The Screengrab : hillary clinton

New World Order Update--"Die Hard" Director to Karl Rove and the FBI: "J'accuse!"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 15:00:00 GMT

John McTiernan used to be best known as the director of Die Hard and its second sequel, The Hunt for Red October, and (shudder) Last Action Hero. The last ten years have not been kind; his 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair had its modest, reheated charms, but the other movie he released that year, The 13th Warrior, sank like a stone, and the two films he's released since then, Rollerball (2002) and Basic (2003), both hit with a splat. McTiernan would of course love to redeem himself by getting back to work and turning out a new string of hits, but McTiernan says that his career has been sidelined by his legal problems stemming from the Anthony Pellicano case. In 2006, two years before Pellicanos was convicted on charges of illegal wiretapping and racketeering, McTiernan pled guilty to charges of lying to the FBI about the case. Sometime after that, he entered into a prolonged legal battle over whether he had the right to withdraw his plea, and last February, his request was granted. According to McTiernan, the FBI, which has indicated that it will continue to pursue its case against him, has stuck him in a position of legal limbo that has rendered him insurable, and therefoere unemployable, by Hollywood studios.

Now McTiernan has finished a film, a change-of-pace project called--breathe deep--The Political Prosecutions of Karl Rove. As the New York Times reports, the movie is a personal screed "that accuses the Bush administration of having pursued the Pellicano case as part of a far-ranging conspiracy under the direction of Karl Rove to prosecute Democrats." The film's argument ties the Pellicano prosecution to highly publicized instances of what some have seen as politically motivated prosecutions during the Bush administration, and specifically charges that l'affaire Pellicano was part of a plot to generate embarrassing publicity that could be used against Hillary Clinton if she had been the Democratic nominee for the presidency. McTiernan narrates the film and also appears on camera at the end to lecture the audience about the dangers of using the legal system as a political tool. Rather than try to distribute this baby to theaters, McTiernan says he hopes to soon post it on a web site , which "will be maintained by the group Victims of Karl Rove Prosecutions." Although Karl Rove himself declined to speak to the Times about McTiernan's charges, one of his elves did issue a statement saying that, “I suspect Secretary Clinton and Mr. Rove are in agreement that Mr. McTiernan is off his rocker.”

Morning Deal Report: Another Wedding for Anne Hathaway

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Rachel Getting Married is only now reaching theaters, but Anne Hathaway is already heading for the altar again. Hathaway will star in The Fiance for Warner Bros. She’ll play “a woman who cancels wedding plans and breaks up with her seemingly perfect fiance so she can try to figure out who she really is. Her meddling parents try to patch things up between the pair, making it impossible for her to move on,” Variety reports.

Naomi Watts will star as the real-life woman who “famously called President Bill Clinton a ‘weenie’”. No, it’s not The Hillary Clinton Story. It’s My Name is Jody Williams, the true story of “a strong-willed teacher working for a temporary employment agency who left her life in Washington to pursue an unlikely career in global activism. Almost a decade and a half later, Williams was honored with the Nobel Peace Prize for leading an international campaign to eradicate land mines,” says The Hollywood Reporter.

Can I interest you in a movie about five people trying to kill Ashton Kutcher? Then get in line for Five Killers, in which Kutcher “will play a former hit man whose life is turned upside down because someone from his past has paid a group of killers to bump him off,” per Variety.

Related:
Anne Hathaway in Wonderland
The Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time

Will Barack Obama Be America's Next Great Black President?

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

You know how there’s usually nothing good on TV, and then finally there are TWO shows you want to watch and they’re both on at the same time? That’s what this election has been like for me. After a a lifetime of troubled Democratic administrations and doomed Democratic candidates from McGovern to Kerry (and don’t even get me started on the disastrous Gore/Lieberman campaign, Nader haters), we finally get two really strong contenders...IN THE SAME FREAKIN’ ELECTION YEAR. And they just spent the past few months beating the shit out of each other.

But that's all behind us now: according to media scuttlebutt, Hillary will officially concede the Democratic nomination on Saturday and become America’s #1 Obama Girl, while Barack moves one step closer to becoming our nation’s first real black president, after many years of fake black presidents on TV and the big screen.

