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When Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race on July 21, it left PBS Frontline‘s The Choice with a big gaping hole.
The documentary of the two major parties’ presidential nominees has been a quadrennial tradition, and its filmmaker, Michael Kirk, had weeks earlier screened a four-hour rough cut of Biden vs. Trump.
“We’d seen the debacle of the debate, and figured he was a dead man walking, but you never knew,” Kirk said.
As it turned out, Frontline executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath had also insisted that Kirk and his team also make a first-of-its-kind documentary on the vice president, meaning that they were already gathering material on the Democrats’ eventual nominee, Kamala Harris.
Yet The Choice was still a scramble.
“We edited it in five weeks, shot it in two weeks, researched it in a week,” Kirk said. “In a way it was great, because we could get all her close friends, because they’d never done interviews before. They were enthusiastic about it, and they wanted to do it, and they wanted to talk about her. And the campaign was the old Biden campaign. The superstructure was there, so we had been working with them on Biden.”
The result is an illuminating portrait of Harris’ personal story, at times with her own comments via the audiobook version of her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold. As is tradition, The Choice does not interview the subjects themselves, but relies on friends and family members, as well as co-workers, associates and journalists.
One of the more dramatic episodes in Harris’ story came in 2004, shortly after she was elected district attorney of San Francisco. After the killing of a police officer, Isaac Espinoza, she faced a backlash from the law enforcement community because she did not seek the death penalty for the suspect, sticking to a campaign pledge. When she attended the officer’s funeral, then-Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) delivered the eulogy and, in a rebuke of Harris’ decision, said, “This is not only the definition of tragedy, it’s the special circumstance called for by the death penalty law.” The crowd of mourners cheered.
Kirk said, “From what we can tell and from what he friends tell us, that was the moment where [Harris] decided, ‘I’m not going to go out too far on these controversial issues. I’m going to stay back. I can’t get ahead of my skis on this’…She learned a lesson the hard way there, and Feinstein put a fine point on it. … People we talked to said this has stayed with her forever — when to be controversial and when not to be.”
Among those interviewed were colleague Lateefah Simon and friend Carole Porter, as well as journalists who have long covered her career. They did not talk to Harris’ father, who is still living but has a “distant” relationship with his daughter, who was raised by her mother. Nor is California Democratic politician Willie Brown interviewed, although the documentary talks about their romantic relationship in the 1990s, and how Harris deftly responded to criticism about it when she ran for DA in 2004.
The Choice also takes a fresh look at Trump’s rise, even though this is the third time in a row that he has been a subject of their profile.
Kirk’s team obtained a surprisingly candid 1980 interview that Trump did with Rona Barrett, in which he talks about his view of life, including anything that would make himself vulnerable.
Deadline talked to Kirk about the making of The Choice — and what he hopes viewers take away from the project.
DEADLINE: You were in the process of making this at a time when there was a race by Harris’ campaign and by Trump to define her in the minds of the public. What were some of the major takeaways that surprised you?
MICHAEL KIRK: The first was that she became a prosecuting attorney. You are the child of a mother and father in Berkeley, California in the 60s and 70s. So you are a little kid during … all of that ‘Bezerkley’ energy is around you as a kid and your parents are protesters. You would imagine the way that she was raised by that mother — very strong, very capable, unbelievably interesting woman in her own right — you would believe that [Harris] would have that outside, ‘attack the system’ [kind of person] and [would] go get a great education and become the head of a protest movement or something. Instead she decides to go completely the other way and become a prosecuting attorney in the crack-filled 80s in Alameda County and San Francisco. Really something that her mother didn’t want. A lot of people in her community were surprised that she would doing it…. A lot of progressives were saying, ‘Wait a minute.’ She kept saying the best way to affect change, from her perspective, is from inside the system. Inside the system there were hardly any Black women in positions of authority, surrounded by white cops. It’s a fascinating decision on her part.
DEADLINE: There were reports of chaos in Harris’ 2019 presidential campaign and even in the initial years as vice president. By contrast, Harris seems to have a much more smoothly run presidential campaign.
