What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [54]
Cole liked Alidra’s project and thought it was right for PBS’s audience. She also saw that Alidra needed relatively little money to complete it. Most important, “I was impressed by her drive and commitment. She had taken a tiger by the tail,” Cole said. And she was honest about what she did not know. “A lot of first-timers don’t know what they don’t know. She had a degree of awareness, insight, and openness that made up for the lack of experience,” Cole said. If Alidra would carry the ball, Cole would lend her name to the project.
Cole’s influence was almost immediately evident. Alidra called PBS in Maine to request sponsorship, but was turned down. But on her next call, to New Hampshire’s public station, NHPTV left the door open to a deal, and Cole quickly sealed it. NHPTV agreed to sponsor, promote, and hold an opening-night screening for the film if Alidra and Cole took responsibility for all postproduction work. They agreed and in November 2005, with the station as a sponsor, ITVS gave Alidra a $100,000 grant and one year to complete the documentary.
But with all Alidra would have to do on her own, that was not much time. Cole recommended an editor to shape the film quickly. Alidra hired him and began supplying notes and transcripts. But the editing went excruciatingly slowly and, Alidra thought, disappointingly. The film lacked emotion.
“You can’t make feeling where there isn’t any,” the editor told her.
“There is feeling,” Alidra insisted and sent off a barrage of notes indicating where the editor could find it in the footage.
With time ticking, Alidra readied herself to go to Joshua Tree National Park, California, in late January 2006 to shoot images she needed to illustrate Granny D’s walk through the desert. But she was instead called to Florida where her mother was dying. For seven days, Alidra sat by her mother’s side, playing her love songs sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. Alidra had time to reflect on how her mother—who had spent her life in busyness and shopping—had failed to develop her own life and unintentionally motivated Alidra to make something of hers. “She was a beautiful woman with talent, [but] she never fully engaged with life. I was determined not to live as she had.” After her mother fell into a pattern of constant sleep, Alidra returned to California and her work. Her mother died two days later. “I didn’t have time to grieve. I had said my good-bye. I had to keep moving. I was on deadline,” Alidra said.
She drove fourteen hours south to Joshua Tree to film the sand and sky, and to re-create Granny D’s point of view during the 1999 walk through the desert when she collapsed from dehydration. At Alidra’s request, Doris sent the clothes and shoes she had worn. Alidra put them on, and a cameraman shot her feet on the pavement and sand and as she was placed in an ambulance. In the documentary, lights flash as the ambulance disappears in a dusty, sun-blanched haze.
Meanwhile, the freelance film editor continued to flounder. At $2,000 a week for his work and $800 a week for editing equipment, Alidra’s budget was evaporating quickly. When, after three months, the editor announced that he was leaving to take on another project, Alidra was too panicked to feel relief.
Fortunately, Cole got Alidra another $20,000 in grant money and recommended that she hire Yasha Ajinsky, a veteran San Francisco-based documentarian, film editor, and teacher, to help finish the film. His pedigree included Oscar nominations for two documentaries, Forever Activists and Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. But it was viewing Outsider: The Life and Art of Judith Scott, a documentary about a woman with Down syndrome who achieved worldwide recognition for her fiber sculptures, that convinced Alidra. “It was so sensitively and beautifully cut, I started to cry. I thought, This is the editor I want.”
Alidra, the novice, and Ajinsky, the master editor, went to work reediting, adding narration, and streamlining her film. “From the start, we