Thursday, April 10, 2003
Heads roll over Hitler miniseries. Canadian producer Alliance Atlantis has fired a top executive because of remarks he made in a TV Guide interview regarding the company's upcoming CBS miniseries about Adolf Hitler, sources said.
Ed Gernon, the longtime head of Alliance Atlantis' longform division, was let go Sunday after company executives read an item in the April 3 edition of the New York Post that featured an advance excerpt of the interview published in the current issue of TV Guide.
The Post item chastised Gernon for reflecting "Hollywood's anti-Americanism" by likening the public's acceptance of the Bush administration's pre-emptive strike on Iraq to the climate of fear that allowed Hitler to rise to power in post-World War I Germany.
Naughty man. See what you get for expressing an opinion contrary to the acceptable mainstream. This is the second story I've read about this Hitler program, incidentally; Elie Wiesel was complaining about it the other day too: Holocaust survivor and best-selling author Elie Wiesel has written to CBS, voicing his outrage over a new miniseries that purportedly humanizes Adolf Hitler.
TV Guide reports the Nobel Prize laureate is the latest Jewish leader to protest the upcoming airing of "Hitler: The Rise of Evil."
"For the first time in my life, I wrote a letter and I didn't get an answer," Wiesel told the magazine.
Wiesel wrote to CBS President Les Moonves about the two-part Hitler film that chronicles the dictator's teenage years and his rise to power in the early 1930s. Jewish leaders fear the series will try to humanize Hitler and explain the Holocaust.
Yes, because for some reason we can't possibly be allowed to even try to understand why Hitler did what he did. I'm sorry, I'm not buying it. Knowing why someone did a thing is not the same as excusing them for doing it. To be honest, I don't think I can begin to understand what sort of loathing would drive someone to kill six million people, but I don't like being told I shouldn't make the attempt.
posted by James Russell |
5:56 PM
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