OCCULT AUTEUR: Hollywood Predictive Magick, 9/11, and Richard Brooks’ Unsettlingly Prescient 'Wrong Is Right'
It's Funny But Not Funny.
[Originally published 24February2020 on Medium. Removed by Medium 30June2021]
Recently watched, for the first time in 33+ years, the very very strange 1982 black comedy thriller Wrong is Right.
This movie is so prescient and ahead of its time, it’s creepy. I mean, like supernaturally creepy. Please read on.
Starring Sean Connery and written & directed by Oscar-winning auteur Richard Brooks (Blackboard Jungle, In Cold Blood, Elmer Gantry), Wrong Is Right was released theatrically (and bombed) just as the first 24/7 cable news network CNN was gaining traction in American homes.
The film takes place, as we’re told during an opening voiceover, “in that elusive time between now and later. That time when dark is light, when down is up, when foul is fair — and Wrong is Right.”
The dashing and rugged Connery, a decade past Diamonds days as 007, plays the world’s most popular celebrity journalist Patrick Hale, a globetrotting reporter for WTN (World Television News) 24/7 all-news network. In Hale’s introductory sequence, he’s profiling a popular new reality TV series — something that didn’t actually exist in 1982, which is just one of the film’s many prophetic plot points.
Despite 1982 being the height of the second cold war, the plot of Wrong Is Right revolves around Islamic terrorism, corrupt Arab Royalty, oil and arms dealers, and escalating suicide bombings that come to American shores.
Moreover, and please pardon the spoiler, but this is mind-melting and key to the weirdness I’m trying to float: The big conspiracy plot revealed at the climax of the film is an attempt by Islamic terrorists to BLOW UP THE TWIN TOWERS. Remember: It’s 1982.
But wait — there’s more! An even bigger plot twist is that it turns out CIA actually maneuvered and manipulated the Arab terrorists into planting bombs in the Twin Towers, in order to give the President an excuse to invade the Middle East and take the region’s oil. This is literally how the film ends! With America triumphantly invading the Middle East!
I won’t tell you Wrong Is Right is a classic four-star movie, or even a three-star movie. **½ is about right. Thematically, Brooks’ film is a very weird mix of straight up espionage thriller, political satire, media criticism and pitch black comedy. It doesn’t all hold together, looks kind of cheap, and a couple performances clank.
But it’s so sly and daring too. One running gag is that pretty much every journalist except Connery is secretly working for CIA, MI6 or Mossad. Journalism is just an extension of the intelligence community. In 1982, that was considered satire, except for a few in the know with eyes to see. Today, it’s a given, except for an ever-decreasing number of brainwashed saps and dipshits.
Wrong Is Right’s plot has two parallel narratives that converge — Connery’s journalist trying to figure out WTF is going on as inflation and diplomatic tensions escalate, while the President (George Grizzard, riffing on Ronald Reagan as a health-nut, media-savvy, perception-obsessed mediocrity) tries to control events in the Middle East by not letting the price of oil skyrocket or a terrorist attack occur.
Meanwhile, the VP is a Black woman who looks a little like Condi Rice (played by the late Rosalind Cash, renown for refusing to take stereotypical “Black” roles). The head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is named “General Wombat.” The insufferable guy who runs CIA is open about the fact the agency killed JFK and a ton of other notable people. Remember: 1982. Oliver Stone’s JFK was still a decade away.
Connery is effortlessly great, as usual, and the film is loaded with familiar actors from the period, some of whose characters die unexpectedly. If you like gorgeous 70s screen icons, there’s a decent role for the beautiful and talented Katherine Ross (most perfect of The Stepford Wives — another “Revelation of the Method” Hollywood movie, if you know anything about MK Ultra and Project Monarch, and, now that you mention it…).
[MK Ultra ASIDE: How many of you know that John Ramsey, creepy father of the tragic and as-yet unsolved (at least officially) child beauty queen murder victim JonBenét Ramsey, was found in possession of the military training film “How To Create A Mind Controlled Slave Using A Stun Gun”? Don’t take my word for it, Ramsey tries to explain it away in his book. Once you know that fucked up fact, it’s good to also be reminded that poor tragic JonBenét’s body had multiple burns similar to stun gun burns on her body. —>OCTOBER 10th 2021 Revision: The link prior, to a CBS News story entitled “Searching for the Stun Gun” in no longer accessible to me. I get a brief flash, then a blank screen. This is what happens when the pedophiles control the corporate media, I suppose. ←Disturbing digression over, but never forget about poor doomed JonBenét Ramsey and her weird family, okay? It kinda ties back into that soulless, shit-eating, diabolical pedophile death cult that’s ruled too long but is currently under multi-pronged assault. OK, thanks for tolerating the tangent into “unsolved” mysteries, now back to esoteric, fringe-y movie criticism!]
Despite everything I’ve written here that makes the movie sound like it could be too strange and uneven for its own good, “Wrong Is Right” is actually quite funny in spots, though the laughs might catch in your throat as the stakes escalate to nuclear war levels and still get played as dark jokes. It’s not a Dr. Strangelove + Network mashup level of good, but you can tell that it wants to be and, to the movie’s credit, it’s weirder than either of them.
But weird seldom makes big money, Billie Eilish notwithstanding, and by bombing at the box office, Wrong Is Right damaged a lot of careers. Connery’s was hurt so bad, he had to limp back to Bond for one more meh go-round in Never Say Never Again.
Worse, after a long and very successful career, writer/director Richard Brooks only got to make one movie after Wrong Is Right flopped, a gambling flick called Fever Pitch. It was an even bigger money pit, starring one of Hollywood’s all-time worst actors and biggest assholes Ryan O’Neal.
Brooks had a helluva life and terrific run in Hollywood, though, and deserves to remembered better than he is, which is almost not at all. His given name was Ruben Sax, born of Jewish immigrants from Russia. He was a journalist for a few years, and, like a suspiciously large number of people in the entertainment biz once you start digging into them, Brooks had a military background, serving in the U.S. Marines.
Brooks got nominated for an Academy Award eight times, three times as a director and five as a writer, winning the latter in 1960 for Elmer Gantry. His films are noteworthy for their “use of understatement, anticlimax and implied emotion…and tended to be more serious than the usual mainstream productions,” according to IMDB. He was a brave iconoclast in a town full of fearful lemmings, who ultimately left the studio system in the mid-60s and started his own production company.
Brooks was married three times, the longest at 17 years to actress Jean Simmons, one of the most spectacular women of all time in a town known for a century-plus of spectacular women. He’s got a star on the Hollywood Hall of Fame on Hollywood Blvd. He died at 79, and is buried in Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California, not far at all from the small studio where I work when I’m up in L.A.
I could go on and on, all this stuff fascinates me and probably you too if you’re still reading, unless you’re a masochist. I hope and recommend you put in the effort to find Wrong Is Right, a funny ha-ha and funny strange movie that sure seems to predict all kinds of shitty things that have happened since its release nearly four decades ago.
Of course, like most movies that TPTB find potentially dangerous or upsetting of the asshole aristocracy’s apple cart — see if you can get your hands on, say, Let Him Be or Vaxxed, whydoncha? — Wrong Is Right isn’t easily encouraged viewing. It’s never on the docket of any of the subscription streaming platforms, so if you want to see it you’ve got to pony up another three or four bucks to one of the huge tech or retail corporations like Google, Amazon, Apple or Wal*Mart (via Vudu).
Or you could digitally put on the metaphorical eyepatch, I suppose, but you’d never read me suggesting such a thing! Even in Law of Inversion Land, that would be, uh…”Wrong.“
[Tom Siebert is a multiple award-winning film critic who has written for the Baltimore and Washington D.C. CityPapers, San Diego CityBeat, the Business Journal and Creative Loafing syndicates, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, Baltimore Sun and many other publications. He is a former member of the Online Films Critic Society and the Atlanta Film Critics Society.]