W. (film) distributed by Lionsgate
Production
W. was Oliver Stone's third film in a trilogy he made about the Presidency, set in the time from the 1960s to today: the set began with JFK and continued with Nixon. Originally, he was attached to direct Pinkville, a film about the Army's investigation of the My Lai Massacre, but development was canceled due to the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike and actor Bruce Willis pulling out of the film three weeks before shooting was set to start. As a result, United Artists shut the production down. Stone moved on to direct a film about the life of George W. Bush, shopping a script that had been written before the strike by Stanley Weiser, who had co-written Wall Street with Stone. Weiser and Stone read 17 books as part of their research for the script, and worked on the project for a year before venturing to film Pinkville. Stone has admitted that he and Weiser had to speculate on some dialogue: "You take all the facts and take the spirit of the scene and make it accurate to what you think happened". W. was financed independently for Stone, with Hong Kong, German, and Australian funds: he tried to approach American studios for money, but got turned down. Lions Gate Entertainment distributed the film.
Though Stone has criticized Bush for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the director said that he was not looking to make an "anti-Bush polemic." Stone compared his goal of the film to that of The Queen, wanting to trace "seminal events in Bush's life." According to the director, "It's a behind-the-scenes approach, similar to Nixon, to give a sense of what it's like to be in his skin. But if Nixon was a symphony, this is more like a chamber piece, and not as dark in tone." He described the structure of W. as a three-act film starting with Bush as a young man "with a missed life", followed by his transformation and "an assertion of will which was amazingly powerful" as he came out from his father's shadow, and finally his invasion of Iraq.The film, originally titled Bush, was re-titled W.  Filming began on May 12, 2008, in Shreveport, Louisiana, and completed filming on July 11, 2008. On May 13, 2008, the New York Post published excerpts from an early draft of the script. The column, written by Cindy Adams, stated "Pro-Bushies will hate it, antis will love it."The film was released on October 17, 2008, timed just before that year's presidential election. W.'s producers reportedly ran television spots for the film opposite Republican Party presidential nominee John McCain's ads in the fall of 2008.
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