Gerrymandering

Those paying attention will notice that the numbering above is ever-so-slightly off.  This is because I’ve decided to limit my accounting to actual shoot days, what I do in the meantime (like today, for instance) is largely desk-based scheduling-type things and, while I’m enjoying being able to focus solely on Gerrymandering within an office context immensely, detailed reportage about responding to e-mails doesn’t exactly make for scintillating reading. 

We’re just back from shooting in Florida (the days noted above), but I should note, for the sake of consistency, that we did have a Day 25 of shooting.  Since we were unable to schedule an interview with Adam Mendelsohn in Los Angeles, we snagged him on a recent trip to New York.  As we were out shooting anyway, we also took a trip to The Old Print shop and spoke with proprietor Harry Newman about antique maps, the mapping impulse and the way the United States has grown over time.  We could have asked Harry tons of questions about redistricting, but I think the key to making something like this (essentially a tangent) work is to lead your subject right to the precipice of the actual matters at hand without crossing.  After you fall off that ledge, you’ve crossed into the realm of obviousness.   This could really open up some of the big conceptual questions about the implications of a map and the power inherent in representing our world on paper, if we can make it work. 

But on to our sleepless adventure in the Sunshine State:

Day 26: Brutally early flight from JFK to Miami.  Gary and I arrive on time, and pick up our bags without incident.  It’s wonderfully warm.  Of course, thanks to our friends at American Airlines, Susan is nearly two hours late forcing us to push our interview with Ellen Freidin from Fair Districts Florida back by hours.  Never let anyone downplay the role driving around takes in film production: while waiting for Susan to land, Gary and I get completely lost driving in what we later learn is essentially a rectangle around the perimeter of the airport.  Once Susan arrives, we make our way to Ellen’s office where the space we’re given is seriously tiny and the folks in the neighboring office decide to take all their calls on speakerphone for the duration of the interview.  Still, I think it went well and am feeling more at ease with the interviews themselves.  At least enough that I can help Gary and Susan more extensively with the lighting which saves everyone time. 

Day 27: Two interviews: former U.S. Senator and Florida Governor Bob Graham, and Democracia USA President Jorge Mursili.  Both go extremely well.  In between, we drive the outline of the 107^th State Senate district which comprises poor black and Cuban neighborhoods, gay enclaves in South Beach, Downtown and the uber-rich Coral Gables.  We shoot with two cameras: little camera mounted on the dash doing a time lapse, Gary hanging out of the car with the big camera.  I’m not sure how all this is going to work but I have in my head some kind of overlay that traces the artificial district lines on a map set against the images from the actual neighborhoods.  It’s a district that definitely begs the questions on contiguity and communities of interest – is it better to have confined districts of like-minded people or do we create better legislators by forcing them to run in really diverse districts? 

Day 28: Another brutally early flight, this time to Tallahassee.  I try to stow the little camera in an overhead compartment and inadvertently break the bin door, nearly forcing our plane to be grounded.  (The power of Gerrymandering.) We arrive at our destination nearly an hour late, but still with plenty of time to make our interviews.  However, the lights decided they wanted to stay in Miami, so we flip out, have Alex start looking for extra equipment from New York, track the bags, and work on re-scheduling the day.  Magically, the whole thing works out and we complete two great interviews: Thom Rumberger, a former redistricting lawyer for the Republican party now turned reform advocate and Barry Richard, a redistricting lawyer for the Democrats who is more well known for winning Bush v. Gore in 2000. 

Day 29: A day that was supposed to be light turns into a pretty intense shoot.  Our main plan was to shoot some B-roll of the Capitol and Supreme Court (I have an idea for using the Rumberger and Richard interviews, archival video of the recent Fair Districts argument before the Supreme Court, and our shots of the room empty to create a mini courtroom drama like my favorite of the genre, Bresson’s Trial of Joan of Arc).  We complete this, but spend the rest of the day running around the archive like mad shooting beautiful old redistricting plans, making photocopies and bugging the poor folks who run the archive up until closing time.  Susan deserves great credit for stumbling upon the archive, and we shot nearly an hour of random map footage that should come in hugely handy.  Then, at around 7PM, we thought it’d be a good time to take a six-hour drive to West Palm Beach…

Day 30: With not much else to do in Tallahassee, we headed down to West Palm Beach to pick up an interview with Senator Dave Aronberg, whose district stretches across the state from the Atlantic to the Gulf of Mexico.  It was well-worth the trip and I think Aronberg, like Fred Keeley may end up one of the stars of the film. 

