ACTING PRESIDENTS

Five years ago, the President of the U.S. couldn't get arrested, at least not in the show-business sense of the phrase. "No one's interested in movies about the President," an agent told me in the spring of 1992, explaining why we had seen relatively few presidential characters on the big screen since the era of Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May back in the '60s. "People get enough of him on the news every night. They don't want to see him at the multiplex." This was the conventional wisdom in Hollywood at the time. Two enervating elections and four draining...