And so, in honor of Senator Barack Obama’s historic achievement, Screengrab decided to look back at some of the African Americans who occupied the Oval Office in fiction before reality finally caught up:

Morgan Freeman as President Tom Beck in Deep Impact (1998)

After playing God in Bruce & Evan Almighty, President of the United States was actually a step down for Morgan Freeman...but America was lucky to have his wisdom, authority and soothing, inspirational baritone during a crisis involving a potential Extinction Level Event, a.k.a. a giant comet on a collision course with Earth. Rather than farming out the whole thing to Haliburton, President Beck freezes wages and prices to prevent an economic disaster and dispatches Robert Duvall’s Capt. Spurgeon "Fish" Tanner and a multinational crew of astronauts, who sacrifice themselves to destroy the big rock, thus saving (most of) humanity. Heckuva job, Fishie.

Dennis Haysbert as President David Palmer on 24 (2002-2004)

After surviving assassins in a truly harrowing California primary, Haysbert’s resilient, basso profundo commander-in-chief is faced with nuclear and biological terrorism, as well as attempts by corrupt American businessmen to manufacture war in the Middle East in order to drive up oil prices and...uh...hey, isn’t this a Fox show with a big conservative fan base? Must be all the torture...so much torture, in fact, that West Point Academy worried cadets were starting to view such behavior as acceptable interrogation procedure, and I’ve personally heard talk radio guys condone extreme neo-con interrogation policies because, heck, they always work for Jack Bauer. Yet isn’t it also possible, given the show’s impact, that Haysbert’s performance as the indomitable President Palmer in some way helped Middle America get used to the idea of a handsome young African American Democrat in the White House?

Bill Clinton as President Bill Clinton in Contact (1998)

While not technically African American, Bill Clinton received an honorary designation as the nation’s first black president (until the real thing comes along) from a plurality of U.S. comedians. And while not technically a cast member of Robert Zemeckis’ adaptation of Carl Sagan’s tale of Earth’s first contact with extraterrestrial life, Clinton nevertheless received more screen time than Rob Lowe or Angela Bassett thanks to a presidential speech about rocks found on Mars that was repurposed (controversially) as a fictional proclamation about alien transmissions received by astronomer Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster). Ironically, the only reason Clinton got to portray the president in the movie was because Sidney Poitier passed on the role.

Terry Crews as President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho in Idiocracy (2006)

Of course, some presidents are better than others, though given the average IQ of the dumbed-down populace of Mike Judge’s little-seen, depressingly spot-on social satire, Idiocracy, Crews’ President Camacho doesn’t really do that bad a job. Sure, he almost executes the smartest man in the world (Luke Wilson’s cryogenically-preserved average Joe, whose 21st century common sense reads as genius in 2505 America). But he does have leadership skills, and when Joe’s brilliant plan to water crops with, y’know, water instead of corporate sports beverages helps to end a crippling food shortage, Camacho has the wisdom to actually listen to expert opinion rather than (ahem) stubbornly staying the course.

Tommy “Tiny” Lister as President Lindberg in The Fifth Element (1997)

Forget the Axis of Evil...Lister’s science-fictional administration has to deal with The Great Evil, a sentient flaming asteroid intent on, yes, wiping out all life on Earth. While Bruce Willis’ cab driver and Milla Jovovich’s supernatural supermodel do most of the heavy lifting in the fight against Evil (and its chief henchman Zorg, played by Gary Oldman in a peculiar plastic hat), President Lindberg nevertheless doesn’t ask and Chris Tucker’s Ruby Rhod doesn’t tell when his ultra-flamboyant radio host joins the mission, and the intergalactic commander-in-chief even supports his troops by preventing a naggy mother from cock-blocking Willis’ eventual clone chamber tryst with Jovovich...talk about advocating stem cell research!

Depp vs. Murray: Dueling Gonzos

Andrew Osborne — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Many people think of Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson as the drug-addled grotesque at the center of Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas, a buffoonish personification of the worst of ‘60s & ‘70s excess...and, by most accounts, Thompson both played up and fell victim to this public persona in the latter part of his life and career, trading on his wild-and-crazy persona in the pop culture fast lane like a counter-culture Hugh Hefner while his writing became ever more lazy and diffuse. "I'm leading a normal life and right alongside me there is this myth,” he admitted as early as 1977, “and it is growing and mushrooming and getting more and more warped. When I get invited to, say, speak at universities, I'm not sure if they are inviting [his crazed, quasi-fictional alter-ego Raoul] Duke or Thompson. I'm not sure who to be."

