Barack Obama, movie star? He’s won a Grammy, published best-selling books and taken the lead in the Democratic presidential race, so can an Oscar be far behind?
You won’t see Obama donning a tuxedo for this Sunday’s Academy Awards show, but next year he might very well be there on stage, if not in spirit.
A major documentary about the Democratic presidential candidate is in the works, offering an inside view of his campaign with filmmakers shooting “staggering amounts” of revealing behind-the-scenes footage. The project, currently untitled, has been ongoing for roughly two years, backed by actor-producer Edward Norton’s Class 5 Productions banner and directed by Amy Rice, sister of Andrew Rice, an Oklahoma state senator and U.S. Senate candidate. Alicia Sams, who served as field producer for last year's doc "Election Day," is co-directing with Rice.
Every campaign season brings out camera crews, and this year is no exception. Expect at least three documentaries about Obama to emerge out of this election — not all of them laudatory.
Though Rice has only been involved with small documentaries, and Norton is best known for his acting roles in Hollywood dramas such as “Fight Club” and “American History X,” one advantage these filmmakers enjoy is near-exclusive access: They engaged directly with Obama and won his staff’s trust in the year before he even announced his presidential candidacy.
Many documentaries about political campaigns, such as “The War Room” — the acclaimed 1993 doc about then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton — gain minimal access to the actual candidates. (Clinton hardly appeared in that film.)
Says Norton, “We were interested in tracking the progress of someone from our generation, rather than our parents’ generation, taking the national stage, [and] documenting his impressions and experiences. When we first became involved, we weren’t even sure he was going to run for president, so it’s turned into something far beyond any of our expectations.”
“An Inconvenient Truth” changed Al Gore’s image from boring stiff to cool green dude, but it could be a while before the Obama doc is even seen, much less has an impact on his reputation. The movie is still being shot and filmmakers won’t begin editing until his race for the presidency has ended. Plans call for a 2009 release, says Rice.
Filming digitally with hi-def cameras, Rice has shot what’s been called “gauzy footage” of Obama in an Iowa barn during the state’s early caucus, holding court in strategy sessions, suffering defeat in New Hampshire’s primary, prepping for debates across the country, and eventually surpassing one-time presumptive nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton. “The film is still being made, literally, every week,” says Norton.
The authorized biopic with a famous producer isn’t the only Obama documentary in the works. Conservative nonprofit Citizens United is rushing its own Obama doc into production — this after nearly two years making an anti-Clinton video called “Hillary: The Movie,” and watching its commercial prospects dim as its subject struggles to stay in the race.
Ironically, Citizens United president and longtime Clinton-hater David Bossie says he enjoys seeing Clinton falter, though he isn’t quite so happy to see his DVD business slide as a result.
“Hillary: The Movie” sales are “directly related” to Clinton’s political ascent, Bossie explained in an interview with Politico, estimating more than 20,000 DVDs were sold in January, when the title was first released. “If Hillary is out [of the race] by April, that will cut our market share dramatically.”
Watching Clinton fall “from metaphysical certainty to an underdog” is bad for his company, Bossie admits, even though he sees a silver lining. “If she’s not the nominee, even if I don’t sell as many DVDs, that’s a victory,” he said.
Citizens United also had problems advertising “Hillary: The Movie” because of campaign finance laws that block TV spots supporting or condemning specific candidates. Royce C. Lamberth, one of three federal district court judges who heard company arguments in the case, wrote that the video was made “to inform the electorate that Sen. Clinton is unfit for office ... and that viewers should vote against her.” (The judges reportedly laughed out loud when Citizens United attorneys argued their product was no different than TV news programs “60 Minutes” and “Nova.”) The case is currently up for consideration by the U.S. Supreme Court.
As a result of the Clinton dilemma, Bossie says he’s budgeting a million dollars for his new Obama video, tentatively titled “The Big Picture.” But there are problems with that project, too: He’s having a “very difficult” time locating documents, archival footage and early photos of the candidate.
Still, Bossie is hopeful he can hire enough commentators and pundits to fill the attack video, which he stresses will be “issue-based” and cover Obama’s positions on immigration, taxes and troop withdrawal from Iraq. Bossie also dreams of an Obama/Hillary Democratic ticket. “Then,” he says, “I’ll have a double feature.”
Dozens of other docs are being created this campaign season, of course, and you’ll find them mostly on blogs as well as YouTube. Robert Greenwald, the liberal TV and movie producer who reinvented himself a few years ago as a guerrilla filmmaker skewering Rupert Murdoch (“Outfoxed”) and Halliburton (“Iraq for Sale”), now dedicates himself to instant mini-docs.
“A year ago I decided to focus on short, investigative videos,” he says. “I projected there’d be a million and a half viewers my first year, but it’s been closer to 12 million.”
Among Greenwald’s greatest hits: a “Fox Attacks” series of controversial Fox News material (“Fox Attacks Obama”) and the anti-McCain clip “Less Jobs, More Wars.” One Tuesday night in January, he heard Bill O’Reilly opine there were “not many” homeless veterans; by that Thursday morning, Greenwald had posted a new video profiling a half-dozen such vets.
“Let others with more resources and bigger megaphones make feature documentaries about the presidential campaigns,” he says. “I’d rather focus on issues, not candidates.”
While quick-hit clips are gaining in popularity, long-form films are still the preferred format for old-school moviemakers — even if the hurdles are higher. Frazer Pennebaker, a producer and son of veteran documentarian D.A. Pennebaker (“The War Room,” “Don’t Look Back”), was invited to shoot a series of hour-long docs about McCain last year, but finding proper financing doomed the project.
“You need a huge entity to pull off these kind of films,” he says, noting that the cost of shooting digital video has become cheaper, but buying $1,500 last-minute plane tickets and other factors quickly eat into a low budget. Nailing down distribution can also be tough. “HBO and other TV outlets are shying away from buying films aligned with one candidate over another,” he says, while full-scale theatrical runs are difficult as well.
Pennebaker, who served as producer of his dad’s “The War Room,” said that the classic campaign film had a high budget for the time, even though just 30 hours of footage was actually printed. “We shot on film, not video, so it was really expensive,” he recalls. “The easy part was that we stayed in one place for most of the time, and the Clinton camp didn’t have a clue what we were doing. George Stephanopoulos thought it would be a late-night PBS show that only his mother would watch.”
Eugene Jarecki, whose poetic yet powerful 2005 documentary “Why We Fight” delved into the psychology of America’s war fever, yearns to see a hard-hitting expose that accurately depicts the fundraising machinery, the greasing of palms by Washington lobbyists and the ever-higher costs that go into a political campaign.
For any documentarian, digging beneath the surface is a Herculean task, he says: “It’s nearly impossible to speak in dulcet tones and be heard.”
Source: Politico