Tag: Blinded By The Right

3/9/2015   Deadline   by Lisa de Moraes

Kevin Spacey has promised to use his “normal voice” when he narrates a six-part series for CNN about the dirty tricks, Machiavellian schemes and powerful campaign speeches people have employed over the years in the race to the White House, so as not to confuse it with the dirty tricks and Machiavellian schemes and powerful campaign speeches he will employ in his White House race on Netflix.

CNN said this morning Spacey, who plays ruthless, conniving politician Francis Underwood in House Of Cards, will narrate and produce a six-part series for the cable news network in 2016 about six of of history’s most famous White House races past.

Race For The White House will be co-produced by Raw Productions and Spacey’s Trigger Street Productions, and exec produced by Spacey and his Trigger partner Dana Brunetti, CNN said as it’s touting its upcoming primetime docus to potential advertisers. The series will use previously unseen archive footage, interviews with key players, and dramatic re-creations.

“When we created the CNN Original Series brand, this is exactly the type of programming we had in mind,” CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker said in today’s news; Race For The White House, he said, “will be the perfect complement to our coverage of the 2016 campaigns and election.”

It may also be the perfect compliment to a fourth season of Netflix’s House Of Cards; Netflix recently premiered Season 3 of the political soap and has not yet said whether Season 4 is in the cards. If that happens, it is expected to premiere in 2016 as well.

As described by CNN, each hour  of its Spacey project “will tell the story of a four-year, no-holds-barred battle to become the most powerful person in the world, culminating in a single night of heart pounding tension. From powerful campaign speeches to the dirty tricks and Machiavellian schemes, Race For The White House will capture the drama of how a high-stakes presidential election can turn on a single issue and so much more.”

Raw Productions has a client list that includes the BBC, Channel 4, Discovery, A&E, Film4, CBS, ITV, National Geographic, History and Syfy; its output includes Gold Rush for Discovery, The Hunt For The Boston Bombers, BAFTA-winning The Liquid Bomb Plot, and Locked Up Abroad all for National Geographic, and the BAFTA winning feature documentary The Imposter.

Trigger Street’s credits include House Of Cards, Captain Phillips and The Social Network, 21, Shrink, Fanboys, Beyond The Sea, The Big Kahuna, The United States Of Leland, Mini’s First Time, Bernard And Doris, and Recount.

http://deadline.com/2015/03/kevin-spacey-cnn-series-presidential-race-1201389124/

3/3/2015   Business Insider   by Hunter Walker

Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky is continuing her post-scandal career with a TED talk later this month.

Lewinsky, who gained international infamy due to her affair with former President Bill Clinton, is scheduled to speak at TED 2015 Truth and Dare in Vancouver, Canada on March 19.

After a lengthy absence from the public eye, Lewinsky began remaking herself as an anti-bullying activist last year. Her biography on the TED website touts her experience surviving the scandal and becoming a “social activist.”

“Monica Lewinsky advocates for a safer and more compassionate social media environment, drawing from her unique experiences at the epicenter of a media maelstrom in 1998,” the biography says.

Lewinsky’s gave her first major public speech on anti-bullying activism last October at the Forbes Under 30 Summit. In that address, Lewinsky described herself as the first person to become the focus of a media circus in the modern, digital landscape.

“I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one. I was patient zero,” Lewinsky said.

http://www.businessinsider.com/monica-lewinsky-is-giving-a-ted-talk-2015-3

2/14/2015   The New York Times   by Maureen Dowd

WASHINGTON — I’LL pay for this column.

The Rottweilers will be unleashed.

Once the Clintons had a War Room. Now they have a Slime Room.

Once they had the sly James Carville, fondly known as “serpenthead.” Now they have the slippery David Brock, accurately known as a snake.

Brock fits into the Clinton tradition of opportunistic knife-fighters like Dick Morris and Mark Penn.

The silver-haired 52-year-old, who sports colorful designer suits and once wore a monocle, brawled his way into a Times article about the uneasy marriage between Hillary Clinton’s veteran attack dogs and the group of advisers who are moving over from Obamaland.

