- “The Front Runner” delves into the presidential campaign of Senator Gary Hart in 1987, which ended when it was reported that he had an affair.
- To give an authentic retelling of the events, director Jason Reitman teamed with veteran politics journalist Matt Bai and strategist Jay Carson to write the screenplay.
- The three told Business Insider how they created the fast-paced, often comedic, look inside the campaign trail.
Jason Reitman knew exactly what was wrong with Matt Bai and Jay Carson’s script the moment he held it in his hands.
“He said, ‘I’ve got good news and bad news for you, the good news is you guys can write, the bad news is you’ve gotten a lot of Hollywood notes and you’re telling a more conventional story than it deserves,'” Carson recalled to Business Insider in a swanky hotel room in Toronto sitting alongside Reitman and Bai.
Carson looks back on the moment with glee because it marked when he and Bai realized they had finally found someone in the movie business who had the leverage to tell the story they had always wanted to tell.
Bai’s 2014 book, “All the Truth Is Out: The Week Politics Went Tabloid,” is a deep dive into then-senator Gary Hart’s infamous affair that didn’t just ruin his hopes to become president when he ran in 1987, but changed how politics would be covered by the media forever.
Since Bai, the former chief political correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and now Yahoo’s national political columnist, had been writing the book he and Carson — a former political strategist (he was the inspiration for Ryan Gosling’s character in “The Ides of March”) — had been talking about teaming up to write a movie adaptation of “All the Truth Is Out.”
Over the years they made some progress, but as Reitman saw with a quick glance, a few rounds through the Hollywood spin cycle had turned it into a cookie-cutter political drama.
Around 2016, Reitman read Bai’s book and was hooked. In fact, he instantly took out a legal pad while on a flight and began jotting down the story structure for a movie about the Gary Hart scandal.
Reitman got ahold of Bai and Carson and invited them to his office.
“I said, ‘Let’s watch ‘The Candidate,'” Reitman said, referring to the political drama starring Robert Redford. “We watched it and immediately got into conversations about the core idea of the movie we eventually made, which is how do you present a world where a lot of things are happening and it’s the audience’s job to parse through and think what’s important?”
It was the plan Carson and Bai originally had for the story — capturing the frantic pace of a presidential campaign — and by the time the screenwriters left Reitman’s office, “The Front Runner” was born.
Starring Hugh Jackman as Hart, the movie (which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival and will open in theaters November 21) is a fast-moving, fast-talking look inside Hart’s campaign for president, which starts…
