I awoke to this possibility after reading Craig Unger's tightly-written, highly persuasive piece on page 162 of this month's VANITY FAIR called "Saving the Saudis," which covers a lot of the same territory as FARENHEIT 9/11.

I presume Moore's doc will be a bit less studious and exacting and employ more of a common- guy touch in reviewing the incendiary facts. My understanding is also that FARENHEIT 9/11 will ask why the United States has become a target for such virulent terrorism among Middle-East militants, and that it'll generally delve into the emotional residue of the World Trade Center disaster. But Moore's film and Unger's article will be in synch on several points.

The thrust of Unger's reporting, which will get renewed attention in his forthcoming book called "House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties" (Scribner's, due in April '04), is that the Bush family's very tight and cozy relationship with the Saudi chiefs over the last 20 years resulted in a bizarre, close-to-surreal decision by the George Bush administration only hours after the 9.11 disaster.

The claim is that the White House arranged to fly several members of the Saudi family along with 24 relatives of Osama bin Laden's family out of the U.S. and back home to the Middle East before the FBI had a chance to interview them and get what would probably have been some good leads about the perps behind the World Trade Center slaughter.

"How was it possible that, just as President Bush declared a no-holds-barred global war on terror that would send hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to Afghanistan and Iraq, and just as Osama bin Laden became Public Enemy No. 1 and the target of a worldwide manhunt," Unger writes, "[that] the White House would expedite the departure of so many potential witnesses, including two dozen relatives of the man behind the attack itself?"

The evacuation was done partly in order to protect the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden's from possible hate crimes, but it was also obviously in defiance of any kind of thorough approach to investigating a crime of this magnitude.

This seems especially questionable now that it's common knowledge that members of the royal family (including the wife of Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan) and the bin Ladens were complicit in financing Middle East terrorism, especially by their sending money to charities that wound up financing the World Trade Center attackers.

For some curious reason this amazing story has barely caused a ripple in newspapers or on the cable news channels. It got some play in the press after U.S. Senator Charles Schumer raised it on the Senate floor a while back, but there hasn't been much beyond this. We all know average Joe's don't read like they should, but why is the news media just letting this one sit around and collect dust? Why didn't someone with the NEW YORK TIMES or the WASHINGTON POST write it first?

No one will be able to avoid the story once Moore's doc starts being shown next summer. My suspicion is that once Unger's book and FARENHEIT 9/11 make their way through America's political digestive system, Bush's bedrock image as the patriotic Texan who stood tall and marshalled America's response to terrorism will be severely damaged among the hoi polloi.

I'm not saying the Saudi/bin Laden story will waste him outright, but once its gets around it'll start to seep into things and smell bad. The laminated 9.11 pass that Bush has been carrying in his wallet and flashing at the voters for the last two years won't be worth nearly as much, and he'll be forced to deal with his critics and opponents on an issue-by-issue basis, which means he'll be vulnerable as hell.

I'm a Howard Dean man myself -- anyone else? I think Wesley Clark smiles too easily.

I spoke to Unger briefly on the phone Tuesday morning. He said half the book is done but he's still wailing on the other half. He said a couple of people from Moore's office have contacted him, presumably to use some of his material or do an on-camera thing of some kind, but nothing has happened since.

(You're not alone, dude. Moore's Dog Eat Dog Prods. has it own time-table and way of doing things. A prominent journalist tells me she couldn't get past Moore's flunkies in his New York office when she tried reaching him, and I had the same experience when I tried getting through for this story.)

Unger says Moore's film is expected to be finished by April '04. FARENHEIT 9/11,which has an advertising tag line that reads "the temperature where freedom burns," is being co-produced by -- yikes! -- Mel Gibson's Icon Productions, which will be dealing with reactions to another controversial film, THE PASSION, when it opens next March.

At the very least this arrangement between Moore and Gibson gives lie to the notion that Gibson, an ardent bedrock conservative, is any kind of loyal Republican. Moore's film could really be a spear in Bush's side if it turns out well and people embrace it like they did Moore's BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE.

Coinage

Artisan, Newmarket, Lions Gate, Magnolia, Cowboy, and Strand Releasing are regarded as the "true" independents of the film-distribution world. It follows, naturally, that the studio-owned, indie-styled distribs like Fox Searchlight, Focus Features, Paramount Classics, Warner Independent Pictures and Sony Classics would acquire the nickname "the dependents."

