A docu-jungle out there

When filmmaker Michael Moore walked onto the floor of the Democratic National Convention on a hot July morning, it was as though a dry sponge had dropped into a puddle of water -- he was instantly swarmed by reporters. High overhead, in a fifth-floor suite at Boston’s Fleet Center, director Robert Altman and writer Garry Trudeau watched and marveled. Then they went about constructing their own sly reply to Moore, whose feature documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11” was one of the year’s anti-Bush White House rallying points.

The summer of political documentaries is about to get a fall rebuttal in their new fictional series, which draws some of its most trenchant insights from real personalities in unscripted roles.

The project, “Tanner on Tanner,” reprises their groundbreaking 1988 HBO series “Tanner ‘88,” which followed fictional presidential candidate Jack Tanner (played by Michael Murphy) and captured -- with what fans called dead-on accuracy -- the very moment when politicians’ personal lives became fair game for the public and press. The new “Tanner’s” four parts will air on the Sundance Channel Tuesdays starting this week and running up to the election.

Viewers may be mildly disappointed if they are expecting a continuation of the original “Tanner,” because Altman and Trudeau have moved on from politics. But they haven’t gone far. They’ve just sidestepped into the world of documentary filmmaking -- which itself has become obsessed and entwined with politics as never before.

Unchanged is the “Tanner” conceit of working real personalities into a fictional story line to give the show verisimilitude, and opportunities to quickly incorporate current events into the plot line. In fact, with the team already well-versed in “setting up spontaneity,” as one of the producers put it, the marriage of real and fake in Boston produced some dizzying results.

Altman constructed his scene in Boston around Ron Reagan Jr., son of the former president and a speaker at the convention, and Alexandra Kerry, daughter of the Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry. The younger Kerry was wearing a navel-grazing turquoise T-shirt, low-slung jeans and cut-out shoes. Both played themselves, real-life offspring of candidates interacting with Alex Tanner (played by Cynthia Nixon), the fictional filmmaker daughter of former fictional candidate Tanner.

Reagan showed up with a camera crew, which was filming for his show on MSNBC, where he is a commentator. As he came out of the bathroom just before shooting the scene, a producer for Alexandra Kerry waylaid him to sign a release form, because Kerry was shooting a real documentary on her own experience during her father’s campaign.

Then into the fictional scene they all piled, the real cameras mingling with Altman’s cameras. Two of the actors also carried video cameras, which were shooting real video for the series. The only camera not in the “Tanner” shot was the one from NBC’s “Today” show, which was there to film Reagan because his convention speech was stirring up controversy.

If that’s too many cameras to keep track of, that’s the point.

Media’s house of mirrors

Altman, who is 79, has a dark vision of the cameras upon cameras layered so ubiquitously these days at the points where politics and media intersect. He calls them “incestuous” and equates them with facing mirrors that reflect images of themselves back to one another ad infinitum.

“Nobody has any content to make a documentary,” he said as he waited for his team to set up yet another shot. “It’s great for democracy but bad for art.” He added, “What we’re doing here is about the idiocy of documentary filmmaking.”

Altman clearly has strong feelings on the subject, but the uncanny timeliness of the new series was partly kismet. Long before the new episodes were envisioned, Sundance merely wanted to rerun “Tanner ‘88,” with new one-minute introductions to “keep viewers from realizing they were watching a 16-year-old show,” Trudeau quipped in an interview.

The intros made it appear that viewers were watching a documentary on the 1988 campaign, in which Murphy’s character ran for president -- with the campaign slogan “For Real” -- as he confronted publicity traps at all turns, finding himself in hot water over everything from old friendships to his dating life. Along the way, there were cameos by Bruce Babbitt (filmed just after he dropped out of the real race), evangelist Pat Robertson and even Kitty Dukakis, wife of 1988 Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis.

When the idea of new episodes was later broached, “It dawned on me that we had inadvertently created a way to move forward by arbitrarily making Alex Tanner a documentary filmmaker,” Trudeau said. And the documentary theme would give the filmmakers new territory to play with instead of reprising the political process, which they felt they had already covered.

