But first, a prelude.
Arguably one of the most famous people ever to post here -- the late comedy writer Larry Gelbart -- is best known for having taken the movie "M*A*S*H" and turned it into a television series, writing many of the initial scripts and creating characters like Cpl. Klinger, who longed for Toledo and who dressed the part. "M*A*S*H" was unabashedly anti-war; patriotism was the last refuge of a series of scoundrels.
Gelbart's most overtly political work, though, was a hilarious and extremly pointed satire of the Iran-Contra hearings and the then-new CNN's coverage of it. The stand-in for William Casey had, among all his other irons in the fire, ownership of a film company - Master Pictures - which plays a key role in the investigation. Hence, the play's title, and the name of the scandal being investigated: "Mastergate."
The play was filmed in 1992, but is now impossibile to find, and I've never seen it. Which bugs the crap out of me: James Coburn, Darren McGavin, Buck Henry, David Ogden Stiers, Jerry Orbach, Dennis Weaver, Burgess Meredith, Jerry Orbach, Ed Begley, Jr. ... and, as shown above, Ben Stein, all of them likely having the time of their life with the incredible dialogue.
David Ogden Steirs: "It's extremely musical in a difficult way. It's the mark of a brilliant writer who managed to put a harness on his anger and lead it to the typewriter or the word processor without diluting that anger ever, parsing it out very carefully and making out of that anger and annoyance and sense of betrayal a coherent, linear, sometimes savage, always funny, persistently insightful piece." The play's hearings are a whirlwind of political clichés, including a line I think would work very nicely in a contemporary shade of orange:
"What did the President know, and did he have any idea he knew it?"