MOVIES : In Hollywood, Liberals Win by a Landslide : Rob Reiner’s ‘The American President’ is the latest film with a sympathetic Democrat and a villainous conservative. And coming soon: Oliver Stone’s ‘Nixon.’

In Rob Reiner’s “The American President,” the chief executive is debonair, sympathetic . . . and a liberal Democrat. His challenger is pinched, nasty . . . and a right-wing Republican. Conservative media analysts say it’s yet another example of Hollywood using movies as a bully pulpit to further its ideological goals.

The director makes no apologies.

“Sure, I made the shallow-thinking and mean-spirited Republican senator played by Richard Dreyfuss the bad guy--but, in my perfect world Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich are the bad guys,” says the newly slimmed-down Reiner, sipping mineral water on an overstuffed couch in the antiques-filled living room of his Brentwood home. “When they make their movies, Clinton or Chris Dodd or Dick Gephardt can be the villains.”

A romantic comedy scheduled for release by Columbia Pictures on Friday, the film portrays a JFK-type widowed President (Michael Douglas) who, much to the dismay of his electoral strategists, becomes intimately involved with an environmental lobbyist (Annette Bening). A man whose left-of-center tendencies have been tempered by political reality (“any resemblance to persons living or dead . . . “), he throws off the shackles of public opinion polls, Frank Capra-style, and follows the dictates of his ACLU-loving heart.

The movie is Reiner’s first foray into the political arena after achieving A-list status with critical and commercial successes such as “Stand by Me,” “When Harry Met Sally. . . ,” “A Few Good Men” and “Misery.”

Trying to express himself more deeply these days, he says he’d be remiss in having a forum and not using it. “If I don’t make a movie with some of me in there, it’s just a job,” he says.

What Reiner perceives as artistic freedom and civic responsibility, however, is anathema to the many in the political right. The bias in modern filmmaking, they say, is abundantly clear.

“It’s indirect rather than direct,” maintains Brent Bozell, chairman of the Virginia-based Media Research Center, a conservative, media-oriented research and educational foundation. “Movies are less liberal than they used to be and aren’t as bad as TV sitcoms in which George Bush and Dan Quayle were the regular butt of jokes. But it’s rare that you find negative portrayals of liberal issues or positive portrayals of Republican ones.”

Though political figures are rarely targeted by name, Bozell asserts, the bad guys in 1990’s “Die Hard 2” were drug runners working for the CIA under a Republican president; the epilogue to “Air America” the same year pinned the Iran-Contra activities squarely on the shoulders of the GOP; Oliver Stone’s “Salvador,” a movie critical of U.S. Central America policy, came out at the height of the Reagan Administration--on whose doorstep HBO’s “And the Band Played On” also laid the blame for the AIDS epidemic.

“If the culprit is government, the government is always Republican,” says Boz ell. “But every once in a great while, almost by accident, a conservative perspective sneaks in. There was ‘Hanoi Hilton,’ ‘Red Dawn,’ ‘Rambo III’--not to mention ‘Forrest Gump,’ which was a complete repudiation of liberalism. I have to giggle when I hear Hollywood deny it. That’s why it did so well.”

Tim Robbins’ 1992 mock documentary “Bob Roberts” featured a liberal senator fighting off a glib and calculating Republican challenger; Ivan Reitman’s “Dave” (1993) showed a ruthless, philandering chief executive replaced by a humanitarian Everyman double. In “Nick of Time,” which also opens Friday, a conservative governor who takes up the cause of minorities and women is targeted for assassination by a reactionary power elite.

“You can’t help but feel there’s a formula at work,” says John Herr, communications director for the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, an L.A.-based conservative think tank. “Not pro-change, or pro-status quo, but pro-Democrat--at least the ones that get financed.”

Richard Jewell, associate dean of cinema and television at the University of Southern California, suggests that the 1960s were a watershed period in terms of the product Hollywood turned out.

