There was a stint at a seminary, where Thomas studied to become a priest, followed by a flirtation with campus radicalism and the Black power movement. At school Thomas was teased by his classmates, who called him “ABC”, short for America’s Blackest Child. The son of an absent father and a mother who wasn’t able to care for him, Thomas was raised by his grandfather, an abusive man. “One person we talked to said that in the caste system that exists in America, especially for minority people, Clarence Thomas was born an untouchable, and has spent his life trying to rise up.” Kirk recalled a conversation he had while making the movie. Other talking heads include the New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer (who also worked on the film as a reporter) Clarence’s Yale Law School classmate John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN and national security adviser and an assortment of Thomas’s former friends, colleagues, and an ex-girlfriend who all offer anecdotes that help explain how a Black boy who grew up in a Savannah home without a toilet became what the hosts of Pod Save America call “the supreme court’s most scandal-plagued rightwinger” and half of what the Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy coins “the it couple of the far right”.Ĭlarence and Ginni Thomas in 2021 Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images “It’s so improbable it’s a novel,” the author Kurt Andersen, Ginni’s childhood neighbor, says in a filmed interview. At its core, the documentary tells a Shakespearean tale of humiliation and revenge. “I had said to my staff: I’m longing to get a little emotion and some characters in our movies again,” he said of landing on his latest subject. Kirk has made more than 50 documentaries for the Frontline series, including recent films about Vladimir Putin and Nancy Pelosi. Set to premiere on Frontline on Tuesday night, Clarence and Ginni Thomas: Politics, Power and the Supreme Court is a psychologically astute two-hour feature (slated, as of three weeks ago, to run at half the length) that lays out the origin story and driving motivations behind one of the more mystifying duos of our time. The work was already shaping up to be more entertaining than a documentary about Clarence and Ginni Thomas has any right to be. “This thing that I do for a living is exhilarating, and a little bit terrifying,” Kirk said as he and his team geared up for a long weekend of reworking the final cut. The funds came from Harlan Crow, the far-right Texas billionaire who has also been in the hot seat for bankrolling the couple’s luxury vacations. The supreme court justice and his conservative activist wife had been accepting private school tuition payments on behalf of the great-nephew they are raising as their son.
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