If history is any indication, film enthusiasts readily engage in critical and theoretical discourse after stumbling upon a film that challenges audience expectations in a fresh and innovative way. Courting Condi, a film that certainly falls within this camp and begins a theatrical run on May 29, has already been generating enthusiastic (and less-than-enthusiastic) responses from cinemagoers and film pundits alike. Heralding itself as the first musical docu-tragi-comedy in cinema history, the film follows aspiring musician Devin Ratray – famously known for his role as Buzz in Home Alone (1990) – in his quest to win the heart of former United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Ratray’s story is an unusual component to what is an otherwise sobering indictment of Rice’s time in the Bush administration. But director Sebastian Doggart (30 Days, Project Runway) had a clear agenda in mind when making Courting Condi and that was to “get audiences singing, laughing and screaming back at the Bush administration.” In my interview with Doggart, which follows below, he reveals his reasons for crafting a new genre as well as his primary goals for the film.

Both Devin Ratray and director Doggart cite the tumultuous months leading up to and following the film’s completion as a period that called for determination on the part of those behind Courting Condi to keep the film in production and, subsequently, available to be screened by the public. A week before filming was scheduled to begin the crew lost the financial backing of Discovery, a blow that forced them to complete the film on a shoestring budget. Doggart holds that the Bush administration was the cause of the withdrawn funds and suspects a similar explanation behind the controversy that surrounded a canceled screening of Courting Condi by the Stanford Film Society in December of last year. According to Doggart, SFS President Kerry Mahuron saw the film, loved it, and extended an invitation to screen Courting Condi on December 2, 2008. The abrupt cancellation caused Doggart to suggest that there may have been other forces at play; an accusation that elicited an official statement by Mahuron in which she claimed that the film was canceled due to being “poorly made,” “boring,” and of “low quality.”

While Doggart still maintains that First Amendment rights were genuinely at stake, one thing is for certain: employing the form of a musical docu-tragi-comedy in order to address the life and times of Condoleezza Rice has proven to be a controversial decision. Courting Condi divides its time between interviewing Rice’s top biographers in a style consistent with Frontline and documenting the interaction between Doggart and Ratray as they collaborate to “win her heart” in a style consistent with Borat (2006), an approach which includes showing the audience multiple animated “Love Disk” music videos. It is precisely this juxtaposition of content that Mahuron of SFS cites as inappropriate in her formal reply over Courting Condi’s cancelled screening. Nevertheless, the film has been warmly received by others. It has gathered fourteen awards to date, most recently Best Documentary, Best Director, Best Song and the Audience Choice Award from the Treasure Coast International Film Festival, Special Jury Award at Worldfest Houston, and Best Narrative Feature at White Sands International Film Festival. Nominated for a Golden Leonardo Award for Best Documentary at the Milan International Film Festival, it is slated to appear at many more festivals and screenings in the future.

The moral of the story: Courting Condi will push your buttons whether it does so in terms of its unorthodox form or in terms of the unsettling nature of Condoleezza Rice’s time with the Bush administration. Regardless of your opinions of the film after viewing it, it’s a must-see. Just don’t forget to bring your critical thinking cap and maintain your ability to discuss taste as rationally as possible.

SIDE A: Sebastian Doggart

AE | Your background is as diverse as the film itself. You’ve worked as a journalist after receiving a degree in social and political sciences from King’s College, a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, and then as a drama director and a producer/director in television and film. Considering what you’ve been able to bring to the film, what is your main goal for the documentary?

SD | There are two goals. The first is to inform people about a woman who has changed all of our lives, who was primarily responsible for the direction that the US took in foreign policy between 2001 and 2009; and to shed light on a woman that the media have failed to properly investigate. This is a woman who has been very clever at flying beneath the radar of public scrutiny. She once said, ‘I want to leave office without anyone knowing where I stand on any of the issues’. This film tries to change that and to enlighten and educate people about who Condoleezza Rice truly is and the impact she’s had on the world. The second purpose is to entertain: it’s a comedy and it’s a musical, and music and laughter are the best ways to make people feel happy and entertained and get bums on seats and bring joy so we wanted to do those two things at the same time. That’s why we created this form of the musical docu-tragi-comedy.

AE | From reading your statements it seems that the main push for making the film came out of a desire to look at the successes and pitfalls of the Bush administration in a fresh way; how did this lead you to the form you ended up adopting for the film? Where did Devin come in?

SD | If you look at a film like Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), which won the Best Documentary Oscar in 2008, almost nobody went to see it. It had ridiculously small revenue from theatrical distribution – in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. People just don’t want to be depressed. They don’t want to go to the cinema to be told that our leaders are torturers and liars and cheats and cronies; they want to be entertained. But at the same time we urgently wanted to tell this story.

