NEW DVD "Embedded": Actor enters stage left and takes aim at the lying politicians and their lapdog

Tim Robbins at War http://www.embeddedlive.com/

Actor enters stage left and takes aim at the lying politicians and their
lapdog media

By Bruce Kirkland / Winnipeg Sun

NEW YORK -- Psychologically, Tim Robbins sits poised somewhere between
Hollywood celebrity and American citizenry. It is neither a comfortable nor
a safe place.

On one hand, Robbins is an Oscar-winning movie star known for the complexity
of his performances, whether as hero, as victim or just as often as the
villain. In Steven Spielberg's current sci-fi movie War of the Worlds,
Robbins is all three rolled into one for his strong cameo. During the alien
invasion, Robbins' half-crazed character obliges hero Tom Cruise to make an
astonishing moral choice to ensure survival for both he and his daughter.

On the other hand, Robbins is a concerned citizen, a left-wing activist who
was -- by default -- one of the most vocal Americans to oppose the invasion
of Iraq and who now believes George W. Bush is "a lame-duck president" who
should be repudiated by his own Republican backers. Along with his long-time
romantic partner Susan Sarandon, also an Oscar-winner and political
activist, Robbins has been ridiculed for his willingness to take a stand.
Most absurdly, he was one of the celebrity puppets lampooned as dupes and
fools in the South Park creators' comedy, Team America.

Today, Robbins' two hands are clapping together on one project. It is a new
self-financed DVD called Embedded -- and it is not available by conventional
means. Instead, Robbins is flogging it over the Internet in a bold, if risky
move that could show a new way to proceed for filmmakers to avoid getting
lost in a glut of DVDs at the big-name video stores.

"You can't think in the old paradigm," Robbins tells The Sun in an exclusive
interview in the library lounge of his funky office penthouse in lower
Manhattan. "You can't think like that."

Robbins is changing a lot of his thinking. For the War of the Worlds media
onslaught, Robbins did just a mass press conference. For Embedded, he sat
down for an hour one-on-one to talk about a citizen's responsibility, the
pressure on celebrities, what he perceives are the evils of the Bush
government and his disillusionment with "the pussies" in the Democrat Party,
including John Kerry, who refused to oppose Bush over Iraq.

Some of that is woven into Embedded, which was written and directed by
Robbins. Along with fellow members of his theatre troupe, The Actors Gang,
Robbins also co-stars as a sympathetic U.S. soldier shipped off to Iraq for
the war.

Embedded is a spin-off from Robbins' play by the same name. Designed as a
satire but containing many gut-wrenching moments as well, it tells the story
of embedded journalists as well as active soldiers who were involved in the
invasion of Iraq by American forces. The play, and now the film version,
savages the deep thinkers in the Pentagon and the White House for their lies
and deceptions about weapons of mass destruction and other issues, including
false intelligence that linked Iraq to terrorist cells. Embedded also
confronts the U.S. mass media for what Robbins sees as a gross failure to
uncover lies, thus serving as propaganda machines.

The play was written before it was fashionable to acknowledge the truth --
yet Robbins is still attacked as an activist in a country where the word
"liberal" is a profanity. "But we were right!" Robbins says. "We were right.
They were wrong. And why was it us who were the ones who stepped forward to
say those things, to ask those questions?"

By "us" Robbins is referring to other Hollywood celebrities, such as Sean
Penn, Alec Baldwin, Janeane Garofalo and Michael Moore. "And most of us, by
the way, were simply saying: 'Let the (UN) inspectors have more time.' We
weren't purporting to know what was going on but just saying: 'Let's be
patient. Let's not be hurried. This is human life we're talking about. Let's
be judicious.' It's not like we wanted to do that. It's not like, if there
was an opposition party, a strong voice of resistance, that we would go:
'Wait! I want to be on the show, too. I want to say something.' No, there
would be absolutely no need for it. There would be no need for an actor to
speak. But we don't live in that world."

Obviously, the U.S. government ignored the protests, at home and abroad, and
the invasion of Iraq went ahead. It was at that point that Robbins decided
to create Embedded as a play. It was his personal reaction to the situation.

