US networks offered UK drama on Bush assassination
By Adam Sherwin, Media Correspondent of The Times

(p)resident Bush is assassinated on British Satellite TV

It was the shot that echoed around the world - President Bush is assassinated by a fanatical sniper in the bowels of a Chicago hotel.

At least that is how Channel 4 would like us to remember the key event of October 2007 in a “shockingly real” film which is already causing outrage among Americans.

Death of a President uses digital trickery, archive footage and actors to imagine the murder of President Bush and the descent into national paranoia which follows.

The feature-length drama will be screened on More4, Channel 4’s digital sister channel next month after receiving a big-screen premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.

Channel 4 hopes to sell the film to US broadcasters but Americans in London declared the film tasteless and feared it could encourage extremists in their home country.

The film is set next autumn, when “US foreign and domestic policies have polarised the country’s electorate”. Arriving in Chicago to make a speech to business leaders, the President is confronted by a large anti-war demonstration.

Unperturbed, the President goes ahead with his visit. But as he leaves he is gunned down by a sniper. While a nation mourns, the “state apparatus” turns its attention to the hunt for his killer. A Syrian-born man is identified but the truth may lie closer to home.

The assassination scene explicitly recalls the attempt on President Reagan’s life in 1981. John Hinckley fired six shots at close range as the President left the Washington Hilton hotel.

Americans were appalled at the Bush film. Michelle Bowman, 35, a US consultant working at the Bowman Group in London, said: “Most American will find a film depicting the assassination of a sitting American President in very poor taste. I cannot imagine that any American broadcaster would show this film.”

The film is directed by Gabriel Range, who made the acclaimed BBC drama The Day Britain Stopped, which imagined a chain of events which could paralyse the UK’s transport infrastructure.

Mr Range told The Times: “We studied hours and hours of footage of Bush. The scenes are created by a mixture of special effects, stock footage and digitally compositing our actors onto the archive of Bush.”

Mr Range secured permits to film the murder scene on location in a Chicago hotel.

He denied charges of sensationalism. “The film is based on meticulous research and interviews with FBI agents and people on the other side of the war on terror,” he said.

“It is a serious and sensitive film. There is no way it would encourage anyone to assassinate Bush and usher in Cheney’s America.”

Peter Dale, head of More4, said the film combined a “gripping detective story” with a “thought-provoking critique” of contemporary US society.
He said: “It’s a pointed political examination of what the war on terror did to the American body politic. I’m sure that there will be people who will be upset by it but when you watch it you realise what a sophisticated piece of work it is.”

citx say…..daaaamn.. i miss Monty Python