Washington Times: Impact of ‘2016’ on 2012 presidential race uncertain
On Tuesday, Citizens United released, “The Hope and the Change,” another film critical of Mr. Obama, on six cable channels and six broadcast networks, and plans to issue a second documentary, “Occupy Unmasked,” in limited release Friday.
Conservatives say they have one man to thank: Michael Moore, who hit it big with a string of liberal documentaries beginning in the 1990s and culminating in 2004’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which made more than $119 million and remains the highest-grossing political documentary of all time.
David Bossie, president of Citizens United, credits the success of “Fahrenheit 9/11” with compelling him to go into show business.
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“When I called around Washington, D.C., in 2004, I called my friends, I even called Ed Gillespie at the [Republican National Committee], and I said, ‘How do we respond to this?’ ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ was a 90-minute attack piece on George Bush,” said Mr. Bossie. “My thought was, ‘My gosh, we have to respond to this,’ but nobody I called knew how to make a movie.”
Mr. Bossie ended up connecting with a couple of Hollywood conservatives, actor Ron Silver and screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd, and released “Celsius 41.11: The Truth Behind the Lies of ‘Fahrenheit 9/11’” in 2004. The documentary did well enough that Mr. Bossie went on to make “Hillary: The Movie” in 2007 about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton, which became the basis for the 2010 Supreme Court case Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission.