Posted on 10/13/2005 9:41:15 PM PDT by nunya bidness
From Clooney's website:
About The Movie
"Good Night, And Good Luck." takes place during the early days of broadcast journalism in 1950's America. It chronicles the real-life conflict between television newsman Edward R. Murrow and Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. With a desire to report the facts and enlighten the public, Murrow, and his dedicated staff - headed by his producer Fred Friendly and Joe Wershba in the CBS newsroom - defy corporate and sponsorship pressures to examine the lies and scaremongering tactics perpetrated by McCarthy during his communist 'witch-hunts'. A very public feud develops when the Senator responds by accusing the anchor of being a communist. In this climate of fear and reprisal, the CBS crew carries on and their tenacity will prove historic and monumental.
President Truman said that Senator Joseph McCarthy, the junior Senator from Wisconsin, was “the greatest asset that the Kremlin has.” Agreeing with Truman were many anti-communist Hollywood liberals like Ronald Reagan, Hollywood labor leaders Roy Brewer and Howard Costigan, and Sidney Hook, a Marxist scholar who turned against the Communist Party.
Although there was a lot of fire in McCarthy’s smoke (one of his main claims, which is the prologue for this movie, was that there were “200 card-carrying Communists” in the State Department. Release of FBI files relating to the Verona Project after the fall of the Soviet Union pretty conclusively confirmed that Alger Hiss, a high-ranking State Department official, was a Communist traitor in spite of 40 years of denials by the left, so the State Department was Communist-infiltrated, as McCarthy alleged, although he later reduced the number), his tactics were those of a police state. Even so, using this quote of McCarthy’s as the prologue for the movie discredits the movie because it leads the audience to believe that the basis for McCarthy’s anti-communism was false, when it was clearly not false. It wasn’t McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade that brought him down, it was his tactics.
For the record, there were communists in the United States, in Hollywood, and in the State Department. They were actively supporting Joseph Stalin, who is still the greatest mass-murderer in history. During the ‘30s he killed the Russian kulaks, its entire middle class, 50 million people, by starving them to death. There is nothing admirable or heroic about any of these American Communists. They were despicable people supporting a despicable monster.
As to the notorious Hollywood Ten, sometimes referred to as the Unfriendly Ten (because they refused to name the names of their fellow Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee, the alter ego for the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, of which McCarthy was Chairman), legendary director Billy Wilder said, “Two were talented, the other eight were just unfriendly.” Even so, the Hollywood Ten who took their marching orders from Stalin have been elevated to secular sainthood by the Hollywood left, who are the people making this movie.
In 1954 McCarthy’s reign was attacked by a newsman, Edward R. Murrow, and it was the beginning of the end for Joe. This is a well-crafted, if sometimes draggy, documentary-style film about that attack. It is shot in black and white for a couple of reasons. First is that it adds to the verisimilitude of the story. The second is that the producers, rather than hiring someone to portray McCarthy, wanted to use Tail Gunner Joe uttering his own words, so they used old black and white news footage. Cutting back and forth between color and black and white to show McCarthy speaking would have interfered with the apparent currency of the film.
David Strathairm gives an Oscar-worthy performance as Murrow. If you never saw Murrow, what you see in Strathairm will give you a good feeling for what you missed. Writer-Director George Clooney plays Fred Friendly who was the co-producer, along with Murrow, of Murrow’s show, “See It Now” (1951-57). Frank Langella gives a brilliant performance as William Paley, the autocratic head of CBS, who backed Murrow’s attack, even though it threatened the viability of his network.
