. Now the
movement is forced back into its traditionally adversarial position. If the
mood at the Liberty Film Festival was any indication, they relish this
prospect.

On my way out of the Border War screening, I chatted with Ronald Maxwell, a
genial conservative who directed the Civil War dramas Gettysburg and Of Gods
and Generals. "The elites are using us," Maxwell warned. "Never forget that
we're the victims."

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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson