Brokedown Palace
Matthew Scott Kelemen, AlterNet.
It's not all mortars and RPG attacks for the men of 'Gunner Palace'...
It's Friday afternoon, and Michael Tucker has just scored a small victory. Yesterday he screened his documentary, Gunner Palace, for representatives of the Motion Picture Association of America, and won an appeal that will allow the film to be released with a PG-13 rating rather than its original R.
"It's a landmark thing," says the director by phone from Los Angeles. "It's landmark for profanity in America. It's huge. It's the most profane PG-13 movie, ever."
The profanity comes from some of the mouths of the 400 soldiers of the 2/3 Field Artillery Unit who, in November 2003 when Tucker arrived in Baghdad, were stationed in a bombed-out palace that once belonged to Uday Hussein. Tucker lived with the soldiers for two extended periods. He rode along on raids, waited interminable hours for action, and absorbed the unease that the soldiers felt as they experienced the rise of the post-invasion insurgency. He also captured their coping mechanisms for dealing with beerless frustration, whether communicative or satirically sacrilegious.
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One Man with a Camera
When Michael Tucker first showed up at Gunner Palace, Sadaam Hussein had still not been captured, and members of the 320th Military Police Battalion had yet to begin snapping digital photos of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. George Bush would make a surprise visit to Baghdad later that month to slice turkey for the troops, but that would to little to relieve the sense of unease that had already set in.
"I always joke that he just came to the gate one day," says John Powers, a captain with the 2/3 who is currently accompanying Tucker on a screening tour. "We had a lot of cameras there, so it wasn't a new thing to have a cameraman with us. Usually we had guys with entire crews."
But Tucker stood out. "He was just one man with a camera," says Powers. "He actually stayed for more than a couple of days. The soldiers saw he wasn't here to get a news clip. A lot of journalists come there with a specific story in mind. I think the guys realized Michael was there to get their story."
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Matthew Scott Kelemen, AlterNet.
