"Are those bagpipes?"
"Are those bagpipes?"
A dispatch from the sets of Monumental, the documentary.
Hi friends! As many of you know, I'm in the midst of a six-week road trip from Portland to Nebraska and back. I'm writing to you from Cody, Wyoming, where I spent a lonely week at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West digging into the archive of one of the artists whose sculptures are part of this project. I have two more days here before driving to Laramie for an interview, and then I head home to Portland to vote. Before Cody, I spent three weeks in Nebraska at an artist residency—I left for a few days to fly back to Portland to film an event.
It's been a busier and more all-consuming trip with less downtime for writing than I anticipated. I never seem to catch up! But here's a dispatch from the documentary side of the monument project.
What first caught my eye when I arrived at Mount Rushmore last month was not the massive presidential monument carved into the mountain. It was a man retrieving bagpipes from the trunk of his rental car.
"Are those bagpipes?" I asked, which is the most obvious question ever, but sometimes you just have to break the ice when you're trying to interview people. But yes, they were bagpipes, and it was his lifelong dream to play them at Mount Rushmore. Depending on how you feel about bagpipes and overt patriotism and iconic American places and other people's bucket lists, his goal, manifested, might have sounded like a charming expression of free speech...or unwelcome noise.
I was in reporter mode in search of people to interview, and so I heard the bagpipes as good luck. Someone was doing something visual that I could film! The bagpiper struck up the Armed Forces medley, and once he caught his breath, I struck up a conversation with him and his companions. The three graduated from West Point in the 1980s. They'd been planning this trip for some time, to celebrate the successful end to cancer treatment for one of the three.
I went to Rushmore to interview people on camera for my monument project, figuring the mountainside carving was on the way to where I was going in Nebraska, so why not? At a minimum, I knew I'd capture a stream of people with opinions shaped by looking at an actual monument. This proved true. But the West Pointers ended up being my first, and perhaps best, interviews of the day. All three had thoughtful, nuanced and moving opinions not just about what monuments mean to the American story but about how their military service had shaped their lives and their views on patriotism. They set the tone for the day—and my expectations.
Walking up to random people and asking them to talk to you for an article (or in this case, to be on camera for a documentary) might give some people hives, but I've always liked it, even back in my newspaper days early in my career. These interviews, often called "vox pop" or "man-on-the-street," distill reporting to its essence. You have to find people, quickly. You have to challenge yourself to approach people who don't look like you, talk like you, or appear as though they share your belief systems. But you also can't waste your time—you have to choose interview subjects wisely, so you must be a quick judge of character, often on surface expressions of personality, such as how people dress or carry themselves.
When you do find the right people to interview, you have to ask good questions to elicit useful answers. You have to set some personal boundaries, too, to avoid creeps. But most people are nice—especially since I wasn't asking them how they planned to vote in a few weeks. In exchange, you get to have interesting conversations. People say all kinds of surprising stuff. They defy their stereotypes. You're on your toes the whole time, totally in the moment. It's fun, if a little exhausting by the end of the day.
Such interviews are never representative of the population as a whole—I was catching people who were already motivated to talk about monuments because they were at one of the biggest of them all. It would be a mistake to think they spoke for all Americans. But they speak for many.
Will any of my Mount Rushmore interviews will end up in the final documentary film? The written version of the project? I don’t know. It's way too early to know whether they make sense. Yet the day I spent filming them was a challenging, yet fulfilling effort—if only to assure myself that this is a topic many people care about. I needed to do it. And I learned that symbols matter to people as much as I thought they might.
This monument project isn't affiliated with a media organization (at least not yet, that is), so I have to work a little harder for people to take me seriously. I created a rudimentary website for the film project, with phone numbers, emails and links. I handed out business cards, too. People I approached could look up my website on their phones and determine for themselves that I was a real film director, not a jackass with a camera trying to punk them. When people asked when and where it would air, I told them the project is "aimed at PBS," which is aspirational, but true enough. And I wore a black baseball cap embroidered with white text that reads "Ask Me About Monumental, the Documentary." This proved a conversation starter that lent even more legitimacy to the project. The website, business cards and sample hats cost about $300, a worthwhile investment in assurance and authenticity. Everyone signed appearance waivers, of course, with their phone numbers and email addresses, so I knew they were legit, too.
In South Dakota, I was on my own, with a simple camera set up. I had one video camera on a tripod with an attached microphone, a lavalier microphone to clip to interviewees, and an audio recorder. I also had a small, hand-held DJI pocket video camera that I always find useful for on-the-spot stuff. It came in handy several times, including when the bagpiping started playing before my “real” camera was set up. Sometimes this is how you have to do things on your own, with minimal equipment, giving it your best shot with the gear you have. Fancy gear is awesome, but so is the authenticity of what’s literally at hand, with what you can manage on your own.
In Portland, I had a stellar crew to film the event: my friends at ZP Productions. We were filming a monument symposium where people were gathering to hear talks about art and policy—and to argue over what to do with the city’s monuments. I hoped we'd be able to film breakout sessions where people were discussing monuments. I wanted on-screen drama! However, since the discussions were being assessed by researchers, they feared filming would skew people's responses. So instead we set up a "listening post" and invited people I recruited to come talk to us about monuments. Not unlike the Mount Rushmore vox pop interviews, but with professional lighting and support from a top-notch crew. Again, it was a self-selecting crowd—people who cared enough about monuments to show up to a symposium put on by a contemporary arts group at a community college on a beautiful fall day. (No bagpipes, but there was a President Lincoln impersonator, go figure.) People had all sorts of sorts of insights. And I met even more potential subjects to interview later.
Initially, I felt a little silly about wearing my “Ask-Me-about-Monumental-the-Documentary” cap, but it was a hit, and once again, helped legitimize this scrappy indie production.
Soon, I'll share more about how you can help support Monumental, the documentary. (It might involve the aforementioned baseball caps.)
For now, that's a wrap.
Erika
Previously in this series: Going Away to Come Back Home Again, Just Passing Through and Plain States. For even further reading: a 2023 dispatch from Mount Rushmore. Coming soon: A dispatch from Yellowstone!
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