Kate Albright-Hanna's documentary, True Believers: Life Inside the Dean Campaign, on Joe Trippi and the Dean Campaign aired Sunday night on CNN Presents. I thought it was excellent and shared the feelings of doubt, fear and uncertainty that permeated the campaign the last days before the Iowa Caucus. I got to speak with Kate the night of the caucus results at the Dean "celebration party." It's funny, because we didn't talk about the Dean Scream. We did talk about how bizarre the event itself felt. But the scream didn't really exist if you were there in person. Kate mentioned to me later that no one in the entire traveling press corp mentioned it on the flight from Iowa to New Hampshire that night of the caucus results. It was really a television only event. Amazing.

Last night, I watched another Dean documentary. This one by Australian video journalist Olivia Rousset. (Here's a photo of Olivia and I.) We met the night of the MSNBC debate in Des Moines. We ended up shooting B-roll of Des Moines one afternoon together and having beers with other media at local establishments like 'The Royal Mile.' Olivia's doc, called The Dean Machine, aired on Australian Dateline (view the documentary here). She has great footage in the doc of the scream standing right next to and below Dean (scroll through the video footage to about 21 minutes). It's great to see the footage from this particular angle, surrounded by the frenzied pushing crowd. She also has a great shot of Dean practicing that arm swing/punch on the bus earlier in the night.

In Kate's doc, Trippi sees a 'I SEE DEAN PEOPLE' sign hanging across the parking lot outside Dean HQ in Des Moines and says, "I hate that sign." It's funny. Trippi's reason for hating the sign is that it reminds him of "I see dead people," from some horror film. When I saw the sign, I hated it too. For me, it just felt too insular and too cultish.

I had a similar feeling the night of the Dean scream. It felt almost cultish. Total cognitive dissonance between what I was experiencing and what I felt like I should be experiencing. The room hovered somewhere between victory and nightmare. I remember straining to find a glimmer of disapointment on anyone's face.

Part of the reason for this, I think, was that the room was filled with mostly volunteers. Several staffers I spoke with that night were crushed. Especially those that had attended caucuses and watched their Dean supporters, whose candidate was suddenly not viable since he was coming short of the required 15%, forced to choose an alternate. One staffer, who had been involved in her particular precinct for months and was friends with the precinct captain and most of the supporters, said it was like leading her lambs to slaughter.

There's a nice little film waiting to be made for the first person to collect all the footage shot from inside the room that evening.