Is an Oscar Winner Filming Obama?

By Jonathan Weisman
BUTTE, Mont. -- After Barack Obama drove away this evening from Montana Tech, home of the Orediggers, his motorcade inexplicably pulled up to the Clark Chateau Museum, a mansion from Butte's glory days.

Pool reporters were told repeatedly that the presumptive Democratic nominee was merely doing a video shoot for the campaign's new media department, a routine operation. But a makeup artist tipped the pool off that Obama was accompanied by a famous filmmaker, for part of a film shoot for the Democratic National Committee and the convention.

Obama entered the mansion at 5:45. He reemerged at 6:43, with a stylish filmmaker in tow and a crew carrying a film camera, not a small digital camera.

Obama's traveling press aides still maintain that nothing is abnormal, but the filmmaker is Davis Guggenheim, the Academy Award-winning director of "An Inconvenient Truth." His father, Academy Award winner Charles Guggenheim, chronicled John F. Kennedy. Credit Kim Chipman from Bloomberg with her Googling prowess.

Davis Guggenheim spoke briefly to a handful of reporters before realizing he shouldn't be. He then said he was merely traveling with his son in Montana and doing some interviews. All that is left is rank speculation -- that Guggenheim appears to be making the biopic for the convention.