KIRK: The chaos inside offices, especially the vice president’s office, is always really bumpy at the very beginning. You have a brand new person who doesn’t know anything about the job. She only was a senator for almost two years. Things like managing an office, both as a senator, brand new to national politics and as a vice president. And what a snake pit it is in every White House in the beginning and the vice president’s office is one area that’s just kind of pushed away for a little while there….She makes mistakes in Guatemala [where she did a shaky interview with NBC News’ Lester Holt], goes back out in America, reconnects with her roots, learns retail politics in a big way, which I gather she is pretty good at, and waits for a moment to come back and be ready to go with a new and different kind of staff….It’s a learning experience for her, but it is always a kind of bumpy road, especially when you are learning in that high octane, high visibility kind of moment.
DEADLINE: How did you approach Donald Trump‘s story given that he has been profiled in The Choice twice before?
KIRK: Everything changed. We have made about eight films about Trump over the course of his presidency. We always had a kind of vector in based on what we’ve done in the 2016 Choice, where we first heard about his father’s kind of eugenic perspective of winners and losers. In this case, after January 6th, the way we watched Trump changed because winners and losers became something else. The emphasis on, ‘I will not lose this election in 2020,’ and the extent to which he did what he did, and the aftermath of that, started to kind of animate how we would view him, how we would tell the winners and losers story. We reemphasized it, went back to the relationship with his brother Freddie. We sort of tracked along his life with a whole new perspective and emphasis on winning and losing — the the building of Trump Tower on the one hand, and on the other hand the failed marriages, the bankruptcies, The Apprentice rise, all the problems that then follow… They are all efforts, we came to believe, to avoid losing, to avoid being the label the loser, and the extent to which Trump does what he does, and goes where he goes in the face of that fear, took on paramount importance from our point of view.
DEADLINE: You have a clip from Rona Barrett’s interview where Trump says, “I don’t want to make myself vulnerable.” He kind of admits what his game plan is for life.
KIRK: Well, that’s it, isn’t it? That’s the playbook. I have this quote I always hang here. ‘A president can bring to the job no more than the lessons of his own life.’ I don’t know who wrote it or said it, I’ve had it for years. But every time I make The Choice I pull it out and hang it up.
So when you say the names Fred Trump, Roy Cohn, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon. Where are we going here? There’s a certain similarity to all of that that you just say, ‘I get it.’
DEADLINE: What impressions do you think viewers will have from each candidate that they didn’t have before?
KIRK: I’m always surprised what people take away from the film. I watch when it’s on YouTube. YouTube, by the way, has delivered millions of eyeballs to these films beyond the public television broadcast audience and the worldwide. … It’s a self-selected group that writes comments after a YouTube film, but it is fascinating to see the impact that films have on people, and what you hope is that when they enter that voting booth, there will be something they picked up, something that makes sense to them about something that hadn’t made sense before.
DEADLINE: With each candidate, what sense did you get on whether their private persona matches their public one?
KIRK: I think Trump is entirely Trump, in and out of office, in and out of public events. I talked to so many people who knew him, and I knew a lot of people who knew him before he was a political candidate and were friends of his. They all say what you see is what you get with Trump.
Harris, I think there’s a lot of things about her that she doesn’t bring forward. She never plays the race card. As far as I can tell, historically or otherwise, she does not play the gender card, does not talk about that, does not want to talk about that, won’t talk about her past. You try to get her to talk about her mom and her dad — she’ll give us what she gave us at the Democratic convention speech. That’s the view of her sister Maya. Not a lot of personal things there. She is not an open book in that sense. So in a way, the job of the biographer is to piece together from actions and from people around her about what they saw, what they believe … but getting inside Kamala Harris’ head is a much harder thing to do, I think, because she doesn’t play that game. That’s not who she wants to be.
The Choice debuts this evening on PBS stations and streaming platforms. Extended interviews will be available online as part of Frontline‘s Transparency Project. The VP Choice: Vance vs. Walz premieres on Oct. 8.
