Star-stumping ’04

Need a lift to the polls?

Danny DeVito is around the corner with a minivan, ready to take you to your Florida polling station. Martin Sheen has been waking up Ohio college kids. “Pearl Harbor” star Josh Hartnett visited Iowa students, while “O.C.” heartthrob Ben McKenzie rallied young Oregon voters.

Hollywood typically supports Democrats with lavish parties and fat campaign contributions. Now the entertainment industry is going the extra mile -- literally -- to support Sen. John F. Kerry by flooding swing states. In putting away their checkbooks and putting on their tennis shoes, these actors, directors and screenwriters are getting a civics lesson in the process.

With presidential polls showing the White House race in a dead heat, Democrats and Republicans alike are heading to battleground states, hopeful their participation can make a critical difference on election night. But the Democrats have a much deeper database of Hollywood volunteers than the Republicans, and the Kerry campaign is training its showbiz emissaries and strategically matching them with particular constituencies.

Alfre Woodard traveled with the Congressional Black Caucus in Florida, and Sharon Stone went on the road with female congressional members in Maine, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. Larry David of HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” is set to woo Palm Beach, Fla., residents, while Leonardo DiCaprio met the state’s coeds and environmentalists in Orlando and Daytona Beach.

And those are just the official Kerry surrogates, whose travel costs are paid for by the Kerry campaign. The campaign received so many offers of Hollywood support that some famous faces have been redirected into doing radio spots.

Other well-heeled show business figures are spending their own money to join efforts organized by independent advocacy groups, often called 527S. One such organization, Bring Ohio Back, sponsored bus tours of actors such as Chad Lowe and Fisher Stevens to register voters in bars, bowling alleys and retirement homes.

“The people on the bus tour were just exhausted, but I think they were also overwhelmed by what they experienced here,” says Jeff Rusnak, Bring Ohio Back’s cofounder. “You hear that [celebrities] are a bunch of prima donnas, but we didn’t have attitude at all. None.”

Although Republicans are far less prevalent in Hollywood, several GOP celebrity stalwarts have been out in the field hustling votes. Actor-turned-senator-turned-actor Fred Thompson addressed voters in Florida, as did actor Ron Silver, while talk-show host Dennis Prager has been speaking in synagogues in Florida and Ohio.

“In California there’s not a contest; it’s almost as if no one is running presidentially,” says Prager, whose travels are being coordinated by the Republican Jewish Coalition. “Here [in Cincinnati] it’s an acute subject. These people are being told how their state goes determines the election.”

One Republican industry executive, who declined to be identified by name, said that he was happy that Democratic celebrities were out canvassing, believing that they would alienate regular voters with their Prada shoes and Jil Sander outfits.

But the Democratic volunteers say there’s been no such backlash from regular voters, just from the media covering their events.

“It’s always the spin from the media, every TV news station that came to interview us or cover any place we went,” says Julianna Margulies, best known for her costarring role on TV’s “ER,” who registered voters for Bring Ohio Back.

“I’m not going there as an actress. I’m going there as a woman, and I’m worried about women’s rights. For me the turning point was having three Republican women come to me and say, ‘I’ve changed my mind.’ ”

DiCaprio has been in Florida, Ohio, Oregon and Wisconsin and is planning to hit Iowa and a couple of other swing states before election day is over.

“I’ve been impressed both with how seriously the young people I’ve been meeting are taking this election and with their concern for environmental issues,” the actor said in an e-mail from the campaign trail. “I think they realize that I’m coming to them as a concerned citizen who shares with them the belief that this is the most important election of our lifetime.”

Hollywood’s involvement is not limited to faces as famous as that of the “Titanic” star.

“Men in Black” screenwriter Ed Solomon is renting a van and piling in Hollywood friends to walk Las Vegas precincts as he did two weeks ago alongside union members from the AFL-CIO. Novelist and screenwriter Anneke Campbell traveled to Wisconsin this week with director Jeremy Kagan. “I’m so not a door-to-door person,” Campbell says. “I’m doing it because I’m desperate.”

Although Brad Pitt tried to bar cameras from filming his appearance in front of screaming fans at the University of Missouri, he ultimately relented. And in fact most celebrities are not behaving like divas. No task is too small, even for some people who are used to private jets and retinues of personal assistants, trainers and chefs.

“When you are going door to door with a clipboard in your hand, it’s a whole different experience from going to a Beverly Hills cocktail party and writing a check at the end of the evening,” says Bruce Cohen, who won an Oscar for producing “American Beauty” and has participated in the Bring Ohio Back bus tour.

“In general, getting anyone in the industry to do anything but show up and write a check is very difficult.”

Many stars employ publicists and disguise themselves to keep the public at a distance. Now they are voluntarily mingling with the masses. “A lot of famous people, when you go into public, you put on a baseball hat and sunglasses. You try to hide and protect your privacy,” says Silver, a President Bush supporter, who may follow his Florida trip to visit Ohio voters.

The actor even went into “spin alley” after the second presidential debate. “Here you’re in a gymnasium standing next to someone with a sign with your name on it.”

The celebrities say they are pleasantly surprised that voters are interested in discussing issues, not Hollywood gossip.

When “O.C.” star McKenzie visited two Oregon colleges last Monday, he worried that students would quiz him about the convoluted romances on his popular nighttime soap.

“I definitely expected at least one or two questions about what was going on between Ryan and Marissa,” McKenzie says. “Instead, they asked about health insurance.”

Worried that ill-informed celebrities might do more damage than good, the Democrats have trained their speakers. McKenzie, who is not from Oregon, can reel off the number of people who have lost their jobs since George W. Bush took office, the percentage of the state’s National Guard troops summoned to Iraq and by what margin Al Gore carried the state in the last election. Talking points for McKenzie and his “O.C.” costars Adam Brody and Rachel Bilson, who barnstormed Nevada last week, were finessed by show creator Josh Schwartz.

McKenzie tells people that he didn’t bother voting in the 2000 election, a decision he regrets. He looked at a room of 250 Oregon State students and thought to himself that the hotly contested state “literally could come down to the people in that room.”

“We can physically get people to vote if we go to Florida,” says actress Rhea Perlman, who accompanied husband DeVito to the state this past week to help early Miami Beach voters get to the polls. “It’s an attraction: Come here, meet us and vote. It’s kind of gimmicky, but anything we can do. I think we all feel this is one of the most important elections ever.”

By heading to swing states, many of these Hollywood figures are abandoning family and work.

“Almost all of us who are doing this are leaving jobs,” says George-Ann Hyams, a documentary filmmaker who traveled to Florida this week. “I don’t know anyone who did this in 2000. But I started to realize, you’ve got to do more.”

Screenwriter Solomon says he went to Nevada not as “an emissary of showbiz. I’m going as a citizen.... I know that the 10 to 12 voters I registered on Saturday may not be the key to swinging the election. But I knew if I was doing it, leaving my wife and our 7-year-old and 3-year-old, there had to be thousands and thousands of other people who were doing it.”