Emmbedded - Tim Robbins

[seemslikeadream]

something to check out again

http://www.embeddedlive.com/video.html#
http://www.embeddedlive.com/




http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/1121-11.htm

'Embedded' by Tim Robbins Opens
Actor's Play Portrays Journos in Fictional War



NEW YORK -- Tim Robbins' new play Embedded, centering on U.S. soldiers and reporters in Iraq -- has opened in Hollywood and runs through Dec. 21 at the Actor's Gang Theater.


Embedded
Written and Directed by Tim Robbins
Previews begin October 30th, Opens November 15, 2003
http://www.theactorsgang.com/

A raucous commentary about the journalists, politicians and media frenzy surrounding a modern day war. Fringed with the jaded sarcasm of front line journalists, the outrageous schemes of government officials and the biting humor of a show-tune singing colonel. At the center of the madness, the play focuses on the brave women and men fighting on the front lines.

Robbins interviewed embedded journalist Evan Wright of Rolling Stone as part of his research, along with Anthony Swofford, the Gulf War I veteran who wrote the popular book Jarhead.

Cofounder of the Actors Gang in 1981, Robbins is both writer and director of "Embedded," which depicts soldiers getting ready to leave for war in an oil-rich land called "Gomorrah" to fight against the "butcher of Babylon."

Also featured are masked characters in the government's "Office of Special Plans" with names like Rum-Rum, Pearly White, and Woof.

Reporters are pictured caving in to military authority, personified by their "minder," a Colonel Hardchannel, who refers to them as "maggot journalists."

[Pastiche423]

1. I love Tim Robbins

and Susan Sarandon for their activism!

Wish I could see the play.

[Marnieworld]

2. you can see the play

By the DVD online. I did recently on ebay but I bet it's in other places.

I had a front row seat to the play when it was in NYC. It was great theater besides the politics and it was a thrill to literally be inches from the man. I love Tim so much. He is what an artist should be.

And of course Embedded was amazingly accurate at a time when the content within it was unheard of. He was very brave to do it.

on edit:

Found link to buy it:

http://store.embeddedlivesales.com/embeddedlive.html

Worth it I promise!

[Pastiche423]

4. Thank you for finding the site!

I will be buying the DVD today.

I still have Tim's speech from 2003, A Chill Wind is Blowing in This Nation on my hard drive.

http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0416-01.htm

[Peace Patriot]

3. "Embedded" should become the "Dr. Strangelove" of the 21st century.

This play badly needs to be made into a movie.

And we don't know the half of "embedded." The play should evolve, as it becomes a movie, in response to fresh revelations, for instance, 'Mata Hari' NYT war propagandist Judith Miller and her clandestine meetings with Scooter Libby, to out honest CIA agents who wouldn't "stovepipe" WMD intel, and what-all Ms. Miller was doing in Iraq, accompanying the US troops who were "hunting" for WMDs that everybody knew weren't there, with a special "embed" contract signed by Donald Rumsfeld.

The story of the Bush Junta and its heinous war and its "Alice in Wonderland" world is almost too crazy to create as fiction. It's as if "Dr. Strangelove" walked off the screen into reality. This aspect of it needs to be dealt with in film. That madness become real. I can't think of a way to do it, but it needs to be done. We need some way of understanding living in Bushworld. Nothing--not even "Catch 22" or "M.A.S.H."--comes close. We almost need a new art form. How do you encompass Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and secret torture dungeons around the world, and the vice president's own company looting the federal treasury in broad daylight, and truckloads of money disappeared in Iraq, and electronic voting machines owned and controlled by Bushite corporations, using "trade secret" code to "count" all our votes, with not a peep out of the Democratic Party leadership, and multiple tax cuts for the super-rich and a $10 trillion deficit, and U.S. soldiers protecting oil contracts for Bush's and Cheney's buds, and C-Span devoting an entire day to Grover Norquist's rightwing insanity convention, and an out-of-control "military-industrial complex" manufacturing wars and hogtieing Congress critters, and one Bushite "pod person" after another going to prison for corruption, but the two war criminals at the top are too rich and too powerful to prosecute, and meanwhile the planet's weather starts going wacko, and all the hairdo's on TV talk about is some bimbo's pink funeral, and all the rest of this madness, in a movie, for all of us to laugh ourselves senseless, and finally understand what we're going through?

Is that too much to ask of a filmmaker? Tim?

[izzybeans]

5. I saw the play at New York Public Theater. It remains one of my favorite

live performances. I wish he'd introduce a new act with updates.