How PBS ‘Frontline’ Scrambled To Produce The Harris Vs. Trump Documentary ‘The Choice’ After The Unprecedented Shakeup In The 2024 Race
deadline.comWhen Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race on July 21, it left PBS Frontline‘s The Choice with a big gaping hole. The documentary of the two major parties’ presidential nominees has been a quadrennial tradition, and its filmmaker, Michael Kirk, had weeks earlier screened a four-hour rough cut of Biden vs.
Trump. “We’d seen the debacle of the debate, and figured he was a dead man walking, but you never knew,” Kirk said. As it turned out, Frontline executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath had also insisted that Kirk and his team also make a first-of-its-kind documentary on the vice president, meaning that they were already gathering material on the Democrats’ eventual nominee, Kamala Harris.
Yet The Choice was still a scramble. “We edited it in five weeks, shot it in two weeks, researched it in a week,” Kirk said. “In a way it was great, because we could get all her close friends, because they’d never done interviews before.
They were enthusiastic about it, and they wanted to do it, and they wanted to talk about her. And the campaign was the old Biden campaign.
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