Devin is the funniest man I know and he has a certain amount of celebrity from being Buzz in Home Alone but I think he’s the new John Candy, the new John Belushi. He was discovered then, but he should be rediscovered now. He’s amazingly talented as a comedian and as a musician – he performs all of the songs on the film and he’s written two of them. He’s a friend of mine as well… and he seems the best person to be the paramour of Condoleezza Rice because he’s so completely different from her. He’s 29; she’s 54. He’s white; she’s black. He’s a struggling musician; she’s the most powerful woman in the world. He’s just a little bit out of shape and she’s totally in shape… so Love conquers all. That’s why I think Devin is ideal for this role.

 

AE | In a producer’s statement, it was suggested that Devin’s pursuit of Condoleezza Rice was comparable to Borat’s pursuit of Pamela Anderson. How would you respond to viewers confused as to whether or not they were supposed to take Devin’s pursuit of Condi as reality or a fabrication to make the film more accessible?

SD | Well, I was at college with Sacha Baron Cohen at Cambridge and I saw Borat after this movie was well down the line. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I actually see Borat much more as a social documentary then I do as a comedy – in terms of exploring racism, religious hypocrisy and social intolerance through comedy. Everyone in Courting Condi is real, even Devin. Those are his real parents there, it’s Devin playing parts of himself: as a child star, he has been obsessed with fame. As a voting American, he has been fascinated with Condoleezza Rice. Everyone else in the film – from Condi’s friends to Brent Scowcroft and from Bush to Rice – they are themselves. At its heart, the movie is a documentary. We’ve fact-checked all of the information reported and there’s no authorial voiceover from me as a director – our expert interviewees – like Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s chief of staff – are telling the truthful story. We have her top biographers in the film: Marcus Mabry, Glenn Kessler and Antonia Felix. So I would call this film fundamentally a documentary. We are certainly pushing the boundaries of the documentary, and one of the ways we are doing this is by using Devin’s quest as a journalistic device. Like any story is framed in some way, we frame ours through a love story.

But the facts are the facts. She was President Bush’s chief confidante right up to his departure from the White house. She was responsible for renewing the Blackwater contract. She did fail to see the signs that 9/11 was going to take place; she did lie after 9/11. She did order torture to take place and thus broke the law. These are the important journalistic facts that we want to get out there. At the same time, we want to sugar those pills with Devin’s comedy and his music and that’s the way I hope we’re going to get people to actually think about this. We are the first retrospective film about the Bush administration, and it reflects a crucial dilemma being faced by America: do we investigate these crimes that took place? Or do we move on and start afresh? The Obama administration is anguishing with this question of accountability. Should we not hold these characters – especially Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Gonzales as the people who ordered torture – responsible and prosecute them for knowingly breaking US and international law, or should we move forward? And that’s a question the film asks of its audience.

AE | The first time I viewed the film I found it vertiginous because of the way in which you challenge genre expectations and deliver something unexpected and unfamiliar to regular audiences of a documentary film. Having now completed the film, how do you see Courting Condi as fitting within film history (being one a kind) and do you feel using the form of a musical docu-tragi-comedy speaks to the necessity or the growing appeal of bending genres in order to cater to a new generation of movie-goers?

SD | We didn’t genre-bust for the sake of genre-busting. I’ve made a lot of documentary films and reality shows, and if I have control authorially, as I did on this film, I start with the subject as the way to find the form. The subject here is Condoleezza Rice. Out of the investigation of who she is and out of the desire to tell her story came the genre of the musical docu-tragi-comedy.

It’s a musical because she says she’s happiest, freest and most herself when she’s performing or listening to music. It’s a documentary in the sense that our expert interviewees and archival footage are wonderful tools to tell a story; we used the documentary form in both non-traditional and traditional ways. It’s a comedy because, as Molière once said, quoting Jean de Santeuil, it ‘castigat ridendo mores.’ Comedy punishes the customs of our time by laughing. And finally, it’s a tragedy because Condoleezza Rice’s story is a Faustian story of a religiously educated woman who gradually succumbed to the temptations of power and who is now left alone with blood on her hands. This is a tragedy of a good woman – a woman that could have fulfilled the promise that Rosa Parks hoped for educated African American women like her. It is a tragedy of the corrupting influence of power, and narratively follows the genre tradition of classic Faustian films like The Red Shoes (1948), Seventh Seal (1957), Wall Street (1987), Devil’s Advocate (1997), and Traffic (2000). It is the first musical docu-tragi-comedy in the history of cinema, but it is also not a random choice. It came out of three years of investigation and it came out of an attempt to paint her as truthfully as possible.

SIDE B: Devin Ratray

AE | How did the director, Sebastian Doggart, approach you to be in his documentary and what was your initial reaction? Were you ever hesitant about the concept of doing a musical docu-tragi-comedy on Rice?

