Engelberg produced Hollywood films
Mort Engelberg, a one-time photojournalist who made his way to Hollywood as a producer for movies including “Smokey and the Bandit” and “The Big Easy,” then brought his eye for stagecraft into politics by taking Bill Clinton and Al Gore on the road in 1992 with a celebrated campaign bus tour, died Dec. 9 in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 86.
The cause was lung cancer, said his brother, Steven Engelberg.
Engelberg’s address book was a guide to the showbiz and political nexus that expanded during the Clinton era.
He was a buddy of Jackie Gleason, who played the sheriff chasing racecar driver Burt Reynolds in the 1977 hit “Smokey and the Bandit.” He hobnobbed with Steve McQueen on the set of the star’s final film, “The Hunter” (1980), which Engelberg produced. He knew studio heads and top directors — and loved to regale cocktail party guests with insider tales of Hollywood.
Engelberg came into Clinton’s orbit with a political resume that already included campaign work on the unsuccessful presidential runs of Democrats Walter F. Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988. Engelberg’s job with the Clinton campaign was to figure out how to best harness the Arkansas governor’s crowd-mingling powers. Engelberg envisioned buses rolling through small-town America.
He rented a Ford sedan in Philadelphia, bought a road atlas, headed west and began scouting locations: Chautauqua, N.Y.; Centralia, Ill.; La Crosse, Wis.; New Braunfels, Texas; and dozens of others places big and small over a 1,000-mile serpentine route. “You look for places that look nice and will make a pretty picture,” he told The Washington Post.
The next step was convincing Clinton and his running mate Gore. The campaign honchos eventually signed off. Yet Gore and some others still nursed doubts even moments before the buses started rolling after the Democratic Convention in July 1992 in New York.
“In the elevator riding down, [Clinton] sort of whispered to me if I thought it was a good idea,” Engelberg recalled in a 2011 interview on the “Polioptics” podcast, “and the only response I could make was that we’d already rented the buses.”
Before setting off, Clinton proclaimed: “We’re going to go back to the heartland of America and into the hearts of America.” There was one early hiccup. A homeless man was “camping out” on the staff bus and had to be evicted by the Secret Service before the entourage got rolling, Engelberg recalled.
The eight-day journey — with media in tow — was hailed as a political masterstroke. Big crowds turned out, albeit with some protesters in Republican strongholds. Clinton was in the zone, glad-handing, joking and working the rope line. Engelberg told friends that the bus trip had all the elements of a good buddy movie: a star in Clinton, a sidekick in Gore and lots of adventures.
For Engelberg, the trip cemented his legacy as a campaign impresario and redefined political strategies, effectively creating the modern version of the old rail car whistle stops.