On a recent Friday afternoon, Phil Donahue was sitting in a dimly lit production studio in midtown Manhattan when a reporter entered. Mr. Donahue looked up. He was wearing a checkered dress shirt over jeans and sneakers. Under a crop of shaggy white hair, his big blue eyes bulged mischievously.
He offered a mock warning to his fellow film producers in the studio. “Now watch what you say,” said Mr. Donahue. “We have a member of the mainstream media in our presence.”
These days, the godfather of daytime television is no longer a card-carrying member of the club. Ever since February of 2003, when MSNBC cancelled his nightly talk show, Mr. Donahue has been wandering through the outskirts of the American media. Recently, he has settled into an unlikely role: a TV icon turned freelancing filmmaker.
“What can I get you to drink,” said Mr. Donahue. “A shot and a beer?”
Mr. Donahue was in from Connecticut for the afternoon to put the final touches on his first feature-length documentary, Body of War. Mr. Donahue recently described the movie as a “non-nuanced, anti–Iraq War documentary,” about a “heartland kid who suddenly went from a social life of single bars and courtship to a daily routine of catheters, puke pans and erectile dysfunction.”
“Little Miss Sunshine, we are not,” said Mr. Donahue.
So far, Mr. Donahue doesn’t have a distributor for the film, which he has financed with his own money. He hopes to begin showing Body of War at film festivals by the end of the summer. The market for Iraq documentaries, said Mr. Donahue, was growing more crowded by the day, but he felt confident that his would stand out. “There are no tanks in this movie,” said Mr. Donahue. “No Humvees. Nothing that goes BOOM.”
“This is Baby Jessica in the well in Texas,” said Mr. Donahue.
Body of War focuses narrowly on the physical and political struggles of Tomas Young, an injured veteran adjusting to life in a wheelchair. Mr. Young, a freckle-faced twentysomething native of Kansas City, Mo., joined the Army a few days after Sept. 11. He had expected to fight in Afghanistan. Instead, he went to Iraq. On his fifth day in combat, he was patrolling Sadr City when a shot ripped through him.
Mr. Donahue reached out to demonstrate. “The bullet entered here,” said Mr. Donahue, tapping a reporter near the left clavicle. “It exited, here, in the T4 vertebrae of the spine.”
“Now he’s paralyzed from the nipples down.”
Mr. Donahue said his inspiration for the film was a Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl running from a cloud of napalm. “See the pain,” said Mr. Donahue. “Don’t sanitize this war.”
The film features two original songs, written and performed by Eddie Vedder, the front man of Pearl Jam. Mr. Donahue explained that he and Mr. Vedder first met in 2000, when they were both campaigning for Ralph Nader. Their paths crossed again in the spring of 2007, in Scottsdale, Ariz., at a Chicago Cubs fantasy camp.
“I said, ‘Eddie, I’m doing an anti–Iraq War documentary,” said Mr. Donahue. “He said, ‘You want a song?’ I said, ‘Are you kidding?’”
“Wait until you hear the sound in this place,” said Mr. Donahue.
The screen flickered. Mr. Vedder’s voice filled the room.
Nothing’s too good for a veteran,
Yeh, this is what they say,
So nothing is what they will get,
In this new American way.
For the next half hour, Mr. Donahue showed clips of his unfinished film. Along the way, Mr. Young was shown struggling to pull his pants over his unfeeling legs; his fiancée appeared onscreen trying to figure out how to get Mr. Young through their wedding day without accidentally soiling his tuxedo; and a wheelchair-bound Vietnam Vet was seen advising Mr. Young on Viagra.
“There’s a lot of what you might call ‘guy talk’ in the film,” said Mr. Donahue. There is also plenty of stirring footage. In a particularly mesmerizing sequence, Mr. Young watches stoically as his younger brother, fresh out of boot camp, ships off to Iraq.
To judge by the preview, Mr. Donahue has eschewed much of the genre’s perfunctory Bush-bashing and, instead, has aimed the camera on the members of Congress who voted to authorize the war.
One person who does not appear in the movie is Mr. Donahue. During the course of the film, the man who made his career in front of the camera decided to stay behind it. “I didn’t want to upstage Tomas,” said Mr. Donahue. “And I don’t want to look like a guy out there tap-dancing his feet when we have 3,500 guys dead.”
A week later, Mr. Donahue called The Observer from his hotel room at the Peninsula on Santa Monica Boulevard. He was in Beverly Hills to present an award at the Daytime Emmys and to meet with film distributors.
“I’m showing it to some biggies here this week,” said Mr. Donahue. “We’ll see. At this point, it’s still just a dream.”
