 |
(Photo: Amy Sussman/Getty Images) |
The main character in Beau Willimon’s play Farragut North, which opens November 12, is a hotshot young press secretary (played by John Gallagher Jr.; see here) for an insurgent presidential campaign headed for victory in Iowa—just like Howard Dean’s 2004 effort, which Willimon worked on. How much is based on real life? “He drew some of the characters out of the personalities he saw,” says former Dean campaign manager Joe Trippi, who is still in touch with Willimon. “But the story is a fictional campaign. These are fictional people.” The campaign manager’s career collapses when he has an affair with a 19-year-old intern. That, says Trippi, is entirely fictional, as is a scene in which an opposing campaign tells its supporters to lie to pollsters in order to fool the Deanesque campaign into expecting victory. Willimon says the events and characters in his play, which has been optioned for a movie with George Clooney attached, “have no parallels in real life.”
Email
Print
The Transformation of TV Into an Art Form
The Draw of Dream Worlds in Film
Gosselin, Prince of the Professional Nobodies
A Decade of Defining Moments in Pop-Culture
The Invention of New York's Local Cuisine 
Thirty-Five Short-Lived Looks of the Decade
Two Views of a Swath of the Upper West Side
An Older Generation Moves Into Williamsburg
Ten Years That Changed Everything
A Generation of Overparenting
The Sports Rivalry of the Decade
What Is the Point of the United States Senate? 
