The news wave

As the November election approaches, it’s becoming difficult to tell movie directors from investigative reporters. Spike Lee is fulminating about the Watergate burglary, Jonathan Demme is spouting Dwight Eisenhower’s prophetic warning against the perils of the military-industrial complex, and John Sayles seems to know more about where the bodies are buried in Texas politics than anybody but Karl Rove.

Nearly four years after the 2000 election, it’s clear that a host of maverick filmmakers saw George W. Bush’s disputed electoral victory as a wake-up call -- an alarm that rang louder after we endured a horrific terrorist attack, a series of wrenching corporate scandals, and a bitter debate over whether the country was deceived into going to war against Iraq.

This past week alone moviegoers got a double bill of highly charged films. The big studio entry, “The Manchurian Candidate,” stars Denzel Washington in a thriller about a sinister multinational conglomerate’s efforts to use political assassination to install its man in the White House. The art-house entry, Spike Lee’s “She Hate Me,” which opened Wednesday, offers a volatile take on everything from corporate greed and sexual politics to the Watergate burglary.

Coming after a prolonged period in which Hollywood has been almost obsessively preoccupied with comic-book fantasies and teen comedies, these films crackle with topicality, as if the filmmakers had been eavesdropping in corporate boardrooms and campaign strategy meetings. I saw Lee’s film, with its satiric take on various corporate scandals, the same week that the papers were full of stories about new developments in the Enron, Adelphia and Martha Stewart cases. Critics were preparing their reviews of “The Manchurian Candidate” just as news surfaced that Halliburton may have violated anti-terror sanctions by operating in Iran while Dick Cheney was the company’s chief executive. At one point in the latter film, a liberal senator confronts the vice presidential candidate, who is under the sway of Manchurian Global, the film’s stand-in for Halliburton. He says: “Raymond, you’re about to become the first fully owned and operated vice president of the United States.”

The parallel is almost too close for comfort, even for the filmmakers. “It makes me wince when I hear it,” says Demme. “I go, ‘We’ve got that now!’ The press says Cheney didn’t personally award the Halliburton contracts in Iraq. But he didn’t have to. He breathes the same air they do.”

Extolling Frank Wills

Lee and his film’s co-writer, Michael Genet, did voluminous research before shooting “She Hate Me.” Genet’s digging resulted in a striking flashback sequence that connects the whistle-blower hero of the film, played by Anthony Mackie, to Frank Wills, the security guard who foiled the infamous Watergate burglary, setting in motion a chain of events that led to Richard Nixon’s 1974 resignation.

“Wills is a great American hero,” says Lee, whose films, from “Do the Right Thing” to “Malcolm X,” have been loaded with political commentary. “He changed history, but he died penniless, while the bad guys went on to make plenty of money.”

It’s fitting to find a connection to 1974 in one of these new films, perhaps the last time Hollywood was so in sync with the high political drama of the times. In a six-month period in 1974, as the Watergate cover-up was unraveling, moviegoers were seeing dramas and thrillers full of paranoia and corruption in high places, most notably “The Parallax View,” “Chinatown,” “The Conversation” and “The Godfather Part II.”

The prevailing mood was perhaps captured by the latter film, when Michael Corleone says: “If it’s one thing we’ve learned, it’s that we can kill anyone.” 1974 also saw the release of “Hearts and Minds,” a searing documentary about Vietnam that ended up being as controversial as Michael Moore’s hotly debated “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Dumped by its original distributor, it went on to win the Oscar for best documentary, prompting a furor when producer Bert Schneider, taking the stage to accept the award, read a telegram of congratulations from the Viet Cong delegation at the Paris Peace Talks.

“People felt galvanized then just as we do now -- it galvanizes you to be living through a nightmare,” says producer John Calley, who as head of production at Warner Bros. in the 1970s released “Hearts and Minds” as well as the fabled “All the President’s Men.” “There was a terrible sense of discontent about our society, though I have to say that Watergate was nothing compared to what we have now.”

In September, Sayles joins the political conversation with “Silver City,” a thriller about an Enron-type energy octopus that handpicks a born-again, grammatically challenged son of a powerful senator to run for governor of Colorado, aided by plenty of Big Oil money. Several documentaries are also appearing, including an expanded version of Robert Greenwald’s “Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War,” due this month, and “Bush’s Brain,” a barbed look at Bush political svengali Karl Rove, which opens Sept. 3.

It’s unlikely that any of these films will have the explosive impact of “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which recently surpassed $100 million in box office. But they certainly took me out of my summer movie doldrums. Too many filmmakers end up in Hollywood’s straightjacket, using their cool or artistic credibility to breathe life into a forgettable franchise film. It’s especially refreshing to see gifted directors like Demme and Lee rejuvenated by their embrace of films rooted in ideas and political consciousness, not a studio marketing slogan.

Surfacing as they are amid a heated election campaign, these films are positioned to help shape the impassioned national conversation about the country’s future -- a role the filmmakers are eager to play. Although the tumult of the last few years may have spurred interest in topical subjects, the filmmakers argue that we’re seeing so many political films and documentaries because the mainstream media have failed in their role as the guardian of public interest.

“Politics is messy, complicated and annoying,” says Sayles, whose films and novels over the years have offered probing reflections on American culture. “Most people can only get it together once every four years to be interested, so this is the one window where you can get their attention.”

When he was researching “Silver City,” Sayles kept stumbling onto eye-popping stories that hadn’t been covered by the local press. He says he was told “the local media didn’t care, was afraid to stick their necks out or misreported the information to make it look less damning than it was.” He adds: “For me, Michael Moore is a super journalist, especially compared to the mainstream media.”