In his prime, however, Thompson was not only a larger-than-life, groundbreaking literary stylist, but also a crack-shot political reporter with a formidable grasp of American realpolitik. Nearly four decades before Hilary and Barack started trading body blows in the 2008 primaries, Thompson was bemoaning the essential fracture he saw at the heart of the modern Democratic Party in Fear and Loathing On The Campaign Trail ’72: “I think what most people seem to be tired of are the sort of lint-headed, wooly-minded—what a lot of people call do-gooders—people who would like to do the right thing, but who just can’t get it up.”

On The Campaign Trail ’72 is a fantastically insightful cautionary chronicle of the doomed McGovern presidential campaign, essential reading for anyone interested in the health of the Republic (especially in an election year)...and, in fact, I'd only just recently finished re-reading the book when a friend, out of the blue, sent me a DVD packed with various bits of Thompson-alia, including The Crazy Never Die, a 1988 documentary short about Dr. Gonzo by the Mitchell Brothers Film Group of San Francisco, along with material from the two extant fictional depictions of Thompson’s life: Terry Gilliam’s Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas (1998) and Art Linson’s Where The Buffalo Roam (1980).

I had seen both Thompson biopics before, but it was interesting to compare the movies and their lead performances side by side. According to Doug Hill & Jeff Weingrad’s backstage history Saturday Night, Bill Murray became so immersed in his semi-autobiographical portrayal (in Buffalo) that he palled around with and virtually became Hunter S. Thompson, “complete with long black cigarette holder, dark glasses, and nasty habits,” a pseudo-Method transformation that lasted until the movie came out and bombed like the Enola Gay, after which the comedian returned to his regular, affable self, as if waking from a long, strange coma.

Despite all his apparent mental immersion in the role, however, Murray the actor never really disappears into the character, and his performance as Thompson is not markedly different from his 1979 performance as Trip Harrison in Meatballs or his later depiction of Carl Spackler in Caddyshack. If anything, his Thompson seems like the bastard child of Carl and Trip, with a few Gonzo quotes and props thrown into the mix.

Johnny Depp also palled around with Thompson before, during and after his portrayal of the man, but the actor’s performance as “Raoul Duke” in Gilliam’s adaptation of the allegedly unfilmable Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas is a believably stylized depiction of a more fully-realized character, grounding the film’s bombastic excesses with deadpan wit and an undercurrent of genuine sadness for the lost utopian dreams of the '60s counter-culture.

In the final analysis, Depp (arguably) offers a better performance in a better film, but after Gilliam’s surrealistic take (and Benicio del Toro’s intense but off-putting performance as Duke/Thompson’s friend, Dr. Gonzo/Oscar Acosta), Where The Buffalo Roam’s more laid-back, relatively naturalistic approach, while meandering (and, well, bad), still makes me wish for an accurate, insightful biopic of the real Hunter S. Thompson, beyond all the same old fear and loathing.

Barack Obama and Brad Pitt: Separated at Birth?

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Genealogists have uncovered some startling connections between our current crop of presidential candidates and everyone’s favorite celebrity couple – and for all we know, they’ve given Oliver Stone some casting ideas for a future project.

According to the Associated Press, the good people at the New England Historic Genealogical Society have determined that Barack Obama is a distant cousin of Brad Pitt, while Hillary Rodham Clinton and Angelina Jolie are “ninth cousins.” But that’s not all! “Clinton, who is of French-Canadian descent on her mother's side, is also a distant cousin of singers Madonna, Celine Dion and Alanis Morissette. Obama, the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, can call six U.S. presidents, including George W. Bush, his cousins. McCain is a sixth cousin of first lady Laura Bush.”

This should give Stone plenty to work with should he ever get around to making a movie about the 2008 presidential campaign. Meanwhile, the JFK and Nixon helmer is at work on his latest meticulously researched and thoroughly accurate biopic, this one called simply W. Yes, it’s the inspiring story of George W. Bush, starring No Country for Old Men cowboy Josh Brolin as the current president. Entertainment Weekly reports that Elizabeth Banks (Zack and Miri Make a Porno) has been cast as first lady Laura Bush in what the director describes, presumably with a straight face, as “a fair and accurate portrait, focused on things like his relationship with his father, President George H.W. Bush, his wild younger days, and his conversion to Christianity.”

