"If you like Al Franken, you'll love this movie," Jonathan Marlow wrote when he caught Al Franken: God Spoke at SXSW earlier this year. "While I have no attraction for canned comments of this sort, the documentary entirely redeems such a clichéd phrase since it frankly portrays Franken as quick-witted and charming, taking any mild feelings you might have for the man to an entirely new level of appreciation (unless you're a humorless conservative, not unlike several of the folks he belittles in the film)."
Now, as the segues from the festival circuit to a theater near you, he talks with
Chris Hegedus and
Nick Doob not only about God Spoke
but also about how the nature of documentaries has evolved over the decades and about their early work with Hegedus's husband and partner, D.A. Pennebaker.
Regarding the project that you did for the Sundance Channel...
Chris Hegedus: Fox vs. Franken.
Nick Doob: Perhaps we should ask you some questions. Do you like how we recycled it?
Well, yes. Yes, I did. The opening scenes of God Spoke share some obvious similarities. There is a jumping off point somewhere in here but, before we even talk about that, we should discuss the Al Sharpton project. From one "Al" to another...
Doob: That started with a
New Yorker piece. Maybe not...
Hegedus: It came from a guy named Roberto Ramirez, who was Al Sharpton's first campaign manager, almost. Roberto is a political guy from New York. He was a Bronx borough chief at one point [according to the
New York Sun, he was the "former Bronx Democratic Party boss"] and he actually was in jail with Al Sharpton. He spent a long time in jail there, six months or something, protesting the Army base. Roberto, who is Puerto Rican, worked his way up from being an elevator man or door man in New York to going to NYU Law School and becoming a part of politics. He wasn't entirely in favor of the politics of Al Sharpton but, when he was in prison with Reverend Sharpton, he got to know him and really started to like him and thought he was an incredibly moving and committed and charismatic person. He decided that he could do something. He sees the American political landscape as a possible force that unites the Hispanic and Black vote to some cause. That was what he was wanting to do and, whether or not he would elect Al Sharpton as president, he was hoping to fire up the two communities and point them towards whomever would be the candidate...
Doob: It would be a huge Black vote if he would have pulled it off. It's not something that's pulled off very easily. It hasn't happened. It didn't happen in the last election. I think that was Roberto's ambition but he also always said to us, "I can't promise you what's going to happen. You're just going to have to go along with this as far as it goes."
And you were involved for about seven or eight months?
Doob: Yes.
At what point did the other folks that were working on the campaign decide that this was a good idea and that they wanted to jump into it as well? That film hasn't been finished, right?
Hegedus: No.
Doob: This has happened more than once. This might sound a little vain, but I think that people see how we're doing things and say, "We could do that." There's a little bit of that going on, I think, in this case. This guy, a good guy, had been shooting film for Sharpton for a while, for his organization, and it was kind of very straight, reporter-on-the-street stuff. He did very straight reports about what the Reverend was up to with a woman who would speak in-front of the camera. Then we'd come in and film all these things that I don't think he was used to seeing filmed around the Reverend. I think he saw an opportunity. He did have much better access to Sharpton than we did, you know, much more personal access. Eventually, he came in with a lawyer and sort of "strong-armed" it.
Hegedus: Although Reverend Sharpton kept saying he wanted us to do the film. I kind of admired that he didn't want to push us away but he couldn't say no to this friend of his. In the end, we had to decide...
You bowed out...
Hegedus: So we bowed out and found another Al.
How did you approach Al Franken? This was immediately following the period when he had the lawsuit with Bill O'Reilly?
Hegedus: O'Reilly, yes. We basically read about the lawsuit in the paper. Our producer on the project read an article about it and brought his name up. Before we could even blink, the lawsuit had been laughed out of court, so we thought, "Too bad, that would have been a great idea." We then heard about his book tour and we'd always been interested in doing a film about an emerging writer doing a tour. This isn't that story, necessarily, but we always thought it would be interesting to follow somebody with their first book. When Al Franken was doing the tour we thought, "Let's see what he's doing." We called him up and, since he was right in our neighborhood, he came over to our [Chris Hegedus and
D.A. Pennebaker's] little brownstone. We have a little backyard where he sat with us and just started telling us about these huge crowds that were showing up at the bookstores. It was amazing. They had to hire halls outside of the bookstores just to fit everybody in because people were just so motivated and hungry for the type of information that he was giving them. It was all based around the election and how to get rid of
George W. Bush.
Doob: I think a lot of people had a sense that there was a ground-swell happening at that time. I think another thing that was operating for us, with the Al Sharpton film and potentially with this film with Al Franken, was that it would be a way to look at what seemed like a very important election. So we'd see it through them, through either Al. Al Franken has such a direct connection to everyone that matters in Washington, it's really kind of amazing. Everybody knows him.
Hegedus: There was kind of a funny moment because one of the first things we filmed, outside of the sequence where he dresses up as Moses, was the New York Democratic debate between the Democratic presidential candidates, and Al Franken was going to give a...
Doob: There were ten [potential candidates] at that point.
