selling the real thing
local filmmaker made the pitch for granny d
by c. leslie bothwell (a thinly-veiled disguise)

Asheville-based Producer/Director Rebecca MacNeice knew she had a problem when she took on U.S. Senate candidate Doris “Granny D” Haddock as a client. In fact, there were three problems: a slim budget; not much time; and a well-funded incumbent with enormous name recognition and bipartisan support. Former New Hampshire Governor and current Senator Judd Gregg was running for his third term. By any politics-as-usual measure, the 94-year-old Granny D’s campaign was doomed from the start.

“It was completely impossible,” MacNeice laughs. “It was irresistible.”

Children’s Crusade

MacNeice was no stranger to political campaigns. Earlier in the year she had produced a Web commercial for Dennis Kucinich, condensing a 30-minute stump speech Kucinich had delivered in Asheville’s City/County Plaza into a 3 1/2 minute highly stylized montage. That commercial garnered 687,351 hits in its first week on the Web.

Nor was MacNeice unused to travel to pursue her work. “I’m lucky that my profession isn’t place-dependent,” she said, “So I can live where I want to live. But, on the flip-side, living in Asheville means that a lot of my work will always be elsewhere. I shoot all over the country.”

“With Doris, I was working with an out-of-state candidate who I had already filmed in Asheville and in Boston, during the Democratic National Convention. That was the normal part. But she was also a candidate who wouldn’t take money from corporations or PACs, who had walked coast to coast for campaign finance reform when she was 90, and whose campaign staff included dreamers and zealots,” MacNeice remembers. “It was a children’s crusade led by a grandmother. How could I refuse?”

An anti-candidate required an anti-commercial and Joe Trippi, mastermind of the Howard Dean Internet tsunami, signed on as an advisor. The brainstorming began and the diverse team cooked up and discarded a handful of potential concepts before settling on the final approach. MacNeice notes, “A political spot normally needs to be seen four to five times to make an impression on the viewer, but with their broadcast budget we absolutely needed to make our point and brand our candidate the first time. We needed to show her in a favorable light without giving  her opponent an opening for attack. And I knew we had to use film, not video. Film is emotional and it does a better job at catching light and color.

Connection: Asheville

MacNeice had a history with Granny D, starting with Rolling Thunder/Asheville in May, 2003. Granny flew in from a speaking engagement in Michigan to address the event while MacNeice was shooting it for Bill Moyers Now. The filmmaker shot a lengthy interview with the activist and they hit it off. Later, when GrannyD stopped through Asheville as she crisscrossed the country registering working women, she stayed with MacNeice.

“We really clicked,” MacNeice recalls. “I’ll never forget the night I took her to dinner on my motor scooter, zooming through downtown Asheville, laughing and shouting.”

In July, when the filmmaker traveled to New England for the Democratic Convention, she crashed on Granny’s sofa. Later, MacNeice and Haddock shared an air mattress in an overcrowded residence in Boston. By then, Granny D had jumped into the U.S. Senate race and she soon enlisted MacNeice to produce a fifteen minute video, composed from earlier footage, for fund-raising house parties.

Winging It

October, back in New Hampshire to shoot the commercial, and after days of planning and various setbacks, MacNeice received a call from Cleveland, Ohio. Kucinich was now running for reelection to Congress and wanted TV spots ASAP, in case his comfortable poll numbers began to slide. MacNeice lived on caffeine and junk food in a Cleveland production studio for the next four days before jetting to Washington, D.C. There she collected equipment and then drove back to New Hampshire to film the Granny D ad.

Fading Candidate, Fading Light

On the day of the shoot, Granny D was all over New Hampshire, delivering three speeches around the state while the crew prepped. “These two strapping young men were sent off on the strange mission of rummaging in her closet for outfits the right color,” recalls MacNeice, “And when Granny arrived, she was clearly weary. But she dashed into the camper to change her clothes and hurried out to jump into a canoe. She was still putting on make-up while those young men towed her upstream.” The nonagenarian hadn’t canoed in 30 years, but, somehow, there she was, gamely plunging her paddle into reflected autumn colors as the crew shouted, “Hurry! We’re losing light!”

It was the magic hour, an October sunset on a golden pond and there was no time on the calendar for a remake. The crew towed the canoe upstream again. And again. And in the end there was enough light and just enough film to shoot a seconds-long head shot to use beneath the legally mandated message, “I’m Doris Granny D Haddock, and I approved this ad.”
Granny D didn’t win her race, though she polled 36 percent, but MacNeice remains a believer. “If politics is ever going to change, we need candidates like Doris Haddock,” she said. “We need average citizens who are willing to step up to the plate. The spot we created was positive and effective. In a world full of negative campaign ads, we managed to avoid negativity. I am proud to have been a part of that effort.”

C. Leslie Bothwell* is a Mountain Xpress staff writer, former managing editor of that newspaper and founding editor of the Warren Wilson College environmental journal Heartstone. He has nabbed national and regional awards for investigative reporting, humor and criticism, and is currently writing a critical biography, The Prince of War: Billy Graham’s Legacy of Aggression. Bothwell lives in downtown Asheville with three cats, many cacti, and an iMac. His other car is a canoe.
*We assume you guessed this is Cecil? - Ed.