Hillary hasn’t announced a 2016 campaign yet. She’s busy polling more than 200 policy experts on how to show that she really cares about the poor while courting the banks. Yet her shadow campaign is already in a déjà-vu-all-over-again shark fight over control of the candidate and her money. It’s the same old story: The killer organization that, even with all its ruthless hired guns, can’t quite shoot straight.

Squabbling competing factions helped Hillary squander a quarter-of-a-billion dollars in 2008.

As Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick chronicled, the nasty dispute spilled into public and Brock resigned last week from the board of a pro-Clinton “super-PAC” called Priorities USA Action — whose co-chairman is Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager — accusing the political action committee of “an orchestrated political hit job” and “the kind of dirty trick I’ve witnessed in the right-wing and would not tolerate then.”

He should know.

The former “right-wing hit man,” and impresario of “dirty tricks,” as Brock has said of himself, made his living in the ’90s sliming Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” and breaking the Troopergate story, which accused Arkansas state troopers of setting up liaisons for Bill Clinton and spurred Paula Jones’s 1994 sexual harassment lawsuit.

He has tried to discredit anyone who disagreed with his ideological hits (myself and reporters I know included). And that’s still the business he’s in, simply on the other side as a Hillary zealot. (His conversion began in 1996 when he published a biography of Hillary that was not a total hit job and that began the thaw.)

Just as Bill Clinton was able to forgive another architect of the vast right-wing conspiracy, Richard Mellon Scaife, once Scaife was charmed by Hillary in person and began giving money to the Clinton foundation, so, too, was Bill won over by Brock’s book, “Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative,” and Brock’s Media Matters and Correct the Record websites, which ferociously push back against any Hillary coverage that isn’t fawning.

With the understood blessing of the Clintons, Brock runs a $28 million cluster of media monitoring groups and oppo research organizations that are vehicles to rebut and at times discredit and threaten anyone who casts a gimlet eye at Clinton Inc.

As Confessore and Chozick wrote, he uses a fund-raiser named Mary Pat Bonner, whose firm has collected millions of dollars in commissions — a practice many fund-raising experts consider unethical.

Everyone wants to be at the trough for this one because Hillary is likely to raise, and more important, spend more than $1 billion on her campaign.

The Clinton crowd is trying to woo Brock back into the fold because he’s good at getting money and knows how their enemies think. The Clintons appreciate the fact that Brock, like Morris, is a take-no-prisoners type with the ethical compass of a jackal. Baked in the tactics of the right, Brock will never believe that negative coverage results from legitimate shortcomings. Instead, it’s all personal, all false, and all a war.

This is a bad harbinger for those who had hoped that Hillary would “kill off the wild dogs,” as one Obama loyalist put it, and Bill would leave behind the sketchy hangers-on in the mold of Ron Burkle and Jeffrey Epstein.

Hillary’s inability to dispense with brass-knuckle, fanatical acolytes like Brock shows that she still has an insecure streak that requires Borgia-like blind loyalty, and can’t distinguish between the real vast right-wing conspiracy and the voices of legitimate concern.

Money-grubbing is always the ugly place with the Clintons, who have devoured $2.1 billion in contributions since 1992 to their political campaigns, family foundation and philanthropies, according to The Old (Good) New Republic.

David Axelrod, the author of a new memoir, “Believer,” wrote that Hillary’s past gurus, Morris and Penn, were nonbelievers — mercenary, manipulative and avaricious. He told Politico’s Glenn Thrush that he would have advised Hillary not to cash in with her book and six-figure speeches.

Axelrod reiterated to me that Hillary’s designated campaign chairman, John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s last chief of staff who left his post as an Obama counselor on Friday, “has the strength and standing to enforce a kind of campaign discipline that hasn’t existed before.”

But, for now, what Republicans say about government is true of the Clintons: They really do believe that your money belongs to them.

Someday, they should give their tin cup to the Smithsonian. It’s one of the wonders of the world.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/opinion/sunday/maureen-dowd-call-off-the-dogs.html?smid=fb-nytimes&smtyp=cur&bicmp=AD&bicmlukp=WT.mc_id&bicmst=1409232722000&bicmet=1419773522000&_r=1&referrer=

2/10/2015   The New York Times   By NICHOLAS CONFESSORE and AMY CHOZICK

Lingering tensions between Hillary Rodham Clinton’s loyalists and the strategists who helped President Obama defeat her in 2008 have erupted into an intense public struggle over who will wield money and clout in her emerging 2016 presidential campaign.

At issue is controlling access to the deep-pocketed donors whose support is critical to sustain the outside organizations that are paving the way for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. It is a competition that has been exacerbated, many Clinton supporters said, by Mrs. Clinton’s reluctance to formally enter the race and establish a campaign organization with clear lines of authority.

The dispute broke into the open on Monday after David Brock, a Clinton ally, accused Priorities USA Action — a pro-Clinton “super PAC” whose co-chairman is Jim Messina, Mr. Obama’s 2012 campaign manager — of planting negative stories about the fund-raising practices of Mr. Brock’s organizations. Mr. Brock resigned from the super PAC’s board in protest.

Mr. Messina is one of the half-dozen top veterans of Mr. Obama’s campaigns that Mrs. Clinton’s tightknit circle of advisers has hired or courted, vexing some longtime Clintonites seeking more prominent roles for themselves. Other former Obama aides are working with pro-Clinton groups to organize grass-roots volunteers or to fend off attacks on her record, efforts that some Democrats view as the first step toward a place in Mrs. Clinton’s campaign when it finally gets off the ground.

All recognize that Mrs. Clinton’s political operation could dominate the Democratic Party for the next decade, controlling the flow of commissions, consulting work and political appointments. But the marriage between the two camps — based to a large degree on mutual interest, if not love — now appears more uneasy than at any time since Mr. Obama asked Mrs. Clinton to serve in his administration after the 2008 election.

2/9/2015   Talking Points Memo   ByDylan Scott

2/6/2015   The New York Times   By KURT ANDERSEN

BACK in the late 1980s, when I was a co-editor of Spy magazine, we published a cover story about the 1970s. Spy being Spy, it was a grand feast of love-hate celebration: “A Return to the Decade of Mood Rings, Ultrasuede, Sideburns and Disco Sex-Machine Tony Orlando.” One of its implicit premises was the silliness of the pandemic of American nostalgia, especially for a culturally dubious decade that had ended less than a decade earlier. Over the last half century, we Americans have come to create and consume automatically and continuously a kind of recent-past wistfulness.

But what about the 1990s? Nostalgia for the era in which you were young is almost inevitable, so people born between 1970 and 1990 feel a natural fetishistic fondness for that decade. But even for the rest of us, the ’90s provoke a unique species of recherche du temps perdu, not mere bittersweet reveling in the passage of time. No, looking back at the final 10 years of the 20th century is grounds for genuine mourning: It was simply the happiest decade of our American lifetimes.

This isn’t (mainly) fogeyishness on my part. No. It is empirically, objectively, broadly true. I am not now nor have I ever been a Clintonite, but when Jeb Bush reportedly said a few weeks ago, apropos of 2016 and the probable Democratic presidential nominee, that “if someone wants to run a campaign about ’90s nostalgia, it’s not going to be very successful,” I think he was being wishful.

Let’s begin with the quantifiable bits. America at large was prospering in the ’90s. The United States economy grew by an average of 4 percent per year between 1992 and 1999. (Since 2001, it’s never grown by as much as 4 percent, and since 2005 not even by 3 percent for a whole year.) An average of 1.7 million jobs a year were added to the American work force, versus around 850,000 a year during this century so far. The unemployment rate dropped from nearly 8 percent in 1992 to 4 percent — that is, effectively zero — at the end of the decade. Plus, if you were a man and worked in an office, starting in the ’90s you could get away with never wearing a necktie.

