Remember the other 9/11 propaganda film?

Just read an online chat transcript with Rep. Charles B. Rangel at the Washington Post and came across this question..

Bristol, R.I.: What would your reaction be to a movie with the opposite political view, i.e. supportive of the President and focusing on the more positive aspects of the war with Iraq? Wouldn't the left call it propaganda?

Rep. Charles B. Rangel: I guess we would but we would not try to prevent it from being shown.

As I recall, there already was a movie with the opposite political view, and no, none of us on the Democratic side of the spectrum tried to shut down free speech.

Shown in early September 2003, Showtime's DC 9/11: Time of Crisis put a completely positive spin on BushCo's actions that day.  Here's a couple of excerpts from J Hoberman's review in the Village Voice, which sound kind of familiar now..

In the end 9-11 turned out to be a made-for-TV movie, or rather, the basis for one--a shameless propaganda vehicle for our superstar president George W. Bush.

The upcoming Showtime feature DC 9/11: Time of Crisis is a signal advance in the instant, ongoing fictionalization of American history, complete with the president fulminating most presidentially against "tinhorn terrorists," decisively employing the word problematic in a complete sentence, selling a rationale for preemptive war, and presciently laying out American foreign policy for the next 18 months.

Scheduled for cablecast on September 7, DC 9/11 inaugurates Bush's re-election campaign 50 weeks before the 9-11 Memorial Republican National Convention opens in Madison Square Garden. DC 9/11 also marks a new stage in the American cult of personality: the actual president as fictional protagonist.

There are, of course, precedents. "One of the original aspects of Soviet cinema is its daring in depicting contemporary historical personages, even living figures," André Bazin dryly observed in his 1950 essay, "The Myth of Stalin in the Soviet Cinema."

[...]

A movie that attempted to reconstruct Bush's actual activities on 9-11 would be fascinating, if not entirely heroic.

[...]

Screenwriter and co-executive producer Lionel Chetwynd had access to top officials and staffers, including Bush, Fleischer, Card, Rove, and Donald Rumsfeld--all of whom are played by look-alike actors in the movie (as are Cheney, Rice, John Ashcroft, Karen Hughes, Colin Powell, George Tenet, and Paul Wolfowitz). The script was subsequently vetted by right-wing pundits Fred Barnes, Charles Krauthammer, and Morton Kondracke. Chetwynd, whose vita includes such politically charged movies and telefilms as The Hanoi Hilton, The Heroes of Desert Storm, The Siege at Ruby Ridge, Kissinger and Nixon, and Varian's War, is a prominent Hollywood conservative--a veteran of the 1980 Reagan campaign who, after Bill Clinton's election 12 years later, was recruited by right-wing pop culture ideologue David Horowitz to set up the Wednesday Morning Club [..].

Chetwynd bonded with Dubya in March 2001 when, at Rove's suggestion, Varian's War was screened at the White House; Chetwynd was subsequently involved in various post-9-11 Hollywood-Washington conclaves and currently serves Bush as part of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. Shot largely in Toronto, DC 9/11 was eligible for Canadian film subsidies, but it is, in nearly every other sense, an official production.