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The big "money shot" in Roland Emmerich's 1996 alien-invasion epic, "Independence Day," had the White House being zapped to smithereens. It capped the previews, helped the film earn $816,969,268 and got an Oscar for visual effects.

Well, essentially, that's what the director does to Shakespeare in "Anonymous," a hysterical historical that brazenly reassigns credit for the Bard's plays and poetry to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. The film bows Oct. 28, and the police tape is up.

"It's not our theory," insists screenwriter John Orloff, who has gone where no theorist has gone before (unless you count the established, company-line "Stratfordians," who have always held that Shakespeare wrote his own stuff).

	Screenwriter John Orloff
	photo by Reiner Bajo – © 2011 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc.

"Some of the people who thought Shakespeare didn't write the plays are Mark Twain, Henry James, Sigmund Freud — Walt Whitman became obsessed with it — a lot of writers, and I don't think that's coincidental because writers understand how you write. It's a big question in this case because writers tend to write what they know. They write from experience. Mark Twain's whole point when he wrote an entire book about why he didn't think Shakespeare wrote the plays was that he [Twain] couldn't have written about the Mississippi, had he not been a Mississippi boat pilot and known these people and had these experiences. His thesis was: 'No way can you can convince me, Samuel Clemens, this boy from Stratford could write about all these noblemen and the intricacies of court and the metaphors of falconry and lawn bowling and tennis and medicine and law, if he hadn't been that person.'

"There is a reason why four Supreme Court Justices don't think William Shakespeare wrote the plays, and the reason they don't think he did is that the law in Shakespeare is incredibly accurate, 16th-century law. In fact, for a couple of hundred years, people thought William Shakespeare must have been a lawyer or law clerk. We don't think that anymore because there is no record of him going to law school.

"We didn't make a documentary. We made a movie, and we can't say it more clearly than the opening moments where we have an actor on a theatre stage [Derek Jacobi at the Broadhurst] introducing the movie, saying it's a piece of theatre. This is a movie about the intersection of art and politics. It's about: 'Is the pen mightier than the sword?' We're just using that story to talk about that bigger truth."

	Vanessa Redgrave in "Anonymous."
	photo by Reiner Bajo – © 2011 Columbia TriStar Marketing Group, Inc.

"Anonymous" has the impressive heft and production value of the usual spectacle turned out by Roland Emmerich, who, while still a student filmmaker, was dubbed "Little Spielberg" for a 10-minute CinemaScope sci-fi saga he premiered in competition at the Berlin Film Festival. ("I was thinking big even then," he shrugs.) In Hollywood, he behaved accordingly ("Stargate," "Godzilla," "The Patriot," The Day After Tomorrow"), and his pictures have grossed more than $3 billion worldwide.

If anything, "Anonymous" is Emmerich in a restrained mode, more cerebral and less costly (a mere, but splendidly spent, $26 million — thanks to the miracles of CGI). Most of his energies went into matching the right actors with the right roles.

"I have to say, it was the longest casting I ever did," the director readily admits, "and it was the most interesting casting I ever did because I didn't want to put people in boxes. I was, in a way, getting out of the box myself, and I didn't want to box other people in one. I didn't tell most of the people I met what part I was seeing them for. I just wanted to talk in general about the script first, and then I would always ask the most important question: 'Which part in the movie would you like to play?'"