George W. Bush and Hollywood

George W. Bush, Filmmaker? Certainly a stretch, but Psychotronic Video Guide's Michael J. Weldon points out an extended piece that from 1983 to 1992 Bush was on the board of Silver Screen Management, a firm that produced films for Tri Star and then Disney. Bush, of course, was never credited on any of the movies Silver Screen Management produced (he seems to a well-connected moneyman, if anything), but Weldon speculates on Bush's involvement in the process of moviemaking: " I'd love to know if GWB did anything besides lend his famous name and share in the profits of these movies. Did he help secure locations, read or approve scripts or make casting suggestions? Did he attend premieres and party with the stars?"

The films themselves? Silver Screen Management produced 74 major release features while Bush was on the board, and most of them are hardly memorable --the sort of instantly forgettable Hollywood product that used to gather dust on Blockbuster shelves in the late '80s and show up on pay channels to fill up the hole in their schedules: The Black Cauldron, My Science Project, Tough Guys (with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas), Adventures in Babysitting, Can't Buy Me Love, Ernest Goes to Camp, the shitty remake of D.O.A., V.I. Warshawski. Bush scored some hits, too: Three Men and a Baby, Cocktail, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, The Little Mermaid. The common thread for all these films was that these were the one of the first manifestations of creeping corporatism that now seems to run Hollywood: the high concept package deal, heavy duty marketing and focus group surveys, the gleaming perfect surface of glitz, spectacle, and sentiment. Entertainment was always a commodity in Hollywood, but in the '80s it became a science. Weldon writes: "Note how well Silver Screen Management practiced product placements, recycling (remaking French films) and outsourcing (filming in other countries)." Indeed, one can make analogies to Bush's style of politics: the spectacle, the control and marketing of image and message, product placement (Hallibuton, any one?), the manufactured edginess of Bush's maverick image, the thumbs-up platitudes. It's like some forgotten '80s movie, only it's not relegated to a 2 AM showing on The Movie Channel. It's live.