Gary Hart spreads his message in L.A.

Remember Gary Hart?

The former Democratic senator’s presidential bid -- and political career -- may have ended years ago amid an extramarital scandal, but Hart still has fans in Hollywood.

On Monday evening, “Pulp Fiction” producer Lawrence Bender hosted a gathering of about 50 people at his Beverly Hills home to talk politics with the graying elder statesman. (Hart’s on a national tour to promote his latest book, “The Shield and the Cloak,” which calls for a rethinking of America’s national security strategies.)

The eclectic group included longtime supporters (Mike Farrell and Donna Mills) and Hollywood’s new generation of politicos (“Syriana” writer-director Stephen Gaghan and “Munich” producer Barry Mendel).

Mellowed but still opinionated, Hart, 69, talked for about an hour on topics as varied as Iraq and religion.

Foreign policy? Never act without allied support, Hart said.

The Democrats? They need to finally tell the country what they stand for.

The religious right? There needs to be a clearer separation of church and state.

Want to know more? Read one of Hart’s 16 books. He told the crowd: “I wrote another one last night.”

“Someone said to me, ‘Why don’t you just shut up and go home?’ ” he joked. “Somehow I just can’t do that. And I’ll just keep writing these books until someone reads them.”

Farrell said he had been a fan since Hart’s time in the Senate.

“It’s always interesting to get the perspective of someone who’s been there -- but has had a little distance from it,” Farrell said.

“Hart understands the issues and he’s always been ahead of the game.”

Of course, there was the famous misstep: Hart was more than 20 percentage points ahead in 1987 in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination when he was photographed with Donna Rice -- sitting on his lap on a yacht out in the Atlantic Ocean on the way to the Bahamas.

Michael Dukakis got the nomination, and was overwhelmingly defeated by George H.W. Bush.

Event attendee Morgan Baylis, age 23, said he learned about Hart while studying politics.

“I was quite impressed with him,” said Baylis. “He has a lot of strong opinions. I don’t remember the shenanigans, but from my research he was apparently the man who was supposed to be president.”

“I still love him,” Mills said of Hart. “I wish he would have been president. How would things have been different now?”