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Tim Robbins has taken on corrupt senators and the death penalty. In the upcoming Cradle Will Rock, he tackles censorship. But please, don't say he directs political films. That could ruin his career.

Tim Robbins for president? Don't bet on it. But this walkin', talkin' news machine loves to beat up on a politician or two. In his new film, Cradle Will Rock, Robbins keeps on swinging -- this time, for artistic freedom.

The penthouse suite with a panoramic view that Tim Robbins occupies in Vancouver while finishing up an acting gig is beyond nice. It's presidential. But Robbins, who is decidedly schlumpy in an open shirt, jeans, and $5 Chinese slip-ons, is anything but statesmanlike. In fact, there's nothing this loose cannon of an artist -- who wrote and directed the upcoming Cradle Will Rock, about the shuttering of the Federal Theater Project's pro-union musical in 1937 - despises more than career politicians. And of course, he takes great offense when anyone suggests that Cradle Will Rock, Dead Man Walking, or Bob Roberts, his trilogy of issue-based films, are political. To him, they're simply celebrations of life and the common man, in the tradition of Frank Capra. "Say the words political and film together, and it's a recipe for disaster," he moans as he tucks his long six-foot-five frame into a chair.

"I mean, who wants to see a political film? The word *politician* describes people who are manipulative and careerist. Nobody trusts them. Real leaders don't listen to polls. They go with their conscience and heart. I saw Dan Quayle on Letterman the other night, talking about the importance of public service, as if what these guys do is some kind of noble thing. Give me a break."

This is not posturing. He means it. In fact, as a not-so-subtle form of protest, he and his partner, Susan Sarandon, once turned down an invitation to dine with the Clintons at the White House. "By accepting a dinner invitation, you're buying into the whole thing, including the policies," says Robbins, a pacifist who loathes Bill Clinton for orchestrating the bombing of Kosovo and who was warned 10 years ago by certain powerful Hollywood executives that his participation in Gulf War protests could be detrimental to his career. "If I thought my opinions at a White House dinner would have any impact, that would be different," he adds. "But politicians only pretend to listen. It's really just a big yank-off. Besides, look at what happened to Eartha Kitt when she had lunch with Lady Bird Johnson and she shot her mouth off about Vietnam. She didn't work again for 20 years."

Robbins and Sarandon, of course, know about being shunned for mouthing off. In 1993, while presenting an Oscar, they used their airtime to make a plea to public officials to shut down an internment camp for Haitian refugees with HIV. For this, they were criticized harshly by the public and the Academy. (Not long after their speech, however, the camp was shut down by the US government.) More recently, Robbins was shocked to see a photo of a New York City policeman wearing an ABANDON SARANDON button. It was in response to her vigorous participation at City Hall protests (despite Mayor Giuliani's new regulations making large gatherings on the steps illegal) after the shooting of an unarmed black man, Amadou Diallo, by the police.

"This mayor definitely has the head of a little dictator," says Sarandon. "You can't sit back with blinders on," Robbins adds. "You have to speak up."
In many ways, Robbins' high-concept Cradle Will Rock sounds like it might have come off as a sullen leftist attack on the greedy forces of capitalism in this country. Yet it plays like a rollicking ensemble comedy, with the boyish and celebratory tone of the socialist musical it chronicles, The Cradle Will Rock, written by Marc Blitzstein and directed by Orson Welles. With an all-star cast that includes Sarandon, Vanessa Redgrave, Bill Murray, John Cusack, Joan Cusack, John Turturro, Emily Watson, and Ruben Blades, it was produced by Disney's Touchstone Pictures, even though it has the higher-end intellectual tone of a Miramax production.

Last May, after the movie (which captures the same, giddy let's-put-on-a-show energy that made Shakespeare In Love so appealing) was screened at the Cannes Film Festival, Variety called it "a vibrant evocation of a rare moment in American history, when art and politics were dynamically forged on the same anvil." This fall, in the New York Times, director Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night) named Cradle Will Rock one of the most important films of the year. And Vanity Fair called the $32 million project a "fabulous promenade." Not bad for a Depression-era epic about artistic expression. "A story of people doing something against the odds is always inspiring," says Sarandon, who, not surprisingly, admires her husband's way of working with actors and capturing political ironies. "Of course, when you're coming of age at a time when the issues are clear -- as they did in the '30s and I did in the '60s -- it's a natural thing to find a voice."

