FBI agents upset over movie

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Gregg Schwarz frowned as he positioned himself, just so, in front of the wrought iron fence surrounding John Edgar Hoover’s grave, a place he has visited countless times but never before in anger.

A retired FBI agent who joined the agency in 1972, the year Hoover died, Schwarz had hired a videographer to film him for YouTube expressing his displeasure with a movie that depicted Hoover as a repressed homosexual. In a dig at Clint Eastwood, the director of “J. Edgar,” Schwarz titled his video response, “Dirty Harry to Filthy Harry.”

“Mr. Hoover was portrayed as an individual who had homosexual tendencies and was a tyrannical monster,” Schwarz said into the camera, as the sun glinted off his FBI cuff links and FBI lapel pin. “That is simply not true.”

Many former FBI agents share Schwartz’s pique with the film’s dropped hints of an abiding love between Hoover and aide Clyde Tolson, who is buried a few grave sites away. Historians agree that there is no evidence that either man was gay, and a request for comment from either Eastwood or screenwriter Dustin Lance Black was declined.

Since “J. Edgar’s” release early this month, hundreds of agents have griped about the film on xgboys, a closed e-mail list for FBI retirees that takes its name from one of Hoover’s pet dogs, which in turn is a play on the old nickname for federal agents, “G-men.”

“I don’t know anyone who’s not extremely upset,” said Bill Branon, a former agent who is chairman of the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation, which grants scholarships to college students studying law enforcement and forensics. “It’s not only because of our admiration for him. It’s the fact it’s just not true. If it were true, it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. But don’t do that to the poor guy when he’s dead and gone.”

The widespread unhappiness over Hollywood’s imagined rendering of Hoover’s rumored-but-never-proven personal life largely comes from men who started their FBI careers when Hoover was still in charge. Their devotion is undimmed almost four decades after his death.

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But mostly, they say, they are offended on his behalf because the intimation that Hoover was gay is false. They say agents, apparently a gossipy bunch among themselves, would have heard about it if it were, because Hoover was always tailed for his protection, despite his objections; they called it “Hoo-Watch.”

“It’s hard to have an illicit homosexual love affair with an agent looking in the back window of your car,” said Fred Robinette, a former FBI agent and Hoover’s grand-nephew.

WaPo

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The film looks like another Leo DiCaprio clunker, remember he and Scorcese did a bio-loser about Howard Hughes. The reported production budget is 35 million, including clam cake sandwiches and chateaubriand steak and lobster dinners, has revenues, after 20 days, of 29 million. To break even the film must sell more than 5 million box office tickets ($50 million) or risk cash flow profitability through university-public library, dvd, or television distribution. This storyline-scenario is limited by only domestic market with near zero international interests. There is very little general want by the general public in resurrecting this man’s life story which the film industry cannot do fairly or honestly. The film industry twisted philosophy is that there is no such thing as celibancy for men or women; the truth is that there is no viable scientific proof that such a prejudiced slant bears any truth.

As with many others I’ve of course heard the accusations that Hoover was a closet transvestite, however even if he was a transvestite, it doesn’t necessarily lead to a conclusion that he was a homosexual.