War of The Worlds Writer: Martian Exterminators Represent US, Humans Represent Iraqi Civilians

So says David Koepp, in an interview given to an obscure Canadian horror mag, thinking no one would notice in our wired world.

Too bad... Koepp is actually a pretty talented writer, a real pro who can deliver a decent script.

John Leo runs down Hollywood for its bitterness at the rest of country, which "just can't be educated" about the real nature of the world:

Hollywood has grown eye-poppingly angry with the rest of the country, mostly over Bush and Iraq, but partly, at least, because the left coasters apparently thought they were somehow entitled to a string of Democratic presidents after Clinton. The upshot is that even mild-mannered nonpropagandists like George Lucas have come under pressure to display their lefty credentials with silly political touches. The first three, brilliant Star Wars had no such touches, but the last three, nonbrilliant ones surely do. In the last of the epics, two anti-Bush lines showed up, “Only a Sith [a dark lord] thinks in absolutes” and “If you’re not with me, you are my enemy.” Lucas said the “enemy” sentence had been written before Bush’s similar words after 9/11. Maybe so, but Lucas had three years or so to figure out the political impact of the line but left it in anyway. Last May, at the Cannes film festival, natural breeding ground for excitedly anti-American prose, Lucas apparently said that his final Star Wars movie, featuring the rise of Darth Vader and the sinister empire, is a wake-up call to Americans about the erosion of freedoms under President Bush. (I say “apparently” because Cannes news reports, appearing only in various Canadian papers, had no direct quotes about a wake-up call, only paraphrases.) Paul Jackson of the Calgary Sun wrote: “Now [Lucas] says the Star War movies a political message: Fight to free Americans from the ever more frightening dictatorial tyranny of the Bush administration.”

...

“There is a tremendous drive in Hollywood to exculpate Islamofascist terrorists,” Michael Medved says. No movie has been made about the terrorists since 9/11, nothing on al Qaeda, the Taliban, Daniel Pearl, Saddam Hussein, the USS Cole, the embassy attacks, the daring and impressive attempts to track down terrorists. Nothing. Not even a movie about heroic action after 9/11—the firemen who ran upstairs to their deaths to save others in the twin towers, the people who drove all night from Texas and the South to help New Yorkers cope with the disaster.

But wait. Help is on the way. Hollywood is still reluctant to irritate terrorists, but a few movies about 9/11 heroes are on the way. And whom did Paramount pick for the highest-profile one? Oliver Stone, the unhinged director/screenwriter who refers to 9/11 as a justified “revolt” against the established order and the six companies he thinks control the world. At a panel after 9/11, Stone said that the Palestinians who danced at the news of the attack were reacting just as people responded after the revolutions in France and Russia. He thinks 9/11 may have unleashed as much creative energy as the birth of Einstein. Internet commentators are going berserk over the idea of a wacky pro-terrorist paranoid directing the first big 9/11 movie.

You know who would be a good guest for our show tomorrow? A screenwriter in Hollywood with Republican credentials who's pretty annoyed at the studios' reluctance to portray the real world we're living in, with real terrorists and real evil.

Someone like Bridget Johnson, a.k.a. "GOPVixen," a journalist and screenwriter in LA, who just wrote about Hollywood's PC attitudes towards psychopathic Islamofascism in her most recent Opinion Journal essay.

Yeahp. That would be a good, timely guest to have.