Drawing on extensive archival research, the documentary film “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death” makes its New York City theatrical debut with an engagement starting Friday (March 14) at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan.
Coinciding with the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the documentary’s premiere in New York comes shortly before the nationwide home-video release of the film in late March. Overseas, the movie is scheduled to air on national TV networks in a dozen countries this spring.
Produced by the Media Education Foundation and narrated by Sean Penn, the “War Made Easy” film adapts the book of the same name by Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. For a sample of the film’s reviews, see WarMadeEasyTheMovie.org.
LORETTA ALPER
Alper is the producer and co-director (with Jeremy Earp) of “War Made Easy.” She said today: “While there has been much hand-wringing over the administration’s faulty war plans, little attention has been given to how it was able to launch the war in the first place. ‘War Made Easy’ puts the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion in context — looking not only at how the current war was sold, but also at 50 years of nearly identical government spin and media complicity to promote U.S. military actions based on manipulation and deception.”
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NORMAN SOLOMON
Solomon, the author of War Made Easy, appears in the documentary. He said today: “Our country’s historical pattern amounts to a repetition compulsion disorder in political form. One war after another has gone through a media spin cycle — from agenda-building to insistence on staying the course — while human catastrophes and economic losses have mounted. When we step away from self-serving partisan messages, we can see the broader outlines of a warfare state that propels the United States into repeated frenzies of what Martin Luther King Jr. called ‘the madness of militarism.’ The results, in human terms, continue to be too horrific to fully comprehend. An unflinching assessment of the historical record — distant and recent — is essential if we’re going to end the recurring disasters brought on by war as a way of life and death.”
Solomon will be in New York from March 13 to 17 and in Washington on March 18 and 19.
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-002; or David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
