Category: scott sforza, wh producer

Wow, we have entered the Sforzian Baroque period.

A GWB “townhall-style meeting” at a moving company in Sterling, VA took place on one of the most soundstage-like sets we’ve seen in a while. These screened supporter-packed events were very popular during the campaign. Here, the classic “Sforzian Backdrop” gives way to a more spatially complex theater-in-the-round composition, complete with white picket fences, white white people [oops], and on-message Astroturf [oops again].
But wait, there IS a Backdrop, a pop-out house, complete with shingles and clapboard siding. [and on-message banner, of course]. I’d be interested to see if WH Prod. built the house, or if it was pre-existing, and thus served as a source for the WHP design.

Whether it was intentional or not, you have to give the White House credit; this through-the-fence angle is a thoughful gift to the powerless liberal Photoshoppers clamoring for impeachment.

Or those dreaming of a good old-fashioned showtrial.

Images: top two: AP/Evan Vucci, bottom: Reuters/Jim Young via yahoo]
Shoutout to lowculture Matt for the Iraqi Defendant Crib reference.

Because it matters FAR more than you know.
You have to be a certain age to remember the shock and confusion of 1977. That was when, just as Farrah postermania had crested, America turned on the TV one Wednesday night, only to find that Jill Munroe had been replaced by her harder, kind of meaner-looking, equally cop [but not, alas, equally hot] cousin Kris. [You cry nepotism? cronyism? family connections? Whatever, Kris did hold down the job longer than Jill ever did.]
It was the most audacious swap out since the whole Two Darrins Affair, and it worked. Once. But the producers got cocky, sloppy, fat and weary, and Charlie’s Angels lost its way. When Leonard Goldberg & Aaron Spelling needed another smart one after Sabrina left, they first tried Tiffany Welles and, inexplicably, Julie Rogers with no success. People had had enough.
It seems totally obvious to me that the incumbency is too valuable an electoral advantage for Karl Rove, the White House’s Aaron Spelling, to pass up. And so the question is not if Dick Cheney will give America another “Waitaminnit, where’s Farrah??” shock, or even when [although it’ll be some time two years-and-a-day from the start of Bush’s second term and the 2008 election, with Plame, torture, spying, impeachment probabilities, and the 2006 election outcome helping a bit.] but who?*
McCain? Rice? Frist [hah]? Graham?
There are two reasons I bring this up now: One was yet another report of Dick Cheney’s health problems. The other was the screening last evening of the most comically bad Bond movie EVER [or at least until the one with Wayne Newton in it] last night on TNT: A View To A Kill, which was notable only for Grace Jones and for proving that, yes, Tanya Roberts could do worse than Sheena and Beastmaster. The last thing America needs right now is a Tanya Roberts presidency.
The Democrats’ big problem is not that, once it gets on the air, a series can almost always manage to push out one viable spinoff: Laverne & Shirley, The Jeffersons, Melrose Place, Frasier. That’s Quayle/Mondale-era thinking. The real problem is if Karl Rove is not Aaron Spelling-evil, but Dick Wolf-evil. As if there wasn’t enough interchangable Law & Orders already.
* well, it ain’t gonna be you, you out-of-touch intellectual seeking to bust me for showin’ my connection with the Amercan people by avoidin’ the use of ‘whom’.

Just when you [and by “you,” I mean “Scott Sforza”] think it’s been a rough month or two, and you’re reduced to staging photo ops in a yurt on the backlot of Far and Away, you wake up and find one of these on your doorstep, and it makes it all worth while. It’s an early Christmas at the White House.
And then you catch the headline right under it: “US is Said to Pay to Plant Articles in Iraq Papers,” and it hits you, like the helpful list the super slides under your door with the names of all the building staff, or the Xeroxed holiday greeting from your mail carriers: These guys are hitting you up for tips.

White House Productions ordered up this backdrop for use at GWB’s hotel press conference.

As the camera angle in the BBC screenshot above shows, the “China” & “Beijing” characters are perfectly placed to flank GWB’s talking head (in the TV camera’s frame).

The trompe l’oeil gates and knockers–they’re copied from The Temple of Heaven–complete the backdrop, and provide an exit “backstage.”
According to wikipedia, the Emperor would visit the Temple of Heaven each winter to make elaborate ceremonial offerings. “It was widely held that the smallest of mistakes would constitute a bad omen for the whole nation in the coming year.” Fortunately, no one believes that kind of superstitious mumbo jumbo anymore…
No exit, stage right.

