Schwarzenegger Documentary Slams "Bipolar" Governor — Mar 14th 2007

By Karina Longworth

The South By Southwest Film Festival is widely considered to be one of the top showcases for documentary film in North America, and if we're to take the 2007 lineup as an indicator of general trends, then there is currently no hotter nonfiction genre than the election movie. The Festival (which began last Friday and runs concurrently with the famed SXSW Music Conference through March 18) is screening at least five feature films focused on elections. An inordinate amount of attention has already been bestowed on just one of SXSW 2007's election films, the Michael Moore expose Manufacturing Dissent. But while that production by Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine offers an undeniably alluring behind-the-scenes peek at the documentary world's biggest blowhard, another SXSW election doc has managed to embroil pop culture notables as disparate as Alec Baldwin and Jello Biafra in a massive smear against the most powerful man in California.

That film is Running With Arnold, directed by former entertainment reporter Dan Cox. The doc tracks Arnold Schwarzenegger's wild ride from Austrian yokel to world-class bodybuilder--and then from action superstar to titan of Sacramento. The film is comprised of old interviews with Arnold, new interviews with Arnold's detractors, clips from Arnold's movies, and footage shot during the whirlwind recall election that first put him in office. It's an extremely entertaining piece of propaganda, one which seems content to settle for knowing laughs from the choir in lieu of offering the kind of hard analysis that might actually convert skeptics.

Cox identifies Schwarzenegger's Achilles heel early on, with a clip from an ancient archival interview in which the young bodybuilder describes his unquenchable thirst for attention. As Cox tells it, a defining moment came while Schwarzenegger was serving in the Austrian military. He went AWOL in order to enter a bodybuilding competition, and when he returned to his unit, he was promptly thrown in jail. Not for the first time, the future Governator chose physical vanity and personal stardom over national duty. No doubt this is a dubious personality trait, and an embarrassing anecdote. But like most of the revelations in Running With Arnold, it's hardly the kind of thing that will make a dent in Schwarzenegger's career.

The film excels at laying bare the thorny socioeconomic climate that made Arnold's election possible. The fact that the Enron scandal ultimately led to the recall of Governor Grey Davis has already been documented in a prior Sundance hit, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005). What Cox reveals is a more direct line connecting the action-star-turned-politico to the now-defunct energy company. Running With Arnold details a meeting that took place before the recall effort had picked up significant steam, at which Enron czar Ken Lay tentatively floated the idea of Schwarzenneger taking over the governor's job. For Lay and his cohorts, the recall was a must. Both Davis and Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamante were attempting recoup $9 billion in phony Enron profits; the latter was in the process of filing a lawsuit against Lay, while the former was threatening to collect the funds from Lay's Republican cronies in the federal government. Schwarzenegger, a political outsider who claimed to be rich enough to fund his own campaign, looked like the perfect figurehead for the palace coup in Sacramento.

The California electorate turned a blind eye to the fact that the action star had no demonstrable ability to run a state. Nor did the voters flinch at Schwarzenegger's questionable history with women, which Cox explores in great detail. Unfortunately, the director is so intent on portraying Schwarzenegger as a pectorally enhanced sleazeball that he fails to sufficiently contemplate why California Democrats put him in office.

Cox repeatedly compares Schwarzenegger's campaign and time in office to a blockbuster promotional tour. In the absence of any real political know-how, the director argues, Schwarzenegger has drawn on his 20-plus years of acting experience in order to solve (or, in some cases, distract from) political problems. As an old Hollywood hand, he can change character in a snap, playing whatever role is required of him. This hasn't always been an asset; his "bipolarity," as the film defines it, has prompted more than one media crisis. In a particularly galling episode, Schwarzenegger landed in hot water after suggesting at a press conference that the state needed to close its borders. This was was an impractical proposal: agriculture accounts for ten percent of California's jobs, and by some estimates, eighty percent of farm workers are in the state illegally. Seemingly blind to the multiple ironies of the whole situation, Schwarzenegger quickly blamed his gaffe on the fact that English is his second language. He later claimed that he had meant to suggest securing the border against terrorists, implying that cheap labor would continue to have no difficulty entering the Golden State.

If Cox gets away with portraying Schwarzenegger as sleazy and inept, he's far less successful when he attempts to equate the Governator's moral laxity with outright villainy, especially when he falls back on visual and aural sleight-of-hand to make his point. In one particularly egregious sequence, Cox characterizes his subject as a power-mad despot, then layers audio from Dwight Eisenhower's famous Military-Industrial Complex speech over images of Nazi rallies. Such juxtapositions feel like pointless provocation. Later on, the Dead Kennedys' punk classic "California Über Alles" (originally penned as a satirical attack on former California governor Jerry Brown) plays over the end credits; divorced from its original context, the song seems like a cheap shot, less likely to energize than to alienate the audience.

Among the alienated is left-leaning Hollywood star Alec Baldwin, who happens to be Running With Arnold's narrator. The actor publicly washed his hands of the project last October, announcing on The Huffington Post his intention to legally force the filmmakers to remove his narration. Speaking to Netscape News the day after Baldwin went public with his cease-and-desist, Running producer Mike Gabrawy admitted that Baldwin's opposition had caused "a hiccup in [the film's] distribution strategy," but insisted the actor had no legal leg to stand on. When Running with Arnold premiered here in Austin on Friday night, Baldwin's narration was intact. So what happened in the intervening five months?

According to Gabrawy, shortly before Baldwin went public on Arianna Huffington's website, the filmmakers agreed to pull the film from the Hamptons Film Festival (where it was scheduled to debut alongside another, similarly-titled Baldwin project, Running With Scissors). Several conversations ensued between the filmmakers and the irate actor's camp, during which Gabrawy maintained that rerecording the narration would be impossible.

"Regardless of everything, I love Alec Baldwin and I think he's the best thing that could have happened to the movie," Gabrawy says today. The Alec Situation, as he calls it, "gave us international exposure, which is huge for a little political documentary." And the producers never paid much heed to the legal maneuvering itself. "The cease-and-desist was absolutely off base," Gabrawy says. "They had no grounds." The crisis essentially ended the day Baldwin cashed the check (made out to his personal charity) for his services. "His agent called and I said, 'So we have nothing to worry about?' And she said, 'Well, he cashed the check.'"

The film is currently up for sale, and Gabrawy and Cox are hoping to find theatrical distribution. "Because of the Alec Situation, we weren't able to strike at the obvious time, before the November election," Gabrawy says. "But because that election was such a landslide, in the end it was probably for the best."

California voters, of course, reelected Schwarzenegger in November by a huge margin. In doing so, they overlooked the fact that the alternative to the supposedly corrupt Davis had broken a slew of campaign promises, even taking money from the exact same special-interest groups as his predecessor. It would would be nice if Running With Arnold could help us to understand these contradictions. But while Cox's film does a fine job of tracking Schwarzenegger's rocky progress from Terminator to Governor, it comes up short on historical context and analysis. It's long been rumored that the Schwarzenegger camp is lobbying for a revision to the U.S. Constitution that would allow legal immigrants to run for president. Should Arnold's political career extend far, far beyond the governor's mansion in Sacramento, one can only hope a weightier film than Running With Arnold pops up to explain how it happened.

Tags: arnold schwarzenegger, ArnoldSchwarzenegger, california, documentary, movies, politics, republican, running with arnold, RunningWithArnold, sxsw

12 Comments