E-Mail This Article to a Friend CINEMA RANGER Total eclipse on Kerry BY ADAM REILLY

If John Kerry were seeking a fair and balanced documentarian to chronicle his early political history, Chris Egan probably wouldn’t be his first choice. Egan, a 40-year-old Back Bay resident who runs the business-talk Boston radio station WBIX-AM, is one of Massachusetts’s most prolific Republican fundraisers. In the faux–Old West parlance of the Bush-Cheney campaign, he’s a "Ranger," someone who’s raised over $200,000 for the cause. (Egan’s father, Richard, the founder of Hopkinton-based EMC2 Corp and Bush-Cheney ’04’s Massachusetts finance-committee chairman, is a "Ranger," too; so is his brother Michael.)

In a just-completed film documentary — Eclipsed by the Sun: The Political Education of John Kerry — Egan chronicles Kerry’s 1972 campaign for Massachusetts’s Fifth Congressional District, which he lost after being repeatedly hammered in the editorial pages of the Lowell Sun. (Hence the title — get it?)

As Egan tells it, the topic came to him during the primaries. "I was watching the Democratic candidates debate in Iowa, watching C-SPAN late at night, and John Kerry said something really interesting at the outset of the debate — that he’d learned in 1972 not to leave any charge unanswered," he recalls. Initially, Egan considered simply writing an op-ed on the 1972 contest. Then a friend in broadcasting urged him to consider a full-fleged documentary — and Kerry proceeded to win in Iowa and New Hampshire. "That’s when I decided to do the project," Egan says.

Of course, as a fervent Bush supporter, Egan brings a unique perspective to his subject. Revisiting Kerry’s 1972 congressional race allows him to highlight a bevy of embarrassing Kerry factoids — the three mailing addresses Kerry acquired in two months in 1972, as he looked for a suitable district to run in; the arrest of Kerry’s brother Cameron and campaign field director Thomas Vallely for breaking into an office building where Kerry and a Democratic rival both had offices; Sun editor Clement Costello’s acid panning of Kerry’s anti–Vietnam War stance ("Mr. Kerry’s national reputation as a radical leftist war agitator which he himself created in an immature judgement of America’s role in Vietnam will not inspire confidence or respect for Mr. Kerry or the district ... in Washington"). It’s compelling stuff — especially if you want to see Bush back in the White House in 2005.

Yet Egan insists his film, which will have its first showing at Lowes Theatres Boston Common on July 22 at 6 p.m., isn’t a hatchet job. "This is a documentary," he asserts. "A documentary is an accurate portrayal of historical facts on some event that people have deemed worthy of history, and this is a significant event in Massachusetts political history. All I’m doing is putting it on film. It’s going to be what a documentary is, which is a clear, factual, straightforward representation of the facts."

Egan may be eager to discuss the documentary form, but he gets testy when asked how how much he’d raised for Bush to date. "I’d rather talk about the documentary, if that’s okay," Egan says. "I don’t want this to be a Bush documentary. I’ve worked too hard for too long. Now it’s time to talk about something I’ve done." Then, this addendum: "But make no mistake who I support in the general election."

Spoken like a true "Ranger."