On October 25, once and future New York City Council candidate Zack Weiner hosted a rally in Washington Square Park. When I arrived, a large crowd had gathered in front of the Arch. I was impressed.
But it turned out that the crowd was actually there for Mel Ottenberg and Alex Consani, the editor-in-chief of Interview and his latest supermodel cover star. The Weiner campaign was instead posted up at a table set further back in the park. A couple people wore hot dog costumes; a couple of sex workers offered slapping, boot kissing, and dirty talk for a suggested donation; Weiner tried to get his constituents’ attention with a megaphone. This tracks for a homespun campaign that was put on the map after a video of its candidate being flogged in a sex dungeon was picked up by the New York Post, then by the Guardian, Teen Vogue, and many more. If you’ve heard about this campaign at all, this is why. But this leak was actually coordinated by the campaign, to get attention for their candidate and the film they are now screening about him, Citizen Weiner.
Like the events in Washington Square Park, Citizen Weiner spends nearly 90 minutes observing Weiner’s humiliation in his effort to run for office. The film straddles the line between documentary and mockumentary; Weiner actually was on the ballot for New York City Council, and he did really think staging a sex scandal might help him win, even if his campaign staff was composed of actors. And he’s probably going to run again.
When Weiner ran in 2021, he finished with about 2% of the vote. This was the expected result, as he was running against former Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer. You might think that, considering this, the entire idea was a joke: a twenty-something candidate with no political experience running an internet-brained campaign against a seasoned, popular politician. But Citizen Weiner director Daniel Robbins maintains that they were serious, and that Weiner has serious political aspirations. In this conversation with The A.V. Club, Robbins breaks down the fact and fiction in the campaign, and why he thinks what he calls a “reality movie” could be a blueprint for fellow young filmmakers.
The A.V. Club: How did you come up with this idea?
Daniel Robbins: Zack and Joe [Gallagher, who plays the campaign manager] met up at his apartment because Joe was just fired from his sales job. Zack just got out of a bad relationship—he was dumped. They both weren’t doing so well. This was 2020. They were watching TV, going between Trump rallies, political rallies, and wrestling, and they felt like they were so similar. It encouraged them to try something where they run for office and they acknowledge that they’re acting and being fake but still go along with it. Zack separately had an idea about a movie about a politician who has a scandal and embraces it. Those two ideas were floating in their heads, and they came and spoke to me about it. I was like, “Well, I don’t think following you for a year of my life with a camera really makes sense. I feel like this movie wouldn’t be that interesting—there’s no climax.” Then we connected the ideas and said, “What if you actually run in real life? Then a week before the election there’s a big scandal you have to recover from.” That scandal gets picked up by a paper or two, that was the hope. And then it ended up really exploding in a big way.
AVC: There’s a funny moment when you go to Miami to get away, apparently hoping that the video is going to blow up while you’re gone, and it doesn’t.
DR: That’s a good example of how it’s unclear what’s real and what’s fake. Our intention after filming for eight months was to leak [the BDSM video] to the press and it’d just go viral. But it didn’t, at first. We were devastated.
Zack, more than the rest of us, leaked this page to the internet that only a few people he knows saw. It’s not like people know it’s for a movie. It’s this bizarre thing that a few people found out about and it’s really humiliating.
We panicked—what do we do? What do we film? Zack was just so upset, laying in bed. I said let’s film this, it might work. Let’s lean into it. So we called the whole team over and they all met in Zack’s room. I didn’t give him lines, it’s just him talking about documenting a year of failures. And getting votes and getting attention, and how nobody cares about his scandal. That scene, to me, is the funniest in the movie. A good scene in a movie is a scene that can only exist in that film. Having a scene about a politician who’s upset that his scandal didn’t get traction feels like such a true and funny and unique thing.
AVC: Then Zack’s campaign manager leaked it to the New York Post, and from there it took off?
