John Kerry's Big Screen Test

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WITH the air-conditioning off to avoid extraneous sound as the camera rolled, George Butler and Max Cleland sat a scant three feet apart here in the sticky-hot party room of Mr. Cleland's apartment building, doing their bit to get their mutual friend John Kerry elected leader of the free world.

Mr. Cleland — a veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, then went on to share six years in the Senate with Mr. Kerry — expertly wove together lines from the candidate's stump speech, a tribute to Mr. Kerry's courage and his own war story. Mr. Butler, a photographer-filmmaker who has called Mr. Kerry a close friend since they met at a summer barbecue 40 years back, captured the whole thing on camera, silently rolling his hand in the air to encourage Mr. Cleland to keep the good words flowing.

After 90 minutes, the hot lights went dark. "Thank you for casting the spotlight on an incredible guy," Mr. Cleland said. "John loves you, and he trusts you implicitly."

"There are those on the boat, and those off the boat," he added, looping Mr. Butler, who escaped the draft as a Vista volunteer in Detroit, into the closeness Mr. Kerry feels for his Navy crew. "You're on the boat."

And so unfolded a scene from the newly crowded nexus of film and politics, where instead of trying to compete with summer movies, politicians seem to be starring in them.

Mr. Butler, who 30 years ago helped start Arnold Schwarzenegger's career with "Pumping Iron" and sparked the public rediscovery of the Antarctic explorer Ernest H. Shackleton with a four-pack of films in 2000 and 2001, was not shooting a campaign commercial for the Democratic presidential nominee-in-waiting. Nor was he making a video biography to introduce Mr. Kerry at next month's Democratic National Convention, Ã* la former President Bill Clinton's "Man From Hope" in 1992. (Kerry aides are mum about plans for that.)

Working outside the campaign but in sync with its image makers, Mr. Butler is instead making a $1.3 million, 90-minute documentary about Mr. Kerry's life, which he is racing to finish for theatrical release in September.

His is among a bumper crop of political movies this year, from "Fahrenheit 9/11," Michael Moore's anti-Bush polemic, to "The `R' Word," about conservatives in Hollywood.

"Never in my career have there been any films that have come out about that year's presidential campaign that have the potential to impact the presidential race," Mark Halperin, the political director of ABC News, said the other night at Silverdocs, a documentary film festival in Silver Spring, Md., where Mr. Butler screened a short clip of his movie, as yet untitled. "This year there are at least two."

Like Mr. Moore, Mr. Butler has come under fire for blurring the line between documentary filmmaking and propaganda. Republicans and other critics accuse him of skirting campaign-finance laws to make what amounts to a long-form campaign advertisement. Some have suggested that by buying up the rights to reams of stock footage about his subject, he is effectively preventing less-loving portraits. Even Democrats, while desperate for anything that helps humanize their candidate, are worried that the biopic could backfire by further focusing on Mr. Kerry's controversial comments about Vietnam atrocities — or by a limp box-office performance just when the candidate most needs to look popular.

Though the campaign has helped Mr. Butler arrange interviews and has given him special access to Mr. Kerry on the campaign trail this winter, both sides are now careful to keep their distance; Mr. Kerry has rebuffed Mr. Butler's appeals for a sit-down (and he also declined to discuss Mr. Butler or his movie for this article). Mr. Butler said he would not screen the film for any campaign officials. But he is in close contact with David Thorne, the brother of Mr. Kerry's first wife, who remains in the candidate's inner circle, and has said he would listen to any thoughts Mr. Thorne offered.

Instead, Mr. Butler — who, with his partner, the writer Caroline Alexander, splits his time between a brownstone flat on the Upper East Side and a 100-acre farm in New Hampshire — is relying on the 6,000 photographs he took of Mr. Kerry over four decades, and 30 hours of scavenged footage, some never seen before. "It is very, very difficult for any piece of art to change people's opinions," Mr. Butler said when asked what he is always asked these days, which is whether he is out to influence the election. "Did `Bowling for Columbine' change anyone's view on gun control?" Then he acknowledged that "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and "The China Syndrome" did sway public opinion. Then he pointed out that in the wake of his own "Pumping Iron" film, 100,000 gyms opened across the country.

