Exhuming McCarthy.

In today's NY Post (link via Drudge):

February 12, 2003 -- Bad-boy actor Sean Penn

I'd give my eye-teeth to see people drop the use of the lazy catchall descriptor "bad-boy" in reference to Penn. He's really more of a "tantrum-boy" anyway.

says his opposition to a war in Iraq cost him a lucrative movie role - but the film's producer, Steve Bing, calls the claim "extortion."
The feud over "Why Men Shouldn't Marry" erupted yesterday amid dueling lawsuits in Los Angeles.

Penn accuses Bing of "borrowing a page from the dark era of Hollywood blacklisting" by denying him a promised role in the movie, which Bing wrote and was supposed to direct.

Oh, God. "I didn't get the role I wanted. I'm so obviously right for the part it has to be unfair blacklisting." Can we PLEASE stop dragging out the ghost of Joe McCarthy every damn time some H-wood nutbar doesn't get his way?

But Bing - a multimillionaire who fathered a child with Liz Hurley - says he's the object of "an extraordinary extortion attempt by an irrational and irresponsible actor."

Not that that doesn't describe 99% of the H-wood population, but it's a lot more likely than any apocryphal blacklisting.

Bing says Penn is trying to force him to pay $10 million, even though Penn never had a formal contract to do the movie.

Penn visited Iraq in December, and has complained that President Bush's wish to disarm Saddam Hussein takes "a simplistic and inflammatory view of good and evil."

For which bit of simplistic and inflammatory stupidity he will probably be forever remembered, if at all.

The movie will begin filming next summer, and is supposed to also star Woody Allen.

Penn should probably count himself fortunate not to have been cast, then.