IN THE NEWS

New York Times
Out on the Trail With an Informal, Playful George W.
Nov 3, 2002

New York Observer
Getting High on George
November 3, 2002

The Washington Post
Curious 'George': Documentary Finds the Candid in a Candidate
October 1, 2002

People
Bush Tracker; George W. Bush untamed!
Filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi captures the candid candidate
March 25, 2002 

The Weekly Standard
George W. Bush, Movie Star
A private screening of Alexandra Pelosi's forthcoming documentary
March 4, 2002  

New York Times
A Memoir Disguised as a Bath
May 9, 2002 

Newsweek
Bush and The Beast
Before he became warrior king, he was a clown-prince candidate
March 11, 2002

Time Magazine
Meet the President as The Cutup in Chief
Coming soon: a campaign documentary that has some Bush aides nervous 
Feb. 10, 2002

The Baltimore Sun
A new documentary will reveal a lighter side to President Bush
April 2, 2002

Austin American Stateman
A behind-the-scenes look at Bush
Film from campaign trail shows quirky, casual side of then-candidate.
 January 13, 2002

New York Times
Out on the Trail With an Informal, Playful George W.
Nov 3, 2002
By JAMIE MALANOWSKI

BIRD'S-EYE views take in the majestic panorama; worm's-eye views see the dirt. In late 1999, Alexandra Pelosi was a producer for "Dateline" when she wangled an assignment as the NBC News person attached to George W. Bush's presidential campaign, a reporter at the beck and call of all the anchors and correspondents and producers at all of NBC's network and cable news shows. This didn't exactly make Ms. Pelosi a worm, but it did position her close enough to the ground that she was able to take a long, hard look at a lot of grubby details of modern campaigning: the endless turkey sandwiches, the indistinguishable Best Westerns, the vast tedium entailed in covering, and indeed running in, an election whose victor becomes the most powerful person in the world.

Ms. Pelosi, fortunately, had the wit to bring along her own Sony TRV-900 video camera, which she used to keep a diary of the long campaign. After the election, she and her friend Aaron Lubarsky turned the tapes she had amassed over 16 months into "Journeys With George," a documentary that appears on HBO on Tuesday. The film offers views of strip malls and factory parking lots and reporters cracking wise and, best of all, a startlingly informal, seemingly unrehearsed picture of the current president of the United States.

It's not completely surprising that Ms. Pelosi, now 32, could make something interesting out of subjects others had found banal. She grew up in a political family. Her mother is Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic whip; her grandfather was a Maryland congressman and the mayor of Baltimore; her uncle was also mayor of Baltimore. Her childhood memories include long hours of licking envelopes and serving homemade hors d'oeuvres at fund-raisers. That upbringing gave her an appreciation for the nitty-gritty of politics, but it also inoculated her against the allure. In lobbying for the assignment, she said: "I told my bosses: `I grew up around this. I'm not going to get the Stockholm syndrome as easily as everybody else.' "

Maybe she didn't succumb to a syndrome, but she admits that she grew to like George W. Bush. "I had a great relationship with the guy," she said over lunch at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant last month. "And he's a total movie star, even though his politics make me sick." But they're really not a factor in the film. Instead, Ms. Pelosi, who is fast talking, always wears purple and doesn't hesitate to describe herself as wacky, comes across in the film as the mischievous student who teases the teacher, and who gets the teacher to tease back. "He's never met anyone like me, I can guarantee you that," she said. "No one has ever gotten in his face the way I did."

The payoff is a picture of Mr. Bush that even frequent news viewers will have seldom seen. Reporters have often commented on his easygoing manner, the charming jocularity that emerges, for example, in his fondness for bestowing nicknames. But let's face it: as President Bush, he's a formal chief executive. He's not as rigid as Richard M. Nixon, the yardstick of presidential stiffness, but he doesn't have that occasional loosey-goosey quality often seen in his father, and there are never any of the swingy verbal improvisations that were the hallmark of Bill Clinton. "Journeys With George" doesn't show George W. Bush developing strategy or working on his debate answers. But it sure does show him goofing around.

He mugs for the camera. He sticks his eye right in front of the lens. He rolls oranges down the aisle of the press plane. He teases Ms. Pelosi about her boyfriend. He asks her about the movie, and even names it ("How about `Journeys With George'?" he suggests. "You could spell it with a G.") At one point he shows up at a margarita party in the back of the plane. "My people!" he booms. He's holding a nonalcoholic beer, but in the moment we can see the ghostly outlines of the blender boy of margarita parties past. "It takes an animal to know an animal," he says, then quickly adds, "Not that three weeks before the election I'm saying I'm an animal."

History will be happy that Ms. Pelosi caught this side of Mr. Bush on tape. "I have known him for a long time, and I thought she really captured the George W. Bush I know, a friendly, good-natured guy," the CBS correspondent Bob Schieffer said in an interview. Of course, Mr. Bush never does anything really outlandish; he's the boss at the office birthday party, with that curious brand of informality that never relinquishes authority. He pats people on the back to show them he's a regular guy, not to invite a pat in return.

"George Bush is no dummy," Ms. Pelosi said. "He knew I was a TV producer and I had a camera rolling in his face. One of the main premises of the movie is to show how charming he was, how he made people feel like they had a personal relationship with him. I don't want to say he's manipulative, because that makes him sound like an evil, sinister guy. But politics is all manipulation, and he's a good politician. Look at the movie. He named it! He knew how he was coming across."

The oddest scene in the film is also the one Ms. Pelosi considers the most revealing. Mr. Bush finds her on the plane, filling out her ballot for the California primary. He plops into the seat next to her, and in the informal way typical of their encounters, he asks for her vote. But in this instance Ms. Pelosi isn't particularly playful in return; she tries to get him to make his case. She asks him questions about policies that protect the poor and middle class, the little guy. "I am the little guy," he says in return. "Have you ever seen me next to my brother?"

"I wanted to laugh in his face," Ms. Pelosi said. "You are the governor of Texas and your father was president. You are trying to sell yourself to me as the little guy? I kept giving him a chance to make his pitch, and he could never do it." At one point he tells her that if she votes for him, he'll give her a kiss, whereupon he leans in and pecks her cheek.

Sheila Nevins, the HBO executive vice president who acquired the film, said: "I thought that it was remarkable how she conveyed a future president in such a colloquial way. It made me respect the system - that she could go out there and get on a plane and take a man who'll potentially be president of the United States, and ask him questions and joke with him and say she might not vote for him and eat potato chips with him. It made me feel a little patriotic, in a way that was odd."

Ms. Pelosi said that she and Mr. Lubarsky struggled in editing the film, ruthlessly eliminating many of her favorite moments to keep the story moving. One scene that was dropped has been the subject of gossip among political insiders, she said. It came shortly after Ms. Pelosi fell getting on a plane and sprained her ankle.

"I was in so much pain," she recalled. Mr. Bush "came over and got down on his hands and knees, and he held my ankle in his hand, and he's like, `Heal, heal.' Jonathan Alter from Newsweek shot the scene with my camera.

"The urban myth is that Bush got on his hands and knees and started kissing my ankle. A lot of reporters will tell you it was the creepiest thing, and that they saw it with their own two eyes. To this day, people will say, `Remember that time Jonathan shot the footage of him kissing her foot?' And they're journalists!" Ms. Pelosi said she planned to include the scene on the DVD.

The news media in general does not come across that well in the film. The film catches the odd dynamic of two groups of people, the campaign and the media, bound together by antipathy and suspicion. And yet in a more fundamental way, they're just people who have to work together. The relationship is best caught in a sequence where Mr. Bush is said to have lied to a reporter about a D.W.I. conviction many years before, which sets off a frenzy among the press corps. "In the morning, it's feast, feast, feast, the buzzards are feasting on the meat," Ms. Pelosi said. "And by the end of the day, it's, `Let's have a margarita and eat some cake because it's Laura Bush's birthday party.' "

Although the film makes it seem that Ms. Pelosi had a fairly jolly time on the campaign trail, the experience, in fact, soured her on political reporting, and led her to quit her job. "The love affair I had with journalism died on the campaign," she said. "It's just all the stuff I saw, all the times that you would see someone cutting corners or stealing someone's story, or when you see your best friend leaning over your shoulder and looking at your writing, and then you hear her on the phone reporting it."

But Ms. Pelosi hasn't abandoned political reporting altogether; she's hoping to produce a documentary about the 2004 election from the Democratic side. The idea is to focus not on one candidate but the whole field. "I want to do more of a deconstruction of the political process, and just examine what a person has to go through in order to become president," she said.

Ms. Pelosi has received a generally positive response so far, although audiences at film festivals in San Francisco (her hometown) and TriBeCa (near her current home in Greenwich Village) objected to what they considered an overly friendly portrayal of Mr. Bush. The day after a screening at the Library of Congress, Ms. Pelosi walked through the halls of Congress with her mother. "Republicans walked up and said, `You're going to get Bush re-elected.' And Democrats walked up and said: `Good going, girl. You got him.' For some, it confirms their suspicions of him as a frat boy. Others say it humanizes him."

