BuzzFlash Reviews
"BoogieMan": The Lee Atwater Story
Directed and Edited by Stefan Forbes
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Like "Orwell Rolls" by Robert Kane Pappas, of which we sold 3500 copies, "Boogie Man," directed and edited by Stefan Forbes, proves that you can make a high impact film on a low budget.
You can watch the trailer of Boogie Man Here.
Karl Rove was Atwater's protege, and George W. Bush, a kindred spirit, rode shotgun with Atwater during the infamous "Willie Horton" campaign of 1988.
The '88 campaign, in which Dukakis was 17 points ahead before Atwater "Swift Boated" him is the playbook for the 2000, 2004, and 2008 campaigns. (Atwater died of brain cancer about half way through George Herbert Walker Bush's first term and wasn't around to torpedo Bill Clinton's campaign.)
Atwater comes off as a ruthless, relentless, fascinating and even amusing guy. He appears to be not so much immoral as amoral. He was a hit man who could charm your socks off.
His passion outside of politics was playing the blues, which he did with black musicians who liked him as a person.
For Atwater, politics wasn't personal; it was just about winning by disemboweling your opponent and then desecrating his grave.
As a bonus, original interviews with Michael Dukakis show how poorly most Democrats are prepared to deal with gutter politics. Dukakis took the high road while getting knifed again and again. Atwater knew how to reach down into the emotional core of the average voter and grab the basest emotions up to the brain so that rational thought was drowned in a swirl of fear.
This is an absorbing, revealing film that is sort of a Rosetta stone to Republican campaigning in recent years.
From the New York Times Review by Eleanor Randolph:
For all the nastiness of this year�s presidential campaign, the downward spiral into ever-meaner electioneering really started about 20 years ago. The political Magus who ushered in our new muddier era was Lee Atwater, best known for engineering George H.W. Bush�s win in 1988. Mr. Atwater became such a mythic figure in American politics that he was praised at his funeral in 1991 for being Machiavellian �in the very best sense of the word.�
As many Democratic victims could attest, Mr. Atwater was Machiavellian in the actual sense of the word. �Boogie Man,� a new film by Stefan Forbes, details Mr. Atwater�s impish, strangely seductive charm, his mean boogie guitar and mostly his political chicanery. A lot of the latter sounds very familiar to anyone following the 2008 campaign.
Many of today�s third-party ads like the Swift Boat attacks that helped defeat Senator John Kerry in 2004 are linear descendants of the Willie Horton campaign. A supposed slip of the tongue that in fact gets some truly nasty tidbit on the record � that tactic is straight from the Atwater manual. As are nasty blog items, quickly denied by candidates who know full well that their supporters are behind them.
The Washington Post review by Neely Tucker:
In the can't-look-away documentary "Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story," the career of the wildly successful, and wildly controversial, late Republican political operative comes back to us in ways that are funny, sad and mean. There is more than one moment in this film that will likely pop your jaw open.
Consider then-Secretary of State James A. Baker eulogizing Atwater at his 1991 funeral as "Machiavellian . . . in the very best sense of that term." (My dictionary defines the term as "characterized by unscrupulous cunning, deception, expediency or dishonesty.") There's Ed Rollins, the veteran Republican campaign manager, describing how Atwater went from protege to backstabber in such outrageous fashion that Rollins profanely threatened to beat him up. And then there's one of Atwater's musician buddies, a white guy, insisting that Atwater had so much soul that he was actually a "black person in a white body."
The last is particularly jolting, since we also see Howard University students staging a massive (and successful) protest to have Atwater, a veteran race-baiter, kicked off the university's board of trustees.
Such morsels help shape this riveting look at a green-eyed South Carolina kid who grew up under the political wing of Strom Thurmond and rose to become a consultant to three presidents, including a stint as the 1988 campaign manager for George Bush the elder. He helped perfect the ugly art of "wedge issues" and "driving up the negatives" on opposition candidates. Entertaining, guitar-playing, insecure and hardworking -- he delighted in achieving a victory through fair means or foul -- Atwater was compared by one journalist to a "wolverine . . . sort of always chewing through the plywood."
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