BEFORE: Today, our nation faced a terrible LINKING CRISIS, one which only I can fix. When I first put this documentary chain together, I had a lot of options - there's so much carryover between one doc and the next, especially if I confine the chain to just a few topics, like politics and comedy (the two subjects aren't so far apart, if you think about it...)
Once I had my 30 or so films, there were thousands of ways I could watch them, but then again, there are some docs with just a few notable people in them (like, "Icarus" or "Tower"), so I started there and I built my chain. The film about Watergate, with archive footage of Walter Cronkite, would be my lead-in, and the lead-out had to, ideally, get me somewhere close to "Spider-Man: Far From Home". I happened to notice, somehow, either on the IMDB or on Wikipedia, that an actor named Jonathan Freeman who appeared in a documentary called "Life, Animated", was also in a film called "October Sky". Jake Gyllenhaal could then carry over from "October Sky" to the new "Spider-Man" film. And so I had my chain.
Something didn't feel right, though, and yesterday I went and double-checked my links - Jonathan Freeman is not listed in "October Sky", not on IMDB, not on Wikipedia. So where did that come from? I thought I had this, made-in-the-shade, and I was well on my way to a Perfect Year, no gaps in the chain. Did I see some bad info on a cast list? Did I type the wrong name into my documentation? Did somebody update the IMDB to remove bad information? I'll never know, but the crisis continued - I now had no viable link to get me out of the documentary chain and back into fiction films. Well, this just wouldn't do - I didn't link over 180 films together just to let the chain die NOW!
So, I scrambled yesterday - I had to find a way to get the end of the chain to get me to Gyllenhaal. Let's see, Jonathan Freeman, what else has he been in? OK, there's "The Associate" with Whoopi Goldberg. Whoopi's also in a few of the docs I haven't watched yet, like the one about Robin Williams, so that doc can move to the end of the chain, and it's got a huge cast list, so that gives me options. I hate to do it, but let me scrap the order of the 14 or 15 docs that are left to watch, and come up with something else - everything's negotiable for the moment. John C. Reilly is in that Robin Williams doc, so is Nicole Kidman, Robert DeNiro, Steve Martin, Daniel Day-Lewis - there's a lot to work with! There's just got to be a link there to something with Jake Gyllenhaal, I just have to FIND it!
I could move a couple of the documentaries around and end with something with Jane Fonda, that might help. She's in a movie with Robert Redford that's on my list. Wait, she also makes an appearance of some kind in that new Whitney Houston documentary. And Kevin Costner's also listed in that doc, probably some footage from "The Bodyguard", and then there's an action film on Netflix that has both Costner and Chris Cooper in it - and Chris Cooper is also in "October Sky", so by adding two films, I can avert the crisis and get back on track. Only I'm already two films over the limit, and this would mean I'll have to cut two of the documentaries that I really want to see - including "Life, Animated", which caused the problem in the first place....
After cutting two docs out of the chain, and shifting things around a bunch of times, I noticed something else - Martin Scorsese is ALSO in that Robin Williams doc. I was going to link from the doc about Roger Ebert to the documentary about Ingmar Bergman via Scorsese, but what if I did it another way? What if I linked via Scorsese to the Robin Williams film, and that would move my comedian-based documentaries up a week, and move the Bergman doc to the end of the chain, essentially flipping around a piece of the chain that's about 9 or 10 films long, and making a few different connections. The film "Trespassing Bergman" has a number of big-name directors and actors in it, including....Laura Dern. And she's also in..."October Sky", starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Boom. ("Trespassing Bergman" also has Isabella Rossellini in it, and she's also in "Enemy" with Jake Gyllenhaal, which I could have flipped with "October Sky")
So I can't believe I'm saying this, but I went back to the ORIGINAL list of the 14 documentaries remaining in my chain, and I just put them back together in a different way, tabling "Whitney" and that Costner/Cooper film. Now I'm back to all the films I wanted to see, and none of the ones I didn't - I just have to watch them in a different order, that's all. And now they get me to exactly where I wanted to go, even if those same 14 films DIDN'T do that before, though I thought that they would. It's kind of like a wall collapsed in my house, and I built it back up using the exact same bricks - only each brick isn't in the same position it was before. Who cares? As long as the wall is solid and it stays together as a wall.
This is why my system has so many "multiple outs", because I sometimes have to move things around. But now I really need to double-check all of my links, I can't afford any more mistakes. If I had waited 4 or 5 days to check my links, it would have been too late, I wouldn't have been able to come up with another workable path for the 2nd half of Documentary Month - then I would have gotten to the end of the doc chain and been very frustrated over my mistake. Whew, that was a close one!
Roger Stone carries over from "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer".
THE PLOT: A documentary exploring the life and career of notorious Republican dirty trickster and longtime Trump adviser Roger Stone, who helped create the real estate mogul's political career.
