March 3, 1994| Never mind the nifty reviews and the Oscar nomination. As far as campaign strategist James Carville is concerned, the most amazing thing about The War Room is, people actually are paying money to see it.
And they’re doing so even though anybody who might buy a ticket to the film — a behind-the-scenes account of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign — already knows how it ends.
“Yeah,” Carville admitted in his trademark Louisiana drawl during a recent telephone interview, “I’m really a little taken aback at how successful this thing has been. It’s done real well so far in New York and Washington, and…
“Where did you say it was playing in Houston? The River Oaks 3, eh? Well, there you go. I’m surprised they didn’t put it on at Rice [University Media Center] or something.”
An odds-on favorite to win this year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, The War Room is classic cinema verité by D.A. Pennebaker (Primary, Don’t Look Back), the director who practically invented the genre, and Chris Hegedus, his wife and longtime collaborator.
But while the subject is Clinton’s improbably victorious campaign, Clinton himself is just a bit player in the movie. The real stars are communications director George Stephanopoulos, the boyish, button-down wonk who now serves as Clinton’s senior adviser, and Carville, the self-described “hired gun” who more than lives up to his nickname of “Ragin’ Cajun” in his aggressively unbuttoned approach to political hardball.
According to Hegedus, it was the sight and sound of Carville in full-throttle action that helped convince the filmmakers to expand their project from a short subject about the 1992 Democratic Convention in New York to a feature-length overview of the entire campaign.
Backstage at the convention, Hegedus said, Carville “was so outrageous in what he was saying, it was almost like, ‘Is this man really going to be continuing with this campaign being this outspoken?’
“But, after the convention, it was obvious that he was. And we said, ‘Well, if there’s any film, it will be with this group of (campaign advisers) — and, definitely, with James Carville.”
“The way they told it to me,” Carville said with a self-deprecating snort of laughter, “was, the camera just kind of naturally gravitates to me.”
Pennebaker and Hegedus somehow managed to remain as inconspicuous as possible during the long months of campaign hurly-burly, all the better to serve as fly-on-the-wall observers. On those few occasions when Carville was aware of them at all, he was greatly impressed with their stealthy, guerrilla-style approach to capturing reality on film.
“There’s no lights, no boom mikes or anything like that with them,” Carville said. “They really became part of the tapestry of the campaign.
“They were like the umpire in a baseball game — they were there, but you didn’t know they were there.”
Asked about his own reaction to his on-camera antics, Carville chuckled heartily.
“All of my life,” he said, “people have been telling me about how jumpy I am — how I’m always moving around, and my eyes are always moving around and everything. And I never really paid much attention to the observations. But when I saw the movie, I thought, ‘Geez, I am jumpy. I make myself nervous.’”
Carville, 49, has spent much of his adult life trying to make other people nervous, especially when those other people are the campaign strategists for candidates running against Carville’s clients. Sometimes the magic works — in addition to the Clinton victory, Carville has scored wins in state-wide campaigns for Pennsylvania, Kentucky and New Jersey candidates — and sometimes it doesn’t. In 1984, Carville led a losing effort in Texas by then-state Sen. Lloyd Doggett to unseat U.S. Sen. Phil Gramm. (“Gramm won that one by a galaxy,” Carville ruefully recalled.) Five years later, he played a major role in Fred Hofheinz’s unsuccessful bid to unseat Kathy Whitmire as mayor of Houston.
Win, place or show, Carville — who currently maintains an office in Washington, D.C. — thrills to the challenge of the race. And he’s not afraid to let his enthusiasm — no, make that his messianic fervor — show.
One of the funniest scenes in The War Room has a volcanic Carville tearing into Clinton’s chief opponent, President George Bush, while addressing a group of campaign workers: “He reeks of yesterday… He has the stench of yesterday… Whenever I think of an old calendar, I think of George Bush’s face…”
Carville remains entirely uncontrite about the fiery outburst, but insists that, hey, there were extenuating circumstances.
“I was just mad at the time,” he said, “because I’d just been with some reporters, and all their questions were, ‘How ya gonna answer Bush’s attacks,’ and blah, blah, blah. And I was just sort of bleeped off.”
The War Room is chockablock full of such revealing moments, thanks in large measure to the hands-off approach taken by Carville, Stephanopoulos and other campaign officials.
“We had the right to edit anything we wanted to edit,” Carville said. “Before the final film was put together, we got to see the rough cut. But we never did edit anything. We never exercised that right. I mean, there were two or three things we might have thought about editing, we sort of talked about it. But we decided, ‘Well, if you take one thing out, they’re gonna say you’re some kind of censor. So it ain’t worth it.’ So it’s all intact.”
(Indeed, the movie even features a brief encounter between Carville and his unlikely sweetheart, Bush campaign adviser Mary Matalin, whom he married one year after their professional rivalry ended.)
“And one of the best things about this film is that, now that it’s released, I’ve actually had people come up to me and say, ‘Gee, I really would like to work in a campaign, to work in a campaign with you.’
“I think the only thing people knew about our profession before this film is these media stories about unprincipled mercenaries — you know what I mean? — who cared only about themselves and nothing else, who ran these sort of computer-driven, negative campaigns. And I think, from my gauge of the reaction to it, the film makes people feel like we’re really just very fallible, sometimes funny, hardworking people sitting in there, busting their butts, trying to make a go of something.
“And that’s been the best part of it. People will look at (The War Room) and judge it one way or the other. But I think, as I said in the film, I earn an honorable living. Regardless of what some East Coast newspaper columnists might think. I think this film makes all of them look foolish.”
