Ralph Nader, "An Unreasonable Man"?

By Robert Avila

You may not think of Ralph Nader as the most electrifying personality, but he’s one hell of a lightning rod. Mere mention of his name in liberal circles is cause for vituperative wrangling and extreme, love-it-or-leave-it pronouncements about patriotism, loyalty, betrayal, and the devil. And in fact, say what you want about his wonkish demeanor, professorial posture, or ultimate role in American political life, the man is both fascinating and charismatic, as countless Nader Raiders will testify and Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan’s riveting new documentary, “An Unreasonable Man” (now playing at the Smith Rafael and Landmark Theatres), amply demonstrates. SF360 recently spoke to Steve Skrovan, a new documentarian and veteran comedy writer (you’d need a sense of humor to wade into this debate), as well as writer and former Nader Raider Karen Croft (also interviewed in the film) about Nader, the documentary’s reception, what you may or may not see in the forthcoming DVD extras, and the role of documentaries (and comedy) in relaying some inconvenient truths.

SF360: When most people think about Ralph Nader, I’ll wager they don’t necessarily think of him as the most exciting of personalities. But the film and the man it profiles both prove very engrossing, even exciting.

Steve Skrovan: It’s very gratifying to hear you say that because when you’re putting together you’re into the minutiae, and you go, ‘Is anybody else going to be interested in this except me?’ To put it out there and have people say, I couldn’t tell it was two hours — there’s nothing more gratifying than that.

Karen Croft: The great thing for me, after working for him for two years, is that we did go through that: being in the office, saying, ‘Does anyone else know what’s going on here?’ He’d be on TV occasionally, he’d do interviews or go on Saturday Night Live, or whatever. But your film is the first time the public gets that sense of how exciting it really was to be a part of that. And you could only do it in film; I don’t think you can’t do it in print.

Skrovan: The more I talked to people like Karen, and other people who were Nader’s Raiders, the more I felt obligated to tell that story. Because it’s bigger than Ralph, it wasn’t just him, and he purposely designed it to be that way. We say he’s a priest. He’s always looking for disciples. The religion is civics and he’s always looking for new recruits to join the church and spread the word. And he purposely decentralized it, would start something and remove himself so it could live on its own. But that story is larger [than Ralph Nader].

SF360: There are at least two other major stories that come out of this profile, and one of them is this generational story you’re alluding to, part of a restive baby-boomer revolt against the status quo, and the right-wing backlash it provokes, which really takes off in the 1980s with the so-called Reagan Revolution. The other story, which is intimately related and comes out vividly in the film, is the continuing rise of corporate power. It’s a story that dovetails so explicitly with other documentaries out now, including at least two other GM-centered stories, ‘Roger & Me’ and ‘Who Killed the Electric Car?,’ but also ‘The Corporation,’ ‘Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,’ and so on. Were those two larger stories already part of what you envisioned when you embarked on the documentary, or did they grow organically out of the focus on Nader?

Skrovan: It sort of bubbled up. And that’s how I like to work anyway. I bet [co-director] Henriette [Mantel] would say the same. We want to tell the story of this person, and out of telling the story, whatever they get involved with, whoever they have conflicts with, these larger themes naturally and organically bubble up. I went into this not knowing what the story was. If I knew everything beforehand I wouldn’t need to do it. If you know the ending, there’s no need to write. So that was all exciting stuff for me to learn. And we tried to incorporate as much of that as possible in order to give this story context.

SF360: You mention the defeat of the Consumer Protection Act effort in 1978, which seems to have been sort of the ERA of the Consumer rights movement.

Skrovan: I learned that from David Bollier, who characterized it that way. That was not something I knew beforehand, and when he said that seemed to be the high-water mark, he’s sort of the historian of this movement, so I took him at his word.

SF360: Going into the film, you expect 2000 to be the turning point, and of course it is a turning point, but not necessarily THE turning point or the only turning point. Nader and his movement have to reinvent themselves in response to larger political shifts.

Skrovan: And none of this is as neat as it comes cross, necessarily. There were other victories in the ’80s. The No Nukes concert happened in 1980. And that was a huge thing that still affects us today. But in essence, yeah, it was the institutional turning point. The thing that he couldn’t institutionalize was this Consumer Protection Agency. And because he couldn’t institutionalize it, all the victories beyond that were going to be ad hoc — there was air bags in 1985, which we had to cut out of the movie, No Nukes in 1980, Prop 103 in California in 1988.

SF360: So it does feed into the strategy shift, which eventually takes the form of the presidential campaign.

