MULRONEY TAPES DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING AT ITS BEST
Ottawa Citizen, Nov 21, 2005
By Alex Strachan

On a night when you can choose between Las Vegas -- Monica regrets hosting a comic-book convention! -- and Prison Break -- Michael finally has it out with T-Bag! -- a two-hour clip job called The Secret Mulroney Tapes sounds as if it could be a crushing bore, but it isn't.

Loosely based on the Peter C. Newman book The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister, this well-crafted documentary jumps back and forth between news footage of the day and bookend interviews with the author himself.

All the while, carefully selected portions of the tapes play on in the background, with captioned subtitles spooling across the bottom of the screen.

The audio quality of some of the Mulroney interviews is iffy at best -- Newman did most of his interviews over the phone, and some of the calls sound as if they're coming in from Uzbekistan -- and the captions are not nearly as distracting as they sound.

In fact, nearly everything about this remarkable film is well chosen.

The Secret Mulroney Tapes plays like a great western, High Noon on Parliament Hill, with Mulroney as the self-deluded Gary Cooper figure, barricading himself in his fort while all around him the weak-kneed town Nellies fret about the gathering storm.

This is a fine, fine film. Newman reveals more about himself than he perhaps intends in his bookend interviews -- I bet you won't find that in the book -- and for once the portentous background music adds to the overall effect.

CBC political documentaries are often lazy and uninspired, full of weepy narration, overbearing music, tedious talking heads and no sense of craft or artistry.

The Secret Mulroney Tapes is one of the good ones: It was obviously put together by real filmmakers, with a real grasp of style in storytelling.

People will hear what they want to hear in the Mulroney tapes, of course, but don't make the mistake of prejudging the film based on what you think of the man or his politics. This is historical documentary filmmaking at its very best: Crisp, fast, eye-filling, thought-provoking and fascinating to watch.

TAPES GIVE EARFUL OF MULRONEY
The Canadian Press, Nov. 21, 2005
By John McKay

It's one thing to read them.

But it's quite another to actually hear the words of Brian Mulroney in those audio tapes compiled by author Peter C. Newman and used as the basis of Newman's summer book The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister.

Tonight, CBC-TV airs a feature-length documentary for the first time lets Canadians hear the former PM in all his profanity-laced glory.

"I was a fly on the wall for the conversations," says producer-director Mike Sheerin about listening to the tapes early this summer. "It creates a mood. It's theatre of the mind, even though it's television."

The listener is struck first by the breadth of the obscenities, not always provoked by passion but rather a staple in the rhetoric of a private personality far different from the public one.

But Sheerin doesn't think Mulroney swears all that much, or that it's a big deal.

"He uses it to punctuate certain sentences here and there. I do that. . . . It's just sort of normal talk."

The former prime minister displays a loathing for members of the parliamentary press gallery, who trigger the strongest obscenities during the 90-minute film.

The tapes reveal Mulroney's apparent disdain for his opponents, from Pierre Trudeau to Jean Chretien, and even for his own party colleagues, from Joe Clark to Lucien Bouchard, who he insists did not quit the Tory cabinet in 1990 as history has recorded.

"I fired him," Mulroney says bluntly, although the revelation was not included in Newman's book. Sheerin doesn't know why, except that Newman may simply have forgotten it in the mountain of material he had.

For the documentary, the sound clips, chosen from hundreds of hours of phone calls and in-person interviews taped over two decades, are married to relevant newsreel clips and interspersed with on-camera comments by Newman. There is no narration.

Sheerin says he befriended Newman two years ago when he was producing a CBC Life & Times biography on him. Sheerin was one of a handful of people who were aware at the time that Newman was working on his book and that led to Sheerin assembling this companion documentary in secret under the rather melodramatic code name Project X.

 

THE SECRET MULRONEY DOC
By Brian Gorman, Zap2It, Nov. 21, 2005

Talk about your tall orders: imagine being a filmmaker and getting the assignment of making a two-hour documentary based on several hundred hours of audio tape. That's the job Mike Sheerin was handed about a year ago - when no one had any idea that Peter C. Newman was working on his book, "The Secret Mulroney Tapes: Unguarded Confessions of a Prime Minister."

