Friday, September 24, 2004
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Filmmaker David O. Russell has found a distributor for a new anti-war documentary that was supposed to be featured on a new DVD of his George Clooney film "Three Kings" before Warner Bros. rejected it.
Cinema Libre Studio announced this week it plans to release Russell's film, "Soldiers Pay," on a double-bill with the documentary "Uncovered: The War in Iraq."
"The political [documentary] double-bill makes a powerful duo, complementing each other with strong arguments about the consequences of war and the lies that were told to get there," Lauri Blue, spokeswoman for the company, said Wednesday.
The 35-minute "Soldiers Pay" features interviews with Iraqi refugees, human rights officials and veterans of the current war on Iraq.
Warner Bros. officials have said they thought the documentary for the DVD of 1999's "Three Kings" would focus on people from the Middle East who appeared in or helped with that movie.
"Three Kings" starred Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube as three American soldiers searching for gold in Iraq during the Gulf War of the early 1990s.
Instead, the studio rejected the finished product as a "polemic about war," but returned the rights to the $200,000 documentary to Russell, freeing him to find distribution elsewhere.
The move by Warner Bros. was notable in a year when the Walt Disney Co. cited political sensitivity for its refusal to distribute Michael Moore's blockbuster "Fahrenheit 9/11."
"Uncovered" was made by filmmaker Robert Greenwald, who accused Fox News of Republican bias in the recent documentary "Outfoxed."
Russell's film also will become part of the "Uncovered" DVD release, set for Oct. 19.
Russell also directed the new comedy "I (Heart) Huckabees" with Jude Law, Naomi Watts and Dustin Hoffman.