Charlie Wilson's War

He always wanted me to do different parts for table reads.

The greatest table read I was ever at in my entire life was the – I wish that – please, world, if there's a copy of this, if this exists, and maybe it's not as grand as my dreams, but the table read for Charlie Wilson's War was the most extraordinary table read I was ever at.

Really? Because I don't know if you remember that movie.

The real scripted ending of Charlie Wilson's War was – was he goes to the CIA office and they're going to give him a secret, you know, give him a medal because he's not supposed to know that.

Right.

And it's over.

For the 2007 films, we've got Tom Wilkinson for Michael Clayton, which I haven't seen yet.

We've got Casey Affleck for The Assassination of Jesse James, Philip Seymour Hoffman for Charlie Wilson's War, Hal Holbrook from Into the Wild, which I love the film.

I wouldn't say he was particularly incredible in the film, but I did like him in it.

And the winner, and in my opinion, like I say, I haven't seen a lot of them, but a great, great role, one of the best villains ever, Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Odd Men.

And for those who don't know, I did write a book.

and two other books after that, Esoteric Hollywood, which largely deals with propaganda in films and in Hollywood and in fiction.

But for those that might not know in the audience, and you've talked about this in many interviews, John, which is the interest that the CIA and other entities, Pentagon, even military, they have in Hollywood and fiction.

Why would the CIA care about Dr. Zhivago? What is that going to do in the Soviet Union? Who cares about that? Why would they do that?

Yeah, it's all about the propaganda, and it's all about combating propaganda.

It's a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week process.

In films, you watch movies or shows, you see something like The Americans, and we see back during the Cold War, number stations are putting out the message codes to the Soviet operatives in the U.S., um and i if i recall it's been some years since i watched there it is the condor but robert redford's like scanning for propaganda but isn't it also perhaps like uh messages from soviet operatives to certain cells or something like he's trying to see if he can find something maybe it's not i don't remember um does that still go on in terms of i know there's number stations sort of putting out those codes and whatnot um is that still happening at that type of a level yes okay

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, not daily yet, but there's a long battle to be waged, almost as long as the Korean War to make that case.

Yeah, we're talking about Charlie Wilson's war.

Which is an absolutely fascinating movie about an American politician of whom it was once said he could strut while sitting down.

Listeners won't be able to know if that's true for us because we don't put the video feed out, but we do have a newsletter.

Then he ventured into TV with ABC Sports Night from 1998 through 2000 and, of course, The West Wing from 1999 through 2006, the latter of which proved to be one of the most acclaimed and popular shows of all time, bringing him five Emmys.

Subsequent TV shows have included NBC Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, 2006 through 2007, and HBO's The Newsroom, 2012 through 2014, as well as screenplays including 2007's Charlie Wilson's War, 2010's The Social Network, 2011's Moneyball, and 2015 Steve Jobs.

I should note, he was awarded the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Social Network and was nominated for it again the following year for Moneyball.

And he won the Best Screenplay Golden Globe for both Social Network and Steve Jobs.

And Malice was original.

American President was original.

Charlie Wilson's War was an adaptation.

I think everything after that.

just don't think that was ever going to be the case.

Now, I think back to, if you've ever seen Charlie Wilson's War, at the end of it, they're like, oh, if only we'd built a couple of extra schools and spent some extra money, then they would have liked us.

And it's like, you've got guys like Jalal ad-Din Haqqani and Gulbadin Hekmatyar.

They're not going to be won over by building schools.

I can thank a producer named Kreil.

In fact, Kreil wrote a book called—let's see, it starred Tom Hanks and Julie— Robert's Charlie Wilson's War.

And then Judy Moses, executive producer of 2020, called me, said, oh, we read your article, you know, it's really phenomenal.

Can you help us do it? And I said, yeah.