Except the term didn't seem to kick in until last Monday when the HOLLYWOOD REPORTER's Gregg Kilday used it in a piece he co-wrote with New York staffer Ian Mohr. Kilday told me on Monday that Mohr picked it up last week from someone involved in the New York indie distribution scene. So I called Mohr to ask who passed it along, but Mohr, perhaps determined to protect the confidentiality of his source and being one of those rock-solid journalists who just won't bend or buckle, didn't return my call.

So I called one Manhattan guy to see who may have coined it. Magnolia Pictures president Eammon Bowles said he isn't the one, but that he's heard it used a few times before and that it's nothing new. I meant to call Newmarket's Bob Birney, but I got distracted by Microsoft Word software on my new laptop crashing three times in the course of six hours. I should have tried former Miramax exec Jack Lechner, but I didn't think of it until the New York work day was over. I queried Paramount Classics chief Ruth Vitale, who said she'd never before heard it but thought it was funny. The same response came from DreamWorks marketing exec Terry Press.

Ahhh, the hell with it -- just give the credit to Mohr and Kilday.

Here-and-Now Candidate

I'm such a hard-boiled fan of John Frankenheimer's THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE ('62) that I'm not all that keen to see the Jonathan Demme-directed remake that began shooting in late September with Denzel Washington in the Frank Sinatra role. (An African-American guy whose last name is Marco...why not?) Is anyone hot to see this thing? I'm probably not alone in saying no matter how "good" it turns out to be, it's probably going to seem bothersome on this or that level.

Demme's film will also star Liev Schreiber as Raymond Shaw (i.e., Laurence Harvey's role) and Meryl Streep as his possessive manipulating bitch mother (i.e., the Angela Lansbury part). That's inspired casting right there -- an ultra-blonde German-Swedish type playing the mother of a guy who looks like a Jewish professor from Queens College. Jon Voight will play the ultra-liberal Senator Thomas Jordan, who was played by John McGiver in the '62 version.

The only information I'd come across until recently is that the new CANDIDATE, which is being produced by Scott Rudin and Tina Sinatra for Paramount Pictures, is substituting the Gulf War of the early '90s for the Korean War setting of the novel by Richard Condon. The demonic brainwashed-assassin plot is hatched by baddies operating somewhere near or around around Kuwait rather than Asian Commie villains based in Manchuria.

There's something off about this. Why transpose Condon's work, which came out of the Red Scare days of the '50s and contains references to '50s political figures like Joe McCarthy, Adlia Stevenson and whatnot -- why mess around and change the time and the locale for the mere purpose of re-making it? I know, I know -- because the filmmakers don't want to do a Gus Van Sant a la PSYCHO. But the idea for this thing came out of a specific social brew. You might as well remake John Ford's 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's THE GRAPES OF WRATH but drop the Oakies and the 1930s backdrop.

I know that at least two Texas guys are dead-set against this thing -- Aint It Cool News' founder Harry Knowles and film critic and feature writer Joe Leydon.

Knowles ripped it several weeks ago by asking if "anyone involved believes they can make a better film out of the material than Frankenheimer did? There is just no frickin' need to remake this movie. The audience doesn't want it, [and the] critics will sharpen their knives." And Leydon wrote in a Washington interview piece that ran in Monday's issue of the San Francisco Examiner that when the new CANDIDATE opens sometime in late '04 or whenever, "tradition-minded critics will be lining up to kick [Denzel's] butt."

"Yeah," Washington answered, "but I remember that most of them are probably older than 40. Me, I never saw the (original) movie. I never heard of it in my life. Because when it came out, I was playing football."

Hold on...Denzel never heard about one of the coolest, most ahead-of-its-time movies of the early '60s because he was spending a lot of time wearing a helmet and shoulder pads and playing scrimmage games?

"Those who are going to complain or criticize are going to do that anyway," Washington went on., "But I don't care about what people think. If I did, I wouldn't get anywhere. If I'm a bottle maker, then I got to make the best bottle I can make. I can't be going around asking people, 'Hey, what do you think of this?' Because maybe they won't like what I'm doing, and I'll wind up with nothing. I'm going to make it, and put it out there, and if you like it, you like it. And if you don't, you don't.

"That's not confidence, that's common sense. And the opposite is stupidity. At least, that's the way I look at it."

I agree with Denzel's attitude. You can't make any creative enterprise work while looking over your shoulder. But before I go any further, I have a confession to make.

