First “Chicago” was filmed in Toronto. Then the cable story of dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker and mayor Rudy Giuliani. And now ? from the people who should know much, much better comes, are you ready? ? a TV movie on George W. Bush.
“The Big Dance,” which makes a 9/11 hero of Bush, was shot on a Toronto sound stage last month. The U.S. audience will see the two-hour movie on Showtime in September.
Here’s the part that really hurts. “Dance” was produced in collaboration with Toronto-based Dufferin Gate Productions in order to take advantage of the Canadian government incentives.
The movie is eligible for the federal Film or Video Production Services Tax Credit, the Ontario Film & Television Production Services Tax Credit and a federal tax-shelter program. Altogether, it could result in hundreds of thousands of dollars in Canadian government checks being sent to producers, according to a story from Bell Globemedia.
Lionel Chetwynd, a White House insider and apologist, wrote and produced “The Big Dance” with the close cooperation of the prez and his top officials.
The movie is an effort to reconstruct Bush as a determined and principled military leader. The public image of Bush, who sat out Viet Nam military service and often has been derided as a doe-eyed naif on satirical TV shows, is a key concern to White House communications offices, many of them friends of Chetwynd, the Globemedia story stated.
In accounts such as Bob Woodward’s stories in the Washington Post, Bush seems uncertain after the terrorist attack, and spends a lot of time approving proposals from his aides. In “Dance,” Bush delivers long, stirring speeches that immediately become policy.
(Thanks to SAG/AFTRA’s Kit Woods for getting this story out. “Can there be a better example of how our industry is being decimated by foreign competition?” she ask
