‘Face in Crowd’ Saw the Danger

Gather around.

The setting is a room where a fossilized senator and his Cro-Magnon cronies are advised that he’ll have to change tactics if he wants to make a serious run for the presidency.

“Politics has entered a new stage, the television stage,” these aging bow-ties are informed. “Instead of long-winded public debates, the people want capsule slogans: ‘Time for a change!’ ‘The mess in Washington!’ ‘More bang for a buck!’ Punch lines and glamour.”

This short primer on election strategy is no epiphany in the year 2000, the marriage of politics and TV having been consummated long ago. Yet it does acutely define the medium’s key role as a spinner of imagery in contemporary elections, right up to today’s start of the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

Time for a change? The mess in Washington? Where have we heard that before?

The “punch lines and glamour” speech came in “A Face in the Crowd,” of all places, a film released in 1957, that dusty attic of history when Dwight D. Eisenhower was beginning his second term in the White House. “A Face in the Crowd” reunited director Elia Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg (who earlier collaborated on “On the Waterfront”). Although highly regarded for the quality of its narrative and acting by Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal, it never got the credit it deserved for its commentary on media that in some ways was as visionary as “Network” about what lay ahead for broadcasting.

In Schulberg’s scenario, Lonesome Rhodes lay ahead.

Larry Rhodes (Griffith) is a drunken drifter with a guitar and a facile tongue when Marcia Jeffries (Neal) renames him Lonesome and puts him on her rural Arkansas radio station, where his bluesy wailing, grass-roots aphorisms and cotton-pickin’ wit earn him a huge following. More than just a hick with a line, he’s a born communicator, somehow able to connect one-on-one across the airwaves.

With the infatuated Marcia in tow, Lonesome’s rise is meteoric. First comes stardom on a Memphis TV station, then New York where the deep pockets of a vitamin sponsor beckon him. Say hello to riches, a revolving door of tootsies and a two-story penthouse in the city’s swankiest hotel. And say hello to power.

“Look at all those TV aerials stickin’ up like branches down there,” Lonesome observes from his terrace far above Manhattan with eyes as bright as color bars. Ratings are his pulse beat. Eating up the camera on his new show, he’s raw, he’s primal, he’s beloved by his 65 million viewers. And he’s a fraud. Beneath the caring, aw-shucks country boy lurks a greedy, mean-spirited, power-craving monster who hasn’t a spittoon of integrity or compassion for others.

It’s here, especially, where Lonesome and the year 2000 collide, as he is solicited to help rigid conservative Worthington Fuller, a stuffy U.S. senator who wears his cobwebs proudly, get to the White House. He may have been the screen’s first consultant advising a candidate on utilizing TV.

“I’ll have them lovin’ him,” Lonesome promises Fuller’s entourage of pastel big-shots. “I mean lovin’ him.”

Lonesome tells him to bring a dog along on public appearances, and he gives the balding Fuller a nickname--Curly--to show the public he has a sense of humor about himself. He studies the senator’s face. “No hard feelings. We’re talkin’ television. Don’t press your lips together so much. It’s a sissy look. Keep your mouth relaxed.” And he has Fuller copy his own big, maniacal signature laugh.

His head swollen like a beach ball, Lonesome is now a full-blown demagogue and tyrant. He dreams of being a cabinet-level presidential advisor and tells Marcia: “This whole country jis like my flock a’sheep. Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers--everybody that’s gotta jump when somebody else blows the whistle.”

As the disillusioned Marcia observes incredulously, he creates a new show he titles “The Lonesome Rhodes Cracker Barrel” on which he will “sound off about everything from the price of popcorn to the hydrogen bomb.” He’s not just an entertainer, he declares. “I’m an influence, a wielder of opinion, a force.”

Flash-forward to an episode of the show, with Lonesome sitting around and ruminating with his country sidekicks, commenting on global affairs in good old boy speak.

Then the guest. “Well, look who’s stoppin’ by to chew the fat with us on the old cracker barrel,” Lonesome says about the woodsier, folksier new Fuller. “Howdy, Curly. C’mon in and meet the boys. Get yer feet up on the stove there.”

As Curly settles in, Lonesome sets up the message: “I wish you’d give me the cotton-pickin’ truth on how you feel about more and more and more Social Security.”

These two use each other, with Lonesome’s ratings and Fuller’s popularity rising together.

Lonesome Rhodes would have difficulty navigating unscathed through today’s round-the-clock media minefields. He and his program would be news channeled, morning showed and talk radioed to death, and every fissure in his country image examined under a high-powered microscope.

The camera itself is no microscope, despite the old saw about it never lying. Schulberg’s story deflates that common wisdom. Although he has Walter Matthau’s acerbic writer assure Marcia that the public ultimately “gets wise to phonies,” it’s the camera that perpetuates Lonesome’s lie.

He is toppled not by a public that finally sees through him but by his creator. Tortured by what he’s become, Marcia switches on the audio as a smiling Lonesome is going off the air one night, giving viewers an earful of him calling them “morons” and “trained seals” as the credits roll.

Deception on TV? It’s something else to keep in mind as Democrats follow Republicans with their own brand of show-boating for the media and the electorate.

Punch lines and glamour.

Howard Rosenberg’s column usually appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The rest of this week, he’s on assignment at the Democratic National Convention. He can be reached by e-mail at howard.rosenberg@latimes.com.