Maybe not. First of all,
those trailers on YouTube don't show much evidence of the $5 million in production values the producer, "Sam Bacile" claimed.
Secondly,
Sam Bacile apparent;y doesn\'t exist, either , Although Jeffrey Goldberg apparently met someone who knows him:
Klein told me that Bacile, the producer of the film, is not Israeli, and most likely not Jewish, as has been reported, and that the name is, in fact, a pseudonym. He said he did not know "Bacile"'s real name. He said Bacile contacted him because he leads anti-Islam protests outside of mosques and schools, and because, he said, he is a Vietnam veteran and an expert on uncovering al Qaeda cells in California. "After 9/11 I went out to look for terror cells in California and found them, piece of cake. Sam found out about me. The Middle East Christian and Jewish communities trust me."
He said the man who identified himself as Bacile asked him to help make the anti-Muhammad film. When I asked him to describe Bacile, he said: "I don't know that much about him. I met him, I spoke to him for an hour. He's not Israeli, no. I can tell you this for sure, the State of Israel is not involved, Terry Jones (the radical Christian Quran-burning pastor) is not involved. His name is a pseudonym. All these Middle Eastern folks I work with have pseudonyms. I doubt he's Jewish. I would suspect this is a disinformation campaign."
And Gawker managed to track down a cast member who says that
entire blocks of dialogue was over-dubbed , and the entire cast was deceived about the real nature of the film:
The story of the Muhammed movie which sparked deadly protests in Libya and Egypt gets weirder. The actors who appeared in it had no idea they were starring in anti-Islam propaganda which depicts Muhammed as a child molester and thug. They were deceived by the film's director, believing they were appearing in a film about the life of a generic Egyptian 2,000 years ago.
Cindy Lee Garcia, an actress from Bakersfield, Calif., has a small role in the Muhammed movie as a woman whose young daughter is given to Muhammed to marry. But in a phone interview this afternoon, Garcia told us she had no idea she was participating in an offensive spoof on the life of Muhammed when she answered a casting call through an agency last summer and got the part.
The script she was given was titled simply Desert Warriors.
"It was going to be a film based on how things were 2,000 years ago," Garcia said. "It wasn't based on anything to do with religion, it was just on how things were run in Egypt. There wasn't anything about Muhammed or Muslims or anything." (...)
According to Garcia, her three days on set last July were unremarkable. The film's mysterious pseudonymous writer and director, "Sam Bacile," has claimed to be an Israeli real estate mogul. But Garcia said Bacile told her he was Egyptian on set. Bacile had white hair and spoke Arabic to a number of "dark-skinned" men who hung around the set, she said. (A Bacile associate also told The Atlantic he wasn't Israeli or Jewish.)
"He was just really mellow. He was just sitting there and he wanted certain points to be made."
Once, Garcia said, Bacile wanted a girl that "Master George" (aka Muhammed) was to sleep with to look seven years old, instead of 10, to heighten the outrage. But his Assistant Directors protested, saying that was too young.
After the protests erupted and Bacile appeared in the media, Garcia called him up today to express her outrage at his deception.
"I called Sam and said, 'Why did you do this?' and he said, 'I'm tired of radical Islamists killing each other. Let other actors know it's not their fault.'"
Garcia isn't satisfied simply knowing it wasn't her fault.
"I'm going to sue his butt off."
A disinformation campaign? Hmmm...
Here is the original casting call for the movie. This is just getting weird.
Onward and upward,
airforce