DR | I was definitely hesitant, to say the least. When he approached me at first with the idea I was a little bit apprehensive to put myself out there in public since it was my name and his name and we were going to go out there and tell this bizarre story and put it to music. The music actually attracted me to the idea because it set it aside from any other docu-comedy that was going to be made and it was definitely an original approach to the subject. The music itself I felt was taken out of the category of just the mundane or the bizarre – well, it would definitely keep it in the bizarre – but it might make it slightly more legitimate in the sense that people would watch it and see these musical numbers intertwined into this weird political love story.

AE | The film has been a success already on the festival circuit and is steadily gaining pre-release attention from the press. What would you say audiences have to look forward to?

DR | I would encourage them to keep an open mind because whatever ideas or preconceived notions they would have for the film, I guarantee you they will be getting something different. The thing about our last presidential administration and Condoleezza Rice is that everybody has an opinion one way or another about her. And I guarantee you there will be information in the movie that you did not know about this woman because not a lot is known about this political figure. There will clearly be at least pieces of the film that will be a surprise to anyone who goes to see it, no matter how they are politically affiliated.

AE | At the Orlando Film Festival, Courting Condi was the opening night film; you won Best Performance there and the film has picked up several other awards as well. Congratulations on that success. On the flip side, have you gotten any negative responses toward the film?

DR | Well, it’s not a film that’s going to please everybody. It tries to paint a broad and unaligned picture of a political figure but in the end you will definitely see that the film has created an opinion about Ms. Rice. And that’s not going to agree with everybody. We have people who object to the way the film was shot or handled and while shooting it we had a lot of problems with people who were inside the Bush administration who did not want the film to be made at all. Without even seeing it, they didn’t think we had a right to make a film about anything that we wanted and because they weren’t in control of it they tried to stop us from making it.

AE | In the film there are guest appearances by Adrien Grenier and Jim Norton. Did you anticipate including these encounters in the documentary before you began filming or was being able to include them as cameos a pleasant surprise in the middle of production?

DR | Those two are friends of mine; they are close business associates and whatnot of mine. I went to high school with Adrien and I have acted with him in several projects. And Jim Norton is a friend of mine, as well, from my New York radio days. Both of them were intrigued by the subject and they were willing to do me a favor and appear in the movie and I’m very grateful to them. They were great contributions to the movie.

 

AE | Do you have a favorite moment in the film or a location/event that was particularly memorable for you?

DR | When the rally in front of the White House actually came together. It had been snowing and freezing and miserable in Washington D.C. until the Saturday morning we woke up to do the rally and it was 65 degrees and sunny and no wind. And this is the middle of winter. It was kind of like a sign [laughs]. All of the extras were people who just showed up that day to the White House, people that were just wandering up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. We gathered them up and they were so willing to help and enthusiastic about the project. If it had been snowing and miserable and raining, I doubt we would have gotten half of those people. We took it as a sign from the higher-ups that, yes, this film is going to happen and it is going to look good and the rally ended up looking great.

I had just too much fun singing and dancing with a crowd of people behind me. It is the first musical that has ever been shot in front of the White House and we were making history that way so it was incredible and really my favorite moment. I guess I am truly a showman at heart. I enjoyed singing and dancing and screaming for Condi to come out and let me take her away.

AE | I have two questions rolled into one: what’s next for Courting Condi and your promotion of it and, secondly, you’ve had a successful career as an actor since the age of six and as a musician as well – what are you currently working on now?

DR | In terms of the promotion of the film, that is mostly Sebastian’s department. I have gone off and done other films since then. I hope that it will continue to be accepted at film festivals and really the ultimate goal is for some distributor of note to see the film and to take it up and do what distributors do aside from ripping off filmmakers and that is to get it into the hands of some huge distribution company. That’s what I’m hoping for with Courting Condi. I think it’s worth it and I think it should go ahead and be picked up. The more people that see it – that increases our chances.

As far as my career, I’m still pursuing music. I’m going to be recording a solo album later this year and I also have several films coming out this year. I’m about to go down to Austin for the South by Southwest Festival where my first starring role in a non-comedic-documentary is [in a film] called The 2 Bobs (2009) and on September 25^th I am also in a movie costarring with Bruce Willis in his sci-fi action thriller called Surrogates (2009).

AE | Is there anything we haven’t covered that you’d like audiences to know?

DR | Sure, there’s a lot. I’m an incredibly good looking 6 foot 1 inch man.

Author’s Note: For more information on Courting Condi please visit the film’s website at www.courtingcondi.com. The film also has a presence on YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and more.

Contributor details

Alexandra Elfner is currently an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, finishing degrees in Film Studies and Philosophy & Religion.