Sat down tonight to watch a rubbish film on Channel 5 (ah, the bliss of weekday nights in), which was called Chain of Command, which stars Roy Scheider as the US President and is about how terrorists take control of US nuclear missiles and wreak havoc (and only one man can stop them). I started watching the film thinking I’d seen something like it before, but it had completely different actors and plot from the film I thought it was. So…I Googled around and it turns out that Roy Scheider has also played President in another film, The Peacekeeper, where, er, terrorists take control of US nuclear missiles and wreak havoc (and only one man can stop them). I mean, talk about being typecast, it’s a long way from being in Jaws. Now he’s permanently playing people who shouldn’t be trusted with a nuclear arsenal.
Wikipedia’s List of Fictional US Presidents (no Dubbya in there, fnar fnar) is worth looking up for more fantasy President trivia - plenty of material for the “Name your favourite fictional President” game. 24’s David Palmer takes it for me, that Bartlett bloke can bugger off.
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August 12th, 2004 at 09:17:02
I saw the film too (or, rather, from the something-bad’s-going-to-happen bit on the ship onwards). It took me a while to realise where I’d seen the hero before - Starship Troopers, where he gets his brain sucked out by an alien. That must be a tricky thing to act - you can’t develop muscle memory from somewhere else. Also, who can say “No, it should be like this…”?
My favourite fictional President is John Cormack from The Negotiator by Frederick Forsyth. The rest of the book is so-so, but the depiction of the President suffering, particularly a candid photo of him from a funeral, is very good.
(Top Forsyth recommendation: Icon.
Top Forsyth anecdote: when he was a reporter for the BBC, his coverage of a war (I think in Africa) was so biased that he claimed that his favoured side had, in a single battle, shot down more planes than the other side owned in total. Unfortunately for him, John Simpson spotted this impossibility, and I think Forsyth left the BBC soon after.)
August 12th, 2004 at 14:47:30
Please don’t ignore Roy Scheider’s turn as the President in Executive Target, where there appears to be a puzzling absence of nuclear weapons, although there are terrorists.
“A stunt driver (Michael Madsen) heading for prison on a minor charge is freed against his will by a terrorist gang. Then by kidnapping his wife, he is forced to drive a getaway car in a plot to kidnap the President from a motorcade.”
This was made in the same year as The Peacekeeper, so Mr Scheider was clearly getting into the groove. As best I can determine, these are the only three Presidents Roy Scheider has played.
August 13th, 2004 at 01:19:40
You should watch Canadian bacon, with one of my most ironically amusing American presidents to date, Alan Alda. It’s Michael Moore’s early work, and has him guest star as a cameo advocate of war against Canadia.
Genius.