The book - based on many hours of casual and often profane conversations with the former prime minister over the years that he was in office - was released in September, to frontpage headlines across the country.

Now, coming to the air with uncommon haste is the two-hour documentary, "The Secret Mulroney Tapes," Monday, Nov. 21, on CBC Television. The film was put together in secret over the course of the last year, as Newman's book was quietly being put into production.

"The hardest part was not being able to tell anyone what I was working on,"   Sheerin says.

"The Secret Mulroney Tapes" is a marriage of Newman's original audio tapes and archival footage from Mulroney's nine years as prime minister, from 1984 to '93.

Sheerin says he went into the project as neither a fan nor a hater of Mulroney, but that listening to the tapes softened his view of the former prime minister.

"I was surprised at my view of the man on the tapes," he says. "After hearing the tapes and reading Peter's book, I see Mulroney as a human being now. I empathize with him."

Sheerin had to transfer material from Newman's original cassette tapes onto a laptop and then remaster the sound digitally. There are about 80 hours worth of tape, held at the University of Toronto and, he says, it took a month to go through them.

"The spine of the show is obviously the audio tapes," Sheerin says.   "Then you're faced with the problem of, 'Okay that's not very visual. So what do we do?'

"So what I decided to do was use archival footage to visually tell the story, but not just the footage we've all seen a million times, because we all lived through that era."

Sheerin put out a call for footage that ended up on the cutting room floor, to various news agencies - particularly the CBC.

Nothing turned up that will change the way we see historical events, Sheerin says. In fact, at lot of it was rushed, out of focus or in the nature of set-up shots and test footage.

"It was all part of a design to enhance what I call the dreamlike quality," Sheerin says. "It's like when you're talking to someone on the phone and viewing things through your mind's eye. When I was listening to the tapes, I found the same thing was going on.

"So, I thought if we just let a raw field tape roll, that's just like mind's eye. Your eye just drifts around looking for something to focus on."

The result is a stream-of-consciousness visual that is at the same time familiar and novel.

For example, most people over the age of 20 are familiar with the famous Quebec City summit, where Mulroney, his wife Mila and Ronald and Nancy Reagan appeared on stage at the end of a St, Patrick's Day revue, to sing "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."

The familiar footage is an aerial shot of Mulroney singing the last few bars alone, in a powerful Irish tenor.

For "The Secret Mulroney Tapes," Sheerin found footage of the two leaders and their wives coming down from their seats and walking onto the stage.

If there's a theme to the film, that's it: familiar events seen in a new way.

 

BRIAN MULRONEY, EVERYMAN
The Globe and Mail - Nov. 17, 2005
By Guy Dixon

It's all there on tape.

Brian Mulroney the pit bull: "If the rules of the game are that the press gallery think that they're going to abuse me, darn 'em."

Mulroney the innocent: "I'm no better or worse than anybody in terms of the truth. I'm just as truthful or as full of doo-doo as anybody who's ever held the office."

Mulroney the conspiracy kook: "They're [the press are] all married to one another and they're shacked up with one another. And their wives are on the payroll of the CBC."

Yet filmmaker Mike Sheerin heard something else when he was selecting excerpts from writer Peter C. Newman's taped conversations with the former prime minister for a coming CBC-TV special. He heard Mulroney sounding surprisingly ordinary, someone a lot like the rest of us.

"The thing that I was so shocked at was how much of a normal person he was, in that he has the same sort of vulnerabilities that everybody has," Sheerin said. "He was concerned with how other people viewed him, just like all of us are."

Sheerin, who is 33 (still a boy when Mulroney entered office), says he didn't simply choose the most scandalous bits when putting together the CBC-TV documentary, The Secret Mulroney Tapes, which airs Monday and stems from Newman's book of the same name. Sheerin was after what he felt was a true representation of the more than 90 hours of taped conversations made primarily during Mulroney's nine years in office.

"If there was anything that was scintillating or titillating, I certainly grabbed that. But I also made sure to grab the stuff that did what I wanted to do with the documentary, which was to flesh him out as a human being," Sheerin said.

