The Final Days

2000 Comedy 6 minutes Directed by Phil Rosenthal

Open in new tab

About The Final Days

In a six-minute comedy made for the 2000 White House Correspondents’ dinner, Bill Clinton plays himself in an emptying White House. He washes the presidential car, rides a bicycle through the halls of the Old Executive Office Building, and runs after a limo with a lunch bag. Kevin Spacey, as himself, takes back the Academy Award he had just won for American Beauty. Mike Maronna plays Stuart, a fictional staffer. Madeleine Albright has a cameo.

Cast & crew

More about The Final Days

Philip Rosenthal cowrote and directed. Peter Hutchins produced. The Democratic Party paid the $12,000. It is not an HBO program. It premiered at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner at the Washington Hilton on 29 April 2000. It runs 6 minutes.

Themes

  • A president in an empty White House
  • A borrowed Oscar
  • A lunch left in a limo
  • Bill Clinton
  • White House Correspondents' dinner
  • Kevin Spacey
  • Madeleine Albright
  • Philip Rosenthal
  • lame duck

Background

Shown on 29 April 2000, with the presidency changing the following January. The joke is an empty building and a president with nothing left to sign.

Making

Rosenthal shot Clinton’s lame-duck months as a joke the administration wanted on the dinner screen. Most scenes were done in one take, Rosenthal told Entertainment Weekly.

Reviews

Entertainment Weekly, 12 May 2000, treated the dinner film as Clinton’s most-watched video since the Lewinsky testimony and quoted Rosenthal saying the president could have an acting job if he wanted one.

Audiences

The dinner audience took it. In the next week it was downloaded more than 200,000 times.

Preservation

The six-minute dinner film circulated online after 29 April 2000.

Notes

  • A trimmed scene had Clinton on the red phone asking Vladimir Putin for a five-letter word for a tasty Russian pancake. The answer in the bit was blini.
  • Spacey was a guest at the White House the night before the dinner and suggested wearing his tuxedo for the scene.
  • Entertainment Weekly reported more than 200,000 downloads in the week after the dinner and called the short viral.
  • Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and Sam Donaldson are on the cast list with Clinton and Albright.

Scenes

  • Clinton washes the presidential car.
  • He bicycles the halls of the Old Executive Office Building.
  • He chases a limo with a lunch bag.
  • Spacey collects his American Beauty Oscar from him.

Also available

  • Wikimedia Commons (The Final Days (Clinton film).webm)