A Calculated Crapshoot Pays Off for Tim Robbins : Movies: ‘Bob Roberts,’ the actor’s first feature film as director, has Cannes audiences impressed with its funny, timely satirical message.

They’ve taken to calling Tim Robbins this year’s king of Cannes. And not only because a huge billboard of him as a Dracula-like Griffin Mill in “The Player” glowers over the seething crowds opposite the Palais du Festival. It’s also because of “Bob Roberts,” the very impressive project he wrote, stars in and directed, which has become the hottest new American film at the festival.

There are posters for “Bob Roberts” around town as well, but they’re smaller and, if anything, more striking. Featuring a bright-eyed photo of Robbins looking born-again, profiled against a bright American flag, they say only “Bob Roberts. U.S. Senate 90.” Which is as it should be, because Robbins, succeeding where almost no one else has even tried, has fashioned an assured political satire. Shrewd and savagely funny by turns, it is as timely as it is disturbing.

“Yeah, the timing,” Robbins says, smiling a pleased smile. “A lot of it was a crapshoot, but a calculated one.” To be jointly released by Miramax and Paramount this August in what Harvey Weinstein, Miramax co-chairman, affably calls “a clash of corporate cultures,” Robbins’ film deals with enough of the social and political issues now on everyone’s lips to make it seem not only comic but prescient.

“I’m interested in the Hollywoodization of Washington, in the complicity between the media and politics and entertainment and how politics is becoming about image and not substance,” Robbins says. “And I wanted to present a different point of view than the one we are constantly force-fed.”

Though its story of a popular singer turned arch conservative politician has echoes of “A Face in the Crowd” with Andy Griffith, Robbins says his main influences were two very different films: D. A. Pennebaker’s cinema verite look at Bob Dylan, “Don’t Look Back,” and the classic documentary of quite another sort, “This Is Spinal Tap.”

And in fact the form of “Bob Roberts” is a mock documentary directed by a BBC type named Terry Manchester who follows the Roberts campaign around Pennsylvania as the conservative candidate battles bow-tied incumbent liberal Brickley Paiste (played by Gore Vidal) for a seat in the U.S. Senate.

“The most important thing for me was having a sense of humor about it,” Robbins says, amused himself at the thought. “I don’t like to see polemics, I don’t like being preached to or told how to think. It’s so important to entertain.”

Helping with the humor are the liberal use of some of Robbins’ actor friends as TV anchorpeople, including his companion, Susan Sarandon, as one Tawna Titan. And then there are the nearly dozen songs, written for the film by Robbins and his brother David, that capture a conservative agenda with such comic verve that Robbins confesses that “I had it put in the contract that there wouldn’t be any soundtrack album. I didn’t think, I knew it would fall into the wrong hands.

“I did ‘Bob Roberts’ as a documentary because I felt it was important not to see the back room, because that’s the way it is in real life,” Robbins says. “I wanted to present the images, and let the audience figure out what they think about Bob from the images received.”

Though it’s his first feature film, Robbins has a good deal of directing experience with his troupe, the Actors’ Gang, and that also proved helpful in the form he chose. “Due to the nature of documentary style, I could not rely on conventional filmmaking techniques like master shots and close-ups,” he says. “What I had to do was stage all the shots in a theatrical manner, and things like blocking became very important.”

Robbins got the germ of the idea that became “Bob Roberts” in 1986, when he returned to the Greenwich Village neighborhood in which he grew up after an absence of nine years and found “a shock. A unique bohemian area had become a gentrified, glorified mall.” He first envisioned Bob as just a businessman-singer, and did it that way on a short film made for “Saturday Night Live,” and then put the man aside for three years, by which time he’d been transformed into a businessman-singer-politician.

Running over “Bob Roberts’ ” end titles is Woody Guthrie singing a haunting version of “I Want to Know,” a song that has never been released sung by Guthrie, and features lyrics such as:

Why do your war boats sail on my ocean?

Why do your death bombs fall from my sky?

I want to know,

Yeah, I want to know.

Robbins had heard another group’s cover of the song just four days away from the time when everything had to be locked in on the movie. “I talked to Woody’s daughter, Nora, and she said it was funny, she had just taken the song out of the archives the previous week and wondered why it had never been released. It was on an old reel-to-reel tape with Woody’s handwriting on it. We heard it and it seemed perfect; we both felt as if the song were written for the movie. Having Nora embrace it was like having Gore Vidal agree early on to play the senator. Things seemed to come full circle. It was a real validation of what we were doing.”