From 1990 to 1999, the median American household income grew by 10 percent; since 2000 it’s shrunk by nearly 9 percent. The poverty rate peaked at over 15 percent in 1993, then fell to nearly 11 percent in 2000, more or less its postwar low. During the ’90s, stocks quadrupled in value — the Dow Jones industrial average increased by 309 percent. You could still buy a beautiful Brooklyn townhouse for $500,000 or less. And so on.

By the end of the decade, in fact, there was so much good news — a federal budget surplus, dramatic reductions in violent crime (the murder rate in the United States declined by 41 percent) and in deaths from H.I.V./AIDS — that each astounding new achievement didn’t quite register as miraculous. After all, the decade had begun with a fantastically joyful and previously unimaginable development: The Soviet empire collapsed, global nuclear Armageddon ceased to be a thing that worried anyone very much, and the nations of Eastern Europe were mostly unchained.

A tide of progress and good sense seemed to be sweeping the whole world. According to the annual count by Freedom House, the tally of the world’s free countries climbed from 65 at the beginning of the decade to 85 at the end. Since then, the total number of certified-free countries has increased by only four.

Between 1990 and 1994 South Africa dismantled apartheid surprisingly peacefully. With the Oslo Accords, Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization had come together at last to negotiate a framework for coexistence and eventual peace. The civil wars in the former Yugoslavia ended and an enduring peace was restored. China became normal, reforming its economy, tripling its gross domestic product and easing its way into the world order.

During the ’90s, the only American-led war in the Middle East was the one that drove Saddam Hussein’s invading army out of Kuwait with a ground campaign that lasted a mere 100 hours.

Peace, prosperity, order — and American culture was vibrant and healthy as well. There were both shockingly excellent versions of what had come before and distinctly new, original forms. Wasn’t the release of Nirvana’s “Nevermind,” in 1991, pretty much the last time a new rock ’n’ roll band truly, deeply mattered, the way rock ’n’ roll did in the ’60s and ’70s? Wasn’t hip-hop, which achieved its mass-market breakthrough and dominance in the ’90s, the last genuinely new and consequential invention of American pop culture?

What is the most remarkably successful literary creation of the last several decades? The Harry Potter novels, the first three of which appeared in the ’90s. Supertalented literary youngsters appeared — David Foster Wallace (“Infinite Jest”), Donna Tartt (“The Secret History”), Jonathan Lethem (“Motherless Brooklyn”) and Dave Eggers (McSweeney’s). And supertalented literary geezers — Philip Roth (“American Pastoral”), John Updike (“Rabbit at Rest”), Alice Munro (“The Love of a Good Woman”), Don DeLillo (“Underworld”) — produced some of their best and most successful work as well.

The quality of television radically improved. “Seinfeld” and “The Simpsons” had their premieres in 1989, and in the ’90s they blew up, along with “Friends” and “NYPD Blue” — all of them broadcast network series, none of them reality shows. HBO, before the ’90s a channel for movies, boxing and soft-core porn, decided to swing for the fences. First with “The Larry Sanders Show” and then with “The Sopranos,” it proved that episodic television could accommodate major ambition and actual brilliance, ushering in an enduring new (cable) TV era.

In feature films, it was the decade of “Pulp Fiction” and the indie movement, thanks to which idiosyncratic, more-commercial-than-art-house masterpieces like those by Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne and Richard Linklater became plausible. It was also the decade in which traditional Disney animation came back from the dead and in which Pixar, with the first two “Toy Story” movies, reinvented the form magnificently.

THE digital age, of course, got fully underway in the ’90s. At the beginning of the decade almost none of us had heard of the web, and we didn’t have browsers, search engines, digital cellphone networks, fully 3-D games or affordable and powerful laptops. By the end of the decade we had them all. Steve Jobs returned to Apple and conjured its rebirth.

And it was just the right amount of technology. By the end of the decade we all had cellphones, but not smartphones; we were not overconnected or tyrannized by our devices. Social media had not yet made social life both manically nonstop and attenuated. The digital revolution hadn’t brutally “disrupted” whole economic sectors and made their work forces permanently insecure. Recorded music sales nearly doubled during the decade. Newspapers and magazines were thriving. Even Y2K, our terrifying end-of-the-millennium technological comeuppance, was a nonevent.