Skrovan: You see that there is a series of events that lead to this. This is not something that just arises out of nothing.

SF360: Which tends to undercut the charge by his critics, that the runs were an ego trip.

Skrovan: At the time, in 2000, people didn’t say that. 2004 they said that, because they said ‘How dare he?’ Nobody really worried about Nader in 2000 until later in the campaign, when they realized people were actually responding to his message. That’s when he became a threat. That’s when the message machine from the Democratic Party about ego, drop out, you know, all of this, became prominent. But I don’t believe, and I could be wrong because I’d have to go back too the research, that when Nader announced in 2000 that anybody was sounding alarm bells. I think they just thought, ‘Oh, here’s something that’s not going to make any difference.’ And the fact that it was going to make a difference, that people were responding to this in sufficient numbers, only later in the campaign, which led to the rise of Nader’s Raiders for Gore and movements like that, did people get angry about it. And then this quirk of fate, this quirk of history that happens in Florida, just solidified that. Then in 2004, when he announces again, then that’s when he’s a megalomaniac, you know — it’s all retrospect.

SF360: Where does this, what seems largely irrational, response to Nader come from? They’re blaming him for running a truth-speaking campaign he’s constitutionally entitled to run, in two separate elections that were pretty clearly stolen, or, let’s say, highly imperfect and irregular in which both major parties played along.

Skrovan: I think it’s human nature. I think this is the big problem with the Democratic Party; probably the big problem with [all of us] in America too: you’re reluctant to look in the mirror and say what did I do wrong? When something goes wrong, it’s human nature to look outside yourself and say, ‘This is the problem, this is at fault; not my fault.’ And Nader’s candidacy offered that easy scapegoat. So you don’t have to face what your limitations are. It’s funny that people are still mad at him after 2004, when he had no effect. They successfully quashed it. So who do you blame then? But that doesn’t change history because people think what a wonderful world we would be living in if Al Gore had been president. I think that the Supreme Court taking that election from [Gore] was probably the best thing that ever happened to him.

SF360: Why do you say that?

Skrovan: Because can you imagine, he’s president, 9/11 happens on his watch? What? He’s either impeached — he’s definitely a one-term president — or he’s got to be extra-macho, because the Democrats are quote-unquote soft. So he’s got to blow more people up than even George Bush, who does it naturally. So all this speculation about this liberal paradise that we’d be living in, again it’s people mistaking the ‘Inconvenient Truth Al Gore’ of seven years later.

Croft: Everybody loves him now.

Skrovan: It doesn’t come out in the film, but Barry Burden, who’s the Harvard professor who did the study of Nader’s campaign, mentioned to us that in August of 2000, during the Democratic convention, Gore was sort of striking this populist note: ‘I will fight for you against the pharmaceutical companies! I will fight for you against the insurance companies!’ And his numbers went up, and Nader’s went down. Then, a couple of months later, just before the general election, they had reined all of that in. And he was again sort of middle-of-the-road, and his numbers went down, Nader’s went up. Who do you blame?

SF360: That’s another part of this story, evidenced too in the huge turnout at the Nader rallies you cover in the film: this huge groundswell of support for these issues, but no representation for them in the two parties. It’s just not the thing being offered.

Skrovan: It’s because there’s no money in it. There’re people there. They’re harder to organize. It’s much easier to put money into insipid ads that deal with character flaws rather than policy issues. What Nader is trying to tell Kerry in the meeting that he has is that there are votes here. If you spent this money registering African Americans, if you spent this money trying to get to these populist issues, then you could actually run on your conscience. But it’s the Terry McAuliffes of the world, the slick money fundraisers who are telling these candidates, ‘No, no, you can’t do it. The big money is here; the thousand-dollar-a-plate dinners are here.’

Croft: There’s also a personality thing. Gore was all stiff. You know, he called Naomi Wolf and asked for her help and was like, who should I be? And people are craving someone who is who they are. And who’s going to tell them what they really think. And Ralph has always done that. They’re hungry for that.

Skrovan: And to a certain extent Bush was authentic in that way.

Croft: Oh yeah, he’s really that way.

Skrovan: He’s really the idiot that he comes across as. But people respond to the authenticity. With somebody like Gore or Kerry—

Croft: Who are they really?

Skrovan: Who are they really? And people go, if I’m going to vote for all of this I might as well vote for the real thing, rather than some guy who’s trying to play both sides.

Croft: And if only a Democrat who has a chance of winning could be more like Ralph, and tell it like it is. If that ever happens again.

