Barry Levinson Goes to Washington (By Way of Tribeca)

It feels like a lifetime ago that everywhere my colleagues and I turned, some new collision of politics and pop culture exploded in or around Hollywood. In reality, of course, it all happened just last year, and we weren't the only ones paying attention: In Movieline's final visit to the Tribeca Film Festival, we found Oscar-winner turned born-again indie helmer Barry Levinson unveiling his own record of that time, Poliwood.

Narrated by Levinson himself, the film follows Anne Hathaway, Susan Sarandon, Ellen Burstyn, Will.i.am and other celebrity activists in lead up to last November's presidential elections. As an invited guest of the Creative Coalition, the director crosses the cultural aisle as it were, reckoning with mass media's impact on a span of American ideologies and vice versa.

Despite 2008's unprecedented overlaps of politics and entertainment via YouTube and other Web media, Levinson told Movieline that television remains the gold standard for communication, whether candidate or actor, pundit or entertainer. Because in the end, they might all be the same anyway.

"I think everything plays a role when it comes to television," Levinson said at last weekend's Poliwood premiere. "I think because of television, everything that's on that screen, we judge it the same way, whether you're an actor, or a politician. You both have to communicate; you have to be somehow visually attractive enough. In the documentary it mentions there are certain presidents in the past who would never be presidents nowadays, just [because of] the way they look!

"So," he continued, "all of that kind of stagecraft that is used in Hollywood is used by politicians, so there's absolutely a blending of the two. It may not be for the better, in terms of the way things are evolving, but it is a reality. And it goes way back to John Kennedy." Maybe so, maybe not; a lot of people don't know that Grover Cleveland was a lot sexier than his White House portraits let on. But would Anne Hathaway go for him? Who knows? She's done worse.

[Photo: WireImage; Additional reporting by Tara House]