Boogie Man The Lee Atwater Story Tagged Articles at Cinematical

October in Austin might mean the Texas-Oklahoma game to some people, or the welcome end of triple-digit temperature hell to others, but for movie lovers it brings us a week of Austin Film Festival, which celebrated its 15th year last week. I can remember when the festival was limited to one hotel and a couple of movie theaters, and the films were just something to do at night after the screenwriters' conference. This year, the conference spread out over several venues and the film festival itself, which lasts a full week, screened films in nine different locations around town.

The Paramount Theatre, which seats about 1,200 people, was packed for the opening-night film, W., with actor James Cromwell in attendance. This was a specially apt venue for the Oliver Stone film because if you walk outside the Paramount and look down the street, there's the State Capitol. The Governor's Mansion -- well, what's left of it right now -- is in walking distance of the theater. If we could only have blocked off Congress Ave. (hah), we could have posed Cromwell with the Capitol prominent in the background. Cromwell not only stuck around after the film for a Q&A, but stayed for the screenwriters' conference the next day to lead a conversation-style session about acting.

Before the pre-festivals press screening of Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, the new documentary about the life and death of Republican political operative Lee Atwater, two separate Rolling Stones songs were running through my head. "Street Fightin' Man, " possibly inspired by Atwater's reputation as a dirty trickster of the higher order, and "Sympathy for the Devil," perhaps springing from Atwater's deathbed renunciation of many of the things he'd done; both associations sprang from the little I knew about Atwater. Thanks to the work of director Stefan Forbes, I now know a lot more; I now know so much, in fact, I'm not sure what to think.

Combining archival news footage with interviews from people who knew Atwater and some who, interestingly, only knew him through the public ramifications of his work, Boogie Man paints a complex portrait of a complex figure: A race-baiting political operative (Atwater may or may not have been behind the infamous 'Willie Horton' ad that cost Michael Dukakis the election in '88) who nonetheless loved to listen to, and play blues music; a man who sprang from the South who helped elect Eastern elites like George H.W. Bush; a man whose pupils in the modern political art of war, Karl Rove and George W. Bush (who worked with Atwater on his father's campaign) turned their back on him as he lay dying.