Elizabeth Warren, a Bigger Star Than George Clooney or Angelina Jolie?

March 18th, 2012 1:08 PM

In the Sunday Washington Post, film critic Ann Hornaday puts on her left-wing political beret to honor a documentary called “Maxed Out” now playing on the Showtime channel -- and its star, Elizabeth Warren, currently running as a Democrat  against Republican Sen. Scott Brown for “Ted Kennedy’s seat” in the Senate.

James Scurlock, the director of “Maxed Out,” is all gush to the Post. “You look at the way people have responded to her, I’m just in awe,” he said. “I live in L.A., which is a celebrity culture, and people get much more excited when you say you know Elizabeth Warren than if I knew Angelina Jolie or George Clooney. She’s like a rock star.”

Hornaday and the Post thought a documentary on Palin called "The Undefeated" was an "ad." But Hornaday loved a film radical feminist Bella Abzug.

Today's film is an "engaging, lucid primer." Scurlock told the Post he can't imagine why Warren would be controversial.

As for the biggest star of “Maxed Out,” Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, Scurlock declines credit for discovering her. “I think she was just really waiting to be heard,” he said, adding that hers was the last interview he did for the film, and that she only gave him an hour. “And she didn’t even really need an hour, because what she basically said was [that] you can’t have banks making more and more money as their customers are going broke faster and faster. That’s not sustainable.”

He was shocked when Warren became a polarizing figure after Obama named her to create the newly formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “Elizabeth has been labeled as anti-business and anti-finance,” Scurlock said, “but the reality is that the financial industry, which is the backbone of the economy, cannot survive bankrupting all its customers. We both felt that’s a very pro-business, pro-economy position.”