Washingtonpost.com: Live Online

Washington Post Style correspondent Sharon Waxman brings Hollywood & Vine Live Online for a discussion about the inner workings of the movie industry. There is a whole political universe behind how the movies happen, the tug and pull of egos, financial imperatives, a pecking order for privileges as well as genuine creative impulses.

Sharon Waxman will be online Tuesday, Dec. 4, at 2 p.m. EST, to answer your questions and field your comments on the industry personalities she has met; the movies that are causing a stir and why; and trends in the industry and the culture of moviemaking in general.

Below is a transcript.

Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

Sharon Waxman: Whoa, sorry I'm late - I've been mesmerized by Donald Rumsfeld. It happens.

I am back from a few weeks reporting abroad, in England and Cairo; one of the pieces I did out there ran in Style today, there are a few more coming. Meantime, I can tell you that with all that's going on in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza, the anti-Israel fervor that one hears all over the Middle East will only intensify.

I suppose our discussion should be a pithy mix of Mideast culture, Afghan politics and Hollywood gossip. Talk about strange bedfellows. Anyway, bring it on, and I hope some of our articulate participants from last week join us again. Here we go....

Springs of Silver Sarah: Sharon: I've been enjoying your recent reporting of Middle East/Muslim-related stories. And I've got a movie tip for you. Rent "My Son the Fanatic," if you haven't already seen it. The director, producer, or screen writer must be clairvoyant! It deals with family conflict between taxi driver father and extremist Muslim son, and is very well done. Have you got a tip for me?

Sharon Waxman: I've been recommending that film a lot. It's absolutely clairvoyant, I agree, and funny too - about a Pakistani immigrant family in northern England coping with the stresses of family life and cultural dysfunction, while one son becomes a fundamentalist, and the father has an affair with a British prositute. I believe it's directed by Hani Kureishi and funnily enough, the name of the British fundamentalist that I profiled was a young guy named Mohamed Kureishi. He said he was no relation and had not heard of the director.

There was one other film broadly on this theme that was also witty and British, about two years before that one; give me a minute, I'll think of the name...

More Muslim-in-Britain books and movie: Hanif Kureishi also wrote "The Buddha of Suburbia", which talks about a young man with a Pakistani father and English mother.

Also the film "East is East" took place in Bradford, England, and also talked about a Pakistani family in England.

Sharon Waxman: That's it! East is East! Thank you very much. Well worth renting. Bradford, by the way, was the site of huge race riots last year, largely between youth in the Muslim community and neo-Nazi skinheads. A government report that came out of that incident talked about how the ethnic communities in England live in complete isolatino from the larger British community, and have never been really integraetd into society, or made to strongly feel a British identity. All this feeds nicely into the fundamentalist ideology, unfortunately.

New Bedford, Mass.: In your Washington Post article today, you identify Al-Jazeera's anti-U.S. bias. But are they anymore biased than Fox News? Fox anchors wear U.S. flag pins, refer to the Taliban as "evil" and worse, refuse to runs stories about civilian casualties or question the Bush administration in any way. And that's just the news programs! The talk shows are much worse.

Isn't the only thing that makes Al-Jazeera a concern is its reach? (Fox only has a niche market). And before Sept 11, the network openly questioned repressive Arab regimes -- exercising a freedom of speech rarely exercised in the Islamic world.

So can the network be thought of as a net plus, even from the U.S. perspective?

Sharon Waxman: You raise very good points, which were hotly debated in the newsroom before this piece ran.

Personally I stopped watching Fox early in the war because I thought they were so eggregiously jingoistic and, what's more, uninformed about world politics, other cultures, etc. So by no means do I excuse Fox its bias, including those flags on their lapels.

On the other hand, al-Jazeera is really a step beyond that; its reporters never seem to miss a chance to make a dig at the United States, they are completely uninterested in informing their viewers about what the reality is involving the taliban or al-Qaeda. Their reporting, instead, seems gauged to buttress a world view in which the United States is the bad guy, and the other guy - no matter the evidence, no matter the facts on the ground - is the good guy. I certainly don't expect a news network in the Mideast to give us the benefit of the doubt, which is fine. Criticize us based on facts as much as you like. But it puzzles me why one would give the Taliban a pass. And this does not even take into account the talk shows, which are a wall-to-wall diatribe against American evil intent.

What I didn't write in the piece, but what is true, is that even reporters within the network have been complaining about a growing Islamization trend on air and on staff.

Is it a net plus - great question. I don't see why we can't encourage the good elements of al-Jazeera, but call them on their bias.

Alexandria, Va: When you were in Egypt, was there any discussion of the recent show-trials of gays (which have been condemned by human rights groups but have elicited little criticism from the U.S. government, or your paper, for that matter)? Will you be addressing the trials in any future articles, along with the general treatment of gays in Egypt?

Sharon Waxman: That's a fascinating and bizarre issue - for those who don't know, there was a mass, show trial of a few dozen gays in Egypt in recent week, a great big black eye for the government in the eyes of the West, certainly. I was really there reporting on the popular culture, so I don't know if I will find a way to include it, though I'll try.

