The Nation

Zach Braff (right) and Donald Faison in a $2 million Kickstarter video. (Credit: Kickstarter.com)

Crowdfunding is becoming more and more a fact of life in America. A Kickstarter for Zach Braff’s latest cinematic effort appeared this week, and it did not kick up quite the excitement that the Veronica Mars film did a little while ago. Braff, as a celebrity and/or creator, simply doesn’t command the kind of worshipful fandom the show did, nor the sense of injustice that a premature cancellation of a good show can bring. Yet, as of this writing, Braff has amassed $1.7 million for his Wish I Was Here. And counting.

One of the great tales of Hollywood “censorship” remains little known today, more than sixty-seven years after it transpired. And who was right at the center of it? None other than President Harry S. Truman. He even got rid of the actor playing him in the MGM movie. For good measure, protests by Eleanor Roosevelt led to the firing of the actor portraying her late husband.

The 1947 MGM film The Beginning or the End deserves special review, however, as the film emerged, after many revisions, as a Hollywood version of America’s official nuclear narrative: The bomb was absolutely necessary to end the war and save American lives, and we needed to build new and bigger weapons to protect us from the Soviets. And so the nuclear arms race began.

My fascination with the making and unmaking of the MGM film took me to the Truman Library, where I was the first to consult key documents. The story of the derailing of the movie, Truman and why it was important is told in my new book, just out this week, Hollywood Bomb: Harry S. Truman and the Unmaking of ‘The Most Important Movie’ Ever Made.

I was lucky to recently see a screening of Robert Greenwald’s new film. It was different that what I expected, not just because it’s a full-length feature, different from many of Greenwald’s earlier, shorter political docs, but also because the film doesn’t champion political activists or progressive heroes, as a series which The Nation collaborated on with Greenwald’s shop did. And it doesn’t take on traditional left targets like Fox News, the Koch brothers and Walmart, as previous Greenwald productions have done.

What the War on Whistleblowers does is shine a light on normal people, conservative and traditional people, who acted with extraordinary courage, conviction and clarity when presented with information they just couldn’t live without revealing. These are people who believed in all that America promises and then sacrificed their reputations and livelihoods and risked imprisonment by the very government they swore to protect.

President Obama discusses the federal budget at the White House. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

At the start of his second term, events pushed President Obama to choose between the living and the dead. He chose dead millionaires over elderly people living on Social Security. The wealthy were given a most generous reduction in the estate taxes to be collected when they die. Social Security beneficiaries were told to live with smaller benefit checks. Instead of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable, Obama went the other way.