I just received the following statement by fax from Katz, Oreilles & Kase, publicists for Mickey and Minnie Mouse:
Because of the furor surrounding the upcoming broadcast of The Path to 9/11, Minnie and I want to set the record straight about our involvement with this project.
While it is true that we acted as paid consultants to this project, I want to stress that neither Minnie nor I had any creative input whatsoever. Our agreement with the producers, Halliburton Film Enterprises, required only that we lend our wholesome family-oriented imprimatur to the production. It is true that in interviews we have praised the historical accuracy of The Path to 9/11 and recommended that it be shown widely in schools, supermarkets, and mental asylums, and that it be broadcast directly to the display screens of electronic voting machines in November. But at no time did we actually review the completed script or the filmed version.
Minnie and I would never, of course, engage in such a relationship with a production studio merely for a sum of $75,450. We have to believe in every project we stand behind. Indeed, we insisted on seeing a detailed synopsis of the plot before (or perhaps sometime after) signing the contract. Nowhere in that page of closely spaced text was there any indication of the liberties that would be taken with historical truth in the final production.
Specifically, the scene in which President Clinton stands on his desk clad only in boxer shorts, beats his chest, and yells "who cares about a few damn terrorists when this place is crawling with juicy interns" was not in the synopsis. Nor was there any indication that the final production would claim that President Clinton diverted money from the CIA intelligence budget to purchase cigars for the White House; that the names of the Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor would be changed to "Madeline bin Albright" and "Benedict Berger", or that the nineteen terrorists would be shown spending the night of September 10th, 2001 in the Lincoln Bedroom.
Minnie and I are entertainers. We are not journalists, or worse, historians. We don't claim to know how closely the final version of The Path to 9/11 reflects the events it to attempts to depict. Was Chelsea Clinton really the 20th hijacker? Did Howard Dean actually take over the air traffic control grid on the East Coast for two hours on the morning of September 11th? These are questions that are, frankly, beyond us.
What is clear, however, is that millions of our friends are unhappy with this production. Friends with children. Friends who take their children to see movies, and on vacation. Minnie and I like to believe that we live in a Magic Kingdom (although one in which witchcraft is not condoned) in which all creatures not only whistle while they work, but live happily ever after together, in a mutually profitable fashion. Therefore, we want to take this opportunity to disassociate ourselves with The Path to 9/11 in a sincere, convincing, but non-legally-binding way.