DR: Yes, but he did more work to leak it to the Post. There’s more that we recorded that wasn’t in the film because it made the plot point too long. But what actually happened is that he emailed it to the Post, and they still didn’t pick it up. Someone gave Joe some PR advice that if they just reported on this story, it seemed like it might be punching down. And there’s the revenge porn element. But if Joe contacted them and said he wanted to get out ahead of the story, then they might feel more comfortable writing about it. So Joe contacted the New York Post as Zack’s campaign manager and said that this tape is going around and that we’re trying to get out ahead of it, and then they were comfortable writing about it. And everyone just treated it as reality after that—Colbert, Fox News, Seth Meyers, a bunch of podcasts.
AVC: I have wondered what kind of fact-checking they’re able to do when you’re basically filming a live show.
DR: People look to them as… I don’t know that people say they’re news sources, but we treat them as news. And truly they just went off the New York Post article. The New York Post deserves credit, too, because they reported it authentically. Jon [Levine] really called them, spoke to them. He wrote in the article that the campaign showed it to the New York Post, or flagged it to the Post, which is a huge red flag. I think they thought this was very odd, but it’s such a funny story we gotta go with it.
AVC: It’s so the Post’s bag to report on something like that.
DR: Right, a Democratic candidate with a sex scandal named Weiner is like the holy trinity.
AVC: How much were you inspired by Borat, or Eric Andre at the RNC?
DR: All that was huge on our mind. The main three were Borat, Nathan For You, and Mr. America, where Tim Heidecker ran for office. I guess the difference between them is those generally prank the people on screen, and today that’s viewed as a little too cynical. So the goal with this film was that anyone that Zack interacts with won’t be pranked, but the prank will be on the media at large and more on the system. And also on us a little bit because, you know, he has a sex tape that leaks.
Another thing that we tried to do was that, in Borat and Nathan For You, if there’s a plot point where you go to this person’s house, they’re generally isolated from the rest of the story and if it doesn’t work they can move on. But here we tried to make it intersect with reality as much as possible and lean into the story. So if we met a character that we liked, we would write them into the movie and have them come back later. It was definitely a little stressful because we couldn’t predict how the movie would turn out at the end, but it gives it a certain electricity.
AVC: Sometimes I’m legitimately scared for the actors in those projects because the other people are sometimes violent or angry. Were there moments during Citizen Weiner where you were scared of some of the people you would run into?
DR: I don’t think so, because it’s local politics on the Upper West Side, so it’s a pretty tame crowd. But there was a point where Jeff Coltin, when he was the city and state reporter at Politico, came to Zack’s rally, where there’s people with ball gags and there’s a big crowd chanting his name. At the rally we had a couple of extra actor friends there to help juice the crowd. Coltin spoke to one of them and they asked him, “Oh, are you here for the shoot?” And Coltin’s like, “What do you mean?” They said, “It’s for the film shoot that we’re helping out with.”
So Jeff went on Twitter and wrote a whole thing about how this is a mockumentary, he has confirmation. We thought the whole thing would come undone. But then our exciting fiction spread better than his boring reality. He got a little attention on Twitter, but it didn’t overcome the story. I think one person even commented on it saying, “Well how can it be a mockumentary if he’s actually on the ballot?” And Jeff wrote, “Well then it’s a very odd documentary,” or something like that. That was a scary day, because we thought we might have been found out.
AVC: Let’s talk about how you define this film between mockumentary and documentary. At the premiere, you called it a “reality film.” What’s the directing philosophy behind that? Did you ever feel like you were staging too much, or not enough?
DR: We characterize it as a reality movie because it’s not fake, but it’s not a real documentary. It’s politics, which exists where people are acting fake but it’s in real life. In terms of directing it, the main thing is keeping the tone grounded.
