Stephen Vittoria's "Overt Political Essay" By Francine Taylor November 17, 2005 - 3:11 PM PST "I was a teenage phenom in the McGovern campaign." From the opening narration by Amy Goodman, Stephen Vittoria's One Bright Shining Moment: The Forgotten Summer of George McGovern doesn't pretend to be anything but what it is: "'American politics will never be the same again,'" intones Goodman, "George McGovern's clarion call to the American people. And for a short time, too short, the long awaited honest man, the prairie statesman was right." "I think Amy is the hardest working true journalist in America today," says Vittoria. "I wanted somebody who was incredibly relevant to the progressive, anti-war movement that is happening now and I don't think there is anyone better than Amy. The narration for me was an overt political essay. I think this idea that documentaries are objective is one of the great myths and fallacies of filmmaking." Vittoria's film, winner of the Best Documentary Feature award at the 2005 Sarasota Film Festival and opening in Los Angeles this weekend, features interviews with Dick Gregory, Gloria Steinem, Gore Vidal, Warren Beatty, Howard Zinn, Ron Kovic, among others, and of course, McGovern himself. When asked about his own participation in the film, George McGovern had to admit he was "somewhat skeptical" of the project at first. But the more he talked to Vittoria in the couple of weeks they spent together, the more McGovern saw that they had the same values. McGovern quickly caught onto how "perceptive and imaginative" Vittoria was and how much Vittoria had understood about his campaign, even though Vittoria was only 15 years old when he campaigned for McGovern during the summer of 1972. What struck me after seeing the movie was the sheer number of interviews and how much work it must have been to cut your first assembly. I shot almost 80 hours of interviews. Two cross-country trips. Every interview was at least two hours long. The interview process for me is part of the research, part of the writing. I didn't write anything but an overall treatment before I interviewed anybody. Wrote a bible of questions. Some people got all the same questions - others got more specific questions as far as their expertise or experience. We shot 75, 80 hours and then I had everything transcribed and, with these three-ring binders I took myself away for about ten days. Put myself up in a little hotel up in Cambria, California on the coast by myself. And I just wrote, pulling from the transcript, and building narration in and around what I had and what I didn't have. I was building the blocks to tell the story. The first script was about 200 pages long, but I knew it was long. You never know what's going to happen in the editing process. So I wanted to have more with that first cut than less. It also lends itself to the magnitude of the project. I wanted the film not to be an episode of Biography. In fact, I used to have that sign hanging up in here for myself and my editors: "This is not an episode of Biography." I wanted it to be living, breathing, relevant, lively, entertaining. There is a part of it, yes, that is journalism. Yes, it's historical, but you're also trying to entertain people. You want to find those funny moments, the really sad and serious moments. You go back and forth a lot in the film between '68 and '72. It's not a completely linear structure, so there is something thematic running through the film that has nothing to do with chronology. I hate linear. I really do. As a storyteller, certain elements have to be linear or your audience is completely lost, but I thought that this would be an intelligent audience and I think it is. I wanted to raise the bar. As a filmmaker, I find this especially when I'm working on gun-for-hire kind of projects: producers and clients are always trying to dumb everything down. Well, it's kind of in our culture. Yes, exactly. I just rail against that. I've been influenced as a writer and by Norman Mailer and his work is so exhaustive when it comes to drilling down and getting beneath to the details and the nuances. I wanted the film to be complete. You know? I just got back from a screening in San Francisco and people are always asking me, "Why don't you put this in? Why don't you put that in?" The film would be ten hours long. For two hours, I think it's right there. And from a structural standpoint, I tried desperately to be more thematic with the narrative than with trying to tell it like, "He was born and he was raised, and he went into the army," and that kind of thing." Yes, it's more integrated with the culture of the time and what was so representative of that election, which really has more historical foundation of where we were as a country and where we were as a culture. You're absolutely right. How can you expect an audience, especially thirty-odd years later, to embrace the story of George McGovern without understanding how history molded him and catapulted him to this point? And I wanted them to understand that '68 to '72 was really an important phase in his political career. Once we established the insidiousness and the importance of the Vietnam War, we needed to go back and kind of have a look at an alternative view of America in history, which is what influenced George McGovern. That the Cold War wasn't just the fault of the Soviet Union. We needed to know about civil rights. We needed to see that he was a bit of a radical in the late 40s, early 