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Judging from that early script, W can also be a lighthearted minuet one moment and a sobering dirge the next. It's not an entirely unsympathetic portrait. Toggling back and forth between Bush's hard-partying youth and his current stint as leader of the free world, it hits the high notes of the president's rise to power, but also lingers with deadpan detachment (or is that amusement?) on many of his lows. There's a scene of 26-year-old Bush peeling his car to a stop on his parents' front lawn and drunkenly hurling insults at his father (''Thank you, Mr. Perfect. Mr. War Hero. Mr. F---ing-God-Almighty!''), while another scene set a few years later finds Bush nearly crashing a small plane while flying under the influence. Some of the bits inside the White House are even more harrowing. ''Just keep your ego in check,'' Bush snaps at Cheney during one chilly exchange. ''I'm the president. I'm the decider.'' In one Strangelove-like moment, he tries to sell Tony Blair on the idea of provoking war with Iraq by flying a U.S. plane painted with U.N. colors over Baghdad, baiting Saddam to shoot it down. ''Plan B is assassinate the sonofabitch,'' Bush informs the horrified prime minister.
Stone insists that every scene in W will be rooted in truth, and that he and Weiser drew from more than 20 diverse books — although, it should be noted, some accounts may have come from disgruntled former staffers. The director acknowledges that he had to speculate on some of the dialogue and delivery. ''You take all the facts and take the spirit of the scene and make it accurate to what you think happened,'' he says. ''But if you take one speech from Cincinnati and one speech from the U.N. and turn them into one scene, who cares?'' A few people, it turns out. Even before actors have arrived on the set — even before there are any sets — debate over the movie's accuracy is already heating up. The Hollywood Reporter even asked historians, including Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush, to vet the early script. ''My quarrel with the script isn't that it departed from factual reality here and there, but that it just misses the guy,'' Draper tells EW. ''You come away with an even more hyperbolized caricature of Bush the Cowboy President than is already out there.''
NEXT PAGE: ''When push comes to shove, all these media companies are chickens---,'' Stone says. ''They're all part of conglomerates.''
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