A Screening With Stars but a Focus on Politics

[realFedUp]

(this film is being sent out to the 23,000 people who
donated $30 to MoveOn.org in a recent fundraising campaign)

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/06/movies/06FILM.html

November 6, 2003
A Screening With Stars but a Focus on Politics
By RANDY KENNEDY

It sounds like the beginning of a political joke: What do you get when you put Moby, a former White House chief of staff and Katrina vanden Heuvel in the same room?

What you got on Tuesday night was an unorthodox attempt to combine brains, beauty and star power to focus criticism of the war in Iraq and the White House's foreign policy. The occasion was a screening of a documentary film called "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War" by Robert Greenwald, a Hollywood producer and director who has spent the last several months interviewing former diplomats, weapons inspectors, scientists and career spies to try to show that the Bush administration misled the public and Congress in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.

Part television exposé, part long-form political advertisement, the film, shown in a stylishly dim basement lounge at the TriBeCa Grand Hotel, drew a crowd of about 100 stylish people who ate St. André cheese, drank pinot grigio and looked like weathered veterans of such downtown screenings.

But the event was also a kind of New York coming-out party for the Center for American Progress, a new liberal Washington institute created by John Podesta, President Bill Clinton's last chief of staff. And as such, the opening made for some strange theater seatmates.

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