Her colleagues in the news media have turned out at screenings; their response, she said, has been enthusiastic. "I'll tell you how impressed I was," Mr. Schieffer said. "I had never met Alexandra, and the day after I saw the film I called Andrew Heyward, the president of CBS News, and told him we ought to hire her. I'd stay out of her way and tell her to go out and cover the next campaign with that little camera, and call us once a week and tell us what she got."

And the subject himself? Ms. Pelosi said she saw the president at a White House barbecue this summer, and he greeted her warmly. "He said, `Congratulations on your movie.' And I said, `Have you seen it?' And he said, `Everyone at the White House who's seen it just loves it.' "

NEW YORK OBSERVER
Getting High on George
November 3, 2002
by Jason Gay

He's a Republican, she's a Democrat. He's a little bit country, she's a little bit rock 'n roll. He's the son of the 41st President, she's the daughter of the House Democratic whip. But the reason George W. Bush and New York filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi fell for each other and became, in the Nov. 5 HBO documentary Journeys with George, the most incongruous cinematic couple since Dennis Hopper met Isabella Rossellini was that they both knew what it meant to be laughed at.

The courtship began a couple years back, when Mr. Bush was the governor of Texas and Ms. Pelosi was a producer riding the Bush campaign plane for NBC News "keeping the seat warm until Brokaw shows up." The girl had wavy brown hair and purple glasses, talked faster than a kindergartner high on Cocoa Puffs, spouted whatever was on her mind, slyly dated a Newsweek reporter and, finally, numbed by the lifeless grind of canned-shit campaign events, began shooting her own video with a handheld camera.

The guy? He found the loudmouthed girl and her camera amusing, and though he never forgot she was The Enemy, he charmed her back, teased her about "Newsweek man" and served as her confidante when she found herself out of favor with her media colleagues after she herself got entwined in a press leak. In one of Journeys with George's best scenes, Mr. Bush tries to get Ms. Pelosi back in the good graces of her fellow reporters by putting his arm around her after the boys on the airbus shun her. "When they see me talking to you, they are going to act like your friends again," Mr. Bush says. "But these people aren't your friends."

It wasn't Tracy and Hepburn. But there was something.

"People have asked me, 'What was it between the two of you?' " Ms. Pelosi said the other day in her purple-bathed Greenwich Village apartment. It was an early afternoon, and the 32-year-old was wearing a black sweater, a checkered black-and-white miniskirt and boots. "Was it because you came from a political family and you knew the political language? Was it because you were a liberal and he was a conservative?"

Nope. "As far as I was concerned, he liked the fact that I could say things no one else could say to him," she said. "I was really irreverent, and he liked that. But the other half was: He knew they were all underestimating me just the way they were underestimating him.

"There was this weird identification going on. All the reporters used to laugh at Bush, and he knew it. He let them laugh. Then all the reporters used to laugh at me, and he used to watch them laughing at me, and he would pull me aside and say, 'Don't let them win.'"

George W. Bush won. He went to the White House, and Ms. Pelosi went back to New York and, to the chagrin of many around her, quit her job at NBC News to make what she calls her "home movie." As Ms. Pelosi and co-director Aaron Lubarsky toiled in her living room, her campaign-kennel buddy became her wartime President. For a while, he was doing a lot better than she was. Ms. Pelosi was paranoid that at any minute the White House or NBC was going to kick down the door and demand her videotape, and she and Mr. Lubarsky would wind up showing Journeys with George only to friends. "We used to say we were going to have a super screening - - for all the supers on the block," she said.

But NBC and the White House played nice, and HBO hurricane Sheila Nevins snapped up Journeys with George. And even though Ms. Pelosi still calls it a "home movie," she is a filmmaker now. There was a premiere for her on Oct. 29 at the Paris Theatre near the Plaza Hotel, and a party at Brasserie 81/2 on West 57th Street. There is currently a line of TV executives dangling offers for her to cover the 2004 campaign; someone even pitched her a talk show. She has spent nearly a year lecturing in front of journalism classes and traveling the world. The French adored her. The French Barbara Walters, asked her: "So, you are Bush's girlfriend?"

Girlfriend has had a better recent couple of months than Boyfriend. Ms. Pelosi doesn't identify with Mr. Bush politically and never did. She'll often say, "I really like George Bush, but his politics make me sick" though reporters chop off the "sick" part, leaving only "I really like George Bush" and driving her crazy. She looks at him now that guy who once fogged up her lens in an endless series of juvenile facial mugs navigating a tumultuous world, and admits she is worried.

But she's stuck to him; they are linked forever. Though Ms. Pelosi insists that Journeys with George is not a film about George W. Bush, but rather a film about her experience in the campaign pack, she thinks about him all the time. More often than not, she finds herself defending him, as she did a couple weeks back at Oxford University in England.

"Here's the definition of irony," Ms. Pelosi said. "Alexandra Pelosi, the House Democratic whip's daughter who dropped out of high school, is lecturing at Oxford apologizing for George Bush. All I did was apologize for him. Even though my mom, that very week, was on the floor railing against going to war with Iraq, I had to stand there and say, 'He's a lot smarter than people give him credit for being because watch how clever he is at exploiting the relationship with reporters. There is some real genius at that.

"The people around him, the Ashcrofts and the Cheneys and the real evil Republicans of the world, they scare me. But Bush I think he's just this nice guy who believes his own compassionate conservatism. I didn't think of him as, like, that evil guy. You go to places in my neighborhood or places in San Francisco, where I'm from and people are like, You should be ashamed of yourself for saying anything nice about the guy. But I just don't think of him as pure, concentrated evil. I think of him as a person."

Alexandra Pelosi paused. "Isn't that scary?"

Then there's the media.

It was Oct. 25. Ms. Pelosi was sitting on her purple couch when the telephone rang. She picked it up.

"What?" she said into the phone. "Oh my God. I didn't have the TV on."

She turned on her TV to MSNBC. Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife and daughter had died in a plane crash in Minnesota. Wellstone had been an ally to her mother, the California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. He was one of the good guys in politics, Alexandra Pelosi said.

As a map of the crash site appeared, an analyst on MSNBC began talking about the ramifications of Mr. Wellstone's death upon the Senate.

"Oh God, they are talking about the politics of it," Ms. Pelosi said. "It's so amazing. Who's going to run? That's so funny. It takes them five minutes to start asking who's going to run. So crass.

"This is why I am not a journalist!" Ms. Pelosi said. She was practically shouting. "I hate this! A man died. Who's going to win the Senate seat? What's it going to do to the balance of power?"

When Ms. Pelosi left Dateline to join the Bush campaign pack, a producer from a rival network came up to her early on and said, "Kid, I have been doing this for 20 years. Just do what I do." She went to the events, wrote down what Mr. Bush said, fed the tape to New York. Every day. "That's just the way its done," she said. "And no one has tried to do anything else.

"All the romantic notions I had about journalism died on the campaign trail," Ms. Pelosi said.

So she broke out her own camera and shot her footage. She showed it to correspondents and suggested NBC run it as part of their campaign coverage. NBC was not interested. "I think they thought the material would make Bush look silly if taken out of context," she said. "Which it would have, probably.

"Network television is not about nuance," Ms. Pelosi continued. "You don't have enough time to explain, to give it context. It's just two minutes of greatest hits from the road."

Some people at NBC were encouraging; some weren't. It was frustrating, but now she understood. "They didn't have a place for it," she said. That was why she decided she was going to leave and make her own movie.

She pulled it off. Journeys with George has become the breakout archival piece from the 2000 campaign; it's The Boys and the Girls on the Bus. Ms. Pelosi is no Theodore H. White, and Journeys may have a marshmallow center the filmmaker herself said, "There's not a moment of substance in this movie", but it will hold up over time a lot better than mostly everything else from 2000. And both the White House and NBC felt O.K. about it.

"Alexandra is a talented reporter and worked incredibly hard for NBC News," an NBC spokesperson said the other day.

If success on her own terms was a vindication for Ms. Pelosi, the time away from the media grind (or at least not within the media grind; she'd been interviewed a billion times) offered perspective. She went on the road and spoke to J-school naïfs, and sometimes she torched her old business but she discovered that wasn't really her, either. Media-bashing was easy, she decided. She just wanted students to be more clear-eyed about what they were getting into. Especially if they were getting into television.

"The thing they don't teach you in journalism school is that corporate television is a business," she said. "You have these aspirations of being a muckraking journalist those dreams aren't going to come true in network television. I have a lot of respect for some people at NBC and their journalism, but every day is a fight and it's always going to be a fight." Journalism students, she said, don't "realize that corporations own the news outlets, and it's a business, and they're selling every story you put on television."

Nevertheless, she wanted back in. A Presidential campaign pack was a weird reality, but Ms. Pelosi found the documentary-filmmaking scene equally strange and cliquish. Audiences chided her for not going after Mr. Bush enough. They wondered why she wasn't taking a stronger stand.

