ESSENTIAL INDUSTRY AND AWARD NEWS  MAY 02, 2019 20 Years of Election, and Tracy Flick Are you an ambitious woman with big ideas, a take-charge attitude, and carefully styled hair? Are you—gulp—a politician? If so, it’s nigh on inevitable that you will, at some point, be compared to a certain fictional high-school student: Tracy Flick, the student body presidential wannabe at the center of Alexander Payne’s 1999 film Election. The uncompromising, self-righteous character, created by novelist Tom Perrotta, has become something of a tabula rasa for audiences over the last 20 years, writes contributor Elisabeth Donnelly: “Is she a villain? A victim? An abuse survivor? An annoying overachiever? A misunderstood hero?” Maybe, Payne told Donnelly, she’s actually all of the above. “She’s a person. A strong person with a strong personality. But that’s how I see all the characters in my movies. They’re people. Because I have to understand them and see what makes them tick,” he said in an interview about the film’s lasting legacy. Nevertheless, the Tracy comparisons persist: “Every four years, when some gal is running for president of something, they dredge out the Tracy Flick comparison. It might be Kirsten Gillibrand, or Hillary Clinton, or who knows who. Then I’m called to make some comment about that. I say, well, it’s like she entered the popular culture, like Archie Bunker. You could never foresee those things.” Elsewhere in HWD, Joanna Robinson reads the tea leaves before Game of Thrones premieres its third-to-last episode ever; Sonia Saraiya gives two thumbs-up to Knock Down the House, a documentary that fortuitously began following Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez long before her historic Congressional primary victory; Richard Lawson wants you to watch Christina Applegate in Dead to Me; and Anjelica Huston stirs up some old Oscar drama.

Pick Flick Alexander Payne on the lasting legacy of Election, released 20 years ago—and the abiding specter of its ambitious central character, whom all female politicians are doomed to be compared against. READ MORE » Next on Thrones The supernatural battle between the living and the dead is over, which means there’s a chance for the show to return to its roots: politics, scheming, and backstabbing. READ MORE » Knockout Rachel Lears’s Netflix documentary, Knock Down the House, is hampered by a lack of conclusions, but seeing the passion of its candidates more than makes up for that. READ MORE » Killer Performance Christina Applegate gets a plum role in Netflix’s Dead to Me, a dark half-hour comedy-thriller that gives a veteran performer the chance to shine a new light. READ MORE » Feud Alert! After Anjelica Huston beat Oprah Winfrey for best supporting actress at the 1986 Oscars, Huston says, “She never had me on her show, ever. She won’t talk to me.” READ MORE »