And in other Sforzian news…Dateline – Ulan Bator:

To see what a barebones Sforzian Backdrop set-up consists of, check out this wide shot of GWB on stage in Mongolia [addressing the Mongolian parliament who, it turns out, meet in the auditorium at Ulan Bator High]: one head-on and two profile backdrops, and then 2-3 setups from the side and below–note the panels in the foreground next to the podium and the little planter/flag thingies below that. I wonder if that pendant hanging above center stage gets into those photos from below?
Also, Mongolian Dutch photographer Iwan Baan was on hand the official photographer for the Mongolian president during Bush’s visit, and his images capture a lot of the backstage activity that is normally invisible in the work of the wire service journalists.
Some highlights: a Mongolian TV crew’s ancient 35mm Arriflex 35BL camera; knots of cameramen perched on the ridge to get wide shots–as if the Mongolian landscape demanded anything less; the Secret Service-issue Porta-potty, surrounded by Mongolian horsemen; the meticulous set dressing, presumably Mongolian-driven symbols of hospitality–the wrapped candy showed up here as well; and the suspicious glances of security agents toward the random Baan, who gets pretty close in to Rice. [Rice & Baan. heh.] The whole thing looks like a visit to the set of a Kurosawa film. I’m thinking Ran, Kagemusha, or Dersu Uzala.
[update: thanks to Iwan for the corrections, and to Chris for ID’ing the Mongolian crew’s camera: “heavy as shit and none too quiet, either,” he points out.]

In his efforts to duplicate Ronald Reagan’s political career, he forgot one crucial lesson: watch your back around Nancy.
Here’s a paragraph from Elizabeth Bumiller’s NYT story, “At California Ceremony, Bush Reaches for Reagan Mantle”:

Laura Bush and Nancy Reagan were at the president’s side for the dedication. In brief remarks before he spoke, Mrs. Reagan recalled that on her husband’s last flight on Air Force One, home to California, his staff poured Champagne and shouted, “Mission accomplished, Mr. President!” On Friday those words seemed an echo of Mr. Bush’s own “mission accomplished” moment, now regretted by his aides, in which a banner with that message hung above him on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln when, in May 2003, he declared major military operations in Iraq at an end.

Suddenly, the Bush banner takes on a whole new dimension which I’ve never seen discussed anywhere. [This, I think, would be the time to confess I’ve never read Reagan’s autobiography.]
Reagan chose his “Mission accomplished” anecdote as the cinematic ending for his book, for which he clearly envisioned a sequel: “Finally, champagne was poured and glasses were raised. ‘Mission accomplished, Mr. President,’ someone called out, ‘mission accomplished.’ Not yet, I thought to myself, not yet. …” The Reagan faithful would’ve recognized Bush’s 2003 banner as a direct reponse–a “now, at last”–to their Great Leader’s call. To which Nancy replies, “I don’t think so.”
Previously: Sforzian Backstabbing

You can fake the accent, you can fake the peppy talks with the troops [oh, actually, you can’t fake those anymore, sorry], and when it’s off-camera, you can fake being a rancher. But what you can’t fake, turns out, is looking like you’ve ever hammered a damn thing in your life.
The problem here is the same as it’s always been: too many conflicting backstories for the character either muddles the plot along the way, or it mucks up the ending [guess which one we’re at now]. The jus’folks ever’man-o-God vs the “happy bottom quartile” Andover/Yale legacy vs the HBS Big Picture CEO President who supposedly picks the most talented people around and doesn’t sweat the small stuff.
Well, you should’ve had a grip build this set, GWB, because as David Letterman points out, you hammer “like a little girl.”

Choking The Hammer (not Tom DeLay, sorry) [onegoodmove.com, video via robotwisdom]

He can orchestrate his star to land on the deck of an aircraft carrier–at magic hour–while never letting San Diego in the shot, even though it was just off the port bow.
He can dispatch a barebones crew with a DV cam at a moment’s notice when Barney the dog makes a break for it across the snow-covered White House lawn.
He can light up Jackson Square–and the road to it–bright as morning while the rest of New Orleans sits in darkness.
But for some reason, he can’t make sunny San Antonio look enough like a hurricane zone to get George Bush a walk-on on The Weather Channel, much less the lead story on the network news:

When Mr. McClellan announced that the president had scrapped his trip, he said that with the search-and-rescue team preparing to move with the storm, “we didn’t want to slow that down.”
Another White House official involved in preparing Mr. Bush’s way noted that with the sun shining so brightly in San Antonio, the images of Mr. Bush from here might not have made it clear to viewers that he was dealing with an approaching storm.