AFTER: OK, so it appears that I now owe some words of apology to Gwen Stefani - it turns out that she may not have had as much to do with Donald Trump becoming President as Michael Moore would have us believe. That's the thing about urban legends, Mike, if they sound a bit too good to be true, then they usually are. Neil Armstrong never made a comment while on the moon about his former neighbor deserving a BJ, it's just an ironic story, or someone's joke that gained ground, and the next person who heard it repeated it as if it were a true story, not a joke. Moore himself was the subject of an urban legend that claimed that he "endorsed" Trump for President - but it was just dialogue from his film "Michael Moore in Trumpland" that was taken out of context. He was (accurately, as it turned out) predicting why Trump would win, because he was appealing to all the middle-class people who were out of work and looking for a way to get back at the system with their votes. Whoever quoted Moore conveniently left out the next part, which was where Moore predicted that voters would regret electing Trump weeks or months later, when they realized that he wasn't going to do a damn thing for the working class - except give them a "tax cut" that wasn't a cut at all, but just withheld less of their paychecks now, and they'd have to pay that back when they filed their annual tax return.
But how did Trump fool so many people - which I've heard you can do some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time - where did he get the ideas, the rhetoric, how did he know what to SAY to get elected? For that, you have to watch the documentary about Roger Stone. He's been hanging around in the background of many major political campaigns over the years, but I'll bet you didn't really know to look for him, did you? He advised Reagan and met Nixon (Stone has, like, the tiniest connection possible to the Watergate Scandal, and he's apparently proud of that...) and when you see footage of Ronald Reagan saying he's going to "Make America Great Again", some things are naturally going to start coming into focus. Roger Stone also worked on famous (or infamous) campaigns for Bob Dole, Al Sharpton and Pat Buchanan. When you put it all together, some call him the "Forrest Gump" of American politics just because he's worked with so many famous people - the difference is that Mr. Gump didn't seek out connections to advance himself, and he also wasn't trying to destroy the country, he just wanted to run across it. Gump was also some kind of a clueless idiot, and I don't think Stone is that - delusional, perhaps, but not an idiot.
And to just say that he pulls "dirty tricks", that doesn't tell the whole story either. For Nixon he would take a jar with a couple hundred dollars in it over to the opposition's headquarters in order to make a donation in the name of the Socialist Party or something equally scandalous, and then he made sure to get a receipt. The only reason to do that is to take that receipt to the press in order to "prove" that the opposition is taking money from Socialists, or Communists, or whatever. You can still do this today by making a donation to a candidate in the name of "The Church of Satan" or whatever, but people at some point started to figure this one out and keep an eye on the names on the checks before cashing them. Michael Moore used to pull a stunt like this too, by sending people checks for 18 cents to see who would cash them, even though that might cost them more to process the check than to rip it up.
And I saw in yesterday's film how Roger Stone helped to take down Eliot Spitzer, on behalf of Joe Bruno or somebody else in Albany when Spitzer was trying to clean up the place. Who told the press about Spitzer's dalliances with hookers? "Gee," says Roger Stone, "I might have said something to somebody, but I don't really remember... Anyway, now that we're talking about it, isn't it shameful? I mean, who keeps their socks on when they have sex with a hooker? He's not just dirty, he's also weird..." and so on. It doesn't matter where the leak came from, it doesn't even matter if the information is true, it only matters that it changes the public's perception about that opponent.
And you follow the logic forward, and that's where Trump got some of his "greatest hits", like "lyin' Ted" and "Crooked Hillary" and "Lock! Her! Up!" These are straight out of the Roger Stone rulebook, get the bad information about your opponent out there, front and center, meanwhile when there are rumors about you, then "Deny, deny, deny." Trump was pushing Stone's "Bill Clinton is a serial rapist" mantra for quite a while, also noting that Hillary put pressure on Bill's accusers to just go away, or forgave Bill for infidelity because that was the quickest way to sweep everything under the rug. I'm not saying Trump & Stone were wrong, but which President has 24 OPEN sexual abuse allegations against him, at the end of the day? And Bill Clinton is a Cosby-style predator? This is the biggest case of "I'm rubber, and you're glue" I've ever encountered.
There's still time, of course, for sexual abuse charges to work their way through the courts, and these things have taken down half of our TV network executives, talk-show hosts, prominent filmmakers and so on. Could they someday take down the President, too? We had Clinton impeached for ONE dalliance with an intern, and then lying about it, what's taking so long with processing the TWENTY-FOUR charges against Trump?
But let's get back to Stone - who's also worked as a lobbyist, in fact he (together with Paul Manafort) kind of almost invented the very concept. So there's some double irony there, when a candidate claims that they're not going to be influenced by lobbyists and special interests groups, and then the same people who worked on their campaign and helped get them elected then take a lobbyist job for the next three years, granting people with enough cash access to that very same politician. What, was that he said during the campaign about NOT being influenced by lobbyists?
