Peeking Into Southern Politics in ‘Storyville’ : Movies: In a patriarchal political setting, Mark Frost, co-creator of ‘Twin Peaks,’ looks at confronting one’s heritage.

About the best thing that happened to the political thriller “Storyville” during its hectic two-month shoot here earlier this year was that Oliver Stone’s much-publicized “JFK” was shooting at the same time.

Because Stone’s movie delves into the murky underworld of Kennedy assassination theories and conspirators--a topic dear to the hearts of many New Orleans residents after local Dist. Atty. James Garrison in 1967 implicated Crescent City businessman Clay Shaw in Kennedy’s death--the city’s attention was focused on the comings and goings of the “JFK” cast and memories of Garrison’s Warren Commission debunking nearly a quarter of a century ago.

That suited “Storyville’s” makers just fine. The more eyes turned in the direction of Stone’s film, the less likely were the chances of offending local sensibilities with the “Storyville” plot, a fast-paced and at times enigmatic script exploring the insidious power of a Southern political dynasty. It’s a plot that also vaguely suggests the power and style of real-life Louisiana figures.

Early word on the $15-million Edward R. Pressman production gave it Kennedyesque overtones as well. Because the movie’s central protagonist, Cray Fowler (played by James Spader), is a seemingly naive and sheltered rich boy whose budding political career is threatened by a car accident killing a black woman friend, the parallels with Sen. Edward Kennedy at Chappaquiddick were irresistible. But the makers and stars of “Storyville” deny the connection. “That’s stretching it a bit,” said Spader. “I think this is really more of a film dealing with the ghosts of the past, a past that, as is said in the movie, isn’t dead, in fact, it isn’t even past.”

In exorcising that past, “Storyville” explores the all-powerful legacy of the Fowler family of swampy, fictional St. Albens Parish in southern Louisiana, a mineral-rich place where the Fowler rule is law. It is here that “Storyville” walks the precarious line between fact and fiction.

Is Raymond Fowler, the clan’s patriarch, really Leander Peroz, the late omnipotent ruler of real-life Plaquemines Parish who made millions off oil and built a concentration camp for civil rights activists in the 1960s? Or are the Fowlers, a family addicted to power and politics, reminiscent of the Longs of Louisiana--Huey and Earl--who dominated the state for three decades and deliciously celebrated their closet’s skeletons?

“It’s all of them and more,” said Mark Frost of “Twin Peaks” fame, who is “Storyville’s” writer and director. “When you do a story like this, you take a little history from everywhere. I didn’t consciously model it after any one family.”

Based on the Australian bestseller “Juryman” by Frank Galbally, “Storyville” is also a multilayered film with several simultaneously unfolding plots including the evolution of Lee Tran (Charlotte Lewis), a Vietnamese woman held emotionally hostage by her morally repugnant father Yang Tran (George Kee Cheung), and Natalie Tate (JoAnne Whalley Kilmer), Cray’s former love interest and a driven prosecuting attorney who re-examines her relationship with Cray as she prosecutes Lee Tran.

Like Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” where the dying Big Daddy’s influence over his fawning brood is suffocatingly pervasive, or William Faulkner’s “The Long, Hot Summer,” with Big Daddy Varner, the moneyed politician who destroys careers and reputations for fun, “Storyville” is ultimately a tale of a younger generation coming to grips with the sins of its fathers.

“The question is how does the later generation of a Southern political family that governs unforgivingly deal with the family’s heritage?” said John Davis, executive producer of “Storyville.” “When a new morality is visited upon the sons, they’re put in the uncomfortable position of either ignoring the past and continuing things as they are, or reconciling the evil their family represents with a stronger sense of morality, of what’s right and wrong.”

For Cray, who gives all the appearance of being a 1990s political Ken doll as he embarks upon a campaign for the U.S. Senate, the dilemma begs the question pervasive in today’s politics: Can a living, breathing politician reveal himself “warts and all,” as Hubert Humphrey once put it, and still survive in a system that puts a premium on pithy 10-second sound bites and coiffed blow-dry hairstyles?

