Oddly enough, a fairly low-budget miniseries airing on a basic cable channel has the Hollywood folks scratching their heads. "The Bible", airing for a couple of hours on Sunday nights via The History Channel through Easter, is knocking them dead; the show last Sunday attracted more viewers than anything broadcast by NBC for the entire week -and the first episode, airing the previous week, snagged a record 13.1 million viewers. Everybody knows there's no audience for stuff like this, yet...numbers don't lie.
It's a conundrum.
And then there's the Oscar-winning "Argo". Actually, not following such awards, it's possible that the movie itself didn't garner one, but the director, Ben Affleck, apparently did. And Iran is seriously perturbed about it, so much so that they've retained a French lawyer to file suit against everyone involved in the production and distribution of the film. Really. Good luck with that, Omar.
The Iranians claim that it's propaganda at best, a covert operation against them at worst, and they want Affleck hanged for what they term "war crimes". Strong words from a place with a long and storied history of covert operations involving training of terrorists across the Middle East, but there it is.
If the makers of Argo are deposed under oath, they may be forced to reveal that their film -- like the fictitious film-within-the-film -- is a covert operation disguised as a movie. One of America's leading experts on covert operations believes that Argo is the propaganda project of an intelligence agency or agencies, and that its purpose is to convince the American people to go along with Israel's plan to drag America into a war on Iran.
They also claim that Affleck's 2001 "Pearl Harbor" film was a covert operation designed to spread the “Pearl Harbor” meme in the public mind in preparation for 9/11. The "Truthers" are going to love this; it comes straight from the Iranians themselves.