I did ask the Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni about this. He's interesting because he is a very Europeanized minister, a painter in his own right and quite powerful. He's also never married, has no children, and is rumored to be gay. He didn't have a good answer; he mumbled something about this being problematic, perhaps the men involved were trafficking in children. Something about the culture being violently opposed to homosexuality. Something about having to maintain a balance between the push for openness and tolerance and the pull of conservative Muslim groups.

Most Egyptians I know find the whole thing repulsive, a political shill to fundamentalist forces.

Mt. Rainier, Md.: Sharon, thank you for an interesting and thoughtful article from Cairo; I'm glad to hear there are more coming. My first wish at the moment is that the combatants and the bystanders would make more distinctions. It seems everyone talking on the subject from all sides boils the issue down to 'Palestinians' and 'Israelis' as though these were monolithic groups. And the Palestinians are further vilified by being blamed for their government as though they had power over it. I have no problem with Hamas being identified as a terrorist group, but as popular as they are they by no means represent all Palestinians. Especially those Palestinians who are Christian, a sizable minority.

Sharon Waxman: Thanks for making some good points. That was a big challenge for me in the pieces I was trying to write, since I was attempting to take the measure of 'Arab culture.' The subject is so broad and varied, that anything one chooses to highlight seems like a distortion. Anyway, I did do a huge amount of reporting and did my best to be balanced.

Washington, D.C.: Ms. Waxman --

This may be a doofus question, but here goes:

Has the Harry Potter movie come out in Egypt? Is it/will it be as big there as it is in the U.S?

Sharon Waxman: Not doofus at all - that was exactly the kind of question I was giong to answer, since Americans don't know and are interested.

Harry Potter is not out there yet; I don't see why it would not be distributed there, unless the censor feels that a movie about magic is somehow an insult to Islam. Not entirely an impossibility, since the first "Mummy" was banned on the grounds it was historically inaccurate.

But Egypt gets a lot of American movies - mostly American movies, in fact. They only ban the very sexy movies. Even Moulin Rouge played there.

The District: One thing I was surprised you didn't report about Al-Jazeera is that it has a policy of referring to Palestinian suicide bombers as "martyrs." Before the war began in earnest in Afghanistan, CNN had an Al-Jazeera correspondent on the show for an interview, and the anchor (I forget who it was) took the correspondent to task on this very issue. It would have been funny if it weren't so disturbing.

Sharon Waxman: Very interesting. I'm sure there are tons of examples of the 'world view' I'm referring to for those who regularly watch the channel. Of course it helps if you speak Arabic. I do, but poorly, so I missed a lot. One interesting comparison, though, was the difference in tone when an Arabic-speaking CNN correspondent like Ben Wedeman would be on al-Jazeera versus their regular Afghan correspondent.

Re: Al-Jazeera: Do they have women reporters or anchorwomen? Do they make them cover their hair? I would find it strange that a network so pro-Taliban would allow their women to be on the air without covering their hair. If they don't require the women to cover their hair right now are they planning on making it a requirement?

Sharon Waxman: Yes, they have women reporters and anchors and they are dressed exactly like Western reporters and anchors. The network is not officially pro-Taliban, or officially Islamic in nature. It claims to follow the values of Western news agencies; many of the reporters came from the BBC. (Although many of them had been fired from the BBC Arabic Service; it's not entirely clear to me the circumstances of that firing, during the Gulf War.) Again, it does embrace many of those values; don't forget that they do interview Israelis, something that had been anathema. They do have former US Ambassador Christopher Ross on, etc.

Rockville, Md.: Based on your stay in Egypt, how did you perceive the person-in-the-street's attitude toward suicide bombers killing inocent civilians? Did they consider it justified by military action on the other side, and equivalent to it?

Sharon Waxman: Another interesting question. The anger toward Israel is really at a fever pitch in Egypt, especially considering the two countries are at peace. Not a very reassuring situation, politically speaking. One of the things I report on in an upcoming piece is a hit movie, a comedy-drama, in which a frivolous young Egyptian becomes a suicide bomber in the territories. He is considered a hero, not a lost soul, someone who has found a higher calling for his life. I asked the producer if he didn't find it strange, romanticizing a suicide bomber. He said something like, 'I didn't make this guy a hero. He was a hero before. I just put it in my movie."

That's the prevailing attitude. (I also asked him how he'd feel if one of his kids - who were hanging about - would go off to be suicide bombers. He said he'd be fine with it, which I don't believe for a minute.)

Washington, D.C.: I found it very interesting that the two Arabic-speaking Americans appear so often on al-Jazeera (one CNN correspondent and the other a former ambassador). How are they regarded by their peers in the American press and diplomatic circles? Are they credited with attempting to balance al-Jazeera's reporting? Or are they derided for appearing on such a biased news source?

Sharon Waxman: I believe they appear so often because Arabic-speaking Americans are quite few and far between. (Notice to those Arabic speakers: there are jobs for you in journalism and diplomacy going begging...) I think all of us are massively impressed at these guys' lingual abilities. If anything, Ross gets extra credit for having the wherewithall to go on the air and get beat up all the time.

