When something as monumental occurs as the Jack Abramoff scandal, someone is bound to make a movie about it. Sure enough, we’re getting two. George Hickenlooper is bringing us Casino Jack, which stars Kevin Spacey as the man with one too many plans. But first up is Academy Award winner Alex Gibney’s take on the events in his documentary called Casino Jack and the United States of Money.
On January 3rd, 2006, lobbyist Jack Abramoff pled guilty to three criminal felony counts. You don’t concede to such a hefty dose of criminal activity without a detailed rise to infamy to back it up. Gibney takes us from Abramoff’s early days as the chairman of the College Republicans National Committee all the way up to the more recent and well-known bouts of corruption.
Whether you’re familiar with Abramoff’s antics or not, the material presented in this film is shocking. How can a man trounce around the nation’s capital using and abusing the elected officials we entrust with the wellbeing of our country? The answer is simple, money. Abramoff knew how to spend it, he knew how to raise it, he knew how to get one person to pay up so he could pay out to another and do so without getting caught.
You can see it all for yourself when Gibney’s Casino Jack and the United States of Money hits theaters on May 7th. For now, check out what Gibney had to say about assembling the footage, lining up his interviews and his personal take on Abramoff after having spoken with him firsthand.
Why Jack?
He was just such a wild and outrageous character, such a good story. And, by phone, his story, it seemed to me to get to the heart of the central problem of our American democracy right now, which is money. And so that’s why I called it Casino Jack and the United States of Money. I think Jack’s story is a wild one and a fun one and an engaging one and he’s one of those great American characters who invents himself, but he also ideologically represents a wing of the republican party that’s all about the view that, you know, let the market be the final arbiter of moral values.
Has Abramoff seen the film?
No, I don’t think so. I don’t think they can give him a DVD in prison.
He gets out in December, right?
No, no, no. He gets out to a halfway house in June. And I even suggested, I told Jack, I said, ‘You should take the film out on the road with you.’
So what did he say about that?
He hemmed and hawed. I hope he’ll go there. I have a feeling when he gets out, he’ll be back with his friends and it’ll be too hard for him. But I told him, ‘Take it out, criticize it, ridicule it, do what you want.’ Nothing would be more riveting to me than to see Jack – I told him that [he should] give a lecture about corruption in Washington from the inside out. I think that would be great.
Did you get any threats when making this?
Threats? No. Not really. People ask me that a lot. I don’t know, maybe I’m not threatening enough.
Did the Justice Department give you a hard time interviewing Jack?
Well, I think what they did is they pressured Jack. The official reason that I couldn’t interview Jack is that Jack declined to be interviewed, but that’s not a good reason because he agreed to be in it. Everybody agrees in Jack’s camp and my camp that he had agreed to be interviewed and the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons weren’t letting us in initially. I hired a lawyer to say we should be allowed in – you allowed Kevin Spacey in – and so we were winning that argument and then low and behold Jack said, ‘I do not wish to be interviewed by Alex Gibney.’ Well, I believe, I know it’s because the Department of Justice both pressured him and offered inducements to him not to be interviewed by me.
You got the chance to sit down and talk with him though, right?
Yes, I visited him in prison.
And what’d he have to say?
He’s repentant and very incisive about this stuff and how it works. It was also interesting just to meet him as a person and I found him to be very charming, you know, charismatic and funny. He’s a good storyteller, peppered with all sorts of quotes from movies. He loves that.
In the film it seems as though he wants to turn DC into Hollywood.
I think he did. [Laughs] I think he succeeded. What do they say? Politics is show business for ugly people? So I think Jack succeeded. He turned DC into Hollywood. I’ve always thought they’re kind of sister cities. LA’s a huge city and there are a lot of industries in LA, but when you speak of Hollywood, that is to say the industry, [it’s] similar to Washington. They’re like coal towns and so everybody in town works for the coal factory. DC’s like that too and also DC’s full of extremely narcissistic people who are all angling for attention. So what better place for a movie producer than Washington DC? I think he moved effortlessly between Hollywood and DC and each one appealed to his imagination.
Any reason why you didn’t put the part about not being allowed to interview Jack in the film?
