Coming to theatres and VOD tomorrow, Friday, December 7:
DIVIDE AND CONQUER: THE STORY OF ROGER AILES
Director:
Alexis Bloom
Premiere:
Toronto 2018
Select Festivals:
New York, Hamptons, AFI Fest, Philadelphia, Indie Memphis, Virginia
About:
The rise and fall of the master manipulator behind Fox News.
Disgraced by allegations of sexual harassment and assault and forced to resign from Fox News in July 2016, dying less than a year later in May 2017, Roger Ailes was widely acknowledged as one of the most powerful men in media. In Bloom’s conventionally constructed but perceptive profile, she lays out his strategic rise to power, moving from producer of THE MIKE DOUGLAS SHOW to media advisor to US presidential hopeful Richard M Nixon and in the process changing the way that politics and media intersected from that point forward – culminating in his later development of Fox News and its confrontational and partisan style of shaping stories and public opinion. The film well captures Ailes’ personality, arrogance, ambition, and legacy, while offering curious insight about elements of his background that are less known, including a strange chapter in which he took over a small town newspaper in Cold Spring NY and tried to run roughshod over the local community. While there is no access to Ailes family members or to Fox insiders, aside from Glenn Beck who could provide a broader sense of the toxicity of the network, Bloom still manages to craft a topical and compelling, if somewhat limited, portrait of privilege and power.
