Filmmakers Drawn Into Clinton’s ‘War Room’ : Movies: D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus get a backstage look at the army for the 1992 campaign.

It’s not exactly a movie with a surprise ending. For that matter, “The War Room”--a backstage look at the Clinton campaign, which opened last week--isn’t even the movie that D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus set out to make.

Not that they’re complaining.

“A lot of people go into marriages they didn’t want to make either,” Pennebaker said with a laugh--and a quick glance at Hegedus, his wife of 11 years--during a recent interview in New York. “But in the end they come out OK. You take your chances.”

Pennebaker, 67, the innovative, celebrated director of such seminal ‘60s pop documentaries as “Monterey Pop” and the Bob Dylan film “Don’t Look Back,” has been collaborating with Hegedus, 41, for the last 17 years. Married in 1982, they have produced, among others, “The Energy War,” their acclaimed, five-hour chronicle of Jimmy Carter’s battle for an energy bill; “Rockaby,” which follows actress Billie Whitelaw and director Alan Schneider through the rehearsals and opening of Samuel Beckett’s play; and “DeLorean,” a profile of the auto maker done before his arrest for selling cocaine. Their output has also included numerous music and performance projects, most recently “The Music Tells You” (1992), featuring Branford Marsalis.

“Most of our films,” Hegedus said, “are made because somebody says, ‘I have this really interesting story or person and you have to come make a film about him,’ and you say, ‘ Aaarrgghhhh ,’ and then we go and you just get involved in what’s happening to these people. And if there’s a lot at stake for the people you’re watching, you just get drawn in.”

They couldn’t have gotten drawn into a story in which there was more at stake, for more people, than the 1992 presidential election. And with exclusive access to the “war room”--a large space located in an old newspaper building in Little Rock where the inner circle of Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s corps of volunteers and professional strategists helped define and decide the campaign--they’ve made a documentary whose production was fraught with as much frustration and serendipity as the campaign itself.

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The pair was first approached, two weeks before the Democratic Convention in July 1992, by producers R.J. Cutler, a Peabody Award-winning director and producer, and Wendy Ettinger, a Broadway casting director (Pennebaker’s son Frazer would later make it a trio).

“They wanted to make a film about the election,” Hegedus said, “mostly because it was such a strange race that was developing, with (Ross) Perot as a possible player, etc. Penny (her nickname for her husband) and I had just finished doing the Branford Marsalis film and were kind of looking forward to a weekend off. So we gave them the chore of trying to find access to the Clinton campaign, and the Perot campaign, and (George) Bush, and the White House.”

Hoping they would bail out?

“Sort of,” Hegedus said. “The last time we did a political film was during the Carter Administration and it took us two years and practically killed us. But we thought, well, if they’re serious . . . “

They were. Cutler and Ettinger returned with 10 pages of names of people they had called in the various campaigns.

“It didn’t necessarily mean we were in,” Hegedus said, “but it showed how serious they were about getting in.”

The person who really had the say in the Clinton campaign was George Stephanopoulos, the 33-year-old former Rhodes scholar and theology student and half of the brain trust behind Clinton’s unorthodox political machinery--the other half being James Carville, the “Ragin’ Cajun,” political maverick and rising star of “The War Room.”

“We tried to work on George from all different angles,” Hegedus said. “We called everybody we knew--everybody who someone we knew knew--to put in a good word. In the end, the word came down that no, we could not film with Clinton. But they did say, ‘You can come film the staff.’

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Pennebaker said he had been confident about Clinton early on, not so about the film.

“My sense, in being around the campaign, was, ‘My God, he’s going to win,’ ” Pennebaker said. “Because no one was going to sit through four more years of what we’d had, for whatever reason, even if just to see something different.

“Perot was a wild card, and in the end this country never goes for the wild card. So I thought, ‘OK, this guy’s got a really good chance of winning and if we can get access, great. If we can’t, is it worth the money and trouble to be with the winning staff? And what happens if it’s the losing staff? You don’t have anything.’ At least if you had Clinton and he lost, you’ve got something.”

