SELLING ‘POWER’: TRYING TO COME CLOSER

The one minute “teaser trailer” for Sidney Lumet’s new movie, “Power,” is visually stark: Against a white background, a thin man dressed in a stylishly cut suit marches toward the audience. Then, in an ominous voice, the announcer proclaims: “More seductive than sex. More precious than gold. More addictive than any drug. Nothing else comes close. . . .” Finally the title fills the screen in thick black letters: Power.

Dramatic stuff. But just what is this movie all about?

It’s about politics. More specifically, it’s about superstar media handler Pete St. John (played by Richard Gere) who is busy juggling three political campaigns in two countries at once. Lorimar Motion Pictures, which produced and is marketing “Power,” eventually let the audience in on what the movie was about (new trailers show scenes from the movie) but the first trailer highlighted the title alone, and for good reason.

The research folks told the marketing folks that while the notion of power was appealing--particularly to the yuppie set--the subject of politics was a tough sale. “Politics can be difficult stuff when it comes to films,” says Ashley Boone, president of marketing for Lorimar. “This is entertainment and if people are spending money for entertainment, you must sell it as entertainment.”

Politics and movie making are closer cousins than they might first appear: Both expend massive energy attempting to appeal to the lowest common denominator--one in the hopes of winning the most possible votes, the other in the hopes of selling the most possible tickets. But in an era when fewer and fewer eligible voters are going to the polls, is the timing right for such a movie? “We’ll find out soon,” said the director over the phone from New York. Lumet, who made “Serpico,” “Prince of the City,” “The Verdict” and about 30 other films, added, “It’s so hard to know if there is still an audience out there for intelligent movies. I’m going on the premise that people aren’t fools and I think I’m right.”

“Power” focuses on a creation of the political world that has rarely been dealt with by the movies in a substantial way: the image-honing media handlers who dictate everything from the shade of the candidate’s shirt to his position on nuclear disarmament. These controversial promoters are the children of the marriage of TV hucksterism and computer technology. The movie is about the dehumanization of the political process and the dangers that these glitzy middlemen could portend for the democratic process.

“This is a piece about the fact there is no more one-to-one contact,” Lumet said. “ A candidate doesn’t talk to us anymore. They talk to us through someone else. These people are not corrupt. It’s much more frightening than that because we are not talking about evil people, we are talking about a system that is slowly evolving.”

Early on in “Power,” we see Richard Gere advising Fritz Weaver, who is running for the governorship of New Mexico. Weaver grabs Gere’s arm and urgently tries to tell him about his heartfelt position on a tax issue. But Gere interrupts him abruptly: “My job is to get you in. Once you do get in, what you do is up to your good conscience.”

The scene comes early, says “Power” screenwriter David Himmelstein, to establish quickly what it is that this slickly dressed operator is all about. (Those are Dunhill suits.) Says Himmelstein: “Early on I realized the protagonist of this movie is involved in an occupation that is unheard of by 90% of the general population. So the beginning had to be didactic and tell people exactly what it is these guys do.”

Himmelstein, 38, is a former newspaperman who got the idea for “Power” (only his second script) while attending Harvard as a Neiman Fellow. On election night in 1982, a fellow student had put together a continuous loop of TV spots from candidates across the country and watching the reel fascinated Himmelstein.

“It occurred to me that the candidates were all basically interchangeable,” he says. “There was no way you could tell them apart by listening to them or watching them and I realized the guys who had put together the spots were at least as significant, if not more significant, in the process. Today, 80% of a campaign budget for statewide office goes to media advertising--the guy who engineers that is hugely influential in any major race.”

As fewer and fewer Americans vote and seem less and less interested in the issues, that apathy has created a power vacuum for these media pundits. Says Lumet: “In the past there was the back room and the newspapers. (In “Power,” Gene Hackman, who plays a veteran and nearly washed up handler, asks Gere: “You want to go back to the old days when the L.A. Times put Richard Nixon in office?”) Clearly, the lack of participation of the electorate is precisely what has created this vacuum to let them (the media handlers) move in.”

They are hired guns, on the surface no different than high-priced defense attorneys like Melvin Belli or F. Lee Bailey: “But nobody ever gave a defense attorney the right to get involved in the electoral process,” says Lumet. “And that process, along with the justice system, is the basis of the way this country functions.”

Fascinating stuff to constitutional scholars and even political armchair quarterbacks, but a difficult sell. For Ashley Boone, who was credited with overseeing the campaigns for “Star Wars” and “Ghostbusters,” the strategy was clear from the start. “You can’t use the word Power in small type. It defeats the use of the word. We were using Power as an art title, we wanted to come up with something the audience could quickly identify with.” ( Like “Jaws” and the “Ghostbusters” logo.)

To sell the movie, Lorimar plastered its title everywhere--on so called “eight-sheets” here (miniature billboards that are backlit so that commuters will still see them when the sun goes down in winter months) and on subways in Manhattan. In addition, with what Boone calls a “healthy” budget, they bought TV, radio and print spots, most of them just pushing the title and the tag line, “Nothing else comes close.”

Said Boone: “People are focusing on power today. Look at ‘Dynasty’ and ‘Dallas.’ These people have all the money in the world and what are they after? Power.”

Boone will have to wait to see if his strategy will work. In effect, Lorimar is selling at least as much sizzle as steak (the old marketing cliche) in promoting the title without dealing with the subject matter at hand. The most recent trailers finally do give a sense of the topic of the film suggesting that Boone and his team realized they could not win with a campaign of just style over substance.

In a way, that’s the same issue that confronts the Pete St. Johns of this world.