Andrea Pelosi has created a kind of homemade, guerrilla journalism, perfectly suited for the digital age. Pelosi, 31, recently released a video documentary that offers a revealing look at George W. Bush's campaign for the White House, titled "Journeys With George."
She calls it a combination home movie and Rorschach test. It's really an antidote to the usual television coverage of pre-packaged candidates and staged events.
All Pelosi had was a Sony mini-digital camcorder, a Mac computer and access to the candidate.
Like Theodore White, who changed the nature of print coverage of presidential campaigns with his behind-the-scenes book, "The Making of the President, 1960," Pelosi has changed the traditional notion of video reporting.
"I didn't set out to do a "Making of the President, 2000,'" Pelosi said this week in a telephone interview from San Francisco, where her documentary was shown at a film festival. "I was on a campaign and I wanted to show people what Bush was like. I think it shows him as a real person."
Bush, in fact, comes across as part aging frat boy, part regular, friendly guy.Pelosi films Bush eating Cheetos, munching bologna sandwiches, bowling, cracking jokes, schmoozing reporters and hustling from one campaign stop to another.
"Stop filming me, you're like a head cold," Bush jokingly tells Pelosi at one point. "I started out as a cowboy, I'm now a statesman," he says.
One time Pelosi jokes with Bush by asking him: "If you were a tree, what tree would you be?" He replies: "I'm not a tree, I'm a bush."Pelosi shoots Bush making faces at the camera, rolling oranges down an airplane aisle, drinking non-alcoholic beer and waltzing around wearing sunglasses and cowboy boots.Remember, this was 1999, a year before the general election. Pelosi, the daughter of House Democratic Whip Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., was a producer at NBC News who eventually quit her day job to work on the film.The 77-minute documentary has been shown at film festivals around the country to rave reviews. HBO recently purchased the rights to broadcast it later this year.
Some White House sources have publicly complained that the film violates campaign coverage ground rules because Bush's "back-of-the-plane comments and antics" were off the record.
"I had a camera rolling in Bush's face for a year and a half," Pelosi said. "It's hard for them to say now that they didn't know it was going to be shown to the public."
Pelosi's film "is that rare breed of documentary that could forever alter public perception of its high-profile subject," Joe Leydon wrote in Variety.
Pelosi and Bush are "kindred spirits of sorts," wrote Anthony York on the Salon Web site. "You get the sense from the film that (irreverent) Pelosi is the person Bush would be if he were allowed to come a little unhinged publicly."
Reporters are also caught off-guard on film, as on one snowy day in Iowa when a crowd of shivering journalists wait for Bush. "The only reason we are out here is in case Bush comes out and slips on the ice and falls down," says one wag, adding, "we're vicious predators."
Audience reaction to the Bush they see in the documentary has been divided, said Pelosi, who now runs her own production company in New York City.
"Most of my friends don't like Bush," she said. "When they see the film, about half of them think he's goofy, but the other half really like him as a human being."
The film is the journalistic highlight of Pelosi's career.
"I worked as a television news producer for eight years, and this is the first act of journalism I ever committed," she said.
"Most of the stuff in the film is the kind of stuff that never made the nightly news. With this project, I got to sit in my living room every night and tell a story without 20 other people at NBC putting their hands on it.
Pelosi's biggest break may have been the controversial vote in Florida, which gave the election to Bush.
"He's president of the United States, so everybody wants to see this film," Pelosi said. "But even if he had lost, it would have been worth it for me. I wanted to show how the media works, how campaigns are run and how we elect our presidents."