Horns and Halos: Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley

"Hatfield was such a con man."

Horns and Halos is the story of three men: George W. Bush, presidential candidate (and later, remarkably, President of the United States); Jim Hatfield, author of Fortunate Son, a controversial biography of GWB; and Sander Hicks, publisher of the book when St. Martin's Press pulled the initial edition of Fortunate Son from bookstore shelves. Michael Galinsky and Suki Hawley's film has been a hit at festivals across the country and was named Best Documentary Feature at the 2002 New York Underground Film Festival.

Marlow: How did you first decide to work together? Did the creative partnership start first?

Hawley: I guess that the other partnership started first [Suki and Michael have a 2½ year-old daughter, Fiona]. I was working on low-budget, independent films during the summer after college. Michael came on the set and helped out. We thought, "This is hard work but it really seems like something we could do. We should make a movie." Basically, we just sat down and wrote a script about his experience touring with bands. That's basically how it all started.

Marlow: In essence, all three of your features are infused with music. How much of your experiences performing with Sleepyhead and Laptop influenced your film work?

Galinsky: It has everything to do with it. Suki and I had a band together called Drop Ceiling. The way we started to make movies was documenting the music world. It's really as much about music as underground culture.

Marlow: How did the Grifters and members of Rodan, Ruby Falls and so forth, become involved in Half-Cocked [Hawley and Galinsky's first feature]?

Galinsky: We were friends with all of those people from playing shows with them. I think that I went to the first Grifters show in Brooklyn and took some pictures of them. Being a photographer was an integral part of it, too. [Galinsky has published a book of his photographs, entitled Scraps, and his work graces many album covers.] I was very interested in documenting the music scene. I was very inspired by things like Suburbia, the Penelope Spheeris movie.

Marlow: Is that also the way that Radiation came about, with Will Oldham and so forth?

Galinsky: Will was supposed to be in Half-Cocked but he didn't show up. Catherine [Irwin] from Freakwater was in town so she came over and played that role. With Radiation, I came back from a tour in Spain and the tour manager there said, "Why don't we do a film tour here? These films [like Half-Cocked] never play here and I can set it up." I came back and told Suki and she just burst into tears. She said, "I never want to show that movie again." We had toured all over with it. I decided that we'd make it a project. We would have the tour and use the locations that we were in as places to shoot a new movie starring the tour manager.

Marlow: Genius!

Hawley: [laughs] Oh, yeah. Brilliant!

Galinsky: Let me tell you, it sounds good on paper. It was kind of a nightmare shoot but it ended up being a movie that we're really proud of. That movie played at Sundance in 1999. Unfortunately, since it didn't really have any stars or anything "super exciting" about it, it was very difficult to get it distributed.

Marlow: What was your experience in Park City? Was the film well-received?

Galinsky: Yes, but at the same time, we were fighting against this thing where there was nothing completely marketable about the film.

Marlow: Were you familiar with White Collar Crime [Sander Hick's band] before the Horns and Halos project started?

Galinsky: Not so much White Collar Crime - we'd heard of them - but Soft Skull Press. I'd met Sander maybe once or twice for five seconds and didn't really know him. Insound [the music website that Galinsky was working for at the time] was selling books for Sander and he let us know that he was going to be republishing the discredited biography of George Bush. We had read about the book being pulled, so we immediately thought, "This is a great thing. Let's follow this and see what happens." We called him first and said that we wanted to make the film. He said, "Great! Come over Saturday. I'm doing the sweep-and-mop," and he hung up the phone. Literally. I had to call him back and say, "Where's here? What is the sweep-and-mop?" So we show up and he's sweeping and mopping the hallway, telling the story of his life, and we knew that, even if nothing happened with the book, we had something like Speed [Levitch] because we had an interesting character.

Marlow: How early in the process did you settle on Horns and Halos as the title? Jim Hatfield says the phrase during the BookExpo America. This idea of a "warts and all" biography is a characteristic of the film as well.

Galinsky: At the end of the process. I can't remember what we were going to call it originally...

Hawley: "Middle Class Anarchist."

Galinsky: That was the working title.

Hawley: Sander hated it. He said, "You can't call it that!"

Galinsky: It became clear that this was what the movie was really about. The "horns" and "halos" not only of Bush but of the book, of Sander and Hatfield. Our culture right now is so invested in being completely one-sided and the truth is always so much more complicated.

Marlow: You've got a number of fascinating characters in the film. In addition to Hatfield and Hicks, you've got Jim Fitzgerald as Soft Skull's un-paid consultant. With Jim, you're able to cover a few aspects of the publishing business that Sander rarely touches upon.

Galinsky: And [Sander's] not too realistic but this also mirrors the way that we make movies. You're not really thinking about the consequences. The truth is, if you stop to think about the consequences too much, you never do anything.

