POLITICS AND POPCORN MOVIES WITH AGENDAS ARE CHALLENGING AUDIENCES AND SPARKING DEBATE LIKE NO TIME SINCE THE '70S.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Writer

They may not be looking like New York did last week, but in this hotly contested election year, movie multiplexes are becoming more and more politicized.

Not that it hasn't happened before. The Depression-era woes of the '30s and the counter-culture movement of the late '60s and early '70s gave rise to a number of political-minded films - from populist works like ``The Grapes of Wrath'' and ``Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'' to anti-authoritarian movies like ``Easy Rider'' and even ``One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.''

As for the current spate of films, ``It's something that was inevitable,'' says writer-director John Sayles, whose election-themed drama ``Silver City'' opens Sept. 17. ``People who make movies react to what's out in the world. And I think the politics in this electoral cycle have gotten pretty extreme.''

Those reactions were evident all summer - you know, what was supposed to be the escapist movie season. We saw references by the truckload to current events in ``The Manchurian Candidate'' remake ... and to gay Republicans in the updated ``Stepford Wives.'' ``The Day After Tomorrow'' boasted a Dick Cheney clone, not to mention a real-life attempt to build a green movement around a dubiously plotted disaster movie.

``The Village's'' allegorical implications of how far Americans will go to shield themselves from fear were more disturbing than M. Night Shyamalan's traditional scare tactics. Perhaps even more frightening was Spike Lee's effort to cram every hot-button issue this side of Iraq into his sex farce ``She Hate Me.'' And if you ask him, Matt Damon will tell you that ``The Bourne Supremacy'' wasn't just an espionage thriller; it made a metaphorical point about how America should behave itself (i.e., not the way that it is), in the post 9-11 world.

Moore and more

Of course, ``Fahrenheit 9/11,'' Michael Moore's blistering attack on George W. Bush's administration and the Iraq War, was the 800-pound phenomenon. Having grossed more than $117 million, nearly six times the amount of any previous nonconcert documentary, ``F 9/11'' boosted a trickle of left-leaning nonfiction films (``Control Room,'' ``Super Size Me'') into a small theatrical flood (``Orwell Rolls in His Grave,'' ``The Corporation,'' ``The Hunting of the President,'' ``Outfoxed,'' ``Uncovered,'' ``Bush's Brain'').

And there are more to come. On the doc front, ``The Yes Men,'' about a troupe of pranksters who impersonate World Trade Organization operatives, opens later this month, and the survey of the gay marriage issue ``Tying the Knot'' arrives on Oct. 1, followed by ``Howard Zinn: You Can't be Neutral on a Moving Train'' and ``Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry.'' ``The September Tapes,'' a kind of ``Blair Witch''-style hybrid about bounty hunters in Afghanistan, hits theaters Sept. 24.

Further down the fiction scale, ``Silver City,'' Sayles' look at a Colorado gubernatorial race, features Chris Cooper as a conservative candidate closely modeled on the inarticulate image of George W. Bush. Next month, we'll see the wackiest - and perhaps most incendiary - political movie of all: ``Team America: World Police'' from ``South Park'' bomb-throwers Trey Parker and Matt Stone, in which a squad of animated marionettes take on all sides in the war against terror. And Warner Bros. plans to rerelease the 1999 Gulf War satire ``Three Kings'' - one of the few political films made by a big studio during the last decade - before the election (although, much as Disney forced subsidiary Miramax to do with ``F 9/11,'' Warners has dropped plans to distribute director David O. Russell's follow-up documentary addressing the current war).

All this after a long period in which Hollywood gingerly avoided mixing politics and entertainment (even Oliver Stone hasn't made a directly political fiction feature since his 1995 flop ``Nixon''), and in which partisan documentaries not made by Moore rarely enjoyed commercial theatrical distribution.

Timing is everything

``The politics of 'Manchurian Candidate,' 'Day After Tomorrow' and all of that was inevitable,'' confirms Robert Thompson, professor of pop culture at Syracuse University. ``Those things tend to go on a kind of generic biorhythm. It's been a long time since we've had heavily politically charged entertainment movies. Given the tenor of the times - terrorism, which has given us a new bad guy that the end of the Cold War had taken away from us, and the scandals of the 2000 election and all the rest of it - I think Hollywood is seeing that there are a lot of dramatic possibilities to be mined. That goes in fits and spurts, and has since the beginning of Hollywood. It's now enjoying a little bit of a resurgence.''

Indeed, the first decade of the new millennium has arguably become the most politically charged since the 1970s - which was, not coincidentally, the last decade to see a healthy abundance of political films.