Not That Anyone Cares Now, but Rudy Giuliani Was the Tazmanian Devil

Phil Nugent — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Jeff Greenfield at Slate offers a timely new unified theory of American presidential politics based on the work of Chuck Jones. In a nutshell: American politicians are divided between those who remind voters of Bugs Bunny and those who remind them of Daffy Duck. "As shaped by genius animator Chuck Jones — he didn't create the Warner Bros. icons, but he gave them their later looks and personalities — Bugs and Daffy represent polar opposites in how to deal with the world. Bugs is at ease, laid back, secure, confident. His lidded eyes and sly smile suggest a sense that he knows the way things work. He's onto the cons of his adversaries... Bugs never raises his voice, never flails at his opponents or at the world. He is rarely an aggressor." JFK was a Bugs, Nixon a Daffy; Ronald Reagan, a Bugs, Jimmy Carter a Daffy (who, as if in some Biblical prophecy, prepared for the 1980 contest by being attacked by a rabbit.) Some partisans may detect cracks in the argument. Greenfield identifies the current incumbent as a "Bugs Bunny", but do either Al Gore or John Kerry match up with Daffy Duck, as described by Greenfield: "He fumes, he clenches his fists, his eyes bulge, and his entire body tenses with fury," responding to every setback with "a sibilant sneer"? (Personally, I always associated Kerry with Bullwinkle. But maybe dragging in characters from Jay Ward Productions would demand a whole other set of rules.) And while there may be something to the idea that George W. Bush seems more "at ease, laid back, secure, confident" than his adversaries, it will come as some news to the United Nations that "he never flails at his opponents or at the world" — and perhaps a bit of a belated shocker to everyone else that "he knows the way things work." (Me, I'd say that Bush was more like that manic little dog who used to follow Spike the bullddog around, looking like he was about to piss himself, babbling non-stop about how they were gonna find some cats and put the smackdown on them. Spike, of course, was Dick Cheney.)

In Greenfield's analysis — and he must be right, he does this for a living — Hillary Clinton is a Daffy, Barack Obama a Bugs. "When Clinton insisted that Obama not simply 'denounce' Louis Farrakhan but 'reject him,' Obama shrugged. Well, he said, I don't really see any difference, but if you think there is, I reject and denounce. Indeed, throughout the debate, Obama leaned back and asked for time with the flick of a finger, as if summoning a waiter for another bottle of wine. Clinton, meanwhile, leaned forward, pushing her points with grim determination." So that should give Obama an edge in the general election when he faces John McCain, who is as Daffy as they come. But if Clinton should prevail, then come November, we will have the awesome, perhaps scary spectacle of two Daffys locked in a winner-take-all battle for supremacy. Worlds will collide in a way that Chuck Jones never dared to imagine.

Strange Bedfellows: Jack and Hillary

Paul Clark — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:00:00 GMT

This clip has been making the rounds for the past few days, so we figured we'd chime in. Normally, we don't go in for political or campaign-oriented discussion, but since Jack Nicholson is involved it's fair game. For most of the clip, this feels like a joke, like some bored YouTuber got it in his head to create a campaign spot using footage from old Jack movies. Even after the text starts popping up onscreen and it becomes clear that the creator of the spot is a Hillary supporter, it's still highly possible that we're dealing with that same semi-anonymous party. Then the final shot comes like a punchline — Jack himself, saying "I approved this message" directly to the camera — and it suddenly hits you that this is for real.

And that's what's so bizarre. I won't begrudge Jack his political opinions, especially since former President Clinton made a lot of big-shot Hollywood friends during his term in office. But what could have convinced him that this spot would work? What prevailed upon him to open with the Joker asking "who do ya trust?" Hate to break it to you buddy, but half of the clips you've included in your little love note to Hillary show you as a bad guy. Do you really think people will embrace a candidate because the Joker, Jack Torrance, and Colonel Jessup told them to?

Of course, it's entirely possible that Jack has another agenda entirely. By marshalling his crazy roles behind Hillary, perhaps he was doing his part to push the undecided toward Obama. It's the only possiblity that makes sense to me. But is this actually the case? Only your undertaker knows for sure.

