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Everything continues to get worse for Rudy Giuliani. On Monday, during the second January 6 committee hearing, a Donald Trump campaign staffer testified that the former New York City mayor got drunk on election night in 2020 and pushed the president to lie to the American public about the results. He apparently wasn’t just tipsy, either: senior campaign adviser Jason Miller testified that Giuliani, who was acting as Trump’s personal lawyer at the time, was “definitely intoxicated.”
This revelation marks a new low, not just for Giuliani but for a nation. How did we let a man who thinks it’s okay to shave in an airport restaurant get so close to our country’s highest office?
Jed Rothstein‘s new “documusical,” Ore!which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival late last week, traces Giuliani’s astonishing transformation from former top federal prosecutor who brought down New York City’s mob bosses to late-night laughingstock who had his law license suspended last summer.
“What really fascinated me about Rudy was, why is this guy so central to so many historical moments in our modern history?” says Rothstein (COM)The China Hustle and WeWork: Or The Making and Breaking of a $ 47 Billion Unicorn) in a phone call with Vanity Fair. “What can we understand about what motivated him, what shaped him, what makes him tick, and, in a larger sense, what does it say about us that we have followed this guy from being‘ America’s Sheriff ’to‘ America’s Mayor ’to the guy who cleaned up Times Square to this hard right turn to this sad clown? What does it tell us about ourselves that this guy, through all these changes, has remained so central to our collective narrative? ”
Rothstein relies on interviews with journalist Andrew Kirtzman, who wrote Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City; former Giuliani adviser Ken Frydman; former New York City police commissioner Bill Bratton; and retired detective Bo Dietl to flesh out his title character’s bizarre life story. Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee, MD, also offers chilling insight into what Giuliani’s decisions and comments have likely done to our nation.
“She gave a really interesting and new perspective on the social impact of all of the lying that Rudy undertook on behalf of Donald Trump in the wake of the November election,” Rothstein says. “I think that understanding his actions through this lens of social psychiatry was very, very instructive for me.”
Rothstein says he wanted his Giuliani project to “add something to our understanding of him” and not “just recount his greatest hits.” The filmmaker had initially fantasized about staging an opera devoted to Giuliani, a nod to Giuliani’s longtime love of the art form. (“I think it saved me an enormous amount of money in psychiatric bills,” Giuliani explains in a soundbite featured early in Ore!). But staging an opera — summarizing Giuliani’s career in his love language, if you will — would have been too complicated and time-consuming.
Instead, Rothstein went the musical route — collaborating with composers Jason Howland, Billy Jay Stein, and Will Bates on songs that were performed by Broadway talent throughout the documentary. (Hence it being described as a “documusical.”) In speaking to Rothstein, though, I start thinking that Giuliani’s journey of extremes warrants an opera.
“Rudy has always been driven by a sense of righteousness. What changed is his definition of what was righteous, ”says the filmmaker.
While researching the film, Rothstein was disturbed to learn the depth of Giuliani’s self-serving in the private sector while working for Trump. But in the filmmaker’s eyes, none of Giuliani’s shady affiliations bear the same weight as the pressure he put on Ukraine to investigate claims about Joe Biden.
“It’s really horrific to me to see this man, who was in some ways the most heroic and most famous person in the world for a period of time around 9/11, come to this point where this is his legacy,” marvels the filmmaker .
Asked whether he predicts a curtain call for the former mayor on the public stage, Rothstein is skeptical: “He riled up a bunch of people to try and essentially overthrow our republic. I think it’s pretty hard to get past that. “
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