Mark Cuban and Bill O'Reilly Throw Down

Now that Redacted, financed by Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban's Magnolia Pictures, has scored Brian DePalma the Venice Film Festival's Silver Lion prize as best director (and a lengthy ovation), get ready for the political scrap between the tee-shirt-sporting, referee-baiting tech billionaire and the conservative Fox news commentator.

It may not help his statesman image on the shouting heads programs to be debuting on ABC's Dancing with the Stars later this month (he showed an ogre streak on the network's 2004 The Benefactor), but he and the neo-cons will be throwing plenty of elbows in public.

Look for O'Reilly and the likes of agent tuned Iraq-adventurer Pat Dollard (who recently showed footage from his Young Americans film-to-be for what he calls the "ever-awesome" Ann Coulter) to keep singling out DePalma and Cuban as as the right's new whipping boys. Redacted may become the Fox news tetherball in the the agony that is America's divisiveness over the war.

On September 4, an O'Reilly show operative sent Cuban a letter asking, "Do you agree that a few random and horrific crimes represent the norm of what is going on in that newly liberated country? And what exactly was it about the film that made you want to produce it?

Riposted Cuban on his website,

Maybe Bill can attempt to be fair and balanced and actually see the movie before he thinks he knows what he is talking about.
I actually have seen it and think it is an amazing movie. But to answer your question, I didn't read the script or know all that much about it before we greenlit it. As we do with several big name directors, we give them carte blanche in producing their movies.

Pointing out that his www.fallenpatriotfund.org has provided $2.5 million in grants to "solders in need" with Cuban covering all the expenses out of his own pocket, he closes his post by saying, "And to anyone who has ever questioned my patriotism or love for this country, fuck you."

A curious irony in degrees of separation is that Dollard was Soderbergh's longtime agent, while Cuban's 2929 company partnered with Soderbergh in releasing his Bubble simultaneously in theaters and on DVD--a precedent that scared the film industry until they realized almost nobody wanted to see the film in any format.

Also showing in Venice to mixed reviews (even Haggis haters called it better than Crash) was was Paul Haggis' In the Valley of Elah, whose story turns on another atrocity from the war. Haggis's film concentrates on the war's impact in terms of post-traumatic stress disorder as it affects veterans. He told Movies Online about a Marine vet he met who was told:

"You have PTSD and you need help. We're gonna get you the right help." He said, "Thank you." And then the Army put him in the brig in a straight jacket in solitary confinement with a helmet on for three months and that's the help he got.
Then he was released home and when he got here, he was told that he had a pre-existing personality disorder and that was his problem.

And that's what's being told to at least 70% of our returning vets who have, who admit that they have PTSD which is a really hard thing for most soldiers to admit because of the stigma. The ones who admit that - and there's 52,000 of them right now I'm told as of yesterday that the Army says have PTSD - 30,000 of them are being told that they have a pre-existing personality disorder.

The conflicts between left and right wing pundits as to who's really on the side of the troops troops will no doubt continue as before. (Such disagreement may be genetic, said a report in this morning's news.) But DePalma's not shrinking from the fight, as his key quotes from a post-screening news conference show: "The pictures are what will stop the war...all the images we (currently) have of our war are completely constructed -- whitewashed, redacted...one only hopes that these images will get the public incensed enough to get their congressmen to vote against the war."

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