The story goes something like this: Not so long ago, when the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was putting people back to work, the Federal Theater Project was established in 1935 in New York City. It eventually employed 10,000 people in 40 states and reached 25 million Americans. Headed up by a firebrand professor from Vassar, Hallie Flanagan (played in the movie by Cherry Jones), and drawing on young talents including Welles, John Houseman, Burt Lancaster, Nicholas Ray, and Sidney Lumet, the Federal Theater was well known for its innovative productions on Broadway (such as Welles's voodoo Macbeth) and for its cinematic-style Living Newspaper performances depicting issues of the day from a common man's perspective. Much of the dynamic institution's inspiration came from the People's Theater movement of Bolshevik Russia that wrested control of the theater from the elite and brought traditional and avant-garde drama to the proletariat. Another major inspiration was the socialist-seeming ideals of Bertolt Brecht, the great German dramatist and director, whose epic productions such as Threepenny Opera and Mother Courage and Her Children explored the politics of everyday survival in a turbulent society. These were not outlandish sources for a theater company to draw from when the United States was falling apart at the seams. "This was before we had Social Security, welfare, or any safety net in this country," Robbins says. "The Depression was a total collapse of capitalism and a system of government that everyone believed in. So at that point, socialism looked pretty good to all those people out of work and, in some ways, to FDR, too, who got accused of being a Red."

After a few years, the Federal Theater (with its feisty artists and repertoire of racially integrated productions that advocated the redistribution of wealth) started to look threatening to certain politicians. In 1938, Martin Dies, a Texas congressman and predecessor to Joseph McCarthy, formed the House for Un-American Activities Committee, which quickly put Hallie Flanagan and all of the WPA on trial. Not long after that, just as The Cradle Will Rock - a call to arms for workers to unite -- was about to open on Broadway, it was shut down unceremoniously. In a grand gesture of defiance against the government and Actors Equity, which forbade its members to participate in the show, Welles & Co. marched through the streets to another theater and presented the play anyway.

Robbins weaves this central story into a kaleidoscopic view of powerful idealists mixing it up with the era's most powerful string-pullers. Sarandon plays an elegant Italian propagandist who ghostwrites a column for Mussolini in the Hearst newspapers and raises funds for Italy by selling masterpieces to ruling-class Americans. Vanessa Redgrave plays a staid industrialist's wife who gets swept up in the Federal Theater's lofty egalitarian mission.

John Cusack plays Nelson Rockefeller, an important patron of modern art who happens to commission the wrong artist for a Rockefeller Center mural -- the stridently anti-capitalist Diego Rivera (Ruben Blades). At the film's end, Robbins takes poetic license by simultaneously showing the mural's destruction and the closing of the Federal Theater.

"We control the future of art," Hearst says, "because we pay for the future." Given Mayor Giuliani's recent removal of funding from the Brooklyn Museum of Art for its Sensation exhibition of confrontational contemporary British art, it seems a particularly germane time to trot out these real-life tales from the city's cultural history.

"It's good for the movie that this censorship stuff is coming up again in the news," says Robbins, recalling a similar battle 10 years ago, when Senator Jesse Helms, incensed by a Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition, led his attack on the National Endowment for the Arts. "But it's very sad for the city and the country. You already have enough artists censoring themselves, and you already have a theater movement in this country that is largely without teeth because nobody wants to risk offending anybody. And I can't help thinking that even though his case will never hold up in court, this is a victory for Giuliani because it helped him get voters in upstate New York for his Senate race. There are always politicians who gain political capital on the backs of people by forcing issues like these. But could this guy really be so spiteful and controlling? I shouldn't talk about it."
He does anyway, of course.

"I grew up in New York City, and I always trusted the police and found them fair-minded," says Robbins, a Greenwich Village native who attended eight years of Catholic school and then graduated from the prestigious Stuyvesant High School in 1976. "They weren't going to bust you for jaywalking or smoking a joint. They knew who the bad guys were. Then Giuliani comes in and tells them to start going after bicyclists and dog walkers. They won't do it. I've talked to cops who told me they thought he was a total joke. So what does he do? He gets new young cops into the force and trains them to be more aggressive. The old cops are pissed off because they've lost the trust of their communities. And now it's more dangerous for them and harder to do their jobs properly."

For an artist without any formal training in political science or history, his level of insight is disarming. In fact, when it comes to dissecting the flaws of politicians, Robbins (who is an avid supporter of the Center for Constitutional Rights, the Nation Institute, and Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) is tireless. Listening to him pick them off one at a time is like watching a highly skilled marksman shooting down ducks over Chesapeake Bay. Show him the front page of the New York Times, and he finds a half-dozen things to go berserk about, including the weather, which he thinks is affected by global warming.

"What's this about George W. Bush and compassionate conservatism?" he fumes. "This is the governor of a state that has more people on death row than any other. He has no compassion. The bottom line is that there are people who got into trouble with drugs in the past, just like he did, and they're now doing time in prison." Al Gore doesn't fare that much better in Robbins's eyes, even though the VP is down with the AFL-CIO and is known to be a strong environmentalist. "Is he?" Robbins snaps. "Then how come I can't buy an electric car where I live? What we need is a sane energy policy -- wind-power and solar-power programs. If Gore is such a strong environmentalist, where are the programs to get us away from fossil fuel? Nowhere, because those companies are too powerful and important to the survival of any politician. "And Robbins isn't buying Clinton's call for national gun control laws either, thank you very much. "It's the ultimate hypocrisy," he snipes, "because this country supports corporate welfare for gun contractors. After they sell their weapons to our government, our taxes subsidize the sale of them to the Milosevics and Mobutus and Saddam Husseins of the world. The fact is, Clinton chose to deal with the Balkans by dropping bombs, so how can you require the movie industry to curtail violence or be shocked when teenagers choose violence to express their frustrations?"

