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The first official White House videographer chronicles his time capturing behind-the-scenes moments of the president and his administration in First Cameraman
From the early months of the 2008 campaign and through the first two and a half years of the Obama administration, Arun Chaudhary had a unique perspective on the president of the United States. "I'm sort of like President Obama's wedding videographer," he explains, "if every day was a wedding with the same groom but a constantly rotating set of hysterical guests."
Some of the moments Chaudhary captures are small, like the president throwing warm-up pitches deep inside Busch Stadium in St. Louis before the All-Star game. Some are intensely emotional, as when Obama comforts a grieving teenager whose father had died in a devastating tornado. And some are just plain bizarre―like getting thrown out of the Indian parliament by his belt, or being trapped in a White House bathroom while Obama conducts a YouTube town hall on the other side of the door.
Film and politics have been intertwined ever since the first Edison reels rattled in projection halls a century ago. But with the advent of new technologies and a new public that is hungry for images of their leaders, Chaudhary has been in the right place at the right time to participate in the interplay of film and politics at the very highest level. His entertaining and eye-opening book―which includes stories and images of key players such as Barack and Michelle Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton, among others―gives readers a unique view of their government and their president in these historic and challenging times.
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Arun Chaudhary served as the first official White House videographer from 2009 to 2011 and was also a key member of Obama's new media team during the 2008 campaign. He previously worked in film in New York and was a member of the NYU Graduate Film Department faculty. He received his MFA in filmmaking from NYU and his BA in film theory from Cornell University. Chaudhary has been profiled by The New York Times, the BBC, National Journal, Politico, Fortune, and many political websites. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.
Introduction
The Fine American Art of Saying Hello
Barack Obama didn’t think about it too long before shaking his head. “No, I don’t want to do that,” he said.
I was a little surprised. It was October 21, 2008, and by that point we’d done a lot together. We’d visited hundreds of diners, state fairs, parades, and high school gymnasia, and let’s not forget the factories. Together we’d inhaled the fumes of a thousand factories. (Traveling press secretary Jen Psaki always said that she, the president, Reggie Love, and I were all destined to die of some mysterious disease caused by a toxic mixture of glass, metal, and drywall particles.)
So I was slightly taken aback by Obama’s refusal. Surely my question hadn’t been that intrusive. Besides, the junior senator from Illinois was used to my intrusions. I’d already ruined plenty of amazing moments, like right after the nomination speech at Invesco Stadium, when Barack was hugging his VP nominee. I’d had to clear my throat: “Uh, hey, guys, could you and Senator Biden just quickly look into the camera and . . . I know, I know, it won’t take long.”1
I’d given no end of confusing instructions: “I’m going to need you to take this mic off before you start speaking into your actual mic-mic up there, okay?” eliciting nary a word of complaint.
This time, though, he was firm, and so I sank back in my seat on the bus with a pastrami sandwich left over from our stop at the Deli Den in Fort Lauderdale. “It’s just that I don’t want to fake it,” he said. “Let’s just wait until I really do it naturally, okay?”
I nodded, and I got it. What I’d asked him to do was a big deal for him. “Senator, would you mind looking out the window for a minute so I can film it? The guys doing the thirty-minute commercial have been asking if I would shoot some out-the-window-thoughtful kind of stuff.”
It was a little inconvenient for me, but Obama’s reluctance to put on a show makes for good politics as well as good policy. Americans detest inauthenticity above all things, whether in a job interview at an investment bank or at the neighborhood saloon of a gold rush frontier town. And there’s a deep truth in that Head & Shoulders ad from the ’80s—you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
We Americans are hand shakers, huggers. When we greet one another, we meet as equals. We’re likely to use first names. There are no inscrutable titles or castes, and certainly no cap-doffing or bowing. We base our introductions on who we are and where we’re from, what we do, what we’re about to do, or maybe what we just did.
This frank and egalitarian manner of self-presentation dominates our cultural landscape, from the poetic boastings of Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali (“I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was”) to the humble biographies of Bruce Springsteen and Loretta Lynn (“We were poor, but we had love”) to those who would be our presidents, be they from a log cabin or a town called Hope.