Hegedus: Al Franken was going to give a keynote speech at the end of the day. It was funny because Al Franken kind of bumped into Al Sharpton down there, kind of a switch to the other "Al" as we were following Al Franken around. Actually, Al Franken knew everybody whereas, at that point, Al Sharpton was still getting to be known. There was a type of attitude like, "What's Al Sharpton doing here?" Eventually, he won everybody over because he has such insights and is really intelligent. In the beginning, when we were following him around through the different halls, everybody came up to Al Franken and they all knew him. He was actually asked to write material for some of the candidates...
Really?
Hegedus: Things like that. He has a very insider position...
Doob: Actually, all of the candidates got up and made a little speech. Al Sharpton gave the last speech. It was a wonderful speech about his role in the Democratic Party. He said it was like what his grandmother used to say to him, "If you want to get that donkey to move, you've got to kick that donkey!" Al Franken loved the speech and there's a hug at the end of the thing that's kind of nice. We never used that.
Will you ever use the footage you shot with Al Sharpton?
Hegedus: We made a forty minute film with it...
Doob: It's not really a film. It could be, but it doesn't go far enough. It's very interesting stuff. No matter what you think about Al Sharpton, he has a very interesting mind.
He was a great agitator during that race, in the right way.
Doob: I think so, too.
In the two Al Franken projects - God Spoke and the one that you made for television - how do you separate these two pieces as you're working on them?
Hegedus: That was a funny thing because we were doing the Al Franken film and following him along. He had heard about
Air America Radio and we started to film him there and then we ran into competition on that project as well. It was this double whammy because there was another film,
Left of the Dial [made about Air America]. That was a very frustrating situation for us...
Doob: Although, again, we had started first.
Hegedus: At the same time, I received a call from the Sundance Channel about their series on the First Amendment. They were looking for directors to do something and I said that I didn't really have a lot of time because I was working on a film on Al Franken. Since there was a First Amendment story in his life, because of the whole book thing, they said, "We love Al Franken and maybe that story would be a good thing." I said, "It sounds like the end-all-be-all First Amendment case but it could also be a very entertaining film," and they went for it. I thought that if something happened and we didn't finish our Franken film, at least we would have done something on Al Franken. It is kind of a funny position but it is part of the process of doing film, especially when you get into these kinds of roadblocks.
Doob: We'd been shooting for about five months before the Sundance thing started up. This really preceded it.
In a sense, the First Amendment Project episode is a kernel that's extracted from the larger whole...
Doob: Just to be a little more practical about it since Sundance gave us some financial support. Outside of that, we had none on this project. It's the one thing that kept us going for a while, but we've always seen the two films as fairly unrelated. The opening is similar but that opening was done before the Sundance film came along. This is what we do quite often. We start a project without support and we keep making trailers. We'd been making trailers for probably four or five months when Sundance called and we incorporated some of that work into the film.
Hegedus: Actually, we debated whether to keep a lot of the book issue in the longer film. It was just so important to the story that we had to put it in.
Doob: It was a little truncated in this film.
At what point is it clear to you during the process of making a documentary like this that it is finished? How do you decide that you're done collecting material for the film?
Doob: Al Franken had his own take on that one! He kept wondering, "When are you going to finish? When is this going to be over with?" At one point, we were filming at the Republican Convention and he runs into
Charlie Rose and says, "Charlie, we've got to end this film and I think the way we're going to do it is that I'm going to kill you." So Al Franken went off on this whole elaborate plan of going out and filming him with this gun chasing Charlie Rose through dark streets and then pistol whipping him, just because we didn't have an ending for the film. But when the real ending came, we just knew. It really was that simple. We just knew. We got out of the car and knew that we had finally come to the place. It didn't happen in the editing. It just happened.
It's admittedly a fairly depressing ending.
Doob: Is it?
"Depressing" in the sense that there was such optimism about the way things were expected to turn out. Particularly when he's listening to [John] Kerry's concession speech...
Doob: But that's not the ending.
Well, not the ending...
Doob: Well, there is that. But I don't see the actual ending as depressing.
It was personally very depressing.
Doob: A lot of people feel that way.
Hegedus: People felt that way so much that we actually took out every image of Kerry that we had in the whole election part of the film.
The only shot of Kerry is at Senator Paul Wellstone's wake.
Doob: That's right.
Hegedus: When people saw him come on, they were always gripping their stomachs because it just was so painful. We abbreviated the whole election area a lot.
Doob: But I think the whole point of the film is what Al Franken does with that event. That's why I don't find it depressing. If anything, he gathers strength from it.
Hegedus: It's the motivation that pushes him over the edge.
Do you think that he would have been pushed over the edge, regardless?
Hegedus: That's a good question. He was debating it before that.
Doob: The Democrats had George W. Bush and Al Franken had [Senator]
Norm Coleman. There was a lot of adamancy in Al Franken to get Coleman out [of office] and I think that's also motivated him. You may be right.
And is that part of the reason why you dwell on this issue, particular on the scene between him and Ann Coulter because she keeps invoking that?
Doob: She saw a place to get him. She has a good instinct about where to push the sword in. She invoked Norm Coleman, really, in what seemed out of the blue, you know, she knew she was dealing with Al Franken who was a friend of the Wellstones.
Hegedus: That all changed after-the-fact when we were editing the film. You hardly notice it along the way.
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