Screengrab Bets the Oscars: Phil's Picks

Phil Nugent — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Let's make sure we're on the same page on this: if you bet money, household chores, or bragging rights on anything you're about to read in this post, you are out of your mind, and while I pity you, I will not admit in a court of law to ever having met you. I got off the Oscar train when I was eight years old and Sissy Spacek didn't win for Carrie; to have continued our relationship beyond that point would have been madness, madness! I claim no inside knowledge or deep understanding of how they decide these things, and the only thing I could tell you about the winners of recent years is that Jennifer Hudson won last year for Dreamgirls. (How do I know this? I was talking to someone on the phone when it was announced, and the woman I was talking to happened to have her TV set on. When Hudson's name was called out, the woman screamed. It turned out that it was a joyous scream, but until she calmed down enough to tell me what the hell was going on, my best guess was that she had just noticed that her couch was on fire.) Anyway, the only thing more completely charmless than the Oscars may be the ugly spectacle of a writer bragging about how little he cares about what he's paid to weigh in on, so now that we've just established that my opinion in this area counts for about as much as hair styling tips from Paul Wolfowitz, here goes:

BEST SCREENPLAY:

Diablo Cody takes Best Original for Juno because the voters have actually heard her name — it's not like, having come across it once, you can get it out of your head without laser surgery — and Paul Thomas Anderson takes it for Best Adaptation for There Will Be Blood, because that's what you get when you make a great movie but you aren't going to get Best Picture and the Best Director prize already taken.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

Apparently this is going to go to Cate Blanchett for I'm Not There, partly because Blanchett is also nominated for a Best Actress award that she is not getting to get and nominating her twice in one year without giving her anything would just seem silly. A good and sound bit of reasoning, and so I will of course reject it. And not only because I don't get the universally accepted logic by which this is agreed to be a "supporting" performance. Who the hell is she supposed to be supporting? The term ought to mean something other than "Big name actor in a role that is frequently off-screen." She's definitely the unquestioned star of her section of the movie, and while I didn't put a stop watch on it, I'll bet that she has as much screen time as any of the other Dylans. And if it turns out that Richard Gere, say, has a little more actual screen time, I'm not sure that the editor did him a favor by it. Until persuaded otherwise, I shall remain convinced that Blanchett's placement in this category is part of some conspiracy to screw over Amy Ryan, who wouldn't win anyway, because you only win an Oscar for playing a character as skanky as her Gone Baby Gone character if the Academy has already seen you in a bunch of glamour-puss roles and so knew for sure that you were acting. It's a moot point anyway, because I boldly predict that the winner will be Ruby Dee, because she has had a long and distinguished career, because she is 83 years old, because her late husband, Ossie Davis, is much missed, and because even though she didn't have much of a role in American Gangster, she did get to slap Denzel Washington, and he needed slapping.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

Hal Holbrook has had a long and distinguished career and is now the same age as Ruby Dee, so if she doesn't win in her category, his chances automatically go up by 50%. But I really don't see it happening. Philip Seymour Hoffman gives the best performance in this category — he's a stone hoot in Charlie Wilson's War, which marks a rare example of an actor giving the Academy three different performances to select for nomination and the Academy choosing the right one. I'd think he had a real chance if it weren't for the fact that he already won not too long ago for Best Actor for Capote, which makes Javier Bardem the needier candidate. Bardem's trigger-happy, unstoppable psycho in a much-discussed hairstyle gave audiences all the fun of watching a Batman villain ply his trade, but it's in an officially certified, critically approved serious film with a literary pedigree, and for this he will be the recipient of much gratitude from voters whose wives dragged them to Atonement. He's already won more than a few awards for this performance, and he'll be throwing one more on the pile.

BEST ACTRESS:

Julie Christie in a lock. Next?

BEST ACTOR:

The conventional wisdom seems to be that this one belongs to Daniel Day-Lewis for There Will Be Blood. I think that George Clooney has a shot for Michael Clayton, which is the kind of hard-hitting, tough-minded, yet still glamorous-looking movie that Hollywood wishes and expects America to take to its bosom. (Clooney looks worn-down and dissipated in it, and a gorgeous-looking man looking as much like hell as he can is the most glamorous thing in the world.) Some would argue that Clooney himself gave the award to Day-Lewis at a recent Newsweek-sponsored gathering where he serenaded his shy British colleague by saying that all actors "bow low to this motherfucker." Indeed, the whole of the media has been going wild these last couple of months about Day-Lewis's position as the great screen actor of our time. I do not disagree. But I happen to be one of those suspicious types who, when I hear conservative pundits on Fox News go on and on about how fearsome a candidate Barack Obama would be against a Republican challenger in November, and how they think that any Republican would just chew Hillary Clinton up and spit her out, I can't help thinking, Okay, would they say that out loud if they really believed it? Hasn't anyone ever heard the one about wanting to be thrown in the brier patch? So, on this baseless idiot notion, I have just decided the media have been building Day-Lewis up in preparation for the shocking upset to come when Clooney takes the prize. Remember, you read it here first! Unless I'm wrong, in which case you can just forget that I said anything.

