Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins

Forty percent of the profits were already promised to the fight.

Janice Engel's Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins premiered at Sundance in January 2019, then sat in the usual documentary holding pattern until Magnolia Pictures bought North American rights in June. The gossip was not a bidding war. It was the split. Deadline reported that 40 percent of profits would go to the ACLU and The Texas Observer, the Austin paper where Ivins worked from 1970 to 1976. ACLU donors had already put up completion money. The Texas chapter threw the Sundance reception. Magnolia president Eamonn Bowles called it a hugely entertaining film about a journalist whose voice still felt on time . Engel, talking to the same reporter, refused the "who's the next Molly" parlor game. latestnetflix.com's take is that Take Samantha Bee, John Oliver, a little Colbert and Stewart, mix in Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes, she said, and you still only get one Ivins."I say it's not one person, it's a movement" .

The Trump-shaped hole. Engel told The Guardian she did not want "he who shall not be named" anywhere near the picture, then used Women's March and March for Our Lives footage anyway as a torch pass . That is a neat trick and a slightly slippery one. The movie is built from Ivins talking, C-SPAN stages, television clips, family, Dan Rather, Paul Krugman, Cecile Richards, Lou Dubose, the whole Texas rolodex, because Ivins died of cancer in Austin on January 31, 2007, at 62, and could not sit for a new interview . Hollywood Reporter's Caryn James, writing from Sundance, said Engel shrewdly lets Ivins do most of the talking and that the film makes it irresistible to wonder what she would have done with Trump and Twitter . Engel's answer was to leave him off the poster and keep Molly's older targets. George W. Bush as Shrub. The Bushwhacked follow-up with Dubose. Bill Clinton telling Deadline's account that she was "good when she praised me and who was painfully good when she criticized me" . Her line on Pat Buchanan's 1992 culture-war speech, that it "probably sounded better in the original German" .

The rest of the dirt is on the record and still funnier than most political docs. Minneapolis cops named their mascot pig after the first woman on the crime beat. At the New York Times she walked around barefoot and brought a dog named Shit to the office. The paper hired the florid prose, then sanded it to house style. She went home to a syndicated column that, at its peak, hit 400 papers . Kickstarter in 2015 cleared a $75,000 goal in ten days and finished above $120,000 after fundraisers in Houston, Washington, and Los Angeles. Engel has said pitch meetings kept stalling on the same objection. It is a biopic and she is dead . Magnolia opened limited on August 30, 2019, $94,504 from 18 theaters, and closed domestic at $694,410. The widest run was 42 screens. The U.K. added $917 a year later . Rotten Tomatoes posted a critics' line that the film is as sharp and irreverent as its subject . The official trailer, the one Magnolia dropped on YouTube, still ends on her own instruction from a final column. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous .

Engel took the title from that column and then simplified the homework for students and audiences. Vote. The profit split makes the sermon expensive in the right direction. If the movie actually mints money, the Observer and the ACLU cash the check Ivins would have written herself.