The first—and, I think, in many ways the hardest—step in running for president is the cold opening, the pitch, that initial handshake, done over and over again over the course of a campaign: My name is so-and-so and I’m running for president. How are you doing and what do you do? This is what I’ve seen, this is what I’ve done, and this is why you should consider getting to know me better.
These days, of course, many of these introductions are taking place on screens, and more than ever online (and not just on Match.com). In a remarkably short span of time, really just since 2008, it’s become standard practice for presidential candidates to announce their campaigns and introduce themselves to the American electorate on YouTube, in videos that, intentionally or not, reveal a good deal about who they are and what type of campaign they’ll be running.
My favorite from the run-up to the 2012 election was Jon Huntsman’s announcement video, which showed the former Utah governor (or a devilishly handsome stunt double) on a motorcycle, cruising past the gorgeous rock formations of Monument Valley while a semi-funny reference to his long-ago rock band Wizard scrolls across the screen. But they are now a staple, from the fake-handheld look of the first online appearance of candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, who just wanted “to start a conversation,” to Mitt Romney’s out-of-the-package windbreaker on a hillside above the University of New Hampshire.
Interestingly, Obama for America’s reelection video didn’t show the president at all: it was a roundup of various supporters’ reasons for getting involved in the president’s campaign, followed by the words “It begins with us.” This approach made sense, since the sitting president of the United States doesn’t need an introduction; the goal was rather to relaunch a movement.
I think all of these intro videos are useful, revealing, and—for lack of a better word—true. Pretty much everything you need to know about the candidate you can deduce from a two-minute video. The Huntsman one speaks of a candidate who wants to be a little edgy, but is simply not suited to the more conservative elements of the Republican base. Romney: competent and unobjectionable, but also uninspired and uninspiring. Not comfortable in that windbreaker. (Also check out his brand-new NASCAR jacket at the Daytona 500; it’s become a habit of Giulianiesque proportions.)
I should say that I have more than a passing interest in how political videos work because I spent four years filming Barack Obama pretty much around the clock. As the first Official White House Videographer, I was sort of like President Obama’s wedding videographer if every day was a wedding with the same groom but a constantly rotating set of hysterical guests.
If there’s one thing I learned over those years, it’s that videos don’t lie—on the contrary, they are the most reliable gauge of truth we have.2 The basic narrative told in a shot is true, despite the ease with which some elements of motion picture can be manipulated. No one can deny the power of editing to influence a viewer. Way back in 1918, Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov famously demonstrated that an audience would ascribe emotion to a neutral face based on the preceding shot, for example, a shot of a bowl of soup makes an expressionless actor look hungry. We’re talking basic stuff here. But the great big personalities who vie for the American presidency are hardly expressionless or neutral. Just look at the cutaways in the debates, when the candidates are supposed to be at their most controlled. A bowl of soup plus Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich is just a bowl of soup plus Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich.3
In our age of media supersaturation, videos have an ever more direct impact on how we judge and elect our politicians. This, at the end of the day, may be a very good thing. Given enough screen time, all candidates reveal who they really are. No matter how carefully scripted and choreographed their media appearances and stump speeches, no matter how skillfully edited their official videos, eventually—for better or worse—the camera will catch them out. It didn’t take long for Mitt Romney to announce that he was “running for office, for Pete’s sake” and that he “likes being able to fire people.” Or for Rick Perry to forget why he was running at all (“oops”). For many candidates, the video camera is a trap just waiting to spring open; for a rare few, it’s a golden ticket.
Let me repeat: the camera doesn’t lie. It may sound simplistic, but this is the chief reason I know, without a single precinct reporting, that Barack Obama will be reelected president of the United States on my thirty-seventh birthday, November 6, 2012. I know because I’ve seen the game tapes (figuratively speaking, of course; the White House has gone digital, like everyone else).
