Bill Wolfe is a native of Ohio and long-time resident of Los Angeles. Though he loves his adopted city, his midwest background gives him a funny perspective on its occasional quirks. This month, he looks at the point where politics and show business may become one.

One of the odd, enduring, shadow-stars of American film history made a big comeback this year: the President. Not in a literal sense, as was true during the Clinton years, when a remarkable number of movies were made with the President as a starring figure. But how Americans feel about their President, how he makes them feel about themselves, how our sense of a President seeps into and colors the popular imagination - that President was the true subject of several of the better known movies this past year.

The five movies nominated for Best Picture are a good example. Looked at from a certain angle, the three male-centered films could be seen as different verdicts on George Bush: the old-fashioned, decent lawman who can't cope with what seems like a new kind of evil in the world (No Country For Old Men); the simple, bloody, take-no-prisoners oilman who destroys everything in his path, including - especially? - that most dear to him (There Will Be Blood); and the unseen, undefeatable puppetmaster pulling the strings in all our worst paranoid visions of corporate America (Michael Clayton).

Prior to this past year, Bush made little impact on movies or TV - surprising, given the vast impact of events initiated during his administration. Now that Bush has finally hit the big screen, though, my bet is that the dark, ugly feelings he generates will be a significant presence for the next few years. The hallmark of the Bush movie may well be a pervading sense that we have all become like Edmond O'Brien in D.O.A. - slipped a fatal dose of slow-acting poison, with no way to save ourselves.

Just as many of the movies starring Bush will very likely be released after he leaves office, the movies where we feel the presence of Richard Nixon continued to be released for years after he resigned in 1974. These would include not simply those most directly about him - All the President's Men (1976), or its trashy/fun fictionalized TV version, Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977) - but the movies that got to the heart of the vertiginous paranoia and disillusionment that were the essence of the Nixon Era. Among these I'd include The Parallax View, (1974) Night Moves ('75), Chinatown ('74), Shampoo ('73), The Last Detail ('73), Three Days of the Condor ('75), the first two Godfathers ('72, '74), The Conversation ('74), Save the Tiger ('73), Hustle ('75), Taxi Driver ('76), Who'll Stop the Rain (1978), Apocalypse Now ('79), and several Robert Altman movies, including McCabe and Mrs. Miller ('71), The Long Goodbye ('73), California Split ('74), and Nashville ('75). The last gasp of Cinema Nixon came in 1981, with Cutter's Way (a.k.a. Cutter and Bone) - a heady blast of Watergate-via-Chandler brimstone that looked awfully lonesome, stranded in Reagan's America. Still, it could be argued that Nixon's most lasting contribution to American culture will be that clutch of movies held in thrall by his dark ju-ju.

Jimmy Carter, with his jive "I will never lie to you" campaign promise, was never anything more than a dim negative image of Nixon. Perhaps less obviously, though, Ronald Reagan crafted his role as President in large degree as a rebuke to the 1970s, a time most defined by the dark consequences caused by those personal characteristics that seemed to emanate from Nixon like ghosts from a seance. Reagan was after all elected in large part due to his implicit promise to bring an end to the infamous malaise of the post-Nixon years - years that were, in fact, still very much in the shadow of Nixon. What was It's morning again in America other than a collective agreement to repress all the Nixon era's doubt and self-recrimination, and above all to deny the realization reached in the Vietnam War of the great darkness that lurked within, and with it any tragic sense of life? So Reagan's representatives on screen were the cartoon heroes of the day, Arnold and Bruce and Sly, who existed to promote a one-dimensional, juvenile view of life as an action movie with an inevitable happy ending, in direct refutation of the more mature moral shadings of the previous decade's movies. (In this sense, Rocky Balboa and Luke Skywalker, in 1976 and 1977 respectively, were the John the Baptists of the Reagan Era of movies.) The cinematic irony of the 1980s was that, as President, Ronald Reagan finally became - by proxy - the great star of the silver screen that he'd longed to be in the 1940s and '50s.

