The Final Days (2000)

Interesting facts

• Budget: $12K
• Filmed in: White House

The Final Days is a humorous short film produced by the White House to screen at the White House Correspondents' Association annual dinner in April 2000. It stars then-President of the United States Bill Clinton as himself. The film was designed by officials of the outgoing Clinton administration to neutralize media portrayals of Bill Clinton as a "lame duck" president by exaggerating that narrative to the point of absurdity.

Production

The idea for the film came from Clinton's joke writer Mark Katz who had observed that a dominant media narrative in the late days of the 2000 election was that the incumbent president, whose wife was campaigning for U.S. Senate while national attention was focused on the presidential contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush, was "increasingly being depicted as the lonely guy minding the store".

The Final Days was filmed in and around the White House. Ultimately, several sequences shot by director Philip Rosenthal were not incorporated into the film, including one showing a crossword puzzle-playing Clinton phoning Vladimir Putin on the Moscow–Washington hotline (also known as the "red phone") to ask "what's a five-letter word for 'tasty Russian pancake'?"

The film's production was financed by the Democratic Party.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.