I've read a 6.6.03 draft of the script for the new THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, written by Dean Georgaris and Daniel Pyne. I'm not going to give anything away except to say it's a pretty wild piece. You could say it feels as "out there" and as wedded to our contemporary neuroses and nightmares as the '62 film seemed nervy and provocative by Kennedy-era standards.

But it feels forced to me. It doesn't seem to flow from its own natural place. It has a pre-determined, re-furbished, squeezed-in feeling -- like a size 13 foot scrunched into a size 11 1/2 shoe.

I'll mention one thing. Without the Korean War to play with, Georgaris and Pyne had to somehow fit the word "Manchurian" into the story so the title would make sense. This effort alone feels labored. That's all I'll say.

Get Walter

If you just like to see movies and industry trash-talk bores you, you probably don't know or care that DreamWorks production chief Walter Parkes is "cordially but fearfully" disliked by a lot of players in this town. Or is it dislike mixed with envy? Whatever -- the case against The Man Who Brutalized ALMOST FAMOUS is laid out by Kim Masters in the new issue of ESQUIRE.

Actually, that's not true. Kim never mentions ALMOST FAMOUS. I'm mentioning this Cameron Crowe film myself because what was done to it during the test-screening process is the only Parkes offense I've personally tasted.

All you have to do is rent the ALMOST FAMOUS "Untitled" or "Director's Edition" DVD and compare the 162 minute "bootleg" cut with the 122-minute version that went out into theatres in the fall of '00. The longer FAMOUS is a better film. It has a lot more flavor, whimsy, grace and personality -- a lot more breathing room and a stronger naturalistic aroma.

All along I heard that Parkes had pushed for shorter, shorter, shorter...and had finally wrestled Crowe into going with the tighter cut because it got a higher test score in some town in Arizona or New Mexico, and because it didn't have any "speed bumps." What a crock, I later realized. What a short-sighted thing to release a cut of a film that was shorter but not as good, apparently because they wanted a print that could be shown five times a day instead of four.

Parkes later told me in an e-mail that he would have cut FAMOUS even shorter if he had his way.....good God.

The indictment in Masters' article, provided by the views of mostly non-attributable producers and screenwriters (two of them on-the-record -- writer Dale Launer and Parkes' former writing and producing partner Lawrence Lasker) along with Parkes' former high-school classmate Mickey Kaus (author of the great political column Kausfiles on Slate), is that...

(a) Parkes has a huge conflict of interest thing going on at DreamWorks, developing various projects but at the same time picking the best ones for himself and partner Laurie MacDonald to produce, and that the projects Parkes and MacDonald don't personally produce tend to be neglected, but...

(b) Despite this, and despite the fact that DreamWorks is undergoing "our first shitty year" (in the words of partner Steven Spielberg), Parkes is on solid ground within the company because Speilberg backs him all the way.

(c) Parkes is indeed overbearing in a Salieri kind of way ("He wants to write [screenplays] himself, and it's not his strong suit," says Lasker) and is perhaps a bit too enamored of his own ideas. A "renowned director" says Parkes is simultaneously "the arsonist and the firefighter"

(d) He's a turf monster who's stepped all over the "nominal" authority of production president Mike DeLuca, the former New Line hot shot who was brought in partly to get more films into the pipeline, but also because his relationships with talent are said to be as good as Parkes' talent relationships are said to be bad. But many believe Parkes has "hamstrung" DeLuca.

There are lots of other darts thrown, but that's the basic gist of it. I don't suppose it's essential that Parkes be blindfolded and tied to a post in front of a firing squad. He's probably an okay or even a loving guy in ways not even alluded to in Kim's piece. But that sounds hollow.

"The person is this article is not the person I work with," said DreamWorks spokesperson Terry Press. "I've never worked on a film with Walter that wasn't improved by his input." The forthcoming, highly touted HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG "isn't his baby, but his notes on it were brilliant and spot-on." The next project with Parkes' handprints all over it is TERMINAL, a Spielberg-directed drama about an Eastern European man (played by Tom Hanks) facing a huge invalid-passport problem when he arrives in the U.S.

Press says that Parkes' assertive personality tends to draw yin-yang reactions. "Either you like him or you don't," she says. "He's not the first person in Hollywood to have this quality."

