Gunner Palace News

The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 02:04:42 +0000

Co- Directed and Co-Produced by Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's ("Gunner Palace") THE PRISONER OR: HOW I PLANNED TO KILL TONY BLAIR opens in select theaters starting March 23 rd.

In an absurd comedy of errors, a freedom-loving Iraqi journalist is mistaken as Tony Blair's would-be assassin and sent to Abu Ghraib Prison where he discovers the true meaning of liberation.

SYNOPSIS

Baghdad, September 2003: In a middle class house on a quiet street, a family is fast asleep. Without warning, the front door is crashed and American soldiers storm the house looking for weapons and bomb-making material. Cameraman Michael Tucker documents the event as the men in the house are cuffed and forced to kneel in the garden. A search of the house uncovers no incriminating evidence, however Yunis Khatayer Abbas and three of his brothers are taken and detained.

Bent on forcing Yunis to confess to crimes he did not commit, his captors press him with bizarre questions about music tastes, sexual preferences and Harrison Ford. His intelligence value exhausted, he is then transferred to Abu Ghraib Prison. The charge: Planning the Assassination of Tony Blair.

Among thousands suffering from food shortages, riots and insurgent attacks, Yunis endures by helping his fellow prisoners and keeping a secret diary. He also forges an unlikely friendship with one of his guards, who he calls "The Good Soldier".

Combining Tucker's embedded footage, Yunis' home movies, testimony from former guard Benjamin Thompson and original comic book art, Tucker and Epperlein trace the moving story of an ordinary man trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare.

Unique in its presentation and unlikely in its very existence, THE PRISONER OR: HOW I PLANNED TO KILL TONY BLAIR details an absurd comedy of errors where one freedom-loving Iraqi journalist learns the true meaning of liberation.

Lazy Ramadi

Wed, 17 May 2006 14:10:20 +0000

I think the title says it all.

Baghdad ER, The War Tapes, Combat Diary

Wed, 17 May 2006 09:41:53 +0000

Rod Nordland at Newsweek has written an insightful piece about three new Iraq documentaries: Baghdad ER, The War Tapes and Combat Diary.

From Newsweek:

Everybody had a camera, and if they didn't have it, by the time you left they did," says Sgt. Steve Hicks in "Combat Diary: the Marines of Lima Company," the best in a newly crowded field of documentaries on Iraq. Lima Company's tour in Al Anbar province last year was notoriously bloody; the 184-man unit took 59 casualties, 23 of them fatal. Director Michael Epstein lets the soldiers speak for themselves, skillfully weaving their low-resolution digital-camera clips with after-action interviews. The soldiers' wisdom and honesty shine through. Lance Cpl. Travis Williams evokes the thrill of combat: "Before anyone got hurt it was almost exciting and fun, like a videogame." His buddy adds, "There's no drug in the world that can jack you up like that. In the beginning it's just awesome ... and then the bad stuff happens and you'll have some of the worst days of your life."
Lima Company's experience was exceptional; the New Hampshire National Guard's deployment probably comes closer to the norm. Director Deborah Scranton gave 10 of them video cameras and directed the filmmaking by IM during their yearlong deployment at Camp Anaconda, subject to review by the military's public-affairs office. What little actual warfare the soldier-cameramen in "The War Tapes" do see gets excised from their takes. Professionals are behind the cameras in HBO's forthcoming "Baghdad ER," and it shows. Emmy-winning filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill spent two months at the 86th Combat Support Hospital, "the CASH," Baghdad's main field hospital in the Green Zone, bringing home the war's carnage. Asked what he hopes for on the Fourth of July, one doc replies, "To not have a dead soldier in my EMT today." Unsentimentalized, the Americans in these films will not always make viewers proud. In "The War Tapes," a sergeant says how pleased he was to see dogs eating insurgents' corpses. But no viewer will fail to be moved by the home video Cpl. Andre Williams ("Combat Diary") makes for his daughter's 6th birthday. "I'll be home real soon," he tells her. He never made it.

Having filmed the Air Force CASF at BIAP and medical evacuation to Landstuhl--the most emotionally intense thing I have ever witnessed--kudos to Jon Alpert for Baghdad ER, an important film that needs to be seen.

War at the Movies

Wed, 17 May 2006 07:24:53 +0000

I happened upon a Rush and Molloy piece today about the backlog of Hollywood feature film projects that deal with the war in Iraq. Most surprising was the revelation that Tom Cruise is slated to play LTC Nathan Sassaman in a feature adaption of NY Times Magazine story "The Fall of the Warrior King". He had better get some 4" lifts for his boots.