In fact, I’ve made a lot of these game tapes myself. I’ve filmed Barack Obama for thousands of hours, from a few months into his long-shot candidacy into the third year of his presidency. For four-plus years, I was responsible for capturing Obama’s every move on film: first with political objectives, then for history. We’d progressed from greasy spoons and VFW halls to the Chilean presidential palace (where the famous progressive rock band Los Jaivas performed their signature classic “Mamalluca”), and, well, the White House. All along the way, I’ve also filmed the less public moments that in previous administrations only a handful of people—the ones right there in the room—had the opportunity to witness.4
Some of the moments were small: the president throwing warm-up pitches deep inside Busch Stadium in St. Louis before the 2009 All-Star Game while a touchingly concerned Albert Pujols gave sage advice. “It’s a long way to the plate, Mr. President—throw it up!” Some of the moments were intensely affecting: POTUS (the president of the United States) comforting a grieving teenager whose father had died in the Joplin, Missouri, tornado two days earlier. And some were just plain scary: the then senator Obama’s sudden appearance in Nick’s Bar in Bloomington nearly inciting a riot among the college students far gone in their cups . . . at eleven in the morning. (I have to admit that at Nick’s the survival instincts kicked in and I put my camera down and just started pushing through the crowd.)...
The Fine American Art of Saying Hello
Barack Obama didn’t think about it too long before shaking his head. “No, I don’t want to do that,” he said.
I was a little surprised. It was October 21, 2008, and by that point we’d done a lot together. We’d visited hundreds of diners, state fairs, parades, and high school gymnasia, and let’s not forget the factories. Together we’d inhaled the fumes of a thousand factories. (Traveling press secretary Jen Psaki always said that she, the president, Reggie Love, and I were all destined to die of some mysterious disease caused by a toxic mixture of glass, metal, and drywall particles.)
So I was slightly taken aback by Obama’s refusal. Surely my question hadn’t been that intrusive. Besides, the junior senator from Illinois was used to my intrusions. I’d already ruined plenty of amazing moments, like right after the nomination speech at Invesco Stadium, when Barack was hugging his VP nominee. I’d had to clear my throat: “Uh, hey, guys, could you and Senator Biden just quickly look into the camera and . . . I know, I know, it won’t take long.”1
I’d given no end of confusing instructions: “I’m going to need you to take this mic off before you start speaking into your actual mic-mic up there, okay?” eliciting nary a word of complaint.
This time, though, he was firm, and so I sank back in my seat on the bus with a pastrami sandwich left over from our stop at the Deli Den in Fort Lauderdale. “It’s just that I don’t want to fake it,” he said. “Let’s just wait until I really do it naturally, okay?”
I nodded, and I got it. What I’d asked him to do was a big deal for him. “Senator, would you mind looking out the window for a minute so I can film it? The guys doing the thirty-minute commercial have been asking if I would shoot some out-the-window-thoughtful kind of stuff.”
It was a little inconvenient for me, but Obama’s reluctance to put on a show makes for good politics as well as good policy. Americans detest inauthenticity above all things, whether in a job interview at an investment bank or at the neighborhood saloon of a gold rush frontier town. And there’s a deep truth in that Head & Shoulders ad from the ’80s—you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
We Americans are hand shakers, huggers. When we greet one another, we meet as equals. We’re likely to use first names. There are no inscrutable titles or castes, and certainly no cap-doffing or bowing. We base our introductions on who we are and where we’re from, what we do, what we’re about to do, or maybe what we just did.
This frank and egalitarian manner of self-presentation dominates our cultural landscape, from the poetic boastings of Jack Johnson and Muhammad Ali (“I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was”) to the humble biographies of Bruce Springsteen and Loretta Lynn (“We were poor, but we had love”) to those who would be our presidents, be they from a log cabin or a town called Hope.
The first—and, I think, in many ways the hardest—step in running for president is the cold opening, the pitch, that initial handshake, done over and over again over the course of a campaign: My name is so-and-so and I’m running for president. How are you doing and what do you do? This is what I’ve seen, this is what I’ve done, and this is why you should consider getting to know me better.
These days, of course, many of these introductions are taking place on screens, and more than ever online (and not just on Match.com). In a remarkably short span of time, really just since 2008, it’s become standard practice for presidential candidates to announce their campaigns and introduce themselves to the American electorate on YouTube, in videos that, intentionally or not, reveal a good deal about who they are and what type of campaign they’ll be running.
My favorite from the run-up to the 2012 election was Jon Huntsman’s announcement video, which showed the former Utah governor (or a devilishly handsome stunt double) on a motorcycle, cruising past the gorgeous rock formations of Monument Valley while a semi-funny reference to his long-ago rock band Wizard scrolls across the screen. But they are now a staple, from the fake-handheld look of the first online appearance of candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, who just wanted “to start a conversation,” to Mitt Romney’s out-of-the-package windbreaker on a hillside above the University of New Hampshire.