BEST DIRECTOR:

The Coens, for No Country for Old Men, in a bigger lock than Julie Christie.

BEST PICTURE:

The big pictures here are obviously No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and I think they're going to cancel each other out. Both are impressive, violent movies that actually alienate as many potential voters as they attract. For the same reasons that I think George Clooney is an attractive candidate for Best Actor, his movie, Michael Clayton, has the smell of a loser to it. So the contrarian, can't-we-all-just-get-alone vote will go to putting either Juno or Atonement over the top. After it won at the Golden Globes, I thought that Atonement, with its period romance and literary prestige, was a shoo-in, but since then I have shifted over to favoring Juno, partly because I got bored with my previous position, partly because Juno is this year's Little Miss Sunshine, and Little Miss Sunshine lost last year. That means that the partisans of indie-flavored whimsy will be harder-driving this year. Also, it came out later in the year than Little Miss Sunshine, and is lucky in its timing: I calculate that the backlash against the backlash against Juno is now on a rising wave and will crest in time for the awards Sunday. It will flatten out the next morning and the papers will be full of "What were we thinking" pieces for the next two weeks.

Kisses for My Precedents

Phil Nugent — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Writing in Newsweek, Joshua Alston reflects on the history of fake black presidents and woman presidents in the movies and on TV, a lineage that may have greased the way for the real-life battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It's sobering to realize that the very notion of a woman or an African-American becoming president has, until recently, been treated mostly as a subject for comic or something close to science fiction, as in the 1964 movie Kisses for My President, which is all about how emasculating it is for Fred MacMurray to be cast in the role of First Husband after his wife, Polly Bergen, is elected president. Bergen eventually resigns the presidency to answer to what the film sees as a woman's higher calling: she's pregnant, and her family needs her. At least she was actually elected. The first black president in the movies, Douglass Dilman, played by James Earl Jones in the 1972 The Man (adapted, from an Irving Wallace novel, by that exemplar of socially conscious entertainment, Rod Serling), rose to the office after a perfect storm hit the line of succession. He just happened to be the President Pro Tempore of the Senate when both the president and the speaker of the house are killed by a collapsed roof in West Germany. After the ailing, elderly vice-president politely declines the job because he already has one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, the cabinet actually urges the secretary of state to ignore the rules and jump ahead of Dilman; he turns them down (no Al Haig he), but The Man remains rooted firmly in the concept that a black man could become president only through a surreal set of circimstances and that much, if not most of the country would balk at regarding his presidency as legitimate. At the end, Dilman is planning to fight to hang onto the job (no Polly Bergen he), but in order to demonstrate that white America can trust him to govern in "moderation", he has to turn over a black revolutionary (Georg Stanford Brown) to the apartheid government of South Africa.

A lot has changed since then, but as recently as 2003, the Chris Tucker-Bernie Mac movie Head of State was predicated on the idea that a black president was both unlikely and hilarious, and more recently than that, the TV series Commander in Chief, in which Geena Davis ascended to the president after the guy who was elected at the top of the ticket suffered a cerebral aneuryam, earned a fair number of perplexed and hostile notices just for its premise. On the other hand, that show also set off a fair amount of tsk-tsking and throat-clearing among people who were appalled to discover how many people still felt comfortable with expressing dismay at the very concept of a woman president; in that sense, Commander in Chief may have been more successful at propelling the debate into, say, the twentieth century than it was as entertainment. Of course, the real triumph may be in Jack Bauer's alternate universe. 24, a show frequently criticized as right-wing propaganda (and one that premiered in the fall of 2001, shortly after Everything Changed), began with David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) campaigning for the presidency and wound up with him becoming first leader of the free world, then a martyr, and finally, with his little brother following him to the Oval Office, as the head of a dynasty. In the next season, Cherry Jones is set to play the first woman president who'll be telling Jack who to blow up next. The show has had its share of white male presidents, too, but they have tended to be a far less inspiring lot. After the last one, the Nixonian President Charles Logan (Gregory Itzin), Jack Bauer might not ever have take orders from another white guy again.