Don't depend on Roger Stone for your livelihood is one life lesson director Christopher Guldbransen almost learned too late. Stone withdrew his cooperation for Guldbransen's documentary midway through the project, no doubt contributing to the director's cardiac arrest, which was nearly fatal. Life lesson two: always work out next to a heart surgeon.
Guldbransen started following and filming the Nixon-fetishist and political dirty trickster Stone in 2018 and planned to continue through the 2020 elections. The aim seems to have been to see the U. S. presidential election through the eyes of someone close to Donald Trump. But what does 'close' even mean to such transactional creatures as Stone and Trump? When Stone finds that Trump has stiffed him by not inviting him to speak at the Jan. 6 rally on the Mall in Washington, D. C., he retreats to his hotel room to watch the day's events on TV. On the phone Stone admits Biden won the election, saying of Trump's campaign, 'That's why they lost: they don't know what they're doing.' Then when the insurrectionists begin their assault on the Capitol, Stone and his little entourage leave D. C. as quickly as possible for Florida, expecting all the while to be charged and arrested. As it turns out, even here Stone seems to have misjudged his centrality to the story, since he was not one of the more than 1,000 people eventually charged.
In the end, this is not the portrait of a political genius pulling strings behind the curtain, but of a sad little man, always in the middle of things in his own mind, tossing others and being tossed himself from one transactional relationship to another. Most of all, as the many verbal, facial, and manual tics attest, it is a life driven by the qualities Stone enumerates in a frothing diatribe: hate, rage, and viciousness.