I thought about it. Within the context of the story and the narration, I didn’t put myself in a kind of first person way in the film, so because of that, it just seemed – we tried it out a couple of ways, it just didn’t seem to fit and there was so much we were trying to get in, but we’ll probably put something about it on the web. We’re going to do a series of web episodes or webisodes that relate directly to the film and there will probably be something about that in one of them.
What was the most difficult challenge unraveling the case and what surprised you most?
What surprised me was how much a part of the mainstream Jack was. I think there’s a tendency to try and portray him as a character who’s a fringe character, who did outrageous things that nobody else did. Well, he did them outrageously, but the things he did were in the mainstream: his use of non-profits, his use of the sky boxes and his use of campaign finances as a lever and also his use of staffers, the kind of revolving door in Washington DC where you take the staffers out of the members’ office, turn them into a lobbyist. Even if you’re not officially lobbying during the one-year ban, you’re still creating, you know, a sense of common purpose.
Abramoff was very involved in the 2000 president election, right?
It’s a part of the story I wish I had been able to get into more, but he was very instrumental in raising money, particularly to defeat McCain. Even before the general election when McCain was on a role and Bush was meeting McCain in South Carolina, Ralph Reed was very much running that campaign and he was very much running the dirty tricks in that campaign, but he needed money and who did he go to for money? He went to Jack. Jack raised it, a lot of money.
You mentioned in prison that he repented but was also incisive about the way things were. What do you recall that he said that was especially incisive?
He talked about the importance of relationships and I think that’s one thing that gets overlooked. I concentrated a lot on the money, but the relationship part is important and that’s where the revolving door really comes in handy. That was very much a part of Jack’s operation is to get these guys from members’ staffs, put them on his staff and then he a pipeline right to the members’ office. There’s a trust level there and I think you can see it in the film in the relationship between Neal Volz and Bob Ney. I think Bob just implicitly trusted stuff that Neal told him, so when Neil moved over to Jack’s shop, Neil would call Bob and Bob would trust Neil with what he had to suggest and that became very much part of the M.O.
How do you approach the editing process? Have you developed some sort of formula?
I don’t know if there’s a formula. I try to pay attention to story and character just like you would in a fiction film. You have the real life characters, but at the same time, the job in making a film is to produce a film where those characters come to life hopefully. So that becomes a key part of the process. The other key part is that there’s a story you want to tell in the beginning, but if you’re too rigid about trying to tell it in the way you imagine it, rather than with the materials that you can find, then you run into a bind and so part of the process then is adjusting and twisting your story to make best use of the most compelling materials. For example, we found the cameraman who was on that Jamba Jamboree trip and he had all his outtakes. Well, then we have to find a way to get that into the film and when we started I had no idea that we were going to have such an extended sequence on Jack’s young revolutionary period, Jack and Dana Rohrabacher’s young revolutionary period. But we got all this great material and we thought that is such a fascinating facet of this character that’s been overlooked, the idea that he’s a zealot, not really a kind of money guy. He’s more of a zealot who really had an ideological agenda.
One of my favorite elements was the inclusion of the Dancing with the Stars clip. It was like the cherry on top!
Oh yeah! Yeah, the maraschino cherry on the ice-cream sundae. No, that was unbelievable. Actually I think we went down and Zena Barakat, one of the producers, went down and shot [Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington] Melanie Sloane’s group watching that that night. I think we’ll post that on the net. But yeah, that was just unbelievable to me. He just becomes a part of the celebrity culture. He’s famous, so, Dancing with the Stars. He’s not very good at lip-synching though. I want everybody to know, that is not our bad synch, that’s DeLay’s bad synch.
Who is this film for? Is it for those who’ve been following the story all along or could it also be for someone who knows very little of it, perhaps young moviegoers?
The younger audiences I’ve showed it to were really turned on by it because there’s a lot of cynicism about government and I think that’s not misplaced, but most of the cynicism is not much aware beyond, ‘Oh, things are bad in Washington.’ They don’t really understand why. I think it’s a pretty good and pretty entertaining look at why things are so bad in Washington. My hope was that people would come to this who were not – I was not an expert in lobbying in Washington. Washington’s not really my town when I started this film, so I hope that people come to this and say, ‘I want to know why things are so bad.’ It’s like going inside the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant. See how the sausage gets made.
