Hollywood’s go-to person on the environment. She was a big fan of the Inner-City Games as well and welcomed the chance to spread the idea.
Los Angeles still stood out not only because it was the home of the Inner-City Games but also because it was the only big city that had after-school programs in every one of its ninety elementary schools. I went to consult the woman who’d accomplished this, a dynamic educator named Carla Sanger. After I’d asked a million questions, she suggested, “Why don’t you carve out the middle schools and high schools and do programs there?” So Bonnie and I started raising funds to do just that. Our plan was to bring Inner-City Games after-school programs into four schools in 2002 and expand from there.
Pretty quickly, though, I realized that the task was too big. We would never be able to raise enough money to put a program into every middle school and high school that needed it. Even worse, Los Angeles was just one city in a state that had roughly six thousand schools and six million students.
When you run up against a problem that gigantic, sometimes government has to help. But Carla told me that she’d tried many times to lobby for funds in Sacramento, and it was hopeless. State officials and lawmakers just did not see after-school programs as important. I checked with a few state senators and assembly people I knew, and they said she was right.
That left only one possible avenue: putting the issue directly before the California voters as a ballot initiative. I saw in this idea the chance to improve the lives of millions of kids and at the same time to get my feet wet in state politics. This wasn’t the right time for me to run for governor, but I committed myself to spend the next year campaigning for what came to be known as Proposition 49, the After School Education and Safety Program Act of 2002.
I signed up George Gorton as the campaign manager, along with other members of the Pete Wilson brain trust, and they set up a headquarters downstairs from my office, a space we had previously leased to actor Pierce Brosnan and his production company. Soon they were surveying voters, researching the issues, preparing lists of donors and media contacts, networking with other organizations, planning for signature gathering and public events, and so on. I was like a sponge soaking it all in.
In my movie career, I’d always paid close attention to focus groups and surveys, and, of course, in politics opinion research plays an even bigger role. I felt right at home with that. Don Sipple, who was expert in political messaging, sat me down in front of a camera and had me talk at length. Those tapes got edited into three-minute segments to be shown to focus groups of voters. The purpose was to pick out what themes and traits of mine appealed to people and what might put them off. I learned, for example, that people were impressed with my success as a businessman, but when I mentioned on the tape that Maria and I lived in a relatively modest house, the people in the focus groups felt that I must be out of touch.
That fall I’d blocked out two weeks to promote my latest action movie,
I learned there is a whole art to shaping a proposition so that it doesn’t put people off or cause unnecessary fights or resistance. For instance, to keep after-school from crowding out existing programs that people liked, we designed it to take effect no earlier than 2004, and only if the California economy was growing again and annual state revenues had gone up by $10 billion. To hold down the overall cost, we made it a grant program to which schools had to apply. And we made it so that wealthy districts that already had after-school programs would be expected to wait in line behind districts that couldn’t afford them.
All the same, when education experts estimated the annual cost—$1.5 billion—we were all in sticker shock. Even in a state with $70 billion in revenue, that was much more than voters would approve. So before we even started campaigning, we scaled down our proposal to cover just middle schools, not high schools. This decision was painful, but something had to go, and the younger kids were more vulnerable and needed the programs more. Narrowing the program cut the price tag by more than $1 billion.
But before we filed it in late 2001, we circulated drafts and went around making presentations to unions and civic groups: teachers, principals, school superintendents, chambers of commerce, law-enforcement officials, judges and mayors and other public officials. We wanted the broadest possible coalition—and the smallest possible number of enemies. Just as Pete Wilson’s guys had predicted, I found the fund-raising part hard at first. The reason I wanted to be wealthy was that I never wanted to ask anyone for money. It was so against my grain. When I made the first solicitation, I was literally sweating. I told myself it wasn’t really me asking, it was the cause.
That first call was to Paul Folino, a technology entrepreneur and a friend of the Wilson campaign, and after a short and gracious conversation, he committed $1 million. My second call was to Jerry Perenchio, a producer and mover and shaker who ended up owning the Spanish-language television network Univision and then selling it for $11 billion. I knew Jerry personally. He promised to raise another $1 million. Those were heavenly calls; I felt so relieved when I hung up the phone. Then I made smaller calls for $250,000. I ended the day flying high.
The next day I went to hit up Marvin Davis in his office in the Fox Studios tower. He weighed about four hundred pounds. “What can I do for you?” he asked. I’d made movies for Fox, and his son had produced
Soon Paul Folino hit on a solution to make me feel more comfortable asking for money. He suggested that we make my fund-raisers low-key: dinner parties and small receptions. We found that as soon as I was in a relatively informal setting where I could schmooze, I was able to pass the hat very effectively.
I loved finding new allies. In November I took our draft of Prop 49 to John Hein, the political chief of the California Teachers Association, the most powerful union in the state. John was used to people asking for favors. I didn’t expect him to be very receptive because Republicans and unions usually don’t mix. So when I made my pitch, I told him right off the top, “We need no money from you. If you endorse this, you don’t have to put a million dollars into the funding or anything like that. I’ll go out and raise the money. But we want to go into this together.” I also made the point that after-school programs not only help the kids but also reduce the strain on their teachers.
To my delight, he approved of our idea. In fact, he recommended only two changes in the proposal, the main one being that we add some language about hiring retired teachers. This wasn’t something I wanted to encourage too much, because young kids relate better to young people, especially after a whole day of teachers and school. They want counselors in jeans and with spiky hair, who can serve as parent figures but who don’t look like them. Still, it wasn’t a lot to ask, and we made the deal. And ultimately it worked out fine because not that many retired teachers wanted to go back to work anyway.
By normal standards, the start of an election year is way too early to put a ballot initiative before the public, since the vote isn’t until November. But I had to juggle Prop 49 and
Then we went back to the slow, painstaking work of building alliances and raising funds. Just like bodybuilding, campaigning is all about reps, reps, reps. I met with Parent-Teacher Associations, city councils, taxpayer groups, and the California Medical Association. This is when I discovered that raising cash from the set of a movie was a huge advantage, and
