Shianne Brown still remembers her disbelief when she heard, half a world away, that Toronto mayor Rob Ford had been caught on video smoking crack cocaine.
“What the hell is happening in Toronto? That’s crazy,” the filmmaker from London, England, recalls thinking when the news broke in 2013.
The late mayor quickly became an international spectacle, first for the bombshell allegation that he eventually admitted to and then for the rollercoaster of scandals that followed — which included allegations of public drunkenness and physically knocking over a city councillor.
More than a decade later, Brown is the director behind Trainwreck: Mayor of Mayhem, a new Netflix documentary chronicling Ford’s rise to power and his chaotic time in office.
Out Tuesday, the episode is part of the streamer’s Trainwreck anthology series, which, according to a logline, examines “some of the most disastrous events ever to blow up in mainstream media.”
“I wanted to really tap into the human being that is Rob Ford, not the political headline that is Rob Ford,” said Brown on a video call from London.
“There is a side of this story where you just go full force into the scandal, but that didn’t feel like it did the story justice or did Rob Ford and his many supporters and his friends and family justice.”
Brown asked Ford’s brother, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, to participate in the film, but he “kindly declined.”
“It’s such a tragic story because of the way he died and you’ve really got to respect the family’s wishes, particularly with a project like this, where you’re going to tap into the scandals and the difficult side of the story,” said Brown.
Ford died of cancer in 2016 at age 46.
The film weaves together archival footage and interviews — with local journalists including Robyn Doolittle, who extensively covered Ford’s political career and authored a book on him, as well as insiders from Ford’s circle, including his former driver Jerry Agyemang — to trace the populist wave that swept Ford into office in 2010 and the public unravelling that made him infamous.
Controversial mayor positioned himself as ‘underdog’
Brown found Ford — who built a largely suburban base of voters with his tax-cutting, anti-establishment agenda — had a way of making the “disenfranchised feel emboldened.”
“He would often be the person who speaks to the cleaner, janitor, the people who keep our lives going but might not always get a thank-you from everyone else,” she said.
Brown says Ford’s rhetoric of standing up for “the people” against what he called “downtown elites” resonates today, speaking to a broader global shift in how power is won.
“It’s a story about the underdog. I think we’ve seen it in elections around the world,” she said, pointing to the Brexit referendum in the U.K. and Donald Trump’s first presidential election in the U.S., both of which many initially dismissed as unlikely outcomes.
“I felt Rob Ford wasn’t necessarily a person who had malicious, vindictive [intentions]. He actually seemed like he was a man who wanted to help people, but half the city just didn’t agree with his politics.”
At the same time, says Brown, Ford was “quite antagonistic to people. He went after the media.”
Hostile relationship with media
The film captures the controversial mayor’s often hostile relationship with local reporters, showing him repeatedly lashing out at those he saw as adversaries.
“I think if he just admitted [smoking crack] first up, that would have really helped his cause. The back and forth with the media, calling them liars […] I think that’s partly where he’d gone wrong.”
Brown says the deeper she dug into the story, the more she saw how frequently cameras captured Ford spiralling in a cycle of substance abuse. Ranging from social media footage of him visibly intoxicated at the Taste of the Danforth festival in 2013 to a clip of him stumbling and swearing outside City Hall in 2014, viral videos of his bizarre public behaviour made him easy fodder for late-night American TV. He even appeared as a guest on Jimmy Kimmel Live! amid the crack scandal.
“This was a man battling addiction in an intensely public arena. It’s a disease. I really wanted it to come across that this was a man who was struggling and he had to confront the media every single day,” she said, adding that she wonders if the story would’ve been reported differently today, considering growing awareness around mental health.
Brown hopes the film makes people consider the circumstances that culminated in the notorious crack video. In the wake of the scandal, Ford was stripped of key mayoral powers.
“What led him to that moment?” she said.
“It’s not really for us to judge, and obviously I’m telling this story, but I just hope it makes people think a bit differently about who he was and what happened to him.”
