For a British TV Movie, a Real President Is Shot
By SARAH LYALL
LONDON, Sept. 1 — The time is October 2007, and America is in anguish, rent by the war in Iraq and by a combustive restiveness at home. Leaving a hotel in Chicago after making a speech while a huge antiwar protest rages nearby, President Bush is suddenly struck down, killed by a sniper’s bullet.
That is the arresting beginning of “Death of a President,” a 90-minute film to be broadcast here in October on More4, a British digital television station. And while depicting the assassination of a sitting president is provocative in itself, this film is doubly so because it has been made to look like a documentary.
Using archival film as well as computer-generated imagery that, for instance, attaches the president’s face to the body of the actor playing him, the film leaves no doubt that the victim is Mr. Bush rather than some generic president.
The movie has not yet been released; indeed, the filmmakers were still editing it on Friday and were not available for comment, said Gavin Dawson, a spokesman for More4. But the station’s announcement this week that it planned to present “Death of a President” as part of its autumn season has raised something of a furor here.
“Whilst one is aware of other films that have shown assassinations, those have been in the realm of fantasy,” said John Beyer, the director of Mediawatch-UK, which campaigns against sex and violence on television. “To use the president of the United States, the real person, in some fictional presentation, I think that is wrong.”
The United States Embassy here directed calls to the White House, which said: “We won’t dignify this with a response.” ...
Carl