Cyrus Nowrasteh

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Cyrus Nowrasteh (Persian: سیروس نورسته), born September 19, 1956, is an American screenwriter and director of theatrical films, television shows, and made-for-TV movies. He is best known for his involvement in the controversial docudrama The Path to 9/11.

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[edit] Biography

Of Persian descent [1], he was born in Boulder, Colorado, and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin. He graduated from Madison West High School in 1974 and was a city boys high school tennis champion. [2] Nowrasteh attended New Mexico State University and later transferred to the University of Southern California to attend the School of Cinema, graduating in 1977. [3] Currently, he is married to wife Elizabeth G. Nowrasteh (born March 9, 1953) commonly referred to as "Betsy." [4]

[edit] History

Nowrasteh began his career in 1986 writing on the CBS television series, The Equalizer. He went on to work on other series (Falconcrest, D.E.A.), and wrote the pilot for the USA network show La Femme Nikita (1996). He also worked on independent films such as the American/Brazilian production The Interview (1997, writer/co-producer), which played at Sundance and on the Showtime network; and Norma Jean, Jack and Me (1998), a film that was not theatrically released but played the festival circuit and aired on HDNet.

In 2001 he wrote and directed the Showtime presentation The Day Reagan Was Shot, which starred Richard Dreyfuss as Alexander Haig and was executive produced by Oliver Stone. The following year he wrote 10,000 Black Men Named George, the story of the Pullman strike of the 1930s, for Showtime.[5]

For both of the above films Nowrasteh received the Pen USA West Literary Award for Best Teleplay -- the only writer in the history of the Pen awards to win two years in a row in the same category. The Day Reagan Was Shot also received the Eddie Award and the Golden Satellite Award for Best Motion Picture for Television, 2001, as well as a SAG nomination for Best Actor (Richard Dreyfuss).

Most recently Nowrasteh wrote the Manifest Destiny episode of the Steven Spielberg and TNT miniseries presentation, Into the West, which was nominated for 16 Emmy awards - though none in the writing category.[6]

[edit] Political Bias

Particularly since the controversy surrounding release of the ABC docudrama The Path to 9/11 (see below), which he himself wrote and co-produced, Nowrasteh has come under scrutiny for exhibiting an alleged "conservative bias."

Nowrasteh has acknowledged that he is broadly conservative in outlook but has expressed a desire to not "just be a conservative version of Michael Moore." [7]. He describes himself as "probably more of a libertarian than a strict conservative."

Other allegations of conservative bias are based on his association with other conservative individuals; for example, during the furor about The Path To 9/11 Rush Limbaugh described Nowrasteh as a friend on his radio show. By Nowrasteh's own account, the extent of his "friendship" with Limbaugh (quotations his) is "a connection limited to two social encounters." [8]

Nowrasteh's came under fire for The Day Reagan was Shot, for its perceived lack of historical accuracy. In this case, criticism of the film arose predominantly from conservatives.[9]

[edit] The Path to 9/11

Main article: The Path to 9/11

Although Nowrasteh's screenplay for The Path to 9/11 was billed by the ABC network as having been "based on the 9/11 Commission Report", there were multiple accusations that the screenplay evidenced political bias because of its portrayal of the Clinton Administration[10].

For the record, Nowrasteh himself has admitted dramatic license in the movie, for example in a now famous scene where former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger is seen hanging up the phone abruptly on former CIA Director George Tenet. (The scene was eventually cut from the American version of the television series.) However, Nowrasteh maintains that a certain amount of dramatic license must be allotted in the process writing a dramatic script with a historical underpinning (see docudrama and biopic). Although the precise conversations depicted in the script may never have taken place, the general tone and content of events depicted in The Path to 9/11 are alleged true. Nowrasteh has said that the film "dramatizes the frequent opportunities the administration had in the 90’s to stop bin Laden in his tracks but lacked the will to do so.” [11] When asked if he thought of the script as a "historical document," Nowrasteh has responded:

No, but I stand by the original version of the movie, and I stand by the edited version... There has to be conflation of events. The most obvious problem any dramatist faces is that of sheer length. I had to collapse the events of eight and a half years into five hours. I don’t know any other way to do it except collapse, conflate, and condense. [12]

Critics, including 9/11 Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste pointed out that certain scenes in the film were fabrications.[13] Richard Miniter - a conservative author who wrote a book entitled Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures Unleashed Global Terror - conceded on CNN on September 7, 2006 that several of the complaints about the mini-series being made by Clinton administration officials were entirely justified, and that several scenes in the film were based on "Internet myth" [14]. The film was a controversial docudrama aired by ABC/Walt Disney. The project has been criticized as having a political agenda and for fictionalizing the lead-up to 9/11 in order to redirect blame to the Clinton administration[15]. Some opinion columns reported their belief that David Cunningham's Film Institute initiated the film project, however a spokesperson from ABC clarified that the network provided the entire funding of $40 million for the miniseries and that UHP Productions was created for bookkeeping purposes.[16] [17]

