If Bill Clinton and Tiger Woods were able to hold onto their jobs after hooking up with skanky women (whether paid or not), why the hell wasn't New York's infamous governor Eliot Spitzer? It's one of the many right-on questions asked by Alex Gibney's new documentary, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, opening in New York today.
The doc is a super-inside peek into what the hell went so wrong with the formerly popular New York governor (who resigned in 2008 amid reports he'd been paying thousands of dollars to hire prostitutes from an escort company), and unfortunately for Spitzer...
He agreed to sit down for Gibney's cameras and attempt to explain himself.
Of course, this is a huge coup for Gibney (and for us), but you soon see it's not just puritanical America—which seems to think some politicians are allowed to sin yet others aren't—that was to blame for Spitzer's downfall, it was Spitzer himself.
Gibney, whose Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room was nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar, is great at asking tough questions of famously flawed American figures. We only wish he'd managed to corral Tiger Woods into the grilling, too, and ask what the hell is it with these guys who think they can cheat with sluts on the one hand and give good American family sound bites on the other?
Perhaps that's a more specific doc Gibney will offer up later?
For now, we have before us the dark delight of Spitzer's often painful honesty on Gibney's stand, as it were. But we also have the man who many once thought might be a future president lying and evading better than any seasoned Hollywood press rep we know. And trust, that's saying tons.
So if Spitzer's show on CNN doesn't work out, he could easily come to T-town and defend sanctimonious starlets who think their rehabbed poop don't stink, that's for sure.