MB Civic

AS usual, he can be found alone, and a trifle manic, in his Lower East Side office, waiting for the phone to ring, oblivious to a hardy breeze that gusts through an open window making missiles and a certified mess of his paperwork. No fear. It’s videotape that he holds precious, especially the 300 hours safely stored in boxes titled, the Mayor. Why not Mr. Mayor? “Because he’s a chump,” says Kevin Keating, the blue-jeaned curator of the archive. Very coy.

Mr. Keating, 61, is a self-labeled “obscure filmmaker” consumed by a public obsession: he is bent on alerting the world via “Giuliani Time” — a gimlet-eyed 118-minute documentary instantly denounced by Republican insiders as a hatchet job — to the potential nefariousness of a potential 2008 presidential candidate, Rudolph W. Giuliani.

As obsessions go, this one may or not be magnificent, but the drain on his time and money has already cost the filmmaker a second mortgage on his Brooklyn home, forced the sale of his beloved ’57 Chevy and sunk his marriage.

Being Kevin Keating obviously has its complications, on- and off-screen. But on the eve of his film’s commercial debut today, after unveilings at film festivals in Rotterdam, Vancouver, and Sydney, he is no candidate for artistic martyrdom. Quite the opposite.

He catalogues his personal setbacks with brio, more jubilant about the finished product than debilitated by the private upheaval it caused. He can always, he says, buy another vintage car, and he is relatively sure his two young daughters — they live in Cobble Hill, and he rents an apartment nearby — don’t hold his Giuliani fixation against him. Well, maybe a little.

But he is convinced that he and his collaborators, including Michael Ratner, a lawyer who is president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, could not not make this film. “I was driven to do it by the right things, not the desire for fame or fortune, but by a desire for social justice,” he says.

“It wasn’t motivated by hate. The idea of his being president, it frightens me. His authoritarian impulse is more than just an impulse. Rudy Giuliani became an urban version of a First Amendment-rights wrecking ball as mayor, and now that he has the potential to ascend higher and impact the entire world, my advice is, be afraid, be very afraid. He has such a classic case of hubris; it completely envelops the guy.”

One might observe that self-aggrandizement currently envelops Mr. Keating, but then again, he’s a man with a movie to sell.

DESPITE those bags beneath his eyes, he is wired, not tired. And more than ready, after 35 years behind the scenes filming Academy Award-winning documentaries like “Harlan County, U.S.A.,” “American Dream,” and “When We Were Kings,” for his new persona as a director and producer. He describes the years since 1998, when Mr. Ratner approached him about making a short film on Mr. Giuliani’s fractious relationship with the First Amendment, as “eviscerating.” But Mr. Keating, whose face-time with the star of his documentary was nonexistent, has made a complete recovery now that “Giuliani Time,” a $1.5 million antihomage to New York City’s former mayor, is being released domestically.

“It’s all been worth it,” he says, on the brink of hyperventilation at his Lower Broadway studio, where the door features a poster for “Giuliani Time” that has already inspired an act of vandalism, or maybe just free speech: someone inked a Hitleresque moustache on the face of the leading man.

“I swear it wasn’t me,” protests Mr. Keating, whose souvenirs from previous projects include a gargoyle from Colombia crowned by a halo of barbed wire from a German concentration camp.

“Is it my ultimate desire to derail Rudy Giuliani’s political ambitions?” he muses. “I don’t think just a film could do that, but I do think it can be a component in the kind of scrutiny he deserves. Is the film intended as a corrective? Somewhat.”

Mr. Keating discounts the halo bestowed on Mr. Giuliani after 9/11: “Yes, he provided an animated face of our government and that’s what we needed in a crisis, especially when President Bush was nowhere to be seen. But really, how else could he have behaved?”

Mr. Giuliani’s longtime spokeswoman, Sunny Mindel, who refused Mr. Keating access to him during his mayoral tenure, recently said that she had no regrets about Mr. Giuliani’s lack of participation in the film, nor did she expect it to affect public opinion of his leadership or legacy.

Mr. Keating, whose father traded bonds on Wall Street, gets a karmic kick from the fact that he and Mr. Giuliani are contemporaries, both born in the city, spirited off to the suburbs, raised Catholic, and aimed for law school, at which point their paths diverged. Mr. Giuliani graduated magna cum laude; Mr. Keating opted out of law school in Boston in favor of an uncompleted master’s in theater at Emerson College. “I fell in love with constitutional law as an undergraduate, but then the war in Vietnam radicalized me.” And he found his own brand of Zen in cinéma vérité.

He moved to New York City with Barbara Koppel, his “college sweetheart” and the Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker behind “Harlan County, U.S.A.” and “American Dream.”

Though they broke up in 1972, they continue to work together. An early mentor was Albert Maysles, for whom he shot film of the Rolling Stones that wound up in “Gimme Shelter.” He recalls aiming a hand-held camera from the back of a motorcycle zipping along at 120 miles per hour while shooting “Hell’s Angels Forever.” Those were the salad days.

He finds it funny that his 10-year-old needles him with this hypothetical: for whom would he vote in a race between George W. Bush and Mr. Giuliani? “Giuliani by a hair,” he concedes. Confession duly noted.