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DOCUMENTARY
Beating around the Bush
BY MIKE MILIARD

When filmmaker Marc Berlin first met Vernon Craig, the rumpled, fast-talking polymath at the center of Berlin’s wry new documentary, The Man Who Knew Bush, Craig was eating a Danish at a coffee shop in Newport, Rhode Island. The two men struck up a conversation and got to talking politics. And talking. And talking. Before long, Berlin decided to record their conversations, because Craig is more than just a garrulous local character. First, the engagingly eccentric and marginally employed poli-sci and genealogy buff shares a bloodline with the Bush dynasty. Second, he claims to have been sucker-punched by his distant relative, the drunken Dubya, outside a New Haven bar back in 1968. Berlin soon intuited that this was too good a story for mere audiotape.

"I got the idea to make this into an actual film," says the director, whose previous credits include the sci-fi spoof People from Space and the documentary Firestorm: Blazing Infernos. "Vernon’s a colorful guy. I like to think I’m a good judge of what’s interesting and what’s not interesting, and I just felt that this guy could hold his own for an hour or so on tape."

That he does. The Man Who Knew Bush, which has its world premiere on Wednesday, July 28 at Loews Copley Place, is a rambling shaggy-dog story, but it’s never less than engaging as Berlin and Craig crisscross New England, visiting the formative places of George W. Bush’s life: his prep school in Andover; Yale, in New Haven, Connecticut; the family’s summer residence in Kennebunkport, Maine.

Craig didn’t just know Bush in passing in the late ’60s. He knows Bush. "[Craig]’s had a lot of free time, to say the least, in the last 30 years, to do a lot of reading," says Berlin. "He spent a lot of time in libraries reading, reading."

The results of this diligence appear in the film when the pair visits Andover’s Phillips Academy, where Craig laments that W.’s politics represents a break with the Yankee noblesse oblige that had ruled his family for generations. He also offers his theory that the Bushes "suffer from a terrible inferiority complex," not having had what it took to hang out with "the super WASPs: the Washingtons, the Jeffersons, the Adamses." He posits that if George H.W. Bush hadn’t relocated to Midland, Texas, the family might never have amassed the political power they enjoy today. "I don’t think they could have made it from Connecticut."

When I reach Craig on the phone in Rhode Island, he’s more than happy to hold forth on Bush and the Bushes. Where did this fascination with the Bush family come from? "Oh, I was a political-science major at the College of William and Mary. I [later] studied Reagan. Nancy Reagan acted with my father’s sister in a Broadway show. My uncle John Beal was also an actor. His last film was The Firm, with Tom Cruise. He starred in The Little Minister with Katharine Hepburn. They knew the Reagans, too. I knew a lot about the Reagans and the Bushes through these contacts."

As for Craig’s personal interaction with the future president, "he reminded me of a typical politician’s son. He was a party boy. Very flamboyant. A Texas drawl. Heavy drinker. Sort of a show-off. He was nice, in the beginning, but when he started getting drunk, he started getting very belligerent. Mean."

Craig laughs as he recounts that well-lubricated night in a New Haven bar in 1968, when, out of nowhere, Bush uncorked his own prototype of shock and awe. "He was drunk, and he got meaner as he got drunk. And I said something I shouldn’t have said. I was sort of drunk, too. He said something like, ‘Oh, I have so many girlfriends,’ or something like that. And I said, ‘Well, I’m sure you do, because all the super-studs are in Vietnam!’ That’s when he slugged me. Good thing he was drunk, because he was much stronger than me."

The Man Who Knew Bush screens at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, July 28 at Loews Copley Place, 100 Huntington Avenue, in Boston, with the director and star in attendance. Call (617) 266-1300 or e-mail info@manwhoknewbush.com.


Issue Date: July 23 - 29, 2004
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