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EXCLUSIVE: Director Matt Tyrnauer is doing a rapid update of his new documentary Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid to reflect Donald Trump’s win in the presidential election. Deadline has learned the filmmaker quickly assembled a crew to shoot a new interview with the famed Democratic political consultant to include as a coda to the film.
“The election wasn’t decided when we finished the film just a few weeks ago,” Tyrnauer explains. “We now know the outcome and I felt that I wanted to put a period at the end of the sentence.”
The recut version is now streaming on Max. “There was a reshuffling of a few elements that are almost invisible,” Tyrnauer says. “Then we give the outcome the election, and then James gives what is almost like his homily — or, battle cry is maybe a better term — which is we’re an opposition party… And that brings the film up today.”
The Democratic Party today is somewhere in the process of coming to terms with a decisive Electoral College loss that saw President-Elect Trump win all the battleground states, albeit by a relatively slim margin.
“When you lose, everything is a mistake,” Carville says by way of an election postmortem. In the film, he is seen sounding the alarm that Pres. Biden was heading for a resounding defeat to Trump. It was in large part because of his influence in the Party (as well as a shove from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi) that the incumbent president got out of the race. But crucially, Carville advocated for some form of mini-primary to determine who should be the Democratic Party nominee to replace Biden. That didn’t happen. After Biden bowed out, VP Kamala Harris almost immediately became the presumptive nominee.
“The amount of talent in the party is just staggering, it’s breathtaking. And I thought if we could get them out on the road in a kind of dog-and-pony show or town hall or something like that, it would create excitement and people would see that Democrats are more than just an old urban party,” Carville tells Deadline exclusively. “A sports metaphor I use is we had .350 hitters all over AAA [baseball], but no one ever got to see ’em. And had Harris gone through that process, it might’ve made her a better general election candidate.”
As became apparent at the polls, this was a “change” election, meaning a majority of voters wanted a sharp shift from the status quo.
“The only person we could pick that really couldn’t give ’em anything different was Harris,” Carville comments. He points to a telling appearance Harris made on The View when she was given an opportunity to articulate a different vision from Biden’s. “When you go on The View to say what would you do different than Biden, and you say, ‘I can’t think of anything…’ Loyalty is great, but loyalty does not trump winning.”
Carville, who played a definitive role getting Bill Clinton elected president in 1992, in large part by insisting the campaign stick to the message, “It’s the economy, stupid,” praised Tyrnauer’s choice of a name for the documentary. “I love the title because the most exalted thing you can do in politics is win the election. That’s it. Everything else is secondary. It is secondary to that one single objective.”
Now that it’s Trump who has accomplished that objective, he’s announcing choices for his cabinet that have raised alarms among Democrats, and in some cases Republicans too. Matt Gaetz dropped out of the running for attorney general after several Republican senators indicated they would not back a man who has been accused of sexual misconduct. But allegations of that nature apply to several other Trump cabinet picks, including Pete Hegseth, his choice to run the Defense Department. As the Washington Post reported, Hegseth “paid a woman who accused him of sexual assault as part of a nondisclosure agreement, though he maintained that their encounter was consensual, according to a statement from his lawyer.”
Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for Education Secretary who was formerly a senior executive with World Wrestling Entertainment, is facing a lawsuit accusing her and her husband Vince McMahon of criminal negligence in the alleged sexual abuse of children who worked as “ring boys” for the WWE (Linda McMahon has denied the allegation).
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., tapped by Trump to run the Department of Health and Human Services, faces a sexual misconduct allegation of his own. “A woman who babysat for Kennedy and his second wife told Vanity Fair magazine that he groped her in the late 1990s, when she was 23,” the Associated Press reported. She told USA Today earlier this week of another incident in which she said a shirtless RJK Jr. asked her to rub lotion on his body.
Multi-billionaire Elon Musk, tapped by Trump to run a proposed “Department of Government Efficiency,” has been sued for alleged sexual harassment by employees of his SpaceX rocket company. SpaceX reportedly settled a separate suit in 2018 that accused him of requesting an erotic massage from a flight attendant.
“Now Bobby Kennedy’s babysitter has come forward,” Carville exclaims. “There’s so many things that these people are, but they’re just a pack of creepy perverts is the picture that’s emerging here. It really is. Everybody has things in their past, but Jesus, the number of sexual crimes — remember, Trump was convicted and found liable in a court of law, of which the judge said, by any definition, he raped that woman [E. Jean Carroll].”
Carville continues, “Sometimes accountability takes a while. I’m as distressed as anybody is about the lack of it now. But maybe it’ll come late. I don’t know. I have to hope. What can I do? I don’t have any choice.”
Tyrnauer describes Trump’s cabinet picks as going “beyond farce into tragedy. It’s hard to know which to pick — tragedy or farce.”
He adds, “I think one thing that is helpful about documentary film, at least the ones that I am intent on making, is that they’re the opposite of the so-called ‘hot take.’ And as horrified as I am by these cabinet choices, we live in the world of the tweet and the hot take and I think Trump is very good at manipulating that type of media. So, I think transmitting a more considered message and ideas for how to prevail on important political issues is something that this film does pretty effectively.”
Tyrnauer lauds his protagonist for having the courage to tell the Democratic Party leadership that Biden was going to lose and action needed to be taken to avoid electoral disaster. Ultimately, Harris didn’t win, but one could argue a larger political catastrophe was avoided by switching to a more viable candidate (the balance of power in the House of Representatives remains very tight; Republicans took control of the Senate, but Democrats won several very closely contested races).
“If you don’t believe James can see around corners, watch the movie and see him seeing around corners and calling it right at almost every turn,” Tyrnauer insists. “And I think we should keep listening to him. I think if more people see the movie and he continues to be a voice that people turn to and listen to, I think we can only be better off.”
Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid has qualified for Oscar consideration this year. The original, pre-recut version of the film aired twice on CNN; A TVOD and PVOD release of the updated doc will be announced in the future.
