Did anyone watch Stephen Gaghan on Charlie Rose...

last night? He is the screenwriter for the movie Syriana and he also wrote the screenplay for traffic.

He described the amazing tale about how the Syriana movie was researched and made. He spent time with the actual ex-CIA man, Robert Baer, on whom the George Clooney character is based.

He touched upon the shadowy world of oil and gun merchants, politicians, terrorists, coup d' etats, and media. It was riveting listening to some of the incidents he described.

He also made some good political points about the lack of transparency in our government and what the ramifications of our current policies are to the rest of the world.

I am going to see the movie today and hopefully tape the re-broadcast of the interview. I just wondered was anybody else blown away like I was?

was impressed. I'm looking forward to hearing DUers' critiques of this movie and look forward to seeing it!

http://www.clooneystudio.com/time111305.html

Sunday, Nov. 13, 2005

"So, You Ever Kill Anybody?"
On an epic research trip, filmmaker Stephen Gaghan asked an ex--CIA officer, gunrunners and Saudi sheiks all sorts of questions. He turned their answers into his thriller Syriana
By JOSH TYRANGIEL/LOS ANGELES

Very few screenwriters get kidnapped. In Hollywood, where most of them live and work, they're considered low-value targets. But moments after arriving in Beirut in 2002, Stephen Gaghan, the Oscar-winning writer of Traffic, found himself in what seemed to be a hostage situation. His cell phone rang, and the voice on the other end said, "I've got something really special you can do, but you have to do it right now and I can't tell you what it is." Gaghan walked out of the airport and got into a car with a stranger. As they drove, he was stripped of his backpack, pens and belt, and was blindfolded, hooded and thrown into the back of another car. "There was a bad 10 minutes in there where I'm thinking, 'You are really an idiot,'" he says. "'You're like Mr. Magoo. You just wander over to the Middle East and, literally, within the first 20 minutes get kidnapped and beheaded. World record!'"

The abduction turned out to be standard procedure for anyone visiting Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, spiritual leader of the Lebanese Shi'ite militia Hizballah, who, unbeknownst to Gaghan, had an interest in movies and had decided to grant the screenwriter an audience--even though Gaghan hadn't requested one. Naturally, the near kidnapping found its way into Gaghan's new film Syriana, which dramatizes the politics of oil, terrorism and the Persian Gulf in much the same way Traffic spun entertainment out of addiction, drug policy and the U.S.-Mexico border. If anything, Syriana, which opens Nov. 23, is more ambitious and demanding than its predecessor. The movie has multiple narratives that are deliberately confusing. It casts an actor known for his likability, Matt Damon, as an oil trader profiting on the death of his son. It takes a star, George Clooney, known for his sex appeal and hides him behind a thick beard and a ring of flab. "It's a miracle this film got made," says Gaghan.

More miraculous is how it was made. Before agreeing to write and direct the movie, Gaghan got Warner Bros. to give him a n unlimited research budget and no deadline. For a year and a half, he read books on the Middle East in his Malibu beach house and then, at his leisure, jetted off to meet people he had read about. He crossed Lebanon's Bekaa Valley on the first anniversary of 9/11, dined with men now suspected of killing former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, and sipped cappuccino in the kitchen of former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle. Being a guy from Hollywood was often all it took to get people talking. "Steve got to do some amazing things," says Clooney, who is also Syriana's executive producer. "Other screenwriters probably want to kidnap him out of jealousy."

more...

Another one was of a party of some rich oil executives in a New York upscale apartment building. They were playing a game about where the next political coup d' etat will be. The host of the party predicted correctly and told how it is done.

Hugo Chavez has to contend with these forces also.

GO SEE IT. :thumbsup:

But wasn't Charlie Rose kind of an asshole? He kept interrupting when Gaghan was expressing interesting complex things.
Can't wait for Syriana to come here.

He also wastes time formulating his wordy questions. Sometimes though, the guest is so compelling, even Rose can't screw up the interview.

If you're looking for a lion's den to preview your film about the convergence of oil company greed, Beltway ambition and terrorism, Washington, D.C., must top the list. Dallas comes in a close second.

And the morning after writer-director Stephen Gaghan screened "Syriana," his intricate, rattling tale of corporate intrigue, Persian Gulf agonies and our reliance on oil, Gaghan still was agitated by something.

"The American Enterprise people apparently walked out, which was perfect," he said, referring to the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank. "It is exactly what happened with Iraq. They don't want to hear the bad news. They don't have any idea what's going on."

http://www.denverpost.com/entertainment/ci_3292788


Founded in 1943, the American Enterprise Institute is today the single most influential think tank in America and the country's main bastion of neoconservatism. In a January 2003 speech at an AEI dinner celebrating the life of neocon godfather Irving Kristol, President Bush underscored the institute's impact. After commending AEI for having "some of the finest minds in our nation," the president said: "You do such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds." That was a conservative estimate: Since the Bush administration took over in 2001, more than two dozen AEI alums have served either in a policy post or on one of the government's many panels and commissions--like the Defense Policy Board, which until early 2003 was chaired by AEI all-star Richard Perle. (5)

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/org/aei.php


During his research, the investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh introduced Gaghan to Richard Perle, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who is considered one of the neocon architects of the war in Iraq. It was weeks before the American invasion, and the screenwriter had just returned from Damascus, where he heard prognostications of what a quagmire the war would be.

