Off-Centerpiece : News Update: John Doe IS Coming Back to the Big Screen

When Ross Perot made his now-famous first appearance on the “The Larry King Show,” characterizing the problems of America in a way that made many people see him as a potential political savior, Hollywood screenwriter Judd Klinger did a double-take. Hadn’t Klinger just written that somewhere?

“Fifteen months before Perot’s appearance on the show, I talked to Larry King about the idea of a John Doe figure speaking directly to the people by way of ‘The Larry King Show,’ ” says Klinger, who had been commissioned by Disney’s Hollywood Pictures to update Frank Capra’s 1941 “Meet John Doe.”

“It was eerie when Perot actually went on there and did it.”

Klinger’s version of “Meet John Doe” follows the structure of the Capra film, but is set in today’s political climate and instead of attacking government for its failure to govern, it goes after politicians and network news executives as partners in public deception.

“Sometime in 1990, I’d seen a segment of Bill Moyers’ TV series ‘The Public Mind’ . . . that dealt with the manipulation and corruption of network news by politicians and political consultants,” Klinger says, “and this became the springboard for my (story). The ‘90s John Doe movement would be about fund-raising, special interest groups, TV campaigning and a grass-roots reform of electoral politics.”

In Klinger’s update, a janitor volunteers to portray a character invented by a desperate TV newswoman, and gradually develops an anti-politics theme that makes him a populist hero. Among the targets of his movement, which is launched via the “The Larry King Show”: the TV sound bite, negative campaigns and all political advertising.

“Actually, it was Jerry Brown who sort of gave me a chill at first,” Klinger says. “How do we fix the electoral system? Get away from attack ads? . . . That’s what John Doe is all about in my script.”

Other recent news events that were suggested in Klinger’s script include a political appearance on MTV (Bill Clinton) and the use of satellite TV for campaign rallies (Perot).

So, where is this movie now that its time has come?

“I guess they didn’t like my take on it,” says Klinger, who has moved on to other things.

Disney Chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg says Klinger’s script never got far enough long in the development process to reach his desk, and the project has since been assigned to Marty Kaplan, a former Walter Mondale speechwriter who has written Disney’s upcoming Eddie Murphy political comedy “The Distinguished Gentleman.”

“ ‘Meet John Doe’ is a very high-priority film for us,” Katzenberg says. “We wouldn’t have Marty Kaplan working on something that wasn’t.”

As for the mood of the country that is drawing all these parallels between “Meet John Doe” and the current political campaigns, Katzenberg says “those things aren’t going away this week, or next. Anytime in the next year, or 18 months, they’re still going to be relevant.”

Katzenberg wouldn’t say what Kaplan’s approach to the remake is, except that it “comes out of Washington.”

Larry King will just have to wait and see if he’s in it.

“Larry loved the idea of John Doe being on his show in the movie and had only one request,” Klinger says. “If he couldn’t play himself, he asked that we cast Richard Crenna. He thinks that they look alike.”