In the episodes, Alex Tanner struggles with how to tell the story of her father’s 16-year-old campaign. Shifting the focus to Alex also gave the filmmakers a star in Nixon, now much more well known thanks to her just-ended, Emmy-winning run in HBO’s “Sex and the City.” All the other major characters return as well, including Murphy’s Tanner, Tanner’s campaign manager T.J. (Pamela Reed), T.J.’s assistant Andrea (Ilana Levine) and cameraman Deke (Matt Malloy).

The plot line was conceived before Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” became the summer’s surprise phenomenon, before the anti-Fox News “Outfoxed” documentary was released on DVD, before “Bush’s Brain” or any of the many other opinionated documentaries started to flood theaters, at least in the country’s major markets. Trudeau calls it “just a piece of good luck for us, serendipity,” that documentary filmmaking popped up in the center of the pop culture. But the “Tanner” format let them respond quickly, adding dialogue about how documentaries have changed from dispassionate discussions of the issues to one-sided arguments. Altman just finished editing in late September.

Trudeau, better known as the cartoonist behind “Doonesbury,” said he’s “not prepared to make as sweeping a generalization” as Altman about the state of documentaries today. “Like any art form, there are good ones and bad ones. I think one thing that has happened is that Michael [Moore] has breathed real life into the documentaries. They are no longer marginalized. For better or worse, he has made something people want to see.”

But Altman argues that with so much material, it’s easy for people -- viewers, voters, citizens -- to “get overwhelmed” if they aren’t selective in what they watch. “I can’t take any of it seriously anymore,” he adds.

Many are ready and willing

“Tanner on Tanner” is Sundance Channel’s biggest and most expensive foray into original programming. What were originally three episodes expanded to four when Altman said he had more than enough good material. “Like I’m going to say no to him?” said Adam Pincus, the channel’s senior vice president for original programming, before the deal for the final episode was concluded.

Sundance had some initial qualms that HBO’s poorly received “K Street,” last fall’s series about the shadowy lobbying world of Washington, D.C., would make a reprise of “Tanner” more difficult. Like “Tanner,” “K Street” used cameos by real characters, but it blurred the lines further by having real-life Washington political strategists Mary Matalin and James Carville play two of the fictional characters. It was all too much for some viewers, and some politicians who dropped by, such as Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, were criticized.

But no such problems occurred with “Tanner.” Dean agreed to a cameo, as did a long list of others, including NBC’s Tom Brokaw, former Clinton spokeswoman Dee Dee Myers, the Rev. Al Sharpton, former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, comedians Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo and former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Sundance’s Robert Redford pops up to give filmmaking advice to Alex Tanner.

In fact, the ease of some of the bookings was in itself an indication of just how ubiquitous the cameras have become for politicians in this era -- and how much entertainment entwines with reality, a subtheme running through the new “Tanner.” When Dennis Kucinich canceled at 11:30 p.m. on a Monday during the Democratic convention, a frantic call by producers to the staff of Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt got him there the next morning.

After Gephardt arrived on the DNC floor for a five-minute consult with Altman, he got whisked away for an interview with Bill Hemmer of CNN. That interview over, Gephardt was mobbed by news crews until the TV series had to pry him away to shoot his scene. Altman urged him to talk freely about whatever “ax you want to polish or grind.”

After just one take, Gephardt was nabbed for an interview by Ed Helms, a real-life correspondent with the fake-news “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” on Comedy Central. Helms wanted to know if calling it the Democratic National Convention was exclusionary to Republicans. “We welcome everyone into this party,” Gephardt said, without missing a beat. But Helms was edged out by a trade policy question from a very serious reporter for Japan’s NHK. Gephardt’s demeanor never changed; he just kept answering the questions.

“It’s part of a politician’s skill set these days,” Trudeau said as the “Tanner” team looked on.

Altman doesn’t like that, either, even though it may have been good for “Tanner on Tanner.” “They’re here for the cameras. When they see a camera they gravitate to it and they think that’s what they should be doing. I think they shouldn’t,” he said. “When there is no privacy left, when there is no mystery left, you become an object of ridicule very quickly.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, “Tanner on Tanner” ends on a bleak note. Without giving too much away, Altman said, “It all comes to naught.”