#13
Washington Post
November 27, 2001
The Ideas Industry
By Richard Morin and Claudia Deane
HUDSON GOES HOLLYWOOD: The right-thinking Hudson Institute is going into the film business, launching a documentary project on the downfall of the Soviet Union as a counterpoint to existing film treatments that the Hudson folks believe are soft on communism.
"All the film materials relating to the Cold War are pretty much on the other side of the issue -- they're very left of center," said Edwin Rubenstein, Hudson's director of research. Rubenstein cites a 24-part Ted Turner documentary of the Cold War, which he says was "factually correct but said nothing about the atrocities that were committed by the Soviet Union against its own people."
The tank's film will be based on the 1996 book "Age of Delirium: The Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union," written by David Satter, a Hudson senior fellow and former foreign correspondent. Satter conducted extensive interviews with a range of Soviet citizens whose lives were shattered by the totalitarian regime. The production team hopes to find many of those interview subjects and record their recollections on videotape, interspersed with archival footage.
Former CIA head R. James Woolsey, whom Rubenstein describes as a "friend of Satter's," is the executive producer of the film. It will be directed and produced by Bruce and Jennifer Young, the filmmakers of a previous documentary project on Stalin's labor camps.
Hudson estimates the project will run about $1 million and should be wrapped up late next year. The tank also hopes "to put our film in high schools and colleges as an alternative view of what communism is all about," Rubenstein said.
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