So off they went to the convention in New York. They decided to begin their film, however, where Clinton’s campaign began, in New Hampshire.

“One of those early scenes of Carville speaking to the volunteers in New Hampshire came from Kevin Rafferty’s film ‘Feed,’ ” Hegedus said. “Rafferty got a lot of footage from a video outfit in Buffalo off the satellite feed of all the candidates before they went on the air, and that’s the basis of his movie. It’s really wonderful and revealing, because you see these people when they don’t know they’re being filmed. Their entire body language is different, how they treat the people around them is different.”

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The “war room” staff, in general, are portrayed as organized, energized and focused; occasionally, their attention to detail becomes obsessive. In one pre-convention scene, the staff becomes embroiled in a heated debate over the color of Clinton convention signs, their type size, their proximity to Jerry Brown’s banners . . . it’s not a sterling moment.

“The one thing George really wanted us to do was leave in the thing about the signs,” Hegedus said, “because that was what it was really like.”

Pennebaker admits a certain delight in finding chinks in politicians’ polished armor. “When you get something that shows them at a disadvantage,” he said of his subjects, “you’re tempted to use it because in the end it makes a better movie.”

“What you want to do is film them doing what they do best,” Hegedus added. “And if someone hits them a hard ball, that’s what we want to see.”

For his part, Carville--currently smarting from the recent defeat of New Jersey Gov. Jim Florio, whose reelection campaign Carville headed--said that it was tough for him to get a perspective on the movie, but that he thought it was truthful.

“One thing I feel strongly about,” he said, “is that I earn an honorable and respectable living, and that my labor is as worthy and as sacred as anybody else’s. And I believe it has been inaccurately maligned in the past, that people have many misconceptions about campaign people.

“But in this film, what people see is us, and if they don’t like us, that’s their business. If they do like us, that’s their business, too, but I don’t think anyone will draw any conclusions that aren’t based on an accurate picture of what we do.”

Carville’s talent for backpedaling--or just not pedaling--is showcased in one of the film’s more memorable moments. Appearing as a member of a panel during the time that Clinton was being criticized for his student trip to the Soviet Union, Carville, clearly trying to pooh-pooh the whole issue, is asked what Clinton was doing there.

“And he almost (expletive) himself up,” Pennebaker laughs. “He almost said something like ‘giving secrets to the Kremlin,’ and he suddenly thought, ‘This won’t go down as a joke,’ and pulled back at the last minute.

“That was such an interesting thing, to watch him do that,” the filmmaker said, “because he covered it by laughing and it left a big hole in the room, in the conversation. And then there’s that poor guy who picks it up and says, ‘Well, at that time in our nation’s history . . . ‘ which reduced the whole room to laughs. But it shows James is thinking all the time.”

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One thing he’s thinking about, during the movie at least, is Mary Matalin, his counterpart in the Bush campaign and now his fiancee (they plan to wed this weekend). One of the couple’s conversations in the film illustrate not only their odd-couple relationship but the difficulties faced by the filmmakers, trying to craft a thoughtful documentary while elbowing their way among the hit-and-run shooters of network news.

The shot was made at such an odd angle it seems to be covert, and in fact, it was. “I saw (Matalin and Carville) starting out of the hall, with the press closing in and a guy running in front with a light,” Pennebaker said, “and I couldn’t figure out how to put myself in front. So I held the camera behind me and tilted it up, and walked straight ahead, looking innocently into the eyes of the other cameramen--who could no longer see them.”

That wasn’t the only difference between them and the TV reporters, Hegedus says. “When we finished this film and the election was over,” she said, “Penny was very insistent that he wanted a theatrical release, not just to have it play on television. TV has a lot of money and access and tends to do almost everything we can do--except follow a story before it’s history. That’s what we were doing.”