The book set off a storm of headlines and renewed debate about Mulroney when it was released in September. Mulroney's candid remarks to Newman tore away the façade of a smiling, hand-shaking prime minister. Instead, Mulroney also showed himself to be at times vengeful, angry and calculating, with a mean streak aimed at many, from Pierre Trudeau to Kim Campbell. Surprise, surprise, many will say. A vindictive, calculating head of state? Say it isn't so. And some, on the contrary, may hear conviction in the tapes, the kind of drive a political leader needs, but rendered naked here.

Then again, there's the unintended comedy, particularly the un-prime ministerial venom directed at the press. "His obsession with how the media viewed him was well documented, but it really shines through when you actually hear him say it," Sheerin said.

As footage from press conferences, prime-ministerial photo ops and various other news clips serves as a visual backdrop throughout the documentary, Mulroney's taped baritone wafts from topic to topic. But his voice isn't explosive or belligerent. It's that same drawl so unmistakably Mulroney's. The difference here is all the times you hear "darned."

Sometimes he's ridiculing John Turner. On another tape, he admits to not thinking too ambitiously in the policy department, blaming instead the need to scale back the national debt as a barrier to more visionary programs. On yet another tape, he's more effusive (or at least a restrained, Mulroney version of effusiveness) as he warmly pats himself on the back when describing a coming meeting with then U.S. president Ronald Reagan.

"This is going to symbolize what Canada's all about," he says.

Other highlights include his alternative version of Lucien Bouchard's resignation from cabinet. Mulroney says that Bouchard didn't quit. He was fired. And as Meech Lake Accord talks drag on, he mentions how his wife Mila Mulroney sat watching former Newfoundland premier Clyde Wells distrustfully.

Yet the documentary does little to uncover the inner machinations of Ottawa. "I very much stay away from the nuts and bolts of [political] decisions, mainly because that's not what they talked about," Sheerin said. "You have to keep in mind that I'm dealing with someone else's interviews, and Peter Newman delves mainly in the art of character study."

Also the conversations between Newman and Mulroney -- sometimes conducted in person, often by phone -- don't have the ominous feel of former U.S. president Richard Nixon's recorded conversations on Watergate. Nor do they have the same weight of history as the post-Kennedy assassination, Vietnam War-era tapes of Lyndon Johnson.

Instead, Mulroney was a prime minister talking to a journalist, which has its own parameters. The talk was mainly about polls and Mulroney's image. "He was using Peter and Peter was using him," Sheerin said.

Still, hearing the tapes may only raise more questions about the close relationship between Newman and Mulroney. To read the transcript is one thing. To hear the tone of the conversation is another.

Often, Newman sounds like a political confidant, agreeing continually with what Mulroney is saying. He even at times gives Mulroney an indication about what will appear in his future columns. Some might see that as crossing a serious ethical line, particularly given the current controversy surrounding former New York Times reporter Judith Miller's closeness to the Bush administration. Miller and Newman are two very different cases and can only be compared in the broadest of terms regarding this question of a journalist's closeness to the seat of power. Yet it's a question in the air these days.

"Everybody has their own interviewing style, and I'm not going to judge what one person's is. But I understand that there could be a conversation to be had about what is crossing the line. But I'm not going to pass judgment on it," Sheerin said.

In the documentary, when Newman himself reflects on the interviews, he now distances himself from his past relationship with Mulroney. With a laugh and a shrug, he explains how "an interviewer is an instrument, a goading instrument, a drawing-out instrument. You try and get people to say things more than they intend to say."

Their relationship eventually ended, apparently from a falling out over things Newman wrote about Mulroney years ago. And it likely has next to no hope of mending now. As Sheerin noted, Newman and Mulroney haven't spoken in a decade.

But back when they were speaking regularly, "you never got the sense that Peter was sitting there with a list of questions," Sheerin said. "It was more off the cuff. They had a friendship, a friendship that eventually soured. But during the time that he was doing these interviews with him, they were good friends. So the tone of that certainly bleeds through into the cassettes."