October 28th, 2020

The Guardian

We thought Reagan was the devil – then came Trump. America, we're rooting for you

By Ian Martin

Veep writer Ian Martin once raged against the Gipper. Forty years later, the US is saddled with a human cronut

Dear America,

HEY! How you guys doing? Longtime British Americanophile “reaching out” across the Atlantic. I’m here to heart you, USA. I’m like “hope the hurting stops soon” (strong-arm mid-tone emoji).

I guess you’re all making a list of The Worst Things Trump Did, then checking it twice because really, who’d believe it. And I know he’s primarily your monstrous problem. But even Brits are citizens of what we used to call “the free world”. Your president was once the leader of it. And one of the very worst things Trump’s done is to make Ronald Reagan look like an intellectual giant. Simply by comparison, Trump has humanised Reagan and elevated his memory to sainthood.

I’m currently researching the Gipper for a project and honestly, next to Trump he genuinely seems like … not the good guy, exactly? But definitely presidential. “Let’s make America great again” was Reagan’s slogan, of course. It was about “American values”, making America great in the world again. Trump’s slogan initially stood for rebuilding economic power. Now it’s shorthand for “let’s win the culture war I relentlessly inflame and sure, bring on an actual armed civil war if I lose the election”.

Of course, Trump’s humanity is at such undetectable levels he makes literally anyone else look like St Francis of Assisi. Infuriatingly, even deadweight predecessors like the Bush dynasty look competent. But Reagan? Along with millions of others in the 1980s, I was there at marches and demonstrations, noisily railing against hated neoliberal Raygun, his nuclear missiles, his utterly insane space force. Oh how we disdained him, this doddery warmonger, this huckleberry clown of a politician. It never occurred to us that 40 years on we’d be contemplating someone so much more clueless, so very much stupider, than Reagan.

None of my business, dear Americans, I know. You’re absolutely right. It’s not my country, it’s yours. You’re the ones pledging allegiance from sea to shining sea. I should butt out. And yet. All this used to be my business, back in the day when Potus was de facto leader of “the west” and led the forces of laissez-faire capitalism against the Evil Empire of Communism. “Ideology”, we used to call it. Man, we thought Reagan was the devil incarnate 40 years ago. Now the news is basically “Self-Satirising Human Cronut Yesterday On Twitter Said …”

As I write this letter of solidarity, I’m watching the televised presidential debate for election 1980, 40 years ago. Jimmy Carter the bruised defender, looking for a second term. Reagan the interloper, the disrupter, landing blow after blow on Carter – the failing economy, the Tehran hostages, the correct pronunciation of “nuclear”. Reagan was the older man but he sounded younger. What is frankly astonishing is the dignity of the debate itself. Here were political enemies – diametrically opposed on every issue - politely disagreeing, listening, yielding when time ran out. Basic human respect. And you stop and think - how is this normal, being nostalgic for normality itself?

Trump often invokes Ronald Reagan as an inspiration, and you can see how the analogy crosses his mind, like tumbleweed. Reagan too arrived at the White House from the world of entertainment. But Reagan had been governor of California for two terms. And president of a powerful union, the Screen Actors Guild. And served in the military. Reagan’s primary domestic objective of “getting government off the backs of the people” undoubtedly helped Trump the young shark-eyed entrepreneur - greedy to build, greedy for profit, greedy for tax credits.

Reagan consistently said that a free press was a prerequisite for a free country, and that it should hold presidents to account. Imagine that: a president inviting scrutiny. Trump dismisses any story he doesn’t like as “fake news” and deals only with Fox – his Pravda, his Tass. Unlike Trump, Reagan was self-aware enough to know his limitations. He surrounded himself with smart counsel and experts. Trump lives in a bubble of sycophancy.

Some of the stuff Trump’s pulling isn’t new, it’s just louder. You couldn’t imagine any of the other presidents not wanting America First. And like Trump, Reagan was an authoritarian who sent armed police in to break up civil protest. Reagan was indifferent to Aids; Trump is indifferent to Covid-19. More than 89,000 people died of Aids over seven years under Reagan administrations. Covid deaths in the US over seven months under Trump are 225,000 and rising …

In his foreign policy dealings, Reagan believed in statecraft, that ancient art of diplomacy now apparently lost in the murk of history. He saw his primary task as leading the world to peace and was prepared to sit down with cold war adversaries to thrash out a disarmament program. Does Trump even have a foreign policy, besides “screw you”? A resurrected Reagan would be aghast at Trump meeting Commie-In-Chief Kim Jong-un three times to discuss nuclear weapons with no tangible results.