50s. Even down to the details of having a mother who said, "All war is wrong. All killing is wrong." That it was some kind of seed for his own consciousness. That was one of those moments as a filmmaker - you want to ask questions you know the answers to sometimes, but you really want to get those nuggets that you don't know about. What are the new revelations? And was that one for you? That was a huge one. I knew that his parents were old-time conservative. Not the neo-conservatives that exist now. But that was interesting - that his mother was a true pacifist and that influenced him greatly. And I think in many ways, he desperately wants to be a pacifist. I've had conversations with him where there is still that World War II part of him where he holds onto "Well, Hitler had to be stopped," and that's a whole other movie. It was one of those times where I started leaning forward and was thinking, "This is one of those moments and I'm going to make a big deal of it in the film," because she was so important to him. I was seeing those seeds, that his mother had a great influence on him to this day. I'm curious about where you were in '72 and what the seed was for you with this film? How old you were, how you were impacted, and how did that lead to doing this project? I was a teenage phenom in the McGovern campaign. In 1972, I was 15, 16 years old and incredibly politically motivated. My mom and dad were social democrats, "small d." I was there all along with the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement as a kid. Jerry Ruben had told us, "Never trust anyone over 30," and George was one of those guys that you could trust. He was the exception? He was the exception to the rule. Did you actually campaign for him? Oh, absolutely. I skipped school. In fact, I was such a phenom that... Back then, public school wasn't quite as insanely fascist as it is now. They actually allowed you life experience. They switched my schedule around so I could go out in the afternoon. Did you go door to door? Door to door. I got to meet some great people. I never met McGovern during that time period but I met other people like Sargent Shriver, who was his running mate. Peter Rodino, Herman Badillo and some of the congress people in New York. I ate, drank and slept the McGovern campaign from the primaries on. And was crushed at his loss. So this had to have really shaped you, his loss. Absolutely shaped me. And when I was 16 years old, I was so devastated by the loss and so naïve to think that he could actually win, and now I know why there was no chance of him being able to win. I ran for the Board of Education in West Orange, New Jersey, as a 16-year-old. I found a loophole in the law that said that you could run. You had to be a resident of the town for two years, and you had to be able to read and write. The election board refused to take my signatures. The ACLU gave me a great attorney and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court with Justice Brennan. And it was a sole decision by him, not a nine-member decision. They stayed the election. He had decided against our case, claiming it would be a conflict of interest for a student to sit on the Board of Education, deciding salaries and conflict disputes of the teachers. And they rewrote the law six months later. Believe it or not, Francine, that was my last foray into politics. From '74 on, I really became a political atheist. You just felt, from a very young age, cut off from the system? Once you realize that the system is rigged, you kind of don't want to be a part of it anymore. So I looked at politics from afar but really was not that interested. Worked in the film business. After eight years of what I can only characterize as cowardice and compromise from the Clinton administration... Bill Clinton, the epitome of the failed McGovern. He worked on the McGovern campaign. And after four or five years of murder and mayhem in the Bush administration, somewhere, deep down inside of me, that flame got lit again. I said, "You know what? What we're doing right now is just so egregious. And it's so ugly." This story has more relevance now, and George McGovern has more relevance now than he did in 1972. The cycle of history has come full circle. I decided to do the film. I don't know if I'm a political atheist anymore. I know that I'm not that positive, either. One Bright Shining Moment is a very positive and hopeful movie. I don't know that I'm that positive about the system. But I was sick and tired of George McGovern's name being used... Kind of as "a failure"? Yeah. His name is just synonymous with failure. I think the man is just an incredible success. So here's a guy that was amazingly forthright with the American people. He was about stopping the war, feeding people, social justice, and he was arguably the most straightforward candidate we've ever had run for the presidency. And he lost worse than anybody else. As a filmmaker, there is the dramatic irony. Here's this guy who, in the "land of the free, home of the brave," was so soundly trounced that I had to look at why. Why was he beaten so badly? Why did the people reject him? And reject him for a guy who is probably one of the worst all-time presidents in American history. A guy who left in disgrace. So there were great story elements. next >>> Index "I was a teenage phenom in the McGovern campaign." "This exceeded my expectations." back to past articles

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