Walking out of the theater, some people think it’s real the whole time, some people halfway through had a feeling it was fake, some people walked out and even after the reveal, they didn’t realize it was fake. The main thing was just keeping the actors as authentic as possible and trying to not to have what Mike Nichols calls “expensive jokes,” which are jokes that are funny but they stretch the reality too much and they make the rest of the jokes in the film less funny. So there were some things that we tried or did that were a little more ridiculous that we had to pull back from to make the experience more engaging. For the actors, that just meant emphasizing authenticity over jokes. I always told them, just do whatever feels authentic, maybe dial it up a little, but never aim for a funny line. You get the sense at the rallies and all the events, we try to be as real as possible.
AVC: Who was the dominatrix? Was that an actor?
DR: Yeah.
We just asked some actor friends we know who might be down. And one of them said, “I know this girl who’s really funny and they’d probably do it for you as long as you blur their face, because they don’t want people thinking they’re an actual dominatrix in an actual sex video.”
AVC: What was it like filming that, knowing that it was hopefully going to be seen by a lot of people?
DR: It was kind of hilarious. It was the first thing we filmed in the whole shoot. It was kind of like Cortez burning the ships, where at that point, for Zack, there was no going back. Once he’s running the campaign for six months and he has constituents, he might think twice about it and not want to film the sex tape. So I was like, “If I’m going to commit a year of my life to this, we need to agree on the tape at the start.”
Filming it, I shot it on a worse camera because if the production value was too high people probably wouldn’t buy it. We showed up to the dungeon in Manhattan on like 26th Street—it’s now closed—booked an hour session, said one of the kinks was videoing, I just went in with them and tried some stuff.
AVC: You had to tell the dungeon that the camera was part of the kink?
DR: Yeah, I mean they probably would have let us do it anyways, but we just didn’t want to be like, “Oh, it’s for a movie,” because that just opens a bunch of other issues.
AVC: I spoke to Zack about potentially doing another campaign. I asked how he could do this again if people know there’s already a movie about the first campaign, and he said that the voters actually seemed to like it. It was a bit of a selling point and gave him some positive attention. What do you make of that?
DR: He’s definitely right and it’s bizarre that someone made a movie about running for city council while they ran for city council, which you’d think would make people not trust him. But people are supporting him to run again now, they’re offering to help raise money. I think it’s because—I mean, we see it now with the election. When people look for someone to vote for, probably the first thing is likability, and then the second is policy. Despite making a movie about running and making his own sex tape, he’s likable, his policies are sound, and people mostly agree with them. Trump has proven that people will excuse character and antics.
AVC: I was surprised that he had actual policy proposals. Getting stores reopened after COVID, stuff that was tangible and common sense.
DR: And it was genuine. Zack and Joe would always have the line that it’s funny, but it’s not a joke. The campaign wasn’t a joke. We tried to make it as funny as possible, but even when I wasn’t filming, they were running the campaign to win. They had other policies that we didn’t cover because it didn’t work in the story but they were definitely taking the campaign part of it with a certain amount of weight. And they had to, because if the campaign wasn’t thought of as real, then none of this would work.
AVC: Does Citizen Weiner have a political outlook?
DR: We try to say that it’s an apolitical political movie, where we don’t go into Democrat or Republican almost at all. It’s a primary with a bunch of Democrats, so it’s about the policies and the community. But if there is a political outlook it would be hyper-localism, where, especially now with the national election, everyone is so obsessed about who’s gonna be president, as if that’s going to determine our future. I hope that the film shows that you can make a much more tangible impact on your local community in your own pocket of the world. It might seem hard for one person to make a difference. I know young people are told that. I for one felt like it wasn’t possible. But after seeing this group of friends run on an almost nothing budget, and have an impact on the community…even though they didn’t win, they still helped people and made their community slightly better. It made me feel like if people just focused on local politics it could help benefit things.
AVC: Is that a feeling you developed over the course of Citizen Weiner? There’s an inherent cynicism to doing a fake campaign where you’re trying to see if the media will pick it up. Maybe that’s more cynical regarding the media than politics.
