Oliver Stone's Bush Biopic W. as a Comedy: Satirical Presidential Biopics

In an article I wrote here on 1/28/08 about Presidential biopics and Oliver Stone's new take on the life of George W. Bush, I mentioned how dramatic Stone has always been in this genre and successfully bringing out the contradictions of most Presidential personalities. Now with his announcement that he'll be making his new George W. Bush biopic as a comedy, we're either looking at a monumental disaster or one of the most brilliant ideas ever attempted in a Presidential biopic made for the silver screen. This might seem like a completely left-field invention by Stone--and it's pretty darn close. However, there have been a few movies about Presidents made for television and the big screen that straddled the line of satire in depicting Presidents of the last 40 years.

Stone said that Bush's goofiness and tendency to get a lot of pictures in the press using that same adjective makes him perfect fodder for playing up a more exaggerated portrait. And those are the types of Presidents others have gone after with movies that played up their nuances (so embedded into pop culture) and subsequently made no other way except to make you chortle if not guffaw at times. Of course, no other Presidents in history could be said to be more easily mimicked than Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Nixon, of course, was the subject of the greatest dramatic Presidential biopic in movie history with one of the world's greatest actors and directed by Stone. But Nixon has been parodied so much in movies and TV, it's almost incalculable.