TUESDAY, 18 NOVEMBER, 2003

A dispatch from the culture wars - THE COMMENTARY

By Joseph Planta

VANCOUVER - Thanks to the relentless campaign of people on the right, as well as the unyielding harping from internet muckraking extraordinaire Matt Drudge, last Sunday night we could have been watching part one of The Reagan's starring James Brolin as the former president, and Judy Davis as the former first lady. Alas, the hue and cry of conservatives in total admiration of the former president managed to pressure CBS to cancel its unbalanced portrayal of the life of the 40th President of the United States. Through leaked portions of the script, which Drudge dutifully and prominently placed on his Drudge Report, there was a critical, if not malicious tone in the way Reagan was portrayed. It seems that the producers and writers took liberties and it did not look all too nice that this was going on, whilst the subject himself, is in the throes of the final stages of Alzheimer's disease.

Mrs. Reagan, through her friends in the media, Merv Griffin among them, waged a calculated media campaign which brought the mean-spiritedness to the fore. CBS, facing the heat; as well sensing that Reagan fans were about to call for a boycott, decided to face down the criticism, claim that the movie was atrocious in that it was not balanced, and shunted the picture to its cable outlet, Showtime. CBS President Les Moonves, claimed the public outcry and bad PR had nothing to do with the move, but of course, it smacks of poor management on the part of Moonves, who waited until less than a month before air to check out the project. (I suspect that this is the unmaking of Moonves as head of CBS. Though highly successful with CBS product over the last five years or so, if he's out in the next while, blame it on the debacle over The Reagan's.) CBS was forced, in the severely competitive ratings period of November sweeps, to rely on old episodes of C.S.I. to fill the void which would have been The Reagan's.

Was CBS right to pull The Reagan's? Surely, the backlash against the network was proof positive that the project had to be pulled. Forget Barbra Streisand and her twaddle that it's been an affront to free speech. The cultural elitists like Streisand are very one-sided in their defence of the first amendment. But the point remains, why the producers of this particular portrayal of President Reagan couldn't just make it clear this was based on the president's life, rather than portray it as a definitive biography, when it was clear that there were there was a motivation to assassinate the character of the Reagan's. Still, it would be interesting to see exactly how the Reagan's were portrayed, just as it will be interesting to see how Mel Gibson portrays the Jews in his film on the crucifixion of Christ, due next Ash Wednesday. Gibson, as we all remember was being crucified for his refusal to let critics screen his film, in particular those who have already taken a critical stance on the picture without having seen it, like the New York Times's pre-eminent columnist, Frank Rich. Rich in his column on the front page of the Times's arts section this past Sunday wades into this whole Reagan mess with a thoughtful column on how everyone heretofore has it all wrong.

Rich writes that Mike Nichols's impressive $60-million dollar television adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, due on HBO in three-weeks, takes a far more critical tone of President Reagan and his role during the 1980s when AIDS was beginning to rear its ugly head on the world, not to mention American culture. Some of those critics of The Reagan's have claimed that the producers had made up some lines, purporting that the former president was callous with indifference to AIDS. This alone, claimed the Reaganites, was reason enough to yank the film. Well, Rich, who obviously has seen the Nichols work, says that the same Reaganites have more reason to call for Angels In America's ouster than they had for the CBS film. Rich writes that those who claimed that it was nasty for CBS to proceed with a hatchet job on a man unable to defend himself thanks to Alzheimer's, should see that Angels in America speaks for the millions of AIDS sufferers who couldn't defend themselves because of Reagan's marked coldness to them when he was president.

The culture wars, between those of the right and left in the United States, have been waged yet again. Though Rich is himself, one with liberal tendencies, he makes a good point in that Angels in America, this monumental achievement (which he says is probably the most important theatrical adaptation since Kazan brought A Streetcar Named Desire to film,) will once again foster vigorous debate on Reagan and his times. Again, amidst a victorious round for those on the right against those dreaded cultural elitists on the left, it is interesting that each side in this debate, while both claim moral superiority over the other, all have hypocrisy residing in each of their consciences.

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