Atwater doc makes conservatives groan

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Then-President George H.W. Bush (right) meets with then-Republican National Committee Chairman Lee Atwater in January 1989.

By JEFFREY RESSNER

Making its debut at the Los Angeles Film Festival this week, “Boogie Man” tells the life story of Lee Atwater, the late, legendary GOP operative who changed the course of modern political campaigning by emphasizing attack ads, wedge issues and, occasionally, outright chicanery. You won’t find the documentary at the local multiplex, and you might even have to sniff around to find it a month or two from now — it’s been sold overseas, but at press time, a domestic distributor had not emerged for the low-budget indie.

George H.W. Bush once said that Atwater — a music fan whose tastes ran toward B.B. King and Percy Sledge — knew how to give Democrats the blues. But after seeing the documentary with a conservative crowd, including longtime Republican political consultant Mike Murphy, it seemed to us that the movie would make the GOP mad, as well. At Monday night’s festival showing in L.A., some in the crowd groaned and hissed, angry at how the film used Democrats of dubious distinction to make its anti-GOP points and how it tarnished Republicans as racists.

Calling it “a pejorative, liberal cartoon,” Murphy gave the film two thumbs way down. The consultant, who knew Atwater back in the day and has since gone on to advise prominent Republicans such as John McCain, Mitt Romney and Arnold Schwarzenegger, said the documentary was guilty of “a greater assault on the truth than anything Lee Atwater was accused of.” (Variety’s review notes, “The man Democrats loved to hate receives a docu-portrait Republicans might chafe at.” Meanwhile, liberal film blogger Jeffrey Wells called it “the sharpest and fairest portrait of smear politics and Republican culture since ‘So Goes the Nation,’” last year’s doc about the 2004 election.)

Atwater’s name might not be too familiar to folks who began their political education after the launch of MSNBC, but his spirit certainly lives on. Just last Sunday, New York Times columnist David Brooks excoriated Barack Obama for his decision to reject public financing, writing that Obama explained his reversal in a videotaped plea “so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding.”

Whether you believe Atwater was monumentally important or merely a historical footnote, the subject matter of “Boogie Man” poses a great challenge to movie distributors hoping to reach wide audiences. Made with foundation grants and edited on a laptop computer for well under $100,000, the film has no narrator and uses rarely seen news footage as well as original interviews with Atwater’s family, foes and friends. And, oh, the stories they tell: tales of Willie Horton and Michael Dukakis, push polling and Tom Turnipseed, a young George W. Bush and an even younger Karl Rove.

Several conservatives in the crowd found fault with director Stefan Forbes’ choice of Atwater attackers, from Clintonista Terry McAuliffe, who pontificates about morality in the back seat of a chauffeured vehicle, to several strongly biased liberal writers. “What impressed was the director’s deft use of Joe Conason, Terry McAuliffe and Eric Alterman as objective voices to drive the narrative,” sniffed Drudge Report contributor Andrew Breitbart, founder of the news website Breitbart.com.

Forbes claims he “purposely interviewed far fewer Dems than Republicans,” because he “wanted the film’s story to be told by the people who knew Lee.” Still, he realizes the backlash, with Atwater’s inner circle “vehemently” opposed to the Democrats featured in the film and likely to “disagree with just about anything said by a Mike Dukakis or a Terry McAuliffe.”

As for his own political beliefs, the director said the term “independent” defines his personal politics as well as his filmmaking ethos. “I’m generally pretty disgusted with both parties,” he said, though it appears the Republicans come off far worse in his film than do the Dems, such as Dukakis, who unintentionally comes across as a doddering Mr. Rogers type in his interviews.

Republicans interviewed for the film include Mary Matalin, Tucker Eskew and Ed Rollins. The director’s entreaties to Rove went unanswered, and the elder Bush was similarly disinclined to participate. Forbes, who had done some camerawork for HBO and previously directed a PBS documentary about Nova Scotia fishermen, said he chose Atwater’s life for his feature debut because it offered up “an epic journey of politics, from his humble roots in the rural South to the heights of power in Washington, D.C.”

To Entertain Heroes

It’s not a documentary, and there aren’t any candidates or runoff races in its story line. Indeed, “Two Tickets to Paradise” might not seem like a political picture at first blush, but it was born out of post-Sept. 11, 2001, anguish and made for blue-collar audiences far removed from the mind-set of the Beverly Hills crowd. Creator D.B. Sweeney is a character actor well-known to film lovers, having starred as “Shoeless Joe” Jackson in John Sayles’ classic baseball drama “Eight Men Out” and having appeared in the famed TV miniseries “Lonesome Dove” and, more recently, in the primetime television series “Jericho.”

Seven years ago, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, Sweeney talked with New York City firefighters who were run ragged from attending daily funerals and drowning their sorrows at bars. When he suggested they take a much-needed break by going bowling or seeing a movie, he was laughed at. “They don’t make movies for guys like us,” the firefighters told Sweeney. He resolved on the spot to change that.

Mortgaging his house to finance his project, Sweeney co-wrote, directed and co-starred in the original film about three aging Pennsylvania pals who score tickets to a Florida football game and take a road trip to escape their troubles at home. Making the most out of a modest budget, Sweeney bought his movie’s vehicles online, secured million-dollar effects work for one-tenth of the usual fee and received a hand from “Eight Men Out” fan Bruce Springsteen, who allowed his music to be used for “next to nothing.”

So far, the movie has won awards at festivals in Boston; Vail, Colo.; Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.; and Savannah, Ga. Sweeney also took it to military bases in the U.S. as well as in Europe and the Middle East; he said a showing aboard the USS Nimitz as the aircraft carrier traveled the Pacific Ocean was particularly moving. Next month, “Two Tickets to Paradise” comes out on DVD via First Look Studios, bypassing theatrical distribution. Considering stuff such as “Get Smart” and “The Love Guru” is now playing at theaters, you would do far better to pick up a couple of six-packs and invite the guys over to watch Sweeney’s sweetheart of a picture.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0608/11316_Page2.html