was a process forced by a strategy oriented situation as opposed to what was the wise choice. we took a back seat at that moment. we reverenced secrecy in the rest of the film and we have that scene talking to john mccain on the phone and we tried to tell that story but it was one of those things. i wish i had time to get that point heart. >> mark halperin? >> i don't remember what his line was. >> it is in the german dvd. >> the audience will await it. question from the audience? the gentleman over here. >> question for danny and jay roach. the casting was inspired. any thoughts how that came about? >> the whole cast was incredible. the main focus for me, all directors a casting is 95% of the job. once you have a great script, great script based on incredible material, really compelling central character who for me whose story sort of sold the moment was unbelievable. the story when i saw that interview steve did with adam cooper so then it is all about who is going to play sarah palin? how is that going to work? such high expectations. they seen tina fay over and over and we talked about a lot of people. it was actually danny on the list, always on her list said i think julianne moore would be great and i the skeptical. she is one of my favorite actresses ever but somehow i didn't get it and we finally took a photoshop process and put the glasses and the hair on and the clothes and dressed her up like you would and using the computer, it just hit and ok, the main goal was to make sure we had an actress who would play the character in a relatable, with all the dimensions required to go past the media iconography and presented persona and the real person. again, julianne moore is excellent in everything she does. i knew it would still be safe with the would-be audience. they're serious about this. this is not a caricature. one of my favorite moment in the film when she is watching tina fay play sarah palin. i wish i could be fair when sarah palin does. i hope she will watch this movie. two people playing her in the same shot. i want the shot of all three of them. one of the most difficult choices was at harris for john mccain because i didn't have anyone else in mind. i couldn't think of anybody other than ed who could do that. the sense of humor. the kind of unpredictable kind of -- all the qualities of john mccain. also had to look like him. somehow the julie -- he started eating more. and gained weight. once that happens and we were lucky he said yes. and julianne moore -- woody harrelson was a dream actor. you always see -- i haven't seen a movie i haven't liked woody harrelson. one last point. we did not want to make a propaganda piece. we had no interest in not telling the best story we could tell of all the players and respectful to these people as human beings trying to do the best they could. no heroes or villains. do the best they could but against a series of complexities and against each other in a way that doomed them to this dysfunction. you can't do that without the greatest possible actor that i cast three of my favorite actors because i believe i needed you to go in with them and experience this with them and the most empathetic possible way and that was our bowl all the way down the line with every character. >> i want to lodge a complaint. julianne moore, sarah palin. scenes and ferry would test someone so much less handsome than steve in the movie. >> so noted. this comes from someone on twitter. i would like you to hansard afterwards. given attacks by his own people on john mccain as manager and leader wonder if he would have been a good president. it comes from that discussion about enhance the trail in the movie but you said the sources you spoke with described him as not part of the management. what is your sense of whether he would be a good president? did feelings about him change over time? >> the vast majority of people think without a doubt from the point of view he would be a better president than barack obama but some in the campaign and you see this almost every losing campaign, some people i talk to you say based particularly on his performance in the financial crisis that gave them pause and something in the book. the one of the leading republican operatives, and chose not to vote. john mccain was troubled by his leadership and organizational performance. people close to john mccain and supporting him feel he would have been a better president than barack obama. >> i think it changed little over time. one of those things, when we were doing reporting on the book right after the 2008 campaign, we ran into a lot more people who were really fond of john mccain. one layer out, senior republican, hard core partisan republican who saw the way it john mccain behaved and reluctantly -- there are a million things wrong with barack obama. he doesn't understand foreign policy but seems to have run such a good campaign and senator mccain was so at sea, i am comfortable -- more comfortable with obama becoming president at that moment in late 2008 early 2009. i think now many of those same people would go back and revise that because they began to have much less charitable view or positive view of barack obama's management skills as they have played out over these three years -- and policies. they also feel even the things they gave him credit for that he would run such a good campaign so he would at least run a good white house. talking about partisan republicans. they changed on that and say we were wrong about that. not only was he as liberal as we thought he was going to be but has not run a good administration. >> your own sense on that and those of your colleagues. >> one of the things i like about the movie is how john mccain is portrayed. you see in the movie for lot of us why we love john mccain. the integrity, the decency of the man. i will say as someone who has been in the middle of two presidential campaigns the notion that the candidate is managing the campaign or the chairman of the board, could not be more dead wrong. it is a full-time job. they are communicating, speaking, doing all of the stuff. the dysfunction in the campaign wasn't driven by john mccain as a manager. even a couple of years later routinely referred to as a campaign manager of the campaign which i wasn't. when i go on television or do an event that has to be corrected i say on organizational principle, ibm or xerox or small business, the notion that there's a lack of clarity of who is in charge is a sign that there is something wrong. there were a lot of challenges in that space and i think navigating a campaign is a totally different