‘Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid’ Trailer and Poster Unveiled (Exclusive)

Ahead of this Friday’s theatrical debut of Matt Tyrnauer ’s documentary feature Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid , The Hollywood Reporter is pleased to exclusively debut the film’s trailer (immediately below) and poster (at the bottom of this post), courtesy of distributor Greenwich Entertainment.

James Carville Documentary 'Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid' Acquired by CNN Films (Exclusive)

The film, a portrait of the legendary Democratic political strategist James Carville and chronicle of his efforts to to convince Pres. Joe Biden to not seek re-election, had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, where it was warmly received. CNN Films acquired it for a one-time airing on CNN last Saturday night. Greenwich subsequently acquired its theatrical rights, and will debut it at the IFC Center in New York this Friday; at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles on Oct. 25; and in other major markets thereafter.

Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid is also one of 10 outstanding 2024 documentary features that will be highlighted at the upcoming SCAD Savannah Film Festival, where Tyrnauer will appear on the 11th annual ‘Docs to Watch’ panel on Oct. 30.

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Carville, film lovers may recall, was the star of another documentary 31 years ago, Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker ’s The War Room , which chronicled the 1992 president campaign of Bill Clinton that the “Ragin’ Cajun” oversaw. (Remember “It’s the economy, stupid”?) The long shadow of that classic may have scared away other filmmakers from further documenting Carville, but not Tyrnauer. “James was the protagonist of a great documentary that people remember decades later, which is very rare for any film,” Tyrnauer told THR in August . “But we’re now 30-plus years on, and James Carville is a household name, not an emerging comet in the political universe. He has had a giant, arching career in the public eye, and a marriage that is almost unique in its political-public nature. And he hasn’t been checked in on for quite a few decades, really. So I thought that there was a lot of fodder in there for this. And then the election of 2024 struck.”

Tyrnauer never imagined that his Carville doc would end up focusing so heavily on its subject leading the charge to convince Biden to bow out of the 2024 presidential election, beginning more than a year before a disastrous debate led many other Democrats to adopt the same position, but that’s how things evolved. “I was shooting with him at his home in New Orleans,” the filmmaker recounted. “It was May 2023 when an ABC News- Washington Post poll came out and said that Biden was losing to Trump. James read the numbers on camera, and then we went to film him doing his morning round of phone calls — which he does every day — to the same group of people who are the foxhole buddies from the ’92 Clinton campaign. At that time, something clicked in James where he realized, with all his expertise, that Biden was in real danger of losing; that this is a ‘change election’; and that nothing says more of the same than Joe Biden versus Donald Trump . So he began pressing, and that became a major storyline that I began following in this film.”

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