Posted on 06/06/2004 1:57:39 PM PDT by Fintan
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Turned off by political attack ads? Get your news from late-night comedy shows? Try this: A comely cartoon stewardess, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, lights the cigar of a nervous businessman, read by Kevin Bacon. "How's the reconstruction going?" he's asked. "Great," he replies, "I mean profitable. Very profitable." As a plane full of businessmen strap on parachutes, grabbing their briefcases and guns, the announcer asks: "What if the same men who profited from the war had to fight it?" Moved? How about a television ad written by satirist Al Franken, in which a $25,000-a-year waitress (Ione Skye) explains Bush's tax cuts to a wealthy lawyer (Illeana Douglas). Recognizing how eyes glaze over when confronted with traditional appeals, Democrats are turning to Hollywood messengers in their quest to uproot President Bush this fall. At least 10 such ads are being readied to run before the November election - all funded by MoveOn.org, a liberal advocacy group largely backed by billionaire George Soros. It's signed up director Rob Reiner (When Harry Met Sally . . ., The American President) and writer Aaron Sorkin, creator of The West Wing. Woody Harrelson (Cheers, Natural Born Killers) and Richard Linklater (School of Rock, Dazed and Confused) will also direct ads. Movies with political ambition will be playing on the big screen, too: Michael Moore's Cannes-conquering Fahrenheit 9/11; John Sayles' Silver City, in which Chris Cooper plays an inarticulate president from a right-wing dynasty; at least two Kerry-celebrating documentaries; and an environmental horror flick already playing the red states, The Day After Tomorrow. Does any of these have a chance of changing minds? There's little precedent, says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Many predicted The Right Stuff would guarantee the presidency for former astronaut John Glenn in 1984, she notes. But in a tight election, anything might tip the balance, says Rob Richie, executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy. New York Times columnist Frank Rich says watch out for Fahrenheit 9/11, which charges that Bush has bungled the terror war and sent U.S. troops to Iraq for specious reasons. The film feasted on free publicity when Disney blocked its subsidiary Miramax from distributing it. Miramax's co-chiefs, the Weinstein brothers, since have bought the film on their own and are teaming with Lions Gate and IFC Films for a June 25 release. "The more fighting there is about the film before its release, the more publicity, the more it becomes that kind of show-business phenomenon where people just feel they have to see it to have an opinion, even if it's to hate it . . .," Rich says. Should that happen and some pro-Bush audiences end up in the theater, "they may find themselves moved by the more emotional and less polemical parts of Moore's account of a family that loses a son in the Iraq war," Rich says. The film's distributors have signed on some veteran political hands to massage the media for Fahrenheit 9/11, including Clinton White House advisers Chris Lehane and Mark Fabiani, said a Miramax official. Conservative author and former New Left activist David Horowitz doubts Hollywood can turn an election. "I'm not really shaking in my boots as a Republican when extremist radical leftists in Hollywood - people out of touch with any semblance of political reality - go about making campaign spots," says Horowitz, editor of the frontpagemag.com Web site. ". . . In my view, Hollywood has become an asset to Republicans because it is so lunatic." Still, no one doubts the power of pictures or the ability of comedy to go where screed is uninvited. The Day After Tomorrow may make people think about global warming, but if it doesn't have a tipping effect, it won't be for lack of trying by MoveOn. The group held a rally last month at the New York premiere, where 500 members heard speakers including former Vice President Al Gore, who lit into the Bush record on the environment. Last weekend, MoveOn dispatched 8,000 volunteers to leaflet moviegoers leaving theaters across the country. Richie predicts that the film will preach to the converted: "What it will tend to do is harden beliefs of those who think it is important to do more - like MoveOn." Horowitz doubts global warming will be high on voters' minds: "The election is going to be decided on the war," he says. "And that is it. It's not going to be decided on the silver screen or a couple TV ads." The timing of the John Sayles film is a mix of commerce and politics. "Whenever there's a lot of attention on politics, it's a good time to put a political movie out," Sayles told Entertainment Weekly. Steve Rosenbaum, director of Inside the Bubble, a documentary about the Kerry campaign's brain trust, is still debating the right release date, recognizing it's good business to release the film before the election, while interest is highest. But that would leave the film without the best ending. Rosenbaum says his goal is to show people "that there is a side to John Kerry that hasn't been able to see the light of day." He says he is not making a 90-minute ad: "We don't think people are going to pay $9 to see a political commercial." Another documentary aims to show off Kerry. George Butler, whose Pumping Iron lifted Arnold Schwarzenegger, turns his lens on Kerry's Vietnam experience in Tour of Duty, from Douglas Brinkley's book. The film is scheduled for September. The messages with the most potential to reach undecideds may be the MoveOn commercials, aimed at the heart of the undecideds - a group that Adam Clymer, political director of the National Annenberg Election Survey, describes this way: "They pay less attention to politics. They read less news. They are younger, they are a little more negative than everyone else about the war and the economy." Swing-state undecideds make up about 11 percent of voters, according to an Annenberg survey released Friday. The idea for the Hollywood ads grew from the Bush in 30 Seconds grassroots campaign that MoveOn launched in the fall, a competition to create the best political ad. That entertainers such as Jack Black, Tony Shalhoub, Hector Elizondo and Gus Van Sant stepped forward to judge the entries suggested to Laura Dawn, MoveOn's event director, that high-profile people no longer feared being called unpatriotic for questioning policy. But MoveOn ran into a problem getting on the air. CBS refused to run its contest-winning ad about the budget deficit during the Super Bowl, saying it didn't run advocacy ads. Eli Pariser, MoveOn's campaign director, is aiming the ads at cable and key local affiliates: "They won't keep us from getting these ads out there."