``It definitely goes in cycles,'' notes Peter Biskind, whose book ``Seeing Is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties'' is a seminal look at how movies impart political messages. ``It has a lot to do with the political climate, clearly. When events in the real world start to actually affect people's lives, you have a resurgence of interest in political filmmaking.''

``Yes Men'' co-director Chris Smith confirms this from the front lines.

``I worked with Michael Moore on 'The Big One' back in '96,'' the documentarian recalls. ``It was interesting to make a political documentary at that time, when not only did people not care theatrically, but the people we were filming were completely apathetic about the '96 election. But now, with the country being so divided, there's a lot more energy and people are much more interested in politics because it's affecting their daily lives.''

How much audiences want to be reminded of current issues at the movies is still a matter of debate, though. Aside from ``F 9/11,'' political docs are hardly burning up the box office.

``Everyone realizes that 'Fahrenheit 9/11' is an exception rather than the way things are going,'' Smith points out. ``I think people are more receptive to seeing a documentary in a theater now, but I'm under no delusions.''

The profit margin

And although the likes of ``Day After Tommorow'' and ``Bourne'' were certified blockbusters, their political subtexts were hardly the reasons why. The more overtly political ``Manchurian,'' though no failure, was perceived as a financial disappointment, as was ``Village.'' And as teen movies went, the only one with any agenda, Christian high-school comedy ``Saved!'' was the least-attended.

``It's always been the conventional wisdom - Samuel Goldwyn said it - that if you have a message, call Western Union,'' notes Biskind, whose most recent book, ``Down and Dirty Pictures,'' examined the corporate politics of the independent film movement. ``Hollywood shies away from it for the same reason that Disney backed away from 'Fahrenheit 9/11': They think it's going to fragment the audience. Especially for big-budget movies that have to make $100 million in the first weekend or whatever, if they're going to antagonize half the audience, it just doesn't make any dollars-and-cents sense to them.''

Others have a more positive spin.

``By and large, political movies have not been among the big blockbusters of all time,'' acknowledges Paul Dergarabedian, president of the box-office tracking firm Exhibitor Relations. ``There have been some standouts like 'All the President's Men' and a lot of the Oliver Stone movies. But if some movies were disappointments to their studios, it was not so much because they're political movies. There's a lot more to it than just that one piece of the puzzle.''

Dergarabedian adds that political controversy, however much it might alienate potential moviegoers whose views conflict with a given filmmaker's, also mobilizes core constituents who aren't moved by typical movie hype. Sayles, for one, is counting on that to bring a larger audience to ``Silver City'' than his low-budget indies usually enjoy.

``Certainly, commercially it's good for our film to have people in the debate and interested in that subject matter,'' Sayles says. ``It's a wider release than we usually have. And everybody from get-out-the-vote groups to the Sierra Club are doing these first-Friday benefits around the movie. It's not every movie you can do that with. So I think that the topicality will help it.''

Get out the word

And you don't necessarily have to be a true believer to applaud the partisan turn so many movies are taking. While acknowledging that 90 percent of the politicized releases slant to the left, conservative critic Ted Baehr welcomes the trend.

``People should be able to get their views across,'' says Baehr, chairman of the Christian Film and Television Commission. ``As long as you know that it's partisan, as long as people are up-front about it, I think it makes it much more interesting.''

Although the marketplace will eventually dictate their viability, the unstable nature of current events seems to ensure that, for the near future anyway, politics and film will continue being bedfellows.

``Movies are a great way to enable people to access political information in a way that is very palatable, for lack of a better word,'' notes Exhibitor Relations' Dergarabedian. ``The proverbial spoonful of sugar, the movies provide that. Even though 'Fahrenheit 9/11' is a documentary, it's an entertainment as well.''

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

CAPTION(S):

5 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Jimmy Stewart in ``Mr Smith Goes to Washington''

(2 -- cover -- color) ``Fahrenheit 9/11''

(3 -- cover -- color) ``The Manchurian Candidate''

(4) ``People who make movies react to what's out in the world. And I think the politics in this electoral cycle have gotten pretty extreme,'' says writer-director John Sayles of his Sept. 17-opening ``Silver City,'' starring Chris Cooper (above) as a conservative Colorado gubernatorial candidate closely modeled after George W. Bush.

(5) ``With the country being so divided, there's a lot more energy and people are much more interested in politics because it's affecting their daily lives,'' says Chris Smith, co-director of the upcoming ``The Yes Men,'' about a troupe of pranksters who impersonate World Trade Organization operatives.