At one point in the film it is alleged that Paley said that McCarthy wanted William F. Buckley, Jr. to do his rebuttal to Murrow’s attack. Buckley graduated from Yale in 1950. He didn’t found “National Review” until 1955, one year after the McCarthy-Murrow dispute. I remember attending some of Buckley’s debates when I was at the University of Virginia Law School in the early ’60s. But I questioned whether he had the cachet in 1954, at the age of 29, to be considered as someone who could take on a national monument like Murrow on behalf of the most powerful man in the United States Senate. This is a strange, one line, insertion in the film that seems out of place with no apparent raison d’être. So I checked with Bill Buckley himself and he confirmed it, but he added something the filmmakers conveniently omitted. While McCarthy did ask him to do the rebuttal, and he agreed, when the McCarthy people submitted the request to Murrow, it was flatly rejected. Apparently Murrow wanted McCarthy to hang himself and knew that Buckley would be too formidable an adversary to achieve Murrow’s desired end. Clooney obviously didn’t want to reveal Murrow’s fear of Buckley, since the point of the film is to parade Murrow being steadfastedly brave. How would it look to have Clooney's valiant 50-year-old hero appear as a quivering lump of jelly, cowering in a corner hiding from an erudite 29-year-old?
Even so, this is an entertaining, behind-the-scenes docudrama about how one man propelled television into a powerful presence in its infancy. If you didn’t live through these times, this movie does a good job of recreating them.
1. THREE times, eh? and you still haven't taken the hint?
2. No, that doesn't count, even if it was accurate. Our government does not dance to the whim of "global public opinion", nor should it.
3. The Almighty Mods are skilled and thorough, aren't they, Moby?
4. Sure, alternative views can be heard here... if they are worth hearing. Yours ISN'T.
5. If the Almighty Mod deigned to explain it to you, the explanation of the obvious would be much like the following:
"The First Amendment restricts the power of the Government to infringe upon the rights of the citizens to free and public exercise of speech. It in NO WAY applies to a private property owner having to put up with crap from numb-nut visitors. One of the founding principles of this Republic is private property rights. As applied here, your rights to free speech are trumped by this site's owner's right to boot your butt off of his property. C'ya, wouldn't wanna be ya."
The explanation would be followed by a potent burst of high voltage, but you know that already.
6. That's a jackass move, DUmmy - similar in all respects to gang-affiliated graffiti-scrawling scum. I will savor your bar-be-cue when it inevitably comes.
7. Translation: "waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"
If you go away and stay away, it'll be a first, Moby
another loser troll that confuses free speech with private property rights... he was beat up on another thread for this too! :)
yeah, but did I manage to wedge that reply in before the ZOT?
Here is another example of blatant liberal lies, spins and rewriting of history while ignoring the deaths and misery brought on this world's innocents by the communists.
If it makes you feel any better, I read all of your reply; it was a doozie.
Hmmm. Well, it IS a pretty stupid comment, though I'm sure that what you really mean is that the French and the rest of the secular socialist Euro-scum that you and your bunghole Democrat buddies admire so much don't like Bush. But why split hairs, right?
Regards,
LH
gettin' yore attenshun ALLUS makes me feel bettah, Howlin ;)
This obsession with dirtying his name and career is beyond comprehension. God bless Ann Coulter for her book!
nothing - the entirety of the troll's pustulent eruption is contained in my reply.
Your font was not cast upon the forum without recognition.
(I did the same thing on another thread, called him a troll, but he was already dead; then wasted an hour arguing with some fool who said I wasn't a very good debater and sounded like a liberal because I called him a "troll." )
So I know how you feel....LOL.
I've seen you when you get in gear... dayyumm.
How could I forget you?
their obsession is beyond your comprehension because you do not think as they do.
endeavor to think like them.
Pretend you are a Leftist... breathe deep... let your intellect go numb...
endeavor to think that facts are less important than words, that thoughts MUST be consonant with Marxist historical progressivism to be considered valid, that theoretical ends justify any and all means AND excuse all real ends, that you and your leftist fellow-travellers really are the high-priests and prophets of the One True God of human destiny...
basically, take some crazy pills, dress up all in black, slap a pink triangle on your forehead, staple a triptych of Marx, Mao, and Stalin to your groin, wrap a rainbow ribbon tightly around your throat, and then goose-step around a campus quad shouting obscenities until you pass out from asphyxiation: The hallucinations you will then endure are the stuff of Leftist "reality"
Not only was he a Senator and the committee was in the House..it was really the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities..One can see the change in meaning HUAC implies.
heya, MEG!
longtime no see.
Waving Hi!
ok... what the [beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!] is WITH these mo-tards?
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