Bowie: I know it's hard to research such a thing, but did you get any sense about divisions between rich and poor nations (i.e. those with and without oil) and about resentment by common people of royal families who absorb most of the wealth?

If so, do those things get into media, or is it controlled enough by government that there is not independent people's voice?

Sharon Waxman: You have to understand that Saudi Arabia, which I presume you're referring to, is a very locked-down country. People cannot easily tell you what they think with regard to the royal family. My sense is that reports of imminent mutinies against the royals are exaggerated, but at the same time there is increasing discontent - since the largesse that was once forthcoming in the flush oil years is no longer, and the population has grown a lot.

In other parts of the Arab world the Saudis are not well-liked; resented for their money, regarded as arrogant and pampered and propped up by Uncle Sam. And no, none of this stuff gets into the local media, which is government controlled.

Arlington, Va.: Hi Sharon,

Definitely a non-Middle Eastern question here for you -- have you heard any details on the filming of The Secret History? I've heard that Gwyneth Paltrow is producing and starring. Any other info on who's been cast and when it will be released?
Thanks!

Sharon Waxman: Have not heard anything about this project. Readers?

By the way, on a Hollywood note, I saw 'Monster's Ball' last night with Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry, an exquisite piece of filmmaking and equally exquisite performances. It was very daring, beautifully shot and very moving. Billy Bob is back on my Happy list.

Washington, D.C.: Did you happen to see that editorial in the Wall Street Journal last week about how Hollywood doesn't matter anymore? Very funny! Any thoughts on the attitude/feelings in Hollywood right now re: the war?

Sharon Waxman: No, I missed it. Why did it say that Hollywood doesn't matter anymore? Did it ever matter? Am I missing something?

Attitudes here are still very low key vis a vis the New Normal. Studios are working very hard to get publicity for the flood of upcoming movies this month, they are quietly jostling for pre-Oscar positions. And I think they're going to be pushing all their war movies very hard - like Black Hawk Down, and the Owen Wilson war movie.

Virginia: Sharon, I have not read your article from this morning and will do so. I happen to agree with the general concensus of Fox News and also stopped watching early on as I do want news, not opinion. But I am sorry, I just don't understand how an American wearing an American flag on their lapel is being jingoistic or prejudiced. I have heard that many news organizations do not allow their employees to wear them on air. I find that more offensive than the fact that anchors wear them. I guess it's probably not a good idea when in a war zone, but on air from New York or Atlanta? What's the bid deal? What is it I'm missing here?

Sharon Waxman: Probably because as reporters or anchors or whatever we are meant to strive for neutrality and fairness and balance as much as possible. We are in a war in which the US is fighting an enemy, so naturally we are going to feel sympathy for our side. But our job is to report what is happening, not to choose one side over the other. Wearing a flag, in my view, announces what a reporter does not need to announce - a private allegiance; we should be trying to distance ourselves from those emotions as much as possible.
A flag not only announces a bias, it validates it.

San Francisco: I don't know if Eraserhead Guy is around, but I was wondering if he has any children.

I can state with some certainty that until you've been up at 3 a.m. with an infant, you really can't understand that film fully. We just had a baby girl, and the first few nights I was constantly reminded of Eraserhead ... the noises from the baby, the fear that you don't understand anything and you're going to kill it, and the general weirdness of the middle of the night ... it all hit home. Even my wife, who hates the flick, commented on how right on the money it is.

Sharon Waxman: I LOVE that. Have been through the baby experience, and must confess the parallels did not spring to mind.

Eraserhead, you out there?

Iowa City, Iowa: Is the new Britney Spears tape/CD/video/DVD out in Egypt yet. What about Iran? Are there any other Arab countries which carry (or will carry) the Britney Spears stuff?

Sharon Waxman: Britney is very hot in Egypt, indeed. But a lot of her pictures are cut off at the neck. Don't know if they could show that python video.

Somewhere, USA: You said Billy Bob is "back" on your Happy List. What did he do to get off the list?

Sharon Waxman: Married that whacko Angelina Jolie. Right after she spent the Oscars making out with her brother.

Los Angeles: Hey Sharon. I'm a 20-something Palestinian American female writer, raised as an Arab and very much an Angeleno (a culture all in itself!). Makes for an interesting mix. Next time you go to the Middle East, take me along ... We can cover Hollywood, pop culture, and the westernization of the region together. I'll help with the language!

Sharon Waxman: I'd love to. Email me anytime at waxmans@washpost.com.

Sharon Waxman: Thank you all for coming today. Was fascinating, as usual. I hope to be seeing a lot of movies in the next week, catching up, getting a beat on the Oscar noms, so we can talk more Hollywood then.

Come back next week and we'll mix it up....

washingtonpost.com:

That wraps up today's show. Thanks to everyone who joined the discussion.

Stay tuned to Live Online:

Astrologer Charlene Lichtenstein at 6 p.m. EST
Live Online Special Coverage: America At War

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