“Casino Jack” comes complete with hit men, murder, corruption, gambling and men with expensive tastes — wiseguy story lines that sound like they were lifted from an Al Pacino mob flick — but the new dramatic comedy based on the Jack Abramoff scandal paints the former lobbyist now doing time in Maryland as more "Kosher Nostra" than Cosa.
POLITICO obtained an advance copy of the film directed by George Hickenlooper that dramatizes Abramoff’s fall from his highflying life as a fat cat on K Street to federal prison in the juiciest Washington scandal of the past decade. The cast of characters is familiar to anyone who followed the twists and turns of the case — Abramoff's onetime business ally, Michael Scanlon; former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay; then-Rep. Bob Ney; DeLay's former press secretary, Emily Miller; mattress man Adam Kidan; Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist; ex-Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed; and many others.
But despite the familiar names and Washington settings, such as Abramoff’s former restaurants Signatures and Stacks Deli, the film is less a documentary than a kind of Washington “Goodfellas" with plenty of artistic license.
“The worst thing you could do in your career as a director is to make a political film,” Hickenlooper told POLITICO. “I wanted to do a movie about white-collar thugs. ... I didn’t want it to be ‘All the President’s Men.’”
Kevin Spacey plays Abramoff, capturing many of the characteristics of an Orthodox Jew who studied the Torah, wore a yarmulke under his baseball cap and cited “Fiddler on the Roof” for making him want to be a better Jewish man. Spacey brings to life what clearly became an internal struggle for Abramoff to balance his devotion to God with his greed and dishonesty. An emotional scene at the end has him telling his wife he feels he let down God, a brief hangover of regret, perhaps even an insincere one.
The movie also does an accurate job of showing the media’s role in first building up Abramoff as one of the most powerful people in Washington, then exposing him. Abramoff loved the fame — whenever he was in trouble, he liked to quote a fawning magazine story on him — and the movie captures his narcissism. “I’m Jack Abramoff,” Spacey says, “and I work out every day.”
9 comments
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kalamere
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Jan. 8, 2010 - 7:49 AM EST
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that_guy
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Jan. 8, 2010 - 9:13 AM EST
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erica stephens
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Jan. 8, 2010 - 10:45 AM EST
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erica stephens
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Jan. 8, 2010 - 10:45 AM EST
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COProgressive
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Jan. 8, 2010 - 1:31 PM EST
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Voltaire2
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Jan. 8, 2010 - 2:49 PM EST
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Yaddah3
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Jan. 8, 2010 - 4:18 PM EST
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STL Hawkeye
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Jan. 8, 2010 - 7:10 PM EST
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MacG
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Jan. 10, 2010 - 6:10 PM EST
View all 9 comments in the forumWho wants to see that! I am sick to death of left wing Hollywood movies, while they completely ignore the wholesale corruption and failed polices of the Democrats and Left wing back room deals.
Hollywood is dead
kalamere,
boo hoo! a movie on the reality of an extremely corrupt conservative is hardly left wing, unless you like Stephen Colbert feel that reality has a liberal bias.
They should have made an HBO docu drama and let Spacey play it straight.It is a great story thar should be told factually.
They should have made an HBO docu drama and let Spacey play it straight.It is a great story thar should be told factually.
Tip for Hollywood!
I would love to see a serious drama of the Economic meltdown and the Bush/Paulson handout to the Wall Street Banksters. Just tell it plan and simple. Then watch the tar boil and the feather pillows get torn and the pitchforks get sharpened.
"Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone." - John Maynard Keynes
I confidentially predict that this movie does not get a distributor and dies quick death. This prediction has nothing to do with the quality of the movie. It actually might be a very good film.
People forget just corrupting Abramoff's influence was. He had much of the US congress and many state politicians on the take as a way to insure the passage of his various projects.
Many of these politicians are still in office and and there is no way that they will patiently sit by and allow the re-airing of this very dirty laundry. The even more powerful financial interests who funded Abramoff's casino lobbying are even less desirous of such exposure and their close connections to the entertainment business make this movie DOA.
You can bet this is the reason that this movie hasn't found a distributor. Nobody will touch it.
I hope that I get to see this movie when it is in wide release; although I could be disappointed if it spends too much time with Abramoff and his fellow self-righteous thugs typing away on their Crackberries.
It looks like the filmmaker is going to tackle the Gus Boulis mob hit which I am happy to hear - it didn't get as much coverage as compared to other noteworthy items of Abramoff's wide-ranging criminal racket. I remember when I first became aware of Jack Abramoff during his involvement with the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe; most any chance I got to tell interested people that the council members who endorsed someone who could be closely connected to a mob-related casino-takeover ( with a spectacular ambush & execution) weren't acting in the best interest of the tribe, possibly. This was at at a time when tribal members were dealing with the implications of the removal of an illegal holdover council and discovering hundreds of millions unaccounted for, the larcenous contractor and offers of suitcases of cash, and the discovery of a multiple-murder conspiracy of per capita-fueled crackheads (please place allegedly wherever applicable) so it's easy to get jaded.
That was a number of years ago and Casino Jack and his pals got convicted for some of the crimes they committed so I'm mostly satisfied and probably will never obsess over the topic again, but I thought I would I would try to offer up a mostly unsubstantiated conspiracy theory of mine, in the hope that someone could better inform me (it might inspire a thoroughly-researched article to tie-in with the movie.) So here goes:
1. What was the origin of any possibly-related evidence (besides the testimony of any of the alleged participants) that was available to justice department officials before the indictments?
2. What was the origin of the evidence that stated that one of the 9-11 hijackers once visited the Sun Cruz Casino?
3. Are the origins, just mentioned here, possibly related and/or actually the same thing?
4. Was this a intelligence-gathering program like Carnivore?
5. I remember a small controversy over destruction of raw data gathered in this way; were either incident mentioned here recorded and then analyzed from this destroyed data?
6. What's the timeline of analyzing the data, further investigation, destruction of data, and the indictments?
7. (Being lazy here) What happened to the trial of the men accused of murdering Gus Boulis? I can't find any mention of it after 2006; any interesting details there?
And on a separate note - I am looking forward to seeing Kevin Spacey in this film, but I'd love to see Jon Lovitz chew up the scenery every moment he's in the film.
Another left-wing movie that won't earn enough money to pay back the catering budget. Do they ever learn? Obviously not; there liberals.
So Kiki writes a story about a Hickenlooper who claims to not wanting to direct a political movie while he clearly directed a political movie.That's why Kiki is writing about it on Politico.The fact that the movie will be a political hit job by the far left Spacey would be another reason that Kiki would be writing this piece.Hey,now we all know what a Kiki and a Hickenlooper are.Very exciting.