Rathergate: The Movie?

by John Hawkins | July 23, 2008 9:16 am

Just when you thought the liberals in Hollywood couldn’t come up with a dumber, less popular form of film than the string of anti-war bombs that have been stinking up theaters of late, along comes this[1],

The Media Mob has learned that a team of Hollywood insiders is currently working on a screen adaptation of Truth And Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power–the 2005 book by former CBS News producer Mary Mapes, in which she defends the 60 Minutes II story by Dan Rather about President George W. Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard, which ran on CBS in September 2004 and eventually led to her ouster from the network.

Who would want to turn “Rathergate” into a feature-length film?

According to sources familiar with the situation, Producer Mikkel Bondesen, (his credits include serving as executive producer on the USA Network series “Burn Notice”) is actively working on the adaptation with screenwriter James Vanderbilt.

Mr. Vanderbilt wrote the screenplay for the 2007 serial killer movie Zodiac–based on the nonfiction book by Robert Graysmith–and is currently writing the screenplay for Spider-Man 4.

In the book, Ms. Mapes was highly critical of how her bosses at CBS and Viacom handled the aftermath of the wildly controversial story about President Bush’s military service. Along the way, she lays much of the groundwork for what could be a juicy White House conspiracy thriller.

CBS had an unreliable, mentally unstable man with a grudge against George Bush giving them copies of documents that he claimed were received from a person no one has been able to prove exists. Moreover, the documents, which were supposed to have been created on a typewriter in the early seventies, were written in the exact same font as Microsoft Word, which is on half the computers in America.

In other words, Dan Rather and CBS wanted to help John Kerry win the election so badly that they got scammed by a tall tale that wouldn’t have fooled the average pimply faced high school journalist — and they’re going to make a “juicy White House conspiracy thriller” about that?

Are there really people who are willing to spend millions of dollars making a pro-Dan Rather/Mary Mapes propaganda film that no one, even liberals, is going to go to the theater and watch?

I guess we’ll find out…