Every four years since 1988, the team behind the PBS series “Frontline” creates a film called “The Choice,” which explores the political biographies of the candidates running for president.
By July of this year, filmmakers Michael Kirk and Mike Wiser had put together a draft of a four-hour documentary about President Biden and former President Trump, two men of the same generation preparing for a rematch after the contentious 2020 election.
“This thing was huge and sprawling, but it was an incredible story,” Kirk said, comparing the project to Michael Cimino’s epic “Heaven’s Gate.”
Then, on July 21, Biden announced he was dropping out of the race and Vice President Kamala Harris quickly emerged as the likely nominee, a historic turn of events that upended the election and forced filmmakers to change course in record time to create “The Choice 2024: Harris vs. Trump,” a two-hour documentary premiering Tuesday on PBS.
Luckily, by the time Biden dropped out, work had already begun on a documentary about the vice presidential candidates, an idea proposed by “Frontline” executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath because of the advanced ages of the likely presidential candidates.
Still, it was a mad dash to complete Harris’s portion of “The Choice 2024,” particularly given the lack of documentaries and biographies about the vice president compared to her rival, who has been courting media attention for decades. “We just jumped at it,” said Kirk, who directed the film in addition to co-writing and producing it with Wiser. “What would have taken us four or five months we did in about nine weeks.”
The documentary chronicles her childhood in the East Bay, where Harris’ single mother leaned on the area’s black community to raise her daughters; her formative years at Howard University, where she joined the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority; and her political career, which began in San Francisco as a district attorney fighting to reform the system from within. It also focuses on some of the controversial episodes that have shaped Harris, including her relationship with politician Willie Brown and the backlash she faced when, as San Francisco district attorney, she decided not to seek the death penalty against the man who killed police officer Isaac Espinoza in 2004.
Harris's entry into the race also meant cutting the portion of the documentary about Trump, which draws a link between the heavy-handed tactics he learned from his father, Fred Trump, and his mentor, Roy Cohn, and the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection.
“The same Trump scenes suddenly look very different when you combine them with Kamala Harris scenes,” Kirk said.
Kirk and Wiser spoke to The Times via Zoom about covering this unprecedented campaign. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
How did you re-organize this film once you knew Biden was dropping out?
Church:We have made six [“The Choice” documentaries]. From the beginning, we learned this phrase, “method of life.” We were gathering things that happened throughout their lives that inform how they make decisions. “What is your method of life?” In Trump’s case, it’s, “Never lose. Do everything you can to win.” It’s the manual that Roy Cohn handed him. We always follow this adage: “A president can bring nothing to the job but the lessons of his own life.” That’s an operating principle for making “The Choice.” If you have good interviews with people who really know [the subjects] —Friends, family, biographers—it's amazing how quickly it all came together, even though there was nothing about Harris that was obviously floating around on the surface.
Former President Trump at the Republican National Convention in July, just days before President Biden announced he was dropping out of the presidential race.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
How much of Trump's material changed because of Harris?
Wiser: A lot of that had to change. We had to bring [the] Triumph [material] The film is cut in half. “The Choice” plays with the two characters. What stories from their lives can you juxtapose? In their case, especially because of the age difference, the film feels very different.
Church: When we did it with George W. Bush and Al Gore [in 2000]They were contemporaries. You could put them all side by side on a chronological calendar. In this case, there's a 20-year age difference as a starting point. He's rich, she's not. He's very white, she's not. The strange alchemy of putting those scenes together — six minutes of Trump, six minutes of Harris — just changed the way you see Trump, which felt very familiar before we added the Harris thing.
You have so much ground to cover with Trump that everything has to be very condensed. I'm wondering how you approach covering the candidates in a way that gives them a similar amount of screen time but doesn't distort their backgrounds or create a false equivalency.
Wiser: That's been a question about this project since we first asked it about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. [in 2016]The challenges have become even more difficult. One of the candidates has been prosecuted for numerous crimes, has been impeached twice, has not accepted the results of an election, and has also been in the news since he entered politics. Our approach is not to shy away from any of those things, but it is to stay true to what “The Election” is, which is to tell a story about who he is. One of the things that was different in this “Election” is the context of it being post-January 6. You look back on his life and say, “Where does that come from?” We decided to emphasize more his relationship with his brother. [Fred Trump Jr.] And what about his father? What is it that makes Trump unable to accept losing his childhood?
The general view is that Harris is reserved and doesn't expose herself too much. Did you find that characterization true?
Wiser: That's definitely one of the challenges. You open his autobiography [“The Truths We Hold”] And you say, “What’s the story she’s telling about herself?” That story is very minimal in terms of biographical details about the things that shaped her. She’s been very cautious about showing that. She came up politically from a place where she didn’t have to do that. When she’s running for district attorney or attorney general, she doesn’t draw on her life story in the same way that a presidential candidate does or even as someone running for the Senate. When she was in positions where people expected that of her, it was very difficult for her to transition and talk about those private things that shaped her.
Do you think that's just her personality or… it is? More strategic?
Wiser: It’s a good question, and it’s one we asked everyone we spoke to, even people very close to her, and they don’t say she’s a different person than she is as a politician — less guarded, more profane, relaxed in a way that, until recently, she hadn’t appeared in front of a camera. Part of that guardedness is due to the increased scrutiny she’s faced as a Black woman in politics. When she first got involved in politics and was running the district attorney’s office in San Francisco, she had the Espinoza controversy right away. All of those things have made her more cautious about telling her own story.
What do you consider to have been the most decisive turning points in your political biography?
Church: I think the main struggle he faced was “How do you decide to fight from within?” His parents are people who marched protesting the Vietnam War, supporting [Black Panther] Huey [Newton]She shakes her fist at the man. She decides to be the man, so to speak, and become a prosecutor and join law enforcement in the 1980s when Alameda County and San Francisco were filled with crack addicts.
Kamala Harris in 2004, when she was serving as San Francisco district attorney.
(Márcio José Sánchez / Associated Press)
Over the course of researching and reporting on Harris, was there anything new that really helped put her in the spotlight?
Wiser: Probably the most interesting parts of his life were the first [years]She has never really talked about what it was like growing up as a biracial child and the kind of names she was called. It was interesting to talk to her contemporaries and her childhood friends about how that shaped her and made her into a pretty thick-skinned person. You can see that in the way she has handled Trump in this election, staying focused and not getting carried away by the situation.
Harris is the second woman to challenge Trump for the presidency. I wonder if you have noticed any differences between Harris and Clinton in terms of their approach to gender.
Wiser: Kamala Harris is very aware of her status. She's very aware when she looks at all the photographs on the wall: they're all of white men, but she doesn't make that the center of her politics or her appeal. With Hillary Clinton, it was very clear from the campaign trail that that was part of what they were trying to activate. I think that was part of Kamala Harris' approach to race and gender from the beginning: to show that you belong where you are, to let the slights fall on your back, to move on.
You have been making “The Choice” together for a long time now. What makes 2024 a unique year?
Church: In the United States, at least for most of my life, it has been true that when a presidential election was approaching, both candidates were plausible. America was not going to fall apart if John McCain became president. Since Trump versus Clinton, things have become increasingly complicated. Many people in the United States now care a lot about who wins, in a way that I never did before. [film] It was very difficult to do and the stakes were very high, like never before. I felt a lot of responsibility to get it right.