Reagan’s statecraft did not hinge on whether the particular head of state “liked him”. Reagan’s preoccupation wasn’t self-aggrandisement. He sought world peace, and found gratification in good deeds. When his mind had gone, his memories lost, all knowledge of being President entirely faded, he remembered this: he had saved 77 people from drowning as a young lifeguard. That, in his shattered mind, was his legacy. In Trump’s bizarro world, drowners are losers.

Anyway, I’ll sign off. You have important stuff to do, like choosing a president. I wish you good luck; we’re all aware Kamala Harris is a result and a heartbeat from becoming America’s first female Potus. Things could be worse, no doubt. But they could also be better. The best to you and yours, my brothers and sisters.

I remain your most ardent admirer,

A Brit, Esq

Ian Martin is a comedy writer. His credits include Veep, The Death of Stalin, Avenue 5, The Thick of it and more

October 8th, 2020

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

Reagan, Gorbachev Cold War Satire in Works from Emmy-Winning 'Veep' Writer

By Alex Ritman

Ian Martin will write the screenplay for 'Tear Down This Wall,' based on the famed 1990 Reykjavik summit between the two leaders.

The historic 1990 meeting between U.S. president Ronald Reagan and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev, seen as the catalyst for bringing the Cold War to a close, is being given a dark, satirical feature-length twist thanks to Emmy-winning Veep writer Ian Martin

Also known for his award-winning writing alongside Armando Iannucci on The Thick of It (for which he was originally hired as "swearing consultant"), In The Loop, The Death of Stalin and Avenue 5, Martin has been tapped by Circle Pictures (The Man in the High Castle) to write the screenplay for Tear Down This Wall.

Inspired by An Impossible Dream: Reagan, Gorbachev, and a World Without the Bomb by author Guillaume Serina and developed by Circle Pictures president Stewart Mackinnon, the comedy drama will track the historic events before and after the now famous Summit at Reykjavik, which many historians view as the seminal moment that jump-started the end of the Cold War.

Even more importantly, it will provide an in-depth look at the bond that was created between two men diametrically opposed politically, but with a common goal to rid the world of nuclear threat.

"This story will follow a long history of political satire by telling the story of two men driven by clever women, pretending to be in control as the world around them cracked and crumbled," said Martin. "It will reveal the absurdity of high-level diplomacy, showing real people stripped to their emotional, ridiculous human core as they maneuver behind the scenes, each side desperate to seem morally superior to the other. It will humanize 'Gorby and Ronnie,' brought together by fate, unable ever to be friends but understanding one another completely."

Joining the project as executive producer will be Jere Sullivan, a senior public relations advisor for communications giant Edelman. He will serve as communications and political advisor on the project.

July 27, 2020 at 5:00 am ET

MORNING CONSULT

Opinion

Time for a New Renaissance

By Nancy Soderberg & Stewart Mackinnon

In “Traveling the Equator,” which chronicled his steamship voyage around the world, Mark Twain noted, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.” Arguably, we have never lived in stranger times and it is stunning to see how many accept pure fiction as fact. In this difficult, dangerous, and disorienting era, we must think creatively about the possibilities for change – and have the courage to implement them.

We have done so before. European civilization produced the extraordinary Renaissance following the Black Plague that wiped out a third of the European continent, killing some 25 million people during the Dark Ages. Like today, instability was fueled by what currently is called “fake news” and Europe’s rebirth was triggered by a resurgent focus on classical learning, art, and science. It produced the invention of paper, printing, the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the discovery of new continents, the growth of commerce and some of the most breathtaking art ever created. In the last century, the tragedies of World War II sparked the building of today’s international system and delivered to America its “Greatest Generation” that contributed to one of the most productive periods of creativity and prosperity in the country’s history.

More recently in the United States, art enticed people to evaluate their society and implement dramatic, systemic change. For instance, during the Vietnam War and the societal conflict of the 1960s, we saw some of the most meaningful films of all time emerge — from “The Deer Hunter” to “Easy Rider” to “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” They grabbed our attention and fueled our emotions and got us to look in the mirror.