Marlow: The details of Jim Hatfield's past are not really sketched out until the third mention in the film, when he's interviewed for the radio program Democracy Now. Still, he leaves out some crucial details. The specifics of the solicitation involved paying a hit man $5,000 to kill a co-worker. He had done time, even before the solicitation of capital murder charge, in Arkansas for burglary. Your approach in this documentary is to leave yourselves out of the story and, outside of a few title cards, let the characters speak for themselves. Did this present some unexpected challenges for you in the editing room, particularly when you're dealing with individuals that aren't entirely truthful?

Hawley: It was definitely a struggle. How much, how little, how to get the information across. If we got too early into his past, too detailed, it just turned people off and they couldn't continue with the film. It was also a problem of our technique to allow the story to come out from the characters themselves. Hatfield was such a con-man; he wasn't talking about his past too much. There weren't a lot of opportunities for this information to come out. But it was something that we discussed at length - how to properly put his past into perspective. I think, without getting into too much detail, it's still very clear that he is not a clean guy.

Galinsky: It was a hard thing. For instance, we had a screening which was quite a bit more brutal on both of the characters. The response was, "That's great, but I could only watch about 45 minutes of this because these guys are such losers." It's not like you want to make something that's just going to please everybody. We'd do a lot of screenings for people as we're working through it, just to see how people are responding. We didn't want people walking away from the movie saying, "A bunch of idiots, a bad book, who cares?" We wanted the movie to draw out the complexities of the story. Did we go a little bit too soft on Hatfield? Probably. I think it's pretty clear that the book is a clip-job, largely. He was reviled for the fact that it is a clip-job but, as a clip-job, what you're talking about is something that's based on fact-checked research - somebody else's fact-checked research, but fact-checked research nonetheless. It's not like the book is full of lies. It's something that the journalists didn't point out much. It's harder to check those facts because it's not footnoted very well but, in general, no one was disputing the fact that basically everything in there was generally known information about Bush. I don't know if you've ever read the book but it's not a horrible indictment of the man. If you hated him before you read it, you'd probably like him a little better afterwards.


"There is an emotional truth that supersedes chronology."
Marlow: The focus on minor details, like the supposed 1972 cocaine bust contained in the controversial afterward, while letting the other details in the book slip away, is all too symptomatic of the political climate these days. In watching the spin by the Republicans after the first debate, it appears they feel that if they repeat things often enough, the average American will believe it.

Galinsky: Look at what is going on with the Kitty Kelly book. Everyone's just talking about Sharon Bush saying he did cocaine, which she may have recanted, but everybody who was there said, "No, she said it." That's the only focus of the book rather than the stuff about the financial dealings and everything else that had to do with the Bush family dynasty. Then you look at the CBS [National] Guard papers. Everyone kind of forgot what they said. The content of them was true. No one is disputing that, only whether or not these papers were faked. It's kind of a brilliant way to change the discussion, which it did. You notice what happened is that it all went away. That's what happened with the book [Fortunate Son]. When the book came out, cocaine was the biggest story in the nation. "George Bush did cocaine!" The book comes out, and it's, "This crazy liar is the guy who said it." The story literally disappears.

Marlow: Was anyone ever critical of your playing a little fast and loose with the chronology? Such as the lawsuit occurring before the 60 Minutes interview? It's not evident by the structure of the film. In fact, the structure helps to make the audience sympathetic to the evolving story.

Galinsky: We're not journalists, so we didn't make it in a journalistic way. It's the same way that someone might take a book and turn it into a movie. If the lawsuit came when it did, it wasn't emotionally true to the story. It needed to have the emotions go in a particular way to keep people interested or to keep people involved.

Hawley: There was a journalist that was interviewing us about our experiences and I think we mentioned that after the press conference at the BEA [BookExpo America] that we had jumped in the car and everyone was kind of giddy and laughing. That was sort of the circumstances and it's factually correct. But it was sort of a nervous laughter in that, "We just did this big thing and it looks like it's probably going to be ignored or it's going to be serious in a bad way." I think everyone, to a certain extent, understood that. We didn't articulate that fully to the journalist. He actually wrote a piece and then quarreled with us at a later point about whether we thought everything was hunky dory after this press conference. There is an emotional truth that supersedes chronology.

Marlow: You were not originally planning to attend the book expo?

Galinsky: Right.

Marlow: It's hard to imagine the film without this footage. It provides a necessary coda.

Galinsky: There wouldn't have been a film. But it was one of those things where, working on documentaries, sometimes you shoot so much and it doesn't seem focused. It's so hard to keep picking up the camera to stay with it. It was like, "Oh, they're going to go there and do nothing again." In fact, we didn't even know what was going to happen because we thought we were kind of done with the film when Sander holds up the book in D.C. [in the basement of a bookstore]. They've basically lost because it's a remaindered title. That would have still been a good film. We would have cut it differently and it would have been less about Hatfield and it would have been much more about Sander. But we called him a couple of weeks later and asked how everything was going. He said, "Oh, I forgot to tell you. We're republishing the book!" We had to head out again and it was a good thing that we did.

