THE FRONT RUNNER

[jo]

This is author James Fallows twitter account -- in case you want to check out the responses to the article he wrote:

Click on any space on his tweet to view the responses.

[jo]

Also interesting --

@randy1116
·
11h
Replying to
@jamesfallows
This is, sadly, utterly believable, knowing the activities of Mr. Atwater. - And, Donna Rice owes folks the truth about this, don’t you think?

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


James Fallows

@jamesfallows
·
10h

As I say in the story, I tried repeatedly to get a comment or reaction from her.


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

Randy Mayeux

@randy1116
·
10h


I did see that you tried to get her to respond. I was just observing/thinking; knowing of her conservative values, truth-telling should be one of those values. But, I suspect she is unwilling... - I really appreciate your writing: and your over the long-haul substantive thinking.

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

James Fallows

@jamesfallows
·
10h
Thanks!

Ericka McCauley

@erickamccauley


Replying to
@jamesfallows
and
@gadyepstein
Great piece! It would be interesting to hear from the reporters and editors that chased the Hart-affair stories. I’d like to know if they were unwittingly primed and manipulated. Seems like a recurring tactic for some political operatives’ media relations strategies.
12:13 PM · Oct 17, 2018

[jo]

This report on the article featured on THE ATLANTIC includes excerpts of a TIME interview with Gary Hart following his decision to withdraw from the race --


www.westword.com/news/lisa-calderon-wants-to-unseat-michael-hancock-to-become-first-female-mayor-of-denver-10894908

[jo]

I wonder -- does Matt Bai feel that the new disclosures, if true, may be an indirect reference to a lapse in his historical research of what and how it happened?


Jo

[carouselkathy]

Good point, Jo. Matt Bai feels that his research was meticulous and scholarly. I'm sure that his work was as thorough as possible. His statement that "what transpired couldn't have been engineered" seems to be an opinion.

[jo]

Variety summarizes the creative work done by the various filmmaking teams of THE FRONT RUNNER to provide an authentic setting to the storytelling and important characterizations.


variety.com/2018/artisans/production/hugh-jackman-front-runner-1202982100/

[jo]

On the West Coast, Hugh Jackman will be honored on November 19 with the Kirk Douglas Award For Excellence In Film at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival

[jo]

[jo]

Hopefully, the sources of the positive reviews of the movie and Hugh Jackman's portrayal are now more legible --

[jo]

The Hollywood movie press has picked up the feature from THE ATLANTIC -- Hollywood Elsewhere, whose owner/editor/blogger Jeff Wells is a fan of the movie ( ranked it 7th of all the movies he has seen in 2018 so far) --

hollywood-elsewhere.com/2018/10/hart-was-allegedly-set-up-by-atwater/

Hart Was Allegedly Set Up by Atwater

A new Atlantic piece by James Fallows passes along a first-hand conspiracy story from Democratic strategist James Strother. The gist is that the late Republican torpedo specialist Lee Atwater (the guy behind the Willie Horton ad) confessed to Strother on his death bed in ’91 that he “set up” 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Gary Hart. The fatally ill Atwater, 39 years old, allegedly told Strother that “I did it!…I fixed Hart.” The whole Monkey Business episode with Donna Rice, Atwater meant, and that damning photo of Rice sitting on Hart’s lap. All of it a political trap.

Atwater somehow took advantage of and/or worked with Billy Broadhurst, the “political groupie and aspiring insider” who had taken Hart on the fateful Monkey Business cruise. Rice and another woman were invited to join the cruise, and the photo of Rice on Hart’s lap was planned and of course used after Hart suspended in his 1988 campaign. Fallows writes that there’s no proof of this other than Strother’s account.


As much as I admire Jason Reitman‘s The Front Runner, which is all about how Hart’s campaign was destroyed by allegations about a possible Rice affair, it would have been that much stronger a film if the Strother-Atwater story had been woven into the plot. Right now the movie has two bad guy elements — Hart’s cavalier self-destructiveness in not hiding his indiscretions better, and the Miami Herald reporters who were tipped off about Hart’s affair with Rice. If the Strother-Atwater story has been used, it would have trumped both of these elements.