Bush’s Crisis Itinerary at Mercy of Weather, Even Nice Weather [nyt]

[images: reuters/larry downing via yahoo; whitehouse.gov]

Scott Sforza: I’m gonna put these giant spotlights here in New Orleans, just like I did with the Statue of Liberty on 9/11/02, and if you think the next three years won’t be a half-trillion dollar sinkhole of devastatingly corrupt cronyism, too, it’s your own fault.
[update via TPM: In other lighting news, Brian Williams reports the lights came on for the first time last night in the Warehouse District –from about 30 minutes before the Bush motorcade passed by until about an hour after it left.]
[update, Wonkette has Elizabeth Bumiller’s tour of the set for the pool report:

“Bobby DeServi and Scott Sforza were on hand as we drove up about 8 p.m. or so EDT handling last-minute details of the stagecraft,” Bumiller wrote. DeServi is the White House’s chief lighting designer; Sforza is in charge of visuals.
“Bush will be lit with warm tungsten lighting, but the statue [of Andrew Jackson] and cathedral will be illuminated with much brighter, brighter lights . . . like the candlepower that DeServi and Sforza used on Sept. 11, 2002, to light up the Statue of Liberty for Bush’s speech in New York Harbor,” she wrote.
“Here’s a quote from DeServi on the lit-up cathedral: ‘Oh, it’s heated up. It’s going to print loud.’ “]

George Bush asks Condi Rice for permission to pee, plus zoomed back version and on flickr [reuters/yahoo via waxy]

As with any big feature production, studio publicists are compelled by a primal instinct for the preservation of their own power to attempt to control any and all information coming from the set

At first the evidence was scattered and anecdotal. But now it’s pretty clear that a key aim of the Bush administration’s takeover of the NOLA situation is to cut off press access to report the story.

– Talking Points Memo
On the other hand, they do put out carefully crafted selections of promotional stills to keep the protests down. Looks like Gregory Crewdson has a fan at FEMA. [fema.gov, via robotwisdom]

GWB: ‘Only you Republicans get to see
these here 6-day-old maps.’

Wes Anderson did it with Bottle Rocket, and it’s since become a classic indie scenario: you shoot the short in order to get funding for the feature. Turns out White House producer Scott Sforza’s latest short was Friday’s George W. Bush Does Too Like Black People, See?. German television crews reported that Potemkin food & aid distribution centers Bush visited were dismantled and abandoned soon after the mediapack following Bush moved on. And LA Senator Landrieu reported that Friday’s hive of emergency repair activity at the 17th St. levee was gone the next day.
But it tested well, and with the studio in desperate need of a hit, Sforza got the greenlight to make the feature–it’s more accurate to call it a mini-series, since it goes on all week, beginning yesterday. The cast includes all the usual suspects [sic], plus the biggest, blackest Republican they could find, Condoleeza Rice, who replaces little known HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, who originated the role in the short [above]. Karl Rove and Dan Bartlett are writing the script.

White House Enacts a Plan to Ease Political Damage [nyt]
As White House Anxiety Grows, Bush Tries to Quell Political Crisis
See the production blog [whitehouse.gov]

Bush went to Louisiana again today to shoot some more footage of grateful evacuees. Governor Kathleen Blanco traveled with him, although she had only first heard about the trip from reporters. Seems no one from Washington bothered to coordinate the trip with her, or even let her know it was happening until this morning.
I’m sure it’s not politicizing anything. And I’m sure it’s not an infantile, petty, personal snub by the administration meant to punish an outspoken critic who they’re trying to deflect blame for their own failures onto.
No, it’s just that no one could have anticipated the need to maintain an open channel of communication between federal and state leaders in this kind of situation. To the White House’s credit, they apparently did try Blanco’s secretary’s office voicemail last night. Seriously.
“Bush spokesman Scott McClellan said the White House reached out to Blanco’s office Sunday, but didn’t hear back…” [via CNN]

About that 8-minute short subject documentary showing at the Lincoln Memorial, the one about all the people who use “America’s Soapbox” to protest in support of their causes? Well, the Religious Right screened the first cut, and they loved it, they just had a few notes… Aww, who’re we kidding? They hated it, and they had a ton of notes, which they sent to the producers at the National Park Service. So consider that you’ve been watching the rough cut of history for the last ten years.
Of course, to even see the production notes required a FOIA request, and even then, major portions of the conservative suits’ demands and the NPS’s editing decisions that flowed out of them have been redacted. So until the Extra-Special Impeachment Edition DVD comes out sometime after Jan. 20, 2009, this is about all we know of their re-edits:

From the imagemaking insurgency at the Associated Press:

Army Aims to Catch Up on Recruits in Summer [wp, img jamie roper, ap]