A new short documentary from three storied directors about Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis premieres this weekend
Politics. There may be no more dividing word in the English language, or one more popularly misunderstood. A new short documentary about Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis explores exactly what politics in practice is as the United States hurdles toward some of the most important elections of its long history. The film has its world premiere this Saturday at the Round Top Film Festival.
Inside Man: Rodney Ellis and the Art of the Possible is the culmination of decades of work by three storied political documentarians: Louis Alvarez, Andrew Kolker and Paul Stekler. It’s also, partially, a sequel to one of their greatest works, the 1995 Emmy Award-winning documentary Vote for Me: Politics in America. That film, a four-hour interstate look at political processes across the country, featured a bombshell segment starring then-State Senator Ellis on the floor of the Texas Legislature.
Unbeknownst to the rest of his colleagues, Ellis was wearing a wireless microphone as he whipped votes for a civil rights measure. It was an unabashed look into the making of the legislative sausage, with Ellis compromising, cajoling, commiserating, and more to nudge Republicans to support judicial restructuring that would increase Black representation among Texas judges. When the film came out, Ellis faced an immediate backlash from colleagues.
“That sequence in Vote for Me is amazing,” says Stekler. “I’ve always thought that’s one of the reasons why it won an Emmy and a Peabody and DuPont award among other things. But, it was a trying time for him and it was something that was very unexpected.”
Ellis left the Texas Senate in 2017 to become Harris County Commissioner, but he’s never shied away from the same love of the political game that made him famous. In Inside Man, we see him still painfully cognizant of what it takes to move the needle forward in the game of thrones . . . or at least, the game of fancy leather chairs.
Inside Man focuses on Ellis’s fight against cash bail in Harris County, a fight that has become a major focal point of Texas politics. When he took up the cause, he was the only Democrat and the only Black person on the county commission. In a startling move, he joined a lawsuit against the commission pushing for bail reform. The rest of the commission was outraged.
“The optics of these white men beating up on this Black guy, I don’t think played well,” Ellis says in the film. “I wanted those optics as they went off on me . . . I knew I could not persuade any of them . . . so I told my staff to go splice that part because I wanted to make sure people looked at it.”
Ellis’s gambit worked. Bail reform gained in popularity. One year later, a massive blue wave would sweep through Harris County, giving Democrats a majority on the county commission and putting Lina Hidlago into office, who championed cash bail reform.
“Houston has undergone a transition from a moderately Republican to Democratically dominated in terms of Harris County,” says Stekler. “The way that Commissioner Ellis was able to make that happen is pretty amazing, and I think that the end is pretty inspirational.”
Ellis in the film comes across as a fighter who knows that the sun is setting on his career at the age of 65. He still continues to advocate for social and civic justice even as the politics of Texas continue to evolve. However, Inside Man shows the various ways that political will is made manifest, from his deal-making in 1995 to his public stunt-making in 2017. Both moved the needle in Texas, and both will be part of the political fight going forward.
For Stekler, Alvarez, and Kolker, this is also part of their swansong. Inside Man is a piece of Politicos, their final project on American politics and hopefully a guide map for what tomorrow’s fights for civil rights might look like.
“This is our last film together,” says Stekler. “We’ve known each other for over 40 years. Right now, we’re trying to see what we can make of the old footage, throwing forward stories that relevant for a film about the future politics.”
Great Job Jef Rouner & the Team @ The Texas Signal for sharing this story.