"I'm in Perle's kitchen. He's passing out favors in the Bush administration. He's dispensing wisdom and making me a cappuccino from this $3,000 cappuccino machine. He's really smart, really clever, and I'm having a great time. I feel really lucky. I asked him, 'Mr. Perle, I have just one question. Who's going to run Iraq?' He said, 'Oh, no, no, no, we're not going into that. Who says we're going into Iraq?'

"I said, 'Really, if we went in, who's going to run the country?' He said, 'It's a shame we haven't done a better job of supporting Ahmad Chalabi. He's a wonderful man.' I said, 'Listen, Chalabi hasn't been in Iraq since 1959. He wears a Hermès tie. He lives in Paris. If he goes back there, they're going to reject him like a bad organ transplant.' "

Gaghan says that suddenly Perle got very serious. "He looked at me like 'Who let you in here?' He stared daggers at me for about a minute." Suddenly the doorbell rang. "He said, 'Excellent. I'll introduce you to Bibi on the way out.' It was Benjamin Netanyahu, dropping by with nine Uzi-wielding Mossad agents." As Perle ushered Gaghan out, Perle's wheaten terrier puppy, Reagan, began jumping around and, as Gaghan describes it, "pawing the crotch of Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu just stands there and shakes with rage. So I pulled the dog away from him and said, 'Now, now, Reagan, not on former heads of state,' and they just held the door open and let me out."

http://www.clooneystudio.com/latimes103005.html



A circuitous journey

NOT long after Sept. 11, Gaghan found his guide into the world of Middle Eastern politics: Robert Baer, a former CIA agent whose book "See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism" inspired Clooney's character in the film, that of an increasingly disillusioned CIA officer. Gaghan and Baer ultimately spent six weeks traveling together, from the luxury mansions that Middle Eastern oil barons and arms magnates maintain in the South of France to Syria and Lebanon, where they met numerous sources — among them tribal leaders, the leaders of Hezbollah, the Lebanese minister of culture and the Syrian oil minister. Gaghan took copious notes in college-ruled notebooks.

"How I thought things operated in these giant warring nation states wasn't exactly how it happened. In fact, there are these critical people in between — these information merchants. They could be someone just like Bob, a midlevel guy at the CIA, who's just a nexus point for really good, accurate information for what people are intending. These guys are like lubrication for all these endeavors. They're like a little club. Bob speaks Arabic, Farsi and French and spent 20 years there. He can pick up the phone and call a guy with Rembrandts and Van Goghs on his walls, who says, 'I'm going out with my family on the yacht tomorrow. Come with us.' Twenty-four hours later we'd be sitting on the fantail of a beautiful boat while seven blond Yugoslavians were serving us buffalo mozzarella."

Gaghan soon realized that the meetings were never accidental — that Baer was hunting for information about the whereabouts of Al Qaeda operative Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, later acknowledged to be the mastermind behind Sept. 11. ("Bob had turned Danny Pearl on to that story, and he felt some guilt about what happened.") Baer also wanted the addresses of the families of the suicide bombers who flew the planes, a few of whom he wound up going to see as the pair drove across the region's Bekaa valley.

Gaghan later continued his research in Europe and Washington, D.C., where he hung out with energy traders and interviewed members of the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank that is considered the neocon incubator of the Iraq War. He chatted with members of the Carlyle Group, the investment bank that boasts such advisors as former President George H.W. Bush and former British Prime Minister John Major; hung out with American oilmen; and interviewed lawyers who perform American legal work for various Gulf nations.

One such law firm, he says, received $36 million for "services rendered. I asked Bob what the check was for. It was to stop an FBI investigation." Everybody talked to him. After all, he was, as he describes himself, nothing more than "a Hollywood screenwriter, a cliché."

Gaghan touched on some similar incidents and specifically mentioned that AEI walk-out. Apparently he wants to have Cheney watch the movie, maybe to let him know some folks are on to him. In the interview he questioned the "energy task force" secrecy saying decisions on such an important policy issue should be transparent.

I am so impressed that this relatively young man has this amount of access and the wherewithal to tell these stories. I want to see and hear more of what Gaghan has to say. Your links are a good start.

The interview itself was chilling. Gaghan said that he couldn't put some of the things into the film simply because they would not be believed.

Anyway, I've searched the web for a clip of this Charlie Rose interview of Gaghan to no avail.

I'm a technical idiot and don't know if it's possible to upload a clip from Tivo or not. I'd love to see it posted somewhere (like Crooks and Liars). People MUST to see this interview!

Many thanks.