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| August 15, 2006 Carville goes on the stump in Aspen Rick Carroll - Aspen Daily News Staff Writer Tue 08/15/2006 11:01AM MST But this time it's for Louisiana The man who steered Bill Clinton into the Oval Office in 1992 was in Aspen on Monday stumping for an entirely different cause: to raise money to help hurricane-battered southern Louisiana. Political consultant James Carville, the executive producer of the motion picture "All the King's Men," which was filmed in New Orleans and other parts of southern Louisiana before Katrina struck last August, was making his rounds in an effort to parlay the movie screening into a mini fundraising tour for the Friends of New Orleans. It's the second film based on Robert Penn Warren's fictionalized account of the rise and fall of Huey Long, the poster boy for Louisiana politics who was reviled as much for his corruption and backroom deals as he was revered for his hard-nosed campaigns and reaching out to the downtrodden. Before the screening, first held at The Aspen Institute and subsequently at a private home, Carville said the timing of the movie's release -- it's scheduled to come out Sept. 22 -- fits in well with the one-year anniversary of Katrina. Carville said he is hopeful that the movie helps raise awareness of a state whose plight of fading wetlands was exploited by the hurricane that struck the Gulf Coast region Aug. 29. "We're approaching the one-year anniversary of the storm, and there's a lot of synergy here -- showing the film and having a fundraiser," he said. That fundraiser was for the Friends of New Orleans, an organization in which he sits on the board, along with Aspen Institute President Walter Isaacson and other Louisianans and influential figures. The new movie is laced with big names, from Sean Penn as Gov. Willie Stark to Jude Law as Jack Burden. It seemed to be well received by the nearly full house at Paepcke Auditorium, and following its screening a panel discussion, moderated by Isaacson, zoomed in on Louisiana's dubious political history that sits against a cultural background rich with music, food and people. "Was Huey Long a good governor?" Isaacson asked Carville about the populist known as the "Kingfish," who was assassinated on the steps of the Louisiana State Capitol in Baton Rouge in 1935. Long, who had been Louisiana governor, was a U.S. senator at the time of his death. Carville's reply was a line and theme that came straight out of the book: "All good comes from bad." Isaacson, a New Orleans native, wondered aloud if it's a good thing that these days the bayou state is the home to more honest elected officials, but not necessarily rogue ones who could get things done -- such as Long and former governor Edwin Edwards. Said Carville: "When you're 6 feet under water, FDR could have been governor and Rudy Giuliani could have been mayor and you still don't look good." But perhaps the most troubling aspect of Louisiana, noted the panelists, is the erosion of salt-water-rich wetlands that harvest more shrimp annually than all other states combined. "We lose more land a year than the island of Manhattan," Carville said. And every 38 minutes, said Friends of New Orleans board member C.C. Lockwood, a noted wildlife photographer, the state surrenders the equivalent of one football field of marshlands. Lockwood even suggested that if every visitor to south Louisiana brought along a suitcase of sand -- or SOS, as he called it -- it may just help, or at the very least send a message to Washington. That may come off as idealistic, but Lockwood wasn't laughing. "We've got to save the wetlands, the marshes, to protect the levees," he said. "The levees can't do it by themselves." As for the "All the King's Men," Carville and Mike Medavoy, the movie's producer and chairman and co-founder of Phoenix Pictures, seemed confident it will do well not only at the box office, but also in the critics' arena. "It's a movie that you can follow but it doesn't tell you what to think," Carville said. It also follows in some big footsteps. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1946, and the 1949 movie was nominated for seven Oscars and won three, including best picture, best actor (Broderick Crawford) and best supporting actress (Mercedes McCambridge). The first movie, however, was filmed mostly in California, while the current one was shot entirely in Louisiana, and was peppered with footage of the swamplands -- complete with cypress tress and Spanish moss. In the meantime Carville, 61, doesn't seem to be slowing down. He launched a sport-talk show on satellite radio earlier this year around the time of the Final Four, which saw the school from which he graduated, Louisiana State University, get in by upsetting the likes of Duke and the University of Texas. "The sports show is as fun as anything I do," he said. And with football season around the corner, Carville offered a few observations. First, the North Division in the Big 12 Conference, home to the University of Colorado, was "pathetic last year." |
August 11, 2005 Press Secretary Denise Bottcher said the Governor's Office got a call from the White House No date for any visit has been set. - The Advocate July 26, 2005 A House and Senate conference committee selected to come up with one energy bill June 24, 2005 |
