The Screengrab

Slate offers a timely rundown, in the form of a video slide show by Elbert Ventura, on the ways in which George W. Bush has been represented in movies and TV lo these last eight eventful years. I'll admit that I needed reminded that the decision to cast Josh Brolin in Oliver Stone's W. probably hit Timothy Bottoms pretty hard. For a brief moment there in the early 1970s, his roles in such pictures as Johnny Got His Gun, The Last Picture Show, The Paper Chase, and The White Dawn made it seem as if Bottoms was Hollywood's favorite sweet, slightly boring hippie lead, but when the wave of counterculture films rolled back into the oceans of time, Bottoms's career began to resemble a beached whale that had been out in the sun for a few days. Then Matt Stone and Trey Parker cast him in That's My Bush!, their short-lived parody sitcom that treated life at the White House as a string of broadly played shenanigans accompanied by a shrieking laugh track. The show, which had already begun development under the provisional title Everybody Loves Al before the Supreme Court announced that it was recasting the lead role, wasn't exactly long on precisely targeted political satire: in one memorable episode, wacky high jinks ensued after Laura overheard George talking about his desire to have the family cat put to sleep because of the animal's foul, unhealthy odor and assumed he was talking about the pungent aroma of her gynecological region. (Odd to think that in the course of more than 190 episodes, I Love Lucy never went there.) But Bottoms managed to spin his Bush impression off into a cameo in the Crocodile Hunter movie and then a dramatic starring role in DC 9/11: Time of Crisis, a Showtime cable TV movie that was produced and written by professional "Hollywood conservative Lionel Chetwynd. It was a stroke of casting both obvious and very weird, sort of as if Tina Fey were to star in a celebratory feature-length biopic about Sarah Palin. Of course, the difference between Bottoms in 2003 and Tina Fey now is that Fey has other career options.

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Shreveport. Louisiana, the third-largest city in the Pelican State and the center of the "Ark-La-Tex" nexus, is a real nice place to raise your kids up. It was once a swaggering power center of the oil business. But then the Lousiana branch of the Standard Oil Company, which was located in Shreveport back when Huey Long used to like to talk trash about the company's Board of Directors and their mamas, got absorbed by the New Jersey branch, and in the 1980s the city was hit hard by an economic downturn. Today the city is enjoying a major resurgence, thanks to an unlikely embrace by the film industry. Oliver Stone's W. is just one of a number of productions shooting there now, following the trail blazed by Factory Girl, The Mist, and Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. Now, David Carr reports, "Major film-industry companies like Paskal Lighting, Cinelease and Panavision all have permanent presences here. And last month Nu Image/Millennium Films, a producer and distributor of independent films like Mad Money and My Mom’s New Boyfriend, announced the construction of a 6.7-acre production campus with a planned expansion to a 20-acre full-service studio that will have three sound stages, production offices, a mill and a prop house."

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