Nader’s Goal: Crash Hollywood

For four decades, Ralph Nader has used his smarts, chutzpah and grinding persistence to wage war against “corporate tyranny,” tackling such Goliaths as the Detroit auto industry, the federal government and Microsoft, just to name a few. At 66, Nader has been able to get his name on the 2000 ballot for president as the Green Party candidate.

And yet, the imposing 6-foot-4 Nader can’t get Hollywood to return his calls.

For years, the consumer advocate has crusaded to get a movie made of his controversial 1965 bestseller “Unsafe at Any Speed.” The book, a stinging indictment of the U.S. auto industry for caring more about profits and style than safety, took aim at General Motors for its dangerous rear-engine Corvair. Nader called it “one of the nastiest-handling cars ever built.”

Time Warner’s Home Box Office cable channel thought Nader’s story would make a great television movie. Under former production President Bob Cooper, HBO ordered up a script and spent $531,977 to hire three different writers and a director. While development of the project dragged on, Cooper left HBO in 1996. With that, interest in the project evaporated.

To be wooed and then scorned has left Nader crying foul, convinced that the long corporate hand of GM and Time Warner played into the demise of his David vs. Goliath story.

Only in the last week, after a four-year campaign, has there been a slight hope that Nader will have his day on the screen.

For Nader, a Princeton University and Harvard Law School graduate who lives a spartan existence in a downtown Washington apartment, this has never been about money. HBO paid him a mere $35,000 each time it optioned and re-optioned his book. A lifelong bachelor who lives off what he makes from writing and lecturing, Nader says he “doesn’t have much time to spend money, just raise it.”

So don’t bother telling this warrior that he is on a quixotic mission against the media conglomerates. Or that there are a zillion movie ideas that never see the light of day for any number of reasons. Or that a movie idea grows stale fast when the championing executive leaves a company and the new executives have their own agenda.

Nader doesn’t buy any of these Hollywood homilies.

“This is about censorship,” asserts Nader, accusing HBO parent Time Warner of being afraid of yet another movie that would bash a major advertiser such as General Motors.

In 1990, Warner Bros. released Michael Moore’s controversial “Roger & Me,” a black comedic documentary about GM’s closing of its Flint, Mich., manufacturing plants and the ensuing economic collapse of the town.

“Time Warner rubbed it in GM’s face with ‘Roger and Me.’ I know for a fact that GM was infuriated,” said Nader, here in Los Angeles last week campaigning as part of his 50-state tour that he expects to complete by the middle of this month.

After learning that HBO had lost interest in the movie, Nader said he complained to Time Warner Vice Chairman Ted Turner, whom he knew from years earlier when he was a commentator for CNN.

“I said, ‘HBO dropped it,’ and without hesitation, he said, ‘GM is one of our biggest advertisers. We can’t insult them that way. It’s also an old story. They’ve listened to you. They’re producing safer cars.’ ”

Nader said he was “stunned” by Turner’s admission.

Turner was traveling Thursday and could not be reached for comment.

It was HBO’s Cooper who originally approached Nader about adapting his book, recalling how “very ambivalent” Nader was initially.

Cooper had Simon Wiesenthal, the famed Nazi hunter who was the subject of a 1989 HBO movie, call Nader to reassure him that his story would be dealt with in “a non-sensational way,” that he would be portrayed “fairly, accurately.”

“To me it was a classic David vs. Goliath story that resonated,” said Cooper. “I wondered if, today, could one man make such an impact?”

Cooper added, “Here’s a guy who’s never wavered. He’s relentless and difficult and can sometimes get on your nerves. But, he’s never sold out.”

Six months before Cooper left HBO, his colleague Ellen Collett wrote Nader a letter saying “how pleased we are with the progress of the ‘Ralph Nader vs. General Motors’ script,” noting the network’s keen interest in working with director Joan Micklin-Silver, who made HBO’s 1992 drama “A Private Matter,” a film about the birth defect-causing drug thalidomide.

Before Cooper departed in August 1996 to run TriStar Pictures, he had hired screenwriter Edward Hume, who wrote HBO’s “The Terry Fox Story” and ABC’s “The Day After,” to adapt Nader’s book. Two other writers were subsequently brought in to work on the script, “Outraged: The Ralph Nader Story.”

When HBO decided to let the option lapse, no one at the company bothered to tell Nader, who was livid that he had to learn about it through an independent producer associated with the project.

Nader wrote an angry letter to HBO Chief Executive Jeff Bewkes and HBO Pictures President John Matoian, demanding to know why nobody had directly informed him that the option was not being renewed.

In his March 16, 1998, letter, Nader also asked if they would reconsider the project and questioned whether there were “external factors” bearing on HBO’s decision to bail out.

“When someone as fearless as Ted Turner responds when asked if he is interested in the script, ‘General Motors is one of our biggest advertisers, I couldn’t do that,’ it is permissible to ask the question about externalities,” Nader wrote.

In separate response letters, both Bewkes and Matoian apologized for not informing Nader directly of the decision, reiterated they had no interest in his project and assured him that “there were no external factors or advertiser concerns present in our thinking.”

This week, an HBO spokesman defended the network’s decision, saying it has never shied away from controversial subjects.

Wesley J. Smith, an attorney who co-authored four books with Nader and has informally been helping his pal peddle “Unsafe At Any Speed” in Hollywood, said it took him six months to get Hume’s script away from HBO last year. Smith, who wasn’t involved with the project at HBO, believes Nader has an image problem in Hollywood.

“There is tremendous resistance at high corporate levels to do anything autobiographical on Ralph Nader,” Smith said. “I believe that since much of the media is owned by the world’s biggest corporations and Ralph Nader is perceived as an enemy of corporations--which he is not--that it makes it difficult to get coverage on him.”

For example, Smith said he failed to get A&E;, partially owned by Walt Disney Co., to do a biography on Nader after executives at the cable network showed initial interest in doing so. Admitting that he has no evidence to back it up, Smith suggests, “It’s my sense that it got very high up and corporate nixed it.”

Smith, who said he hasn’t yet done a full-court press to shop the Nader project in Hollywood, did send the script out last week to Cooper, at Cooper’s request.

The ex-HBO president, who recently formed his own film, TV and Internet company, Landscape Entertainment, dismisses Nader’s paranoia. HBO’s about-face was nothing more than the usual workings of Hollywood, he said. “I do not think it’s a conspiracy or censorship.”

Like Nader, Cooper is no stranger to controversial material, championing such acclaimed HBO movies as “Barbarians at the Gate,” about the $25-billion leveraged buyout of corporate giant RJR Nabisco Co., and “And the Band Played On,” which chronicles the AIDs epidemic.

In his last executive role, as production president at DreamWorks SKG, Cooper fought to make the dark comedy hit “American Beauty.”

Cooper said he plans to read the Nader script this weekend. “I’ll see if it’s something that makes sense and see if I can make it happen.”

Nader’s waiting by the phone.