Horns and Halos

In late 1998, a small article appeared in the New York Times: publisher St. Martin’s Press had withdrawn Fortunate Son, the first biography of the former governor of Texas, George W. Bush, from the bookshops. At that moment, the book by J.H. Hatfield was number eight in the bestseller list of Amazon.com, a success that was probably due to the fact that the book alleged that, in the early Seventies, Bush had used cocaine. The renowned publisher claimed a breach of faith with the writer, after a Texan newspaper had revealed that the writer himself had been in jail for attempted murder.A little later, the small underground publisher Soft Skull reported that it was going to republish the biography. But that was less easy than the 29yearold parttime cleaner and founder of Soft Skull, Sander Hicks, hoped. This was followed by months and years of court cases, negative publicity and disagreements between publisher and writer.In Horns and Halos, Hawley and Galinsky use all the vicissitudes around the energetic, committed publisher Hicks and the sombre, distrustful Hatfield to sketch an amusing picture of the world of a leftwing underground publishing house from the Lower East Side. But at the same time, the film yields a much greater result: an insight into the mechanisms of the relationship between media and politics.