Demme agrees. “The free press hasn’t been on the job,” says the veteran director, whose films includes the Oscar-winning “Silence of the Lambs,” the AIDS drama “Philadelphia” and the recent documentary “The Agronomist,” about the outspoken Haitian journalist Jean Dominique, who was assassinated in 2000. “Maybe people are turning to all these films and documentaries for information, as if they’re an unconscious effort to fill a void.”

It should hardly come as a shock that the movies lean to the left with their slashing takedowns of big business and big business-owned politicians. It must be a cultural DNA thing. If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, then filmmakers are liberals and talk-show hosts are conservatives. It’s certainly not limited to America. When Australian filmmakers came of age in the 1980s, their historical films (from “The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith” to “Breaker Morant”) offered a scathing indictment of the country’s political past. Likewise with the French new wave in the 1960s and the British kitchen-sink cinema of the 1950s. Filmmakers thrive on conflict and moral outrage, so they rarely buy into conservatives’ soothing “shining city on a hill” myth, which might sound inspiring in a State of the Union address but doesn’t pack much of a wallop in a crowded movie house.

As is evident from the uproar over “Fahrenheit 9/11,” political films have quickly assumed an influential role in the media’s nonstop news cycle. Ten days before its release, “The Manchurian Candidate” migrated to the op-ed pages, with the New York Times’ Paul Krugman using the film’s puppet president subplot as a lead-in for a column arguing that George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq has left the country even more vulnerable to terrorism.

Although Demme insists that his film is foremost a full-tilt thriller, he had no quarrel with it being viewed through a political prism. “If you can make a psychological thriller that gets people talking about what’s going on in this country, and if it spotlights the appalling intimacy our government has with these secret multinational organizations that had no-bid contracts and overcharged the Pentagon at the taxpayers’ expense, wouldn’t that be beautiful?”

In fact, what’s especially fascinating about these films is the way they are being seamlessly absorbed into the media bloodstream, blurring the boundaries between journalism and popular culture. For younger audiences, the news media has become something of a relic -- when they look for political insight, they increasingly turn to Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” or films like “Fahrenheit,” which both heap scorn on the media’s feckless coverage of the Iraq war.

Pop goes the media

The media intelligentsia are getting the message, increasingly turning to movies and pop culture for polemical weaponry. In buttoned-down days gone by, it would have been inconceivable to find old-school pundits like Walter Lippman or James Reston using showbiz slang or movie references to explain the inner workings of political campaigns or global diplomacy. Today it’s second nature, simply another arrow in the op-ed quiver. In a column comparing Democratic presidential aspirant John Kerry to Bill Clinton, Arianna Huffington noted that “trying to get Kerry to be more like Clinton is like trying to get Ian McKellen to be more like the Rock -- it ain’t in the genes.”

The media have given similar starlet treatment to Teresa Heinz Kerry. The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd said she projects the “sultry touch-me-and-you-die” of Marlene Dietrich or Jeanne Moreau. The LA Weekly’s John Powers compared her to “the half-crazy wife that Marcello Mastroianni might have cheated on in a ‘60s Italian movie.” Is it any wonder that it’s often impossible to tell where pop culture ends and politics begins, especially when Arnold Schwarzenegger, an action-movie star and governor of California, derides state legislators as “girlie men,” a taunt lifted from an old “SNL” routine? Desperate for some campaign trail pizazz, John Kerry selected John Edwards as his running mate the way a Hollywood producer would cast a buddy picture, with Edwards playing sexy Brad Pitt to Kerry’s dour Harrison Ford.

“John Edwards is a movie star, pure and simple -- that’s why he’s on the ticket,” says film essayist and historian David Thomson. “The position of the president has itself become movie-like. You’re the man on TV, striking a tough pose or cracking a joke, being the cool commander in chief. You could almost argue that the media have become film-savvy out of necessity.”

If politicians appear more like movie stars, filmmakers often sound more like investigative journalists. When Sayles was researching the web of connections between corporations and politicians for “Silver City,” he spent weeks digging through courthouse public records like a beat reporter. He also met with journalists at the Denver Press Club, quizzing them about corruption and influence-peddling, many of the details finding their way into the movie. Of course, being a filmmaker, Sayles was always looking for a visual angle. When asked why he chose to set the film in Colorado, he explained: “It’s one of the beautiful places on Earth while the ground under your feet is full of the worst toxic wastes in America. So there are a lot of beautiful trout streams with no trout left in them.”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that filmmakers have embraced politics, especially at a time when politics matters. Artists are always searching for ways to have an impact on the culture, something that hasn’t happened much in today’s escapist Hollywood.

“Most mass entertainment is an opiate -- it puts you in a stupor,” says Lee, who has stirred controversy with his new film’s satiric portrayal of a corporate whistle-blower supporting himself as a sperm donor for lesbian couples. “But real art can move you. When I look at great films like ‘On the Waterfront,’ ‘A Face in the Crowd’ or ‘The Battle of Algiers,’ those are movies about people trying to make something happen. They’re a call to action. And that’s what movies can accomplish. They make you want to do something when you get out of the theater.”

As any habitual moviegoer can attest, most studio films offer cozy escapism, not calls to action. But as “Fahrenheit 9/11” has shown, an incendiary Bush-bashing polemic can sometimes compete with any of Hollywood’s mindless action-thrillers.

Calley is convinced that audiences’ political attention span -- at least when it comes to movies -- will last beyond the November elections. He recently acquired the film rights to former terror czar Richard A. Clarke’s memoir, “Against All Enemies,” envisioning it as a political thriller. “It feels a lot like ‘All the President’s Men,’ ” he says, “except that he was at the table in the White House, not in the parking lot with a ski mask on.”

Contact Patrick Goldstein at patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.