"Definitely," Robbins says. "We have a limited number of venues where we can
tell stories or get information." U.S. television was neutered, Robbins
says. Only one major radio show, Democracy Now, was confrontational, he
says. The mainstream print press was failing, too, in his view.

"So where do you go? What do you do? You do what you do and I am incredibly
fortunate in that I have a theatre company and a theatre (an arrangement
with the Public Theatre in New York) and I could write something and put it
on stage and get the information out that way."

Robbins chose not to try to make a regular film, like his acclaimed
political satire Bob Roberts. "If I thought that I could do it on film, I
would have attempted it that way. But I didn't feel that it was possible,
when you consider who owns the film companies. It would also be a process
and it would just be coming out now, if I was lucky enough to have raised
the money way back then. I had the immediacy of my own theatre company and I
was able to do it right away, which, for me, was really great and, for the
actors, it was really great. It was a way for us to do something when
everyone felt so frustrated and impatient about our ability to stop this war
from happening -- and, once it happened, to spread the information that we
knew was out there."

Not surprisingly, Embedded first generated lousy reviews, in L.A. and then
in New York. "If you were to read the reviews and if you were to believe the
reviews, you would think that what we had done was silly and
inconsequential," Robbins now says with a grin. "It was marginalized in the
reviews and I knew that was going to happen. You don't go in to the backyard
of the media and say, 'You're full of s--!', and expect them to embrace
you."

Some reviews attacked him for allegedly making up stuff. In fact, much of
the dialogue and the situations depicted were mined from real-life events,
including BBC reporter John Simpson's eyewitness experience in a firefight,
as well as accounts of the dubious Jessica Lynch rescue. She is called
Jen-Jen in the play but Robbins says she is iconic now and the character
will immediately trigger images in a viewer's mind.

The reviews hurt the show for a week, Robbins says. Then word-of-mouth
revived ticket sales and led to sell-outs.

"We always considered it the little engine that could," Robbins says proudly
of the play. Now he is saying it about the DVD version. He could not find
financial backers to film the play. So he sank his own money into the
project. Then he could not find a regular DVD distributor to handle it.

"We didn't want to release it as a film. We wanted to go out to DVD and to
television and still there was that fear of it."

So Robbins hooked up with Netflix, the U.S.-based service that supplies
films by overnight mail to its subscribers. "That's three million people,
potentially, but there's no way that all of their subscribers are going to
(order Embedded). So we're selling it on our own website (embeddedlive.com
and also on amazon.com) and now it keeps growing. It really is the little
engine that could. We're losing money as of now. But I always knew that,
just like the play, it would be slow, there would be a resistance to it, but
eventually it would find its audience."

Robbins and company were crafty enough, as well, not to simply film
themselves acting out the play. The DVD version of Embedded shows the play
as "an event" that mirrors his attitude towards theatre in the first place.
"We've always kind of done theatre in The Actors Gang that's all raucous and
rude and loud. We were all punk rockers when we started the group so we all
have that aesthetic -- to stir things up."

 

yeah, whatever

 

Hey, at least now I know why it had a Netflix logo on the main DVD menu when
I watched it. Have to admit his working out a deal with Netflix to be the
distro seem a clever way to accomplish getting it out. As for the show
itself I thought it was good, didnt give any "new" info but still
entertaining

 

Er, that's "him and his daughter", dude.

 

Oh lookie! A leftwing reviewer (Kirland) reviews a rabid leftwinger's
stage play (Robbins). They should be skinned alive.
-Rich

 

LOL. Yeah, Live theatre is for left wing girly-men.

 

The only girly-men I see are the right wing ones who support the war(and
the semi-retarded chimp-faced president who started it), but don't have
enough balls to actually enlist in the military and get their chicken
shit butts over to Iraq. Yes, that applies to you, tough guy...

 

Er, that's "him and his daughter", dude.[/QUOTE]

Quit possibly: an astonishing moral choice, to ensure survival of his
daughter and himself.

Himself being the reflexive form of him. Meant to imply an action upon, or
affecting, oneself.

Whereas, "they threatened him and his daughter," emphasizes that an outside
influence is/was at work.

"Dude!" Now there's an underwhelming use of English ;-0)

BJ

 

You're right on all counts. I've been hanging around college
students WAY too much.