How’s this for a lead that makes you want to keep reading:
Oliver Stone, that symbol of everything about Hollywood that conservatives love to hate, is getting help in marketing his newest movie from an unlikely ally: the publicity firm that helped devise the Swift boat campaign attacking John Kerry’s Vietnam record in the 2004 presidential race.
Reporter David Halbfinger goes on to list blurb a who’s who from the far religious right. I can’t wait to see the ads: “A MASTERPIECE!….. GO SEE THIS FILM! – Brent Bozell.”
And Halbfinger gets Stone to shrug off the Swift Boat connection.
Mr. Stone, for his part, has insisted in the past that the film is “not a political movie,” while acknowledging in a recent interview that this “mantra” had been handed to him by his employers. . . .
Mr. Stone said that he condemned the “Swift-boating” of Mr. Kerry, but cautioned that he himself had “hired publicists in the past that had skeletons in their closet.” He added: “It’s not a holier-than-thou street here. It’s an impure market.”
There’s your excuse to any association with bad guys in the future: It’s an impure market. Yes, humanity is.
I will see Stone’s movie, though I’m dreading it more and more with every commercial I see, for I know that he will exploit every emotion. Halbfinger’s story is the best preview of that.
