‘Boogie Man’ of politics

This week Patrick Goldstein’s Big Picture column also became a blog on the L.A. Times website (latimes.com/thebigpicture). The following items and others can be found on the Big Picture blog.

MOST OF my family is from the South, starting with my grandmother, who spent 93 years living in Georgia, Alabama and Florida. She had a pretty simple rule about politicians, saying, “I’d be happy to vote for a Republican, if I could ever find a good one.” Apparently she was one of the few Southerners resistant to the wily political charms of Lee Atwater, who did more than any political strategist of his generation to help the GOP gain a decades-long stranglehold on the South.

Atwater is dead, but his spirit roars back to life in the new documentary “Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story,” which premiered Sunday night at the L.A. Film Festival. (it plays again at 1:45 p.m. Friday at the Landmark.) Directed by Stefan Forbes, it offers a compelling portrait of one of the great con men of modern American politics. The movie isn’t a knee-jerk lefty hit job. In fact, it shows that Atwater was a runaway success not just because he was a devious political operator but also because, in the words of one liberal reporter Forbes interviewed, the sass-talking, guitar-playing Atwater “was the most fun man I ever met.”

For anyone who wants to understand why Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign already has a Fight the Smears website up, debunking scurrilous political rumors, Atwater’s political odyssey offers a telling instructional in the arsenal of campaign dirty tricks. A protege of Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, one of Atwater’s first triumphs came at the expense of Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina state senator who was expected to be easily reelected until Atwater (working for Turnipseed’s rival) started telling reporters that Turnipseed as a young man had “been hooked up to jumper cables,” meaning he’d undergone electroshock therapy for depression.

That was just the beginning. Atwater helped pioneer the use of push polls, hiring operatives to pose as telephone survey questioners. He defeated a South Carolina Democrat named Max Heller by having his henchmen phone voters, ask a few routine questions, then wonder, “Would you vote for a Jew who didn’t believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?”

But how did Atwater graduate from local Dixie devilment to the national stage, where he ended up running George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential campaign and serving as chairman of the Republican National Committee?

Atwater instinctively grasped that it wasn’t all that difficult to persuade Americans to vote their fears. The tactic was dismissed with ridicule by Atwater’s Democratic rivals -- until they kept losing election after election. It is bracing to see all the old footage again, whether it’s Ronald Reagan kicking off his 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., (site of the infamous 1964 murders of three civil rights activists) or revisiting the legendary confrontation between Bush and Bob Dole during the 1988 primary campaign, when Dole -- furious over Atwater’s attacks -- was asked by Tom Brokaw if he has anything to say to his opponent. Dole’s icy retort: “Stop lying about my record.”

Once Bush got the nomination, he was still considered a huge underdog, his reputation soiled by the Iran-Contra fiasco. Atwater responded by getting the media to play up a series of manufactured cultural issues, such as flag burning and the Pledge of Allegiance, culminating with the infamous Willie Horton ad, which transformed the campaign into a referendum on scary African American beneficiaries of prison furloughs.

The documentary offers much for us to brood about, notably the effect Atwater had on our current president, who is seen in the film as a young buck, sitting at the master’s feet, introducing Atwater at a campaign event by joking, “The true test of a good campaign manager is how to deal with my mother.” It makes you ponder the allure of power, since the film makes it clear that, while Atwater desperately sought the perks and respectability of running a presidential campaign, he was treated by Bush like the hired help.

I kept coming back to the whole nature of why we are so easily manipulated into voting our fears. It’s worth watching this documentary to see how Atwater did it, because only a wacko idealist would believe -- with all the e-mail whispering campaigns already underway against Obama -- that someone couldn’t do it again.

Um, where’s Charlize Theron?

From a casual viewing of the marketing material for “Hancock,” Sony’s upcoming Will Smith comic thriller, I hardly knew that Charlize Theron was even in the movie. Our entertainment reporter Chris Lee turned up at an early screening -- the film opens nationwide Wednesday -- and offers this assessment:

“At an early screening of ‘Hancock’ at the Grove last week, Will Smith’s performance as an alcoholic superhero with a bad attitude and a mounting public relations crisis had the packed theater alternately chuckling and wide-eyed. ‘Hancock’s’ third-billed costar, Charlize Theron, on the other hand, had everyone -- high school students, foreign tourists, Sony executives -- literally gasping with surprise.

“In the film, she’s a stay-at-home mom, the skeptical wife of a PR executive with a heart of gold (the movie’s second-billed costar, Jason Bateman) who’s trying to repair super-screw-up Hancock’s negative public image one good deed at a time. For his part, Hancock repays the kindness by trying to put the moves on his publicist’s woman. I won’t spoil the surprise here, but let’s just say Theron has a much meatier part in the film than you might otherwise be led to believe by her marginal presence in various trailers, billboards and one-sheets for ‘Hancock.’

”. . . . All things considered, it’s downright mysterious that Sony would squander any opportunity to connect with ‘Hancock’s’ core constituency -- young males -- by leaving the blond bombshell Esquire named ‘the sexiest woman alive’ on the cutting room floor.”

Chris makes some good points. So I called up Sony marketing guru Val Van Galder to find out -- did the studio blow a chance to get even more young guys in to see their film? Here’s her side of the story:

“There are so few surprises in summer movies that we made a strategic decision to keep Charlize out of sight,” Van Galder explained. “Trust me, there is a big surprise in the film, and when it happens, you hear an audible gasp from the audience. It’s a fun secret, and to keep it fun, we decided to leave it unexplored in the trailer. It’s a lot better to maintain the mystery of what Charlize is up to.”

Most of the time, when you talk to studio marketers about their wildly expensive summer films, they’re under so much pressure -- from insecure filmmakers, cranky production chiefs and busybody reporters like me -- that they sound like they’re about to be rushed off to a funny farm. But Van Galder had the relaxed air of someone who suspects she has a pretty big hit on her hands. (Despite an unenthusiastic early review from Variety.) Van Galder doesn’t think Charlize will be missed too much -- until people see her in the film. As she put it: “I’m hoping that just having Will Smith playing a really cool superhero will be enough to get a few people in to see the picture.”