Abstract

Freedom & the dream factory

This article focuses on the film industry. The author says that even though Walt Disney is not his favorite multimedia enterprise, and Oliver Stone is not his favorite director, he remembers what word old, crotchety the writer François Voltaire sent from his retirement in Ferney, a stone's throw away from the Swiss border, where he had settled so he could hightail it to safety in case of sudden trouble from his royal French masters in Versailles. The author says that he asks himself every once in a while what a fellow filmmaker like Oliver Stone and he himself still have in common. He's a director, whose approach to reality is severely tainted by cheap sensationalism, a steady barrage of half-truths and a totally paranoid view of contemporary history.