Four Seasons Total Documentary (MS-NBC

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night MS-NBC was running a show I wanted to watch called Four Seasons Total Documentary, and I remembered (which I haven’t always) that when they announce a show for 10 p.m. they mean 10 p.m. Eastern time and LandI would have to turn it on at 7 p.m. to watch it in our time zone. The show was about the bizarre press conference Rudolph Giuliani, as attorney for Donald Trump and the Trump for President campaign, gave on November 8, 2020 outside the Four Seasons Total Landscaping headquarters in Philadelphia. When the Trump campaign announced this event via Twitter the location was given as simply “Four Seasons, Philadelphia,” and most people – including the news media who knew they would have to sent reporters to cover it – assumed they had intended to book the Four Seasons hotel in downtown Philadelphia and had contacted the landscaping company by mistake. Not so, according to one of the reporters who covered the event and was interviewed for the documentary: at its conclusion the 2020 Trump for President campaign had burned through $1.4 billion and was broke. (This sounds like Donald Trump was running his re-election campaign the way he’s run every other business with which he’s been involved.) One attraction for the Trump people of Four Seasons Landscaping over Four Seasons Hotel was the hotel would have charged them for the use of the space, while the landscaping company came free. Another consideration was that it was out of the way in an industrial section of Philadelphia and therefore the Trump people thought it would be easier to secure than a hotel in the middle of downtown that would attract counter-protesters.

As things turned out, it did attract street crowds, both pro- and anti-Trump, and the police who showed up had to keep them physically separate so they didn’t come to blows. But the main focus of Four Seasons Total Documentary was on the owners of the landscaping company – Marie Siravo, who founded it and when the press conference happened was 65 and getting ready to retire; her son Michael, whom she was preparing to take over; and a college buddy named Sean Middleton whom he had recruited to join the business. (For much of the show I had thought Michael and Sean were a Gay couple, but they aren’t – though it was only at the end that filmmaker Christopher Stoudt showed us Michael at home with his wife and son, thereby “outing” him as straight.) Apparently Stoudt got onto the story because his then-roommate was Sean Middleton’s brother. The film briefly allows Marie Siravo to talk about the all too predictable challenges she faced as a woman running a landscaping business; she said potential clients would look at her, be nonplussed that a woman was the owner, and ask her, “Don’t you have a husband?” She’d answer, “I have a wonderful husband, only he has his job and I have mine.”

When they were approached by someone from the Trump campaign to hold their press conference there, the Siravos (mother, son and friend) didn’t know what they were getting into – they probably thought it couldn’t hurt and might be good exposure for potential landscaping clients. The film shows clips from the press conference itself, which happened to be occurring right when the major TV networks finally, five days after the election, decided based on the results as they stood then that Biden had won. This was announced to Giuliani when a reporter at what was supposed to be a press conference got the news and asked him about it. “Who called it?” Giuliani sneered. “The networks,” he was told, to which he responded with an even more sneering reference, “The networks?” – as if you’d be a damned fool to believe the mainstream media’s announcement of anything, especially something as consequential as who won the election for President of the United States. Giuliani kept the event going for 37 minutes, longer than this documentary about it, and though at least on this occasion his hair dye didn’t start running down his face (that would come later), it soon became clear that he had no actual evidence to offer to back up his claims of “voter fraud” that had “stolen” the election from Trump.

Much of the media coverage after the fact made light of the Four Seasons’ neighbors – a crematorium on one side and an adult bookstore on the other – but Giuliani had started that process during the event itself when he had alleged, out of thin air, that ballots for Trump had been burned in the crematorium so they couldn’t be counted and Biden would “win” Pennsylvania. Since then, as MS-NBC host Aymon Moheldin (and why don’t they use him as a substitute for their prime-time hosts when they take a vacation or sick day instead of that disgusting Ali “Uncle Fester” Velshi?) and two typical network talking heads explained after the film was shown (and Marie and Michael Siravo and director Stoudt were interviewed on air), believing that the 2020 election was stolen and Trump is still the rightful President of the United States has become an article of faith in the Republican Party. MS-NBC showed a poll indicating that 68 percent of Republicans believe it, along with 28 percent of independents and 6 percent of Democrats, and other polls I’ve seen put the percentage of Republican believers at 80 percent: four-fifths of the membership of one of America’s two major political parties. The “election was stolen” myth has acquired the same importance – and the same deadly power – in Trump’s propaganda as the myth that the German army had really won World War I but had been “stabbed in the back” by cowardly politicians who had ordered it to surrender did in Hitler’s.

The finale of the documentary is a testament to the resilience of the people running Four Seasons Total Landscaping; after their phone lines were flooded with literally thousands of calls – many rather hateful anti-Trump people “joking” that they were having a sale on bullshit and a special for destroying democracy – so much so that they couldn’t do ordinary business and they worried that the company might fold and cost Marie Siravo both her business and her home (since she’d put up her house as collateral for the loan to lease that business space), they figured out a way to fight back. They began selling Four Seasons Total Landscaping T-shirts with slogans making fun of the event – “Lawn and Order” and “Make America Rake Again” – and ended up with a lucrative sideline in merchandising as well as the overall promotion of their business to potential clients they were probably hoping for in the first place.