Like most of us, documentarian Robert Gordon has many firm opinions. The Memphis-based director is quick to suggest his favorite spot to eat between his city and Little Rock ("There's a place called Craig's Barbecue and across the street is the Family Pie Shop -- I like it even better than going to Little Rock: It's really the reason for the trip," he says). But even though Best of Enemies, the new documentary he made with his good friend and frequent collaborator Morgan Neville, about the scintillating series of debates between the ultra-conservative William F. Buckley Jr. and his arch-nemesis, the radical liberal Gore Vidal, that aired on ABC during the highly contentious 1968 presidential election, is essentially political, the left-leaning Gordon knew better than to turn this into some kind of biased celebration. Instead, the pair have made a fascinating film about two highly combative men who were probably a good deal more similar than either cared to admit. He sat down with me at a posh Philly hotel bar and elaborated on his two subjects, and the ways in which the nature of their argument has presaged our current political discourse.
PM: The film is an interesting mix: A time capsule that's also really currently relevant.
RG: I think that's inherent in the debates themselves, and really Buckley and Vidal embodying the ideas they embodied. Because when I saw the debates in 2010, that's what it looked like to me: I couldn't believe how contemporary it was, so strikingly as if you could just replace certain nouns -- replace "Vietnam" with "Iraq" or "Afghanistan" -- and everything just fit like it was happening in real time today. I realize now, through the filmmaking process and research, that that's because it was the beginning of identity politics. These guys having this fight about who each other was, is the way we fight now. It's the roots of that. They were so passionate because they were debating the future of the nation.
They were proto-pundits, who felt what they were saying. As opposed to the industry today, which features a gaggle of people who are paid specifically to stir things up and say outrageous things they may or may not actually believe.
The other difference is people don't want to get taken off the Rolodex. People make their living being pundits. Buckley and Vidal, this was a side affair. People making a living don't want to say something and not get called back. So, consequently, what it boils down to is most of these people are saying basic talking points. If you watch one half-hour you can watch the next four-and-a half hours on mute, and know what they're saying. If someone called someone a "queer" today [as Buckley does in the film] it wouldn't have the same effect, however, if someone was called a queer the way Buckley called Vidal a queer; the vitriol was so evident. You don't see that anymore. It's all very much roman candles now, not raging forest fires.
PM: How much of the power of these debates has to do with the native intelligence of these two men? A lot of our TV pundits today are well trained and use their body language well and make their points dramatically, but I don't necessarily think there's a whole lot going on upstairs. These two guys were both very smart.
RG: That's the thing. I feel the networks took away the wrong message from this. Part of what made this so interesting was that they brought so much to bear into the conversation. When was the last time you heard Pericles, or any Greek or Roman philosopher quoted on national TV? And Gore drops it casually. Today, people who are capable of that dumb everything down, because otherwise then you won't want to have a beer with them. You know, this whole horribly mistaken notion that we should choose our president by whom you want to have a beer with, selecting what you like by whom you would be comfortable with. Where did that come from? Do you want a president who thinks like you, or do you want a president who's going to go into really difficult situations and have many more ideas than you could possibly think of?
PM: Which is another reason you wouldn't see these two kinds of pundits again: Talk about elitist. It was dripping off of them.
RG: And that accent is kind of a put-on for both of them. There's a newsreel of Gore Vidal at 10 years old flying an airplane, and he doesn't have this accent. That's part of what we were saying: These guys weren't of the Eastern establishment, they came to conquer it. But now, someone who was born with that accent and wanting to create a public image would work to lose it, whereas these guys worked to gain it.
PM: As far as ABC's selection of these two -- they really didn't have anything to lose -- but what went into the process of selecting them?
RG: I think each man said that ABC picked [him] first, but it makes sense to me that they picked Buckley first, which is the story we go with, and they picked Gore because Buckley said not to. I think they realized if they had a communist -- Buckley's other no-go -- he really wouldn't have gone. They got paid $10,000 each, which is about $70,000 now. When Buckley was told he was going to be against Vidal, I think the money won him over. Plus the fact that it was when networks really were broadcasting, it wasn't Fox News narrow-casting to the Fox News Choir, so this was an opportunity for them to reach bigger audiences than they normally did. They were known on the talk show circuits, but that was a select audience. Here it was elections; everyone was tuned in. They could change minds.
PM: I was under the impression these debates were more Buckley's territory; he seemed more seasoned of a TV personality.
RG: By '68, he'd done two or three years of Firing Line so he knew how to do the one-on-one back and forth. He was a Yale debate team star, so this was his milieu for sure. But as Sam Tannenhouse says, "Gore was a great talker." And that's why it's so interesting: These guys were masters of something very similar, sort of like mixed martial arts of words.
PM: One of the things that makes it compelling theater is neither man is used to not having his way with an opponent. They both came in confident.
RG: Yeah, I think it's the attraction of opposites. They're so similar but at some point they veer off into polar opposites where one makes a right and one makes a left. All the similarities are there but the poles have switched. The stakes are the nation. The feeling that everything is at play here because they're each the Superman who's going to save the country from that evil guy across from them.
PM: Did you come into the film with a bias one way or the other?
RG: Morgan is a better filmmaker than I am, but we have a good simpatico. We knew this wasn't about taking sides. I mean, I lean left, he leans right, but neither of us wanted to go into this and make a fool out of Buckley or praise Vidal. It would have so much more meaning if it had balance, and then we found out in the research how balanced it really was. The more we got into it, the more we realized how similar these guys really were. Even the fact that Bill loses the debate wasn't the point. It was just interesting to see how it affected them after. This was not about the arguments, but about how we argue.
MovieStyle on 09/04/2015