So what do you want them to walk out with? An urge to make a difference?
Yeah, I hope so, on this one. It’s not like that on every film I do, but on this one, the answer seems pretty simple even though the means to get to that may be hard or complicated, that is you have to take the money out of the system. If the money doesn’t get taken out of the system nothing will ever get fixed and we’ll continue to make more bad decisions. And that goes for the right and the left. If senators and congressman are bought and sold like sneakers we’re never going to get real debates on real issues. It’s always going to be the money steering us where they want us to go. The other problem is with all the problems that we have to solve, because of the enormous amounts of money that have to be raised, these congressmen and senators spend two to three days out of every working week on the phone raising money. Why should we be paying for that? So it seems to me that while given the supreme court decision and given the depressing desire of incumbents to want to stay in power no matter what so they don’t have a vested interest in changing the rules, still, if we all get angry enough and we start voting out people who aren’t all about pulling the money out of the system, then maybe things will change.
Who’d you want to get that refused to be in the film?
Well, obviously I tried to get [Michael] Scanlon, tried to get Jack, tried to get Emily Miller.
And what was that like?
Well, Scanlon said, ‘Look I’m under indictment.’ In fact, he had pled guilty, so he was cooperating so he said, ‘There’s no way I’m gunna talk.’ And Emily Miller just wasn’t interested. I tried to get McCain to talk; he wouldn’t talk. Tried to get Byron Dorgan to talk; he was the democrat on McCain’s committee, he wouldn’t talk. Tried to get Reed to talk. I spoke to him off the record, but I wasn’t able to get him to talk on the record or even for background. I was lucky to get these people to talk. When we started out, nobody really wanted to talk about this because they all felt they were going to be implicated. Then slowly but surely people started to get sentenced, they started to come out of jail and I was able to persuade some of them to talk. For me the big scoop and score was the dynamic duo of Neil Volz and Bob Ney. To me, they’re kind of the beating heart of the film because their relationship gets pulled apart by the corruption. It’s a little bit like Sam and Frodo in Lord of the Rings, you know? It’s like the evil spirit of the ring, of Sauron, starts pulling apart the friendship. The next thing they know, they’re at each other’s throats. They both came to the premiere of the film at Sundance. Neither one of them had seen the film prior to that and I didn’t know what to expect, but Bob Ney liked it and he got out and came down to the podium and actually answered most of the questions from the audience. There was something of a rapprochement between him and Neil because without Neil’s testimony I don’t think Bob would have gone to prison.
Did you make any changes since the film premiered at Sundance?
Yeah, I did. I took about eight minutes out and I also trimmed down the narration. I felt the narration was too full of detail and it was just too much. So I pulled it back and I think it plays much better now.
What made you decide to use straight voiceover narration for this one?
I almost always do. There were a lot of documentarians who feel that that’s somehow not right. It’s an old battle that’s being fought over something over an enemy that’s no longer an enemy, which is the old voice of God narration. Werner Herzog films have narration, Michael Moore’s films have narration. You know, Gonzo was narrated, but it was just narrated by Hunter Thompson’s words with Johnny Depp reading them. But Enron has narration, Taxi narration.
And you’re reading the narration yourself?
Yeah, I started that bad habit with Taxi in part because my dad was in that film. I think for the Lance Armstrong film there’ll probably be an actor. Unless there’s a reason for it, I don’t see why I shouldn’t. It just feels more honest. I don’t feel like I have some really great voice. It just feels more honest.
What’s a good reason then for not doing it, like in the Lance Armstrong film?
I think in the Lance film I’ll write the narration in such a way so that there’s a kind of character attitude. There’s a great doc, was done many years ago called Elvis ’56, and Levon Helm read the narration, but the narration was written for him to be a kind of a character and I think I’ll do something similar with Lance.
Are you looking forward to Kevin Spacey’s biopic, Casino Jack?
I’ve seen it and one director to another shouldn’t comment on the film, but all I would say is, I will say that Kevin Spacey’s performance is great, but he’s no Jack Abramoff. [Laughs]
By Perri Nemiroff