SXSW starts to swing

"Al didn't help us and he didn't hurt us," Doob says. "He did lots of events he never told us about," including hosting a private meeting at his New York apartment between John Kerry and several prominent journalists early in the campaign season, an exercise in insider power the filmmakers would obviously love to have captured. By the end of the film, in the grim aftermath of Bush's reelection, Franken begins to seriously explore a campaign against Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., in 2008. As he tells an enthusiastic St. Paul audience, he'll be "the only New York Jew in the race." (Although he has made no formal announcement, Franken recently bought a home in Minnesota, where he grew up, and continues to raise campaign money.)

There's certainly material in the film that Franken's opponents -- Bill O'Reilly, for one, seems bizarrely obsessed with him -- can pull out to make him look bad. In a television debate with Ann Coulter about the semi-notorious 2002 memorial service for the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, for instance, Franken is preoccupied by relatively minor details: Was Sen. Trent Lott actually booed? Was he ever actually onstage? He never adequately challenges the big-picture smear, in which the event was depicted by right-wing media as a partisan hatefest rather than a spirited farewell to one of the American left's few office-holding heroes.

"We try to make Al a human being, not a cardboard hero," says Hegedus. "I think he loses that debate with Ann Coulter. But you know, I tend to make films about people I'm fundamentally sympathetic to, even if it's in a bizarre way, like with my film about John DeLorean ['DeLorean,' 1981]. When we started this project, we didn't know that much about Al. But when we went on his book tour [for 'Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them'], he was drawing such huge crowds, and they were so hungry for the message he was bringing them. In making this kind of movie you go on an adventure with your characters. You're certain that something exciting is going to happen, but you don't know what it is."

Doob says, "We felt a kind of groundswell around Al, and we connected to that. He's the court jester of the Democratic Party, and he's also so passionate about what he believes is right and wrong. We hope Al inspires people. He inspires us." That said, Doob adds, when the filmmakers called Franken to tell him that the Austin premiere had gone well before a packed house, the comedian wanted to know only one thing: Which of his laugh lines had connected, and which ones had fallen flat?

Speaking of satire gone awry, even the most abysmal failure among the films screened so far partakes of the protest theme. "Danny Roane: First-Time Director," written and directed by its star, cult comedian Andy Dick, has already become a murmured legend among those who were at the Saturday world premiere. Intended as a vicious satire of Hollywood's inanity and self-obsession, "Danny Roane" drags its cameo-laden cast into a downward spiral of gross-out humor and finally becomes exactly the thing it's trying to parody: a disastrous vanity project made by a damaged TV comic whose career has hit the skids.

Undoubtedly "Danny Roane" has cult-movie potential, but all the reasons that might happen are bad ones. Let's put it this way: James Van Der Beek plays himself in this film, or at least himself playing the lead character in Danny's autobiographical film, an alcoholic actor suffering from an unexplained bloody anal discharge. Not enough butt for you? Later in the film we see Dick himself passed out naked on TV actress Maura Tierney's front lawn, with a black Labrador eagerly exploring his hindquarters. Like most other reporters, I fled the Austin Convention Center's hall after the screening, and so missed the Q&A session in which Dick reportedly humped an audience member's head while mumbling vile obscenities. Maybe that'll show up on DVD, fans -- but some distributor will have to buy the film first.

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