James Hatfield

Marlow: How did you feel about Hatfield's revelations at the press conference regarding Clay Johnson and Karl Rove as his sources? At the time, it seemed pretty implausible but everything that has happened since seems to support the possibility of such a far-fetched idea.

Hawley: It's interesting. I'm always a little more skeptical than Michael and, at the time, that theory had been bandied about for a long time at the Soft Skull Press office. When I first heard it, I thought, "That's not implausible at all." As Hatfield's past unraveled a little bit more in front of me, as I spent a little bit more time with him and realized what a con man he was, I started to believe it less and less. Now, with the Kitty Kelly book, it's weird. I'm starting to question it all again. I don't know what the answer is and it almost feels like no one will ever know.

Galinsky: It is hard to know. Personally, at the time, I didn't fully trust it. I still don't know. The interesting thing is that everyone ignored it. It wasn't something that they were willing to touch. We tried to talk to a couple of those writers [at the press conference] afterwards but none of them would go on camera because they didn't want to be involved with it.

Marlow: You're somewhat fortunate that general audiences are aware of the book and the controversy but they aren't aware of how things end up. You mention in the film that Sander is no longer CEO of Soft Skull Press. He has a book coming out - The Big Wedding - about 9/11. Do you stay in touch with him?

Galinsky: Yes, definitely. In fact, I'm going to be the photographer at his wedding next week. He's got a new publishing company. He's publishing a book called American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone. He also works for this thing, INN World Report, which is a Dish Network news show.

Marlow: Pete Slover, in his two interview sessions in the film, appears genuinely penitent about his role in "outing" Hatfield and igniting his downward spiral. Sander mentions that he suspected Slover was tipped off by the Republicans. However, Slover never notes that he himself has a somewhat felonious past - according to Sander's diary [included in excerpted form with the disc if you purchase it], he was arrested early in his career for breaking and entering into a public records office.

Galinsky: Right when this whole thing started, we happened to be going to Texas for Thanksgiving. We called up Pete Slover [who writes for the Dallas Morning News] and asked, "Can we interview you?" He said, "Sure." Then, about twenty minutes later, he called back and said, "I'm sorry, I can't do it. My editor won't let me." I had a long conversation with the editor for about an hour and there were a bunch of letters back and forth. He finally said, "No, it's not in our interest to do it." It just drove us crazy. About a year later, when things had died down and we were still working on the film, I was in Texas for a film festival and I called up Pete Slover. He said, "Sure, let's just do this." He kind of did it against the wishes of his bosses. You know, that's just Sander saying that the Republicans set Slover up to it. Basically, Hatfield's a guy that nobody has heard of saying he's a Texas journalist and he's got all the dirt on Bush. Any journalist who'd been following Bush is going to want to know who this guy is and a simple Lexus search would bring up everything.

Marlow: Hatfield must have realized, by publishing this book, that information about his past would surface again.

Galinsky: Part of being a con man is believing your con. Honestly, I don't know what he was thinking. He had been publishing books with this other guy who was paying for the books - giving him a salary to help get him started - George Burt [whom Hatfield had met in prison]. Then he did Fortunate Son without George Burt, which wasn't actually very fair to him. Hatfield is a complicated guy.

Hawley: He had published two unauthorized biographies of those actors [Patrick Stewart and Ewan McGregor, in addition to a reference guide to the X-Files]. I think he was just starting to naïvely think that, "I haven't been bothered yet, so I won't be bothered now." Knowing what he knew about the Bush family, I don't know why he thought that he would still go unscathed.

Galinsky: It comes back to the same thing we were talking about before. If you think that bad things are going to happen, you're never going to do anything. Basically, you?ve got to have a lot of hubris in some sense to do anything. Hatfield has a barrel-full.

Marlow: Thanks to the tax cut that benefits the wealthiest one percent of Americans, the Billionaires for Bush should be quite active for the next few weeks.

Galinsky: Yes, they're very active. It's funny that you bring up the Billionaires because we're involved in a film about the Republican National Convention protesters. The Billionaires are one of the main characters. I was following around Michelle Goldberg from Salon.com at all of the protests. It was really insane.

Marlow: According to your site, you have three documentaries in the works...

Galinsky: We actually have one that we just sent off today about the search for a serial rapist in Miami. That one is hopefully due to appear in January [at Sundance]. We'll see. And then we have a bunch more that we've started. One is about an 800-pounds man who is trying to loose weight by breakdancing. He actually lost 100 pounds in the first month-and-a-half.

Marlow: Better than Subway.

Galinsky: Standing up. Literally. That's what it took.

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Published with permission from GreenCine