Word: jacked
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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There's a poignant little scene halfway into Primary Colors. It's primary night in New Hampshire, and candidate Jack Stanton (John Travolta) stands alone on a rainy street, knocking on car windows and importuning drivers for last-minute votes like a squeegee guy cadging a dollar. To hell with the odds; this man won't give up. He will keep asking, charming, wheedling, until people finally collapse under his will to be loved. As a character says in the Joe Klein novel on which the film is based, "The heart is a lonely hustler." But hustling--hey, that...
Other Presidents had an anchorman aura: authoritative, a bit square. Clinton has the urgency of a talk-show host. Or guest ("I want everyone to want me"--today on Jerry Springer). He is the first boyfriend (rather than father) figure in the White House since Jack Kennedy. Bye-bye, Poppy; hello, Elvis. That was the cue for the Southern beau-hunk to go on strutting his sex appeal, occasionally swiveling his ideology and forever crooning his ballads: "For I can't help/ Falling in love with...
...Stantons, TIME has learned, are based on Bill and Hillary Clinton. Susan Stanton (Emma Thompson), with her iron irony and rigid self-confidence, is Jack's severest critic and staunchest defender. For all her feminist executive briskness, she is in love with Jack, or with what she can help him become. In a more sophisticated way than Jack does, she sells loyalty, cunning and, when cornered, sex appeal...
...book and the movie, Jack is a guest star. His role is not so much supporting as hovering--like God in the Old Testament. He shows up occasionally to bring fear, awe or happiness to the mortals who are at the center of the story. He asks them to slaughter their first principles, hurls plagues of tabloid headlines their way, gives their lives meaning and hope with his captious majesty. Except, of course, that Jack isn't God. In luring his team toward corruption, twisting their idealism into realpolitik, Stanton is Satan...
Several distinguished actors were approached for the role of Picker. For a time Nichols wanted Jack Nicholson, who has made four films with the director. But Nicholson had a high price tag for a supporting gig. There was another obstacle: a star of Nicholson's wattage would throw the film off balance; viewers would expect Act III to be all about his character, but it's really Kathy Bates' show (when Libby goes on a mission to save and test the Stantons). As he did with the Henry-Susan tryst, Nichols realized he had to serve the story: "I didn...