Indeed, the ’90s were a decade of catastrophes that didn’t happen. The Clinton tax increases did not trigger a recession. Welfare reform did not ravage the poor. Compared with Sandy, every hurricane that touched New York — Bob! Bertha! Danny! Dennis! Floyd! — was a dud.

Were there real problems in the ’90s? Of course. But they weren’t obvious, so … we were blissfully ignorant! Almost none of us were suitably alarmed by carbon emissions and the warming planet. According to a 1995 article in this newspaper about climate change, “most scientists say the amount of warming so far, about one degree Fahrenheit in the last century, is still too small to be distinguished from the climate system’s natural fluctuations.” So why worry?

When the House and Senate passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities and President Clinton signed the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999, doing away with the firewalls between investment banks and commercial banks, the change seemed inevitable, sensible, modern — not a precursor of the 2008 Wall Street crash. When a jihadist truck bomb detonated in the parking garage below the north tower of the World Trade Center in 1993, we were alarmed only briefly, figuring it for a crazy one-off rather than a first strike in a long struggle.

Americans have never much liked paying attention to foreign countries and their problems (see Rwanda, 1994), so the decade between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the war on terror was very much our cup of tea.

No: I mean our cup of coffee. You can’t talk about the ’90s without talking about the sudden availability of excellent coffee — espresso in Idaho! — all over America. This was thanks to Starbucks, of course, which went from nearly 100 outlets in the United States at the start of the decade to 2,000 at the end. But as it goes with so many good things in America — easier credit and financial innovation and electronic connection and all the rest — that just wasn’t enough.

Today there are more than 13,000 Starbucks in the United States. And each of them, to my eye, looks exactly as it did when the rollout began — 13,000 ubiquitous and faintly melancholic time-capsule museums of the last best American decade.

1/31/2015   The Hollywood Reporter   by Natalie Stone

President Bill Clinton made a surprise appearance at a screening of Leonardo DiCaprio‘s Oscar-nominated Netflix documentary, Virunga, at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York on Saturday night.

Virunga is executive-produced by DiCaprio and follows a team of park rangers in Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo who risk their lives to protect the home of endangered mountain gorillas.

Before the screening, Clinton shared about the work of the Clinton Global Initiative members in the Democratic Republic of Congo and importance of the documentary’s mission with attendees.

Ann Curry moderated a Q&A following the screening with Virunga director Orlando von Einsiedel and producer Joanna Natasegara, which discussed the message behind the film.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Jonah Hill, Jeffrey Wright, Jeff Gordon, Beau Willimon and Netflix CCO Ted Sarandos also attended the screening.

Virunga is Oscar-nominated for best documentary feature.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/bill-cliton-surprises-leonardo-dicaprio-768852?mobile_redirect=false

1/23/2015   The New York Times   By AMY CHOZIC

First, she was called the bra-burning feminist with a degree from Wellesley. Then, she was the aggressively political spouse from Arkansas who plotted behind closed doors. Today, she is the millionaire elitist who socializes in New York City and the Hamptons.

Few modern political figures inspire the animus that Hillary Rodham Clinton generates, and the cottage industry that opposes her never really goes out of business. But as Mrs. Clinton prepares for a likely presidential campaign in 2016, the sprawling network is evolving to attack her on new grounds.

There are “super PACs” with names like Women Against Hillary, Just Say No to Hillary, Stop Hillary and Defeat Hillary. The Republican National Committee recently introduced a website PoorHillaryClinton.com, which mocks Mrs. Clinton’s wealth.

While all politicians endure scrutiny and efforts by the other side to define them, the attacks on Mrs. Clinton often take on a personal tone, which her defenders say is driven by an electorate still coming to terms with the possibility of a female president.