Officially, Stone left the Trump campaign in August 20115 - but did he? Why was he a "person of interest" in the investigation into Russian collusion in 2016, then? Why is he accused of getting information to the WikiLeaks guy to discredit Hillary Clinton? And in January of 2019, why was he arrested in connection with Robert Mueller's investigation, and charged with witness tampering and making false statements? Prosecution is pending as of May 2019, of course, but his old business partner Paul Manafort is already incarcerated for conspiracy, money laundering and also making false statements, and he's not due out until December 2024.
Oh, there's so much more - Stone was involved with (or suspected of being involved with) those "Willie Horton" ads in 1992, third-world dictators like Ferdinand Marcos, the Florida recount in 2000, the intentional sabotage of the Reform Party that same year to prevent someone like Ross Perot from interfering with a Republican victory, those "forged" documents saying that George W. Bush had skated on his military service, super PACs, and a whole bunch of racist and disparaging tweets about CNN and MSNBC hosts. Not to mention the "news" about Ted Cruz's alleged extramarital affairs (it's just a coincidence that Cruz was the only Republican candidate left at the time who had any chance of mathematically beating Trump...) and then the career capper, all that stuff with Hillary's missing e-mails, collusion with Russia, Wikileaks and the 2016 Election.
And through it all, Stone's always been seen to be lying down with dogs and somehow waking up without fleas - but that status is pending. You can't keep smelling like a rose when you're shoveling out so much garbage, day after day. From the Nixon tattoo to his weirdly-shaped head, this is a fascinating guy, but then some people are fascinated by rats and roaches, too. When you learn what this guy's all about you may end up hating him, but then he probably expected that and he's already figured out a way to benefit from you hating him. Somehow he's always smarter than everyone else around him, and he's working all the angles - so he could be appearing to help out a candidate, there's always the chance that it could be a double-bluff.
What I genuinely wish most Americans would start to do is to not just listen to what candidates are saying, but maybe also start to think about WHY they are saying THAT. Who benefits? This film is probably important enough to warrant a score of "6", but I'm taking an extra point off for making everyone relive the shock and awe of Election Night 2016. We all know what happened, you really didn't need to go there...
Also starring Donald Trump (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9"), Tucker Carlson (ditto), Paul Manafort, Wayne Barrett (last seen in "Koch"), Charlie Black, Michael Caputo, Ryan Fournier, Alex Jones, Matt Labash, Steve Malzberg, Jane Mayer, Mike Murphy, Harry Siegel, Ann Stone, Nydia Stone, Adria Stone, Timothy Stanley, Jeffrey Toobin,
with archive footage of Steve Bannon, Joy Behar, Wolf Blitzer, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Kellyanne Conway, Ted Cruz, Gerald Ford, Mark Halperin, Sean Hannity, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Mike Huckabee, John Kasich, Megyn Kelly, Jared Kushner, Joe Lieberman, Rachel Maddow, Bill Maher, Marla Maples, Chris Matthews, Richard Nixon, Barack Obama, Bill O'Reilly, Rand Paul, Mike Pence, Ronald Reagan, Marco Rubio, Chuck Todd, Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, Melania Trump, Scott Walker, Barbara Walters (ALL last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9"), Julian Assange, Lee Atwater (last seen in "13th"), Walter Cronkite (ditto), Bob Dole (ditto), Van Jones (ditto), Dan Rather (ditto), James Baker, Carl Bernstein, Tom Brokaw (last seen in "RBG"), Pat Buchanan, Bill Clinton (last seen in "Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer"), Rudy Giuliani (ditto), Geraldo Rivera (ditto), Eliot Spitzer (ditto), Silda Wall Spitzer (ditto), George Stephanopoulos (ditto), Roy Cohn, Chris Cuomo, Lou Dobbs, Terry Dolan, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Willie Geist, Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey"), Barry Goldwater (last seen in "Rumor Has It..."), Al Gore (last seen in "An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power"), Chris Hayes (ditto), Lester Holt (ditto), Lee Iacocca, Jack Kemp, John F. Kennedy (last seen in "Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold"), Jackie Kennedy (ditto), Robert F. Kennedy (last seen in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"), David Letterman (ditto), Gayle King, Corey Lewandowski, John McLaughlin, Seth Meyers (last seen in "I Am Big Bird: The Carroll Spinney Story"), Bill Moyers, Jerrold Nadler, Lawrence O'Donnell, Ross Perot, Nancy Reagan (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story"), Nelson Rockefeller, Karl Rove, Bob Schieffer, Ed Schultz, Al Sharpton (last seen in "Leaving Neverland"), Oprah Winfrey (ditto), Jake Tapper, Chris Wallace.
RATING: 5 out of 10 racist Nixon posters
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