While I’ve very strong feelings about the profound waste of time and money that was the Whitewater "Scandal", I’m going to avoid delving into them as a response to the news that the co-writer of Crash will be adapting Susan McDougal’s The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk. I’m always up for a good political rumble, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a lousy writer like Bobby Moresco goad me into one.
Moresco, who took down an Original Screenplay Oscar for Crash, is planning to make his directorial debut on this project, which sounds like a pretty blatant piece of campaigning for Hillary Clinton. Along with her husband Bill (he was President of the United States for eight years or so), Hillary was hounded by special prosecutor Kenneth Starr for her involvement in a failed real estate deal, from which she allegedly (and illegally) profited. Though indictments were handed down for several of the Clintons’ friends, including McDougal, the investigation yielded very little in the way of abject misconduct. The Clintons were ultimately never charged for any wrongdoing related to the venture, though the politically motivated Starr did find time to get good and obsessed over Bill’s propensity for banging fat chicks.
McDougal’s story is interesting, if only becasue she spent a year-and-a-half in prison for refusing to cooperate with the independent counsel (which was apparently contingent on her admitting to having slept with Bill), but it won’t make much of a movie in the hands of Moresco, who’s already bragging that he has the Clintons’ blessing. Though I might share his distaste for the way this investigation was conducted, it would seem to me that the most honest approach would be to write your script and let the chips fall where they got to fall. Otherwise, you’re just a mouthpiece.
Mark R. Harris, who’s also got an Oscar for Crash, will be producing. Since it appears the movie is getting fast-tracked (though there is no studio attached at the moment), The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk should be in theaters by next fall; if I were the Republicans, I’d be all over Jerry Weintraub to finance a Chappaquiddick expose.