What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [51]
In March 2001, Doris flew to Washington to apply renewed pressure as the Senate took up debate on the bipartisan campaign finance reform bill. This time, Alidra and her camera were with Doris practically every step of the way. “I literally went on the plane with her, shot her coming on and off, being picked up, meeting senators, and doing her walk around the Capitol.” Doris hoped to remind the nation’s senators as they began debate of a bill sponsored by Republican Senator John McCain, of Arizona, and Democratic Senator Russell Feingold, of Wisconsin, that American voters wanted change and were watching. As Alidra discovered, Doris was engaged in a strenuously physical battle, not just a photo opportunity. To force senators to deal with her, Doris walked around the Capitol for a week. During the three days the bill was actually debated, she walked around the clock, stopping only for meals and brief catnaps. For much of that time, Alidra videotaped Doris’s peripatetic vigil from every possible angle.
As exhilarating as it was for Alidra to be in on the action, she soon found herself struggling with resistance from Dennis Burke, then the director of Arizona Common Cause and the coauthor of Doris’s book. Burke had befriended Doris after she collapsed in the desert. As her collaborator, he was suspicious of Alidra and began to run interference between her and Doris. Alidra had, after all, arrived without any background as a filmmaker or a journalist, he reasoned. She did not behave the way other filmmakers in Burke’s experience would have. That is, he said, “She did not fade into the background.” He worried that rather than being a legitimate documentarian, she might be one of the odd sycophants, people of all stripes, whom he had watched try to latch on to Doris.
Alidra was acutely aware of Burke’s discomfort with her. “I can understand that he was asking himself, Who is this woman who doesn’t have a track record as a filmmaker coming with her camera to do all this stuff? But he prevented me from going to certain meetings. There were a bunch of people who were strategizing with Granny D around how to lobby and approach some of these congressmen and senators, and I wanted to be in on that meeting and shoot it. Dennis just stopped me. He wouldn’t let me near it. But I just kept trucking on.”
Doris’s example, after all, had become her motivation. She revered her dogged refusal to quit what many considered a purely quixotic campaign and her readiness to sacrifice herself, body and soul, to her goal. As Doris barnstormed around the country to promote campaign finance reform and her book, Granny D: You’re Never Too Old to Raise a Little Hell, Alidra became her ubiquitous shadow. She, or crews she hired, filmed Doris speaking at conferences, colleges, bookstores, and in radio stations during live call-in shows, where some of Granny D’s most animated moments were filmed. “Sometimes, you’d think you were way the hell out in nowhere and far away from the press and far away from the next photo or the next message opportunity for this campaign, and then, all of a sudden, there’s Alidra with a cameraman,” Burke said.
To get more of Doris’s personal story, Alidra returned to New Hampshire in October 2001 and early 2002. On a couple of those occasions, she brought along Chandler Griffin, a talented young filmmaker. They shot Doris walking along snowy roads—to illustrate her long, solitary preparation for walking ten miles a day during her cross-country pilgrimage; baking cookies and doing her laundry—to show what an exhausted Granny D did after her long walk ended and she returned from Washington the first time; and visiting Laconia, New Hampshire, where she was born and where her family is buried. Shots of her leaving the cemetery there provided evocative illustration of Doris’s life with