Free Republic

Talk about bad timing. Echo Lake Entertainment is set to release its independent film, Truth, the story of former CBS anchor Dan Rather’s self-destruction. It’s based on the 2006 book Truth and Duty: The Press, The President, and the Privilege of Power by Mary Mapes, the discredited CBS producer. Mapes documents and defends Rather’s 2004 attempts to use the forged “Killian documents” to portray former President George W. Bush as someone who shirked duty in Vietnam.

James Vanderbilt's Truth, the high-profile movie chronicling the scandal that derailed Dan Rather's career, has gotten the greenlight to begin shooting this fall. Brett Ratner's RatPac Entertainment and Echo Lake Entertainment will finance the movie, starring Robert Redford as the iconic news anchor and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, Rather's producer. At the same time, FilmNation has come aboard to represent international rights and will pre-sell the project to foreign buyers at the Toronto Film Festival, which kicks off Thursday night (based on the cast, it's sure to whet appetites). Mythology Entertainment is the driving force behind Truth, which was...

The Media Mob has learned that a team of Hollywood insiders is currently working on a screen adaptation of Truth And Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power—the 2005 book by former CBS News producer Mary Mapes, in which she defends the 60 Minutes II story by Dan Rather about President George W. Bush's time in the Texas Air National Guard, which ran on CBS in September 2004 and eventually led to her ouster from the network. Who would want to turn "Rathergate" into a feature-length film? According to sources familiar with the situation, Producer Mikkel Bondesen,...

Mary Mapes website for her book Truth and Duty has a page labelled DOCUMENTS. On this page she has her famous "meshing" defense for proof that the memos were accurate. On November 16 she added 12 additional documents she got from the Texas National Guard Headquarters. Unwittingly, she posted documents that actually DISproved many of her arguments. Some of the documents were letters to the Guard Headquarters asking preferential treatment for the sons of important people, but the letters were actually refusals by the Guard commanders to these requests. They were only up for a day before someone at Mary's...

Buckhead is the Atlanta attorney who originally questioned the authenticity of the documents used to attack President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service in the September 8, 2004 60 Minutes II broadcast. He preferred anonymity for professional reasons, but a diligent reporter for the Los Angeles Times tracked him down and identified him in the immediate aftermath of Rathergate. A reader forwarded Buckhead's comments on the documents to us on September 9, and I included them in our original "Sixty-first Minute" post that morning. For the most part he has kept his silence. Now Mary Mapes is out peddling the...

After initially putting the first chapter of fired CBS producer Mary Mapes's book, Truth and Duty, on its web site, Amazon.com has apparently pulled the plug on the enterprise. Visitors to the online book retailer can no longer read the excerpt as it no longer shows up in listings for the print or audio versions of the book.Was the excerpt yanked because of the several objectively incorrect assertions it contained, and the subsequent blog firestorm their exposition caused? Only Amazon or Mapes's publisher, St. Martin’s Press knows for sure.