SF360: But as the film suggests strongly, there’s so much corporate control at the top that it’s hard to imagine. Which brings me to another aspect of the film, the great amount of archival footage you’ve assembled throughout, and in particular the footage you unearthed showing Nader being expelled from the presidential debates.

Skrovan: We were looking for footage of something — because we knew we wanted to tell this story. And Tarek [Milleron], his nephew, who was there, said you know there were cameras around, and he said, ‘You know I think it was an NBC camera.’ And I immediately assumed it was the local Boston affiliate. And we called them and they don’t keep any of their tapes, they tape over everything. So I thought oh, I guess we don’t have that. And in the meantime we found archival footage of events that were occurring during the day, the marches and demonstrations, and that was all great, it was going to bring to life this thing.

And I remember making a note of this in one of Ralph’s books, Crashing the Party, about this event. He had mentioned that Al Hunt from the Wall Street Journal had made it his Outrage of the Week on the Capital Gang, this pundit show on CNN. So I ordered that footage, just so at least I could get somebody talking about it. We get the footage — and this is relatively late in our editing process — and within the footage, which was a complete surprise to me, there’s footage of Ralph being led to the bus. I go, ‘Oh, There were cameras there! It’s CNN!’ So we called CNN, they said no we got it from NBC, we licensed it from them. It was the national NBC. So we go to the NBC archives, we order up that footage, and the whole scene is there, plus a bunch of stuff that you don’t see in the movie with Ralph talking to people off camera, other reporters who’ve stuck microphones in his face.

And it occurred to me that this is why documentaries are so popular these days. Because it begs the question. This is great footage, this is footage any storyteller would kill for. The scene plays out right there. Why wasn’t this on NBC? If we found it, a small clip of it, on a pundit show in the cable ghetto, at the end of that show — where the rest of the show was taking about Bush and Gore, and how Gore was making faces at Bush and how that would affect him, this innocuous bullshit about the debate — when you have this perfect fascist moment of a corporation using the state police to bar a political candidate from even WATCHING, from even watching the debate in an adjacent building!

SF360: It’s chilling.

Skrovan: It’s very chilling. Why not on NBC? Why do you have to wait six, seven years to find it in a documentary? That is more of an indictment of our mainstream media than anything else, and to me explains why documentaries are important and fulfilling a very popular role today.

SF360: You spend some time in the film too on this, the Lewis Powell memo of 1971 and so on, documenting the deliberate and concerted strategy on the right to take over the media and means of mass communication to influence and regulate public opinion.

Skrovan: To win the hearts and minds of the youth.

SF360: One thing they did overlook was documentary film, though, which I assume they are right now working on correcting.

Skrovan: You know Fox News is doing their answer to The Daily Show now.

SF360: It’s not surprising. The Daily Show is extremely potent, an extremely powerful forum. That’s another thing. Comedy became the other avenue for dissent and the relaying of simple political truths, which is what The Daily Show mainly does.

Skrovan: John Stewart is an old friend of mine and I tease him, I say, ‘Thank you for saving America.’ Because in what other show do they show people saying one thing now and then they say, wait a minute, two years later you said the exact opposite.

Croft: It’s investigative reporting through humor. It’s incredible. He’s doing it.

Skrovan: I get my news through The Daily Show.

Croft: So do I!

SF360: Millions of people do.

Skrovan: And it’s not because people are stupid or they need to be entertained, it’s because they’re sensing something genuine.

SF360: Because truth is getting through. And it seems basic, comparing their words now with what they said before, but nobody else does it.

Skrovan: The major networks, their news division, if they had an editorial department — which they always used to do; you know, John Chancellor would always have a little editorial at the end, or Howard K. Smith. I would just take a page out of The Daily Show and make a segment like that. But they probably won’t do it.

Croft: Ted Koppel tells this [story] in a recent Frontline piece about the news that I actually worked on. When it became a profit center, then it became not doing the news anymore. It used to be sacrosanct. It used to be like CBS News, Edward R. Murrow — you don’t have to make money; you just have to do good journalism. And then it switched. He says it’s kind of ironic because 60 Minutes is one of the reasons that happened because it started making money. And so now everyone has to make money.

SF360: Your original cut was much longer. Was there more on his family, his background, that had to be cut for the two-hour version?

Skrovan: Yeah, and it comes in two forms. In the deleted scenes, the things that we deleted from the Sundance cut, which was 2:35, there’s a story about his brother Shafeek. His older brother was sort of the mentor of the family as far as the siblings were concerned, and really took Ralph under his wing. We tell the story of his influence on him as a young man, and then his battle with prostate cancer in the early

03.12.2007