Nowrasteh wrote about his work on Path To 9/11 in a first-person article in the Wall Street Journal on September 18, 2006. Among other things he stated:

"'The Path to 9/11' was set in the time before the event, and in a world in which no party had the political will to act. The principals did not know then what we know now. It is also indisputable that Bill Clinton entered office a month before the first attack on the World Trade Center. Eight years then went by, replete with terrorist assaults on Americans and American interests overseas. George W. Bush was in office eight months before 9/11. Those who actually watched the entire miniseries know that he was given no special treatment." [18]

Critics - including President Clinton, Sandy Berger, Madeleine Albright, former Clinton aides, an FBI agent who quit as a consultant to the film, 9/11 Commission co-chair Lee Hamilton, and some conservatives including Bill Bennett and John Fund asserted that the film contained multiple inaccuracies and depicted Clinton as so distracted by the Lewinsky scandal that he neglected the terrorism issue (even though the 9/11 Commission had investigated and disproved this allegation)[citation needed]. Critics have also noted that Nowrasteh fabricated an assertion by Condoleezza Rice that President Bush had called for strong action after reading the August 6, 2001 “PDB” warning Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S.[citation needed]

Further, regarding Nowrasteh's comment that "Eight years then went by...", while other Islamic groups had conducted some attacks on American interests in the period of Clinton's term from 1993 to 2001, al-Qaeda had not started directly attacking U.S. interests until 1998 with the African embassy bombings, directly following their initial anti-U.S. fatwa (See Osama bin Laden#Attacks on United States targets). They only had a minor advisory/financial connection to the first attack on the World Trade Center (See Khaled Shaikh Mohammed#World Trade Center bombing, 1993).

[edit] Upcoming projects

Nowrasteh's next project will reportedly be a film adaptation of Thomas Tessier's book The Nightwalker. [19]

[edit] Filmography

  • The Path to 9/11, writer (2006)
  • 10,000 Black Men Named George, writer (2002)
  • The Day Reagan Was Shot, writer/director (2001)
  • Norma Jean, Jack and Me, writer/director (1998)
  • Veiled Threat, writer (1989)

[edit] Quotes

  • On Michael Moore and producing movies: "To quote Team America, he’s an out of control socialist weasel (laughs). Listen. I’m probably more of a libertarian than a strict conservative. In my writing and directing, I don’t want to just be a conservative version of Michael Moore. I’m here to tell a good story first and foremost - and that’s why I can navigate the networks and get my work produced." [20]

[edit] Controversy

A column [21] by commentator Martin Lewis published on Huffington Post on September 9, 2006, alleged that Nowrasteh was the creator of a sockpuppet account on IMDB in order to praise of one of his own films [22]- the 1998 film The Island, which had not yet been commercially released. The story stated that the film had received a solitary consumer review [23] in 1998 shortly after its completion attributed to someone who lived in the same small California town as Nowrasteh and using the IMDB name of "ysteb" [24] to post a review of the film - the unreleased film by Nowrasteh. Lewis observed that "ysteb" was "betsy" backwards - the same first name used by Nowrasteh's wife [25] and that "ysteb" never posted another review on IMDB.

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.libertyfilmfestival.com/libertas/index.php?p=462
  2. ^ "Nikita Is A Gusher for West Grad." The Capital Times, July 8, 1997.
  3. ^ http://www-cntv.usc.edu/documents/inmotion_fall04.pdf
  4. ^ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0637492/
  5. ^ http://www-cntv.usc.edu/documents/inmotion_fall04.pdf
  6. ^ http://www-cntv.usc.edu/documents/inmotion_fall04.pdf
  7. ^ --Interview, June 9, 2005
  8. ^ http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008958
  9. ^ http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/12/19/121006.shtml
  10. ^ http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060907/ap_on_re_us/911_film_clinton_officials_6
  11. ^ http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=23865
  12. ^ http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3584
  13. ^ http://public.cq.com/public/20060905_homeland.html
  14. ^ http://thinkprogress.org/2006/09/07/miniter-911/
  15. ^ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-blumenthal/discover-the-secret-right_b_29015.html
  16. ^ The Orlando Sentinel
  17. ^ Edward Wyatt, New York Times
  18. ^ http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008958
  19. ^ http://thomastessier.blog.com/490878/
  20. ^ http://www.libertyfilmfestival.com/libertas/index.php?p=462 --Interview, June 9, 2005
  21. ^ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-lewis/abcs-path-to-911-writ_b_29059.html
  22. ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138526/
  23. ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138526/usercomments
  24. ^ http://www.imdb.com/user/ur0118893/comments
  25. ^ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0637492

[edit] External links

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