The War Room

The film follows James Carville and George Stephanopoulos, at first during the New Hampshire primary, and then mostly in Little Rock, Arkansas, at the Clinton campaign headquarters. Several key events of the 1992 election cycle and their repercussions within the Clinton campaign are chronicled in the documentary. These include: the Gennifer Flowers scandal, the New Hampshire Democratic primary, Ross Perot's campaign as an Independent, the Democratic National Convention, the Clinton campaign's attack on George H. W. Bush's "Read my lips: no new taxes" statement from 1988, the presidential debates, and the night of the general election.

Much of the film focuses on the interaction between politics and the media and the attempts by the Clinton and Bush campaigns to spin public perception of events and news stories.

Shortly before the 1992 Democratic National Convention, novice producers R.J. Cutler and Wendy Ettinger approached filmmakers D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus about making a documentary about the then-ongoing 1992 U.S. presidential election. Pennebaker and Hegedus expressed interest, provided the producers could get them permission to film what they would need to film, so Cutler and Ettinger contacted the Bush, Perot, and Clinton campaigns. Only the Clinton campaign was open to giving the filmmakers any access, and this was limited primarily to Carville and Stephanopoulos and events that transpired within the so-called "war room" at the campaign's national headquarters in Little Rock, Arkansas, so the scope of the film narrowed from encompassing the entire election to mostly centering around one room. Events in the election cycle that occurred before the Democratic National Convention were covered in the completed documentary through montages of newspaper headlines, the use of clips from TV news programs, and, according to Hegedus, unused footage from Kevin Rafferty's Feed, a documentary about the 1992 New Hampshire primary.[4]

Over a span of four months spent filming, Pennebaker and Hegedus shot about 35 hours of film.[5]

In late April 2008, a clip from the film was posted on YouTube that purported to show former Clinton administration official (and supporter of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton) Mickey Kantor saying to Carville and Stephanopoulos, "Look at Indiana, wait, wait – look at Indiana. 42-40. It doesn’t matter if we win. Those people are shit. Excuse me." Another erroneous interpretation of the clip alleged that Kantor said, "How would you like to be a worthless white nigger?".

On May 2, 2008, Kantor claimed that the footage had been doctored,[6] and shortly thereafter D.A. Pennebaker claimed that Kantor had actually said "Those people must be shitting in the White House."[7] The doctored footage and false allegations against Kantor were discussed in the Return of the War Room, a 2008 sequel made by Pennebaker and Hegedus.

• Primary (1960) – a pioneering film about the electoral process in the 1960 U.S. presidential election that was edited by D. A. Pennebaker
• Cinema verite
• American Crime Story: Impeachment

• The War Room at IMDb
• The War Room at Box Office Mojo
• The War Room at Rotten Tomatoes
• Official website
• The War Room: Being There an essay by Louis Menand at the Criterion Collection
• The War Room" at Actual Reality Pictures