As with regular movie stars, our Presidential movie stars sometimes cross over to the smaller screen. For example, I suspect it's more than a coincidence that the rash of rural-based sitcoms in the mid-1960s hit their peak during the same years when the President was Lyndon Johnson (native of Stonewall, Texas, population 469, according to Wikipedia). I've always thought these shows were an unconscious expression of the American public's view of LBJ - part amused acceptance, part condescending superiority. Jed Clampett and his kin, packing up and moving into their big white mansion in the hills of Beverly, possibly make more sense, and certainly are more interesting, when viewed not as a sitcom, but rather as an absurd expression of Lyndon and his folks moving into that other big white mansion on the East Coast. As the gaping wound in Southeast Asia widened and bled out, this jocular view of LBJ darkened finally into that act of cinematic insurrection, Bonnie and Clyde, where the folksy, charming, murderous heroes wind up dead in a bloody massacre that still has the power to shock.

Living in a poignant parallel universe alongside TV's Life With Lyndon during these mid-1960s years was a fictional embodiment of Johnson's fallen predecessor, John F. Kennedy - one that is, amazingly, still with us today: Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise. (It can't be an accident, moreover, that the suburban Jack and Jackie of Rob and Laura Petrie were eclipsed by the rural residents of Petticoat Junction and Green Acres just as the real Jack and Jackie were being replaced by Lyndon and Lady Bird.) At the very same time that Captain Kirk was exploring his New Frontier, perhaps the single most iconic character in the movies of the 1960s - also still with us today - was at his peak: the very Kennedy-esque James Bond. Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, was Kennedy's favorite author; surely JFK saw himself in Bond - or rather, hoped to see Bond in himself. In a way, some of the more foolhardy undertakings of Kennedy's administration (the Bay of Pigs, the assassination of Diem in Vietnam) make more sense if we imagine Kennedy watching a Bond movie unspool in his head - one where he starred as President Double-Oh-Seven. (If, instead, these were rational policy decisions, they were just plain nutty.) As Bond and his brethren - Derek Flynt, Matt Helm, Napoleon Solo - jet-setted across the decade, we could imagine a Kennedy whose suits and bon mots were too cool, whose guns and women were too golden for him to die in Dallas.

Kennedy succeeded Dwight Eisenhower, another President who starred in both movies and TV. What were all the sweatered sitcom dads of the 1950s if not stars of a huge, unacknowledged show called I Like Ike, starring Eisenhower as the ideal National Daddy? Hugh Beaumont and Danny Thomas and Robert Young and Ozzie Nelson all starred as Ike, and collectively that show ran for 38 years. (Not only that, it made a big comeback in the 1970s, as American Graffiti and Happy Days and Grease, during the dark days brought on by Ike's wayward son, Tricky Dick, who'd taken many a forked path since first finding TV fame by defending his puppy back in 1952.) People often jokingly wondered what Ozzie Nelson, the longest-lasting TV dad, did for a living. That same joking question was probably asked on not a few occasions about Ike. As it turned out, the joke was on the jokers, since both men were very busy daddies: Ozzie wrote, directed, produced and starred in The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-66), while at the same time negotiating the first million dollar, lifetime music contract for his son, rock musician Rick Nelson; for his part, Ike appointed two of the most influential Supreme Court Justices in history, Earl Warren and William Brennan, sent the National Guard into Little Rock, Arkansas to enforce the Court's desegregation decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, used the CIA to topple governments in Guatemala and Iran, and began America's long and bloody involvement in Vietnam. This darker, more anxiety-ridden Ike, the one who chain-smoked his whole life and had the heart attacks to prove it, starred in a number of big screen movies throughout the decade, including Bigger Than Life (1956), There's Always Tomorrow (1956), Executive Suite (1954), The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1956 - the Fredric March role, not the Gregory Peck), and any number of other movies focusing on an experienced, well-meaning paterfamilias vexed by the problems of an unsettling age.