"On the campaign trail, I was sort of like, 'Oh, journalism stinks,'" Ms. Pelosi said. "Then I went into the documentary world with all the open-minded liberal tree-huggers, and I was like, 'That's what it's all about? You have to starve and have nobody see it? Documentary is now a code word for 'boring, righteous and couldn't get funding. That's what people think. If it was good, it would be a three-part series on ABC. If it was good, it would be a Frontline."

Documentary filmmakers are doing "some really good things," she said. "But no one is going to look at me as being an outsider, because I worked within the corporate media. And my mom is the House Democratic whip, so no one is ever going to say, 'You go, girl you're one of us. They think I'm one of them.

"The minute Ari Fleischer went on CNN and endorsed my movie, it destroyed any career I would've had as a grassroots outsider à la Michael Moore," she said. "Michael Moore will always be the outsider, because that is his shtick. I couldn't get away with that. If I stand in front of 30 Rock and throw stones at them, You corporate-media giants, you are evil! Why won't you let me in? they'll be like, 'C'mon in, Alexandra. Wanna be on Conan?'"

She had come full circle. She realized that she wanted to work within the system, try to fix it, and not shout from the sidelines. She had tried to become an outsider, only to discover that she was an insider.

"I have to go back to working for The Man," she said. "I have debated back and forth the merits of network television. What NBC has that I don't have in my living room is an audience. What HBO has is an audience. You can do the starving-artist documentary thing, but you're preaching to the choir. The film-festival thing, it's just not me. I am not a guerrilla filmmaker. I don't want to be. I want to be a player.

"So I am going to go back."

Now she was prepping her return. There was interest from the networks and from cable, she said. NBC was in the mix. She didn't have an agent; she was trying to do the deal herself.

HBO was like a hot boyfriend, it'd made everyone take notice.

"I got the hottest guy in town," she said. "Everyone was like, 'What's going on with her?'"

As for what Presidential campaign Ms. Pelosi would chronicle, that wasn't set, either. But she figures there won't be any shortage of takers.

"They're all going to try and use me," she said. "They're going to think, Ah, we'll get the little rube in here and we'll make ourselves look good."

"What they're forgetting," she said, "is that they are getting my mouth."

Then there was her guy. He'll always be Her First.

She's seen him once. Representative Pelosi took her daughter to the Congressional barbecue this summer, and when President Bush saw Alexandra, he told her, "We're all very proud of you here."

She asked him if he'd seen Journeys with George. "He said, 'Everyone who's seen the movie has loved it," she said. "That wasn't an answer to the question."

It was like old times. She asked him if she could come along in '04. He laughed.

She sees a different man. Mr. Bush isn't mugging for the camera these days. It's made her think differently about Journeys with George, what it says about the President.

"This movie is a period piece," Ms. Pelosi said. She was sitting in a back booth at Joe Jr.s on Sixth Avenue and 12th Street; she had a vanilla shake and a plate of fries. "It's a totally different place and time. It's a performance of sorts. Watch George Bush: the early years! Watch George Bush seduce the reporters so they will write nice stories to get himself elected. It was pre-state of world affairs."

She talked about him like an old boyfriend. She was, after all, a devotee of what she called "the Janet Malcolm theory" that all journalism is the art of seduction.

"You come in, you're all charming and nice to me and you get me to spill my guts, and even though we have all been in love and had our heart broken, we still go back for more, because we're suckers," she said. "Right? The relationship I had with Bush was like the great - he was seducing me and I was luring him in, and he was trying to seduce me, and it was this beautiful dance. And what's so revealing about it is that it shows we had to live off each other. He lived off the media, and the media lived off him. We needed each other."

Did she think George W. Bush had the capacity for growth?

"I'm not a pundit!" Ms. Pelosi said. "I don't know! All I know is that I spent a year and a half with him when he was running for President."

Really, they couldn't be more unlike each other. It's an impossible match.

She voted for Bill Bradley.

"I'll say this about George Bush: Every night that Jay Leno and David Letterman used to make fun of him, he'd be like, 'Let them laugh. I'm going to be their President. 'Who got the last laugh? He knew something that Al Gore didn't know," said Alexandra Pelosi.

"You've got to let people laugh at you."

The Washington Post
Curious 'George' Documentary Finds the Candid in a Candidate
Tuesday, October 1, 2002

George W. Bush's bus had broken down in South Carolina a few days before the primary. The Texas governor hitched a ride on the press bus and began bantering with NBC News producer Alexandra Pelosi, who always had her home video camera ready.

Pelosi -- with her purple wardrobe, purple glasses and saucy questions about Bush's mood and diet -- was the black sheep of a buttoned-down press corps. Bush could relate, and he had taken to playing along.

"Let's be serious," Pelosi said after discussing bologna sandwiches. "If you were a tree, what tree would you be?"

"I'm not. I'm a Bush," he replied. As laughter rippled through the bus, Bush said, "You see, I'm a little quicker than you think, Alexandra," then gave himself a thumbs-up.

The words never graced a yard sign or television commercial, but "quicker than you think" might well have been the slogan of Bush's 2000 presidential campaign. A documentary by Pelosi, which was shown at the Library of Congress last night and will air on HBO on election night, Nov. 5, revives the pre-war, pre-presidential days when Bush felt free to bug his eyes out, open wide and show off the Cheetos he was chewing, and parody his own stump speech. After one primary win, he spelled out V-I-C-T-O-R-Y as if it were Y-M-C-A.

Last night's audience -- mostly journalists, White House officials and Democrats from Capitol Hill -- applauded a scene that showed Bush coming to the back of the plane late one night and trying to make peace between Pelosi, who was complaining that there was too much noise, and the cameramen, who were just trying to enjoy what Bush called "a good, solid margarita." Mocking his own malapropisms, he said he wanted to "breach the rift." Another crowd-pleaser was Bush being led through the cabin wearing a black sleep mask and saying, "I can't hear you because I can't see."

At a time when the prelude to war in Iraq has pushed President Bush back to a 70 percent approval rating, the 76-minute "Journeys With George" hearkens to a time when smirks and Bushisms were nightly fare. Karl C. Rove, now Bush's senior adviser, is shown impishly nailing journalists with snowballs, then raising his arms in a little victory jig.

This series of raw flashbacks was possible only because Pelosi was not taken seriously. Pelosi shouted at Laura Bush to ask who she was going to vote for, interviewed a turkey sandwich and quizzed Bush about freezing his rear in New Hampshire, only she didn't say "rear." When competitors or campaign aides asked what she was doing, she would say jokingly, "I'm making a movie," and everyone had a good laugh.

So the campaign and most reporters did not object to her taping Bush when the staff had declared his remarks off the record, as was usually the case when he ventured into the press compartment of the campaign plane. Bush allowed her to film moments like his explication of the Texas wardrobe, including extra-tall boots "not for looks but for snakebites."

At the same time, Pelosi was doing her day job as NBC's constant presence in the Bush entourage, supplemented by correspondents and more senior producers who rotated in and out. Pelosi said she bought the camera on a lark and was just shooting for her own use, or perhaps for a few light segments to send back to NBC. Then one day Bush asked, "Now is this movie going to be called 'George and Alexandra'?"

"I don't know. What do you think it should be called?" she replied.

" 'Journeys With George'? Pretty good one, huh?" he said. "You could even spell it with a 'G,' " he added, drawing one in the air. Pelosi says this is when she knew she had a real film, although the HBO promotional material tries to evoke the charm of an amateur production by calling it "a home movie."

The documentary portrays Bush as comfortable with himself, good-natured after losses and savvy about the news media. Pelosi says that in an attempt to figure out if her footage would wind up on the nightly news, Bush asked whether she or NBC was buying the tapes. She was.

In one scene, Pelosi, who is the daughter of House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and who made no secret of her liberal politics, was talking to Bush about why she should vote for him. She asked about the hungry, the unemployed and the homeless. "Are you going to look out for the little guy?" she baited.

"I'm a little guy," he said. "Have you noticed? I'm about 5-11. My brother is 6 foot 3."

Pelosi said in an interview that she did not dwell on unflattering moments and omitted plenty of Bush's verbal cartwheels. But she acknowledges that the film will bolster some people's misgivings about the president's intellectual heft. Pressed about what the movie shows about Bush, she says, "You're going to get me in trouble."

Nevertheless, White House aides say they are convinced the film humanizes Bush, and one senior official ventured to predict that it would help him get reelected. Karen P. Hughes, part of Bush's "iron triangle" of top campaign aides, said it shows that he "enjoys having fun during downtime, which I think people will appreciate, and that he does not take himself too seriously, even though he takes his job seriously."

Sheila Nevins, HBO's executive vice president of original programming, is a liberal Democrat but said she found Pelosi's Bush to be charming. "I had thought he was an ogre," she said. "I didn't know he was so quick on the uptake."

Nevins said she doesn't think it's unfair to spotlight road-trip goofiness in wartime. "You can't hold someone responsible for what they did on their 10th birthday when they're 11," she said.