endeavour than governing and leading the country. in fact, one of the dysfunction in politics is they have nothing to do with each other. at a certain level. the campaign wasn't fundamentally about -- about the challenges of the country. if you look at the $16 trillion debt, nuclear prospects for iran, talking about mitt romney's dog on the roof as a major campaign issue, it is about trivialities. john mccain is not a trivial man. he is a serious man. he would have been a fine commander in chief. i think that the country would be in better position today had john mccain been the president. obviously the american people decided otherwise and you have to accept the verdict of the american people. >> time for one more question. the gentleman in the blue shirt and blue tie. >> kyle simmons, virginia statesman. felt like i was sitting on the staff meetings and private events during the campaign. as for mark and john, steve said earlier there were things he would never talk about that happened in the campaign but is there one moment you wish you could have heard about or been part of or seen? >> we did a creditable job describing what it was like in sarah palin's hotel suite during the week of the republican convention. those four or five days but if you ask where i would most likely to have been baked into the wall, because as chaotic as the film portrays that momentum was much more chaotic than that. one of the things these guys had to do to make it watchable was for example the early foreign policy tutoring, take it out of the convention and put it a little further down the line. the actual beginning of the foreign policy began in st. paul. among all the things that were going on. for getting the wardrobe or the convention speech, filming and doing foreign policy and responding to the entire media maelstrom of what is going on. all of that is happening in 72 hours in that hotel suite. i don't think i could imagine. i would love to have been able to see it in the flesh. >> that is all the time we have for today. i would like to thank our guests for taking the time for this and thank you in the audience for coming out. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> visit booktv.org to watch any of the programs you see here on line. type the offer or book title in the search bar on the upper left side of the page and click search. you can share anything you see on booktv.org easily by clicking share on the upper left side of the page and selecting the format. booktv streams live online for 48 hours every weekend with top nonfiction books and authors. booktv.org. up next on booktv the author of king larry recounts the life of the co-founder of the shipping company dhl the disappeared in 1995 in the western pacific. this is just over an hour. [applause] >> thank you very much to book people and c-span and thank you for coming to the talk about king larry:the life and ruin of the life of a billionaire genius which business week has compared both to and leonard caper and trashy analog to walter isaacson's biography of steve jobs. king larry begins on may 21st, 1995, which if you were in the state was heavily from the adjacent and murder trial. but with a beautiful sunday morning hand a small plane who took off from the airport with two important people on board. one was the speaker of the house of the commonwealth of the northern mariana islands and the other was mary home better known as dhl. .. >> so a number of his friends had declined to make the trip with him that morning, and no one was terribly shocked that this plane had also gone down. however, it was a real shock that larry hillblom was suddenly gone. he'd arrived there 15 years before, and he'd become a larger-than-life character in the mariana islands. he bought the bank, he bought the airline, he bought the television and radio stations, he built dozens of businesses including the pawnshop and had been a bartender, so he was very well known. and there was a sort of myth those that was just incompatible with him being dead. but when they went to search for him, they found p two other bodies, the pilot and the speaker of the house, but hillblom's body was never recovered, so this sort of furthered the sense of disbelief. but they had to presume him dead, he was lost at sea, and a few days later hundreds of people flocked to kingsburg, california, a little town in central california just south of selma which is the raisin capital of the world. but hundreds of people including members of the saudi royal family and ceos of major corporations and billionaires as well as normal citizens, dhl drivers and friends from college descend on this tiny little lutheran church to pay their respects. and their really surprised because what they all start to find out talking to each other is that larry was not at all who he said he was. he had, for example, told people that his father was a bank robber who was electrocuted at san quentin, and now they find out talking to his high school friends that larry's father was a roofer who died of heatstroke when he was 2 years old. larry had told them he was the captain of the football team in kingsburg, and they find out he was not, but he was 130-pound linebacker who got his contact lenses knocked out so frequently that the picture in the senior yearbook is of the football team on their hands and knees on the football field searching for larry hillblom's contact lenses. they find out he wasn't this jock and this ladies' man and this brilliant, charismatic person they'd assumed he would be, but he was actually a very awkward kid who was raised in the church and obsessed with howard hughes. as one of larry's friends back there told me, this guy is somewhere out there where the buses don't go. that was their impression of larry. [laughter] he furthered this impression by saying really odd things to people. like his best friend he told he was going to make a lot of money and move far away, never talk to him again. which sort of took offense to, and larry thought this was a totally acceptable thing to say. he was going to make a lot of money and marry a catholic girl. he didn't want to give half of his fortune to a catholic girl, or to a, you know, to a woman. he told them various times he wanted to be an actor, and he decided he wanted to be an evangelist, so he would study jimmy swag earth late at night and blacked out everything but the minister's eyes. and he also vilified his mother for some reason. he would tell friends about all these wonderful things that his mother would do for him like hayrides, how she actually drove him to law school his first year