In a movie opening next week, left-wing activist Woody Harrelson (IMDb page) plays a dirty cop in 1999 Los Angeles whose character impugns the Founding Fathers as “all slave-owners” and warns that if he is fired “I’ll have my own show on Fox News inside one week.”
“I am not a racist,” he declares in a clip from Rampart played on Thursday’s Late Show, arguing: “Now, you want to be mad at someone, try J. Edgar Hoover. He was a racist. Or the Founding Fathers, all slave-owners.” Some Founding Fathers owned slaves, but far short of “all.” In a scene in the promotional trailer featured on Millennium Entertainment’s site for the film, Harrelson’s dirty police officer character threatens: “If you force me to retire, I’ll have my own show on Fox News inside one week. You’ll be my first guest.” (Video of both scenes below)
That’s likely a take-off on Mark Fuhrman, who appeared as a guest on FNC, but never had his own show.
Audio: MP3 clip
(Harrelson plays McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt in HBO’s upcoming Game Change movie about the 2008 campaign.)
The plot summary for Rampart as listed on the movie’s official site:
Officer Dave Brown (Harrelson) is a Vietnam vet and a Rampart Precinct cop, dedicated to doing “the people’s dirty work” and asserting his own code of justice, often blurring the lines between right and wrong to maintain his action-hero state of mind. When he gets caught on tape beating a suspect, he finds himself in a personal and emotional downward spiral as the consequences of his past sins and his refusal to change his ways in light of a department-wide corruption scandal seal his fate.
