"He's Getting Too Close To The Truth" "We Need To Protect Trump From Mueller" "FIRE MUELLER NOW BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE"

[Buzzsaw Checkerling]

"Putin won't protect us this time."
- Fox News insider

Is This the Documentary That Can Take Down Trump?

How Jack Bryan parlayed rich-kid know-how into Active Measures,
the very first feature-length doc about Trump and Russia.

Jack Bryan was your average Upper East Side-raised son of a
millionaire trying to get his filmmaking career started when
Donald Trump began persistently popping up in his life. In New
York City’s social circuit, Bryan’s father, Shelby Bryan—a telecom
mogul and Democratic donor—was friendly enough with Trump, perhaps
because both are relative outsiders (Bryan being from Texas, and
Trump being Trump). On vacation in Palm Beach in 2008, the Bryan
family was immersed in the scuttlebutt about how a then
financially strapped Trump had curiously managed to sell a Palm
Beach estate he’d bought for $41 million to Russian oligarch
Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million. Around 2012, Shelby Bryan
shared a car to the U.S. Open with the real-estate tycoon, after
which he told his son, “That guy sure does like Russia.” The elder
Bryan (who is also the longtime partner of Condé Nast’s artistic
director, Anna Wintour) also brought his sons, Jack and Austin, on
a golfing trip to the United Kingdom, where Trump gave them early
access to his Trump International Golf Links course in Scotland
and chatted with them after their game.

To Jack, Trump registered as a “harmless clown who would appear in
the tabloids.” But as Trump’s political ambitions solidified, the
younger Bryan began to take notice. A self-described “pragmatic
lefty,” he had often texted with his friend and fellow politics
junkie Marley Clements about world affairs. When Clements proposed
that Russians may have been involved in the hacking of the
Democratic National Committee during the summer of 2016, Bryan
expressed skeptical interest.

Then, in March 2017, former F.B.I. agent Clint Watts testified to
the Senate Intelligence Committee that Trump himself had engaged
in “active measures”—a term that describes the Russian propaganda
tactic of using disinformation and manipulation of events to
promote its foreign policy. That’s when Bryan said to Clements,
“Somebody needs to make a film about this.”

Active Measures, a dizzying and rigorously researched documentary,
premieres at Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival this week, where
C.A.A. is representing the film in its hunt for a distributor. It
is 33-year-old Jack Bryan’s effort to connect the dots between
Trump and Russia, including Vladimir Putin himself. “I want to
alert people, and I knew no one else was going to do it in time
for the midterm elections,” he said over beers at Williamsburg’s
Radegast Hall recently. “I felt like I could.”

The story of Jack Bryan smacks like fiction. He’s an oddball rich
kid, the vulnerable, good-looking scion of a well-connected
Manhattan family, who got thrust into radically different
circumstances when he used the powers at his disposal—filmmaking
and access to friends-and-family financing—to realize the solemn
words his father once said to him: “You are going to have
advantages, and that means two things: you won’t have any excuses,
and you will also have a responsibility to be of service.”

Bryan wrote his first film when he was 16—a fictional piece
involving a kidnapping—and took classes at the New York Film
Academy. His schooling included stops at Buckley School and the
Kent boarding school in Connecticut, from which he dropped out
before attending rehab (he said he had depression issues). He
finished high school at Montana Academy, a self-described
“therapeutic school.” After arriving home to New York to study
media and film at the New School at the age of 23, Bryan made a
documentary about the seedy, beloved Siberia Bar, landed a job at
a production company, and directed two micro-budget indie dramas,
one of which had a minor theatrical release in 2015. (The New York
Times called it a “ mere genre exercise.”)

He was in pre-production on another small narrative film, this one
a 24-hours-in-New-York-wild-ride drama, when he decided to pivot
to Active Measures. The filmmaker moved to a friend’s house in
Maryland—he called it “the bunker”—where he and Clements spent
several weeks studying the evidence, scrawling their ideas on
window glass and large sections of cardboard to help envision the
web they were trying to connect. Also on the team was Laura
DuBois, Bryan’s girlfriend and an experienced producer, whom Bryan
calls “the boss of the movie.”

Bryan said that the thesis and main points of Active Measures
haven’t changed much since they first sketched it out in the
bunker—it’s just that their once apparently too-ludicrous-to-be-
real collusion narrative has become more plausible. Audiences will
see this in the film’s highlighted news clips and in-depth
interviews with respected world leaders, think-tank wonks, former
C.I.A. and State Department officials, academics, and Capitol Hill
veterans, including Senator John McCain and former Democratic
presidential nominee Hillary Clinton—who provides insight into
Putin’s psyche, including a wry aside about the Russian leader’s
tendency to manspread.

After a second beer at Radegast, Bryan was off to his apartment to
review post-production on the film. Eventually, more accomplished
documentarians will have Trump stories to tell. (Michael Moore is
currently wrangling a release for his own big Trump film,
Fahrenheit 11/9, which is currently stalled because of the
Weinstein Company’s implosion.) But for now, Bryan is happy to be
in front of the pack. “Until the cavalry comes, people need to
know what’s going on,” Bryan said, brushing away the hair falling
on his forehead. “Until the pros show up, I’m what you’ve got.”


http://bit.do/efBrM