Clearly, then, no career politicians are worthy. And while he dismisses the idea of celebrities in politics as absurd (Arnold Schwarzenegger for president, for example, elicits the kind of "No comment" from Robbins that borders on "How dare you?"), he takes a break from his inspired savaging of every elected official besides Jerry Brown to say that although he would not vote for Warren Beatty, he might vote for Bullworth, the leftist star's truth-spewing, anti-corporate alter ego. "At least if Warren ran, it would be interesting to see, because he'd talk. These career politicians are all so careful. It's great when a wild card comes in and forces the issues. I'd love to see it. It would be stimulating."

Just don't expect him to be passing out BEATTY bumper stickers if he runs. Criticizing Beatty would be more Robbins's style. Still, despite Robbins's explosive opinions (and contempt for the media, which tends to comment on the charisma of candidates, he believes, rather than their policies), let it be understood, on no uncertain terms, that no way in hell would he ever consider running for office himself. "It's my job to entertain people, to make them understand human motivation, and to be nonjudgmental in my work," says this walking op-ed page of a Hollywood hotshot, "and that's enough."

But that doesn't mean he would not like to take this opportunity to touch on a few more points. Kids on Ritalin, for example: "It's a tragedy. Part of growing up is to find your way through depression and anger and learn to deal with these things, which is why so many teenagers self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. When you have authorities leading kids into drug use that masks their anxieties, they're being deprived of life lessons." He would also like to tell you why (before your head explodes with too much information) the prison system, drug laws, and immigration policies are insane. And just when you think this para-professional pundit has finally exhausted the issues, he inveighs against using cheap labor abroad instead of American labor in the Midwest. "We've lost a lot of good jobs in this country because of intensely competitive companies with a slave-labor mentality and a lack of loyalty to Americans," says Robbins, who suggests that Henry Ford was in cahoots with the Nazis because he had factories to protect in Germany. He is quick to add that although there was some pressure from his producers to shoot in Toronto, where it's cheaper because crews are not unionized, most of Cradle was filmed in New York City. He enjoys giving New Yorkers jobs, even if New York can be a tough town for the making of a period film.

"The lampposts are murder," he says, "but the extras are fabulous."

Of course, Robbins knows New York as well as any director. Growing up as the Yankees-loving son of Gil Robbins, a folk-singing club owner, he started performing with a stridently political street theater company called Theatre for the New City at age 12. This taught him the importance of being a fierce entertainer, despite the rude distractions of everyday street life from the audience.

After barely graduating Stuyvesant High School, he went to the State University of New York before enrolling in UCLA's theater program in 1979. He was a punk with an attitude who wanted to be a director, not an actor, and in 1981, after graduating, he formed an on-the-edge theater company in Los Angeles called the Actor's Gang, which did not ever take money from the federal government for any of its challenging productions. Rather, Robbins helped supplement the company's box office income by taking lucrative acting jobs set up by an agent who told him to behave himself. His first gig was as a terrorist on St. Elsewhere. His career took off after his breakthrough role in 1988, opposite Susan Sarandon, in Ron Shelton's baseball movie, Bull Durham (it's when they fell in love, too). His second major role came several years later (after Adrian Lyne's 1990 Jacob's Ladder), in 1992, with Robert Altman's The Player, which made him a bona fide star. But even now, as a high profile talent (he was nominated for a best director Oscar for Dead Man Walking, and his performance as a prisoner in The Shawshank Redemption was universally acclaimed), he tries to avoid the star trappings. He eschews limos and rides the subway. And he likes to strike up conversations with strangers as a way of checking in on life outside the fast lane.

"You get in trouble when you start believing you're special because you're recognized," Robbins says. "And you have to hold on to your ideals no matter how much money you're making. Look, I know I'm fortunate to be where I am right now, but I also know that I have a responsibility to give back. I mean, I was a Boy Scout growing up."

He almost sounds like he's running for office.

It's a slow day on the set of Mission to Mars, the Brian DePalma movie that has kept Robbins in Vancouver for several months, playing astronaut. He is sitting in the makeup trailer while his seven-year-old son, visiting from New York, builds a Lego space station. Robbins peers at a newspaper and, in no specific order, passes his sharply honed judgments on issues from nuclear testing to campaign finance reform to the teaching of creationism in public schools.