Director who made Arnie a star turns camera on Kerry

[T_i_B]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1201383,00.html

Pumping Iron was the film that helped transform Arnold Schwarzenegger from just another middle European body builder into a celebrity, film star and ultimately the governor of California. Now its director is hoping to repeat the trick with John Kerry, the likely Democratic presidential candidate. Tour of Duty, directed by George Butler, will draw on the bestselling book of the same name by Douglas Brinkley.

The film, like the book, will follow the trajectory of Mr Kerry's life, from his time with the navy in Vietnam, where he commanded a boat on the Mekong Delta, to his conversion to the cause of the peace movement and his subsequent political career.

But it is the documentary's possible political impact that will be of most interest. The film is to be released in September, midway between the Democratic convention in July and the presidential vote in November. The Republican convention is set for early September in New York.

"John Kerry has had the most interesting life of anyone in the presidential arena since Theodore Roosevelt," Butler told the film industry paper Variety. "His history as a politician is that he's been underestimated, and that he has enormous willpower, not unlike Arnold Schwarzenegger."