By: Ted Johnson

It wasn’t a big surprise that Paris Hilton’s Web video response to John McCain’s “Celeb” ad gained instant traction: It racked up more than 6.8 million views on FunnyorDie.com. Countless outlets, including the “Today” show, ran and reran the video. And the punch line of the one-minute, 50-second spot — Hilton’s recitation of a point-by-point energy plan — got some commentators wondering, seriously, whether Paris was right.

That begs the question: Why couldn’t the Obama campaign have produced the ad?

They did not pursue it, and campaigns often forswear work with celebrities, anyway. Hollywood’s creative contributions to the presidential race — whether through ads, speeches or other image-making — usually end up on a campaign’s cutting room floor.

Thanks to the Web, however, creative types have an avenue for otherwise stifled ideas, allowing biting and hard-hitting material to reach audiences outside the discretion of a campaign bureaucracy.

It’s hard to imagine Will.i.am’s star-studded “Yes We Can” video, or even Rob Reiner’s pro-Hillary Clinton video featuring Jack Nicholson, could filter through focus groups and keep their sense of style intact. Both spots were hardly negative. On the other hand, a series of biting Web shorts called “The Real McCain” — the work of Robert Greenwald and BraveNewFilms — would hardly look the same or get as many hits if they had been created by the Democratic National Committee.

Hilton “would have said no to Obama,” said Adam McKay, the Obama donor and FunnorDie.com co-founder who created Hilton’s response. “But let’s suppose it was a different actor or actress. I think campaigns are so built to appeal to the majority, to 95 percent of the electorate, and that runs counter to being funny.”

After John Kerry’s presidential campaign gathered screenwriters in 2004 to brainstorm ideas, McKay submitted a very blunt speech for the candidate that “called out the knocks against him.” It was never used. When Al Gore ran in 2000 and appeared on “The Late Show with David Letterman,” McKay provided some jokes, but those, too, were put aside.

“I don’t think they want anyone to find out that they have fiction writers writing for them, but the worst would be if it got out that the guy who wrote ‘Step Brothers’ is writing his material,” said McKay, a writing partner of Will Ferrell’s for films such as “Step Brothers,” “The Anchorman” and “Talladega Nights.”

“If we were to become part of a campaign, we would become, for better or worse, part of large bureaucracies with competing agendas,” said Greenwald, although he challenged the notion that an independent 527 group or even a presidential campaign couldn’t or wouldn’t deploy some of the same approaches he has used. The second in his “Real McCain” series, “McCain’s YouTube Problem Just Became a Nightmare,” debuted in May and has received 3.5 million YouTube views.

“None of these videos are as outrageous” as the McCain campaign’s “Celeb” ad or the 2004 Swift boat attacks on Kerry, he said.

Presidential campaigns do have a history of tapping into Hollywood talent, sometimes to great effect. Frank Sinatra tailored his hit “High Hopes” for John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential bid. John Frankenheimer produced cinéma vérité-style commercial spots for Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 primary bid. Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason worked extensively on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns, including producing the 1992 ad spot “Journey” that was culled from that year’s convention biopic, “The Man from Hope.”

It’s almost a given that a Democratic nominee will turn to the entertainment industry to direct the convention biopic, which is intended to introduce the candidate to a national audience. “An Inconvenient Truth” director Davis Guggenheim is reportedly working on a film for the Obama campaign. In 2004, Kerry chose James Moll, Steven Spielberg’s in-house documentarian, to helm his biopic.

To the surprise of many, Gore enlisted “Being John Malkovich” director Spike Jonze to helm his 2000 convention film. By merely following Gore with a video camera, Jonze came up with a series of intimate, irreverent moments that humanized the candidate — without the aid of a sentimental soundtrack — at a time when he was viewed as too stiff. In the film, Gore jokes with his family, talks informally about issues and admits he is less comfortable on the campaign trail. In another instance, he notes his wife’s propensity to go barefoot.

“It’s actually very hard to be stiff when your wife is going barefoot,” Gore quips. “It just completely messes up my image.”

The film was shown at the convention on Tuesday, the least-watched night, and although it was well received, it did not see the light of day for the rest of the race. About five years later, Jonze screened the biopic again and it was posted on YouTube. Commentators declared that it could have made a difference in the race.

Those who have been at the nexus of entertainment and politics have come to understand that the campaign bubble and Hollywood’s creative community have different mind-sets.

“Without being in the center of the campaign, without being part of the media team all along, it is very hard” to contribute to the campaign’s advertising, said political consultant Andy Spahn, whose clients include Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. “From a content standpoint and logistically, it is very difficult to drop in from the outside.”

That means go it alone.

McKay said he is surprised that the McCain campaign bothered to respond to his Web video: A spokesman claimed that Hilton’s energy proposal appeared to square with McCain’s. “Obama took the high road and didn’t get involved in it,” McKay says.

In a number of ways, perhaps that is a good thing. This week, FunnyorDie.com plans a video response to the McCain camp’s response.

“It is pretty crazy,” McKay said. “How often do you see a dialogue between a pop celebrity and a presidential campaign in the most powerful country in the world? Just the fact that she was having a dialogue with him was just a great way to show how deranged our country has become.”

Ted Johnson is managing editor of Variety and author of the blog Wilshire & Washington.

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