Bush occasionally gave Pelosi stage directions, and one time he grabbed the camera and began grilling her about her after-hours hand-holding with a Newsweek correspondent. "I'm a student of human beings. I've spent a lot of time looking at human beings look at me," said Bush, who loves keeping up with the personal lives of aides and reporters. "I can see a little chemistry there. You know what I mean by chemistry there?" He went on to predict Pelosi and "Newsweek man," as Bush called the correspondent, would hook up. "We're talking about a deeply romantic relationship," Bush said with a wink. "I am an optimist. I'm a uniter, not a divider."

The film offers several flashes of Bush's sharp edge, which the public rarely sees. With Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) still in the race, Pelosi brought up the chumminess of the press corps aboard "Straight Talk Express," McCain's campaign bus. She asked Bush if he thought any of his own press corps "has had the Kool-Aid yet."

"No, particularly when there was a collective wisdom that said I wasn't working hard enough to be the president," he said in a caustic reference to a series of stories about his light schedule.

Bush's skin looked thin when Pelosi asked him at a news conference about the record number of executions taking place in Texas. "You sleep at night knowing that everyone that has been sentenced to death on your watch was completely guilty?" she asked.

"Alexandra, let me put it to you this way: I'm sleeping safely -- soundly -- at night," Bush said icily. Then he ended the news conference with an arch of his eyebrows. "Thank you for the question," he said. "See you all later."

Bush often tries to make up after moments like that, and he had a hint of playfulness when he brushed off Pelosi later by saying, "I'm not answering your questions. Because you came after me the other day. You went below the belt."

But Bush whistled and led a cheer for a reporter who had learned his wife was pregnant, and Bush joined a midair birthday party for Pelosi. When the press corps briefly turned on Pelosi because of a misunderstanding late in the campaign, Bush restored her standing by calling her up to the front for a private chat. What the reporters didn't know was that he had talked to her about fair-weather friendship, and how important it is to know who you are.

Several professors who have viewed "Journeys With George" at film festivals said Pelosi bears damning witness to coziness between reporters and the campaign. Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, calls the film "chillingly revelatory about a lame press and a masterful team of managers of the press, including Bush himself."

"He arranges matters so that if you ask a tough question, you feel like a party pooper who's abusing your host's hospitality," Gitlin says.

Some regulars in the Bush campaign press corps said "Journeys With George" gives a distorted view because it looks like Bush was always hanging out with reporters. In fact, he rarely took questions after winning the Republican nomination. He stopped visiting the press compartment after newcomers would not agree to keep the exchanges off the record.

Pelosi, now 31, has several offers to make cinema verite renditions of the Democratic derby in 2004. She hopes to start the night of next month's elections, when "Journeys With George" begins showing on HBO. "One of the biggest obstacles I face in '04 is that everyone's going to take me seriously," she says.

Bush indicated during one late-night flight that his image had been transformed during the marathon from Iowa to New Hampshire and beyond. With 60 days left in the campaign, Pelosi asked him what had changed since she had first spoken to him a year earlier.

Bush, nursing a Buckler non-alcoholic brew, tried to deflect her with humor, as he often does when asked something serious. "We've actually had several primaries and I gave a couple of speeches," he said. "You know. Couple of Bucklers. My girls went to college. Rangers are in last place. There hasn't been any rain on the ranch, except for today. We got about a half inch, I want everybody to hear."

Pelosi asked again how he had evolved as a candidate. He said he was losing hair, and it was grayer. She asked a third time.

"I started off as, uh, a cowboy," Bush finally said. "I'm now a, uh, statesman."

2002 The Washington Post Company

People
Bush Tracker George W. Bush untamed! Filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi captures the candid candidate
March 25, 2002

See George W. Bush impersonate Elvis. See him gobble Cheetos and roll oranges down the aisle of a plane. See him drink a beer (nonalcoholic, of course) and cheerfully say of a throng of boozing passengers, "These are my people."

No, it's not Will Ferrell doing his best impersonation of Dubya as fratboy on Saturday Night Live. It's the President himself in Journeys with George, a much-buzzed-about new documentary about Bush's 2000 campaign for the White House. Catching the then governor of Texas in remarkably unguarded moments, the grainy 76-minute film is basically "a home movie," says Alexandra Pelosi, 31, who covered the campaign as an NBC news producer and shot the film entirely on her small $ 1,000 Sony MiniDV camcorder. "This is my home movie about my road trip with this man in his race to become leader of the free world." It is also an extraordinarily candid portrait of a politician who makes lots of funny faces and "looks like just another businessman goofing around on a trip," says critic Richard Roeper of Ebert & Roeper, a big fan of the film. "It's the most unvarnished look you'll ever get at George W." More remarkable still is that the woman who shot such unprecedented footage of the Republican candidate is a self-confessed "liberal Democrat" and the daughter of Democratic California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, 62, the House minority whip and the highest-ranking woman in Congress. Before Journeys' debut at the SouthbySouthwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, on March 8, there were reports that its evocation of Bush's hard-partying past worried White House staffers, who feared it played into his pre-Sept. 11 reputation as a lightweight. But Deputy Press Secretary Anne Womack says the White House isn't displeased. "It's just another example of what a good sense of humor [Bush] has," she says. "The President is not upset."

Others, however, are. "What can you expect but a hatchet job if it comes from the family of the most important Democratic woman in Congress?" asks a White House staffer who prefers anonymity. Pelosi denies her film was politically motivated, while her mother, who recently ran into Bush at the White House and mentioned her daughter's documentary, says the President "laughed and said he'd enjoyed her on the campaign trail. He was very warm and friendly about it."

The most fascinating character in Journeys just might be Pelosi, known for her loud purple outfits and pit-bull personality ("You're like a head cold," Bush jokingly tells her). Pelosi was the most extroverted of five children "in a very emotional, talkative Italian family," says her sister Christine, now 35 and a lawyer. Raised in San Francisco by Nancy and Paul, an investment banker, Pelosi grew up stuffing envelopes and helping out at Democratic fund-raisers. Even back then she was the one pointing a camera at relatives at family events.

After graduating from Los Angeles's Loyola Marymount College in 1991 and getting a master's in media studies at the University of Southern California, she worked as a reporter in Washington, D.C. A few years later, as an associate producer for NBC's Dateline, "she was extremely resourceful," says Josh Mankiewicz, a Dateline correspondent. "Once she starts working on something, she can't stop." In early 2000 an NBC news executive called to ask if she had any pets. When Pelosi answered no, NBC assigned her to cover the Bush campaign.

She took along her camcorder with the intention of making a film--"a video diary," she says, "with or without [Bush's] participation." Distant at first, Bush soon warmed to Pelosi, teasing her about her love life and allowing her to shoot him in informal moments; he even suggested the film's title.

Editing 70 hours of raw footage in her one-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment was another challenge, particularly after Sept. 11. "All of a sudden watching Bush roll oranges down the aisle of a plane felt wrong," says Aaron Lubarsky, 31, the film's editor and coproducer. They stuck with it and, says Lubarsky, produced a film "that has a certain innocence to it."

Ironically, the single Pelosi is guarded about her own image, preferring not to discuss a former fiance or other personal matters. Running her own production company since leaving NBC last year, she steers conversations back to her extraordinary home movie, which she hopes will be picked up by HBO. "It makes Bush look like a human being," she says. "He doesn't have the luxury of being able to goof around. It's too bad. I miss that Bush."

The Weekly Standard
George W. Bush, Movie Star A private screening of Alexandra Pelosi's forthcoming documentary.
by Matt Labash
March 4, 2002

NEW YORK It's Valentine's Day, and though I'm a married man, I'm standing on the sixth-floor landing of a Greenwich Village apartment building with a box of Russell Stover candy that's intended for a woman I've never met. I'm on a journalistic suck-up safari, and my quarry has warned me that I'd better not come empty-handed on such a hallowed day. (I almost brought a fruit basket, but it seemed so Connie Chung.) My reportorial blind date is with former "Dateline" producer Alexandra Pelosi, the 31-year-old daughter of California Democratic congresswoman and minority whip Nancy Pelosi. Alexandra may be on the verge of cinematic stardom. After following George W. Bush on the campaign trail for a year and a half, she quit her NBC job, formed her own company (Purple Monkey Productions), and culled hundreds of hours of candid trail footage, shot on her auto-focus Sony camcorder, much of it containing the future president of the United States monkeying around with reporters.

Her documentary is set to debut March 8 at the South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas. But it's already caused quite a stir. Relying on Pelosi friends who've seen it, Time magazine described scenes of Bush reverting to Deke-house form on the press plane: predicting that Pelosi's crush on another reporter would "result in a relationship that goes beyond hand-holding," bumping his way down the aisle while wearing a sleep mask, hoisting his non-alcoholic beer and pushing his way into a boozy press throng while declaring, "These are my people. It takes an animal to know an animal."