Did Hart have certain extra-marital tendencies before the Rice scandal? According to legend, yes. Would he have gotten intro trouble with some other lust object if the Rice thing hadn’t happened? Possibly. But the Atwater confession certainly adds spice to the brew.


From the Fallows piece:

Strother and Atwater had the mutually respectful camaraderie of highly skilled rivals. “Lee and I were friends,” Strother told me when I spoke with him by phone recently. “We’d meet after campaigns and have coffee, talk about why I did what I did and why he did what he did.” One of the campaigns they met to discuss afterward was that 1988 presidential race, which Atwater (with Bush) had of course ended up winning, and from which Hart had dropped out. But later, during what Atwater realized would be the final weeks of his life, Atwater phoned Strother to discuss one more detail of that campaign.

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.


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]

Hugh's portrayal continues to earn laurels, showing a wide range of acting rarely seen in his previous movies. The film rating is Average to Good.


www.movieparliament.com/reviews/the-front-runner-2018-london-film-festival

[jo]

Excellent interview with Jason Reitman --

www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/10/little-gold-men-jason-reitman-interview

Vanity Fair: So I’m thrilled to be here with Jason Reitman, the director of two amazing films this year, The Front Runner and Tully. I wanted to start by talking to you about The Front Runner, which I saw in Telluride, where it got a great reception. You said this film is like a mirror, and it mirrors how people are thinking about politics in general. How did you approach it? What was your thought process in making a film like that?

Jason Reitman: Well, first off, thank you for that introduction. That’s absolutely lovely. Now I’m even more pleased to be on your podcast. My introduction to the Gary Hart story really came through a podcast. It was Radio Lab, and they did a piece on his story and the scandal. I couldn’t quite believe it. I couldn’t believe that there was this moment when the presumed next president of our country wound up in an alleyway in the middle of the night with these reporters, and no one knew what to do, because no one had ever been in their shoes before. It played out like a movie. Like a film noir, as a thriller. When I started bringing up this story to other people, I found that everyone’s reaction was different. Some people heroized Hart, some people heroized the journalist.

There really was a dozen different points of view or ways to interpret how this moment, this one-week story put us on a trajectory towards 2018. I just knew that I wanted to make a movie, but it wasn’t really until I really started sharing the story with my friends and my collaborators in movie-making that I realized, oh we need to take this multi-directional approach. There needs to be 20 main characters because everyone’s going to have a different way in. I suppose that’s why I say mirror, because no two people watch the same movie. There’s certain films where the audience has the same exact experience and that’s the joy of it, right? This collective experience of a group of strangers that have never met before. What I found with The Front Runner and with the story, in general, is that you watch it with the person sitting next to you and your experiences are completely different. It starts real conversation.




Well I’ll tell you what my experience was, I came out of there saying that was a monster movie and the monster is the tabloidization of politics. No one in the movie wants it but everyone, just by doing what they have to do, is helping to create it. That was my takeaway, this is the inception of something that has taken over our society.

Reitman: Yeah, certainly I see that side of it. I’m not a big fan of tabloid journalism, but we have to balance that with our curiosity, which is innate. I mean there’s a reason why tabloids are successful, both in their former magazine form and then also in their current Internet form. We’re curious people, we want to know. We want to know who these candidates are as human beings and we want to know about their flaws. We don’t quite know how to govern ourselves. We don’t know where that line is, and of course, that line is different for every person.



I liked that you insisted on incorporating the perspective of, I think it’s one of the female journalists in the film, where there’s a proto #MeToo thing here. If this is this guy’s way of behaving, we have a right to know that. I was glad that it wasn’t just, oh isn’t it sad that this great man was taken down? That there was a lot of nuance to it.

