The Daily Background

I’m working on another freelance piece for Truthout.org (a nonprofit online magazine with about 250,000 subscribers) about Rudy Giuliani. As part of the research for it, I had sort of an interview with Williams Cole, who was the producer of a 2005 documentary “Giuliani Time.” The piece I’m writing isn’t ready yet, but I thought I’d post some excerpts from the interview with Cole.

You may recall that not long ago, I posted a clip from Giuliani Time on the internet, sent it around to a bunch of people and it was eventually viewed by more than 30,000 people, thanks to the help of a lot of bloggers and others. I wrote about how the video was able to get so many views in such a short amount of time here.

Anyways, as a footnote to the interview, I asked Cole how he felt about this instance in particular, and the importance of viral video in politics more generally. Here are some excerpts:

PARSA: “Giuliani Time” wasn’t financed by any big movie studio, and therefore (correct me if I’m wrong), there wasn’t a whole lot of formal advertising that went into promoting it. I posted a clip from it online (probably illegally), and it’s now been viewed by more than 30,000 people in various formats across various websites. Not every one of them mentioned that it was from a documentary, but several of them did. What do you think about this type of decentralized free promotion and publicity that relies on people rather than advertising budgets?

COLE: I think it’s great on one level because it does allow for a free and widespread awareness of the film through the Internet. But I don’t have much doubt that if our distributor had the money to really publicize the film (with ads in major papers, TV, radio, etc. - NONE of which we had) that it would become the “must see” film right now. It’s hard when you put so much into a film and then when it comes to the release it seems buried or sort of off the radar. The economy of releasing films is difficult and always changing but it seems that fewer films are getting the real backing they need to really get off the ground. Though I do think the viral video element is wonderful and important but I also hope (and we’ll never know) that it sells more DVDs!

PARSA: We’ve recently seen that video– both short web videos and full documentaries– has the potential to do serious damage to politician’s campaigns (take for example the infamous “macaca” video which contributed to the failure of former Senator George Allen’s run for re-election last year). Do you think we’ll see more of this trend in the 2008 Presidential election?

COLE: Good question. I think it all depends how and if it gets into the news cycle. The damage is really done when it jumps from websites and blogs to the MSM (to use a right wing term for mainstream media). That’s when it’s played on the evening news over and over and everybody starts talking about it and it becomes glued to the politician. Our clip of Giuliani in drag and Trump was posted on youtube and written about some and now has over 150,000 views. That’s a lot and I’m sure that is having some effect (though, in my mind for the wrong reasons - the irony of all of this is that it probably won’t be his seriously flawed policies against the poor that bring him down but just the silly fact that he sometimes dresses up for whatever kind of joke). No doubt, though, politicians should and probably will be more careful anytime they speak in public because now everything is recorded. And, actually, that’s kind of a drag for future documentarians, etc. because the more slick and aware politicians are all the time the less they will let who they really are and what they really believe slip out - and that is actually more dangerous in the long run.

I’ll post more excerpts from the interview at a later date, and of course I’ll link to the Giuliani piece when it’s published on Truthout.

Filed under: Exclusive, Z-TDB Blog