But the message against Mrs. Clinton before 2016 is shifting, highlighting new, less gender-based attacks than those leveled during the 2008 campaign. She is no longer caricatured as the embodiment of a 1960s feminist pushing her husband’s administration to the left. Instead, Mrs. Clinton is criticized as overly cautious and centrist and out of touch with average Americans. Last summer she said that her family was “dead broke” upon leaving the White House, yet she has made millions off her books and is paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches.

Richard H. Collins, a Dallas investor whose website Stop Her Now seven years ago suggested that Mrs. Clinton was a witch and featured her bludgeoning other politicians with a “Hillary hammer,” said he had no plans to resurrect the effort in 2016. And when the super PAC The Hillary Project introduced a “Slap Hillary” game online in 2013, many Republicans were quick to denounce the gimmick as sexist.

Sexist attacks were “a dumb thing to do in 2008, and will be a dumb thing to do in 2016,” said Tim Miller, executive director of America Rising, an anti-Democrat super PAC. “The most effective arguments against Secretary Clinton have absolutely nothing to do with her gender,” he added.

A spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, Kirsten Kukowski, said it is not an “either/or” question of whether to point out scandals from Mrs. Clinton’s early years or her current record and finances. Internal polling has shown, she said, that attacks on Mrs. Clinton’s more recent years resonate more effectively with voters. (The R.N.C. is also assembling a book on Mrs. Clinton and has dispatched opposition researchers to Little Rock, Ark.)

There is no question that Mrs. Clinton, after two decades in public life, remains divisive: 50 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of her, and 45 percent have an unfavorable opinion, according to a Quinnipiac University poll conducted in November.

Unlike in 2008, when Mrs. Clinton’s campaign largely ignored the “stop Hillary” websites and the sale of “No Way in Hellary” barbecue aprons, this time Clinton loyalists have formed their own groups to counter attacks early.

They say they are keenly aware of what happened to Senator John Kerry during the 2004 election, when an independent conservative group, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, attacked his military record in the Vietnam War. The attacks stuck and contributed to Mr. Kerry’s loss to President George W. Bush.

David Brock, founder of Correct the Record, a project that defends Mrs. Clinton in the news media, and a onetime conservative critic of the Clintons, published the e-book “The Benghazi Hoax” in 2013 that defends Mrs. Clinton’s handling of the attack on the United States Mission in Benghazi, Libya.

He said criticism that she is wealthy and out of touch would be an easy one to combat, particularly if the Republican nominee is Jeb Bush, the son and brother of former presidents, or Mitt Romney, whose personal wealth became a point of contention in his 2012 campaign and who recently told donors that he was considering running again in 2016.

It was not long ago that conservatives were “raising money off the caricature of her as a dyed-in-the-wool socialist,” Mr. Brock said.

“Now, we’re expected to believe a totally contrary fictional premise — that she’s a plutocrat,” he added.

The fight to define, or redefine, Mrs. Clinton will become only more intense. For Republicans, the attacks not only excite the conservative base, but they can help shape a narrative to weaken Mrs. Clinton’s chances with the broader electorate.

Citizens United, a conservative advocacy group that produced the 2008 anti-Clinton documentary “Hillary: The Movie,” has another documentary in preproduction set to premiere during the 2016 campaign. That film will mostly focus on Mrs. Clinton’s career as a New York senator through her time as secretary of state, and will look at the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

David N. Bossie, president of Citizens United and a longtime critic of the Clintons, said Mrs. Clinton’s time in Arkansas and in the White House were less relevant than her ties to the Obama administration and her family’s finances.

“People have to be reminded of these things that she was involved in, but are they the most important? No,” he said.

Next month, Bruce Fein, a lawyer who is close to Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, plans to introduce a website called HillaryWatch.com that will largely focus on Mrs. Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy positions and her views on executive power. (He joked that it could be called “Queen Hillary.”)

The idea, he said, grew out of a pamphlet that defended Mr. Paul’s foreign policy positions. “We want to destroy these myths about Hillary, one of which is her great competence,” Mr. Fein said. A spokesman for Mr. Paul said the senator had met Mr. Fein but never talked with him about an anti-Hillary website.

