We thought this whole thing was settled last week after DreamWorks yanked its mock Web site for Simple Jack — the movie-within-the-movie featuring the tagline, "Once upon a time there was a retard" — and disability advocates' only slightly unreasonable list of demands ("Paramount/DreamWorks should pull all scenes and clips that include Ben Stiller’s portrayal of Simple Jack from the movie, DVD, trailers, promotional material and merchandising") came and went with nary a splash. But in fact the danger worsens by the day, reports one source, which warns of an ambush by aggrieved disability-rights protestors at tonight's premiere in Westwood and a full-scale, national "No Retard" backlash to coincide with Thunder's national opening on Wednesday:

“Not only might it happen, it will happen,” Timothy P. Shriver, chairman of the Special Olympics, said of the expected push for a boycott. ... Mr. Shriver said that he had also begun to ask members of Congress for a resolution condemning what he called the movie’s “hate speech” and calling for stronger federal support of the intellectually disabled. ...

Over the weekend an ad-hoc coalition of more than a dozen disabilities groups — including the Arc of the United States, the National Down Syndrome Congress, the American Association of People With Disabilities and others — laid the groundwork for public protests to begin Monday. ... "I came out feeling like I had been assaulted,” said David C. Tolleson, executive director of the Down syndrome group who saw the movie.

Funny — that was exactly our reaction to Sean Penn's grossly condescending role in I Am Sam. If only we had mounted a boycott then, we could have nipped this whole crisis in the bud.

• Nationwide ‘Thunder’ Boycott in the Works [NYT]

·Paramount/Dreamworks should pull all references to the words “retard,” “imbecile,” “moron” and “idiot” from the movie, DVD, trailers, promotional material and merchandising;

·Paramount/DreamWorks should pull all scenes and clips that include Ben Stiller’s portrayal of Simple Jack from the movie, DVD, trailers, promotional material and merchandising;

·Ben Stiller, DreamWorks and Paramount should apologize ...

·Paramount/Dreamworks should commit to consulting people with disabilities during the development process about scripts that portray them...

And the list goes on, though this last point is problematic: Tropic Thunder does not depict "people with disabilities," but rather Stiller's portrayal of a bad actor depicting someone with disabilities — a grievous Hollywood standby for which Sean Penn, Cuba Gooding Jr., Dustin Hoffman, Juliette Lewis and that guy from Gigli among sundry other 'retards' of varying severity all owe far more urgent apologies.

Anyway, isn't Diablo Cody connected with this somehow? She's always to blame for something around here. Apologize already, would you?

• Readers: What’s your advice on ‘Tropic Thunder’? [Patricia E. Bauer]
• ‘Tropic Thunder’ Abandoning ‘Simple Jack’? [Vulture]

His logic is crystalline, but alas, its political incorrectness is drawing even deeper consideration this morning as disability advocates wage war on the R-Word:

It’s just good clean fun, the studio might say, pointing out that the movie also pokes fun at racial stereotypes. It’s a sendup of old Hollywood films that trotted out able-bodied actors in disability drag, like Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man and Sean Penn in I am Sam. Stiller isn’t laughing at people with intellectual disabilities, I can imagine his publicist saying. He’s laughing at the way Hollywood portrays them.

But for the estimated 14.3 million Americans with cognitive disabilities and their families, such arguments may be problematic. These people share a history of segregation and exclusion, and report that what many call the “R-word” reinforces negative social attitudes just as surely as racial, ethnic and sexually oriented slurs do. ...

“What we are seeing already is a cause of great concern,” [said Peter V. Berns, executive director of the disability activist org The Arc of the United States]. “People with intellectual and developmental disabilities have had a lot of pejorative labels assigned to them over the years. I’d like to think that we as a society are getting past that, but we are seeing one after the other examples that this is not the case.”

Indeed, Stiller's joke is on Hollywood and the likes of Hanks, Hoffman, Penn and others — not to mention the punchlines implicit in an industry whose urge to outdo itself seems directly inverse to its ability to moderate taste. That's all Tropic Thunder is in the end, and really, if it didn't go "full retard" the same way it goes "full megalomania" (with Tom Cruise) or "full junkie" (with Jack Black), it would be an even more protest-worthy clusterfuck of pulled punches and missed opportunities. We'd hate it, and those 14.3 million Americans (and their families) would still face much worse every few years come Oscar season. They still may, of course, but we have faith that once the "full retard" is out of the bottle, it's gone for good. Let the healing begin.

• 'Once upon a time … There was a retard’ [Patricia E. Bauer via NYT]