(The filmmaker is Charles Ferguson, who made a great documentary on the
2008 financial crisis titled "Inside Job". I am definitely going to
watch his Watergate documentary on Amazon that I heard nothing about
until this article. My guess is that his suit is credible even if he
loses in court.)
NYT, Mar. 24, 2021
Filmmaker’s Suit Says A&E Networks Suppressed ‘Watergate’ Series
By Julia Jacobs and Nicole Sperling
“Watergate,” a four-hour documentary examining the scandal that ended
Richard Nixon’s presidency, had its world premiere in 2018 at the
Telluride Film Festival, an event known to foretell future Oscar
nominations. It went on to be shown at the New York Film Festival and
several others, collecting positive reviews that highlighted allusions
the series made to the Trump presidency.
It aired on the History Channel over three days in early November, just
before the 2018 midterm elections. To the filmmaker’s surprise, it was
never broadcast on American television again.
The writer and director of the documentary, the award-winning filmmaker
Charles Ferguson, is now suing the company that owns the History
Channel, A&E Networks, asserting it suppressed the dissemination of his
mini-series because it was worried about potential backlash to allusions
the documentary makes to the Trump White House.
In the lawsuit filed Friday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr.
Ferguson accuses the company of attempting to delay the documentary
until after the 2018 midterm elections because a History Channel
executive feared it would offend the White House and Trump supporters.
“He was concerned about the impact of ‘Watergate’ upon ratings in ‘red
states,’” the lawsuit said of the executive, Eli Lehrer, “as well as the
negative reaction it would provoke among Trump supporters and the Trump
administration.”
Mr. Ferguson resisted that plan, and the mini-series ultimately aired
shortly before Election Day. But the filmmaker contends the documentary
was given short shrift, despite acclaim in the film industry and
previous assurances that it would receive “extremely prominent treatment.”
The lawsuit describes the treatment of the documentary as part of a
“pattern and practice of censorship and suppression of documentary
content” at A&E Networks, and cites several others that it says were
subject to attempted manipulation for political or economic reasons.
A&E called the lawsuit meritless and the assertion that the documentary
was suppressed “absurd,” saying its decision to not rebroadcast it
additional times was based on lower than expected ratings.
In a statement, the company said it has routinely given a platform to
storytellers “to present their unvarnished vision without regard for
partisan politics.” It pointed to its partnership with former President
Bill Clinton, formed during the Trump administration, to produce a
documentary series about the American presidency and the fact that a
subsidiary, Propagate, had produced the four-part docu-series “Hillary,”
on the life of Hillary Clinton.
“A&E invested millions of dollars in this project and promoted it
extensively,” the company said of “Watergate” in its statement. “Among
other efforts, we hired multiple outside PR agencies, provided advance
screeners to the press, and submitted it to film festivals and for
awards consideration.”
Mr. Ferguson’s “Watergate” is a deep dive into events set off by the
1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters and the
cover up by the Nixon administration. It includes interviews with people
who were involved in the events — such as John Dean, President Nixon’s
White House counsel — as well as reporters who covered them, including
Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Lesley Stahl. The New York Times’s
co-chief film critic, A.O. Scott, wrote that the documentary tells a
story that is “part political thriller and part courtroom drama, with
moments of Shakespearean grandeur and swerves into stumblebum comedy,”
though other reviews panned the film’s re-creations by actors.
Mr. Ferguson, who is best known for his Oscar-winning 2010 documentary
“Inside Job,” said that when he started pitching the project in 2015, he
imagined it as a straightforward “historical detective story.” But, the
suit says, a drumbeat of events involving the Trump administration made
him realize the documentary’s renewed political relevance. In 2017, he
watched as Mr. Trump fired his F.B.I. director, as the Justice
Department appointed a special counsel to oversee the investigation into
ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russian officials, and as
the potential for impeachment loomed.
The series — which Mr. Ferguson said cost about $4.5 million to produce
— does not mention Mr. Trump’s name, but the documentary’s subtitle,
“How We Learned to Stop an Out of Control President,” was a nod toward
his administration.