Interestingly, Obama for America’s reelection video didn’t show the president at all: it was a roundup of various supporters’ reasons for getting involved in the president’s campaign, followed by the words “It begins with us.” This approach made sense, since the sitting president of the United States doesn’t need an introduction; the goal was rather to relaunch a movement.
I think all of these intro videos are useful, revealing, and—for lack of a better word—true. Pretty much everything you need to know about the candidate you can deduce from a two-minute video. The Huntsman one speaks of a candidate who wants to be a little edgy, but is simply not suited to the more conservative elements of the Republican base. Romney: competent and unobjectionable, but also uninspired and uninspiring. Not comfortable in that windbreaker. (Also check out his brand-new NASCAR jacket at the Daytona 500; it’s become a habit of Giulianiesque proportions.)
I should say that I have more than a passing interest in how political videos work because I spent four years filming Barack Obama pretty much around the clock. As the first Official White House Videographer, I was sort of like President Obama’s wedding videographer if every day was a wedding with the same groom but a constantly rotating set of hysterical guests.
If there’s one thing I learned over those years, it’s that videos don’t lie—on the contrary, they are the most reliable gauge of truth we have.2 The basic narrative told in a shot is true, despite the ease with which some elements of motion picture can be manipulated. No one can deny the power of editing to influence a viewer. Way back in 1918, Soviet filmmaker Lev Kuleshov famously demonstrated that an audience would ascribe emotion to a neutral face based on the preceding shot, for example, a shot of a bowl of soup makes an expressionless actor look hungry. We’re talking basic stuff here. But the great big personalities who vie for the American presidency are hardly expressionless or neutral. Just look at the cutaways in the debates, when the candidates are supposed to be at their most controlled. A bowl of soup plus Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich is just a bowl of soup plus Michele Bachmann or Newt Gingrich.3
In our age of media supersaturation, videos have an ever more direct impact on how we judge and elect our politicians. This, at the end of the day, may be a very good thing. Given enough screen time, all candidates reveal who they really are. No matter how carefully scripted and choreographed their media appearances and stump speeches, no matter how skillfully edited their official videos, eventually—for better or worse—the camera will catch them out. It didn’t take long for Mitt Romney to announce that he was “running for office, for Pete’s sake” and that he “likes being able to fire people.” Or for Rick Perry to forget why he was running at all (“oops”). For many candidates, the video camera is a trap just waiting to spring open; for a rare few, it’s a golden ticket.
Let me repeat: the camera doesn’t lie. It may sound simplistic, but this is the chief reason I know, without a single precinct reporting, that Barack Obama will be reelected president of the United States on my thirty-seventh birthday, November 6, 2012. I know because I’ve seen the game tapes (figuratively speaking, of course; the White House has gone digital, like everyone else).
In fact, I’ve made a lot of these game tapes myself. I’ve filmed Barack Obama for thousands of hours, from a few months into his long-shot candidacy into the third year of his presidency. For four-plus years, I was responsible for capturing Obama’s every move on film: first with political objectives, then for history. We’d progressed from greasy spoons and VFW halls to the Chilean presidential palace (where the famous progressive rock band Los Jaivas performed their signature classic “Mamalluca”), and, well, the White House. All along the way, I’ve also filmed the less public moments that in previous administrations only a handful of people—the ones right there in the room—had the opportunity to witness.4
Some of the moments were small: the president throwing warm-up pitches deep inside Busch Stadium in St. Louis before the 2009 All-Star Game while a touchingly concerned Albert Pujols gave sage advice. “It’s a long way to the plate, Mr. President—throw it up!” Some of the moments were intensely affecting: POTUS (the president of the United States) comforting a grieving teenager whose father had died in the Joplin, Missouri, tornado two days earlier. And some were just plain scary: the then senator Obama’s sudden appearance in Nick’s Bar in Bloomington nearly inciting a riot among the college students far gone in their cups . . . at eleven in the morning. (I have to admit that at Nick’s the survival instincts kicked in and I put my camera down and just started pushing through the crowd.)...
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- PublisherSt. Martin's Griffin
- Publication date2013
- ISBN 10 1250037336
- ISBN 13 9781250037336
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages320
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