Best film presidents, Part II
By Sharon Eberson / Friday, Oct. 24
Moviefone.com knows how to get the vote out: It asked its readers to vote on the best movie President of the United States.
With a whopping 271,323 votes, 24 percent of the 1.1 million total, the winner was Harrison Ford as President James Marshall in "Air Force One" (1997).
All of the picks were fictional, negating portrayals such as Josh Brolin's of George W. Bush in Oliver Stone's "W.," the biopic of the sitting president in theaters now.
According to the site, Marshall won on the strength of his physical strength: "Platform: Never negotiate with terrorists -- even if they've hijacked Air Force One and are holding your family hostage. Instead, simply take a cue from Bruce Willis in ‘Die Hard' and pick your captors apart piece by piece. See, the "zero tolerance" policy works!"
Morgan Freeman's as President Tom Beck in 1988's :Deep Impact" was next with 176,303, or 16 percent.
The rest of the list, in order of popularity
3. Michael Douglas in "The American President"
4. Bill Pullman in "Independence Day"
5. Kevin Kline in "Dave"
6. Dennis Quaid in "American Dreamz"
7. Bruce Greenwood in "National Treasure: Book of Secrets"
8. James Cromwell in "The Sum of All Fears"
9. Jack Nicholson in "Mars Attacks"
10. Jeff Bridges in "The Contender"
11. Kelsey Grammar in "Swing Vote"
12. Gene Hackman in "Absolute Power"
13. Peter Sellers in "Dr. Strangelove"
14. Billy Bob Thornton in "Love, Actually"
15. Terry Crews in "Idiocracy"
16. Jack Warden in "Being There"
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Last night's prime-time "Saturday Night Live" skit featuring Tina Fey as vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin and the return of Will Ferrell as President George W. Bush was another example of how we can't get enough of parody and impersonation in an election year.
That's what's happening on the small screen. On the big screen, "W." is the latest in a long line of movies trying to find the heart and soul of a real American president.
The St. Petersburg Times did its own list of top film presidents - ones who actually held the office. The story said that Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt are the most popular lives to adapt to screen - "nobody's interested in making movies about James K. Polk and Rutherford B. Hayes," wrote Steve Persall.
His favorite George Washington portrayal was by Barry Bostwick in "George Washington II: The Forging of a Nation."
"Yes, Brad Majors from ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show' is the best father of our country ever filmed."
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Head over to Slate.com for "Black Presidents: A pop culture survey." The list of TV and films includes the obscure satirical drama "The Man," which in 1972 imagined the first black president of the United States. Joseph Sargent directs a Rod Serling script, adapted from the Irving Wallace novel, that had Douglass Dilman, portrayed by James Earl Jones, as president pro tempore of the Senate. He makes it to the Oval Office after the president and the speaker of the House die in a ceiling collapse. "Unavailable on DVD, 'The Man' is now a rarity, and yet it clearly forecasts the screen existences of subsequent black presidents."