Nichols held two test screenings and was relieved that only a handful of the audience members brought up the Clinton parallel. "I was worried about that," he admits. But many people will be watching for links between reality and fiction. Lawyer Regina Darby says her client, librarian Carter-Clark, will also sue Nichols and Universal Pictures if a sex scene between Stanton and the librarian ends up in the film. Darby claims, "When the film crew went to the library, someone said, 'Where's the woman that had sex with Clinton?'
Nichols hasn't heard anything from the president. He saw the first couple shortly after shooting, when he and Sawyer attended two dinner parties in their honor on Martha's Vineyard last summer. But he says the president never mentioned Primary Colors. The only player from the real-life drama to visit the set was Klein.
And Travolta and Thornton were the only actors who met their archetypes. The rest of the cast were typical Hollywood Clintonphiles: admittedly uninformed about political minutiae but attracted to Clinton's big-hearted glamour. Syndicated columnist Molly Ivins volunteered to arrange a meeting between Kathy Bates and Clinton campaign dust buster Betsey Wright, but Bates refused. "The character was so well drawn in the screenplay that I didn't need to go further," she says. Maura Tierney, co-star of NBC's News Radio, who plays media consultant Daisy Green, felt similarly about meeting Mandy Grunwald, a friend of Klein's. Her research she says, came from growing up as the daughter of a Boston city councilman. But while giving a reading of her character, Green sounds, for a moment, disturbingly like a Clinton apologist: "What's important to [Daisy] is who is the best man for the job. If your house is on fire, you don't care if the fireman is fooling around on his wife."