Reitman: No, and look, that’s why Hart kind of served as an interesting test case. He was smart, cerebral, thoughtful, had great ideas and was a charismatic candidate. But he was flawed and made real human mistakes that stand out. For that reason, people come away two ways on him. I found that, my producer Helen Estabrook who I’ve been working with since Up in the Air, who I have conversations about gender all the time with and really is the reason where I think in Up in the Air the conversations between George [Clooney] and Vera [Farmiga], or George and Anna [Kendrick] have the weight that they do is because of my conversions with Helen. Our conversations on this movie were amped up tenfold and very often that kind of point of view, the point of view of Ann Devroy at The Washington Post who serves as the voice in the paper saying, this matters, is really important.



What was the working relationship like with Matt Bai and Jay Carson? Because they come right out of this politics world, right? Where Matt was a reporter and Jay was a political operative. How did you guys all work together?

Reitman: It was really fun for me because, you know, I’m not a student of history. I’m a student of movies. I love movies, I’m a film director. When you make a political movie it can give off the impression as though somehow, you know, you have a degree of history, and that’s just not the case. Working with someone who was a journalist for The New York Times magazine and covered five presidential elections and working with a political operative who is the press secretary for Hillary Clinton, Howard Dean, and senators who remain in Congress, the stories are rich, fascinating, and funny. As writers, they are this resource where we are trying to create a world that feels messy and real and carries the kind of dialogue that you would hear if you just were dropped in the midst of a campaign or on the floor of a newspaper. Here, we have two people with all this experience who originally were on either side of the battlefield really, I mean these are two people in a fight to control the narrative when they were working in that world. To be suddenly in a room where they are sharing all these intimate stories so that the movie can come to life, it’s just a gift and it makes me feel like a passenger in the car.




Obviously, you mentioned there are a lot of main characters, but obviously, the biggest one is Gary Hart, played by Hugh Jackman. Did you have to persuade him to do this role? He’s playing against type in certain ways, right? On the one hand, Hart has to be charismatic and likable which is what we all associate with Hugh Jackman. On the other hand, he’s kind of this curmudgeonly guy who, in some ways, is in denial through a lot of this movie and is not always behaving that well.

Reitman: Right. I’m not sure Hugh had this experience. I had this experience when I saw Logan where all of a sudden, a new side of Hugh Jackman opened up to me. I knew he was a movie star, I knew he was funny and charismatic and obviously an amazing action star, but there was this moment in watching Logan where, it’s hard to explain, but he just kind of grew up into a new chapter of his career. It was such a nuance heartbreaking performance, particularly for a superhero character to be that nuanced and thoughtfully approached. I immediately thought of the Gary Hart role, frankly, and reached out to him. He really dug the script and we had breakfast and we started talking about how we liked to make movies and found ourselves to be very aligned in how we approach the work. The other thing he’s known for besides being overwhelmingly decent is for being about as hard-working an actor as there is. Whether he’s learning choreography or how to sing or how to do a fight scene, researching the background of a character. His line to me was, I never want to feel like I could’ve done more. That proved to be very true.




Then you had Vera Farmiga, who is rejoining you after you guys collaborated together on Up in the Air?

Reitman: Yeah, it’s interesting, right? Because the two roles are bookends to each other. She plays, between Up in the Air and The Front Runner, Vera Farmiga plays either side of an affair. Look, there is kind of a standard issue way of how to play the person who’s being cheated upon and that is to become shrill and angry. There’s kind of a simplicity to that. Vera doesn’t do simple. Everything she does is complicated and nuanced. Her strength comes through quietly. She’s a force to be reckoned with. I mean she was in Up in the Air and she was on this film as well, she’s intimidating. It’s exciting to give Hugh an actor who can really go toe-to-toe with him the way that she does and the way that J.K. Simmons does.
You mentioned J.K. Simmons, obviously you guys worked together on Juno way back in the day and several other times.
Reitman: Yeah, this is actually our ninth movie together, if you can believe it.



Didn’t you executive produce Whiplash as well?