White House sources, understandably concerned that the president will look less than presidential, have begun sniping at Pelosi. They told both Time and the Washington Post that they were under the impression these sessions were off the record, a claim that taxes credulity since Bush is repeatedly filmed referring to her "documentary." He even went to the trouble of giving it a title--"Journeys With George"--which Pelosi ultimately used.

While Pelosi has shown portions of her film to several reporter friends, I am to be the first to preview the final version in its entirety. Though she has so far rebuffed screening overtures by everyone from USA Today to the "Tonight Show" (first television dibs go to her old colleagues at "Dateline" and the "Today Show"), she mysteriously allows me to talk my way in, though not without making my life miserable first.

After numerous hours of set-up work on the phone in which the deal is nearly done, she turns difficult. "I don't want you to have it yet," she says. She makes me repeatedly assure her that I'm not out to do a hit piece. She tells me that at least a dozen of her friends have nixed me, suspecting a writer from a conservative political magazine could be up to no good with the daughter of one of Congress's most liberal Democrats. ("The Weekly Standard?" exclaimed her sister. "Get out of it!")

When her advisers inform her that I once performed a knee-cap job on Rep. Patrick Kennedy, a personal friend of hers, she insists I call the story up on Nexis and read her all 3,500 words. "That's the meanest thing I've ever had read to me," she says. It all seems a fairly clever ploy on her part: play a manic babe-in-the-woods (even though we're in the same profession), put the reporter on defense until you crush his will to play offense, ensure that he is so beholden to you for granting him access that he writes a nice story. As I knock on Pelosi's door, my integrity (such as it is) already compromised, she continues the hazing.

"HOLD ON," says the raspy voice from behind the door, "I've got to turn my camera on." As a precondition for viewing her documentary, I've agreed, in a fit of postmodernism, to be filmed myself after a brief getting-to-know-you session, from which she will decide if I seem like the trustworthy type. No journalism is supposed to be committed during this trial period, but as her door opens, camera whirring, I reflexively reach for my microrecorder in a Mexican standoff. "Whip it out," she commands. "I'll show you mine if you show me yours." Unhappy that I, the hunter, have become the hunted, I ask her if she used that line on George Bush. ("Stop filming me, you're like a head cold," Bush barks at one point in the film.) She didn't, but easily could have.

For Pelosi is a force of nature, a large presence, a disco inferno. In her bathroom hangs a giant, mirrored disco ball, hardly an oddity considering the rest of her apartment decor: the Reform School Girls movie postcard on her refrigerator, the purple velvet couch ("It's aubergine," she corrects), the campaign-rally photo of her in a University of Texas cheerleader outfit and rubber Bush mask, the Soviet-era propaganda artwork that lines the walls. I compliment her digs, telling her that her apartment looks like a May Day parade at Studio 54. She rolls her eyes, then dictates what she assumes will be my lead, insinuating that she is a Greenwich Village pinko.

Swiping my recorder, as she'll do freely throughout the afternoon whenever she wants to stress a point, she says, "Testing. Is this thing on? I AM NOT the vast left-wing conspiracy. Okay? Bill Kristol, are you listening?" It's easy to see why the New York Times's Frank Bruni--himself just out with a Bush campaign book, "Ambling Into History"--describes Pelosi as "the unrivaled queen of the pack when it came to self-amusement and consequences-be-damned diversion." While his descriptions of her read like harmless throwaway color (she'd pretend to be the campaign's cruise director, when not heading off to Kmart to buy "festive underwear"), Pelosi bristles at such characterizations, saying she was extremely dedicated to her work. In her year and a half as NBC's on-the-bus Bush shadow, she didn't make it back to her Manhattan apartment once. And since she didn't have the luxury of going home, she says she was forced to purchase Kmart's "Hello Kitty" underwear. "It's all they had," she says, genuinely peeved.

"The pack is very serious," says Pelosi. "But I'm a person, not a pack." She is so pleased with this line ("I love it, it's really working for me") that she has made it one of her six permanent talking points, which she allows me to read off a printout that sits next to the Mac computer where she and her editor Aaron Lubarsky cut her film. It rankles Pelosi that journalists are so grossly reductive. "It's what you journalists do," she says, before remembering that she is one. "We take the most extreme thing, and make it look like the norm."

For this reason, she has taken special care not to embarrass anyone in what many expect to be a mockumentary. Promising that her film is not a "Bush blooper reel" (another of her talking points), Pelosi is adamant about not discussing what she left on the cutting-room floor. "You wanna see the movie that no one in the movie has even seen," she scolds, "And now you have the balls to ask for outtakes? You're sick in the head."

INSIDE, Pelosi's apartment is a constant bustle of activity. The phone rings incessantly, a groveling procession of journalists. "What do they want?" I ask, protectively. "A piece, baby," she says. "After you bend me over in your article, I've got to get a publicist." The rest of the calls are from her coterie of family and friends, many of whom are making sure their girl isn't getting worked over by me. It's a recurring theme all day. Even deciding where to eat sends her into existential crisis. We settle on her favorite neighborhood greasy spoon, Joe Jr.'s, since she fears if we go vegetarian I might portray her as one of "those crazy liberal chicks that can't find a man." I tire of all this journalism about journalism--it's starting to feel as though we're play-acting a Janet Malcolm essay. I ask her why she's so distrustful of journalists, considering she is one. "Because I know how much pain we cause," she says.

If publicists were advising Pelosi on how to optimize buzz, they would probably encourage her to cause more pain. What better way to attract attention and a deep-pockets distributor (which Pelosi still lacks) than spraying the leg of what many deem an unbearably respectable post-9/11 George Bush? But it's a fight she has no stomach for. "The truth is, in the end, I had a very nice relationship with [Bush], and that was the beauty of it. A girl who had been indoctrinated in the Democratic party, who'd been raised to believe Democrats were always right, actually developed a good relationship with this Republican son of a president whose father's positions my mom would go on the House floor and attack."

It may be her political lineage that explains her atypical respect for politicians. While Pelosi eschews serious policy debates ("there's not one moment of political substance in this movie"), she's not only the daughter of the House minority whip, but the granddaughter of a three-term mayor of Baltimore, Thomas D'Alesandro Jr. An old-school machine pol from Little Italy, he was every bit as colorful as Alexandra. According to Paul Taylor's book "See How They Run," at one press conference, after a reporter asked a hostile question by saying his news desk wanted to know, D'Alesandro pressed his ear to his own desk, pretended a secret was being imparted, then announced, "My desk wants me to tell your desk to go f-- itself."

In press notices, Pelosi's film has inevitably been twinned with Bruni's book. Each provides as vivid a picture of the at-ease towel-snapping merry-prankster Bush as has been drawn. But Bruni tends to assign Big Meaning to the smallest gesture or preference. Thus, Bush is a pop culture illiterate because he's unfamiliar with HBO's "Sex and the City." The fact that Bush regularly ate peanut butter sandwiches revealed that "he preferred the old to the new, the tried to the untested." Perhaps so. But maybe he just liked peanut butter sandwiches. Pelosi seems much truer to Bush's own spirit. "He's a simple guy. He hates to be psychoanalyzed. So I didn't psychoanalyze him," Pelosi says. "I don't think it means you're not qualified to be leader of the free world because you don't watch 'Sex and the City.'"

BY THE TIME I have cleared all the requisite hurdles and we have talked for several hours, Pelosi is ready to let the movie speak for itself. She pops the tape in her VCR, then slinks off to her room, all of a sudden the shy artist. There's nothing to be shy about. She has delivered a tautly paced, visual Boys on the Bus.

Complementing her bemused voiceovers is a supporting cast of weary newspaper hacks who perfectly distill the absurdity of the never-ending campaign. It's all here: the go-to-hell gastronomic excesses (one female reporter eats seven donuts in a sitting), the folksy wisdom of the American people (a voter moons Bush's whistlestop train tour with gluteal graffiti reading "Raise Minimum Wage"), the random acts of senseless celebrity (in one post-debate spin room, Erin Brockovich shows up for no apparent reason, while the Financial Times's Richard Wolffe sums up the scene as "a lot of really well paid people trying to convince a lot of other really well paid people that we know what's going on in ordinary people's minds").

But the main story is the playful jabbing between Pelosi and Bush. Bush adviser Mark McKinnon, the only member of Team Bush who has seen the film, and who loves it, says Pelosi was better than nearly anybody at drawing Bush out. "She didn't fit the typical profile of a Washington press corps member," he says. "She's purple, for one. [Pelosi often favors purple garb.] She's irreverent. She's the sort of person who's turned inside out--all the emotions are right there."

While everyone knows of Bush's penchant for dispensing nicknames like Pez candies, we have seen the real George W. only through a glass darkly--thanks to circumstantial necessity and his control-freak handlers. But Pelosi's full airing of his charm offensives is superior to previous accounts in the way eating chocolate is superior to reading about someone else eating it. Hopelessly lowbrow, Bush is blessed with matchless comic timing. We see him posing as a chirpy male steward, welcoming reporters on the plane, then angrily snapping at them when they ask for peanuts. We see him reprising his male cheerleader days, pretzel-ing his body into letters to spell "Victory" after Super Tuesday.