The lawsuit hinges on a conversation between Mr. Ferguson and A&E
executives in June 2018, before the film was released. According to the
lawsuit, Mr. Lehrer, executive vice president and head of programming at
the History Channel, said at that meeting that he would seek to delay
the premiere of “Watergate” and “sharply lower” its publicity profile,
expressing concern about its relevance to the politics of the moment and
the reaction it would provoke from the Trump administration and Trump
supporters.
Mr. Ferguson has worked to collect pieces of evidence to support his
contentions, among them an email he provided to The New York Times in
which Mr. Lehrer acknowledged discussing the bipartisan nature of the
network’s audience. In the email, Mr. Lehrer also denied the network was
trying to suppress the documentary, writing that the rationale for
exploring different airdates was to avoid the series getting swallowed
up by heavy sports programming and election coverage.
Mr. Ferguson’s contract did not specify how many times the network would
show the documentary or whether it would receive theatrical
distribution, though successful ones are typically broadcast multiple times.
Nielsen ratings from the time show that “Watergate” earned only 529,000
viewers when it aired, including seven days of delayed viewing, compared
to History Channel’s other multi-episode documentaries like “Grant”
which bowed in May to 4.4 million viewers, or “Washington,” which drew
an audience of 3.3 million in February 2020.
Had the ratings been stronger, A&E says, it would have broadcast the
series multiple times and it would have had a greater chance of securing
additional licenses either with a streaming service or with
international distributors.
“The fact is that Watergate, which premiered in prime time on Mr.
Ferguson’s desired date, drastically underachieved in the ratings, which
was disappointing to all of us,” the company said in its statement.
But the lawsuit says A&E Networks damaged Mr. Ferguson financially by,
among other things, failing to make any “meaningful” distribution deals
or arrange for advertising outside of the network. It says Mr. Ferguson
traded a lower-than-normal director’s fee in his contract for a higher
cut of the royalties, believing that if the documentary was successful,
the majority of the viewership revenue would stem from sales to
streaming services, foreign cable channels and other customers.
One of the A&E executives named as a defendant, Michael Stiller — the
vice president of programming and development at the History Channel —
had told Mr. Ferguson that there would be rebroadcasts and required him
to make slightly shorter versions of the episodes for daytime slots, but
those never occurred, according to the lawsuit.
The company noted the documentary is available on several services,
which include iTunes, Amazon Prime Video and Google Play, including its
own video-on-demand platform, History Vault.
Mr. Ferguson’s lawsuit argues that the company executives interfered
with his contract, and defamed him by telling industry executives he was
difficult to work with, thereby costing him work. In addition to Mr.
Lehrer and Mr. Stiller, the other named defendants include Robert
Sharenow, the network’s president of programming, and Molly Thompson,
its former head of documentary films. Ms. Thompson declined to comment.
Mr. Lehrer, Mr. Stiller and Mr. Sharenow did not respond to requests for
comment.
The lawsuit cites several examples where Mr. Ferguson said he learned
about conflicts between A&E executives and documentary filmmakers,
including a dispute concerning “Gretchen Carlson: Breaking the Silence,”
a 2019 documentary on Lifetime about sexual harassment in working-class
industries. The suit says A&E executives questioned including
information about McDonald’s, an advertiser. The information was
ultimately included after the producers fought for it, but the episode
was only aired once, on a Saturday at 10 p.m., the lawsuit said. A
spokeswoman for Ms. Carlson declined to comment.
The lawsuit also says Mr. Ferguson learned about a dispute regarding a
2019 A&E documentary called “Biography: The Trump Dynasty” that examines
Mr. Trump’s life and family history. According to the lawsuit, A&E
executives wanted the production company behind the documentary,
Left/Right Productions, to add in the voice of a “Trump apologist” who
could “justify” aspects of Mr. Trump’s background, a request that the
suit says generated “significant tensions” between the network
executives and the production company executives.
Left/Right, which works with The New York Times on some documentary
productions, did not respond to requests for comment. The Times did not
have a role in any of the programming cited in Mr. Ferguson’s suit.
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