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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Thursday, August 28th, 2008 - Comments Off on [PR] No End In Sight in full on YouTube from Monday until the election
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[PR] No End In Sight in full on YouTube from Monday until the election

NEIS6567_896.jpgOSCAR® NOMINATED “NO END IN SIGHT” TO BE SHOWCASED
ON YOUTUBE™ DURING HEIGHT OF THE 2008 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
DIRECTOR CHARLES FERGUSON TO MAKE HIS AWARD WINNING DOCUMENTARY
ACCESSIBLE AD-FREE AND UNINTERRUPTED ONLINE FROM SEPTEMBER 1 TO NOVEMBER 5
NO END IN SIGHT, Academy Award® nominee for Best Documentary Feature and winner of the Documentary Special Jury Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, the first film of its kind to examine the American policies that sent Iraq spiraling into a civil war, will also be the first widely released feature film to screen in its entirety on YouTube™ starting on September 1 and continuing through the 2008 presidential election on Tuesday, November 4. The film will be featured on its own YouTube channel and available to anyone with a computer and high-speed internet connection… NO END IN SIGHT is being made available free to the public to reveal the facts about the Bush Administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq to voters concerned with the issues of national security and the adverse economic impact of the war when making decisions in this crucial election. NO END IN SIGHT condenses and clarifies the murky decisions made before and after the invasion and is invaluable to the public’s understanding of what went wrong. The film is both an analysis of an ill-conceived war and a plea to consider the impact of future military actions. According to the film’s director, Charles Ferguson, he underwrote the exhibition of the film on YouTube because, “I wanted to make the film, and the facts about the occupation of Iraq, accessible to a larger group of people. My hope is that this will contribute to the process of making better foreign policy decisions moving forward in Iraq and elsewhere. During this election year, it’s important to examine the leadership mentality and policies that caused Iraq to descend into such a horrific state that after 4,000 American deaths, at least a quarter million Iraqis killed, 4 million refugees, and over $2 trillion spent, Iraq remains in a state of near collapse.”


Produced by Representational Pictures and released theatrically by Magnolia Pictures in 2007 and currently available on DVD, NO END IN SIGHT is a jaw-dropping, insider’s tale of the ignorance, incompetence and blind ambition that ensnared the U.S. in a war without a post-invasion plan. In the film, high ranking officials tasked with rebuilding Iraq, such as former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Ambassador Barbara Bodine, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as Chief of Staff for Secretary of State Colin Powell, and General Jay Garner, who was in charge of the occupation in early 2003, recount principal errors in U.S. policy which opened the door to the insurgency and chaos that engulf Iraq today. From insufficient troop numbers to secure the country to alienating the Iraqi people, NO END IN SIGHT details how a swift military victory descended into a quagmire.
A noted author and foreign policy expert turned first time filmmaker, Ferguson was prompted to make NO END IN SIGHT after discussing the worsening situation in Iraq with some of his foreign affairs colleagues. A month in Baghdad, dozens of interviews and one five hour rough cut later, the film world premiered to critical praise at Sundance and was awarded the Special Documentary Jury Prize “in recognition of the film as timely work that clearly illuminates the misguided policy decisions that have led to the catastrophic quagmire of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq.” Ferguson is a former technology entrepreneur who sold his company Vermeer Technologies to Microsoft in 1996. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. A visiting scholar at MIT and University of California, Berkeley, Ferguson is the author of four books: High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner’s Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars, Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World, The Broadband Problem: Anatomy of a Market Failure and a Policy Dilemma and most recently No End In Sight: Iraq’s Descent into Chaos, the full investigative record behind the award-winning film, published in early 2008 by PublicAffairs Books.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon