The Stars Hollow Gazette w/ Update

So I ran across this while surfing Yahoo News-

You’ll note it’s from the Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol’s rag.

David Zucker is doing an allegorical remake of A Chrismas Carol called An American Carol, which like Ben Stein’s Expelled is supposed to combat left wing Hollywood bias.

Oh and it’s entertaining and funny and will make money too.  Would I lie to you?

Yes he’s that Zucker from Airplane, one of two and part of a team of 3; but he belongs like some to the Muslim Racist Paranoia Dennis Miller types who were scared so shitless of finding a brown skinned bomber under the bed that they wet themselves every night.

A coward.

Zucker was still nominally a Democrat when George W. Bush was elected in 2000. “Then 9/11 happened, and I couldn’t take it anymore,” he says. “The response to 9/11–the right was saying this is pure evil we’re facing and the left was saying how are we at fault for this? I think I’d just had enough. And I said ‘I quit.'”

He hooked up with an ex-Boxer staffer Sokoloff who- Hallelujah shares the save conversion story.

Although she didn’t vote for George W. Bush in 2000, Sokoloff says she was glad that he won. Less than a year later, she understood why. “When 9/11 happened, I knew Democrats wouldn’t be strong enough to fight this war.”

And started making commericials.

As the 2004 presidential election approached, Sokoloff and Zucker looked for a way to influence the debate. Their first effort was an ad mocking John Kerry for his flip-flops that the conservative Club for Growth paid to put on the air. In 2006, Sokoloff and Zucker followed that with a series of uproarious short spots mocking, in turn, the Iraq Study Group, Madeleine Albright and pro-appeasement foreign policy, and pro-tax congressional Democrats.

Spoilers below the fold.

I’ll assume you’re familiar with the Dickens.  The ghosts are Jon Voight who plays Washington, Kelsey Grammer who plays Patton, and John F. Kennedy played by Chriss Anglin.  It doesn’t appear that Zucker feels entirely constrained by the strict Past, Present, Future Dickensian chronology.

Kevin Farley is Michael Malone, a slovenly, anti-American filmmaker.  Farley is best know as the idiot in the Hertz commercial, but he is in fact the less talented younger brother just like Jim Belushi.

Here are two of the comedic highlights-

In the film, a rotund comedian named Rosie O’Connell makes an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor to promote her documentary, The Truth About Radical Christians. O’Reilly shows a clip, which opens with a pair of priests walking through an airport–as seen from pre-hijacking surveillance video–before boarding the airplane. Once onboard, they storm the cockpit using crucifixes as their weapon of choice. Next the documentary looks at the growing phenomenon of nuns as suicide bombers, seeking 72 virgins in heaven. A dramatization shows two nuns, strapped with explosives, board a bus to the cries of the other passengers. “Oh, no! Not the Christians!” O’Connell’s work ends with a warning about new threats and the particular menace of the “Episcopal suppository bomber.”

Zucker is plainly not worried about offending anyone. David Alan Grier plays a slave in a scene designed to show Malone what might have happened if the United States had not fought the Civil War. As Patton explains to a dumbfounded Malone that the plantation they are visiting is his own, Grier thanks the documentarian for being such a humane owner. As they leave, another slave, played by Gary Coleman, finishes polishing a car and yells “Hey, Barack!” before tossing the sponge to someone off-camera.

There’s another scene where Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Hopper gun down ACLU zombies trying to take down the Ten Commandments.

It’s a veritable who’s who of Republican Hollywood, “The Friends of Abe”, though I’m not sure everyone listed actually knows the secret handshake.  I’m not kidding, they have these under the bathroom stall signals-

“I thought that the minute we started talking about politics that would be the end,” Farley recalls. “There was this dance that we did–a dance familiar to conservative actors in Hollywood. Lots of actors have done it.”

“It’s almost like people who are gay, show up at the baths and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were gay!'” Zucker says.

What really strikes me about this article though is the common paranoid fantasies that all these “Friends of Abe” share and how they are working to set up a Faux Hollywood for the true believers.

“Once they found out I was a Republican, unfortunately for some people it was a problem,” he [Lee Reynolds- (former) chief media officer for detainee operations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.] recalls. Several people who had talked to him regularly throughout the shoot simply stopped. And a trip that he was to have taken to participate in an offsite shoot across the country was abruptly cancelled. Another person was sent in his place.

In another scene, which I distinctly recall reading but can no longer find, charitably because it describes the climax of the movie and spoils it, the character played by Farley materializes in a hot burning office choking with dust.  When he complains Kelsey Grammer screams at him- “That’s the dust of 3000 bodies!”

Zucker remarks that scene was hard to work into a comedy.

But it all works out in the end, Farley sees the error of his ways and promises of keep the Spirit of Fear of Terrorism in his heart for the rest of his life and and persecute Muslims every day.

Update:

Hah.  Found it!  Some minor difference in the details but pretty close.

In a clip we saw, Washington takes Malone to St. Paul’s Cathedral to lecture him on freedom of religion and “freedom of speech, which you abuse.” Malone is grossed out by dust in the priest’s box, so the doors open onto the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. “This is the dust of 3000 innocent human beings!” bellows Washington. Malone whimpers that he’s just making movies. Washington won’t have it. “Is that what you plan to say on Judgment Day?”

“That scene,” said Sokoloff, “is hard to put in a comedy. But we had to do it.”