Video Crew On Huntsman? It’s Documentary, Not Politics
Charles Dharapak/Associated Press Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah and the current ambassador to China, arrives on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington.
Word that Jon Huntsman, the American ambassador in China and a possible 2012 Republican presidential candidate, has a television crew following him around in Beijing has gotten the political world all, well, a-Twitter.
Reuters broke the original story, noting that the ambassador “has allowed a video crew to follow him in a range of settings over the past year” and musing that “it would undoubtedly come in handy in any political campaign.”
National Journal picked the story up in a little item. Politico went further on Thursday, quoting a law professor as saying that “If he gave this video crew any special access, or allowed them to do anything other video crews would not be allowed to do, then it would be a serious problem under the Hatch Act if the video were to be used for campaign purposes.”
And that notion bounced around in Twitter messages for the last 24 hours. One person wrote: “RT @pwire: Huntsman has a video crew following him in China… http://pwire.at/i2YBci | Hatch act violation?”
It’s a dramatic — and potentially illegal — notion: the idea that Mr. Huntsman, who has resigned his post effective the end of April, might have hired a television crew to document his time as ambassador for use in a potential presidential campaign.
But the truth seems to be far less sexy than all that. The Academy Award-winning producer of the documentary told The Caucus in an interview Thursday that she is making a film about diplomacy between the United States and China, and that Mr. Huntsman’s abrupt decision to resign has complicated her life.
“Bummer for us,” said Geralyn White Dreyfous, who said the film was not a campaign effort or in any way controlled by Mr. Huntsman. “We got permission from the State Department to make this film. We’re not making a film about Mr. Huntsman.”
The Huntsman family was at the center of the film, she said, which seeks to use his arrival in the country to tell the story about the pace of change in diplomacy over the past 30 years. She said she jokingly refers to them as the “Von Trapp family who arrives in Beijing — six kids, two dogs.” (It is a reference to the large family portrayed in the movie “The Sound of Music.”)
“We’re making a film about Chinese-U.S. diplomacy,” she said. “What better way to see it than to do it through this family?”
The future direction of the film is now in doubt, however. Ms. White Dreyfous said there is no chance that she will shift focus to Mr. Huntsman’s political ambitions and that his departure from China might mean that the film has to find another main character — perhaps the new ambassador who replaces him.
But that’s a daunting thought after 18 months, nine trips to China,and numerous interviews with Chinese scholars and others.
“Obama picks this very talented and unusual choice,” she said, explaining the initial motivation for the film. “It’s a new era. We’re going into the days of China being a superpower. What does our diplomacy have to be?”
The movie was originally scheduled to be finished in 2013 or 2014, after Mr. Huntsman had served as ambassador for a full four-year term. Now, the earliest the movie could be completed would be the first of the year, she said. But it is likely to take far longer than that if they have to go back to the drawing board.
Ms. White Dreyfous said she had never suspected that Mr. Huntsman might quit early or run for president in 2012. She said members of the Chinese media had repeatedly asked Mr. Huntsman that during his tenure there, and that he always just laughed.
Now, though, she’s dying to know whether he’s going to run.
“I’ve asked him,” she said. “He’s said he’s not doing anything until he comes back to Washington. He hasn’t said a word to me about it. I keep trying to get his wife and kids to talk to me about it. I really could not have predicted.”
Tim Miller, a spokesman for the Horizon Political Action Committee, which is serving as a possible campaign-in-waiting until Mr. Huntsman returns to the United States, said, “The PAC has absolutely no connection to the documentary, nor any formal or informal relationship with Ambassador Huntsman.”
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