To: Sully- who wrote (64302 ) 2/22/2008 3:50:12 PM From: Sully- Respond to of 90947 Yeah, Hollywood’s All About The Money By Dirty Harry on General LIBERTAS Look at all the wrangling going on over a film that made a total of $91,867 in 14 theatres over thirty-days. Read this and see if you can guess why there’s such a fuss: <<< HBO has picked up pay TV rights to the controversial Oscar-nommed doc “Taxi to the Dark Side” after Discovery Channel opted not to run it for now. The pay cabler negotiated with Discovery Communications to assume the first TV run of the doc, which will now bow on HBO in September. As part of the deal, Discovery maintained rights to run “Taxi to the Dark Side” on its Investigation Discovery channel; those basic cable airings won’t begin until 2009. “Taxi to the Dark Side,” directed, written and produced by Alex Gibney (”Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”), focuses on the murder of a taxi driver at the U.S.’ Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. The homicide is used as a backdrop to investigate American use of detention and condoning of torture in interrogations. After it was apparent Discovery wouldn’t run “Taxi” this year, HBO Documentary Films prexy Sheila Nevins said Gibney contacted her team directly to gauge their interest. “We heard it was available, and now it’s ours,” Nevins said. “We’re happy to put it on, especially before the election. When we see something we want and it’s available, we go after it. It’s raw, it’s truthful, it’s sad, and it’s important for people to see. It has all the things we like in documentaries.” Gibney said he was concerned that “Taxi” might not hit TV screens — where it would get wider exposure than in theaters — this year. “I was upset,” he said. “This is a big election year, and these issues are important right now.” >>> So, here you have a film 99.99999999% of liberals! ignored but It. Must. Get. On. HBO. Now. And what “issues are important right now?” I guess it’s looking at the incredibly selfless and generous response of America to the attacks of 9/11 through the soda straw of one incident, where one supposedly innocent man died, all in the hopes of electing a man who’s promised to feed 25 million innocent Iraqis to al-Queda and death squads. Would someone please be kind enough to walk me through the logic and compassion of that kind of thinking. And while you’re at it, tell me again how Hollywood is money driven…? libertyfilmfestival.com