because he wanted to keep his job at the cannery which was about a three-and-a-half hour drive back and forth. and he would say, you know, she did all these great things for me, the bitch. like, he had this very odd way of talking to people. he goes to bolt school of law school which was a hotbed for the or feminism movement and the sexual revolution. and his ec seven terrorist si -- eccentricity continues. he ridicules jane fonda and joan baez and thinks it's ridiculous anyone would care what an actress or a singer thinks. and his professors can't even understand him because larry believes that the law should be a function of business, you know, law should be structured to help businesses succeed. so back to the memorial services, his college friends and law school friends and high school friends and people he knew in saipan were talking to each other. a couple of common themes in larry's life. he was very, very stubborn, and the other is he is a master after manipulating people to do what he wants them to do. and this is really how larry eventually made his great fortune. he became a courier out of high school, and he would fly from san francisco to los angeles every evening after he picked up documents at insurance companies and banks in san francisco, the bay area, and he would drop them off in l.a., spend the night at lax, sleep in a chair or wherever, pick up whatever needed to go to san francisco the next morning, take the earliest flight out and be back this time to go to class. but he realizes there's a huge market for this because at the time it's really only the post office delivering mail and documents, and they're doing a very bad job of it. they're very slow, and they're very unreliable. so the summer after he graduates from bolt he runs into the salesman from this little courier outfit who was kind of a silver-tongued ladies' man, 55 years old, very smooth talker, and they decide they're going to start their own business and take advantage of this great demand for express couriers. l -- he gets another guy, robert lynn, involved and who's a real estate investor, and he's going to provide the money, and dalcy, hillblom and lynn, dhl, incorporate in september of 1969, and lynn immediately drops out because dalcy and larry can't stand each other, they're complete opposites, and all they do is argue, and it's clear this thing is just going to be a total disaster which, which it is for the first year. they don't have any money. larry's the only person available to be a courier, so he's living on coffee and methamphetamines and going back and forth between l.a. and honolulu, and he's either living on a porch, on a friend's couch or in a station wagon. he's dumpster diving for food some of the time, and they're just unable to really sign up the clients they need. they can't get insurance. but the idea is so strong, and it's such a great, there's such a great demand for their product that eventually dalcy's magic begins to work, and they get bank of america, they get the federal reserve, they get maxim shipping lines, they get ibm, and suddenly it's just taking off because no one can believe that dhl can actually pick up their documents one around, and the next morning before their office across the country or the pacific ocean is open, their documents are there. it's just mind blowing. you know, this is five years before fedex, so word gets around, and dhl just starts to take off. and larry's got this kind of odd charisma that gets people to work for free and to get people to rally around the cause, and he carries chairman mao's little red book around him, and he's just convinced a master of manipulating people, which he is. and in one year, their second year of business, sales go up 1,000%, it's just taking off like crazy. but that attracts attention. first, it attracts the attention of the fbi because the fbi's hearing about all these people frying for free, and -- flying for free. so they send two agents out to figure out if this is a drug-running operation, and eventually the fbi agents become convinced, and they become couriers because, you know, they can't believe what a great deal it is. dhl gets attacked by loomis, the nixon administration which says that they're an air carrier, and they're not allowed to fly without a certificate. and they're attacked by the post office not just in the u.s., but around the world because they're doing something that is really considered illegal. the post office is supposed to have a monopoly on delivering mail. but larry just wins every time, and he starts to have this kind of uncanny knack for beating all of his competitors. so, all, by 981, 12 years in, dhl's the fastest growing company in the world, and larry is bored out of his mind. he does not want to run a company, he wants to be howard hughes. he wants to be behind the scenes, pulling strings. he does not want to be sitting in board meetings and sitting behind a desk and the typical things a businessman would be required to do. and he discovers this little island called saipan which is very beautiful, but it's also a bizarrely magical place in that you get 95% of your federal income taxes rebated there. and larry just thinks this is the most amazing thing he's ever heard about in his life. so he immediately moves there and goes about becoming a citizen. he buys these businesses, he runs for office and loses. but he eventually gets appointed as a supreme court justice on the island and gets to know all the politicians and offers up his legal services for free which means that he can write the laws on banking and real estate and all of these other really fun things. that also happen to benefit him. and now he's coming under attack from the fbi again, and they see him stirring up the islander politicians against the u.s. the u.s. has this covenant relationship with saipan in the marianas where they're supposed to really maintain control, but larry doesn't want the feds come anything and auditing his tax returns or, you know, exercising any authority over him. he wants their hands off of his island. so now he's got a new cause which is independence for the mariana islands, and he's got new enemies. there's a guy named bill millard who runs a computerland which has been another one of the fastest growing companies in the world. who decides to move to saipan because he's heard about this 95% tax rebate, and he holds a press conference announcing that he's going to move computerland to saipan, take advantage of the tax break and not pay income taxes which drives larry crazy because he wants to keep it under wraps, and he knows the reagan ad