The Way It Is

"I live in Shanghai, China, and since they don't show non-dubbed English-language movies in theatres here, I buy a lot of [bootlegged] DVD's off the street. I have probably 200 in my cabinet right now. Of these 200, exactly one was copied from an Oscar screener. The rest were either taped inside the theatre or copied from commercially available DVD's. I don't understand the MPAA's position on screeners at all." -- Tony Tovar, Shanghai, China.

Wells to Tovar: The issue isn't how many DVD's you own that have been copied from Academy screeners. The issue is how many bootleg DVD's does the typical Shanghai customer own that contain smallish, inwardly directed quality films starring Patricia Clarkson, Paul Giamatti, Ben Kingsley or Benicio del Toro?

Video piracy is driven by hot-ticket, big-studio attractions with lots of scope and CG effects and stars like Tom Cruise or Russell Crowe. Everyone knows the "little" films are probably going to be hurt this year by being thrown into the same basket as the "big" films...everyone except Jack Valenti and the studio chiefs, that is.

The MPAA position is that however marginal the effect of eliminating Academy screeners might be upon the overall piracy problem, at least they're doing something. They're doing something, all right -- they're making sure that smaller-profile flicks will have a tougher time being seen by Academy members over the next several weeks and possibly coming up short in terms of Oscar nominations.

House of Saud & Bush

"The Saudi/bin Laden story has been reported tons of times in the NEW YORK TIMES editorial pages. That aside, I'd say things are getting bad for that shithead Texan. His polls are slipping and the media is finally calling him on his errors. While I think Moore's documentary will be a push in the right direction, it's really only going to appeal to the hard left. He's a bit too radical for the vital center.

"But look at the NY TIMES bestseller list. Liberals dominate the top ten with only Bill O'Reilly's book standing out. Check out N.Y. TIMES columnist's Paul Krugman's book 'The Great Unraveling.' -- smart, informed, and stunning. Less name calling and a bit more substance than Franken's." -- Mystery Man, New York City.

Wells to Mystery Man: I'm not sure about Moore being perceived as "too radical" for the center. I think there's a growing comfort factor about this guy among many mainstream Americans-with-a-brain. I realize references to the general story have gotten ink in the TIMES and elsewhere. I asked why didn't a TIMES or WASHINGTON POST reporter break the Saudi/bin Laden story?

Mystery Man to Wells: "Perhaps they didn't break the story because in the months after 9/11 the press gave Bush a free pass, and it now seems difficult for them to go back and start accusing Bush of this or that. Despite the sort of revolt going on against the neocons, they're probably afraid of being branded un-American. Did you catch that Showtime movie DC-11? I mean Jesus Christ, talk about glorification. Imagine if they including that fact that within those hours Bush was giving out free passes to Bin-Laden's family. "

"Although I whole-heartedly disagree with you as far as your personal politics go and I am proud to call myself a conservative Republican and a firm supporter of our President, your column does inspire debate for my personal beliefs. So I like the columns and I think you should be commended for them.

"First, the fact that Mel Gibson's Icon Productions is co-producing Moore's shlock [documentary] doesn't prove that Mr. Gibson isn't a loyal Republican -- it proves that he and his company are willing to allow all voices to be heard. A true conservative does not demonize or try to put a stop to the left's ideals. Although I do think Moore's film is basically propaganda for the Democratic party, it is still a voice and according to the Constitution, it can be heard. Instead of questioning Mel Gibson's true beliefs and feelings, I think he should be commended for this.

"Secondly, it seems likely [that] this film will probably attack President Bush and quite possibly sway some people's votes come next Fall. But then rational-minded people are aware of Moore's spinning and bending of truth's, which you admitted to in your article. Just let me say this: I love movies and I love any kind of thought that a movie can bring out of me, but if a filmmaker who is a known Democrat with Socialist ideals can sway an election, than no matter who is elected President, this country is in serious trouble." -- Derek DiCiccio,Texas Golf Association, Dallas, TX.

Wells to DiCiccio: Okay, Gibson is doing credit to himself for being willing "to allow all voices to be heard." You say that Moore's FARENHEIT 9.11 film, which you haven't seen, will be "propaganda for the Democratic party." I assume then that you feel Unger's piece in the current VANITY FAIR is Democratic propaganda also? (Sit down and read it, and then get back to me.) You also use the term "known Democrat" as if it has the same connotation as "known child-molester." Have you ever read Molly Ivins' books about Bush? Or do you ignore her because she's a "known" Democrat also?