Thoughts in a Haystack

Well, Variety has now gotten into the act.

Reporting on the fantasy flick, Expelled, it said:

Producers of the $3.5 million film, which has been enthusiastically backed by anti-evolution think tank the Discovery Institute, have harnessed some big guns to get the film's message out. They've hired Motive Entertainment, the marketing brains behind "The Passion of the Christ" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe," to spread the intelligent design gospel and tapped powerhouse PR firm Rogers & Cowan to handle the film's media campaign.

Marketing is always the star of any Intelligent Design production.

The story notes that Ben Stein, who scripted Richard Nixon's speeches and became "famous" when he trod the boards as Ferris Bueller's monotonous teacher said:

It's not important to me whether it makes money. I've already been paid, and I might add quite modestly at that.

Yeah, but there other ways to receive residuals. It's being reported that "Ben Stein Wins Money from Intelligent Design Community" through his being given, in lieu of any Oscars, the oxymoronically entitled "Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth" from that bastion of science, Biola University, otherwise known as Bible Institute of Los Angeles. It is also reported that he is "making the rounds" of college campuses and evangelical church screenings.

Stein claims:

I'm hoping that (schools) will at least allow in science classes someone to say, 'What if it's not Darwinism, but what if there was some intelligent designer who created the universe?'

As far as I know, every school in America allows people such soliloquies. They just direct them from the science class down the hall to the religion class or across the street to the church or synagogue or mosque. But Variety may sum it up best, even if not quite intentionally:

[U]nlike most movies, "Expelled" may be looking to effect policy change more than rack up B.O.

From downwind, the second objective has been already achieved in spades.
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