It’s about to get real.

This, if you can believe it, is the lull.

In another month or so, once the month-long holidays have passed, the Colorado General Assembly will be in session and the 2022 campaign year will be in full swing. In Colorado, a crucial U.S. Senate seat and the statewide executive offices will be on the ballot, along with the new, battleground congressional district in the suburbs and exurbs north of Denver.

In addition, all 65 members of the Colorado House of Representatives and half of the state Senate will be chosen by voters under redrawn district lines, potentially shaking up the Democrats’ hold on the chambers.

Before that whirlwind greets us, however, we thought it would be a good time to consider popping some popcorn, curling up on the couch, dimming the lights and watching a movie that is both entertaining and illuminating.

It’s impossible to separate politics from entertainment these days. Some argue that that’s the root of many of the problems that beset the country these days, as an ever-briefer news cycle collides with a crop of politicians all too happy to feed the churning demand for anger-inducing spectacle.

“The Front Runner,” the 2018 Sony Pictures movie set at what could be considered the hinge point when “politics went tabloid,” as journalist Matt Bai puts it, is worth another look.

Bai is one of the movie’s screenwriters and the journalist who wrote “All the Truth is Out,” the 2014 book the script is based on.

The feature film, starring Hugh Jackman, tells the story of Colorado Sen. Gary Hart’s downfall on the national stage – and explores the birth of the political world that prevails to this day.

The flick treats viewers to an inside look at the final weeks of Hart’s 1987 presidential campaign, when rumors about the political star’s extramarital relationships derailed what had looked like a solid path to the White House.

“I think we’re at the ultimate manifestation of what began in 1987, which is the collision of entertainment and politics that creates a different kind of process, where you treat leaders like celebrities,” Bai told Colorado Politics shortly after the film had its debut three years ago in Denver. “And then you treat leaders like celebrities, you get celebrity leaders.”

It can be hard to picture the time before political news didn’t center around raging controversies that erupt for a few days and then fade into the background, making room for the next shock.

The film tells a well-worn story about how Hart – who narrowly missed winning the nomination in 1984 – saw his presidential aspirations vanish after Miami Herald reporters staked out his Washington, D.C., townhouse. They’d received an anonymous tip that Hart was having an affair with a woman later identified as Donna Rice after the two met on a boat with the made-for-TV name Monkey Business.

The movie closes with Hart withdrawing from the race after refusing to answer a reporter’s question about marital infidelity.

A month later, the photo that locked the scandal into the national psyche appeared on the cover of the National Enquirer – Rice on Hart’s lap next to the aptly named yacht on the Caribbean island of Bimini.

The film premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and was shown at a red-carpet screening at the Denver International Film Festival in November 2018 before opening nationwide.

The day after its unveiling in Denver, Colorado Politics had the chance to hear about the making of the movie and the questions it explored with Bai, director Jason Reitman and screenwriter Jay Carson – at Red Rocks, near where Hart announced his second presidential run.

“Whenever you’re living in a moment, it’s easy to forget that things used to be different,” said Carson, a political consultant who had a front-row seat to the changing times as press secretary on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential run.

“The idea that candidates and journalists used to socialize … there was still a little bit of that left on my first presidential campaign, in 2000, which is where I met Matt,” Carson said. “So there was clearly still some fraternizing with the press. But I watched that bleed away over eight very quick years, from 2000 to 2008. The treating of each other as human beings in the process is largely gone, and that’s really unfortunate. The more we bleed humanity out of this process, the worse it gets.”

Bai drew a line between the end of the Hart campaign and the just-completed Senate hearings that ended up confirming Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.

“Kavanaugh triumphs through that process not because he says, ‘You have no right to delve into my high school years, I’m not bringing my wife in front of the camera.’ He triumphs because he gives a tremendous theatrical moment; he performs in that hearing room, and that performance put him over the top,” Bai said. “I think we have a performance-based politics, and that is a direct result of the forces that collided in 1987, and I think for that reason, it’s as relevant as ever.”

Carson said he is still an optimist.

“When I say that, it’s a little bit like, when you’re at stage 4 cancer, stage 3 cancer is better. I think we’re in a deeply cancerous process right now. But if we can put some humanity back in the process – the press corps can treat the candidate and the candidate can treat the press corps, and the staff can treat both with more humanity and realize that we’re all human beings doing this and not one-dimensional, deeply hate-able caricatures – then that’ll help a lot.”

He said that he believes the character of individual candidates can make a tremendous difference to the climate.

“One toxic candidate can push a troubled process into total toxicity,” Carson said. “One deeply thoughtful, resonant candidate can pull a process back from that level of toxicity. Not improve the whole thing, not change Washington forever, not all this (BS) that people promise, but improve the process.”

Politicians and the press have always tried to give the public what it wants, Bai noted, but can choose which appetites to feed.

“Every day when you go to work, when I go to work, people make decisions about what to cover, when to cover it, how much of the page it’s worth, what to publish, when to publish it, how long to leave it up,” he said. “We are, in our industry, we are gatekeepers. We do have a responsibility to curate and prioritize.”

Added Bai: “I think the public has a role to play in getting the best out of the process that they can get, but neither political leaders nor journalists, when they’re doing their jobs, leave all the prioritizing and road-mapping to the public. You have a responsibility to make decisions.”

Reitman said that making the movie impressed upon him the responsibility borne by voters, who decide what news they want to consume.

“What is our curiosity and how does our curiosity affect the trajectory of the country, and do we ever stop to think about it?” he asked.

“That seems to be all the more relevant in the clickable era of news in which, as readers, we are telling newspapers what we want to read every time we click,” he added. “And the message we seem to be sending is give us more gossip, give us more entertainment. I’m not sure how healthy that is.”