Reitman: Yeah, Whiplash and Jennifer’s Body. Our first movie, of course, was Thank You for Smoking together. Where he played Nick Naylor’s boss. Then he’s in Up in the Air. In Young Adult, he was Mavis’s boss. The only one he’s not in is Tully, and I still regret it. But I just literally, I could not find a role for him.


So you’re reading scripts thinking, all right where is the J.K. role? Or writing, right? Does it just come to you?

Reitman: There honestly is a part of me that is always going, O.K. but what is J.K. going to play? Because I don’t think it’s a film of mine if he’s not in it. I think in his voice, and I also think he’s just one of the greatest actors alive, hands down. So I feel very lucky that I get to work with him.



You said you were a student of movie history. This film has been compared, I think on the Toronto Film Festival landing page to Robert Altman. Were you thinking about Robert Altman and The Player when you were making it? What are the political films that have inspired you?

Reitman: When you think about Altman you think about these language master shots that are not focused on any given character but rather focused on the scene at large, the overlapping way in which real human interaction happens. We definitely looked at that. During prep we watched Nashville and we’d play and pause and talk about what made it effective. The North Star for this film though was Michael Ritchie’s, The Candidate. I’m a big Michael Ritchie fan. I think that trio of films he did at the top of his career, Downhill Racer, The Candidate, and Smile are one of the greatest starts to a career that I can think of. We watched it, the writers and I, Matt, Jay and I, and immediately recognized the tone and style of what we wanted to achieve on this film.



So the three of you sat down, watched it and said, “All right, let’s get to work”?

Reitman: That’s the funny thing about telling a movie about real events. This is the first time I’ve done that. I’ve never made a movie about anything real, let alone people that were still alive. So when you do a movie about real events, the plot already exists. You don’t have to figure out what happens. What happened, happened. So now the question is, how are you telling this and why are you telling this? When we watched The Candidate, the “how” became very clear.




Have you talked to Gary Hart about this movie? Has he seen it?

Reitman: I met him beforehand. We were in contact during the movie, and he has seen the film.
Were you scared showing it to him?

Reitman: Oh, yeah. I mean that’s the scariest. Showing the movie to Donna Rice and to Gary and his campaign staff and to Tom Fiedler . . . these are the scariest screenings I’ve ever had. Scarier than showing my first movie to my dad my first time.



It’d be great if you had one screening with all of them in there.

Reitman: Oh god, yeah, on a boat. But Gary, as the others, felt that the movie had empathy for him and treated him with respect. The kind of decency that I think Gary Hart has been looking for. Donna Rice has been looking for in the 30 years since this all happened. These are people who were private people, who wound up in a very public story and received no empathy in the retelling of their story. Their story was kind of told as a joke and Hart went from being the presumed next president to one week later leaving politics forever. So, he’s a thoughtful person and he was hoping for a thoughtful approach. I think he recognized that we at least attempted to do that.



Do you follow politics these days a lot? Were you trying to comment on the current state of things with this film?

Reitman: Who doesn’t follow politics these days? . . . It’s what we talk about each day. It’s impossible to be alive today and not think about it. Funny enough, we wrote this movie in 2015. So the movie is written prior to the presidential election. It’s written prior to the Harvey Weinstein revelations and the #MeToo movement, and then as we were making this movie the world shifted in our fate. It’s been relevant but now . . . I could deal with less relevancy, honestly.



I can imagine. Speaking of relevancy, have you seen this story, I think Matt Bai was involved in it, that there’s now evidence that Gary Hart might’ve been set up by Lee Atwater?

Reitman: Yeah, I’ve read the story. It’s a fascinating read. Obviously, this is a deathbed confession, and hard to know the complete accuracy of it. But it’s interesting. Most interesting because you realize it really gets to this idea how one moment can change the trajectory of a country. Whether or not you’re a fan of Gary Hart, without him in the race the Democrats were not able to field a suitable candidate in time. Instead, George Bush became president. We have the first Iraq war. Because of his presidency, his son eventually becomes president. Dick Cheney becomes a character in this nation’s history. A lot of things change.