At one photo op, Pelosi accosts Karl Rove with her shaky hand-held camera. "Why are you lying?" she asks. "I'm not a journalist," Rove calmly replies. "I'm not a liar." Someone grabs the camera and turns the tables on Pelosi, prompting her to distance herself from other journalists by saying "I don't like these guys." "You don't like me?" Bush asks, incredulous, his head popping into the frame like a groundhog emerging from his hole, late to the party. "You call this objective journalism?"

A source of constant chiding was Pelosi's unrequited crush on Newsweek's Trent Gegax. Bush, ever the gossipy girl, one day turns the camera on Pelosi after noticing her taking a walk with Gegax. "It's none of my business what your private life is like," he winds up, "But let me ask you this question, was that just a social encounter with Newsweek man?" Pelosi replies that she was merely discussing Bush's tax plan with a fellow member of the press corps. "And you felt like you had to hold his hand in order to amplify the discussion?" he presses. Before she can gather her wits, he moves in for the kill: "Is it true you believe a person of your stature can go one solid week without bathing?"

For a year, Bush lugs Pelosi and company around the country, from a candlepin bowling meet-and-greet to a snowmobile photo op in New Hampshire. They often end up hating not only him for it, but themselves as well. "Mooooo," groans the Dallas Morning News's Wayne Slater, as he is again herded like cattle. At a sub-freezing airport rally in Iowa, the Houston Chronicle's R.G. Ratcliffe, who possesses a walrus mustache and a hangdog disposition, explains, "The only reason we're out here is in case Bush comes out, slips on the ice, and falls down. 'Cause we're vicious predators." From his airplane seat, Richard Wolffe once again nicely sums up the whole experience: "The great thing about this story is that we can pretend that it's somehow serious. Of course, it is serious. . . . But at the same time, most of our time is spent doing really stupid things, in stupid places with stupid people."

Through it all, Bush commands the stage in the back of the plane. He proudly models his western wear. He eats cheese doodles out of plastic airline cups. He lobbies Pelosi for her vote, telling her, "If I lose, you're out of work, you're off the plane, baby." When she asks why she shouldn't vote for someone who will protect the little guy, he earnestly declares, "I am the little guy. My brother's 6'3". Have you noticed that? I'm about 5'11"."

In an unexpectedly poignant moment on the plane, Bush tries to swim around Pelosi's queries as to what's changed since their odyssey started. He jokes that his daughters went off to college, that the Rangers are in last place, that his hair is turning gray. But she presses him for a serious answer. He cocks his head, joylessly holding his Buckler near-beer, and with a resigned sigh, unaware of what the next year will bring, he says, "Let's see, I started off as a cowboy. I'm now a statesman." All told, "Journeys with George" lets George be George, or as George as he can be, considering that he was withstanding the constant scrutiny of hypercritical observers whose best days at the office came when Bush announced that he wanted to eliminate trade "bariffs and terriers."

Pelosi helpfully suggests that a good talking point for me regarding her movie would be to say that "it's better than 'Apocalypse Now.'" It's not. But among its finest moments--and the entire film is almost nothing but fine moments--is one that she simply narrates. Pelosi had conducted a super-secret margarita-fueled straw poll among reporters in the back of the plane about who they thought would win the election. Most predicted Al Gore. Somebody leaked the results to outside media. Embarrassed by the disclosure, and fearful that it would cost them access to Bush, most of the pack refused to come near Pelosi the next day. But in an act of kindness, Bush did. In Pelosi's telling, he said, "When they see me talking to you, they're gonna act like they're your friends again. But these people aren't your friends. They can say what they want about me. But at least I know who I am, and I know who my friends are."

New York Times
A Memoir Disguised as a Bath
May 9, 2002

When Alexandra Pelosi quit her job as an NBC News producer after a year of covering George Bush's election campaign, she faced a decision: hire a contractor to redo her bathroom, or make a movie. "I decided to make the movie and do the bathroom myself," said Ms. Pelosi, 31.

Judging from the critics, she made a good choice. Ms. Pelosi, working with an editor, Aaron Lubarsky, and video she shot on the campaign trail, put together a 76-minute digital film called "Journeys With George." Using a computer in the living room of Ms. Pelosi's one-bedroom apartment on West 11th Street, they managed to make the behind-the-scenes documentary for $50,000. Variety magazine called it "casually astonishing."

"Journeys With George" will be shown at the TriBeCa Film Festival tonight and tomorrow (for information, www.tribecafilmfestival.com), and HBO plans to show it during election season in November.

The bathroom didn't turn out too badly, either.

A 9-by-5-foot space that used to be a drab gray and black, the bathroom now teems with collages, beads, photographs and other detritus from Ms. Pelosi's life. The tile and tub equivalent of a memoir, it is also testament to an artist's desperate need to procrastinate.

While Mr. Lubarsky was busily attempting to edit the film, which incorporates bits about Ms. Pelosi's love life, the demands of her NBC job and her growing distaste for turkey sandwiches, Ms. Pelosi was often in her bathroom, assembling an even wilder autobiographical tale.

"There were moments when I needed space to think," Ms. Pelosi said. "So I'd go into my bathroom and glue stuff."

This was not a typical bathroom rehab. The total cost, including a case of Sobo glue, was $50.

Hanging on one wall is a line drawing of Ms. Pelosi's native San Francisco. She watercolored it, then glued hundreds of tiny word magnets on the frame, straight up, sideways and upside down, forming a running ode to the city by the bay ("In the end all I need is to celebrate the impetuous movement and use that passion like hunger," to cite one snippet).

Next to one towel rack is a stuffed Mickey Mouse, its arms squished in the jaws of a trap (a symbol of NBC's competition with Disney-owned ABC). Next to the medicine cabinet are three cellphones, her incessant companions on the campaign trail, hushed for good.

One of the sliding shower doors is now a glass showcase for personal memorabilia. An employee health care card is glued next to an award Ms. Pelosi won for being the best psychology student in her high school class. There's also an identification card issued by the United States Congress, where Ms. Pelosi's mother, Representative Nancy Pelosi, is the House minority whip. Bits of broken tile salvaged from a beach near a former garbage dump in Brooklyn are interspersed with expired Macy's and G.M. credit cards, pennies, splashes of paint and a business card from Ms. Pelosi's days as a promotions director for KXLU-FM in Los Angeles. "My institutional identity," she said, "that's who I was to `the man.' "

The other sliding door is an explosion of purple. Mountains of creamy lavender splurt from valleys of darkest violet and swirl into silvery swales and grape-colored gorges.

Ms. Pelosi used shoe polish, crayons, magic marker and gooey dollops of paint. "Every color on here came labeled as purple,"' said Ms. Pelosi, who was wearing magenta eyeglasses and fuchsia sneakers. "And look how many different shades there are: some are blue, some yellow. I love it."

The first time her next-door neighbor Michael Dodson, an architect, saw her smearing shoe polish on her shower door he asked what she was doing, and Ms. Pelosi replied, "I'm making a movie."

"Alexandra's thing," Mr. Dodson said, referring to bathroom and film alike, "is like, I'm going to take anything that's here and put it up on the wall and see what happens. She gets cool stuff out of it."

What's with the purple color scheme? Ms. Pelosi cited the poem "Warning," by Jenny Joseph, and its famous opening line: "When I am an old woman I shall wear purple."

"It says, I'm going to do all these crazy irresponsible things when I'm old, but now we have to be conservative and adult," Ms. Pelosi said. "My point is, why wait?"

Across one wall she has stretched fishing wire and attached a dozen snapshots to it with alligator clips. "My 12 favorite people in the world," Ms. Pelosi said, reaching for one and yanking it off. "It's time to get rid of her," she said, declining to name her fallen friend.

Hanging above it all is a disco ball, its tiny mirrors catching the light from globes above the medicine cabinet and twinkling reflections of more artwork, purple bath salts, Funny Foam, a monkey-faced cushion with crisscrossed ribbons to hold toothbrushes and a bead-studded cubby that holds toilet paper.

"Where else would you put a disco ball?" Ms. Pelosi asked.

Newsweek
Bush and The Beast
Before he became warrior king, he was a clown-prince candidate. A look back at a work in progress.
By Howard Fineman
March 11, 2002

The soon-to-be-released documentary 'Journeys with George' offers an inside look at George W. Bush's presidential campaign.

If you want to be president, you have to give good plane. You have to pacify, if not win over, the media horde that travels with you. As the 2000 campaign began, George W. Bush kept his distance from a group he privately called "The Beast." Though he was gregarious by nature, his father's experience and his own brief career in Texas had taught him to avoid journalistic close encounters. But aloofness was not an option after New Hampshire, where John McCain yakked his way to victory in a bus called the Straight Talk Express. The ever-competitive Bush realized he had to open up-not just to match McCain, but to outmaneuver Al Gore, whose press relations were testy at best.

