sunspot.net - movies & video: "Tanner starts out as a likable, hollow figure mouthing liberal bromides about a better tomorrow for America, then fitfully matures as a politician. The turning point comes when Tanner sits with inner-city Detroit mothers whose children died in the streets. He's been mouthing a chic platform that includes the legalization of drugs; now he comes face to face with a constituency horrified by the free flow of pharmaceuticals. The confrontation is galvanizing, for him and for the audience.
'We went to see those women who all had children murdered,' Altman recalls, 'and then we decided to do a session there.' The production sent out the word that they wanted rappers and verse-slingers to perform at 'a jamboree' for S.O.S.A.D. -- 'Save Our Sons and Daughters.' A man named Earl Henderson recited a poem called 'So Sad' with the hair-raising, heartbreaking refrain, 'I never held ill feelings to anyone/Till I found my child was dead/Till I found my child was dead/Till I found my child was dead.'
Directing Trudeau's new lead-ins made Altman himself see 'the arc of the piece much more strongly. At first, Tanner's kind of a sappy candidate. ... But that afternoon in Detroit changes the campaign. As Tanner says in one of the new introductions, 'It meant that social justice above all else would be our central message, would inform everything we did. It also meant, of course, that we'd lose.' ' "