‘Spin’ doctors in a bizarre operating room

Which is harder: turning a bodybuilder-actor into a governor or an alcoholic into a president?

According to political consultant George Gorton, who advised Arnold Schwarzenegger during his recent successful gubernatorial bid in California and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin in his run for reelection, each has its challenges, but only one could get you killed.

“Entirely different experiences,” Gorton said. “You’re dealing with the oligarchs in Russia. It can be frightening. It’s one of those things you have to work yourself up to. If you’re dealing with Arnold Schwarzenegger, he’s just about the nicest guy in America.”

On Sunday, Showtime premieres “Spinning Boris,” a darkly comic look at the efforts by Gorton (Jeff Goldblum) and colleagues Dick Dresner (Anthony LaPaglia) and Joe Shumate (Liev Schreiber), who are secretly hired to help Yelstin gain a second term in 1996.

Already facing questions about his health after two heart attacks, Yeltsin had another problem, Gorton said.

“I don’t want to say bad things about him, but he was not necessarily a great politician. He may have been in his younger days, but he drank a lot by the time I got on the scene. During the campaign, he flew to Canada. On the way, he stopped in Ireland. The airplane stopped, the steps went down, the red carpet went out and he never got out.

“Finally, the red carpet rolled up, the Irish prime minister was left standing there and the explanation that the press secretary gave was that he had too much to drink. Do you believe that?”

According to Gorton, Yeltsin wasn’t the only one drowning his sorrows. “I drank more in the six months I was there than in the entire rest of my life.”

Part of that was the stress of mounting a U.S.-style campaign in a newly democratic foreign country, but the rest was fear. It began with the man who financed the consultants.

“Time magazine didn’t want to use his name,” Gorton said, “and Showtime didn’t want to use his name. I don’t want to say his name, so I don’t think you’d want to, either, believe me. Honestly, he’s not a guy you want to upset. He’s big time. He’s more influential now than he was when I met him.”

The movie opens with Gorton making a panicked phone call to his home answering machine, leaving a message just in case he doesn’t make it back.

“I was very happy to get out in one piece,” he recalled.

“A number of times, I went back and forth thinking, ‘Come on, George, you’ve been reading too many spy novels. This is just another gig’ and thinking, ‘Oh, my God, what have I done? What am I doing here? How could I shout at that person?’

“I thought the two armed guards I had everywhere I went were my armed guards. Then I realized after a while that they weren’t my armed guards at all, they were somebody else’s. Every time I got in the car with them, I wondered if they were going to take me out in the field and shoot me. No, seriously, toward the end, it was really quite a thriller for me.”

“Spinning Boris” is based on Gorton’s dictated journal. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “At first, it was a lark. It was fun; it was easy. If I had known at the beginning what I knew at the end, I never would have written it down.”

Said Goldblum: “It was really spooky what those guys were fooling around with. There was real jeopardy. In this story, in these events, George was terrifically heroic and had a wild fit of integrity, at some personal risk. Boy, hats off to him and all those guys. I like them a lot.”

But that doesn’t mean Goldblum would want to be the man he played.

“What a world! I’m glad I’m not in that world,” Goldblum says. “George Gorton is a great guy, great to play, great at what he does. But me, even though I’m interested in the culture and I watch politics, I’m rooting and I’ll participate in some way, boy, I’m sure glad I’m not involved.”

A surprise to many viewers, Gorton believes, is the large part played in the story by Tatiana Dyachenko (Svetlana Efremova), Yeltsin’s married daughter.

“If I hadn’t been able to sell Tatiana,” he said, “we would have been over there doing nothing. They didn’t bring us over to win. They brought us over to convince Boris Yeltsin to cancel.

“The nice part was, unbeknownst to them, we ran into Tatiana, and that wasn’t her plan. Her plan was to win. You probably know that she went on to essentially rule Russia.

“She was so young and naive and inexperienced when we met her. The title of the movie could have been ‘The Greening of Tatiana.’ She went from being completely inexperienced, never had a job as far as I know, never had a job in business, politics, government.

“And by the time we were through with the elections, she was one tough cookie who brooked no umbrage from anybody, including me.”

As for political consultants, Gorton says, “we went over there and took polls and focus groups and perception analyzers and created a message and a strategy and came up with a winning campaign. We’re not necessarily evil.”

Kate O’Hare writes for Tribune Media Services.

“Spinning Boris” airs at

8 p.m. Sunday on Showtime. The network has rated it TV14-LD (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14, with advisories for coarse language and suggestive dialogue).

Cover photograph by L. Pief Weyman.