The dream began years ago with a visit to Ralph Nader. Sometime around the winter of 2004, Mr. Nader had received an invitation to see an injured soldier at the Walter Reed hospital in Washington, D.C. Mr. Nader asked Mr. Donahue to tag along.
At the hospital, Mr. Donahue met Mr. Young for the first time. He was bedridden, paralyzed, groggy from morphine and engaged to be married. Mr. Donahue was floored.
“Jesus, the kid couldn’t walk,” recalled Mr. Donahue. “I couldn’t just pat him on the head and walk away. I thought, ‘O.K., Mr. Retired Guy, what the hell can I do?’”
He decided to write a book.
But before he could begin putting pen to paper, he had to fly to St. Louis to attend the second annual National Conference on Media Reform. There, a few thousand media-watchdog types were gathering to critique the shortcomings of the corporate media. It was a subject close to Mr. Donahue’s heart.
A few years earlier, Mr. Donahue had joined MSNBC to host a nightly talk-show program that would compete with The O’Reilly Factor on Fox. At the time, the nation was preparing for war. “Everybody was go, go, go, bomb, bomb, bomb,” recalled Mr. Donahue. “I thought, ‘Well, people will watch my show because I’m different.’”
The experiment was short lived. In February of 2003, NBC Universal executives replaced Mr. Donahue’s show for an extra hour of Countdown: Iraq. They attributed the move to lackluster ratings. Afterward, somebody leaked an internal NBC study to AllYourTV.com, which noted that Mr. Donahue “seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives,” and, as such, presents a “difficult public face” for the network in a time of war.
In May of 2005, still getting over what he describes as his “short miserable life at MSNBC,” Mr. Donahue traveled to the media-reform conference.
On the eve of the gathering, the conference’s organizer, Robert McChesney, a communications professor at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), spent a day walking around downtown St. Louis with Mr. Donahue. They were besieged by fans. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Mr. McChesney recalled recently. “It was like walking around with Elvis.”
Within the conference halls, Mr. Donahue received a similarly warm reception. “Suddenly he’s around 2,500 people who all really share his concern about what’s happening with the media and the coverage of the war in Iraq,” said Mr. McChesney. “You’re not alone. It’s not hopeless.”
Afterward, a rejuvenated Mr. Donahue decided to scrap the book. “I thought, ‘What the hell am I talking book here?’” said Mr. Donahue. “I’ve spent my life in television. Let’s do a movie.”
On the plane ride home, Mr. Donahue happened to sit next to DeeDee Halleck, a pioneer of independent media. She gave Mr. Donahue the digits for Ellen Spiro and Karen Bernstein, a team of documentary filmmakers who ran an outfit called Mobilus Media in Austin, Tex.
“And here we are two years later,” said Mr. Donahue.
Reached by phone last week, Ms. Spiro said that she had enjoyed working with Mr. Donahue despite their vastly different media pedigrees. She said that when Mr. Donahue first called her out of the blue, she thought it was a prank. “It was sort of like getting a call from Pippi Longstocking,” said Ms. Spiro.
Over the course of making Body of War, Ms. Spiro came to appreciate many of Mr. Donahue’s quirks, including his fascination with C-SPAN.
“It’s his favorite channel,” said Ms. Spiro. “It’s a revealing channel because there is no mediator. It’s the opposite of what’s on cable television. Phil watched hundreds of hours of material having to do with the war. He was obsessed with the C-SPAN footage. If you watch enough, it becomes an exposé.”
Ms. Spiro believed that the process of making the film had been a catharsis for Mr. Donahue. “I think that Phil was a victim of the Bush administration’s manipulation of the media in the build up to the war,” said Ms. Spiro. “Most people would have gotten angry and fought. But he went inside himself and decided to do something positive. Creativity can be a great healing process.”
Back in his hotel room, Mr. Donahue agreed. Making the film had been a good way to channel his discontent. “For me, it’s very interesting to see how fast we got into this war and how agonizingly slow is our effort to get out,” said Mr. Donahue.
He seemed content to be on the outside of the mainstream media looking in. “You still can’t say that we’re losing,” said Mr. Donahue. “Just ask Harry Reid. You can’t say that our soldiers have died in vain. You can’t criticize the war because if you do, you’re demoralizing the troops. You can’t show flag-draped coffins.”
For the time being, Mr. Donahue is free to say whatever he wants. All he has to do is find a distributor and an audience. “It’s been quite an adventure,” said Mr. Donahue, before getting off the phone. “This is not for sissies, this game.”
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