For the creators of “Storyville” the answer is a hopeful “yes,” and they draw upon the rich history of Louisiana’s rancorous politics for their sustenance. It was here, after all, that Huey Long “embraced his skeletons,” said Spader. “This was a guy who reveled in talking about his potential impeachments and any other scandal he might have been involved in at the time. And I like that; that’s the kind of feeling that infuses this story.”

After Huey came brother Earl, a fighting, snorting and thoroughly Machiavellian governor of Louisiana who served three non-consecutive terms from the late 1930s to the late ‘50s, drank to excess, ran with Bourbon Street strippers, and once actually bit a political foe in a French Quarter street brawl. Admonished once by an aide for raising taxes after he promised voters not to, Earl barked out his explanation: “Tell ‘em I lied!”

Although the Longs have enjoyed favorable treatment on film, chiefly through Robert Penn Warren’s “All the King’s Men,” and “Blaze,” which chronicled Earl’s public affair with French Quarter “exotic dancer” Blaze Starr, the most recent of Louisiana’s long line of chromatic governors, Edwin W. Edwards, has yet to make it to the big screen, perhaps because his career is still not over. Yet Edwards, too, is a Longian, and measuring by “Storyville’s” confines, could even be a member of Cray Fowler’s family, winking at wrongdoing and telling one reporter just before his 1983 reelection landslide: “The only way I can lose this election is to be caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.”

“One of the things that’s unique about Louisiana politics is that people here have a much more realistic attitude about who their politicians are,” said Frost. “They know they are human and not saints or Mormons or Eagle Scouts. You think of the troubles Edwin Edwards has had or even the Huey and Earl Long periods and you realize there’s sort of a celebration of eccentricity, the kind of which we never see in our national politics today where we have these gray-faced, gray-suit types stamped out of the same mold.”

Associate producer David Roe, who originally optioned the book “Juryman” for film, said “Storyville” can be seen as a New Orleans version of Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” where murder and corruption are excused depending upon who commits the crime. “The system comes off looking rather bad in all of this,” he said. “Whether it’s the political system, or the system of jurisprudence, we learn that it is not a perfect system. It is not even a fair system . . . Politics and jurisprudence are really the framework upon which the film is hung. While this film is in many ways a suspense film, a thriller, it still never at any point veers very far from this strong message about power and our system.”

Yet, oddly, it is also a film of hope, chiefly personified in Cray Fowler. Expected to win election as senator, Cray is seen as the heir apparent of the Fowler dynasty--a pleasant, inconsequential figure who will carry on the patriarchal and conservative traditions of his heritage. But in an extemporaneous speech, Cray reveals a surprising commitment to civil rights. Similarly, Cray begins to question the assumptions of his family’s private life and values and soon realizes the difficulty of reconciling his past with his present.

“The story centers around Cray’s growth,” said Spader, who won international acclaim for his role as a soft-spoken amateur filmmaker in 1989’s “sex, lies, and videotape,” also filmed in Louisiana. “For that reason, it works well in the South. In this part of the country everything always seems to be on the precipice of enormous change, while at the same time there’s no change at all. Ultimately Cray has the choice of living the life of a spirit, with all of the skeletons and ghosts and swampiness swirling around him, or making a break from that past.”

Cray’s eventual transformation is a metaphor for the changes that we all go through in our lives, said Spader, “confronting our own ghosts and moving into our future.”

Yet, said Frost, “Storyville,” never fully breaks from the history of its time and place, leaving viewers with the idea that “change is subjective, that we not only have to deal with the change in ourselves, but the changes around us, too.”

Frost, who began work on the “Storyville” script at least two years before his involvement with “Twin Peaks,” added that he hoped the movie would honor the tradition of such past political film classics as John Frankenheimer’s “Seven Days in May” (1962) and Michael Ritchie’s “The Candidate” (1972). “Hollywood has done well by the political film,” he said. “And, on one level at least, I think this movie functions well in that tradition.”