Hollywood Techniques at Play in Politics

[Commentary] Politics has looked to Hollywood before for inspiration — take, for example, the Capra-like film tribute to Ronald Reagan for the 1984 Republican convention or “The Man From Hope,” the triumph-of-the-human-spirit fable created for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign by the television producer Harry Thomason.

Hollywood came early to the 2012 presidential race in the unlikely form of “When Mitt Romney Came to Town,” the 28-minute documentary-style attack film that opens with the word “capitalism” and comes to an end with chants of “Wall Street greed.” “When Mitt Romney Came to Town” borrows from a different script — the documentary exposé. The film uses real people talking directly to the camera, varying film stocks and camera angles and cutaways of lonely factories surrounded by weedy parking lots to not only question Mr. Romney’s ability to create jobs but indict him as someone who has been pretty good at destroying them. Think of Willie Horton recast as a venture capitalist and you get a pretty good idea of the flavor of “When Mitt Romney Came to Town.”