Yeah, it’s a fascinating microcosm of that relationship between policy and personality that has just reached, really, insane levels in the current state of things. But has been, obviously always affected politics, but really in the last 30 years, it’s been a huge thing.

Reitman: I mean, that’s the thing. You may be a fan of the two Bush presidencies and you may continue to think that it was a good idea that we went into Iraq. But it’s impossible to be alive in 2018 and not think the system is broken in one way or another. No matter where you land politically, something is not quite right. We’re all trying to fix it. One of the ideas at the core of this is where the politics meets personal, and who these people are and how much we know about them. Where shame comes into be a factor. We have a system in which people who experience shame drop out of the race. The way Al Franken did and the people who don’t experience shame remain and thrive. So we have a system that favors the shameless.


More... (Other subjects).









Your father, Ivan Reitman, directed Meatballs, Stripes, and Ghostbusters, which is enough for any person to be able to say. Did you grow up on sets? Did you grow up with Bill Murray pranking you and stuff?

Reitman: I was 11 days old on the set of Animal House. That clearly had a profound impact. Yeah, I’ve been on all these sets. I did grow up on sets. I had my first production assistant job when I was 13 on Kindergarten Cop. I also had my first kiss on-screen in Kindergarten Cop.



Oh, wow.

Reitman: My childhood was kind of woven throughout my father’s movies. Frankly, when I think about my childhood, I can kind of time things out to what movie was being shot at the time more than what grade I was in. It was just an incredible way to grow up. It’s like growing up in the circus. You’re with all these fascinating people who every morning, drive the trucks in. It’s like they put up the tent and they tell a story. Filmmaking is, every day you get to do something no one has ever done before. No matter what, you’re showing up at a place and you’re going to film it in a way that presumably no ones filmed it before. You’re figuring out something new. There’s a thrill to that, that I can’t imagine being measured up to in any other business. The way that every day is a surprise. It was a really exciting way to grow up.



Are there things about your dad that didn’t make sense when you were a little kid and now that you’re a director doing the same kind of work, you’re like, oh now I understand?

Reitman: I mean I’m not sure I can come up with an example right off the top of my head. But look, directing is hard. It’s just the truth. It is a lot of pressure. It is the pressure to tell the story, it’s the pressure to get it done on time and on a budget and you’re responsible for all these people who showed up for work who are looking to you to give them guidance, to give them purpose. All these people who show up to make a movie, whether you’re driving the trucks or operating the camera or making the food, you’re all sacrificing something. They all have families, they all have lives, and they’re sacrificing time with their kids, at their homes with their spouses and their partners to go tell some story that you think was so important to tell. It’s up to you do to do something good enough that makes that sacrifice worthwhile. Not to mention, the money that is being spent and the people who will eventually buy a ticket and give up a couple hours of their life just to listen to whatever you thought was important enough for them to watch. So there’s this pressure that comes with it. I probably didn’t think about that when I was a kid. I just thought, oh this is so cool to be on a movie set. I’d see him get stressed out and I thought, eh, O.K. Now, I get it. I’m a dad and I make movies and it’s a tricky balance.


Has he given you any good advice? Is there one thing you’ve learned from him?

Reitman: Oh my god, I mean, I could honestly write a very long book on all the advice he’s given me. For the most part, it’s all been good. Frankly, any time I meet a young director or an actor who’s thinking about directing and they want to grab a bite and hear whatever I have to offer, inevitably 90 percent of what I say begins with, “Here’s a story my dad told me.”



It’s been 10 years since you went to the Oscars as a nominated director for Juno. Was that your first time at the Oscars? What do you remember about that night?

