A MOVIE ABOUT THE MAKING OF THIS MOVIE WOULD ACTUALLY BE COMIC (via Gene Brown):

Bye-Bye, Mr. American Pie: Paul Weitz Tries Sharp Satire (SHARON WAXMAN, 10/02/05, NY Times)

LATE last year, the writer and director Paul Weitz set out to create a political satire about President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq. It seemed a risky proposition, both for the filmmaker - known for his teen sex comedy "American Pie" and the wistful "About a Boy" - and for the company that agreed to release it, NBC Universal: How the picture will play when it reaches theaters, next spring or later, may depend as much on world events and the gyrating fortunes of the American presidency as on Mr. Weitz's craft.

The movie stars Dennis Quaid as the clueless, if good-hearted head of state named Staton. Marcia Gay Harden plays his Laura-like wife who calls him "Poopie." Willem Dafoe, a senior presidential adviser of the Karl Rove kind, gives the president "happy pills," and fits him with an earpiece. Hugh Grant stars as the gratuitously nasty host of a popular television singing contest called "American Dreamz." And a novice actor, Sam Golzari, plays Omer, a suicide bomber with a penchant for American show tunes. As the film came to life, with hundreds of extras, nervous movie stars and 12-hour days on a tight $19 million budget, the soft-spoken, somewhat shy Mr. Weitz observed, "It people don't have anything to say about it, it will be really disappointing."

HUGH GRANT is pacing in his trailer in downtown Los Angeles, raw, restless and a little frightened. It is July 21, and the news is everywhere, that London has been hit by a second attempted wave of bombings, after deadly attacks that left 52 dead two weeks earlier. [...]

In between the frantic pace of shooting, watching film shot the day before and preparing for the next day's shoot, Mr. Weitz has been rereading the script with concern. The bombings in London gave him a jolt. "In my own head, I wondered whether I was being exploitive," he says. The attacks "pointed out to me that I'm not living in a fantasy world, and to consider that these kinds of things have occurred, and will occur." He decides to change a line in the script, where a suicide bomber is wondering aloud whether to go through with his mission. Mr. Weitz has the character wonder "whether I can ease one person's suffering by making other people suffer."

As always with such things, nothing in the movie will be as funny as Mr. Weitz's take there on what motivates the Islamicists.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 2, 2005 9:51 AM