Stone between Bolivian president Evo Morales (left) and producer Fernando Sulichin (right)

Noted political firebrand Oliver Stone attended the Bolivian premiere of his documentary “South of the Border” last night at El Coliseo La Coronilla, an enormous indoor sports stadium in Cochabamba. More than six thousand Bolivians, including Bolivian president Evo Morales, attended. Stone even walked away with the key to the city, bestowed on him by the city’s mayor.

“I don’t think in my entire career in cinema I’ve seen a crowd so big to see a movie of mine,” Stone told the audience. “I’m honored to bring this film to Cochabamba.”

Fresh off directing “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” for Fox, Oliver Stone is in talks to helm “Travis McGee” for the studio. Leonardo DiCaprio is attached to star as the lit-based title character.

McGee is the shaggy hero of 21 detective novels written by John D. MacDonald and could provide fodder for another Fox franchise. The movie will be based on the first book in the series, “The Deep Blue Good-by,” published in 1964. The novel tracks the Florida-based “salvage consultant” as he reluctantly leaves his houseboat to go in search of a treasure hidden by a soldier after World War II.

The rare female screenwriter working in non-romantic comedy genres, Læta Kalogridis has had her hands on a diverse array of scripts in the past 15 years — “Scream 3,” “Tomb Raider,” “Wonder Woman,” “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “Night Watch,” and “Alexander,” to name a few. Friday, Paramount releases the Martin Scorsese-directed “Shutter Island,” her adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s paranoia-soaked Cold War thriller. And this summer Fox will let loose its action tentpole “Knight and Day,” which Kalogridis co-wrote. She also served as an uncredited helper on James Cameron’s record-busting “Avatar.” Here, Kalogridis talks about the bloody inspiration in Greek myth, female superheroes and the appeal of the “unbelievably, incredibly, outrageously violent.”

How exactly do you pronounce your name?
It’s Læta, with the diphthong—it’s Latin, actually. If it were Greek it would be Lay-eta. But it’s Latin, so it’s like Caesar.

So your ethnic background is Greek?
On my father’s side.

Twenty-seven days until an election of massive consequence, which seems like an excellent time for movie pundits and bloggers to take up the question of a film about a lame-duck president. Hey, Hollywood may get to the party late, but at least it brings a bottle of wine. (And — saving grace! — with the Obama campaign successfully painting a McCain presidency as Bush: The Sequel there may be an unlikely bump; don’t people like going back to watch the original when a sequel is on its way?)

So far, the reviews on “W” have been more upbeat than we might have thought, though it seems to us there’s a little bit of a Palin Effect here. It’s hard to disappoint when expectations are so modest.

The conversation, as it has for months, is centering on whether Stone handles his subject fair-mindedly or cartoonishly; though the script, which we read at a previous stage, had moments of easy lampooning, the word is starting to leak out that the finished movie may show some subtlety. (THR’s Kirk Honeycutt: “It deserves a fair hearing by U.S. audiences, though, for Stone goes out of his way to give Bush a fair hearing.”)

Some early watchers even think Stone pulled it off on cinematic terms. Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells, who we might have expected to like it on Bush-bashing grounds, <a href="http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/2008/10/a_little_w_love_1.php
“>actually praises the drama : “One of the most startling and surprising films of the year.” Wells is an early pundit to anoint “W” as a deeper portrait of a tragic figure — and one made more impressive, he says, because its central character is the shallow vessel of which tragic figures are rarely made.

But there’s an issue of timing that we haven’t seen raised yet. So far that issue has been talked about it the context of audience (ie, right finds it polemical and left finds it redundant, so who will see it?)  And it’s true, the film seems to occupy a nether space in which the man is still in office (thus removing it from the category of historical film) but comes a full election cycle too late.

It’s bigger than audience, though. “W” is a story we’ve been watching and dissecting for eight years, which gives it a storytelling problem. It’s like trying to release a new Star Wars movie years after all the great space operas have been made.

Comparisons to other feature tales only show it up further. With electoral strategizing and debates going on constantly, we already have some pretty great and fresh onscreen drama (and with the nonstop David Gergening of this election, plenty of said drama’s Ebert & Roeper).

Paint a similar portrait of someone we’ve never heard of — or if this movie somehow could be released in an alternate universe where no one knows George Bush Jr. — and there’s a shot here at compelling drama. In this one, even Stone’s best effort may look like it’s in need of a remake.

After all the casting announcements, Drudge links and general Oliver Stone-ish handwringing, there’s finally some footage to go along with the speculation about the upcoming "W." extravaganza. Lionsgate has released a trailer — a mix of Bush behaving badly and quick shots of actors doing their best impersonations of administration figures — and while it’s hard to get a full read on the movie, there’s certainly some tonal inferences about Stone’s sardonic take on the commander-in-chief (and a bonus Kennedy joke!) Here’s the trailer so you can be amused/closely study it yourself.

