Richard Ben Cramer

Before Game Change there was What It Takes, a ride along the 1988 campaign trail and “possibly the best [book] ever written about an American election” (NPR).
Written by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and New York Times–bestselling author Richard Ben Cramer, What It Takes is “a perfect-pitch rendering of the emotions, the intensity, the anguish, and the emptiness of what may...

This film presents a portrait of the man who made the American West into the American story. For most Americans in the mid 1800s, the Wild West existed only in dime novels, but a young man from Kansas who had roamed the prairies in the war with the Plains Indians came to embody the picaresque frontier hero. As the frontier was rapidly disappearing, he realized he could market his life as entertainment, and millions around the world would pay for...