The cottage industry caricaturing Mrs. Clinton has its own kitschy paraphernalia, some of which seems more rooted in the early mockery of her than on her more recent record, like bumper stickers that read “Even Bill Doesn’t Want Hillary!”

The creators behind the “Hillary Nutcracker” plan to reintroduce the item — which, as the name suggests, cracks open nuts between Mrs. Clinton’s thighs — the day she declares her candidacy. They expect it to resonate with both pro- and anti-Hillary customers.

“If you see a bossy, polarizing broad with ideas you don’t like, then that’s what you get,” said Gibson Carothers, one of the creators. He added, “If you see a tough, strong leader with ideas you do like, then that’s what you get.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/24/us/politics/in-prelude-to-2016-anti-hillary-clinton-groups-are-just-beginning.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&assetType=nyt_now&_r=0

1/22/2015    The New York Times    By AMY CHOZICK and MICHAEL CIEPLY

Martin Scorsese has tackled the mob, the Dalai Lama and the real-life Wolf of Wall Street.

But he appears to have met his match in Bill Clinton.

Mr. Scorsese’s partly finished documentary about Mr. Clinton — which once seemed likely to be released as Hillary Rodham Clinton was navigating a presidential run — has stalled over disagreements about control, people briefed on the project said.

Though parts of the film were shot over the last two years as Mr. Clinton made a philanthropic visit to Africa and elsewhere, the project is now indefinitely shelved, partly because Mr. Clinton insisted on more control over the interview questions and final version than Mr. Scorsese was willing to give, those people said.

How Mr. Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, who briefly worked as a special correspondent at NBC News, might figure in the film or on the production team was also an open question.

Asked about assertions that the project, which is backed by HBO, was stalled over differences about content and control and was now put aside, Matt McKenna, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton, in an email described them as “inaccurate,” without elaborating.

A spokesman for Mr. Scorsese declined to comment on the project, as did a spokesman for Steve Bing, a Clinton friend and donor who was to be a producer of the film. A spokesman for HBO said, “It’s not happening soon but that doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen.”

The people who described the project’s disintegration (barring a sudden thaw between the two camps) spoke on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality strictures.

Mr. Scorsese, an Academy Award-winning director who is 72 years old, still has many cinematic irons in the fire. This week, a representative at his Sikelia Productions said the filmmaker and his associates were preoccupied with preparations in Taiwan for the filming of “Silence,” a period piece about Jesuit priests, which stars Liam Neeson and Andrew Garfield and is set for release in the United States by Paramount Pictures.

But Mr. Scorsese clearly had a soft spot for the Clinton project. In a 2012 statement, he said the film would “provide greater insight into this transcendent figure.” Mr. Clinton at the time said he was pleased to become the subject of a “legendary director.”

Still, neither Mr. Clinton nor Mr. Scorsese proved able to overcome the complications inherent in an attempt to build entertainment — however informative a documentary might be — around a figure whose wife stands on the verge of another presidential campaign.

Clearly, the film carried the risk that an unflattering camera angle, unwelcome question or even an obvious omission by Mr. Scorsese would become a blemish to Mr. Clinton’s legacy or provide fodder for Clinton critics as the 2016 campaign approaches. Apparently to avoid such problems, people close to Mr. Clinton sought to approve questions he would be asked in the film, and went so far as to demand final cut, a privilege generally reserved for directors of Mr. Scorsese’s stature.

Mr. Scorsese’s camp rejected those suggestions and the project was shelved. The film now appears to be years away from completion.

Chelsea Clinton, who left her lucrative NBC News job in August and works closely with her father, was expected to figure in the documentary in some way, and some in the Clinton circle had speculated that she would be credited as a producer. But a spokesman for Ms. Clinton said any notion that she had sought to join the production was “categorically false.”

In recent months, Mr. Clinton’s team has shown increased discipline in keeping the former president on message ahead of his wife’s likely 2016 presidential campaign. Mrs. Clinton is expected to declare her candidacy sometime this spring.

