“As dull as Phil Angelides‘ campaign has been, I believe that he would better represent the interests of more Californians than Schwarzenegger could ever hope to,” Alec Baldwin wrote on The Huffington Post two days ago. “Schwarzenegger is not a leader. Like Bush, he is a front man for a group of powerful interests and he is reading from a script.”
And yet Baldwin has decided not to narrate a documentary by director-writer Dan Cox and co-writer Jerry Decker because he feels it pushes certain back issues — Arnold’s father’s Nazi associations, for one — too forcefully. “The makers of Running With Arnold hammer Schwarzenegger over his private behavior and his record as governor,” Baldwin declares. “But Schwarzenegger deserves to be treated fairly and the film’s images of Nazi rallies were over the line.”
I asked Cox about seeing this film a while, and then again a couple of days ago. He said copies will be going out to the press fairly soon. I’ll reserve comment until I see it, but journalists have been doing stories about Arnold’s dad’s Nazi affiliations back in Austria for a long time, and it seems fair to get into this — although there’s something about the stink of Naziism that always seem to warp or overbake an inquiry when it’s mentioned. I don’t know what the “private behavior” stuff is about, but I can guess — and if I were doing an Arnold doc I would definitely leave that shit out.