After ABC’s scandal-plagued “Path to [tag]9/11[/tag]” became a fiasco, I foolishly assumed that it’s writer, conservative activist Cyrus [tag]Nowrasteh[/tag], might have a little trouble finding work again. After all, this was his most high-profile project to date, and instead of creating a historically-accurate movie to be shown to the nation on the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks, he crafted a hatchet job to spite his political enemies.
The project was widely panned, not only for being a bad movie, but for unnecessarily smearing Clinton and his top national security aides. What’s more, it came under fire from both sides of the aisle — no one saw any value to using 9/11 to falsely smear anyone. When the fiction eventually aired, it’s ratings were awful.
So, his career was ruined, right? Wrong.
Now [tag]Paramount[/tag] Pictures and [tag]Oliver Stone[/tag] have signed up Nowrasteh to write another movie about 9/11. Variety has the details:
After steering clear of political controversy with 9/11 heroism tale “World Trade Center,” Oliver Stone and Paramount Pictures are venturing into edgier territory with “[tag]Jawbreaker[/tag].” Pic will focus on America’s response to the terrorist attacks with the invasion of Afghanistan and hunt for 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden.
Cyrus Nowrasteh, whose most recent credit was the controversial ABC miniseries “The Path to 9/11,” is set to write a second draft of “Jawbreaker.”
The movie is to be based on a book, also called “Jawbreaker,” that blames the [tag]Clinton[/tag] administration for failing to capture Bin Laden and praises President [tag]Bush[/tag].
You’ve got to be kidding me.
The last we heard from this guy, it was a little more than a month ago. Nowrasteh wrote a full-throated defense for the debacle for the Wall Street Journal. It wasn’t particularly persuasive.
I felt duty-bound from the outset to focus on a single goal–to represent our recent pre-9/11 history as the evidence revealed it to be. […]
I know…as does everyone involved in the production, that we kept uppermost in our minds the need for due diligence in the delivery of this history. Fact-checkers and lawyers scrutinized every detail, every line, every scene. There were hundreds of pages of annotations. We were informed by multiple advisers and interviews with people involved in the events — and books, including in a most important way the 9/11 Commission Report.
Even after all of the obvious and borderline-libelous fiction, Nowrasteh wanted to convince WSJ readers that his docudrama was scrutinized, line by line, by fact-checkers and lawyers, which was a fairly ridiculous claim, since even ABC was willing to acknowledge the project’s shortcomings. In its disclaimer for viewers, the network explained, “For dramatic and narrative purposes, the movie contains fictionalized scenes, composite and representative characters and dialogue, as well as time compression.” Perhaps Nowrasteh failed to realize that the disclaimer contradicts his “scrutinized every detail” argument.
Moreover, Nowrasteh insisted he’s not ideological. “I am neither an activist, politician or partisan, nor an ideologue of any stripe,” he wrote, adding that he is not a “political conservative.”
But as Judd noted, this is the same Nowrasteh who described himself as a libertarian; spoke on a panel titled, “How Conservatives Can Lead Hollywood’s Next Paradigm Shift”; and spoke extensively to far-right websites to promote his docudrama. Of course, he also wrote a screenplay that invented scenes that made Clinton and his team look negligent. He certainly doesn’t sound like a neutral, dispassionate observer.
And now Paramount is giving him another writing gig? About 9/11?
The mind reels.