[ad_1]
Mention the name Rudolph “Rudy” Giuliani in a crowded room and a number of arguments are bound to arise. The controversial former New York City mayor turned defender of President Donald Trump has attracted both positive and negative media attention over the past few decades. His drastic career swings have led to fluctuating opinions about his legacy. This weekend, television viewers get a look at what happened to this complicated political figure in a documentary produced and directed in part by a Montclair resident.
Valerie Thomas, a longtime filmmaker, producer and storyteller, has lived in Montclair for about 15 years. She has a long history of telling diverse stories through a wide range of genres. On Sunday, January 8 at 9:00 and 10:00 p.m., the first two episodes of her latest project – the four-part “Giuliani: Whatever Happened to America’s Mayor?” – will air on CNN.
“I’m really interested in anything that’s a good story,” Thomas said, “whether it’s in the political realm or in arts and culture.”
Thomas entered the film industry early in life when he assisted director Jonathan Demme, known for films such as The Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia. For about 10 years, Thomas led the creation of dozens of projects, working in both development and production.
After working with Deme, Thomas decides to go in a different direction and returns to school. Aspiring to become a print journalist, Thomas attended Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he earned a master’s degree.
After graduating, Thomas decided to take a few years off to care for his newborn child. Her career then took a different turn when she decided to return to work, this time into screenwriting and novel writing.
In 2010, Thomas published his first novel, co-authored with Stacey Kramer, titled “Karma bites.” Two years later her next book, “From what I remember,” was published. Thomas continued to pursue a creative career and also wrote a screenplay for Twentieth Century Fox.
Eventually, Thomas balanced his storytelling and writing talents and dived into the world of documentary filmmaking.
“I thought, ‘You know what, I think I should switch to documentaries if I can,’ because it’s a good combination of print journalism and filmmaking,” Thomas said. “That’s why I started writing documentaries. And from there I started producing and directing. And that’s about the last 10 years. So yes. This is the way.”
Prior to directing and producing two of the four episodes of the Giuliani series, Thomas directed two episodes of “The Murdoch Family: An Empire of Influence,” a six-part CNN series about the Murdoch family. And before that, Thomas produced a feature documentary called “The sit-down: Harry Belafonte hosts The Tonight Show,” which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Screenplay in a Documentary.
Across genres, Thomas has unpacked and revealed the hidden stories behind niche subjects.
“It’s a huge range of different topics, but I think what ties them all together is just stories that I’m interested in telling others that they might not have heard of, and that are fascinating and teach us of something about the larger world they live in,” she said.
The Giuliani series took just over a year to create. In the early stages, Thomas was heavily involved in research, spending days with the production team to uncover Giuliani’s history and socio-political connections.
This research led the team to what may be the most rigorous element of the production – deciding who to interview. To begin, Thomas, who has given many interviews in the series, reached out to some of the more obvious players in Giuliani’s life, including print and television reporters who have covered Giuliani for years and writers who have written books about his career.
For a deeper look at Giuliani as a person, Thomas and the production team tried to reach out to those closest to him, those who worked directly with him or under his direction or knew him personally. However, given the complicated nature of Giuliani’s character, Thomas said, about half of those asked declined to be interviewed.
“A lot of people didn’t want to talk about him,” Thomas said. “One of the things that we’ve run into, I would say, across the board, is that people who knew him well, who for the most part are pretty disillusioned and disillusioned with the way things have turned out over the last couple of years. I didn’t want to talk about it. They had positive memories and a positive experience of working with him, let’s say, and they didn’t want to be the ones saying they were angry or disappointed.”
Giuliani also declined an interview request. While the lack of response wasn’t a surprise to Thomas, it wasn’t necessarily intended either.
“On the one hand, I thought, ‘Why would he talk to us? Obviously, we’re not necessarily going to tell the story that he wants to be told, because it’s going to be pretty critical, factual, and so it kind of doesn’t make him look too good,” Thomas said. “But at the same time, he’s in the limelight and he likes to be in the spotlight and he likes to be the center of attention and we all thought there was a good chance he’d say yes, just to be on camera and tell his side of history, but he never did. It was disappointing.”
Although the production team received a number of interview refusals, Thomas interviewed a surprising number of people who put together the pieces of the Giuliani puzzle. These interviews revealed the many ups and downs of his political career. From his days growing up in a blue-collar Italian family, through the highs and lows of his time as mayor of New York, to his aggressive endorsement of Trump and the “investigation” of Hunter Biden, all the way to his persuasive speech in front of the Capitol riot on 6 January 2021, Giuliani: What Happened to America’s Mayor? has it all covered. And while the highs and lows of Giuliani’s life may leave people wondering what happened, Thomas hopes this docuseries will give them some clarity.
“I think it makes for a portrait that makes sense,” Thomas said. “This is a guy who, even though he’s made some unexpected decisions and taken some strange turns in his life, there’s also a lot of consistency. There are themes and character traits or behavioral tendencies and so on that have been there from the beginning. I think that’s what I hope people see.
“It’s hard to make sense of it. I mean, even if you know everything about him, it’s hard to understand because he’s a brilliant guy. He was a brilliant lawyer. He led the city and the country on 9/11. There are so many things about him that are positive and counter to what he has done. It doesn’t make sense on some level, like, “How could someone who did this do that?” But if you look at the whole picture, it kind of adds up.
The four-part series of “Giuliani: Whatever Happened to Mayor America?” will air over two consecutive weekends, with the first two episodes premiering on Sunday, January 8 and the third and final episode premiering on Sunday, January 15 . .
[ad_2]
Source link