If politics is entertainment these days, then Stephanie Cutter has certainly taken the note. A Democratic Party fixture for decades, the political consultant worked as Bill Clinton’s deputy communications director, adviser to Barack Obama in his first term, and deputy campaign manager on Obama’s reelection bid. She’s been intimately involved in some of the country’s most intensely fought modern political battles. And now she’s facing a new constituency: Emmy voters.
Just as Hollywood needed to get creative in the COVID-19 era, the Democratic Party lacked the typical tools for mounting an effective campaign against a sitting president in 2020. The Democratic National Convention, for starters, had to be redefined; the stage where the presidential nominee is certified, and where a party (literally) comes together to gear up for the election, couldn’t exist as we knew it. Without the ability to physically gather in a space, the DNC went virtual—with Cutter tapped as the televised, multiday event’s producer. “There was no model,” she tells Vanity Fair.
Yet the production—from daily celebrity “hosts” including Julia Louis-Dreyfus to the brilliantly reimagined delegate roll call—emerged as a rousing success. Then, Cutter put her producer hat back on after Joe Biden won the election, to helm the prime-time inauguration special, Celebrating America—another star-studded, well-received show.
Both the DNC and Celebrating America are now eligible for Emmys—categorized as a hosted nonfiction special and a live variety special, respectively—with Cutter now in a very different kind of campaign mode.
“Certainly when you’re in the throes of dealing with a pandemic…you’re not thinking, ‘Let’s submit this for an award’—you’re just trying to get through the end of it without making any huge mistakes,” Cutter says. “But we were really encouraged to submit these for an Emmy because they were so different from what you normally see in politics. In the era of a pandemic, we accomplished something pretty big in terms of being able to produce interesting creative content that engages people in a virtual setting.”
Cutter and her team—including Adrienne Elrod, talent director for Biden’s inaugural committee, and Ricky Kirshner, an Emmy-winning television veteran—needed to navigate both the new world of entertainment and longstanding political norms. They cut the DNC to two hours a day (typically, its daily runtime would go as long as six hours), with speeches of party bigwigs shortened accordingly. “We knew what story we wanted to tell,” Cutter says. “Usually people get up there and speak for 10 to 15 minutes. The average was two minutes for us, and everybody understood. We didn’t get any pushback from anybody wanting to speak longer, for the most part.” She pauses. “There were one or two, but I won’t mention who they are.”
“That is such a politically challenging decision Stephanie had to make there… To go to some very notable VIPs and say, ‘You can only speak for four minutes,’ that is not an easy thing to do in the world that we work in,” Elrod says. “We wanted to convince the American people to support Joe Biden. If we had a bunch of boring speeches, it [was] not going to work.”
The pre-recorded DNC required careful planning, but Celebrating America was a different beast entirely. The election dragged on for days in November before Biden’s victory was officially called, and then weeks before the January 20 inauguration, the insurrection in the U.S. Capitol building transformed the entire tone of the event. “On Jan. 6, we’re in the middle of a zoom meeting, planning out a [Celebrating America] segment, and I looked over to my TV and I see the caption, ‘The Capitol has been Breached,’” Cutter recalls. “At that moment, we didn’t know if we’d be having an inauguration or what it could look like.”
They pivoted to “meet the moment,” as Cutter puts it: “America wasn’t really in a celebrating mood after seeing what happened at the Capitol, after going through that election, after living through a pandemic. We had to think about how we were going to communicate the importance of this moment. Celebrating America was really, for us, about the strength and perseverance of the American people and of our democracy, not the celebrating a new president.”
This was also at the height of the COVID-19 winter surge. “The things that we carried through from the convention [are] that, you don’t have people cheering for you—there is no audience, there’s nobody applauding, so how do you translate that into a virtual program?” Cutter says. “It’s really driven by emotion.” The special had Tom Hanks hosting from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial—“a father figure to the American people,” as Cutter calls him—interwoven with stories of everyday Americans doing extraordinary things with big musical performances. And this was all live.
“We could have taken the easy way out—we could have had everybody out of the city, nothing live from the Lincoln, [kept] Bruce Springsteen and John Legend…at home,” Elrod adds. “That would have frankly made our lives a lot easier, because the logistical aspects of getting them here, making sure that they were secure, moving them around a city that was essentially locked down, was challenging. But I’m glad we put the time in to make it happen. I’m glad that we didn’t go back.”
Indeed, while great reviews came in for such temporary fixes, many of the lessons learned in the entertainment space are going right back to politics. “Shorter and tighter is here to stay,” Elrod says. So don’t expect the DNC to start giving hour-long floor time to VIPs again anytime soon.
But back to the entertainment—it’s why we’re talking here, after all. The end of Celebrating America offered the kind of big finish that awards were made for—and it didn’t hurt to have some real star wattage bringing it home. Was Katy Perry singing “Firework” on the patio of the Lincoln Memorial, with an enormous fireworks display behind her, a little over the top? Most definitely. Did Cutter and Kirshner, who spearheaded that closer, pull it off? Those who watched know the answer. “Nobody knew exactly what it was going to look like,” Cutter admits. “But in rehearsals, Katy…had such a great sense of timing, that the moment just really clicked.”
And for Elrod, the final scene’s power goes right back to what made the show so powerful—and important—in the first place: “The Katy Perry moment really represented that a change was coming,” she says. “It was time for us to look to the future and celebrate.” They pulled that off. Can the Emmys keep the party going?
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