Harry Truman is one of three Presidents - the others being Carter and Bush the Elder - who seem to have utterly failed to capture the cinematic imagination of the American public. Perhaps in Truman's case it's because he was a small town boy, through and through, at exactly the instant when America first became decidedly urban. Consider that film noir was perhaps the dominant genre in American movies of this period, then picture how out of place our collective image of Harry Truman would be in the urban, shadowy world of any film noir. Truman was a 12-year-old farm boy in Missouri when the first public showing of a movie took place in New York City in 1896; maybe it makes sense that he was never ready for, nor even interested in, his close-up: the movies were for city slickers, not good Missouri folk. There's an intriguing contrast here with Eisenhower, who sprang from the equally humble surroundings of Abilene, Kansas, circa 1890; perhaps thanks to his years spent circling the globe with the Army, however, Eisenhower always seemed much more the cosmopolitan than Truman ever did. There's another irony in the fact that the workings of the Kansas City political machine run by Tom Pendergast, Truman's patron for the first 20 years of his career, were not unlike what we might see in any film noir - yet, despite that, we can't imagine our Harry in such a fetid cinematic setting. It's significant that Truman only became an object of public fascination in the Nixon Era, when our sense of having fallen from grace made us yearn for a supposedly simpler world, represented by someone who was already a man out of time in his own day. It's notable too that Truman's star rose via the old, prosaic medium of print, courtesy of Merle Miller's Plain Speaking, rather than the modern, poetic medium of cinema.

Regarding our two remaining cinematic nullities, little needs to be said. In the case of Jimmy Carter, that self-righteous scold, has anyone ever dreamed of making a movie about Tom Sawyer's Aunt Polly? And with poor old George Herbert Walker Bush, his political downfall was his inability to know who he was as a public man; if he didn't know, how could we? And, not knowing, how could we dream our movie dreams about him?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a master of the public imagination for an amazing length of time, through many of the most significant events in American history. And yet, despite that, his presence is scarce in American movies of his time. A silhouetted figure here or there (Yankee Doodle Dandy, to name one movie), but not much else. Why? Anti-Semitism was at a peak in American life in the 1930s and early 1940s, with the American Bund - a powerful political force and a figure as famous as Charles Lindbergh being very open about his attraction to Germany and his dislike of Jews; in an effort to show their loyalty in this fearful time, the movie executives thought it wise to treat the President as an object of quasi-religious adoration - meaning we could not gaze upon His face. This is the feeling I get during those rare and fleeting moments when an actor dons the sacramental robes of Roosevelt. In my memory of these moments, He is forever seated in shadow, shot from behind, and speaking in hushed tones, while angelic choirs sing reverently in the background. It's peculiar, and leaves me feeling both a little queasy and more than a little sorry for the powerful movie bosses who still felt so isolated and at risk, even with an ocean between them and the Third Reich.

The last starring Presidential role worth noting may also mark the first appearance of the President as a character on screen. That happened during the brief interregnum when Herbert Hoover was on his way out, but FDR was not yet in - when the tsunami of the Great Depression had struck, but the lifeboats of the New Deal had yet to arrive. Two examples: Gabriel Over the White House (1932), where an angel appears in a vision before the hack politician who's been ram-rodded into the White House by political bosses, inspiring the hack to become a paladin of the people, and The Phantom President (1932, starring George M. Cohan!), where a bland but decent Presidential candidate hires his doppelganger, a charismatic huckster, to stand in the spotlight as the public face of the candidate, while the genuine article stays hidden off-stage. These movies record that brief sizzling flare of a moment in the early 1930s when we sense that the peasants came very close to storming the castle with pitchforks and torches. It's remarkable that Hollywood put this on screen, and it's startling to see it today - as if we'd stumbled across an old cache of family letters in which our grandparents were plotting sedition.

Prior to these early Depression years, I can't say whether the President was a starring character in movies, because I haven't seen enough work from the Silent Era to know. But even if he didn't make his cinematic debut until 1932, the President - sometimes in the Oval Office, but much more often in civilian camouflage - has been an enduring, sometimes dominating movie star for more than seven decades. Other than Lillian Gish, no one else comes close to this career. Given every President's saturation advertising every night and day on TV, it's inevitable that nearly any future choice to serve in that office will also be securing a second career as the latest actor filling the role of the World's Longest Lasting Movie Star. It's America's version of Dr. Who, with A-bombs.