Could Two New Docs Subtly Change the Presidential Election?

Adam Kinzinger had turned down more than a dozen requests to make a documentary. Then the director of Hot Tub Time Machine walked in.

The Illinois Republican congressman who famously — and largely solitarily — turned on Donald Trump after Jan. 6 was reluctant to participate in a movie that focused on his fading hopes to retain his seat. But Steve Pink, the aforesaid auteur of the jacuzzi, wanted to get more personal than that.

“Everyone else was interested in re-election,” Kinzinger said in an interview with THR as the Toronto International Film Festival was set to start Thursday. “But when I talked to Steve and the team their interest was in the human element — what’s the cost to you and your future kid?”

That conversation was more than two years ago. Now the resulting film, The Last Republican, could make an impact on more than just Kinzinger when it premieres at TIFF 2024 on Saturday. That film and Carville — a Telluride documentary about the maverick consultant James Carville and his long lonesome bid on the other side of the aisle to move the Democrats off Joe Biden — could thrust movies into the thick of the election. But how much are film companies interested in these stories — and will it matter in the grand voting scheme if they are?

Carville, at least, has answered the first question. CNN Films bought the movie (subtitle “Winning Is Everything, Stupid”) just before Telluride and will debut it on-air October 5 with an eye toward influencing voters. The Last Republican still seeks its own home when it plays for distributors this weekend, making the case that a good way to defeat Donald Trump is to popularize the backboned Republican who defied him. Submarine is handling sales on the film. 

“Things are dark, Trump is still ascendant and shenanigans to call into question this year’s election seem inevitable,” Pink said in an interview. “And here’s someone who, even though his political views I abhor on a good day, lives by his beliefs in an active and tangible way. I think that will resonate with people.”

Both Republican and Carville could make a splash in the 2025 Oscar documentary race, which has seen scattered contenders but few runaway favorites. But the campaign impact could be even greater.

Pink’s movie took shape when he and producer Jason Kohn, known for directing the Andre Agassi documentary “Love Means Zero” circa TIFF 2017, made their bid to Kinzinger that his story belonged on screen. And what a story it is: longtime Air National Guard pilot and conservative ideologue who spoke out against Trump’s role in January 6 and even joined the mostly Democratic Congressional commission, causing Republicans to shun him and eventually re-district him out of office.

A rapport even developed between Pink, an avowed liberal, and Kinzinger; the film suggests an odd-couple affability.  “At some point this started to feel like the national Thanksgiving dinner we haven’t been able to have since 2016,” Kohn said wryly.

The filmmaker known for the temporal-shifting power of chlorine and the filmmaker who once told of tennis betrayals would not seem like obvious choices for an inside-Rayburn account. But the former’s sense of improbable story and the latter’s ability to capture a maverick serve them well. Kinzinger helps his own cause with a personality that is brash and often funny, a world away from Congressional starch even as he is facing death threats.

To MAGA Republicans Kinzinger is a Judas; to liberal Democrats he’s a martyr. But even as the 46-year-old courts attention — he did agree to the movie, after all — he says he is neither. “I’m not courageous. I’m just surrounded by cowards,” Kinzinger said in the interview, echoing a theme from the film. 

For distributors, the calculus on Last Republican is a tricky one: they could buy the film now and see its value skyrocket if Trump wins. But if Trump is defeated on Nov 5, possibly for the last time, the film might be worth a lot less.

Should a distributor choose to take a flyer on a pre-election release, it could model for solidly Republican voters a way to go against Trump, depicting a man who still did so even though he paid with his career.

“Maybe I’m deluded but I think that a story can compete with Trump’s. Trump’s story is that Adam is disloyal, Adam is a RINO, Adam doesn’t represent his party,” Kohn said. “But I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a conservative audience to pick up on another story.” On Friday, Dick Cheney furthered that narrative when he added his name to the list of Republicans endorsing Kamala Harris.

A film release would also jolt viewers into recalling the attempted insurrection, depicted here in evocative detail, as well as the many mainline Republicans who quietly about-faced after first condemning Trump. (Former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy comes out particularly worse for the wear.)

A party’s dangerous groupthink is also the subject of Matt Tyrnauer’s “Carville,” which shows scene after scene from earlier in the year of its subject in vintage form, joyfully growling, cussing and eye-rolling over what he sees as the party’s dangerous deference to an unelectable incumbent. For months, that seemed to be an irrelevant message.

“It was almost a lost cause type of movie — you know, too late the hero,” Tyrnauer recalled in an interview. 

The film was actually being screened for friends and family on the night of the fateful Trump-Biden debate in June. The minute the lights went on in front of Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, Tyrnauer knew he had a new ending on his hands. The film now ends with a pivot to Harris.

Still, Carville now runs the opposite risk — having been ahead of the curve for months, it could seem like old news. Carville and Tyrnauer say the movie — which also revisits its subject’s famous work on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign, his improbable marriage to Republican operative Mary Matalin and the generally colorful Louisiana personality always beaming from the airport TV — still carries a timeless message of both the shrewd game of politics and the nobility of public service.

But the principals also believe their film has a role to play as the campaign heats up. Tyrnauer said an explicit goal was to get it out before balloting begins, while Carville says he sees the film’s potential to influence voters’ 2024 behavior.

“I don’t know how many people watching it are going to change their vote, but maybe somebody’s gonna write 100 more postcards or maybe somebody’s gonna volunteer at a phone bank,” Carville said in an interview. “There are a thousand things people can do to get inspired. My hope is this movie inspires people to get involved with the election.”

A CNN spokeswoman, Jordan Overstreet, declined to comment on the network’s aims for the film.

The history of movies trying to shift electoral maps is a checkered one. “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore’s blockbuster 2004 documentary that sought to get people not to vote for George W. Bush, failed in its main goal. But other modern documentaries from “Blackfish” to “Citizenfour” have succeeded in changing consciousness, and experts say that’s not hard to conceive of here.

“The idea that a filmmaker can make a difference on an election has been proven wrong — we’ve seen how that doesn’t work too many times,” said veteran documentary expert Thom Powers, who runs the doc section at TIFF. “What I think can happen is a film hits the zeitgeist in just the right way and can change how people think. The Last Republican and other films playing at this year’s festival have the potential to do exactly that.”

Kinzinger says he’s trying to keep his eye on something even bigger.

“If you fast-forward to 2124 and the administration of President Zarkon 3 or whatever we’ll call him, we’ll probably still be debating the same issues we’re debating now,” Kinzinger said. “But we can’t get there if the environment becomes one where people have lost faith in a system and even turn to violence because they think they don’t have a voice.”