Conrad Black's downfall captured on film

By CHRIS TRYHORN

Disgraced former Daily Telegraph boss Conrad Black's last year has been captured on camera for a new film that includes interviews with some of his key executives including his right-hand man, Dan Colson.

The film, which follows Lord Black throughout the tumultuous events that saw him lose control of his newspaper empire, will show his "hubris" as his empire began to crumble around him.

Citizen Black, which is premiering in Canada this weekend at the Montreal film festival, is expected to be aired in November on BBC4's Storyville documentary strand.

The 90-minute documentary includes interviews with Lord Black himself, as well as a number of senior Telegraph executives, including the former Telegraph editor Charles Moore and Spectator editor Boris Johnson.

Also featured are Andrew Knight and Dan Colson, former chief executives of the group - which was finally sold last month against Lord Black's wishes, ending his near 20-year reign at the paper.

Film-makers Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine began work on the project long before Lord Black's empire began to implode amid allegations of financial impropriety, and were able to capture a dramatic series of events.

For them it was a case of being in the right place at the right time when Lord Black came under pressure from shareholders and was forced out of the company he had built up himself by his own board of directors.

"His character is extremely flamboyant, he's an interesting person and not as much of a pure money man as all the rest," Ms Melnyk said. "It was amazing when his entire career started falling apart before our eyes and before our camera. We had no idea this was going to happen."

The film includes footage shot on a hand-held cameras from inside the tempestuous Hollinger International shareholder meeting in May last year, from which many British journalists were excluded.

Ms Melnyk got into the meeting by insisting that she needed somewhere to dump her luggage from an earlier flight, and managed to smuggle in a video camera in her handbag.

At the New York event she chatted to Hollinger director Richard Perle and Lord Black's friend Donald Trump.

Then a few months later she was with Lord Black as the roadshow plugging his book on wartime US president Franklin D Roosevelt descended into a media circus.

By that stage the peer had stood down as chief executive of Hollinger and was under fire over controversial management fees paid to himself and other executives. He has denied any wrongdoing.

"In Toronto it was like a celebrity event - journalists were pushing and shoving, and screaming out questions like, 'Can I have the name of your accountant?'"

When they went on to a talk at the former home of Roosevelt's mother, amid an "amazing circus", Ms Melnyk asked Lord Black why he was persisting with the tour while his business problems were mounting. "I don't want that to get in the way," Lord Black replied.

Although he was on hand to answer questions during the book tour, Lord Black declined to be interviewed formally for the project.

But he did not discourage the work, and has remained in touch with Ms Melnyk by email throughout the production process.

Only once did he threaten to put a spanner in the works, after his wife, the columnist Barbara Amiel, received a request for an interview.

On the eve of the film-makers' visit to London in January 2003, he threatened to warn his friends and colleagues away from them, which would have put a stop to some of the interviews.

They boarded their flight to London not knowing whether they would be wasting their trip until checking their email on arrival.

In the event Lord Black relented and they got to speak to Dan Colson, a longtime Black ally and until March this year the Telegraph's chief executive, as well as Jeremy Deedes, then managing director and Mr Colson's replacement this year while the paper was being sold.

The documentary also features contributions from historian William Dalrymple and the former Sunday Telegraph editor, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, who discuss Lord Black's influence on the Telegraph's politics, in particular its attitudes to US foreign policy and the Middle East.

It covers the story up until the Delaware court case in February this year, when Lord Black's dream of hanging on to his business was effectively ended.

There is also an animation sequence, in which Lord Black appears as his hero Napoleon, while his henchmen batter shareholders with bags of money.

Now that the film is about to get its premiere, Ms Melnyk has written to Lord Black asking him along.

"I invited him last week," she said. "I said I think I can scrounge up a couple of tickets for you. But I haven't heard from him yet."

Ms Melnyk sees Lord Black as a kind of tragically flawed character with a more beguiling range of qualities than the average media tycoon.

"Through his hubris and a certain amount of greed he flew so close to the sun that like Icarus he burnt his wings and came tumbling down," she said. "He had so much more to offer than the pure money men who buy and sell newspaper and TV companies for the hell of it."

She said she expected him to devote time in the future to writing more history books. At one point he told her that he no longer enjoyed the newspaper business, she said.

As for Ms Melnyk and her collaborator, producer Rick Caine, they are taking on another major media figure for their next project - anti-Bush auteur Michael Moore.