HOW TO PACIFY THE Beast? Bill Clinton had done it in 1992 with endless games of hearts and late-night policy gabfests that mesmerized writers with the manic reach of his mind. Bush, true to his own heritage, did it by becoming the clownish but calculating social chairman of a fraternity he had never wanted to join. He charmed people he didn't trust, played the fool for laughs and lowered expectations, and mastered the dynamics of a foreign culture: fuselage journalism. In exchange, he expected the fraternity to avoid nasty or unexpected questions. When they asked them anyway, he would freeze them out with a smirk or a dagger stare-until he freed them from double-secret probation with a smile and a warm embrace. Overall, Bush got decent coverage-too decent, in the eyes of the Gore campaign.

Given the monumental challenges he faces now, it may seem silly to look back to the Bush campaign plane-full of cranky reporters and day-old turkey sandwiches-for clues to his strengths and shortcomings as a leader in crisis. But, in fact, the president we see today, the one with the lofty approval rating and the frustrated political foes, was present in chrysalis in 2000, and can be seen in two retrospective exhibits that open this week.

One is a book called "Ambling Into History" by Frank Bruni, The New York Times's first Bush man; the other a documentary film called "Journeys With George" by Alexandra Pelosi, a former NBC producer who assigned herself the additional task of chronicling the campaign with her digital camcorder.

SHREWD HANDLING
Political charm comes in many forms. As Bruni and Pelosi vividly show, Bush's gift was, and is, a preternatural sense of the room-an ability to suss it out and win it over, or at least survive it unscathed. With dead-reckoning eyes for telling details, the two Gen-X journalists document how the candidate shrewdly handled his reporters even as they constantly wondered (to themselves, if not in their stories) whether the guy had a brain in his head. The outsider seems to get it from the start. "As a politician, I think he's much smarter than people give him credit for," says Richard Wolffe, a Brit from the Financial Times, to Pelosi's camera. Bush administered the schmooze, big time. But he did it with a conspiratorial wink that made the theatrics more palatable to his jaded audience. As reporters climbed aboard, he would greet them, flight-attendant style, with trays of soft drinks. He would whisper unsolicited advice about their love lives, and inquire about who had stayed up late, and why, in the hotel bar. After a second (and last) primary loss, he had himself paraded through the plane with his sleeping blindfold on, in a parody of self-mortification.

Winning big the next week, Bush became the prep-school cheerleader he once was, twisting himself into body letters that spelled out victory. Behind the showmanship was a touch of steel, and arrogance. You played by house rules or not at all. At one press conference, Pelosi shot him a tough question about the record number of executions he'd approved in Texas. "How did he sleep at night?" she asked, in a moment captured in her film. His eyes narrowed into slits of anger. "I'm sleeping safely, soundly, at night," he snapped. On the plane, he found his way back to her seat. "I'm not answering your questions," he said, leaning toward her camera with an air of (mostly) mock menace. "You went below the belt." He ignored her for several news cycles. Bush knew how to hang a lantern on his biggest problem, which was his penchant for mangling the English language in ways that made it seem he didn't have a clue, let alone a life of the mind. If he botched a line at a campaign stop, he'd get on the airplane intercom and jokingly repeat it-in worse form. Bruni was shocked by Bush's ignorance of popular culture, and of much else besides the business at hand. But challenged to trade reading suggestions, Bush recommended a thriller Bruni found enthralling.

AN 'UNDERNOURISHED INTELLIGENCE'
This, plus his ability to "make cutting, cunning observations," were among the indicia Bruni found of "an ample if sometimes undernourished intelligence." Bush's gaffes usually were committed when he was nervously dealing with a topic he had yet to master, of which there were many. The flip side, Bruni observes, was the authenticity he inadvertently conveyed. And, after Clinton, a glibness deficit was not a bad thing.

Whatever else he lacked, Bush had a Ph.D. in social emotions. Though Bruni kept his intellectual distance and wrote his share of tough pieces, Bush charmed him with simple gestures, asking about his dad, halting a press conference when he spotted the Times man fumbling with a balky tape recorder. Bush's dealings were more complex with Pelosi, a pure-bred San Francisco liberal (a daughter of Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi) who debuted on the plane dressed head to toe in purple. If he could win her, he'd win them all.

So Bush went to work, waiting for a crucial moment to make the sale. It came when an informal onboard poll she had conducted-showing that most of the plane expected a Gore win-found its way into the papers. The journalists, fearful the story would cost them access, ostracized her. Her only friend: the candidate, who made a show of embracing her. "When they see me talking to you," he tells her, "they're going to act like they're your friends again." Bingo. That was the moment, Pelosi says in "Journeys With George," when she decided that, while she liked journalism, she "didn't have the stomach for the cannibalism." Saint George hadn't slain The Beast, but he was taming it, one reporter at a time.

Time Magazine
Meet the President as The Cutup in Chief
Coming soon: a campaign documentary that has some Bush aides nervous
February. 10, 2002

George Bush is a careful custodian of his image. It's fine to snap a photo of him without a tie as he works on his ranch, but photographers have been prevented from snapping him with his tie loosened. So the premiere next month at an Austin film festival of a feature-length movie that depicts Governor Bush merrymaking with journalists aboard his presidential campaign plane in the fall of 2000 may not get a thumbs-up from the Commander in Chief. "These are my people," says Bush, who is seen wading into the boozy throng's cocktail hour as the press corps whips up margaritas in the back rows of the 757. "It takes an animal to know an animal," Bush proclaims, to the whir of a blender. "And I'm not admitting I'm an animal, with 60 days to go in the campaign." The ex-tippler doesn't break his sobriety, but he is filmed doing something else that other photographers were forbidden to capture: drinking a nonalcoholic beer with the gusto of a man who has downed the real thing in his day.

How did someone film that scene and hours more of Bush at his most relaxed, when the rest of the press corps was told Bush's back-of-the-plane antics were "off the record"? The answer comes in one of the early scenes of Journeys with George, the video by former NBC producer Alexandra Pelosi, who is the child of Nancy Pelosi, the new House Democratic whip. At a New Hampshire rally in the fall of 1999, Pelosi jokes to a fellow reporter about their colleagues, "I hate these people." Suddenly, Bush is in the camera frame. "Why do you hate me?" he mistakenly asks. For the next 18 months of the campaign, Bush was drawn to Pelosi's camera with an intensity that almost matched his dislike for the big, imposing network ones. In front of them, he had to work, but when the red light was lighted on Pelosi's Sony handheld, that was fun. Even on the night of his loss in Michigan, Bush was mugging for Pelosi, wearing a sleeping mask and bumping his way down the plane aisle.

Unlike The War Room, which chronicled the back-room intensity of Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, the Pelosi video does not pan across the full landscape of the campaign. Cut down from hundreds of hours of footage and put together in her New York City apartment, what it does capture is a never-before-seen view of the cutup former Deke fraternity president who, friends and supporters always boasted, was such fun in close quarters. If Americans were surprised that Bush at war was so different from the man they saw before Sept. 11, they are likely to be just as amazed now at the campaign trickster. Is the somber man who consoled a nation at the National Cathedral days after the attacks the same guy who walked the aisles wearing a neck pillow, asking Pelosi for her vote? More Jonathan Winters than John Wayne, Bush can't pass the camera without twisting his face in on itself or striking a pose. Often the Governor provides mock counseling to the filmmaker on her careening romance with another member of the press corps. "I predict that you ... will have a relationship that goes beyond hand holding," he says of the fling. Bush never leaves PG-13 territory, but that has not kept the White House from fretting about the movie. Former campaign media adviser Mark McKinnon persuaded Pelosi to show him a copy. Afterward, he sent White House counselor Karen Hughes an e-mail saying there was no great damage. Late-night comedians and columnists are likely to have a different view, though, using the video to open up a new season of poking fun at the Commander in Chief as a fraternity goof. Clips are certain to find their way onto the Internet to provide a bright contrast to the square-jawed Bush who is trying to fight terrorism. "The Europeans will love this," chuckles one Administration official.

But some senior advisers are a good deal more concerned, claiming Pelosi, who now has her own production company, broke an agreement with the campaign. "She promised then Governor Bush and looked him in the eye and said it was for personal use," says one. "It is disappointing that she gave her word and didn't keep it." Pelosi says the conversations she had with Bush about her filming are in the movie, which speaks for itself.

Those who have seen it say the President was a willing participant, referring often to how the movie will make a "lousy documentary" and even coming up with the title himself. He asks what the movie will be called and then offers his own suggestion. "Journeys with George," he says, adding mysteriously, "You know, you can spell it with a G."

The Baltimore Sun
A new documentary will reveal a lighter side to President Bush
By Ellen Gamerman
April 2, 2002

WASHINGTON — The scene: George W. Bush, the Republican front-runner for president, has just been trounced in the New Hampshire primary. The day after, he boards the campaign plane that he must now share with the news media. Closeup on Bush approaching a cabin full of reporters.

