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Claudia Rossett has uncovered some Hollywood-style accounting in the UN’s oil-for-food program. Scratch that. When the Paramount accounting department insisted, with a perfectly straight face, that Forrest Gump didn’t make any money, at least their cooked figures added up. If UN bureaucrats were in charge of Forrest Gump, they wouldn’t know whether the production costs were $50 or $60 million, or whether it made $400 or $500 million worldwide; the director would still be collecting a salary and finishing post-production 6 months after the movie came out on video; and, if anyone asked about the discrepencies in the figures, they’d just dismiss it all as “rounding off”.
Of course, being the object of blind worship by so much of the intelligentsia and Big Media, this story will quietly fade away. Why shouldn’t the U.N. be brazen about it?