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Sorry for a bit of a house-cleaning post, but this blog is as much to help me remember what we’ve been doing as it is to keep readers abreast (it certainly helps when I have to go back and label hours of tapes).  I’ll work on getting back to the more interesting, more conceptual stuff soon.  Maybe during the holiday.   Or, maybe I’ll just eat a lot and pass out. 

Next stops:  Iowa and Oklahoma.

From the Republican-American of Waterbury CT:

 Most baseball fans would like to see the Chicago Cubs make it to the World Series, now that a century has passed since they last won it all. One way to facilitate that would be to reorganize the National League divisions periodically, stacking the Cubs’ division with bad teams. But Major League Baseball would never consider such an approach, reasoning correctly that it would make a mockery of the game.

Yet for some reason, it’s OK for Congress to do that on behalf of its incumbent members to give them an insurmountable advantage over potential challengers by rigging their districts.

Read the whole article here.  Team Gerrymandering heads to Florida on Monday.

I’m currently on a flight back from Los Angeles to New York after what (I think) was a really successful first round of shooting.  I still wonder to myself at least six or seven times a day if we’re making the most boring, obscure documentary of all time, but even with my natural tendency to doubt anything I work on until it’s done, I’m slightly more than cautiously optimistic about the sixty-plus hours we’ve shot so far. 

Day 20: Emboldened by a lengthy, wildly creative and psychedelic round of “map porn” (our impromptu map shoots in my hotel room) the day before, we spend the afternoon in Irvine talking to two scholars, one of whom, Bernie Grofman, we interview for nearly three hours.  I’d been looking forward to interviewing Bernie since I started reading his redistricting texts two summers ago because amidst his highly statistic-based, theoretical writings I found, somewhat miraculously, an accessible sense of humor, and he didn’t disappoint as an interview subject.  Bernie’s one of the nation’s experts on the subject and we covered far more ground than could ever make it into the film (I do harbor some slight desire to turn this into a gargantuan epic…), and I think the whittling process, especially here might be tough.  Gary might disagree as the room we shot Bernie in was so tiny that he was forced to sit on a metal box cramped in the corner while I indulged all of my nerdy redistricting interest to the fullest — ’m guessing he’d rather forget the whole thing.   

Day 21: Election Day.  I’m a bit of a poll-obsessive, and part of the relief of that night stemmed from knowing that I wouldn’t need to anxiously parse minute shifts in the numbers the next morning.  (The other bit of relief came from electing the right candidate.)  We followed Arnold to vote in the morning and then hopped in a car with Vincent and Kathay to shoot Kathay while she voted at a polling place nearby.  Afterwards, we spent a few hours at the Beverly Hilton talking with Adam Mendelsohn, a mastermind behind the Prop. 11 campaign who used to work on Schwarzenegger’s staff.  I’ve been talking to Adam about Gerrymandering for months, but it wasn’t until we all sat in the lobby chatting that I realized he’d be a perfect character for the film—a young-looking, but hardened and cynical campaign operative never far from a blackberry and with a terrifically wry sensibility.  We’ll (hopefully) interview him next week in New York. 

That evening we shot Kathay and the Governor at the very exclusive Prop. 11 party held at the top of the Hilton.  My sense was that the crowd was largely Republican, and it was odd watching the election returns in a largely somber room.  (Ohio had been called for Obama on our way there, so we were brimming with excitement.)  After Schwarzenegger spoke, things petered out a bit and we went a few blocks over to the huge Democratic celebration and shot for a bit.  The contrast was, well, striking, and if I were interested in taking cheap shots, the juxtaposition of the two rooms could certainly be played for a laugh.  I think this footage will be valuable, though….there’s something to the fact that such a major election happened in the midst of us tackling redistricting that I like.  It locates the film somehow, and hopefully I’ll be able to find a way to work Obama’s election into Gerrymandering in such a way that it helps broaden the context. 

Day 22-23:  Aside from a morning Schwarzenegger press conference announcing the Prop. 11 victory (an unexpected win that’s still up in the air due to provisional ballots), our last two days are spent holed up at the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce banging out interview after interview.  I think we completed nine in the final two days, and I’d write more about who we talked to, but my head hurts just thinking about it.  When I’ve got more time I’ll try to tease out that odd state of divided focus (externally rapt on the interviewee’s words, internally rapid mental shuffling through notes, ideas, words, concepts) that leaves me utterly exhausted by the end of a marathon session.  Note to Self #1: thank the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in the credits.  Note to Self #2: When interviewing subject in opposition to a certain issue or cause, do not unthinkingly display buttons promoting said issue or cause on your lapel. 

