Fellow-speechwriter Lorne Christensen was so taken with my recent post on celebrating speechwriters that he emailed me today from Hong Kong. He tells me that “W” –- Oliver Stone’s forthcoming movie about President George W. Bush –- is going to open with a scene about writing one of the president’s speeches.

The depiction, at least according to the link to the working script that Lorne sent me, is anything but flattering. It shows Bush with his speechwriter and a gaggle policymakers and sycophants struggling to get from “Axis of Hatred” to “Axis of Evil” with a pit stop at “Axis of the unbearably odious” along the way.

Reading the script, I was reminded of a scene from the 1994 movie “Speechless”, with Michael Keaton and Geena Davis. (If you don’t remember the film, it’s a frothy but tolerably amusing comedy about two speechwriters from opposing political campaigns who fall in love.) At one point, Michael Keaton is tasked by his candidate to put positive spin on the fence he wants to build between the U.S. and Mexico to stop illegal immigration.

Keaton obliges with a line from Robert Frost: “Good fences make good neighbors.” I winced when I watched that scene, because the Frost poem would have been the first thing to occur to me had I been given the same assignment.

Anyway, if you want to compare that scene with the one that Oliver Stone is supposedly working with right now as he begins shooting his latest film, it may be viewed at http://www.riskybusinessblog.com/2008/04/the-real-w-or-a.html.

I suppose speechwriters should be grateful that moviemakers acknowledge our existence. As they say in Hollywood, the only bad publicity is no publicity.