The Media Equation: Hollywood Techniques at Play in Politics

While watching it, I half-expected to see Michael Moore, the creator of “Roger and Me” and “Bowling for Columbine,” walk onto the screen to hammer the point home.

Mr. Moore half-expected it himself, even if the film was paid for by supporters of Newt Gingrich.

“I wondered who they stole from my crew,” Mr. Moore said in a phone interview. “It was fun to hear what I have been saying for 20 years, not just by any Republican candidate, but Newt Gingrich.”

Politics has looked to Hollywood before for inspiration — take, for example, the Capra-like film tribute to Ronald Reagan for the 1984 Republican convention or “The Man From Hope,” the triumph-of-the-human-spirit fable created for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign by the television producer Harry Thomason.

“When Mitt Romney Came to Town” borrows from a different script — the documentary exposé. The film uses real people talking directly to the camera, varying film stocks and camera angles and cutaways of lonely factories surrounded by weedy parking lots to not only question Mr. Romney’s ability to create jobs but indict him as someone who has been pretty good at destroying them. Think of Willie Horton recast as a venture capitalist and you get a pretty good idea of the flavor of “When Mitt Romney Came to Town.”

Through journalistic documentaries from directors like Alex Gibney and the more politically driven work of Mr. Moore, the public has learned to believe that when they watch a documentary, they will find out the story behind the story. “When Mitt Romney Came to Town” has that ripped-from-the-headlines feel, with Hollywood techniques knit to a scabrous script.

So it only seemed fair to ask Hollywood types what they thought of the film.

“Those in power will appropriate the counterculture to their own ends,” said Mr. Moore, who, like other filmmakers I talked to, seemed taken aback by just how far this particular appropriation goes.

“The people in the film are real and you can tell they are speaking in unscripted ways,” he said. “And what they say is what people in my films say, which is that the rich are getting richer, the middle class is being eliminated and greed rules. This is not just the language of my films, but the language of Occupy Wall Street.” (Simon Dumenco of Advertising Age called the film “the documentary that Occupy Wall Street never got around to making.”)

Unlike some of the documentaries it mimics, “When Mitt Romney Came to Town” has an explicitly partisan and very specific goal: stopping Mr. Romney’s ascent to the nomination. The film was made by the Republican operative Barry Bennett, and was quickly sliced into Hollywood-style trailers and posted online. Financed by a donation from the casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, the pro-Gingrich super PAC Winning Our Future bought the movie and purchased time on television to broadcast it in South Carolina.

Mr. Gibney, the filmmaker behind documentaries like “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” and “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer,” got right to the point when I called him.

“O.K., I admit it. I made the documentary. They paid me $10 million. I figured it would be seen as a seamless part of the rest of my work,” he said. Jokes aside, he is concerned that the line between hard-hitting point-of-view documentaries and paid agitprop could become a fuzzy one.

“It worries me because it pollutes the form,” he said. “People could marginalize something that I made by saying that it’s no different than some other piece of paid propaganda that is out there.”

Judd Apatow, the director/producer behind “Superbad,” “Knocked Up” and “Bridesmaids,” said he initially saw the documentary as of a piece with films like Mr. Moore’s “Roger and Me.” “But after a while, it becomes so over the top that it seems more like a sketch on ‘The Daily Show,’ ” he said.

“I think they tapped into something that a lot of people think about, though,” Mr. Apatow added. “There are plenty of people who believe that companies will try to be profitable no matter what the human costs.”

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter.com/carr2n

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=2c4f71491b04623efe67f139e924ab6a