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Without question, Mia Farrow's Wall Street Journal op-ed warning 2008 Olympic adviser Steven Spielberg that his failure to pressure the Chinese government about its funding of the Darfur genocide risked establishing him as the "Leni Riefenstahl of the Beijing Games" was a stirring speaking-truth-to-Hollywood-power moment, and one that proved far more effective in getting the director's attention than Brad Pitt's pulling aside Spielberg at the after-party for the A Mighty Heart premiere to tell the legend, "Um, Steven, I think Angie has something she'd like to tell you about The Sudan." But what drove Farrow to risk a DreamWorks disappearing by so publicly criticizing the beloved icon? Slate's Kim Masters reports that after a pair of personal pleas went unanswered, she felt she had no other recourse:

Farrow got no response. Then she read that Spielberg was going to be an artistic director of the games. "I wrote him a letter of conscience saying I hoped he knew all these things," she says. "I really suggested he think twice. And then when I didn't hear back, I had a vision of a box within a box within a box—that he has an office, and then there's a real office behind that and maybe a really real office after that and maybe three letters a month actually get to him.

So to be fair, maybe he didn't get any of my letters. [But] I'm on another time schedule where ten thousand people a month are dying. So you wait two weeks, that's five thousand people right there. I just could not wait any longer. So the piece was born."

In the end, it seems that someone managed to penetrate the innermost of Spielberg's Russian-nesting-offices with their Darfur concerns, as a spokesman has just announced that he's considering quitting his advisory role if the Chinese don't soon address the problem of their support of the Sudanese government. While the loss of Spielberg's consulting services would certainly send a clear message, the director may need to make a bolder statement to get the dramatic result everyone's hoping for; perhaps if he publicly threatens to withhold the release of next summer's Indiana Jones 4 from Chinese theaters, the outcry from hundreds of millions of the nation's outraged Indy fans, who've suffered over two decades without a new adventure from their favorite swashbuckling archaeologist, will pressure their leaders to take real action.