BEST OF ENEMIES written and directed by Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville. A Video Services Corp. release. 87 minutes. Opens Friday (July 31). See listings.
You can have a thriving creative partnership with someone and still not know everything about his resumé.
When Robert Gordon got his hands on bootleg tapes of the famous debates between Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley during the 1968 presidential nomination conventions, he asked collaborator Morgan Neville if he wanted to see them. Gordon got a big surprise.
“He didn’t know that my first job out of college was working as Gore Vidal’s fact checker,” says Neville at last spring’s Hot Docs fest, where he was promoting their new film, Best Of Enemies.
“It was the worst job. Gore hated to be told he was not correct. Ninety-nine times out of 100 he was right. But the few times I had to tell him he was wrong he hated.”
Best Of Enemies tracks those groundbreaking debates, which gave new cred to the ABC network and signalled television’s ability to start important conversations.
The right-wing Buckley and lefty Vidal weren’t the foremost public thinkers of their time, but they had something that made for great TV: they couldn’t stand each other.
“There were other public intellectuals with headier credentials, but they weren’t very good on TV. We interviewed Noam Chomsky for the film, and he was terrible.
“Buckley understood the media. Vidal was a playwright and loved the-atre. Buckley had an innate sense of theatre – he was playing a character and wasn’t the same person in real life. But they let their anger and hatred get the better of their intelligence.”
Which is why, as debates proper, they’re not all that good.
“The people at ABC were embarrassed by them in the beginning,” notes Neville. “But the ratings were so big that they realized, ‘We don’t need substantive people throwing off sparks – we just need the sparks.’”
It’s almost as if it were a Fox News prototype.
“That’s right. But now you get the sparks from people with questionable credentials.”
Neville made the Oscar-winning 20 Feet From Stardom, and though it may seem like a reach to go from music docs to this political film, he says the process of making the two wasn’t that different: the directors just thought of the debates as songs.
And where does he keep that Oscar anyway?
“It’s on my living room mantle. We do have fireplaces in L.A., you know.”
See our review of the film here.
susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
