Ever wanted to be a fly on the wall in Nixon's Whitehouse? Penny Lane's Our Nixon,' a riveting compilation of never before seen Super 8 home movies shot by the President's staff, is in theaters now.
In her first feature length documentary, Penny Lane takes audiences inside the Nixon White House through home movie footage compliments of three of his top advisors: H.R Haldeman, John Enrlichman and Dwight Chapin. The trio shot a remarkable 500 reels of film from 1969 to 1973, catching notable public events and intriguing private interactions that took place during Nixon's regime.
Through this all-archival documentary, Penny Lane constructs an interesting, complicated and intimate portrait of our 37th President through the eyes of his loyal staffers in Our Nixon. She spoke to us about the idea of company men, working with the Nixon library and why she hates the production process.
Tribeca: While you've been making documentaries for almost a decade, Our Nixon is your first feature-length film. How familiar with the Nixon administration were you before your starting making this documentary?
Penny Lane: I would say as familiar as you probably are. I had the knowledge of your average, college-educated person who took a few history classes. I was not an expert or obsessed or anything. It wasn't like I had always wanted to make a Nixon movie.
Tribeca: What challenges did you encounter while making a feature length documentary that were different from the challenges that come with making short documentaries as you had done in the past?
PL: The biggest one was that I was used to doing everything myself. And, you can I'm a good editor, I can do whatever. The biggest challenge was getting to the point of realizing that I didn't want to do everything myself. I guess I could have, but it wasn't going to be as good of a film as I wanted it to be unless I figured out how to be a director in a more traditional sense. I'd never done that before.
Because I'd never done that before, I'd also never dealt with raising the amount of money needed to marshal a somewhat substantial crew. In our case it was all post-production, but we still needed crew. There was a difficult period of time when I knew the people I wanted to be on the team but I hadn't yet raised the money to build the team. Without the team, I knew I couldn't make the kind of quality film that would attract investment. It was a dilemma.
We were lucky though in that we had to deal with uncertainty for only a few months for a lot of filmmakers, things are up in the air for years.
Tribeca: Did you ever turn to crowdfunding?
PL: We did. We had spent $18,000 to make the first round of video transfers so we did a crowdfunding campaign a couple months later to recoup that money and get back to zero. That was pretty early in the Kickstarter days, and I didn't have any friends who had used Kickstarter before. It was March of 2011, so it was over two years ago.
We raised $16,000, which was, at the time, a pretty significant amount of money on the platform. I mean, now people raise $1.25 million, so it wasn't the biggest deal in the world but for us it was crazy amazing. It was amazing, too, because the appeal wasn't as much about the money as it was about the viability of the project.
Yes, we paid ourselves back for this initial investment with that funding, but what it really did was a market test. We found out how many people were really excited about this film, and I don't think we would have had any way to know that unless we had thrown it out into the world and gotten the kind of response we got. We ended up meeting our executive producers because of the Kickstarter campaign through a lot of really early press and buzz. It wouldn't have happened if we hadn't done the Kickstarter.
Tribeca: I thought it was really fascinating that your team paid to make digital copies of the home movie collection from the Nixon Library to use the films in your documentary. Can you talk about your negotiations with the library? Were they at all apprehensive about what you'd reveal?
PL: Oh no, they wanted someone to do that. You know, someone's got to pay to have the stuff made accessible. It was technically in the public domain; it was just that there wasn't any funding from the federal government/national archives system to make every single thing that's ever come through their doors accessible. So they have all this material but the great majority of it has never been digitized. They rely on the interest of individual researchers to come and say, I want to digitize that film, because then the duplicate copy of that digitized film becomes available to the next researcher.
Tribeca: Have representatives from the library seen the film?
PL: Sure! The audio/visual archivist Ryan Pettigrew was the person we worked with the most, and he has definitely seen the film. The Nixon Library is part of the federal government; it's not they are Nixon partisans who are afraid of things. Also, what would they be afraid of in these home movies? They are hardly incriminating.
Tribeca: It was so interesting to watch Nixon at a wedding and making a phone call it seemed like he carried on a much more personal presidency than leaders today. How did you react to the home videos knowing what kind of interaction the public has with recent and current politicians?
PL: I don't think we get to see those kinds of images today. Barack Obama I follow on Twitter, but I don't really think it's him. There's kind of a pretense of that sort of personal access, but I don't think it's real.
As an artist, I have come to accept and embrace the idea that I'm more interested in finding things out than making fictional worlds.
Tribeca: Not a single
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Ever wanted to be a fly on the wall in Nixon's Whitehouse? Penny Lane's Our Nixon,' a riveting compilation of never before seen Super 8 home movies shot by the President's staff, is in theaters now. 
