For God Spoke, the filmmakers followed Al Franken for 18 months — starting with the launch of his book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, through Fox’s ill-fated lawsuit to prevent the publication of the book, through the launch of Air America Radio, through the 2004 campaign season. They caught him wrestling seriously with the decision of whether to run for Senate in 2008, a decision he still hasn’t finalized, and wrestling hilariously with a backpack that somehow got tangled up with a wheel of an office chair.
The film that was shown last night wasn’t the original version, we were told during a question and answer session. They had filmed a 2004 debate between Franken and Ann Coulter at the Connecticut Forum, but Coulter demanded they remove footage of the debate from the film. Part of what was cut was this exchange:
When [the moderator] asked [Coulter] to name which historical figure she would most like to be, she replied: “(Sen.) Joe McCarthy.” She called him “a great American patriot” who removed “communist spies from the government.” Her second choice, she said, was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, “so I could not introduce the New Deal.”
“Then I would be Hitler,” Franken said. “You’d call off the New Deal; I’d call off the Holocaust and World War II. But I’d keep the Volkswagen.”
I can’t imagine why Coulter wouldn’t want that in the film.