Reading that, it got me thinking about how Hollywood will represent this war and how war's been portrayed in the past.

Tim Page, the Vietnam combat photographer immortalized in Michael Herr’s Dispatches was once asked by a British publisher to do a book that would “finally take the glamour out of war”, to which he responded, “Take the glamour out of war? I mean, how the bloody hell can you do that?”

War, or at least the Hollywood version of it, has always been seductive to young men. When I went off to Army basic training at seventeen, we young recruits didn’t view Apocalypse Now as a cautionary tale about the “horror” of war, for us, it was just a coming attraction. So, arriving in Baghdad 20 years later--at the end of the beginning of this war--armed not with a rifle, but with a camera to film a documentary that would become Gunner Palace, I wasn’t surprised to find war imitating art.

Before finally settling on the soldiers of 2/3 Field Artillery as my subjects, I was warned by a public affairs officer about another unit I was considering filming, “You don’t want to make movie about those guys, they’ve watched Platoon too many times.” I didn’t have to ask to know what he meant. Those soldiers wanted to get some in this war, so I steered clear and made my way to 2/3 FA’s base at one of Uday Hussein’s minor pleasure palaces in Northwest Baghdad.

You couldn’t have built a better location on a studio backlot. The main building, a gaudy monstrosity with massive columns, was hit by a JDAM during the "shock and awe" bombing campaign, “We bombed it and now we party in it,” a soldier exclaimed. Out back, there was an Olympic-sized swimming pool, a stocked fishing pond and a newly laid putting green. The commander, a West Point graduate who came straight out of central casting--“the hard-charging colonel who loves his men”--lived in Uday Hussein’s old quarters, a pumpkin shaped building--complete with a circular bed worthy of Austin Powers--that he dubbed The Love Shack. It was Hollywood on the Tigris.

For the senior officers, M*A*S*H* was the model. Their wives sent them aloha shirts to wear at the monthly poolside barbecues, where they smoked Cohibas and knocked balls around on the putting green as gunships buzzed the river on cue. Their operations had code-names that read like they were pulled out of the script for Animal House or Old School: Hide the Salami, Rocket in My Pocket, Don’t Sheik it More than Twice--names that invariably brought laughter as radio operators read them over the net.

The older NCOs who had joined the Army in the shadow of Vietnam, borrowed a few pages from Apocalypse Now. Going on a raid, you could hear them humming Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries--a homage to Colonel Kilgore--as their Humvees rolled out the gate, one foot hanging out of the door, helicopters on wheels.

The young soldiers, raised on South Park, hip-hop and speed metal, made it up as they went along. Their movie could be called Jackass Goes to War-- rolling down down Route Irish on escort duty to the airport--and a sidetrip to Burger King--the PX boombox blasting The Black Label Society, Zakk Wylde screaming F*ck Iraq to passerby. In WW II, pilots painted Betty Grable on their planes, in this war, the soldiers fight with Sponge Bob by their side and Paris Hilton on their laptops. And you can’t have a war without a motto. Private Joker, the narrator of Full Metal Jacket, had “Born to Kill” scrawled on his helmet. In this war, the definitive Humvee bumpersticker reads: “Happiness is Iraq in my Rearview Mirror”.

The commander called the palace an “Adult Paradise”, but that was before his men started dying. Before Ben Colgan was killed behind the mosque. Before two Alpha Battery soldiers and an interpreter were killed on a routine patrol. Before the brigade’s Command Sergeant Major, who I had filmed at a pool party, was killed by an IED on Christmas Eve. Before a Bravo Battery soldier was killed during the uprising. Before Super Cop was gunned down in Adhamiya. Before mortars landed in the pool.

It wasn’t like it is in the movies. Any notion of Hollywood glamour was gone from their war, replaced by loss, the true face of war.

As I finished filming in Baghdad, Specialist Richmond Shaw, a young soldier wiser than his years, noted instructively, “For y’all this is just a show, but we live in this movie.”

I hope his words don't fall on deaf ears in Hollywood.

This Film is Not Yet Rated

Tue, 24 Jan 2006 20:56:42 +0000

Kirby Dick's film about the MPAA rating system--which features some comment about our MPAA rating and appeal with CARA--is showing at Sundance this week. I'm curious if it will spark a serious debate about ratings system.

The Times of London had this to say: