Finke dissents, Vidal accuses

Nikki Finke takes the contrarian, ho-hum view of the Pellicano wiretapping stories.

The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Variety et al. would have us believe in their oh-so-serious recent articles that rampant paranoia is sweeping Tinseltown. Because the feds are fanning out to investigate what they’re telling potential witnesses is a treasure trove of wiretap transcripts belonging to The Pelican, a.k.a. Anthony Pellicano, L.A.’s film-noirish private investigator...

So Hollywood is spying on Hollywood. Talk about an almost victimless crime. Good luck finding more than a few sympathetic characters who were “done wrong.”

Also in the LA Weekly, Marc Cooper interviews Gore Vidal -- now a fulltime Angeleno of the Hollywood Hills variety, since the death of longtime companion Howard Austen -- and finds him as acerbic as usual. An excerpt:

MC: So if George W. Bush or John Ashcroft had been around in the early days of the republic, they would have been indicted and then hanged by the Founders?

GV: No. It would have been better and worse. [Laughs.] Bush and Ashcroft would have been considered so disreputable as to not belong in this country at all. They might be invited to go down to Bolivia or Paraguay and take part in the military administration of some Spanish colony, where they would feel so much more at home. They would not be called Americans — most Americans would not think of them as citizens.

MC: Do you not think of Bush and Ashcroft as Americans?

GV: I think of them as an alien army. They have managed to take over everything, and quite in the open. We have a deranged president. We have despotism. We have no due process.

Vidal's latest book is Inventing A Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson.