THE FRONT RUNNER

[carouselkathy]

Great interview! Hugh includes an excellent history lesson about the life and times of Gary Hart. I hope THE FRONT RUNNER, aside from the scandal, also includes elements of the issues that Gary Hart cared about and fought for. Doing so will make the film even more powerful in demonstrating the turn from serious problems to tabloid noise.

[jo]

The Front Runner is everywhere

[jo]

The feeling of nostalgia may work in favor of the movie's audience appeal.

[jo]

[jo]

Sorry, couldn't read the article --

I wonder, could it be because --

*he is portraying a living person

*he is portraying the likely worst time in Sen Hart's life...and that needs sensitive handling

*he has met Sen Hart and they have even become friends ….and that could have caused some awkwardness if you are trying to give a portrayal from an artistic point of view?


Just speculating.

Jo

[jo]

The Front Runner is among the touted entries to the London Film Festival --

www.goldderby.com/article/2018/2018-bfi-london-film-festival-top-10-films/

Potential nominations for awards!

[jo]

Jason has been doing the festival circuit for THE FRONT RUNNER -- this time in the Mill Valley Film Festival

[jo]

It looks like the movie will draw a mature crowd, which hopefully will find the subject and cinematic treatment engaging and worthy of discussions!

At the queue at the Vancouver Film Festival --

you have to click on the photo to see the whole image especially of the queue.

[jo]

girlonfilms.net/2018/10/14/at-lff-2018-day-five/

Hugh Jackman and Alexander Skarsgaard are both promoting new projects at the BFI London Film Festival today.

Jackman will join directed Jason Reitman at the gala screening of their political drama, The Front Runner. The film’s follows Gary Hart’s failed campaign to run for US President in 1988. It’s one that I’ve been very much looking forward to...

[jo]

Hope Hugh is not ill or some other serious reason has occurred?

A lot of fans are disappointed because he was confirmed to attend the gala premiere.

[jo]

Too bad for the fans...but a sigh of relief that it was just a travel-related issue.

[jo]

[jo]

http://instagram.com/p/Bo7QJWtAPtQ

I have my own memories of Leicester ( as in Les-ter) Square - crossing it to get to the West End theatres on that side, to get to Covent Garden ( and even traversing Covent once to reach the Lyric Theatre where OKLAHOMA! played after its run at the RNT), to the unique antique print shops, to where the theatre which featured my first seeing Michael Ball perform onstage ( Aspects of Love), to get to Chinatown to eat, to hear Mass in French (only language it uses) ...and where the hotel I have stayed in so many times was located. Yet, in all those times, I never went to see a movie, except when DECEPTION opened . It was more theatre-related than movies-related to me. I didn't realize this was the area where most of the movie premieres in London were held, eventually including major ones with Hugh Jackman (Les Miserables, The Wolverine and Pan...maybe Logan and Greatest Showman, too) … and now The Front Runner


Jo

[jo]

[jo]

Jason Reitman is a fan... of Hugh Jackman

[jo]

This article will be featured in the November issue of THE ATLANTIC ( formerly The Atlantic Monthly), a respected media publication. It is very interesting and worth the entire read. It poses the question "What If? as to the veracity of the Gary Hart scandal. Did it actually happen as sensationalized by the press or was Gary Hart set up?

www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/was-gary-hart-set-up/570802/?utm_term=2018-10-16T10%3A00%3A42&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_medium=social


I wonder - if this is all true : is this one of the reasons why the Hart marriage has lasted for 60 years?

Too bad that Gary Hart, who has kept his personal privacy all these years, has never tried to explain the circumstances of that National Enquirer photo which doomed his presidential bid. I guess he has kept his enigmatic reputation and chosen not to expose it for what it was.

Very interesting read -- had it not been The Atlantic which will feature the story, it almost sounds like fiction. But what a sad commentary on dirty politics if this was all true.

Jo

[jo]

It is a long article -- let me cull some of the key paragraphs ( although there has to be more than a few for a good understanding of the events) --

Excerpts --

Politics

Was Gary Hart Set Up?

What are we to make of the deathbed confession of the political operative Lee Atwater, newly revealed, that he staged the events that brought down the Democratic candidate in 1987?
James Fallows
November 2018 Issue


In the spring of 1990, after he had helped the first George Bush reach the presidency, the political consultant Lee Atwater learned that he was dying. Atwater, who had just turned 39 and was the head of the Republican National Committee, had suffered a seizure while at a political fund-raising breakfast and had been diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. In a year he was dead.


Atwater put some of that year to use making amends. Throughout his meteoric political rise he had been known for both his effectiveness and his brutality...

In the last year of his life, Atwater publicly apologized for tactics like these...

And in a private act of repentance that has remained private for nearly three decades, he told Raymond Strother that he was sorry for how he had torpedoed Gary Hart’s chances of becoming president.

Atwater had the strength to talk for only five minutes. “It wasn’t a ‘conversation,’ ” Strother said when I spoke with him recently. “There weren’t any pleasantries. It was like he was working down a checklist, and he had something he had to tell me before he died.”

