Adam McKay, director of "The Big Short," talks Wall Street and the 2016 election with POLITICO's Glenn Thrush. | Bridget Mulcahy
Adam McKay really, really wants Hillary Clinton to see his movie — so she'll see the error of her Wall Street-loving ways! Actually, he just wants her feedback.
McKay, who has earned an Academy Award nomination for his direction of "The Big Short" — an adaptation of Michael Lewis' comedy-horror insider chronicle of the 2008 financial crisis — is a big Bernie Sanders supporter, a huge Elizabeth Warren fan — and a potential "hold my nose" Hillary Clinton general election voter. In other words, he's a progressive Democrat under the age of 65.
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"I'm really curious if she's seen the movie," said McKay a friendly but intimidating 6-foot, 5-inch writer-director in Barton Fink specs who has made all his previous films with buddy Will Ferrell in the lead.
"I'd really like her to see it," he said, in a half-hour sit-down for POLITICO's "Off Message" podcast, where he described his discomfort with Clinton's coziness with Wall Street and her opposition to re-imposing Glass-Steagall banking regulations that were repealed on her husband's watch.
Would he vote for her? He sighs. He swishes the water around his glass at a Georgetown hotel lounge. He sighs again. "Obviously if it's Donald Trump I have to vote for her. I'll probably — it bums me out, but I'll probably have to hold my nose and vote for her. I'm not a fan of a lot of things she's done. But she's not a wackadoodle. I mean, she doesn't believe that, you know, mankind was created 5,000 years ago. ... Um yeah, there's no way. If it's Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, I have to vote for her."
The 47-year-old Pennsylvania native, whose father was a bass player and mother was a cocktail waitress, made his name introducing his audiences to such complex subjects as "Sex Panther" cologne ("Anchorman") and the "Shake and Bake" NASCAR sling-shot maneuver ("Talladega Nights"). But he earned his first Academy Award nomination on a project in which he employs celebrities, using the same 7th-grade vocabulary, to explain derivatives, credit default swaps and other financial instruments whose mere complexity made them weapons that helped sink the global economy.
This was no one-off for McKay, who has been obsessed with Wall Street and the role of corporate money in politics since his days as a student at Temple: One of his earliest turns on stage, as a founder of Chicago's Upright Citizens Brigade, was in a sketch in which he played Noam Chomsky as a kindergarten teacher— and to some extent his current role as a mass-entertainment explainer of inexplicable financial instruments is Noam-by-numbers.
"I've been tracking money and politics for a lot of years," McKay told me, still buzzing after his first meeting with Warren, at her Capitol Hill office. "There's greed within Wall Street, but it really happened just because our government got captured by the banks. That's it. The government was bought by the banks. ... So finally I got to the point where Bernie Sanders steps up and he goes, 'I'm not taking any money from banks, from oil companies, Super PACs, weirdo billionaires.' And I'm like, I'm tired of playing this game, that's my guy."
Little known fact: "Talladega Nights," which began production months after George W. Bush's 2004 reelection, started off not as a racetrack screwball comedy but as McKay's attempt to get under the hood of the hardening lines between red and blue states, and to explain the red state mentality in a way that made people laugh on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line.
That division, fittingly enough, exists in his own family, in the form of his divorced and politically divergent mother and father. He sees them as a two-person representation of the country at large, in terms of their politics and personal experience. "My dad lost his house," he says, returning to the topic of the '08 mortgage meltdown. "My mom and her husband had three neighbors walk away from their houses which drove down their property values. My mom's a right-winger, my dad's a left-winger. This should not be a right, left issue."
But it is. "My parents were kind of hippies in the '60s and '70s," he tells me. "In the '80s, my mom definitely leaned left. She remarried in the late '80s, and her husband was a right-winger. She was always kind of religious, and now they're both full-on evangelical Huckabee-Fox watchers. As far right wing as you can imagine."
And so this world-famous director — an autodidactic expert on campaign finance and Wall Street — shares much in common with many, many grown children: He's banned dinner-table political conversation with his own mother.
"Six years ago, six years ago, I said to my mom, 'Let's never ever again do this. Let's not bring up religion. Let's not bring up politics," he recalls, and then cites an unfortunate, if memorable, breach in that agreement at a recent Passover dinner with his wife's Jewish family.
"My mom came to a seder ... and in the middle of the dinner tells everyone, 'You know, this is great and all, but since you're not accepting Jesus, you're all going to Hell,'" he says. "Now we have found a pretty good common ground, we just don't talk about it. ... We talk about what Americans talk about. We talk about what we're going to eat, our kids and, uh, 'Hey, you got a great deal on the shirt from Marshall's."
Back to politics, back to Hillary and Warren, whom he sees as the two not-irreconcilable poles of his political world. The Massachusetts senator was a real charmer this afternoon, he says, and she told him about sitting through the "Big Short" near her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and being approached at the end by a constituent who wanted to know if the economic carnage described in the movie actually, really, truly happened. "Yes," Warren whispered.
"She loved it," he added, genuinely tickled that she endorsed his work.
As the mics were being turned off, McKay approached me with a question of his own.
"You cover Hillary ... can you find out if she's seen it?"
I'm still working on it.
About Off Message:
Each week during 2016 election, POLITICO's award-winning chief political correspondent Glenn Thrush will take you behind the scenes on the campaign trail in his podcasts — a smart, unvarnished take on all things 2016. Consumable, sharp, and to-the-point, Off Message episodes are easy to download or stream from POLITICO, iTunes or SoundCloud and are designed to fit into the media roster where nothing else can — on the train, at the gym, in the car.
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