Imagine what it would feel like to discover that you’re the doppelganger of the leader of the free world? That's precisely what happened to Bronx resident Louis Ortiz one day when he shaved his beard and saw Barack Obama looking back at him in the mirror. The difference is that unlike Obama - who was at the time campaigning for his first presidential term - Ortiz was unemployed, struggling to make ends meet and trying to raise his daughter. When the opportunity arrived for him to work as an impersonator, he seized it and hasn’t looked back, even if his career has become almost completely dependant on Obama’s uncertain future once he leaves office. Ortiz is at the center of the insightful Bronx Obama, a documentary film by Ryan Murdock, which chronicles his discovery, his career choices and the personal battles he’s had to fight in order to make a living.
Part neorealist comedy, part political essay, the documentary draws indelible parallels between Ortiz and the President, while also becoming an allegory for the economic crisis that still sends aftershocks throughout the country. We spoke to Murdock who elaborated on the film’s process from being a radio story to becoming a feature length, Ortiz’s future and his own goals as a filmmaker.
Before you turned this into a feature it was a story on This American Life and then a short in The New York Times. Can you walk us through this process?
I met Louis in 2011 right after Bin Laden was killed and people were congratulating him everywhere he went, which blew my mind, so interestingly enough from the beginning it was obvious to me that there was a feature film there, since there’s always complex things going on with Louis as a person and as a character and the blurry line between them, not to mention the loaded image of Obama and all it represents. I saw all these things and knew the 2012 election was on the horizon. One of my friends who is a producer at This American Life thought that this was a great idea for a radio program, so I adapted it and the result was a 36 minute story that I told as a filmmaker, which aired on February 2012. I continued following Louis, did a Kickstarter to raise money to allow me to follow Louis around, and right around the election I was approached by The New York Times who asked me to adapt some of my material for a short film, but all along, the feature was the ultimate goal. The short film was huge, it was on the cover of the Times. So the following year I had run out of money finally got to edit the over 200 hours of footage we had, I first made a three hour cut of the film with not a lot of structure and I showed that to people and partnered with some people who brought in editors and got us all the way through. It was a three year process to our film premiere, which was six months ago. People are aware of the story even if they haven’t seen the film, because of all the ways in which we’ve told the movie. This American Life was like the first act, the short was an inner monologue and the feature tells a more complicated story with higher stakes.
We get a sense that Louis is changing a lot as we watch the film, and in a way his transformation into a version of Obama, made me think of something out of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, and we get a sense that by the end of the President’s second term, Louis will also be out of work, was this metaphysical parallel something you were interested in exploring?
Absolutely, the Mitt Romney character says it in the film, “we live their lives”, which I think is quite profound. One day you’re a regular person, the next day you’re tied to this person in an intimate and very unique way. It’s also very complicated and there’s a question of whether this is a choice or not, for example Louis chose it as his career, but even when he’s in plain clothes, people will still come up to him. He takes the attitude that if this is something that will always surround him and he can take advantage of it from an economic perspective, then he might as well embrace it. Now that the film’s out, Louis has become famous in his own right, he’s known as “the Bronx Obama”.
Did Louis ever talk about how being Obama would be an obstacle in his pursuing an acting career in the future?
Yeah, it’s funny you bring that up. He’s interested in branching out, once Obama is out of office. I personally think that the resemblance is just too strong, I’m not sure if he could, without it being a little weird at least...maybe I’m wrong. We have talked for example about how if you think of Elvis, or Michael Jackson, or JFK, once they’re out of the spotlight, there’s almost more of a need to relive their character, and I think this might be beneficial to Louis. Once we’re out of the bullshit of politics, maybe he doesn’t have to respond to every political thing and develop a stock routine that people would want to see. I think there’s a way to do something like this well, that’s not degrading.
As the creative director of your production company how do you feel about documentaries becoming more at home on TV than in theaters?
As a filmmaker, there’s always these competing goals. I would love to have my movies in theaters, because I think the theater experience is important especially in a film like this where it’s a mix of funny and sad, and you get that communal emotional experience, but at the same time I also want as many people to see the film as possible and frankly, Showtime is getting to get thousands more of people than it would get in theaters. I’m sort of a platform agnostic I guess, I think we’re all gonna start watching things in whatever way is most complimentary to our lifestyle.
Bronx Obama is now available on iTunes, Vimeo On Demand and other VOD platforms, as well as playing on Showtime. For television listings click here.