What he wanted to say, according to Strother, was that the episode that had triggered Hart’s withdrawal from the race, which became known as the Monkey Business affair, had been not bad luck but a trap. The sequence of events was confusing at the time and is widely misremembered now. But in brief:

In late March 1987, Hart spent a weekend on a Miami-based yacht called Monkey Business. Two young women joined the boat when it sailed to Bimini. While the boat was docked there, one of the women took a picture of Hart sitting on the pier, with the other, Donna Rice, in his lap. A month after this trip, in early May, the man who had originally invited Hart onto the boat brought the same two women to Washington. The Miami Herald had received a tip about the upcoming visit and was staking out the front of Hart’s house. (A famous profile of Hart by E. J. Dionne in The New York Times Magazine, in which Hart invited the press to “follow me around,” came out after this stakeout—not before, contrary to common belief.) A Herald reporter saw Rice and Hart going into the house through the front door and, not realizing that there was a back door, assumed—when he didn’t see her again—that she had spent the night.

Amid the resulting flap about Hart’s “character” and honesty, he quickly suspended his campaign (within a week), which effectively ended it. Several weeks later came the part of the episode now best remembered: the photo of Hart and Rice together in Bimini, on the cover of the National Enquirer.

Considering what American culture has swallowed as irrelevant or forgivable since then, it may be difficult to imagine that allegations of a consensual extramarital affair might really have caused an otherwise-favored presidential candidate to leave the race. Yet anyone who was following American politics at the time can tell you that this occurred. For anyone who wasn’t around, there is Bai’s book and an upcoming film based on it: The Front Runner, starring Hugh Jackman as Hart.

But was the plotline of Hart’s self-destruction too perfect? Too convenient? Might the nascent Bush campaign, with Atwater as its manager, have been looking for a way to help a potentially strong opponent leave the field?

“I thought there was something fishy about the whole thing from the very beginning,” Strother recalled. “Lee told me that he had set up the whole Monkey Business deal. ‘I did it!’ he told me. ‘I fixed Hart.’ After he called me that time, I thought, My God! It’s true!”


Strother’s conversation with Atwater happened in 1991. He mainly kept the news to himself. As the years went by, he discreetly mentioned the conversation to some journalists and other colleagues, but not to Gary Hart. “I probably should have told him at the time,” he said recently. “It was a judgment call, and I didn’t see the point in involving him in another controversy.”



Crucially, Strother realized, he had no proof, and probably never would. Atwater was dead. Although Hart did not run in later elections, he was busy and productive: He had earned a doctorate in politics at Oxford, had published many books, and had co-chaired the Hart-Rudman Commission, which memorably warned the incoming president in 2001, George W. Bush, to prepare for a terrorist attack on American soil. Why, Strother asked himself, should he rake up an issue that could never be resolved and might cause Hart more stress than surcease?

But late last year, Strother learned that the prostate cancer he had been treated for a dozen years ago had returned and spread, and that he might not have long to live. The cancer is now in remission, but after the diagnosis Strother began traveling to see people he had known and worked with, to say goodbye. One of his stops was Colorado, where he had a meal with Gary Hart.

Aware that this might be one of their final conversations, Hart asked Strother to think about the high points of the campaign, and its lows. Hart knew that Strother had been friends with Billy Broadhurst, the man who had taken Hart on the fateful Monkey Business cruise. According to Strother and others involved with the Hart campaign, Broadhurst was from that familiar political category, the campaign groupie and aspiring insider. Broadhurst kept trying to ingratiate himself with Hart, and kept being rebuffed. He was also a high-living, high-spending fixer and lobbyist with frequent money problems.

Strother talked with Hart this spring; Broadhurst had died about a year earlier. In retrospect, Hart asked, what did Strother make of the whole imbroglio?

“Ray said, ‘Why do you ask?’ ” Hart told me, when I called to talk with him about the episode. “And I said there are a whole list of ‘coincidences’ that had been on my mind for 30 years, and that could lead a reasonable person to think none of it happened by accident.



“Ray replied, ‘It’s because you were set up. I know you were set up.’


“I asked him how he could be so certain,” Hart told me. Strother then recounted his long-ago talk with Atwater, and Atwater’s claim that the whole Monkey Business weekend had occurred at his direction. According to Hart, that plan would have involved: contriving an invitation from Broadhurst for Hart to come on a boat ride, when Hart intended to be working on a speech. Ensuring that young women would be invited aboard. Arranging for the Broadhurst boat Hart thought he would be boarding, with some unmemorable name, to be unavailable—so that the group would have to switch to another boat, Monkey Business. Persuading Broadhurst to “forget” to check in with customs clearance at Bimini before closing time, so that the boat “unexpectedly” had to stay overnight there. And, according to Hart, organizing an opportunistic photo-grab.