Today, our international system is failing. Inequality is growing, with the world’s eight richest men owning more wealth than the bottom 4 billion people. According to Freedom House, 2019 was the 14th consecutive year of decline in global freedom, with fewer democracies today than a quarter century ago. Across the globe, populist leaders seek elimination of checks and balances through attacks on the judiciary and the media and the demonization of perceived foes, usually minorities. The COVID-19 pandemic continues to spike, having already infected more than 15 million people and killed over half a million. We are now seeing communities from Spain to Australia resume lockdowns as we brace for continuing surges and a possible more deadly second wave of the virus, while America looks on.

On top of the pandemic, we have seen racism once again rear its ugly head stoked by the senseless killing of George Floyd in plain sight, captured on video and streamed across social media around the world. Like the Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who triggered the Arab Spring by setting himself on fire in frustration over economic and racial inequality, the brutal death of an unarmed black man has set off global protests around the failure to provide equal rights and dignity to minorities. It has served as a rallying cry for all regardless of their nationality, age gender or race — to protest, discuss and hopefully spark society’s rebalance.

While many of the great works produced in the 1960s were panned by some as the voice of the counterculture, in fact, they were reflective of the conscience of the masses. It was the arts that aligned with our purpose and spawned change. It can again. The studios and streaming networks should see this as an opportunity to produce drama that has something meaningful to say.

But where are the films and television dramas that reflect these issues, our anger and frustration? We’ve never had more content to watch and so much time to view it — but few of the stories reflect society’s current concerns and define these troubled times. They need to spark a clarion for change.

It is time for another renaissance which can help rebuild our global institutions to address these challenges and coalesce around a common good. And while film and the arts alone will not solve our current woes, they undoubtedly have an important part to play.

We are calling on the industry to produce drama that entertains but also has a purpose. It is also our hope that others from the political and arts communities will also recognize the opportunity and take up the challenge.

The two of us come at this with a common view even though we hail from markedly different walks of life. One of us spent her entire career as a national security advisor in U.S. politics, where the facts were the most valuable asset. The other worked for four decades creating film and television drama — often based on fiction — but always with purpose at its core. That is what has drawn us together – an alignment around truth and principles and an objective to bring it to the big, and small, screen.

While we may represent the real — and the not-so-real — worlds, we believe that the two are interconnected. History has repeatedly proven that point.

We need to embrace a bit more of Mr. Twain’s definition of fiction and “stick to possibilities” and not be subjected to truth which sadly today has been hijacked for the self-aggrandizement of the privileged few.

Nancy Soderberg served as a U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and as Deputy National Security Advisor to President Clinton. Stewart Mackinnon is president of Circle Pictures and developer of Amazon’s “Man in the High Castle.” Both are part of the Portent Project, a ‘what if’ drama series where a fictional president initiates a war in order to secure a second term.

MC is a global data intelligence company delivering insights and custom market research on what people think in real time. It was named one of the fastest growing technology companies in North America by Deloitte in both 2018 and 2019.

Britain’s film renaissance: made in UK, owned in USA?

Geoffrey Macnab

The mood inside London’s Roundhouse was exultant last month when the UK government announced its new £150m Creative Industries “deal”. Ministers enthused about the strength of a sector that employs more than 2m people and that is growing at “twice the speed of the economy as a whole”. Film was at the heart of the discussion. By 2025, some were predicting, revenues from film inward investment to the UK “could nearly double to approximately £4bn a year”.

To those who had witnessed the travails of the British film industry over the past 30 years, the irony was obvious. Where once politicians had either ignored the country’s filmmakers altogether or chided them for their wastrel ways, now they were proselytising on their behalf.

Back in the mid-1980s, no one in government wanted to go near the British film industry. Cinema admissions dropped to an all-time low of 54m in 1984. Production rates plummeted. An occasional Bond movie or big Hollywood movie such as Tim Burton’s Batman in 1989 may still have been shot at Pinewood Studios but the industry was on life support. Frantic lobbying from Richard Attenborough and David Puttnam helped keep it alive but few would argue that British cinema was thriving in this period.

Since then, a remarkable transformation has taken place (as chronicled in my new book Stairways to Heaven: Rebuilding the British Film Industry, published by I.B. Tauris). Britain has had the video boom, The Crying Game, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Harry Potter, tax breaks, National Lottery investment, a huge upsurge in British-based visual effects and post-production houses, and more and better Bond movies. Stars Wars and Disney appear to have taken up near-permanent residence at Pinewood. The cinemas themselves, with their luxury seating, “dynamic pricing” and digital projection facilities, are very different from the smoke-filled flea pits of the 1970s and early 1980s.

