Hillary Clinton documentary cancelled
Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testifies before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the Sept. 11 attacks against the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Jan. 23, 2013 in Washington, DC.
CNN Films has cancelled its highly anticipated documentary about Hillary Clinton after director Charles H. Ferguson dropped out of the project on Monday.
"Charles Ferguson has informed us that he is not moving forward with his documentary about Hillary Clinton," CNN Worldwide spokesperson Allison Gollust told POLITICO. "Charles is an Academy Award winning director who CNN Films was excited to be working with, but we understand and respect his decision."
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"[W]e won't seek other partners and are not proceeding with the film," she wrote.
In a blog on Huffington Post, Ferguson cited pressure from Clinton supporters in the Democratic Party for causing many sources to shy away from participating in the film.
"But when I approached people for interviews, I discovered that nobody, and I mean nobody, was interested in helping me make this film. Not Democrats, not Republicans — and certainly nobody who works with the Clintons, wants access to the Clintons, or dreams of a position in a Hillary Clinton administration," Ferguson wrote. "Not even journalists who want access, which can easily be taken away. I even sensed potential difficulty in licensing archival footage from CBN (Pat Robertson) and from Fox. After approaching well over a hundred people, only two persons who had ever dealt with Mrs. Clinton would agree to an on-camera interview, and I suspected that even they would back out."
In August, the Republican Party voted to boycott debates on CNN if the project moved forward. It also said it would boycott NBC for its planned miniseries on Clinton, which is currently in the early stages of production and will star actress Diane Lane as the former Secretary of State.
The network said the four-hour miniseries — which does not yet have an air date, but is expected to be released before the 2016 presidential election — will follow Clinton's life and career from 1998 to the present.
Ferguson previously won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2010 for the financial crisis film "Inside Job."
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