IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
HORNS AND HALOS
Directed by Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky
Not Rated, 79 minutes
Burning books give off a bitter smoke that strikes at the heart of the liberal Western conscience. When in 1999 St. Martin's Press recalled and burned its entire press run of Fortunate Son, a biography of then Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush, it caused some concern among the reading public.
The book had made the claim, in a hastily-assembled afterword, that the young Bush had been busted for cocaine possession in 1972. The source of the allegation was not attributed, and when a Dallas journalist dug up the criminal past (five years for conspiracy to murder) of the book's author, J.H. Hatfield, St. Martin's reached for the matches.
Hatfield had previously turned out quickie biographies of actors Patrick Stewart and Ewan McGregor. But he was to discover that writing about a presidential candidate raises the stakes on your past, just as running for president does. When the news of Hatfield's sordid history broke, Bush was able to brush aside the coke allegation: "Obviously if he's a convicted felon his credibility is nothing, but his credibility was nothing with me to begin with because his story is totally ridiculous."
Into the ashes of the St. Martin's bonfire stepped a most unlikely new suitor for Fortunate Son. Sander Hicks, a lanky, twenty-something Mohawk-topped punk-rock bundle of energy, was the publisher of Soft Skull Press, a scrawny little imprint run from the dismal basement of the Lower East Side building of which Hicks was the superintendent. Between sweeping the stairs and fixing the toilets, he managed to bring out a new edition of the controversial biography, an edition that was beset by problems of its own. An appearance on "60 Minutes" left no doubt as to where Leslie Stahl stood on the book's dubious credentials, and a libel lawsuit from a former business partner of Hatfield's over an accusation of complicity in the murder conspiracy in the forward to the Soft Skull edition brought the punk publishing house to the brink of ruin.
Filmmakers Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky have taken an extraordinary trove of material and made a pretty good documentary out of it. It might make an even better feature film, a political thriller along the lines of "Z" or "All the President's Men", with outlandish characters, shadowy power, a David/Goliath battle, and a shocking, tragic ending. As it is, the level could have been raised enormously if the filmmakers had been able to marshal the resources or the imagination to go after more of the story. There are no interviews with St. Martin's, not much investigative probing into the book's claims, and little exploration of one of the movie's most intriguing revelations - that according to Hatfield it was Bush's own Rasputin, Karl Rove, who was the Deep Throat who fed him the cocaine tidbit just before the St. Martin's edition went to press. Now why would the man known as "Bush's Brain" have done that? Hmmmmm.......
Hatfield does not come off as the most reassuring of sources. His book has been branded a "clip job", he has been accused of plagiarism and sloppy research, he cites sources who swear he never talked to them, and his on-camera time shows a depressive, temperamental, emotionally volatile man who clearly has bitten off more than he can chew. But before the counterattack, Fortunate Son had climbed into Amazon's top ten, and Hatfield recalls thinking "Oh my God, we could make, like, $80,000", which is a modest amount in the Bush leagues but a tidy piece of change in some neighborhoods.
Hicks is another story. He's an irrepressible, naïve dynamo who flings himself around the world of publishing with the same frenzy he projects on stage with his punk group White Collar Crime, a pursuit for which he should not quit his day job. We see him go through three or four different images as he makes a stab at growing up before our eyes, growing out his hair, adding a Thomas Dewey mustache, putting on a suit. He's an unabashed leftie who makes no bones about having it in for Bush.
But "Horns and Halos" will disappoint those looking for a juicy exposé of W. It's more the anatomy of an unglamorous corner of the publishing world, and a study of two unlikely allied personalities. And in any case the cocaine allegation, never proved by Hatfield or denied by Bush, would probably be small potatoes on the scorecards of Bush's detractors in the wake of a presidential record that includes Iraq, a staggering economy, and controversial initiatives on the environment.
The filmmakers are disciples of the Maysles Brothers, and have credited "Salesman" as a model for their approach here. "Gimme Shelter", the 1970 Maysles film about the Rolling Stones, would be another antecedent worth mentioning, with its Altamont concert climax built around sudden death. Hawley and Galinsky didn't have cameras on the scene, but a shocking development as their story was wrapping up gives the movie more of an ending than they'd bargained for.
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