Day 24: I barely slept last night as it took so long to pack, arrange the gear, figure out what was going where, etc.  Somehow I’ve been stuck with the majority of our team’s luggage, but thankfully I have Carter (our four-wheeled production assistant) to help me out when I land.  There’s a lot more to say about this first leg, about things we shot, about the great, great people we met, but right now I’m looking forward to thinking about anything at all except redistricting politics.  I’ll probably put the blog on a slight hiatus for a few days, but we’re back on the road again in a week.  Next stop: Florida. 

Oh, and a mea culpa for massive grammatical inconsistencies in this first round of shoot-blogging.  My co-editor at Reverse Shot would murder me for all the missing commas, danglers and run-ons.  I’ll try to be better on the next trip…

I’m trying out a Flickr account for posting photos of our Gerrymandering travels in lieu of actually writing a big entry about the last four busy, busy days in Los Angeles, or prepping for the four or five interviews I’ll be doing tomorrow. 

This seems to have worked….here’s a photo of me with the fabulous Kathay Feng of Common Cause and some guy in a jacket.   Back to NYC on Friday! 

Here’s a quick primer on how prison populations can affect the redistricting process.  We’re going to spend a little time on this in the film. 

We’re in Los Angeles again and it looks like we’ll head back east this Friday.  I never thought I’d be excited to be in LA, but as much as I like the quiet prettiness of Sacramento (so many trees!), the weather was starting to turn a little colder, a little greyer.  Los Angeles definitely doesn’t disappoint in the climate department.  Since we missed the seasonal changeover in New York, getting off of the plane in a few days is going to be a rude awakening. 

Day 16: There wasn’t much on our plate for the day, so we went back to the capitol to shoot on the Assembly floor which required special permissions.  At some point, Susan or I decided it would be great to take a “filmed tour” of the place, and we were assigned a terrific guide who led us around for a few hours, helped us shoot some map transparencies in the State Clerk’s office, and basically indulged us far beyond any reasonable call of duty.  Susan, Gary and I having a running debate over the necessity of me actually appearing in the film (they’re for, I’m against), and I’ve been regularly nixing taking those shots in docs that I hate so much: staged door entries or exits, canned greetings, pensive reaction shots.  In general, I prefer either images that are completely and obviously artificial or those captured verité to faked realism, but today I let the objections go and Gary films me walking around and chatting with our guide.  Not sure if anything useful will come of this, but there was a good bit where I asked him to find his rep’s seat on the assembly floor and we wandered around for about ten minutes looking for it.  An apt metaphor. 

Day 17:  Friday was easily the most brutal day of shooting so far.  I’d scheduled six sit-down interviews back-to-back throughout the afternoon and was up late the night before nervously preparing.  It all went fine, but trying to juggle schedule changes, the technical side and niceties like eating and hydrating while maintaining the necessary concentration to poke and prod our interviewees was exhausting.   By the end of the day I started getting more than a little glassy.  At around noon I got a phone call that throws everything out of whack: the Governor was scheduled to make an appearance at a phone bank set up in Kathay’s office in LA the next morning.  We complete the rest of the interviews knowing that we’ll have to pack everything up and drive six hours to cap off a tough afternoon. 

Day 18: The potential to have Schwarzenegger and Kathay (at this point, our two main “characters”) in the same space was an obvious must-get for us, and it certainly paid off in spades.  This is the kind of documentary kismet we’d been looking for, and we were shooting as soon as we got into the small Common Cause offices and didn’t stop until well after the hubbub had died down, about three hours later.  The Governor arrived a bit after we did and as he roved around the room talking to volunteers, it was basically a free-for-all with cameras and microphones jockeying for prime position.  Kathay led him, and the shots we have of the two of them together neatly and effectively tie the Prop. 11 narrative we’ve been working on into a nice bow.  At one point, I whispered to Kathay, asking her to introduce us to him, which she did, and he turned to our cameras and invited us to his election party Tuesday evening which should provide even more great footage, especially if we can convince Kathay to let us follow her there.  Sharon took some great pictures and I need to figure out how to post them here.  Give me a few days. 

Day 19:  It’s only noon of this day as I’m writing, but after a breakneck couple of weeks, I think we’re going to take it a little easy, shoot some maps, and get rested for the sprint to the finish of Gerrymandering, leg one.