“There were a lot of people on the dock, people getting off their boats and wandering up and down on the wharf,” Hart told me. “While I was waiting for Broadhurst and whatever he was working out with the customs people, I sat on this little piling on the pier.” Hart said that Donna Rice’s friend and companion on the boat, Lynn Armandt, was standing a short distance away. “Miss Armandt made a gesture to Miss Rice, and she immediately came over and sat on my lap. Miss Armandt took the picture. The whole thing took less than five seconds, with lots of other people around. It was clearly staged, but it was used after the fact to prove that some intimacy existed.”

What are we to make of Strother’s late-in-life revelation of Atwater’s deathbed confession? Hart’s reputation, deserved or not, certainly gave Atwater something to work with, if that’s what he did. (“It would be just like the perversity of history for someone to undertake an effort that might well have happened by itself,” Matt Bai told me when I spoke with him recently.) What would have induced Broadhurst to participate in an entrapment scheme? (When I asked Strother this question, he said, “Money.”) How exactly was the scheme supposed to work? Hart had been introduced to Donna Rice at least once before (briefly, at an event at the musician Don Henley’s house, in Colorado, that Hart attended with his wife), and he phoned her after the Monkey Business weekend. Both Rice and Hart denied any affair. A few people still living may know what happened that weekend, and why. (Rice, who now leads an internet-safety group called Enough Is Enough and goes by her married name, Donna Rice Hughes, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.) Most likely the rest of us never will.

[jo]

That sounds very plausible. I thought the controversial photo did not seem right -- if they were having an affair, why publicly pose like that? Why was a boat named MONKEY BUSINESS conveniently be the one used for supposedly a secret tryst? And Gary Hart was smiling... not looking furtive, if that were a stolen photo ( although it looked very much posed!).

Maybe Gary Hart was too stubborn to let go of his personal privacy ideals and deny that it all happened vehemently. But he seemed to have retained his enigmatic reputation. The onus would have to be on Donna Rice to tell the truth ( although would she be accused of a crime, if the truth came out that she was paid to do it?). Both denied an affair and Donna could have said that the photo was a gag. But would the public have believed it?


I wonder if Matt Bai and Jason Reitman had known of this? If so, would that have made the movie more interesting? Hmmm... I think their thesis was more of presenting the two sides of the story ( and how media changed its colors) to provoke discussion on the process of choosing leaders, not really to become a scandal worth dramatizing.


Maybe this was why Gary Hart allowed the book and the movie to be made -- he knew he was telling the truth about L'affaire Monkey Business! And why Lee Hart has stayed with him all those years?



Hope Hugh gets to read this article. He said he has become an admirer of the man himself!


Jo

[jo]

What if this is going to be the final vindication of Sen Gary Hart?

If this the truth, the timing of coinciding with the movie release would have made everyone sit up and notice!

[jo]

[jo]

It looks like the article was discussed on a news clip on MSNBC --

[jo]

[jo]

[jo]

Oct 16, 2018 21:54:30 GMT -5 jo said:

Why was Gary Hart wearing that t-shirt and a pair of shorts. In a scene from the trailer, he was shown striding towards a boat wearing a long-sleeved shirt and slacks. Where and why did the t-shirt/shorts come up?


From the account of THE ATLANTIC --

Strother talked with Hart this spring; Broadhurst had died about a year earlier. In retrospect, Hart asked, what did Strother make of the whole imbroglio?

“Ray said, ‘Why do you ask?’ ” Hart told me, when I called to talk with him about the episode. “And I said there are a whole list of ‘coincidences’ that had been on my mind for 30 years, and that could lead a reasonable person to think none of it happened by accident.

“Ray replied, ‘It’s because you were set up. I know you were set up.’
“I asked him how he could be so certain,” Hart told me. Strother then recounted his long-ago talk with Atwater, and Atwater’s claim that the whole Monkey Business weekend had occurred at his direction. According to Hart, that plan would have involved: contriving an invitation from Broadhurst for Hart to come on a boat ride, when Hart intended to be working on a speech. Ensuring that young women would be invited aboard. Arranging for the Broadhurst boat Hart thought he would be boarding, with some unmemorable name, to be unavailable—so that the group would have to switch to another boat, Monkey Business. Persuading Broadhurst to “forget” to check in with customs clearance at Bimini before closing time, so that the boat “unexpectedly” had to stay overnight there. And, according to Hart, organizing an opportunistic photo-grab...

Hart did not expect the trip to last for more than a day. After he had spent the night, he must have been offered a t-shirt and a pair of shorts to wear the following morning?



.

[jo]

Twitter reactions ( click on any space on the actual tweet to see the responses) --

Interesting reaction from one tweeter --

J Savage

@jsavagefl_j
6h


Replying to
@theatlantic
and
@jamesfallows
Too bad Fallows didn’t call me for the facts. He owes Donna Rice and Lynn Armandt an apology.

*******************************


J Savage

@jsavagefl_j
·
7h


Replying to
@theatlantic
and
@jamesfallows
I reported and edited the Miami Herald Hart scandal story and I know Fallows story is
(link: http://false.It)
false.It falsely implies Donna Rice and her friend conspired with W. Broadhurst to betray Hart. Broadhurst begged me and the Herald team to kill our story to protect Hart.