The three-and-a-half-minute clip Mr. Butler recently showed focuses on Mr. Kerry's four months commanding 50-foot swift boats on the Mekong River. It is strikingly on-message with what the candidate and his handlers try to present to the public every day. "You can't understand John unless you understand what Vietnam is to him and to his life," John Marttila, one of his political strategists, intones over a series of stills of a young Lieutenant Kerry in uniform. "People sometimes look at this man who's very elegant and well-coiffed and so forth and well-spoken, and they forget the war hero stuff is real."

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A dramatic montage mixes Mr. Butler's black-and-whites with grainy Vietnam action and Mr. Kerry's 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There is a Kennedyesque image of Mr. Kerry on the grass in Cape Cod nuzzling his toddler daughter, and one with his second wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. Mr. Kerry's clean-cut face is contrasted with those of angry hippies as the Buffalo Springfield anthem "For What It's Worth" blares.

"The fact that he was able to say no to the war passionately," says Peter Yarrow, the folk singer and longtime Kerry loyalist, in a voice-over, "and correctly, and in a dignified fashion, at a time when a lot of the protesters were so blatantly unrestrained — that changed our capacity to oppose the war."

Chris Hegedus, who with D. A. Pennebaker made "The War Room," the celebrated documentary on the 1992 presidential campaign, described the clip as "very beautiful and very moving." But she also said, "it was kind of like an ad for John Kerry."

Political hagiography has always been a mixed-media art, but never more so than now, as a proliferation of 24-hour news channels, idiot-proof video cameras and Web logs offer ever more opportunities to disseminate — and dismantle — candidates' carefully constructed images. The paid advertisements that have driven public perception since Dwight Eisenhower's campaigns are, because of saturation, ceding some of their power to politician's memoirs and partisan best sellers. This election season, online video tributes have emerged as tools for the campaigns, and independent supporters, to spread their gospel.

"Clearly, paid commercials are still going to drive things, as will news TV, but I think it puts a premium on other kinds of messaging," said Joe Trippi, campaign manager for Howard Dean's unsuccessful presidential run. But big-screen politics is not completely new, he pointed out, noting that decades ago John F. Kennedy and Adlai Stevenson got movie studios to tack their ads onto previews. "The longer the format, the better things are," he added. "Five minutes is better than 30 seconds. If you can keep people for an hour and a half, you've got them."

But previous feature-length political films, like "The War Room" or Alexandra Pelosi's 2000 campaign diary, "Journeys With George," came out long after the ballots were counted, and took the view of the outside observer. What's new this time is the sense of insider access, as well as a willingness to influence events as they are unfolding — as much in the spirit, perhaps, of reality television as of documentary film.

Mr. Butler's portrait of a fighter who has "gone against impossible odds time and time again and always pulled it out" depicts a John Kerry whom those in battleground states will recognize from television advertisements currently on the air. Mr. Butler has interviewed the same Navy men who star in those spots, the same ones who surround Mr. Kerry at stage-managed rallies designed to diffuse any doubt about ousting a wartime commander-in-chief. He has not interviewed John O'Neill, the veteran who has antagonized Mr. Kerry since they debated on the Dick Cavett show in 1971 and who now leads a group of anti-Kerry veterans.

For Mr. Kerry, the building of this back story is essential. Far less well-known than President Bush, he has spent the past few months fighting off the Republican caricature of a flip-flopper weak on defense. And trying to shed his stiff, senatorial image, his campaign plays up the patriotic self-sacrifice, the outspokenness, the sportsmanship — all of which are on display in Mr. Butler's archive.

To Mr. Butler, the electoral implications are obvious. "I think I'm going to be able to make a film that doesn't even use the word `Iraq,' " he said, "and people are going to say, wait a minute, didn't John Kerry say in 1971 not to do this?"

But will the right people see it? And will they take that question to its intended conclusion?

"If you are an undecided voter," said Douglas Sosnik, Mr. Clinton's political director in 1996, "it's hard for me to believe that you are prepared to pay for a movie ticket and sit through a 90-minute political film. A movie or a documentary that is supportive of your candidate, whatever side of the debate you're on, you'd rather have that than the opposite — it can't hurt. But I don't think at the end of the day that's how most people are going to get their clues about how to vote."

