Harry Thomason, an Emmy-nominated producer and director, spoke recently about his new movie, The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill Clinton, on a mobile phone while driving along California Highway 1. The film opens in Washington, D.C., on Friday, June 25.
What is the main message of your movie?
The media does not do their job as thoroughly as they did in the past. The lesson for both sides -- not just the liberal one -- is you cannot take things at face value. You need to read a lot of newspapers and watch a lot of news channels and then form your own opinion.
You say the media doesn't do their job. But maybe they were trying too hard when they wrote about Clinton.
Yeah, they were looking for something that wasn't there. It's kind of like the National Football League. The number of teams has expanded so much over the years that they now need more players -- and the talent pool has gotten thinner on a per-team business. Most people who are playing today could not have played in the 1970s. Basically the same thing has happened in news. There's a proliferation of cable channels and other news outfits. So reporters who would not have been working before can now find jobs. Many of them tend to rely on sources that are not as good as they should be. Or they'll go with stories that don't have sources. This puts pressure on the top of the food chain. You see, a major newspaper doesn't want to be left behind. They've got to match the work of what even the lowest of the cable networks is doing -- for economic reasons. They need to keep their stock prices up. This makes people run stories that wouldn't have appeared in the past. They would have been vetted much more thoroughly.
I heard it cost $2 million to make the movie. Who were the private investors who helped make it possible?
Some of them were friends. I just called and said, "This is an interesting project, and it's never going to happen unless you guys all band together and help me do it." I must say, they all answered the call. There's probably a group of 10 or 12 people that sort of pitched in and either raised money, or donated money, or whatever to do the film.
Sounds like running in the right crowd.
It's a good crowd. Here's what they have in common: They all knew the story and thought it should be told. I remember when Hillary Clinton said there was a vast right-wing conspiracy: She might have been wrong about it being vast, but it was a small, effective right-wing conspiracy. The problem was that the story -- as it's told by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons in their book, The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton -- is so dense. I knew it would take 18 hours to make a movie out of it. We decided we would make a shorter film and just give a flavor of what had been going on. Once people heard it was possible to tell the story in 90 minutes, it was easy to get them to invest in the film.
How did The Hunting of the President end up being a summer movie?
We've been accused of being part of a giant Bush-bashing wave of films released this summer. In fact, the film is being released now because we're slow. It took more than 20 months for us to wade through the material and put something together. We wish the film had been out six or seven months ago, but we couldn't do it. So, yes, we opened in New York on the same day The Stepford Wives opened. Which is not bad, really. In some ways, it makes our point: The press became Stepford Wives. They just went along.
So the main culprit in the film is --
The press. The film shows how easily the press was misled by the extreme right-wing. Once it started, you sort of joined in because it all seemed to make sense.
In the film, James Carville talked about a "Clinton journalist." Can you elaborate on that?
If you were a journalist and you said something in favor of Clinton, the extreme right-wing would blitz the owner of the magazine you wrote for, or the head of the network you worked for, with several thousand emails about what a bad reporter you were. If you showed any favoritism toward Clinton, you picked up a name: "Well, he's a Clinton journalist. You have to discount him." It takes its toll.
In the film, a Newsweek reporter in Little Rock is quoted: "I tried to tell my editors there is no there there, and they wouldn't listen." But a lot of good reporters -- from The New York Times, from all over -- thought there was a story.
There's no doubt about it -- a lot of people out there were trying to do a good job. But they were misled by a bunch of people in Arkansas who seemed very dumb but were actually very clever. They led some good reporters astray. And once they made those mistakes, they couldn't reverse themselves. They felt they had to ride those mistakes to the end or suffer damage to their reputations. Quite truthfully, a lot of them were under pressure from their editors. The attitude was: "We don't care if this story is true or not. You prove something about it. You just prove something." Jeff Gerth at The New York Times was driven by his editors to make that story true whether it was true or not. They believed that everything he printed about Whitewater was accurate. But it turned out not to be.
Speaking of the Arkansas folks, Larry Case [a Little Rock private eye] wanted you to rent a Corvette for him in exhange for helping on the film -- that was what it said at the end of the film. So he was totally scamming.
That's right. He sent a letter demanding we do it. I thought it was funny that it never stops. These guys are these guys, and they keep moving ahead. To this day, Larry Case will tell you he never found one single bad thing about Clinton. He was only too willing to get people to say whatever stuff a reporter wanted to hear.
In the film, Paul Begala talks about a time when official Washington went mad. Do you think understanding this era will make it easier to avoid it in the future?
I don't think so. See, I think as long as people believe that it might work then it will continue to happen. Starting in the '70s, Nixon started getting people to build the right-wing institutions that we see today -- The Washington Times, The American Spectator, and so on. They spent 25 years doing this. When they controlled the White House, they didn't need these organizations. But once President Bush lost to Clinton, they were all focused on one thing. Let's face it, their agenda was to railroad a president out of office. In some third-world country, they would have used guns. In this country, it was done with words. But the end result is the same whether you use guns, dirty tricks, or whatever. If the guy's out, he's out.
Has Bill Clinton seen the movie?
When we started this project, I told him, "Look, I may not treat you as kindly as you would like. But in order for us to have validity we have to examine every aspect of this, so let's make a deal right now. I'm not going to tell you how we're doing on the film. I'm not going to let you see any of it. And I'm not even going to talk about it with you." And so we've stuck to that. Some of the investors are friends of his. They have the DVD, and I believe he has seen the film. I hope he has because he's still talking to me.
You've gone from [1992 campaign video] A Man from Hope to The Hunting of the President. What have you learned about Clinton over the years?
What we've learned about Clinton -- and what I think the nation has learned -- is that people have extreme feelings about him one way or another.
And you?
I've learned that he is a very tolerant man. And that he never hates his enemies. And that makes him a better person than I am.
Well, then he has a gift.
He has a gift: not taking things as personally as most of us do.
When Clinton was at a conference in Aspen last year, he told a group of people that he believes most of our wounds are self-inflicted.
Well, I don't know anybody who knows that better than he does.
Tara McKelvey is a senior editor at The American Prospect.