A film crew shoots 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone' in Gloucester Cathedral

Every region in Britain is currently hosting big film or TV shoots and reporting an upturn in business. Since its pilot in 2009, HBO’s Game of Thrones has been based in Belfast, which is now also host to big new superhero series Krypton; Scotland has Amazon’s Outlander filming in Cumbernauld; Wales has its new Wolf Studios in Cardiff. Work is being done everywhere from converted bottle yards in Bristol to former RAF sites in Yorkshire and car factories in Swansea. Even Essex is getting in on the act. Dagenham looks set to have its own film studios in time for the opening of the Crossrail train line over the next two years.

Nonetheless, some industry insiders urge a note of caution about the nature of the film business that Britain has engineered for itself. The emphasis, they suggest, has been far more on the “industry” part of the equation than on the “creative”.

“The correct thing is to say we’ve become a film-making nation as opposed to a film-creating nation. You could argue that we’re so busy making that we have no time for creating,” Puttnam suggests, adding that the UK has become “a successful film-making factory, very successful, probably more successful than any of us would have imagined 20 or 30 years ago”.

This is a point echoed by fellow producer and industry stalwart Iain Smith, who chairs the British Film Commission. “The truth is that what we do is . . . export. Even though we call it inward investment, what we are actually doing is exporting goods and services,” he says. “There is a serious money stream coming in, letting British crews and facilities work on content that they would never be able to do within the British context . . . we’ve benefited to the tune of billions.”

Even in the dog days of the 1980s, British auteurs such as Derek Jarman, Terence Davies, Sally Potter, Bill Douglas and Peter Greenaway were carving out international reputations. Today, we still have Ken Loach and Mike Leigh, as well as such distinctive voices as Andrea Arnold, Steve McQueen and Lynne Ramsay, but it would be very hard to argue that this is a golden age of British filmmaking. Nor has Britain seen the emergence of any new production companies to match Working Title, the Universal-backed but proudly British outfit behind Four Weddings, Bridget Jones, Darkest Hour et al, or independent distribution outfits that compare with the Green brothers’ Entertainment Film Distributors.

In 2016, Working Title became the first British company to pass the $1bn milestone at the UK box office, but there is little chance of that feat being emulated by anyone else in the near future.

Some argue that Britain’s public film policy has been as much to the benefit of Hollywood as of the domestic industry. “Everyone talks about the ownership of intellectual property, but I can tell you that the only people that are acquiring IP are American-owned companies,” says Stewart Mackinnon, producer of Dustin Hoffman’s Quartet and of the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle.

A troupe of White Walkers cross Oxford Street in London to publicise 'Game of Thrones'

Top British talent is currently working on US studio-financed, Netflix- or Amazon-backed projects. Without the creativity of those individuals, many of the most memorable films and TV dramas would never have been made — but the underlying rights inevitably belong to the big US conglomerates.

“The voice of the producer, the distinctive British values — and I am not waving a little Union Jack, I am just saying the way we think about the world, our human values — that is our unique selling point,” Mackinnon says. He suggests that this distinctively British flavour is in danger of becoming lost. The goal of creating sustainable British independent film companies remains as far away as ever.

Independent British producers are in an invidious position. If they make films with budgets of £3m or £4m that don’t have big-name stars attached, they will not recover their money. However, if they do manage to cast big-name stars, the budgets are likely to be far higher and they will almost certainly lose control of the projects (and of the IP).

“There is no business at all in independent film, full stop,” declares Mackinnon. That is a gloomy thought worth bearing in mind when we hear the boosterish rhetoric about the hundreds of millions of pounds in inward investment and the thousands of jobs that the UK film industry is generating.

It would be perverse, though, to see things in too negative a light. Thirty years ago, that industry was in the doldrums. No one then could have imagined that levels of activity would have risen to their present heights. In the past, the British film business was a closed shop. It was very hard to break into at any level, especially in production. Now, thanks to initiatives such as the new London Screen Academy being set up by Working Title and the British Film Institute’s Future Film Skills action plan, opportunities are opening up for diverse, young talent that simply weren’t there before. “The skills base, the expertise in Britain is just dazzling,” Mackinnon acknowledges.

Many of the biggest-grossing films in recent years, whether Stars Wars instalments and Marvel superhero movies or Disney spin-offs such as Beauty and the Beast, were made in Britain. As for Oscar-winners, there has been no shortage of those either. All that is lacking is ownership of the rights behind these movies.