Political Documentaries Face Buyer Resistance in Election Year

You could hear a pin drop at the Soho House Screening Room as outspoken political gadfly James Carville and filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer talked about their new movie, “Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid.”

The film barely finished in time for the Telluride Film Festival, as Tyrnauer had to reshoot the entire ending after President Joseph Biden self-destructed at the first presidential debate. The documentary filmmakers at the packed screening were hanging on Carville’s words because he had predicted that if Biden stayed in the race, he would lose, which turned out to be prescient when he finally dropped out and his VP Kamala Harris took over. Carville knew Biden’s weakness from May polling data, and now the room wanted to know what he thought was happening in the week before the election.

But the film, picked up by CNN Documentary Films, rolled out late in terms of reaching election voters and awards voters.

“I wanted the film out before the election,” Tyrnauer told IndieWire. “We didn’t know what type of narrative we were doing. Suddenly, was this a tilting-of-windmills movie where James was on this lonely mission to get a sitting president to decide not to run again, which hasn’t ever happened quite this way in history? And would he succeed, or would he fail? And that really mattered, the ending of the film. And then there was that strange, almost three-week period where the President hadn’t made up his mind, and it seemed like he was going to stick, and what would the ending in the movie be then? So we just kept cutting toward suspicions of what might happen. It was a guessing game. But we had to finish the film. That was the pressure point, and then we had to get it sold.”

The film raised terrific response in Telluride. Tyrnauer, who had raised the funding independently, had to find a distributor who could release it before the election. “There weren’t that many places that could turn it around that quickly,” he said. “People are slow. We had a topical film. CNN [was] on our list, and then it quickly came together.”

When approached to direct the film, Tyrnauer was eager to take it on, he said. “James is a truth-teller in politics, which is the rarest of things, and that bore out in an unexpected way in the cycle, because while the entire Democratic Party has their heads in the sand like one giant collective ostrich, there was one person who was consistently saying after he saw the poll of May 4, 2023, on a day when we happen to be shooting in New Orleans, that the President United States was not going to be re-elected, and the fate of democracy was on the line, and he was vocal about it, in a way that almost every one of his peers refused to be.”

The movie shows Carville on his daily round of calls with his secret Democratic think tank of smart, connected journalists and operatives who have been talking every day since the early ’90s. “He gathers up all this information,” said Tyrnauer. “He’s widely and deeply read, and he has a one-man intel operation going, and then he formulates a message. He has multiple platforms: his own podcast, and MSNBC, CNN, etc, and he puts out these messages, and he’s the best in the world at distilling it down. What I saw was one man sitting in an apartment in New Orleans, moving the needle. He’s the ad hoc elder statesperson for the [Democratic] party at this point. [Nancy] Pelosi is the elder statesperson.”

‘Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid’Courtesy Everett Collection

Needless to say, the audience wanted to know what Carville thought of the polls. “They tell me the same thing they tell everybody else,” he said. “The race is close. If there are seven swing states, the most unlikely outcome is they break four/three. An election usually breaks one way toward the end, and if it broke against us, we would lose. If it breaks for us, and I think it’s going to break for us, I’m a big believer in ‘if you don’t think you can win, you’re not going to win.’ If you’re sitting there depressed and questioning it, then it’s terrible when it’s shit at the end. I have good reasons to think that we’re going to win.”

There are several, Carville said. “First of all, we have more money. Secondly, we have real party unity, the Democratic coalition right now goes from Liz Cheney to AOC. We have by far better organization. There’s a lot of passionate people that don’t like Trump. We got every cultural, entertainment, athletic [endorsement] from Taylor Swift to LeBron James. We have two presidents. And if the campaign has a sense of closing momentum, it’s going to matter. It’s going to help us break this little log jam here that we’re pretty sure it’s going to break. Oh, I just want to be sure it breaks our way.”

How did Carville interpret the high turnout for early voting? “I’m seeing that habitual voters are voting early, so it doesn’t matter, because they want to vote on Election Day anyway,” he said. “We’re seeing among self-described registered Republicans, we have a higher female ratio than you would expect. And I think that’s good news. People will worry themselves and analyze, well, it’s better in Michigan, but it’s not as good in Georgia, and by way, that’s still going on, from what I can discern, it hasn’t told us a lot.

Carville wrapped up the night by saying, “23 million people have health insurance today because of what they worked on in 2009. There is no power remotely more meaningful than political power, not star power, cultural power, financial power, religious power. You can mix and put them all together, and they don’t have the same effect on people’s lives that political power does. There’s nobody out there that can get 23 million people health insurance that didn’t have it before. And why do we hold in contempt the one thing that has the greatest capacity to change people’s lives? You can’t change people’s lives without selling what you’re doing, framing the argument, drawing a coalition together to do the things that politics has to do.”

While “Carville” has some catching up to do in terms of the Oscar race, it was lucky to get out before the election, airing several times on CNN and getting a qualifying theatrical run. So did Errol Morris‘ incendiary border separation documentary “Separated” (Greenwich), which played in limited release in theaters October 4 but won’t hit MSNBC until December 5. At Telluride, Morris told me he wanted people to see his movie as soon as possible. “To say that I’m a little bit discouraged would be an understatement,” he said. “Well, it’s not over. We’re working on it. We have not given up.”

Again, this is not how you mount an Oscar campaign. Many successful Oscar contenders open at Sundance in January and build awareness through other festivals and screening programs in the months to follow. Other political films that have had to turn to self-distribution despite earning strong reviews are SUndance opener “Union,” about organizing an Amazon warehouse, and “Zurawski v Texas,” which shows the horrific impact that restrictive abortion laws can have on pregnant women, 22 of whom joined a lawsuit against the state of Texas. Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and Jennifer Lawrence are executive producers and have helped to raise funds for a 50-state impact campaign ahead of the election in states with abortion ballot initiatives on the line. But no distributor has taken it on. The filmmakers hope that the film will find a permanent home with a traditional distributor after the election.

‘Zurawski v Texas‘Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault

“We’ve been self-distributing,” said director Maisie Crowe, who has been traveling across the country with her co-director Abbie Perrault and the film’s participants. “We did screenings across Texas. Last weekend, we did a virtual watch party that we were able to put out for free for anyone across the U.S. It was so popular that people who streamed it wanted to have family members, friends, people in other states be able to stream it, and we got so many emails that we decided to do another weekend of streaming. I know we’re not alone. I know there’s a lot of powerful documentaries waiting.”

Added Perrault, “We want this to reach as many people as possible. We think these messages will outlast the election, because the day after the election, nothing will have changed in Texas immediately and in many other states. It took 50 years to reverse Roe v. Wade. It’s going to take a while to secure some of our rights back.”