Are Latest Political Movies Propaganda?

June 17, 1004 -- -- Filmmaker John Sayles was so angry at the Bush Administration, he didn't write a letter to his congressman — he wrote a movie.

The resulting film, Silver City, to be released on September 17, stars Chris Cooper. Cooper, who most recently won an Academy Award for his performance in Adaptation, performs a new sort of adaptation in the Sayles project, acting out Sayles' take on George W. Bush in his gubernatorial years.

"She was on my DWIs, all that stuff from 10 years ago," complains Cooper's character — Colorado gubernatorial candidate Dickie Pilager, a former ne'er-do-well Republican political scion with some notable characteristics in common with those about Bush that liberals frequently like to mention.

"In about two weeks, I had a first draft so that we could start scouting," Sayles told ABC News. "We really felt like it was important to get the movie out before the election just to get into the conversation at the right time."

Accompanying the famous tidal wave from the trailer of The Day After Tomorrow — a disaster flick about global warming endorsed by former Vice President Al Gore— comes a tidal wave of films with liberal political messages hitting muliplexes near you.

An Embraceable Cultural Form

"People of liberal ideology have finally found a cultural form that they can embrace the way people of conservative ideology have embraced talk radio," says Robert Thompson, a professor of Television and Popular Culture at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.

In addition to The Day After Tomorrow and its vice president bearing a striking resemblance in appearance and tone to Gore successor, Dick Cheney, comes a myriad of others:

The Hunting of the President, a documentary on the Clinton impeachment based on the book by left-leaning journalists Joe Conason and Gene Lyons, was directed and co-written by Clinton friend Harry Thomason.