“It was then that cinema finally took on some kind of ideological agenda with filmmakers trying to change the world,” he says. “Before then, you had movies such as ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ ‘Gentleman’s Agreement,’ ‘Pinky’--projects that took on poverty, anti-Semitism, and racism, but most were based on well-known message novels or nonfiction books rather than original material written for the screen. People of the Republican persuasion feel they have a legitimate gripe. They don’t see much coming out these days that links up with their take.”

Stanley Rothman, a professor of government at Smith College and author of the upcoming “Hollywood’s America: Social and Political Themes in Motion Pictures,” suggests that the demise of the old studio system opened things up. “The old moguls were culturally conservative and didn’t believe that movies were the place for messages,” he says. “They were careful to make sure that politics wouldn’t interfere with commerciality. When the system broke down, the orientation of the artists who are generally left of center worked their way into the films. Still, if a movie wants to be successful, it can have a little ideological baggage--but not a lot.”

The suggestion that Hollywood is out of sync with an increasingly conservative populace is rejected by “Dave” screenwriter Gary Ross.

“Conservatives love to tout the virtues of the free-market system in everything but the movie business,” says Ross, whose film grossed $70 million domestically. “If people weren’t choosing to spend their $7 to see what we make, we’d be losing money--and we don’t. Besides, ‘Dave’ is less a liberal than a humanitarian. The movie is about the values of the average person transposed onto a corrupt political system. If the conservatives want to say that populism is ‘liberal,’ that shows how out of touch they are.”

Though Ross and Reiner challenge the notion of a conservative revolution, the latter acknowledges that the political climate has changed. “Ever since [Presidential candidate Michael] Dukakis lost in 1988, liberals have been branded pariahs. At this rate, ‘Democrat’ will be a dirty word.”

Film critic-historian Richard Schickel rejects the idea that a “demonic” Hollywood is trying to put something over on the public.

“It’s a ‘rooting interest’ issue more than a political one,” Schickel asserts. “The point is to show that a politician is a nice, decent human being despite the fact that he commands Air Force One and the Marine Band and has a great phone system. In the 1944 biographical film even the narrow and priggish Woodrow Wilson was presented as a genial sort. Frank Capra was probably conservative politically, but wasn’t about to make ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ and focus on a balanced budget. It’s a mistake to look at movies in a narrowly ideological way.”

Robert Redford viewed what would become “The American President” as a “ ‘30s or ‘40s screwball comedy” when he brought it to the director six years ago. Reiner and co-screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, with whom he had worked on “A Few Good Men,” favored a more realistic approach. Following Clinton around the White House and interviewing former presidential aides such as Dee Dee Myers, George Stephanopoulos and Mack McLarty, Reiner suggests, brought him in touch with both the stresses and the perks.

“If the premise of ‘When Harry Met Sally. . . ‘ was whether men and women can be friends,” he says, “the central question in this one is whether you can do the dirty job of being President and still remain a man.”

Still, Schickel says, there’s never been a truly realistic portrayal of the President on film. “That’s why I have a lot of hope for [Oliver Stone’s upcoming] ‘Nixon.’ Nixon is not only the designated ‘mean guy’ . . . but is being tackled in the post-modern anti-heroic age which likes to show great figures as flawed.”

Robert Lichter, director of the nonpartisan Washington-based Center for Media and Public Affairs, believes a picture like Stone’s could not have surfaced in the days when heroic bio-pics such as “Young Mr. Lincoln,” “Sunrise at Campobello” and “PT 109” were the rage.

“Movies like that have disappeared,” he says. “Because the presidency as an institution is no longer revered by Hollywood, a conservative value has been lost. It’s interesting that ‘Nixon,’ the first big-screen [presidential] bio-pic in 32 years, is actually muckraking--a negative myth.”

Reiner, whose next film centers on the trial of Medgar Evers assassin Byron de la Beckwith, agrees. Hollywood may be liberal, he says, but when it comes to proselytizing, the right leaves the left in the dust.

“In terms of the new media, the Republicans are way ahead of us,” the director maintains. “While they’re making use of radio, TV, Internet . . . every means of communication . . . the Democrats are waiting to be invited onto ‘Meet the Press.’ ”