‘A Savage Art’ Team On Their Film About Political Cartoonist Pat Oliphant And Why They Hope It Gets Under Skin Of Trump White House – For The Love Of Docs

November 19, 2025 5:45pm

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Americans love a great satirist: Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, Dorothy Parker, and more recently the likes of Jon Stewart, John Oliver, and Andy Borowitz. But no one has done it more caustically, more brilliantly – and above all more artfully – than political cartoonist Pat Oliphant.

For six decades Oliphant has wielded pencil, pen and quill to eviscerate the powerful, especially American presidents from LBJ to Donald Trump. His long career of political and social commentary is examined in the documentaryA Savage Art: The Life & Cartoons of Pat Oliphant, directed and produced by Bill Banowsky and produced by Paul O’Bryan.

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Proximity helped bring the project to fruition. Banowsky and Oliphant live a block apart in Santa Fe, NM.

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“It wasn’t a situation where I just came out and said, ‘Hey, I want to make a documentary film about you,’ because that was not something that I thought I wanted to do,” Banowsky explained as he and O’Bryan took part in a panel discussion after a screening of their film for Deadline’s For the Love of Docs virtual series. “What I did want to do was to make a short documentary, a five-minute profile of him that we would show at our movie theater here in Santa Fe, a profile of interesting people in Santa Fe, and he was the first one that I asked about doing this… We filmed that first interview and really very quickly it became clear to me that this is not something that will be satisfied by a five-minute profile. Someone needed to do a feature length documentary film about this man and his career.”

Amazingly, for so incisive an observer of American politics, Oliphant didn’t grow up in the U.S. but in Australia. That’s where he began his political cartooning work. He didn’t move to America until he was about 30, taking a job at the Denver Post.

“He came over and introduced a new style of cartooning that just wasn’t happening in this country,” Banowsky said. “And he came over at the time where political cartoonists were celebrated. Everyone got a newspaper every day — sometimes twice a day. And most of the major newspapers had on their staff editorial cartoonists. And they were a very important part of the editorial journalism that these newspapers were putting out… But the fact that he could come in and understand American politics so quickly and so well is a remarkable thing, truly.”

“I think it helped that he didn’t come in as a partisan, he didn’t come in with one side or another,” O’Bryan added. “He was looking at the whole thing and not choosing sides but looking for essentially the ‘bad guys.’”

Political cartoonist Pat OliphantMagnolia Pictures

Perhaps the single most difficult task for the filmmakers was to choose which of Oliphant’s cartoons to display in the documentary. The artist has published at least 10,000 of them.

“It was really challenging. I was given the archive of cartoons, and it was overwhelming,” O’Bryan commented. “I started going through, looking at every single folder, which was sorted by years and just pulling my favorites, whether or not they were incredible visuals or just great political jabs, great takes on things… My first cut of selects was a thousand cartoons, just over a thousand. And then it was just a process of what works best in the film. And up until the last minute, Bill and I were even swapping out cartoons for ones that played better. So yeah, it was painful to eliminate a lot of them.”

Oliphant, who turned 90 in July, retired in 2015. He published some cartoons on the rising Donald Trump – depicting him with a mop of hair obscuring his eyes, protuberant lips formed in an “O” shape. It’s very fortunate for the now two-term president that Oliphant hasn’t been active as a cartoonist during his administrations; the famously thin-skinned leader hasn’t responded well to satirical humor about him – attackingSaturday Night Live, and late night hosts Seth Myers and Jimmy Kimmel among others.

It’s clear Oliphant does not admire the president; in 2017 he came out of retirement to draw a cartoon of Trump dressed in a Nazi uniform admiring himself in the mirror. He asks then White House advisor Steve Bannon how he looks and Bannon, giving a Nazi salute, says, “Exquisite as usual, Herr Trump!” (A small pig character in the bottom right corner of the drawing, next to the acerbic Puck the Penguin character Oliphant often incorporates into his cartoons, says “Heil Trump!”).

“We really do hope that this film gets noticed by people in the Trump orbit. We hope that this gets under their skin. That would be our best hope,” Banowsky said. “Adam Zyglis, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist from the Buffalo News, who’s in our film, he published a cartoon this summer after the Texas floods, and it was making fun of a MAGA Republican in the context of the flooding. And that did get noticed by Trump in the White House, and he and his family both received death threats. The Buffalo News has provided security for him and continues to because of this polarization that’s going on in our world right now. And the stuff that these guys have been doing, these cartoonists for centuries, has been dangerous work and it continues to be.”

A Savage Art delves into the history of political cartooning, which goes back a very long time (Ben Franklin is credited with creating the first American political cartoon in 1754, the iconic “Join, or Die” image). The film also explores the sheer artistic brilliance of Oliphant’s work, and how he continued to develop his gifts at a time when he could easily have rested on his laurels. Oliphant also became a noted sculptor and painter.

“He was driven by his artistic instincts,” Banowsky said, “and he was always pushing the envelope as an artist in every facet and form.”

Watch the full conversation in the video above.

Our For the Love of Docs series continues next Tuesday with a screening ofMonk in Pieces, a documentary about composer, singer, choreographer, and filmmaker Meredith Monk directed by Billy Shebar. To RSVP for that screening,click here.