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By Steven Zeitchik

Even before a single talent deal was signed or locations
scouted, Oliver Stone’s "W" was hotter than a Texas afternoon in July.
Conservative pundits were ready to pounce on the provocateur for what
they said was agenda-driven filmmaking, while Stone and his partners
said they were simply telling the story of the Bush White House without
varnish or sugar-coating.

As Stephen Galloway and Matthew Belloni report in THR today, both turn out to be right — sort of. According to four Bush scholars who read a draft of the script, the tale has elements that are unquestionably accurate (like when George Jr. comes home drunk and nearly gets into a fistfight with his father) and elements that are just plain made-up (like when the president and his advisers discuss high-level policy in a casual, even frat-house, sort of manner).

Rather than just let the experts judge, we decided to offer the first few pages of the script, in which Bush and his advisers prep for the "Axis of Evil" speech, here on Risky Biz — with the caveat that this came from a draft of the script dated in mid-October and, according to sources close to the project, may have changed in the interim.

Access to this excerpt is no longer available.

I dropped by a little World Trade Center affair at Morton’s last week. Clustered by the front door were CAA honcho Bryan Lourd and Paramount’s Gail Berman and Brad Grey, World Trade Center director Oliver Stone and producer Stacey Sher, and Paramount producer Lorenzo Di Bonaventura. Yes, Time’s Jeffrey Ressner is right, this was an Oscar award season party designed to drum up press support for their movie. Of course, what else would it be? Everyone knew the drill. Inside the party, production co-president Brad Weston was high on the studio’s slate for 2007 (most expensive movie? Michael Bay’s Transformers, natch) and really excited about 2008. And financeer Moritz Borman talked about how much countries around the world, especially Germany and France, are turning against American movies as well as American foreign policy. When Stone did PR for World Trade Center in America, he had to be careful not to send a political message; when he went overseas he was encouraged to be more critical of the U.S. The movie’s foreign gross ($76 million) has recently passed its domestic gross ($70 million) for a total of $146.9 million. As for its Oscar chances? They had to do something, because at this point, I’m not hearing the buzz.

Oliver Stone’s would-be comeback World Trade Center rates a respectable but not great 68 average from Metacritic. Unfortunately for the film’s Oscar chances, while fave raves from Time, Newsweek and the NYT’s A.O. Scott are good to have, a pan from the film industry’s paper of record, the LAT, could have a devastating impact on Oscar voters.

The Paramount flacks have done such a good job marketing World Trade Center—it is after all, one of the first pictures that the new team really put together— that there’s not much more to say about it. We all know that director-for-hire Oliver Stone eschewed politics for skillful, honest storytelling. I was impressed by the first 25 minutes I saw in Cannes; when I finally saw the entire movie last week I was moved to tears. Young screenwriter Andrea Berloff, who was improbably hired by the producers Stacy Sher and Michael Shamberg to write the script, scrupulously interviewed everyone involved, determined to stick to the facts. It is that versimilitude—and Stone’s own drive to stay real— that saves the movie from the Scylla and Charybdis of politics and excessive sentiment. What these people go through is so harrowing—and they were so near death—that the movie feels almost like it is too good to be true. [AP Photo by Stuart Nimmo: Rescuer Scott Strauss, director Oliver Stone, actor Michael Pena]
Some recent links: the NYDN’s Jack Mathews, the NYDN interview with Stone and the LAT’s Claudia Eller on Debra Hill, the producer who didn’t live to see her movie made. Three marketing stories: <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/27/movies/27stone.html?
_r=1&ex=1154232000&en=e9f6c2e60dbf015e&ei=5087%0A&oref=slogin”>the NYT; The Independent; and the LAT on how teens see 9/11.

Entertainment writers can’t get enough of Oliver Stone, because he’s fearlessly honest—he even enjoys talking to journalists—and in short, can’t resist giving good quote, like this one about his next film World Trade Center, to the <a href="NYT’s David Halbfinger:

“This is not a political film,” he insists. “The mantra is ‘This is not a political film.’ Why can’t I stay on message for once in a while? Why do I have to take detours all the time?”

Exactly. Stone is a publicist’s nightmare. Just when Paramount Pictures has worked overtime to set up their real-life drama World Trade Center (which opens August 9) as Stone’s most straight-ahead apolitical drama in a while, off he goes being candid with Chris Heath in GQ—thus handing tabloid fodder to the gossips. It’s so easy for people to fall back into that old Oliver Stone groove—indulgent Left Coast filmmaker has foggy brain warped by conspiracy theories—and forget that he’s a smart, skilled, disciplined, gifted film stylist. I’m looking forward to World Trade Center based on the 24 minutes I saw at Cannes; early word from those who’ve seen the rough cut is excellent. The movie will speak for itself. But Stone may want to keep a low profile.