WHAT DO YOU WATCH IN ‘THE FRONT RUNNER’?
AUSTIN — Of the eight feature films that Jason Reitman has directed five have been literary adaptations. “There are difficult things about adapting a book,” says Reitman. “You always leave out something good and something that readers love.”
Reitman’s latest literary adaption steps into theaters today. “The Front Runner” is based on the book “All the Truth Is Out There” by Matt Bai, and the film examines the fall from grace of U.S. Sen. Gary Hart, D-Colo., during the presidential race of 1988.
Reitman, who shares screenwriting credit along with Bai and Jay Carson, maintains that a good script “is like sculpting, not painting. It’s a subtractive art form versus an additive art form.”
“In painting, you are adding to the canvas. In sculpting, you are removing marble, and that’s how a book is when it’s turned into a film. You find the shape of the movie within the book.”
Hart was the proverbial lead candidate of Democratic contenders in 1987, building up to the election to replace two-term President Ronald Reagan. That changed when reporters from the Miami Herald acted on a phone tip that Hart was having an affair and staked out his Washington, D.C., townhome in early May.
Hart was hounded by condemning innuendos regarding a yacht cruise with friends, including Donna Rice, out of Miami that turned into a two-day excursion to Bimini.
Repeated calls and rendezvous with Rice culminate in the D.C. stakeout, with no less than five reporters and photographers from the Herald.
“At a certain point, the emotional truth of the film is paramount. What can the audience track, and what can we get specific about in our storyline?” says Reitman about reducing the number of reporters to three.
Within a week, the story had become a sensation, and Hart had
dropped from the race.
Thirty years later, instant access to information has changed the media landscape from when satellite news trucks and 24-hour news channels were a nascent phenomenon.
If a Hart-style scandal occurred today, Reitman says, “He would be under even more scrutiny. If Bai was looking at the first time political journalists went tabloid we are now in a full mix. … You wake up and open up your news app and there’s a clickable piece about the midterms, and it’s directly across from a clickable piece about Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson breaking up.”
When the Washington Post started reporting on the Hart scandal, they took an even harder line. A New York Times reporter had used a throwaway quote where Hart dares reporters to follow him if they think he’s having an affair. All these moments are captured in “The Front Runner,” but in some cases combining multiple people into a composite character.
“When you’re making a movie, you need to follow arcs,” says Reitman. “We wanted the arc of one journalist, in specific, who would develop a relationship with Hart, admire Hart and define the idea of what it means to be a journalist. Also to feel that editorial pressure to ask questions.”
The character of Post reporter A.J. Parker is a combination of real life correspondents E.J. Dionne from the New York Times Magazine and Paul Taylor of the Washington Post.
“Dionne is the New York Times writer who got the innocuous quote from Hart to ‘follow me around.’ A quote that almost wasn’t in his original story, but then he slipped it in during a revision,” Reitman says. “Taylor is the young Post journalist who admired Hart but had a conflict whether to ask him about adultery.”
Bai’s book was published in 2014, yet last month Atlantic Magazine published an article that purported Republican mover and shaker Lee Atwater had set up Hart.
“It felt to me more like Atwater was clearing his conscious rather than shedding any actual light onto this story, which oddly says more about today than 1987,” Reitman says about the deathbed confession.
“The Lee Atwater story falls into that. At the most what did he do?” asks Reitman. “Hire a boat? At the end of the day, Gary Hart apparently met this woman at a party, they had chemistry, they kept in touch, he invited her to D.C.
“I don’t think Atwater engineered that. Frankly, when it comes to the movie, it doesn’t matter. What Gary Hart did doesn’t matter. It’s our reaction that matters.”
Reitman’s directorial vision merges with the writer’s intent in a dynamic and lengthy one-take opening scene.
“The philosophical question of this movie is what is relevant versus what is entertaining?” Reitman says. “That’s the core of Matt’s book and what I wanted to figure out a way to do cinematically.
“Right from the get-go, you’re presented a shot where there’s too much to look at and too much to listen to. You’re in a van, there’s three monitors playing, one is rewinding, another has the ‘Where’s the beef?’ comment.”
When Hart ran for president in 1984, he was trounced after lead candidate Walter Mondale asked Hart “Where’s the beef?” The slogan was appropriated from the then popular Wendy’s commercial. The media latched onto the phrase like a mountain lion onto prey.
“From the beginning, you’re offered this question of which of these characters is important, which of these stories is important. What am I supposed to listen to?
“You go through that process until the last shot of the film where you’re presented with an image on one side of the frame containing a politician making the last speech he’ll deliver. And on the other side of the frame are a husband and wife in a complicated marriage hanging on for dear life. We’re asking the audience where do you want to look, what do you want to listen to?
“A shot like the opening sequence takes a whole day to film. It’s two-and-a-half minutes of the movie. We did 10 takes during the day to get the blocking down,” Reitman says. “Because we were shooting in Atlanta on a busy street corner we had to pull all the equipment off the street and onto the sidewalk for rush hour, and then after it was nightfall, we brought it all back out and did 10 more takes and we got it.
“Actors like Hugh, who weren’t even in the shot, came down just to see it done.”