John Weaver, communications director for Senator John McCain's 2000 presidential run, said the filmmakers are "breaking new ground as propagandists" but would very likely have little effect. "They are going to be seen as so over-the-top anti-Bush that they're going to lack credibility," he said. "Those kind of things generally preach to the choir."

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Which is why Steve McMahon, a Democratic ad-man who also worked for Dr. Dean in the primaries, sees the movies as trying to capitalize on the election as much as trying to influence its outcome. "If you think about this for a second, conservatives have been doing this for a long time," he said, citing authors like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. "They're basically partisan books that leverage partisan views in order to have commercial success. There's a ripe audience."

Mr. Butler, who majored in classics and English at the University of North Carolina — he dropped a course in photography — began snapping pictures while living in Detroit's riot-scarred North End after college. The lifelong project of chronicling Mr. Kerry started soon afterward, during his service as a sort of press secretary for Vietnam Veterans Against the War and Mr. Kerry's failed 1972 Congressional campaign. That was Mr. Butler seated directly behind Mr. Kerry during his Senate testimony, standing by his side as he and other veterans tossed their ribbons into a trash heap. Mr. Butler shot both of Mr. Kerry's weddings, all of his campaigns, countless family vacations.

The two men are bound by some striking similarities, despite their divergent paths during the war. Mr. Butler, whose father was a British Army officer, grew up traveling around Africa; Mr. Kerry, whose father was a diplomat, grew up bouncing around Europe. Both their mothers descended from Boston Brahmin dynasties. Now 60, both remain avid athletes. In fact, when they met, at a party given by McGeorge Bundy's nephew Harvey — Mr. Kerry's roommate at Yale, Mr. Butler's friend from Groton — Mr. Butler was on his way to Texas to sell dictionaries door-to-door; Mr. Kerry spent a college summer hawking encyclopedias. "I had the absolute conviction that he would either be president or run for president, the moment I met him," Mr. Butler said. "I am good at spotting people."

He hasn't been quite as good at raising money, at least not until Mr. Kerry sewed up the Democratic nomination this spring. But he now has 30 backers (including a Republican who also backed "Pumping Iron"), investing from $10,000 to $100,000, and like him they view his relationship with the film's subject as an opportunity. "Most works of art are meant to give a particular point of view," said R. Boykin Curry, a money manager who has contributed to Democratic candidates, including Mr. Kerry. "I don't think anybody's going to go into this movie, any more than they go into a Michael Moore movie or a Mel Gibson movie, saying, `This guy is going to give me a balanced "60 Minutes" story.' "

William Samuels, who met Mr. Kerry through antiwar circles in 1971 and now serves on his campaign's national finance committee, has been the leading fund-raiser for the film. "I wish there were no commercials running on TV, but there were, instead, 50 hour-and-a-half, thoughtful pieces on the candidates," he said. "I think the voters are smart enough to make a decision if you saturate them."

Newsweek recently reported that one co-producer, Daniel Holton-Roth, said he was thinking of removing his name from the project for fear it would be a puff piece; he did not return repeated telephone messages over several days, and both Mr. Butler and Mr. Samuels denied he had raised such concerns.

The crew of 20 includes the cinematographer Sandy Sissel, who worked on "Master and Commander" and Mr. Butler's Shackleton films; Tim Squyres, who was nominated for an Academy Award for editing "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon;" and, as an executive producer, Lawrence Bender of both "Kill Bill" movies.

Despite the infusion of cash and Hollywood credentials, the film faces several obstacles. Mr. Butler still does not know whether he can send a cameraman to Vietnam for landscape shots, nor whether he will have good enough access to shoot at the Democratic convention. The movie lacks a score. And since the historian Douglas Brinkley asked him to stop borrowing the title, "Tour of Duty," from his Kerry biography, it also lacks a name. "I'm racing against my soul and my brain and my livelihood and my friends and everything else to get this done," Mr. Butler said.

And if he meets his deadlines, there will still be some convincing to do.

"Your film, just the clip we saw, seems very similar to a Kerry campaign commercial," one woman watching at Silverdocs told him. "How is it going to be credible to people who are not in love with Kerry?"