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amused by his alien abduction in Contact... or was he? |
by D. Trull
Enigma Editor
dtrull@parascope.com
The experts like Siskel and Ebert probably have a fancier name for it, but let's call it Fake President Syndrome. When a movie's storyline calls for the President of the United States to participate, the director's generally got two options: either use a shadowy stand-in whose face is coyly kept from view, or just ride the trolley straight to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe with some dude named "President Marshall" or "President Wilkinson." These cop-outs wring a slight ripple in the audience's willing suspension of disbelief, but what else are you gonna do? Cast the real guy?
That's what Robert Zemekis had the hubris to think of. After developing a serious predilection for manipulating real-life chief executives in Forrest Gump, Zemekis seems determined never to suffer Fake President Syndrome again. His big-budget adaptation of Carl Sagan's Contact needed the president to calm a jittery nation in the face of alien intelligence, so Zemekis and his team of digital compositing wizards stuck in Bill Clinton. The trick worked so well before with those dead presidents, it must have seemed irresistible to hijack the current Oval Office occupant.
The problem is, Zemekis didn't seek up-front approval for his little cinematic conceit. When Clinton's advisors learned that the president was going to be hollering about Martians in theaters coast to coast, they were none too pleased. With the enthusiasm of the Bubba who taught Gump about shrimp, the Bubba in the White House taught Zemekis about lawyers.
White House counsel Charles Ruff fired off a nasty letter to Zemekis, summoning forth enough righteous indignation to rival the late Sagan's fury toward UFO spotters and Apple Computer. "You have manipulated images of the president's public statements, taken them out of the context in which they were uttered, and adapted them to fit the plot of your film," it read in part. "By appropriating President Clinton's image and words in this manner, you have essentially given him a role in your film without his authorization."
The White House plans no legal action over the issue. Ruff's letter, which was released to the press, was intended to send Zemekis and the rest of Hollywood a stern warning: don't mess with the president. Ironically, the special effects used to insert Clinton into Contact weren't really all that special. Zemekis edited footage from a press conference on those fossilized microbes from the Mars meteorite, with the end result only slightly more high-tech than Clinton's appearances in The Jerky Boys Movie and Beavis and Butt-Head Do America. Clinton didn't even shake hands with Jodie Foster or talk about having to pee or anything.
Nevertheless, the movie has opened a heated debate over a filmmaker's First Amendment rights versus presidential privacy and privilege. White House spokesman Mike McCurry argued that the Contact cameo went beyond the legally protected realm of usage in parody and satire. "There is a difference when the President's image, which is his alone to control, is used in a way that would lead the viewer to believe he has said something he really didn't say," he said.
In their defense, Zemekis and Warner Brothers have explained that scripts and final prints of Contact were submitted to the White House prior to its release. No administration officials questioned Clinton's appearance until the movie was playing nationwide. Zemekis admits he didn't ask permission to use the president, and maintains that he didn't need to.
"No, the president is in the public domain," Zemeckis said. "He works for us."
The director may be on solid ground as far as freedom of expression goes. But there's another, more compelling legal argument against his movie mischief. Official White House policy prohibits the use of the president's likeness in any way that implies a direct relationship between the president and a commercial product or service.
"The real question," as intellectual-property attorney Edward Rosenthal said, "is whether a motion picture is really a commercial use or protected First Amendment speech." If all films were the creative works they ought to be, the president wouldn't have any grounds to bitch and moan. But it's getting harder and harder to think of the giant summer blockbuster as anything more meaningful than a merchandise-shifting corporate revenue generator. Business imitates art.
Regardless of how these murky shades of legality ultimately resolve themselves, one fact seems clear. The White House staff can denounce Bob Zemekis until they're blue in the face, but Clinton himself surely must love being in that damn movie. If you really think Contact alienated our Commander-in-Chief, you've got to be from another planet.
C'mon, he's up there alongside spacemen, big 'splosions, a Jodie Foster sex scene, his buddy Larry King... what greater fantasy could a celebrity-loving redneck like him ask for? If not for his advisors intervening in a vain attempt to keep him looking "presidential," ol' Bill would be lobbying all-out to star in Contact II: Space Cowboy. "This time around, I'm ridin' the spaceship! And I'm gonna kick me some alien butt! Yee-HAH!"
Truly, between Zemeckis's work and the new Jabba the Hutt scene in the Star Wars: Special Edition, 1997's movies have enjoyed a banner year for fat, loathsome computer-generated monsters.
Sources: Reuters/Variety; CNN. Special thanks to Ruffin Prevost.
(c) Copyright 1997 ParaScope, Inc.
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