DR: You’re right that the idea does sound cynical, but that’s also the part that wasn’t really surprising to us. Zack had the line that people are a lot more likely to pay attention to a car crash than how to fix a road. We all knew that the media wouldn’t cover a local candidate’s policy, but they would cover a local candidate’s sex scandal. So I don’t think that part surprised us, but what did surprise us is that even though… you can call politics a fugazi, the fugazi can still be used to benefit the people around you. That’s what happened in the film, where it is this fugazi but it did help, you know, the young entrepreneur who opened his storefront, it helped a few other people in the community and brought some energy to local politics.
AVC: What advice would you impart to other campaigns?
DR: It would be the same advice that people are giving to companies now, which is to be authentic and fun. Politics doesn’t have to be taken that seriously. The main currency in politics is attention, and you’re not going to get attention just by having the best idea. It takes a certain amount of marketing and creativity to get that idea out there. James Carville, he just had a documentary that came out. I listened to him on a podcast and one of his main points that he pushes to Democrats is that you have to be a huckster. Even though you have the idea, you still have to know how to sell it and make it entertaining. To view politics as just a policy game will land people on the losing side. But if you view it as policy with entertainment, then you can build a real strategy for winning. It’s proven here that Zack actually has a coalition now that’s going to support him because he’s shown he’s entertaining with his policy, despite the madness of how he made this film.
AVC: So he wants to run again?
DR: Yeah, I think he’s going to.
AVC: What’s the future of that look like?
DR: We’re still deciding a few things. One is: we’re probably going to film it, but how do you top it? You don’t want to make another project and have it not be as good. We don’t know if we’ll just support him and film videos for a more genuine campaign, or if it’s a genuine campaign and we just try to make an entertaining movie around it.
One idea now is to play in the waters of a Super PAC. A lot of people have heard about Super PACs and might understand intellectually how it works, but, emotionally, if you actually see it, it would have a much different impact. People know that you can give as much money as you want to this PAC and then they can support the candidate as long as they don’t coordinate directly. So there could be something funny if Zack’s campaign manager becomes in charge of a Super PAC, gets all this money and starts supporting Zack, but they can’t coordinate directly so we see them trying to talk to each other and they can’t talk about what he’s going to do but he tries to, just to show how ridiculous this law is and maybe get some attention to it. That’s just the first conversation—we don’t truly know. But if he does run again, the goal would be to win this time. Like Rocky; he loses the first time but he gets a win in Rocky II.
AVC: Don’t incriminate yourself on video.
DR: It’s for sure going to end up with someone in jail, but Dan Bright said he’d help protect us. He’s a pretty fierce lawyer.
AVC: I love that scene where your lawyer is talking about beating the hell out of people. What was that?
DR: [Laughing] I wish I knew. We needed a campaign lawyer that we could ideally film, so Joe went online and he reached out, I think, to Rudy Giuliani’s lawyer first. But he wanted a ridiculous price and wasn’t comfortable with the camera. But then Joe found Dan Bright. There are like six election lawyers for local politics, and Dan was another one of them. Dan said we could film. So we went there, and after like ten minutes, I was like, “This scene is not interesting, I don’t think anything gonna happen.” But then Dan’s like, “You’re gonna want to get all this.” He kept us there for like two and a half hours, and he was just telling them the craziest stories of lawsuits he’s had, how he told this person to fuck off and how he threatened to murder someone, and I was videoing it completely in shock. I didn’t think this would even make a scene because it was just so insane. But then our editor put it together as a supercut of insane things he said. A lawyer speaking that frankly with no filter is rare to see.
AVC: What would Weiner run for in the second go? The same seat?
DR: He would run for mayor. Well, we’re saying mayor, but he’d run for the same exact seat. I think Gale Brewer is going to run again, so it might be a true Rocky II rematch. But if she doesn’t run again, I think we’ll still run.
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