Among the Intellectualoids / The Book on Dave

...I've learned the system, sufficiently so to . .. Well, let me tell you about this truly original script I'm working on...

...But authorial paranoia aside, I doubt I'd like Dave in any event, perpetuating as it does the Capra-esque myth that there is nothing wrong with Washington (and government) that One Well-Intentioned Man can't set right...

...In short, given that the writer of the screenplay is a former wordsmith for Michael Dukakis, the character Dave is a liberal's idealized perception of a liberal, albeit of populist rather than Harvard persuasion...

...some light, some heavy, but all given over to the Capra myth in one form or other...

...Were I truly paranoid, instead of merely rankled, I'd conclude this is exactly what the liberal Hollywood myth-makers hope for when they make movies like Dave...

...They do this by bringing in a double, the spitting image of the stricken president...

...Kind of a Jimmy Stewart type, but I see someone like Kevin Kline playing it, with, say, Sigourney Weaver in the role of a feisty newspaper reporter who...

...It's about a young, ingenuous senator—call him Jones or Smith—who goes to Washington to do battle with the fat cats and lobbyists...

...only that, four decades after its holy war against the House Committee on Un-American Activities, the Hollywood Left is now reduced to showing its colors in terms of red ribbons and ski-resort boycotts...

...Smith, or Dave, or Bill...

...True, there is evergreen Barbra Streisand to say otherwise, along with Robert Redford and that durable den-mother of Hollywood liberalism, Lauren Bacall...

...Or to wonder at the remarkable coincidence of real-life characters like the McLaughlin Group and Bob Novak appearing in Dave when the same personalities, playing their same obstreperous selves, had been written into the Gold-Cheney plot five years earlier...

...Think also of Chaplin's The Great Dictator and Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper, fables involving a role switch between the powerful and the pure-ofheart...

...Smith, John Doe—and you have the essence of Dave, touted by Reitman and friendly critics as a post-Reagan affirmation of the ultimate triumph of compassionate leadership over gluttonous special interests...

...Of course Los Angeles is a marvelous environment for telepathy, so who am I to question the plot similarity between Dave, which surfaced as an, ahem, original screenplay in 1992, and The Body Politic, which was making the rounds of Hollywood's studios and agents as early as 1988...

...A conniving White House chief of staff and the vice president's press secretary then conspire, for ulterior political motives (as if there were any other) to keep the death a state secret...

...But of course, as Ben Stein regularly tells us—and as my experience in the un-making of The Body Politic confirmed—this is to view Hollywood West as an ideological hotbed, which in fact it isn't...

...They do this by...

...But Dave is another matter...

...Who indeed...

...I've liked Kevin Kline as an actor since The Big Chill, and think enough of his co-star Sigourney Weaver to have sat through an entire performance of a theatrical mishmash called Hurly Burly...

...It is, in case you haven't seen it or read the reviews, a movie about a thoroughly dislikable president who has a stroke while bleeping a woman other than his wife...

...This isn't to say that the place isn't liberal...

...All of which brings me back to Dave and Hollywood West's perception of how people-and-power operate in the nation's capital...

...S till, I wonder...

...Think of Frank Capra—Mr...

...in any given week, the Style/Life sections of the Washington Post and Times bring word of Clint Eastwood holding up traffic (In the Line of Fire) or Denzel Washington's breakfast order at the Four Seasons (The Pelican Brief...

...I've even enjoyed the work of Dave's director Ivan Reitman when he's handled material like Ghostbusters and Big, aimed at pubescent and would-be pubescent audiences...

...Let me tell you about The Body Politic...

...In Capra's day—indeed, up to the time of Otto Preminger, who came to town to film Advise and Consent—Washington was awed by the arrival of directors, stars, and crews to film scenes for a motion picture, major or minor...

...And it rankles that a major studio like Orion, instead of making The Body Politic, should, within weeks after buying it, do a Chapter Eleven, leaving Lynne Cheney, me—and among auteurs, the estimable social commentator Woody Allen—without a studio in which to flaunt our comic genius (though Allen, as we know, has gone on to bigger laughs...

...For my own part, I was relieved of that puerile notion about the time John F. Kennedy, three months after riding into the Oval Office on a white charger, turned to the cameras and said, "This job's a lot more complicated than I thought it would be...

...No, Hollywood West isn't so much a hotbed of serious opinion as a place with an attitude, a fickle constituency as likely to turn on its friend Bill as Capra's mob turned on Gary Cooper...

...Or think, as I necessarily do, of The Body Politic—assuming you've heardof it—a Washington novel by Vic Gold and Lynne Cheney bought by Orion Pictures and scheduled for production in the political season of 1992...

...No longer...

...Nor do I, next time around, intend to get rolled when I add my contribution to the pile...

...A conniving chief of staff and White House communications director then conspire to keep their boss's condition a state secret...

...Hollywood East: Coming soon to your neighborhood theater, an excess of movies about Washington...

...but predictably, Dave the double, in heartwarming Hollywood fashion, is thoroughly likable, a salt-of-the-earth mensch...

...And who can forget the descent of the glitz-and-famous on Washington in January, when the new president and his leading lady, on their first night in the White House, turned the Lincoln Bed over to the producers of "Evening Shade" and "Designing Women...

...It is the story of a thoroughly dislikable vice president who has a heart attack while bleeping a woman other than his wife...

...ut think back, if you will, to B another night, eight months earlier, when Billy Crystal, emceeing the 1992 Academy Awards show, brought the house down with a shake of his head and the words, "Didn't inhale...

...But there are others, obviously, with less memory and more sanguinity, who go to the polls every four years in slack-jawed search of Mr...