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Hunh, no movies about crazed Muslims flying jet liners into
American buildings?
No movies about crazed muslims blowing up American destroyers?
No movies about crazed muslims blowing up bus loads of innocent JEWS??
No movies about crazed muslims with exploding sneakers?
No movies about crazed muslims with stock piles of Ricin?
Hollywood is loosening it.
Time was when they had their finger on the pulse, now they
just have their thumb......well, somewhere.
Snicker.
The working man's unions used to be the top donor to the democrats, now its the laywers and hollywood pukes.
Thank that John McCain for giving Hollywood so much power.
Meathead sure is the right name for that guy, but someone please tell me what happened to Campaign finace Reform.? How can these ads be legal? What ever happened to equal time. McCain sure gave us a loser with his Campaign Finance Bill.
maybe the RNC's best response to the ADS would be to have film segments of Soros pulling puppet strings and droning in his horrible accent, making very clear that this is not even an American that is spending so much on the election's outcome...
Good. There's nothing America hates more than Actors telling us how we should live our lives. Everytime I see an actor telling me that I should read to my children I want to jump through the TV and wring their neck.
I guess we would have to start calling the owners of the stations that agree to run these commercials...and the companies that also advertise on these stations...
McCain, Feingold and everyone who voted for this moronic deprivation of the First Amendment (including Bush, who signed it, and the Supreme Court justices who voted to allow it) should have to watch each and every one of these ads and then write an essay on how those kinds of laws never work and only result in new loopholes. Disgusting.
If I recall correctly Hollywierd did the same during the "Gipper's" reelection bid for the same reasons plus they viewed him as doubly the traitor as he had left the sacred cow of the Dimwit party to become a Republican.
maybe the RNC's best response to the ADS would be to have film segments of Soros pulling puppet strings and droning in his horrible accent, making very clear that this is not even an American that is spending so much on the election's outcome...
I can just see it...
"Republicans can be bred unt slauuughtered!"
Well, it looks like I'll be adding some more actors and ACTRESSES (<---politically incorrect) to my "Do Not Watch" list. I won't go to see any movies these libs have acted in or made. I greatly dislike any Hollywood folks who think their acting skills somehow qualify them to speak as experts on everything else.
Can somebody explain to me how all this Hwood, Soros and Moveone money (471?) can be allowed by campaign finaance laws that the RATS voted for? I fail to understand, but then again I do. We're talking about RATs here and they do not obey the laws but expect everyone else to do so.
Rob Reiner also directed 'The Princess Bride', one of the best movies ever made. Oh, it has zero politics in it. Hmmm, maybe there's a lesson there for Hollywood.
Ah, yes... I can see it now...
Fade main title up over black
Fade out to black main title
Roll production crew credits
End, bring up house lights
Jeez, the post on this is gonna be a real quickie... I can book the edit suite for one hour and then go head over to Mickie D's for an early lunch. This is gonna be great! Hey where can I apply for the post production supervisor's job?
Soros is American.
Well, it looks like I'll be adding some more actors and ACTRESSES (<---politically incorrect) to my "Do Not Watch" list. I won't go to see any movies these libs have acted in or made. I greatly dislike any Hollywood folks who think their acting skills somehow qualify them to speak as experts on everything else
Yeah, I'm reving up to beat Hollywood.
...Admin. Mod. Remove this. I'll understand...
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