It's Popcorn Politics, and a Movie-Dazed Public Eats It Up
And now, here he is -- the man whose words steer the ship of this Golden State of ours, the governor of California
Stop! Cut! Who?
Down, boys. Arnold Schwarzenegger is still governor. But some of his bring-down-the-house zingers, exported from Hollywood to Sacramento, were written for him by Wisher and director James Cameron, who together crafted the scripts for "Terminator" 1 and 2.
Statecraft by screenplay: "Hasta la vista, baby." "Terminate them." "I'll be back." And now "girlie men," lifted from an old "Saturday Night Live" sketch and slapped onto the California Legislature like a bumper sticker. (I tried to find out which "SNL" wit concocted "girlie men," but it seems lost in the mists of the 1980s.)
If Wisher got residuals every time Schwarzenegger threatened to "terminate" some budget proposal or the legislator proposing it, he could outsource writer's block, should he ever have any.
I asked Wisher how he liked being the "shadow governor," and he just laughed. He likes Schwarzenegger, likes what he's doing in Sacramento, and the movie-script vocabulary "is how people know him
Time was, politicians cribbed from one another, or at least from foreigners or dead guys. Now they lift lines that screenwriters crafted for movie characters.
Dwight D. Eisenhower: "You ain't seen nothin' yet." (Alfred A. Cohn for "The Jazz Singer,'' the first "talkie," which is why it was originally "You ain't heard nothin' yet.")
Ronald Reagan: "Go ahead, make my day." (Harry Julian, R.M. Fink, Dean Riesner for "Dirty Harry.")
George Bush I: "Read my lips." (Authorship disputed -- either another Eastwood film or speechwriter Peggy Noonan. Also the title of a 2002 French film, so let's not go there.)
John Kerry, about George W. Bush, and Bush, about Iraqi insurgents: "Bring it on." (Not a sound bite, but the title of a movie about dueling cheerleaders and a good description of the way we've abandoned government by process for government by pep rally.)
The GOP stews about Hollywood being in Democrats' pockets -- the red carpet/red states gap, Warren and Annette, George Clooney, and Sarah Jessica Parker vs. Tom Selleck, Bo Derek, Dennis Miller and Bruce Willis. But has it struck anyone else that most actors who actually become politicians become Republican politicians? If the GOP says its new guy looks like he came straight out of Central Casting, he probably did.
