Power in populist hands

In recent weeks, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been endlessly compared to Ronald Reagan, both men being actors turned politicians who made their first foray into politics during a California gubernatorial campaign. But to grasp what’s at work here, it would be better to look not just at Arnold but at other figures who set the tone for our carnival-like recall election: Ain’t It Cool News founder Harry Knowles, Napster creator Shawn Fanning and the reality-TV gurus who brought us “Survivor,” “American Idol” and “Joe Millionaire.”

The Last Action Hero’s sudden ascendancy in our electoral free-for-all is deeply rooted in the populist upheaval that has wreaked havoc on the creaky old top-down entertainment establishment. Call it the Revenge of the Outsiders.

Editorial writers all over the world have hooted at the zany opening week antics in our recall election, which features a cast of 135 self-styled candidates, including porn kingpin Larry Flynt, billboard diva Angelyne and, my personal favorite, Scott Mednick, who owns a company that makes beer aimed at spring breakers.

As some pundits have described it, the recall is the political equivalent of Gray Davis being devoured by an angry mob. The phrase has a familiar ring; nearly every new pop cultural force lately has been derided, at least by those in power, as a catastrophic threat to the established order.

In 1997, Knowles was an obscure film geek who ran his Ain’t It Cool News Web site out of his father’s house in Austin, Texas. Then, months before the release of the supposed sure-thing sequel “Batman and Robin,” Ain’t It Cool News posted a string of early, venomous reviews of a test screening of the film, one of which called director Joel Schumacher “pure evil.”

When the movie had a lackluster opening, Knowles became Hollywood’s Public Enemy No. 1. One studio threatened to sue him; another slapped him with a cease-and-desist order. It wasn’t the vitriol of the reviews that incensed studio executives, but the loss of control. Just as in the recall election, where anyone with 65 signatures and a $3,500 filing fee can be a candidate, any geek with access to a computer could subvert a studio’s carefully calculated marketing campaign. Overnight, $100-million movies were being undone by a kid from Austin and a gang of cronies with aliases like Moriarty, Hercules the Strong and Tom Joad.

The film establishment reacted similarly to the way much of our political elite has responded to the recall. “The worst thing about Harry Knowles is that he’s perfectly reflective of the taste of predominantly young America,” complained Variety executive editor Steven Gaydos. “He loves the garbage movies -- the big stupid movies and the little stupid movies.”

In other words, the Internet, like the recall, was participatory democracy out of control.

Politics under siege

THE recall election has been fueled by widespread anger with Gov. Gray Davis, who to many represents everything that is wrong with insider politics. As veteran campaign strategist Tony Quinn put it recently: “What this recall is about is an assault on the whole political order.”

I’ve heard that kind of rhetoric before, except it was directed at Fanning, whose creation of Napster put the music business under siege from a grass-roots insurgency led by its own fans as the heads of the major record companies were excoriated by fans unhappy with having to pay inflated prices for CDs that only contain one or two quality songs.

Enter Napster, which gained loyal adherents faster than Darrell Issa’s petitioners recruited recall supporters. Napster became so popular during the 1999-2000 school year that by May 2000, 73% of U.S. college students were using the service to download music.

Since then, it’s been a battle to the death. Just as Davis’ career is over if he loses the recall, the music conglomerates believe their business model will go down the drain unless they destroy every outlaw file-sharing service. By allowing fans to swap music for free among themselves, Napster left the record labels out in the cold, in much the same way that the recall has eviscerated the power of the political parties, allowing candidates to appeal directly to voters. The labels sued Napster and put it out of business, but now Kazaa and other sites have popped up to take its place.

It seems a Pyrrhic victory. Instead finding a way to adapt -- and exploit -- this gigantic consumer revolution, the music companies have responded, Gray Davis-style, with a spirited negative campaign, painting their own customers as evildoers. No sympathy with the devil permitted. When Rolling Stone’s coverage of the issue seemed soft on file-sharers, the record labels responded by pulling their ads. As New York magazine columnist Michael Wolff put it recently: “These guys who have built their careers and their industry on trying to give an audience exactly what it wants -- no matter how low and valueless and embarrassing -- are now standing with a high-church rectitude against the meretricious desires of this same audience.”

A carful of clowns

A similar drama has played out in network TV over the past few years. When California Democratic Party chairman Art Torres said the recall reminded him of “going to the circus and seeing this little car going into the arena and you couldn’t believe how many clowns were able to come out of it,” he could just as easily have been a TV critic responding to the reality TV explosion.

With the exception of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” virtually every megahit of the last four years has been a reality show, the one TV genre that can apparently lure young audiences away from downloading music from the Internet.

Most old-school network execs still treat the genre with thinly veiled contempt. Asked by a reporter about Fox programmer Mike Darnell, the man behind “Joe Millionaire” and “Celebrity Boxing,” Don Ohlmeyer, who ran NBC’s entertainment division during much of the 1990s, responded: “I think I can arrange for four Buddhist monks to immolate themselves in Times Square next month. Is he interested?”

This is the way people talk when all bets are off, when the public taste runs off the rails, when action heroes with no real political platform run for governor. The recall itself has the air of a reality TV show, with a fresh twist -- there’s no Svengali like Darnell or “Survivor” creator Mark Burnett at the helm, manipulating events for a big dramatic payoff. It’s too bad the FX network pulled the plug on “The War Room” producer R.J. Cutler’s reality series, “American Candidate.” A show that wanted to let viewers choose a candidate to run for president in 2004 would’ve been a perfect complement to our own throw-the-bum-out recall campaign.

The recall’s populist spirit has not gone unnoticed in Washington. The Bush White House, always keenly alert to voter anxieties, has shrewdly embraced the bottom-up rhetoric of the Internet. When President Bush nominated Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency the other day, he praised Leavitt as someone who “rejects the old ways of command and control from above.”

Schwarzenegger hasn’t gotten such a crafty endorsement. In fact, so far Arnold is just an old-school show-biz personality riding a tsunami of voter discontent. He’s yet to prove that he’s an idea man like Fanning, Knowles and the reality TV impresarios. He’s caught the wave, but he could just as easily wipe out, especially if he plays by old top-down celebrity rules, avoiding tough questions and spouting tired platitudes. If there was ever an election shaped by entertainment marketing gimmickry, the recall is it -- and in show biz, hot new things become old hat in the blink of an eye, especially at the first whiff of elitism or inauthenticity.

People are suckers for charisma, but they can sniff a phony a mile away. Once the studios started flying Knowles to screenings on their private jets, his street-cred evaporated overnight. Still, people shouldn’t underestimate Arnold. As producer Larry Gordon once told me, Arnold has the competitive spirit of a champion athlete. “He’s like Michael Jordan -- he has that sheer determination to succeed.”

But in a shotgun election where the voters view the political establishment with the same surly disregard that teenagers have for record company fat cats, Arnold had better hang onto his outsider mystique as long as he can. Otherwise his campaign could end up being an expensive flop, just like “The Last Action Hero.”

“The Big Picture” runs every Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.