By Mr. Curmudgeon
The History Channel is in hot water over a docudrama whose script will not be finished until sometime next year. “The Kennedys” is an eight-party miniseries chronicling events in the lives of America’s most prominent political dynasty. The controversy surrounding the miniseries is not over what might be in the film as much as who is behind its making – Fox television network’s “24” creator Joel Surnow. It’s feared the conservative Surnow will further tarnish the Kennedy image by portraying the Massachusetts clan in ways not in keeping with what for liberals is a Bauer-esk heroism.
The New York Times reports that documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald is upset that any member of the Fox entertainment family should attempt to tell the story of New England’s holy family. He describes the yet-to-be-made miniseries as a “political character assassination,” and criticizes the portrayal of salacious events in the lives of the Kennedy men as “sexist titillation and pandering.” John and Ted’s sexual adventures may be titillating, but as the name of the channel airing the miniseries suggests, they are history.
Greenwald, therefore, is undertaking preemptive damage control, something the Kennedy’s could have used in life, by posting a 13-minute Internet video plea for viewers to sign a petition telling the History Channel “I refuse to watch right-wing character assassination masquerading as ‘history.’” This could be the filmmaker’s attempt to rise above what the New York Times once describes as his “commercially respectable B-list” movie reputation. What’s so odd about Greenwald’s rescue attempt is that so much of what he fears about the film has been the subject of so many supermarket bestsellers. Even stranger, Theodore Sorensen, a trusted adviser and speechwriter for President Kennedy, is joining in on this fool’s errand.
“I was amazed to find, reading those pages,” says Sorensen in the video, “that every single conversation with the president in the Oval Office or elsewhere, in which I, according to the script, participated, never happened.”
In 1955, JFK’s book “Profiles in Courage” won the coveted Pulitzer Prize. The book chronicles the story of eight U.S. Senators who defied public opinion to do what, in their view, was just. It is well known that Sorenson, not Kennedy, wrote the celebrated book. Sorensen’s complaint seems to be that the job of putting words in JFK’s mouth was filled over fifty year ago. And he has – err, JFK has – the Pulitzer to prove it.
Greenwald’s video divides each short interview with a text message. One such note informs the viewer to, “Tell the History Channel this belongs in the National Inquirer.” Greenwald does not help his cause by bringing up the sensationalist Inquirer. It was the Inquirer, after all, that broke the stories of the Gary Hart and Donna Rice affair, Rev. Jesse Jackson’s illegitimate child and John Edward’s adultery and its resulting love child. Who knows what they would uncover by revisiting Camelot. The History Channel will go a lot easier on the Kennedys than a supermarket tabloid that includes at least one extraterrestrial story in every issue.
0 comments on "Saving a Dynasty from History"