Movie producer also helped stage appearances for political candidates

Mort Engelberg, a movie producer behind such hits as “Smokey and the Bandit” and “The Big Easy,” who drew on his Hollywood expertise to stage-manage appearances for politicians, notably a bus tour for Bill Clinton and Al Gore following the 1992 Democratic convention, died Saturday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 86.

His brother, Steven Engelberg, said the cause was lung cancer.

Mort Engelberg toggled between film and political advance work, setting up campaign trips meant to produce photo-ready moments and drawing on the tropes of road movies to help invent the modern presidential bus tour. It featured the gregarious Clinton and his sidekick Gore on a journey through Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky and other heartland states.

“Mort came in with basically the same formulation as the Hollywood buddy movie he so perfected in his ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ series,” said Josh King, a colleague of Engelberg’s on campaigns and during Clinton’s presidency.

Presidential candidates had long made whistle-stop tours, originally by train. By the 1980s, though, the trips were made in chartered jets with brief airport stops — “basically, nothing but some white men on tarmac,” as Engelberg said in a 2011 podcast.

His innovation was to have Clinton and Gore roll into small communities where presidential candidates were rarely seen. But he cannily ensured that the appearances were within range of big-city media markets, so that they would make local TV news.

The eight-day bus trip, which drew throngs of people, helped cement Clinton’s image as a down-home retail politician. “It was spectacular in its success,” said Mickey Kantor, Clinton’s 1992 campaign chairman. “It fit into his greatest strength, because Bill Clinton truly, truly wants to talk to every human being he’s ever seen.”

Kantor said the bus tour was Engelberg’s brainchild and that he put it together despite the skepticism of many in the campaign.

Ever since, even the most wooden politicians have felt required to embark on bus tours, whether running for president or City Council.

Despite Engelberg’s successful Hollywood career, he gravitated to one of the least glamorous jobs in politics — the advance person, who scouts locations, plans logistics, sets up chairs and a rope line and ensures a big noisy turnout. He told members of his team that if they were spotted by the press organizing a crowd — making it seem anything but spontaneous — he would fire them.

Engelberg “loved the action,” his brother said. He never took a salary, living off income from his movie producing, which in addition to “Smokey and the Bandit” in 1977, starring Burt Reynolds and Sally Field, and “The Big Easy” (1986), with Dennis Quaid and Ellen Barkin, included “The Hunter” (1980) with Steve McQueen.

In 1992, he told The Los Angeles Times that he liked campaign advance work because it was “therapeutic” and a “wonderful relief” from Hollywood.

Engelberg went on to set up trips for Clinton throughout his presidency, from 1993 through 2001. After the president left office, Engelberg continued to plan several trips abroad for him each year. “The best talent he had was that he had the full confidence of Bill Clinton,” Kantor said.

In an email, Clinton wrote: “I loved the times I shared with Mort. He was a fascinating man — funny, big-hearted and always mentoring younger people in his orbit. He told the best stories, educated us about movie making and never stopped believing in America.”

Morton Roy Engelberg was born Aug. 20, 1937, in Memphis, Tennessee. His father, Nathan Engelberg, sold wholesale meat and cheese, and his mother, Lillian (Padawer) Engelberg, helped in the business.

Engelberg graduated from the University of Illinois in 1959 and spent a year studying photojournalism at the University of Missouri, after which he worked briefly for The Commercial Appeal of Memphis.

He moved to Washington to work at a government magazine for the United States Information Agency, which led to role as a public relations official under Sargent Shriver, who founded the Peace Corps.

With the Vietnam War pulling the Johnson administration away from its domestic agenda, Engelberg segued to the movie industry, working as an on-set publicist beginning with “The Dirty Dozen” in 1967. He moved into production, working his way into the role of line producer, the executive in charge of logistics.

His first credit as producer was for “Smokey and the Bandit,” an action comedy starring Reynolds, then one of Hollywood’s highest-paid stars, as a bootlegger and Fields as a runaway bride, who are pursued across the South by a sheriff played by Jackie Gleason. Made on a budget of $4.3 million, it grossed over $300 million worldwide, ensuring Engelberg years of residual payments.

“It’s certainly not Citizen Kane, but I guess it struck a chord,” he later said. He went on to earn credits as the producer or executive producer of more than a dozen films.

His expertise on movie sets brought him back to politics. He did advance work for the unsuccessful Democratic presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988.

Engelberg married Helaine Blatt, the retired owner of a Beverly Hills pawnshop, in 2016, after the couple had dated for 26 years. An elusive bachelor, Engelberg married Blatt on her 75th birthday, when he was 79. She survives him, along with his brother.

Engelberg