The Collison of Politics, Celebrity and the Media: Barry Levinson Goes To “PoliWood”

A scene from Barry Levinson's "Poliwood." Image courtesy of the Tribeca Film Festival.

“In the most simplistic way, it’s really about the collison of politics, celebrity and the media,” Barry Levinson told indieWIRE about his new documentary “PoliWood,” premiering next Friday night as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. “Basically, how they collide and how they feed off one another. That’s the theme of the piece.”

More specifically, the piece uses interviews with a variety of high-profile celebrities and political figures (from Anne Hathaway to Ellen Burstyn to Sting), exploring the influence Hollywood has over today’s political process.  Levinson is attempting to exemplify the exceedingly thin line between politician and actor, and news and entertainment.

“I think it’s interesting to watch, and it can pose a lot of questions,” Levinson said of the film in an interview earlier this week at the SoHo Grand Hotel in New York City. “Or you might just enjoy it on a level of watching all of these people navigate these channels for ninety minutes.”

The film came together a few weeks before the Democratic National Convention. “There was no preconceived notion of exactly what it was going to be about,” Levinson recalled of the film’s origins.  “It was simply to follow the events as they unfolded and see where that went, and then allow the piece to begin to direct itself in a way. I didn’t want to impose any ideas upon it intially. I wanted to let it breathe on its own and then see what happens. And then I began to see how these things begin to intersect with one another.”

Documentary was not always something Levinson has aspired to take on. “It just came up,” he said. “I’ve always been interested in politics, I’ve always been interested in entertainment, and I’ve always been interested in the media.”

Levinson has exemplfied this in much of his narrative work, from “Wag The Dog,” about a spin-doctor and a Hollywood producer who join efforts to fabricate a war in order to cover-up a presidential sex scandal, to “Man of the Year,” which folows a comedian who decides to run for president, and a computerized voting machine malfunction gets him elected.

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“With this film I could see what it was really like,” Levinson said in respect to his previous work.” How absurd does it, in fact, become?” What it has become, it seems, is that everything has been turned into entertainment. “That has become the rule,” Levinson explained. “Why politics has to be entertaining, I don’t know. But it has to be, because its on television all the time. So therefore, there’s an upside/downside to that, naturally. We will frivolize a lot of very important issues and we will find a way to distract from the main issues. Because sometimes a distraction is more entertaining than the real issue. So what we do is constantly move away from what’s sometimes the essentials, onto the non-essentials. Because the non-essentials are more interesting to us. You watch it happen constantly. I mean you can watch recently and see how much time has been spent on Obama shaking hand with Chavez. Was he shaking hands with him? Was he smiling? Should he have been smiling? Does that show weakness? I mean, look how much time we spent on a visual of that. That has no relevance to anything. It’s nonsense. We’ve taken these silly things that may be entertaining and made it an essential. That’s frightening.”   (1 of 2)  Next Page › posted on April 24, 2009 |Share