Reitman: It’s a blur now, frankly. But it was one of the great moments of my life. I mean, I remember the moment I was nominated for the first time. I really did not think it was going to happen. I had woken up at five in the morning or whatever it was to watch Diablo get nominated, which at that point was kind of a certainty. With the hope that Ellen Page would get nominated and the hope that the movie might get a best-picture nomination. There’d been enough talk about it that it seemed like, oh this might just happen. But no one, including myself, thought that I would be nominated and when it did I just kind of froze. I just couldn’t believe it. The first person to call me was my father. He was crying. He could barely finish a sentence, he was trying to tell me that he was just so proud of me. It’s one of the great moments of my life.

[jo]

Another interesting interview with Jason Reitman --

www.thehollywoodnews.com/2018/10/19/interview-jason-reitman-the-front-runner/


Excerpts --

Obvious question, why Hugh Jackman?

[Laughs] Why not Hugh Jackman? He’s such an incredible movie star in that his talent is only surpassed by his decency, and he’s has hard-working as anyone I’ve ever met. He’s some who, the first one we met him said, ‘I never want to feel that I could have done more.’ That is an inherent truth to that man.


He has such a range as an actor.

Oh yes, whether he is murdering people with his claws or dancing, or singing, but in this movie, he clearly does something very different, and that was the challenge that we were both excited about – the idea of playing a character who is an enigma – someone we are desperately trying to understand that won’t let us through the door. I think that’s the way people have felt about Gary Hart, even his family and his friends.

[jo]

Another media interview with Jason Reitman --

www.flickeringmyth.com/2018/10/exclusive-interview-director-jason-reitman-discusses-the-front-runner/

[jo]

[jo]

The Front Runner will be screened as centerpiece movie at the Middleburg Film Festival in Virginia.


What a nice setup for filmgoing --

[jo]

Oct 20, 2018 18:19:25 GMT -5 jo said:

The Front Runner will be screened as centerpiece movie at the Middleburg Film Festival in Virginia.


What a nice setup for filmgoing --

[jo]

The Front Runner is the film of the night on Closing Night of the Chicago Film Festival --


www.hollywoodchicago.com/news/28938/film-news-closing-night-film-of-54th-chicago-international-film-festival-is-the-front-run

Jason Reitman is making an appearance.

[jo]

The movie is also going to be part of film festivals in Mexico and Brazil --

Excellent marketing strategy to get the movie known in non-USA/Canada/UK territories.


Jo

[jo]

NYC and LA filmgoers will have a chance to see the movie on Election Day itself!

[jo]

THE FRONT RUNNER will have its NYC premiere at the MoMA on October 30, 2018!


www.ifonly.com/entertainment/product/127344/2-tickets-to-the-film-premiere-of-the-front-runner-plus-exclusive-after-party-access?fbclid=IwAR25wbkGRX2mQ9TE5pBU9SFaHm2OhLI-guOOpMqTXa71i-vYw3oCNQErug8



Isn't this the same day for the Advance screening for the public?


www.92y.org/event/reel-pieces-hugh-jackman



Jo

[jo]

Another very insightful interview with Jason Reitman --

www.denofgeek.com/uk/movies/jason-reitman/61334/jason-reitman-interview-there-s-connective-tissue-between-politicians-and-movie-stars

Jason Reitman interview: “There’s connective tissue between politicians and movie stars”
Jason Reitman directs a fresh political thriller that questions the role of journalists and candidates in the 1980s and today...

Interview
Caroline Preece
Oct 23, 2018


Making a political film in 2018 is a dangerous game - no matter where you fall you’ll be hammered with criticism, so split have opinions and values around US politics become of the past few years. Jason Reitman, however, has taken on the challenge with his new film The Front Runner, which attempts to unseat the audience with a stance that lets the viewer decide what they believe.

The Front Runner is the story of Gary Hart, a politician who briefly ran for US President in 1988 before withdrawing after reports of an affair derailed his campaign. The film follows Hart, his campaign team (led by JK Simmons), journalists breaking the story (led by Alfred Molina), woman in question Donna Rice (Sara Paxton), and his family at home (Vera Farmiga; Kaitlyn Dever).