"It's a beautiful experience seeing you all this morning," Bush announces, his Texas drawl fairly dripping with irony. A handheld camcorder zooms in on him, and he peers back at the woman handling the camera. He's not interested in reflecting on why he lost. He wants to talk about whether she's got a hangover.

"Did you have too much to drink last night?" he teases.

If George W. did reality TV, this would be it. A new documentary, the product of home-movie-style footage shot by a former NBC producer in her spare time, shows off the behind-the-scenes Bush that his handlers preferred not to display. Instead of the candidate placed in statesmanlike settings, here is the Bush who goofs and wisecracks, who gossips and slugs non-alcoholic beers — the guy some Americans glimpsed but never saw on a big screen, in Technicolor.

Now they will.

The first-time filmmaker behind it all is Alexandra Pelosi, the product of a liberal political dynasty who spent a year training her digital camcorder on the scion of a very different sort of political family. The result is "Journeys With George," a 76-minute documentary about the manipulation of a campaign, the off-duty manner of a candidate and the life of a press pack.

HBO is finalizing a deal to air the film before the fall elections, after a limited release in theaters in New York and Los Angeles next month.

"I got to know the president well," Pelosi, 31, said in a recent interview, just before her movie's debut at a film festival in Austin, Texas. "That was my job as a journalist. But nothing I learned about him ever ended up on the nightly news. That's why I made this movie."

And what exactly did she learn?

"That he's a baloney-and-Chee-tos-eating matchmaker," she said. "It's the kind of silly insight you get on a candidate from that kind of access (during a campaign) that you don't get to share, because you'd be breaking some unspoken code."

Pelosi describes Bush as a man "really comfortable in his own skin." And, indeed, out of the public eye, the candidate seems far less guarded than how he appeared to many Americans in his tightly scripted campaign events in 2000.

Bush urges Pelosi to "make a little whoopee with the tequila drinkers" among the pack of journalists carousing in the back of the campaign plane and encourages her in a crush on a reporter he dubs "Newsweek man" ("I can see a little chemistry there," he says. "You know what I mean by chemistry?").

He chomps junky snacks fit for a teen-ager, teases reporters about their bathing habits, imitates Elvis, mocks his own syntactical errors and provides plenty of appreciative laughter for the jokesters among the press corps.

The White House has said little publicly about the film, though aides have complained that Pelosi had led the campaign to believe that her footage was for personal use only, not for public consumption. And they contend that her footage should remain off the record.

But Pelosi counters that Bush and his key advisers knew all along that she was working on a documentary; her film even includes a scene in which the candidate muses about the film's title.

Pelosi said she never intended to produce a Bush "blooper tape." But Bush critics may see in her film reminders of the one-time frat boy who they thought lacked presidential stature during the campaign. During one alcohol-fueled press party on the campaign plane, the film shows Bush saying of the partyers: "These are my people. It takes an animal to know an animal."

But in "Journeys With George," Bush is not the only lead. Instead of being part of the film's background, as in traditional journalism, Pelosi shares the spotlight herself.

She assumes a leading role in her documentary, loud-mouthing her way down the campaign trail with raspy-voiced zingers, commandeering Bush's attention with the force of her outsized personality.

Bush and Pelosi — with her love of zany purple outfits and her occasional dance interludes at campaign rallies — make an unlikely pair. But both actually have one life-shaping force in common: Politics runs in their families' blood.

Pelosi's grandfather, Thomas J. D'Alesandro Jr., was mayor of Baltimore, as was her uncle Thomas J. D'Alesandro III. Her mother is Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat who now serves as House minority whip — the highest-ranking woman in the House.

The youngest of five children, Alexandra Pelosi never strayed far from politics. Democratic presidential candidates paid house calls to her mother and father, Paul, an investment banker, who moved the family to San Francisco just before Alexandra was born. The children attended Democratic conventions and helped their mom's campaigns.

Pelosi calls the movie an "accidental documentary." At first, she says, she was just playing around with her Sony miniDV camcorder. But soon she got hooked on the material, particularly the territory familiar to any child of politics: the line between the public and the private person.

"Because I come from a political family, I understand being in the public eye and being a human being and how much of yourself you can share and how much you should withhold from the media," she said. "I was drawing that out."

Austin American Stateman
A behind-the-scenes look at Bush Film from campaign trail shows quirky, casual side of then-candidate.
By Ken Herman
January 13, 2002

NEW YORK -- Coming soon to a film festival near you: One woman's "home movie" about her 18-month road trip with the man who would become leader of the free world.

From June 1999, when George W. Bush announced his presidential bid in Iowa, until he took the job Jan. 20, 2001, NBC producer Alexandra Pelosi was close by and rarely without the Sony camcorder she brought along for the wild ride. "Caution," said a sticker handwritten by Bush adviser Karl Rove and stuck on Pelosi's camera. "I am very dangerous."

Now, hundreds of hours of video have been condensed into an 89-minute movie that will premiere in Austin on March 8 at South by Southwest. It shows a candidate not shy about cutting up and mugging for the camera, political reporters not always sure why they do what they do and an up-close look at a process that defies logic.

And viewers will see a movie (which is still subject to some tweaking before the premiere) named by its star. Early in the film, parts of which were previewed recently by Pelosi in the Manhattan apartment where she put it together, Bush asks her what it will be called.

"I don't know," she said. "What do you think it should be called?"
"Journeys with George," he said, adding somewhat inexplicably, "You know, you can spell it with a G." The product, traditionally spelled, has Pelosi, the 31-year-old daughter of House Minority Whip Nancy Pelosi of California, as camerawoman, reporter, producer and key player in a romantic subplot.

"I think the movie is like the Rorschach test," she said, referring to the inkblots psychologists sometimes use to help diagnose patients. She said viewers who like Bush will see the nice, friendly man they think he is, and viewers who don't might see behavior that justifies their worst fears about him. But she also believes some of the footage could change people's attitudes about their president.

"I'm just showing you the guy I met. This is completely apolitical. There is never a moment of substance in this movie," said Pelosi, who says she wound up liking Bush. "I think in a year a lot has changed. The whole world has changed. It's like saying, `What was someone like in high school?' How could you compare?" she said.

'Queen of the pack'
With her purple-leaning wardrobe, unignorable presence and a personality that is beyond extroverted, Pelosi quickly became a character among characters on the Bush campaign journey.

Unceasingly energetic, she was an acquired taste for a press corps challenged by deadlines, travel and too many miles on the road. Some never acquired the taste.
In his soon-to-be-released book, "Ambling into History," the New York Times' Frank Bruni writes that Pelosi "was known to dance little jigs or burst into song or get on the public address system in the front of a bus and pretend to be a cruise director."

"She carried her own little personal video camera with her, turned it on and asked her colleagues offbeat questions, goading them into self-parodying soliloquies," Bruni wrote, naming Pelosi as "the unrivaled queen of the pack when it came to self-amusement and consequences-be-damned diversion."

For some reporters, Pelosi's camera became reason enough to steer clear of her. Others played along in good humor, joking about the bizarreness of it all. Like Bush, Pelosi is from a political family, albeit a family of liberal Democrats. Her mother is in a congressional leadership role, and Pelosi's grandfather was a mayor of Baltimore.

But a presidential campaign trip was new for Pelosi, who previously worked as a producer for NBC's "Dateline." She couldn't resist documenting what she saw. NBC executives were uninterested in the product, she said.

Last April, Pelosi quit NBC, formed Purple Monkey Productions and went to work putting "Journeys with George" together. "The purple wardrobe isn't all that I packed," she says in narration at the beginning. "I brought my camcorder along, and what you are about to see is my home movie of my year-and-a-half-long road trip with this man in his race to become leader of the free world."

And she captured it all: the redundant speeches, endless turkey sandwiches, back-of-the-plane margarita parties, funny faces from Bush and reporters second-guessing their career choice.

"This is insane," Houston Chronicle reporter R.G. Ratcliffe of Austin said on a frigid night in Dubuque, Iowa. "The only reason we are out here is in case Bush comes out and slips in the ice and falls down. "We're vicious predators," said Ratcliffe, a respected veteran reporter having a momentary, on-camera bout with self-respect.

Pelosi's camera also caught the temporary insanity that sometimes overcomes voters. She turned her camera on a Bush fan who had painted his face for a rally. "Someone asked me to do it, and I said, `Yeah,' " the man said by way of explanation. "If someone asked you to jump off a bridge, would you do that?" Pelosi asked. "Depends on how high the bridge was and what was underneath it," the man said.

The candidate
Although he has more important things on his mind, there is on-camera evidence that Bush has not forgotten about the movie. The topic came up recently when Bush called Nancy Pelosi to congratulate her on winning a House leadership position. Alexandra Pelosi has her mother's end of the conversation on videotape. "I think you would like it," Nancy Pelosi told Bush about the film.

The jury's out on that one. Some of the film's most intriguing moments involve Bush in, shall we say, less than Oval Office mode. He makes funny faces, wears a funny blindfold, dons a neck pillow in a funny way and generally behaves like a guy who either has no fear of being seen in an informal way or does not believe the movie will