The former president is often a strong asset for his wife, but Mr. Clinton also proved to be a liability during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary when he made comments about then-Senator Barack Obama that many interpreted as racially insensitive.

While “Clinton the Musical,” a stage satire focused on Clinton administration scandals, is now set for an Off Broadway run beginning in March, other Clinton-themed entertainment projects have faltered.

In the fall of 2013, CNN scrapped a documentary about Mrs. Clinton in the face of pushback from Clinton aides and the Republican National Committee; NBC dropped a planned mini-series in which Diane Lane would have portrayed her.

Also, “Rodham,” a planned feature film about the romance between a young Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham, has been struggling through Hollywood’s development process since Lionsgate acquired rights to it in 2013.

According to people briefed on the status of that project, the proposed director, James Ponsoldt — whose David Foster Wallace bio pic “The End of the Tour” has a Sundance Film Festival premiere on Friday — remains interested in directing “Rodham.”

But the producers are looking for a prominent, preferably female screenwriter, to revise a script that was originally written by Young Il Kim, a little-known writer who had studied economics at Harvard and wrote “Rodham” as a passion project. As yet, no star is attached, and no start date has been set.

The people briefed on its status said the project had encountered neither direct interference nor encouragement from the Clinton camp, though both political friends and opponents of the Clintons have privately weighed in with various opinions.

Some allies see the film as a potential plus, while others fret that even a slight misstep in execution may make the Clintons look unappealing. On the flip side, some political adversaries suspect the film will become a promotional tool, while others welcome it as a complicating factor in any Clinton campaign.

Over all, the crackle of media attention and conflicting opinion have made the development process more difficult than usual, one person briefed on it said.

As an unauthorized biography, “Rodham” does not depend on support from the Clintons, as did Mr. Scorsese’s film. But resistance could become a problem when the producers eventually seek out actresses who are represented by a small number of Hollywood agencies. Already, two people said, at least one Hollywood actors’ agent sympathetic to the Clintons has communicated concerns about the possible impact of “Rodham.”

Queries to Lionsgate, to Mr. Ponsoldt’s agents at the United Talent Agency and to producers at Temple Hill Entertainment and the Arlook Group, which are producing the movie, drew no response.

Mr. Bing, a generous donor to Mr. Clinton and the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, had been a guiding force behind Mr. Scorsese’s documentary, and had initially persuaded the 42nd president to cooperate in its making. Mr. Bing was a producer of Mr. Scorsese’s 2008 documentary “Shine a Light,” about the Rolling Stones.

Known for its critically acclaimed documentaries, HBO has previously produced films about presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. Mr. Scorsese had earlier worked with HBO on documentaries about George Harrison and Fran Lebowitz, and he was an executive producer of the cable channel’s drama “Boardwalk Empire,” which recently ended its run.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/23/business/media/a-scorsese-documentary-on-bill-clinton-is-stalled.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=1&assetType=nyt_now

5/6/2014    Politico    By DYLAN BYERS

Monica Lewinsky has credited the conservative website Drudge Report with driving what she describes as her “global humiliation” in the wake of the affair with President Bill Clinton.

In a new tell-all for Vanity Fair, published Tuesday, the former Clinton intern took aim at the media circus that surrounded the scandal, singling out both Drudge and Maureen Dowd, the sardonic New York Times columnist.

“Thanks to the Drudge Report, I was… possibly the first person whose global humiliation was driven by the Internet,” Lewinsky wrote of the influential aggregator, which covered every turn in the Lewinsky scandal.

Lewinsky said she used to call the Times columnist “Moremean Dowdy,” because of her biting columns about the affair, but added, “today, I’d meet her for a drink.”

Lewinsky, who stayed silent on the subject of the affair for more than 15 years, said she wrote the piece because she is “determined to have a different ending to my story.”

“It’s time to burn the beret and bury the blue dress,” she wrote.

Our colleague Lucy McCalmont has more on the tell-all here.

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2014/05/monica-lewinsky-hits-drudge-maureen-dowd-188043.html