'Get Me Roger Stone' Director Talk Paul Manafort & Roger Stone Partnership In Business & As Fast Friends

Paul Manafort (l) and Roger Stone (r)

The Hollywood Reporter touches base with  Morgan Pehme, Dylan Bank and Daniel DiMauro, directors of the 2017 Netflix documentary 'Get Me Roger Stone'. Famed conservative pundit and Trump whisperer Roger Stone is a longtime friend and former business partner of Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign chairman indicted Monday by the Robert Mueller investigation. The duo worked on Ronald Reagan's presidential campaigns in the 1980s and helped set up a powerful Washington, D.C., lobbying shop, Black, Manafort & Stone.

THR queries: How closely tied are Manafort and Roger Stone?

Daniel DiMauro: One of the through lines of our film is Stone and Manafort’s lifelong friendship and partnership in politics. Their bond dates back to their early 20s. Manafort managed Stone’s successful 1977 campaign for the chairmanship of the Young Republicans, which was part of their plan, as Manafort says in our film, to move the "Republican Party in a more ideological direction" toward the conservative right. Then, in 1980, after playing key roles in the Reagan campaign, Manafort and Stone decided to go into business together by creating a lobbying firm to cash in on their relationships within the new administration. That company, Black, Manafort & Stone, became one of D.C.’s first mega-lobbying firms and made millions, in part because of BMS’s willingness to represent brutal third-world dictators like Mobutu Sese Seko in the Republic of the Congo and Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines — work that led to their firm being branded "The Torturers’ Lobby." BMS also represented a host of high-powered corporate clients, including Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, The Tobacco Institute and, starting in the early 1980s, Donald Trump.

After Manafort and Stone sold their business in the '90s, their careers went in different directions, but they always stayed in touch, and their relationship to this day remains close. As Manafort admits in our film, it was Stone who recommended him to Trump for the job of campaign chairman. Stone has also been instrumental in helping Manafort navigate his post-Trump campaign challenges from a public relations standpoint.