REEL DRAMA OF ‘MARIE’ WINS SUPPORTERS

“Marie: A True Story,” starring Sissy Spacek, may be a new movie, but the story of Marie Ragghianti (pronounced RAH-jee-AHN-ti) is well known in Tennessee’s capital city.

Ragghianti, a former state official, made headlines nine years ago for her battle against a corrupt governor and his top aides. Far from becoming a local heroine for her efforts, Ragghianti found herself an outcast, her “real” motives questioned in the media and debated among local residents. She eventually moved to Florida.

However, Ragghianti said during an interview here this week, “Marie” may have changed all that.”

“I was definitely ambivalent about coming back,” she explained. “When I did a publicity tour here (to publicize author Peter Maas’ book, on which the movie is based), the press reaction was not so favorable.” (Book reviewers maintained that Maas, who also wrote “Serpico” and “The Valachi Papers,” was too one-sided in his approach and made Ragghianti seem, as several wrote, “like a saint.”)

“This time the community and the media were quite favorable toward the movie,” Ragghianti observed. “I was a little bit surprised.”

Ragghianti’s real-life drama began in 1976. During her brief tenure as chairman of the State Pardons and Paroles board, she discovered that Gov. Ray Blanton, through his top aides, was “selling” pardons and early paroles to politically connected prisoners. When her protests went unheeded, she took the information to the FBI.

Before Blanton and other aides were convicted and sent to prison (on additional charges of taking kickbacks on liquor licenses), Ragghianti was fired from her job (she later won a wrongful dismissal lawsuit); arrested on drunk-driving charges that didn’t stick and slandered by rumors that she was sexually involved with many top officials.

Maas’ book made a point of the failure of local media to discern what was really happening in the Blanton Administration, and that, Ragghianti suggested, may have accounted for the cold reception the book received here.

Why then would the media be favorably inclined toward the film, which screenwriter John Briley (“Gandhi”) adapted directly from the book?

While Ragghianti declined to speculate, she was amused when reminded that several journalists who had reported on her troubles with Blanton were cast by director Roger Donaldson in the film.

“I don’t think it’s important to evaluate why their attitudes may have changed; I’m just glad they did,” she said. Curiously, one reporter who appeared in “Marie” wrote a story after an early screening that was full of effusive quotes, mainly from other local people also cast in the film.

“Nobody else was covering it, so I figured I would,” explained Dwight Lewis, a reporter for the Tennesseean. Lewis, who said his beat normally includes the penal system, had written several unflattering stories about Ragghianti that eventually were traced to Blanton aides. “I came off kind of bad in the book,” Lewis acknowledged.

“So I figured if I was going to look like an jerk in the movie, I might as well play myself.” He described the movie as “pretty accurate, I guess.”

Larry Brinton, a former newspaper reporter who now works for a local TV station, said he decided to appear in the film “as a lark. The truthful thing is, everything I did in the movie I had done in real life.”

Brinton, described by Maas as the top investigative reporter in the state, felt the movie to be better than the book. “This is not to square with Maas, I just think he really went into so much detail and dates; the movie uses her children more as a thread. Plus, Peter did portray the press as sitting on their thumbs during the Blanton Administration, which nobody liked.”

Unlike Lewis, Brinton steered clear of doing “Marie” stories, explaining that “I’m not a movie critic; the last movie I saw before this was ‘All the President’s Men.’ ”

A standout among other locals who joined the cast was Ragghianti’s real-life attorney, Fred Thompson, whom she described as a “born actor.”

Thompson, who made his television debut during his tenure as minority counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee, portrayed himself in the film. His performance was described in The Times review as “surprisingly adept . . . (Thompson) has the glowering presence of a Joe Don Baker.”

It may be the start of a second career for the successful Nashville attorney. “A New York agent sent me a script with a part for a plainclothes police officer,” Thompson said in an interview, “but I’m not interested in that kind of role.”

While “Marie” won high marks from movie critics, it performed “sluggishly” at the box office during its first weekend, according to Daily Variety.

Yet as it turned out, audiences apparently are interested in at least one variant of the individual-battling-the-system theme: The top-grossing film last weekend was Chuck Norris’ “Invasion U.S.A.”