Alex Gibney's new documentary about the prostitution scandal that toppled former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is marketed as a piece that brings to light whole new dimensions on the spectacular public fall of the "Sheriff of Wall Street." On two counts, it delivers: Firstly, it lays out in detail the case that a series of powerful enemies might have orchestrated Spitzer's exposure; and secondly, it shows that Ashley Dupre (pictured above), the escort who became the tabloid face of the scandal, was not Spitzer's central temptation.
That distinction goes to a still relatively anonymous young woman who worked at the same agency as Dupre under the pseudonym "Angelina," and though Spitzer has never been eager to talk about her, Gibney found her one of the most fascinating characters he encountered.
"Angelina" was Spitzer's favourite at Emperors Club VIP, the high-priced international escort agency. Gibney tracked her down and found an honest, smart young woman who had stayed out of the tabloids and now works as a commodities day trader.
In the film, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer, the audience thinks they've met her. A pretty strawberry blonde speaks candidly about her liaisons with the former Governor and trying to lay low when the scandal broke. But Gibney soon reveals that she demanded her identity be hidden, so he hired an actor to play her because he felt she was someone who bucked the stereotypes most have of prostitutes and wanted to avoid making her seem like "an underworld figure" by blurring her face and distorting her voice.
In turn, unearthing "Angelina" made for some tense conversations with Spitzer, whom Gibney had coaxed into a hours of on-camera interviews, as well as extensive off-camera chats. In exchange for Spitzer's participation, Gibney agreed that anything he discovered that wasn't in the public domain would be run by Spitzer first, so the ex-governor could rebut or respond to it. That meant confronting Spitzer about "Angelina," something that "initially, I don't think he was really interested in talking about," Gibney says.
But thanks to Gibney's decision to shoot much of the Spitzer interviews as a close up study of his face, we get a front-row seat as Spitzer tries to publicly reckon with a fuller portrait of his transgressions.
"Those close-up angles allow you to see the blink of an eye or the wince, or a kind of narrowing of his eyes. You can see when he gets angry and he trains those eyes on you," Gibney says.
According to the film, that's a familiar stare in New York.