The obvious comparisons between the Hart ‘era’ and the current political climate in the US are not lost on Reitman, but he told Den of Geek during London Film Festival that it was initially the strangeness of the case that drew him to the project.



“I was immediately taken by all of the connective tissue between this story and 2018, but it just felt like a movie,” he said. “Here you had the next president of the United States in an alleyway in the middle of the night with three journalists and no one knows what to do. And then within a week he leaves politics forever? It sounded like a thriller.”
Reitman and his other co-writers Matt Bai and Jay Carson drew a lot from the tone of 1972 Robert Redford film The Candidate, which made a similar move in focusing on the characters surrounding the figure of interest, rather than the figure themself.

He continued: “This is my first movie about real events and real people, so in that sense the plot was already written. It became a question of ‘how are we telling this?’. The idea was always to really focus on the people around Hart, and to think about the various audience members and how each of them was going to enter the story.

“You might be a journalist who feels it’s very tricky to be a journalist in 2018 - knowing what people want you to ask, and questions you want to ask, and those your editor wants. Or the editor who wonders whether they even get to control what they publish anymore, or whether they simply have to feed the beast that is curiosity.”



Hugh Jackman might not have been the obvious choice to play a closed-off, dodgy politician, but Reitman was confident that the actor could bring what he needed to the performance.

“If you hear Hugh Jackman’s in a movie, the clear presumption is that he’s heroic, whether he’s being Logan or PT Barnum (in The Greatest Showman),” the director said. “He’s an actor whose heart beats out of his chest, he’s a very emotional actor. You’re surprised when you watch this movie because he’s not even the main character - he’s the object that the twenty main characters are trying to understand.

“He’s an enigma, he’s a guy we desperately want to know but he’s not letting us in. He plays flawed, and gray. His decency is there but it’s also clouded by his choices. I think that was a really brave and interesting choice for him as an actor. I watch as audiences grapple with it.”


So good was the fit for Reitman, who is known for working with actors such as Charlize Theron and JK Simmons across multiple projects, that he said that the pair are looking for the next project on which they can collaborate.He added: “There is a connective tissue between politicians and movie stars - a charisma and an ability to deliver material. I dare say if Hugh Jackman ran for congress he’d win in a landslide.”


Despite the timeliness of some of The Front Runner’s issues, Reitman was keen to differentiate the case of Donna Rice and Gary Hart from more serious stories.

“This is not a whistleblower story,” he said. “In 2018 our understanding of stories like these is that they’re about whistleblowers and truth to power, but this is the story of two very private people who ended up in a very public situation. Neither of them has ever said what happened, we don’t know, and Donna Rice was offered something close to $1 million for her story and turned it down.

“It would have been more indecent of me to say what happened when I don’t know,” he added on not coming down on one side or the other. “You can make presumptions, but frankly it almost doesn’t matter. What matters is how we reacted, and the idea that we deserved to know.”


But it’s true that the conversation around the film, no matter what, will focus on the allusions to our current era, and a time when celebrities and politicians have almost become interchangeable.

“Movies should be an opportunity to reflect our lives and reexamine how we feel about the way we’re living now,” Reitman said. “My job as a filmmaker is not to take you over the finish line, or tell you what to think. My job is to offer questions and then hand you the baton to run with in any direction you wish.

“My thrill is when one audience member has a completely different experience to the one next to them, and the debate that comes from that on the ride home.”

The Front Runner opens in UK cinemas on 11th January 2019.

[jo]

From a TV host --

[jo]

As announced earlier, Hugh Jackman will be honored at the SAVANNAH FILM FESTIVAL where THe Front Runner will be screened.

Per new announcement --

The Front Runner screens Sun. Oct. 28 at 6 p.m. at the Trustees Theater. Reitman and honoree Hugh Jackman will hold a Q&A.

[jo]

The international trailer has been released and EMPIRE gets the scoop --

It's a NEW one!

It summarizes the themes and character portrayals in a more appealing way to audiences.