George Michaels is one of the unsung heroes of US political life, a Democratic member of the New York State Assembly who, in 1970, changed his mind and supported a bill extending abortion rights. He was swayed by his conversations with those closest to him, in particular his sons and his daughter-in-law. He knew that switching his vote would cost him his political career but he did it anyway because he felt it was right.
“What’s the use of getting elected or re-elected if you don’t stand for something?” Michaels asked his fellow politicians in the eloquent and moving speech he made at the time. A day later, Governor Rockefeller signed the bill into law.
Now, the courageous Jewish politician’s story has been brought back to public attention in Deciding Vote, directed by Jeremy Workman and Rob Lyons.
The film, which premiered last summer in Tribeca and is now available for anyone to watch on the New Yorker website, is one of the contenders for this year’s Oscar for short documentary.
“It’s 19 minutes and we’re heaping so much significant story on in that time,” Workman talks about how he and Lyons distil so many complex elements in such a concise fashion.
Nineteen minutes but it still took three painstaking years to make.
Deciding Vote includes archive footage and freshly shot interviews. Workman and Lyons run the company Wheelhouse Creative through which they not only produce their own documentaries but create and cut trailers, promos and sizzlers for some very high-profile movies, everything from The Whale to Quo Vadis, Aida?
“Editing trailers has been incredibly important for me as a filmmaker because it really has forced me to think about storytelling in very fundamental ways: figuring out how best to tell a story in the least amount of words – the most elegant way, the simplest way, the shortest way, the most effective way, the most visual way. All that comes from my editing experience,” Workman says.
Both filmmakers acknowledge that (as Lyons puts it) they “didn’t know anything about George Michaels” before they started work on the doc. But they saw the grainy YouTube footage of his speech and were immediately fascinated by it.
“It struck us so deeply. We hadn’t seen a politician like that in our time and we were shocked that this politician had been forgotten,” Lyons remembers. Michaels was “someone who cared more about the public than his own career.”
“We’re not used in this era to people who change their minds. It’s not something that politicians do,” Workman adds.
They began to research the politician’s career thoroughly. They had considered initially to make Deciding Voteas an archival film but once they met Michaels’ son, Jim, and his wife, they knew that they needed to give a voice to the family.
“Getting to know the family was amazing,” Lyons says. “He [Michaels] paid the price in the short term but all his granddaughters and great granddaughters are so proud of him.”
The filmmakers kept on hearing about “this one person who was championing [Michaels’] story and keeping it out there,” as Workman puts it. This was legendary New York politician and former mayoral candidate Ruth Messinger. They approached her, mentioning the fact they were making the film.
“There wasn’t even a reaction. She was like, great, I want to be in it,” he says of Messinger who continues to use Michaels as an example of a politician to emulate in her leadership courses.
Workman likens Michaels to the juror played by Henry Fonda in the Sidney Lumet movie Twelve Angry Men, a decent man with strong principles who shows moral courage and emotional intelligence. There aren’t, he suggests, many politicians cast in the same mould today.
The story has a dark side. The voters and swathes of the public turned against Michaels after the vote. He received hate mail and soon lost office. “The vitriol over social media would have been unbelievable today,” Lyons suggests of the online fury that the politician would have suffered during present times.
Some make the argument that Michaels was putting his own beliefs and feelings above those of the people who had put him in office – and of those in the Democratic Party who expected him to vote the other way. Workman is having none of that. “A politician is elected not just to be a mouthpiece of the people who voted for him. He is elected to be a sensible and empathetic human that leads the constituents.”
The filmmakers weren’t just startled by Michaels’ selfless approach to public office. They were also surprised by the level of debate and respect that politicians showed to each other across party lines. This may have been just a few years before the corruption scandal of Watergate but Democrats and Republicans listened to each other. There is not much of that going on today.
“The Abortion Bill was co-authored by a Republican. There was actual debate on the floor. It wasn’t just people grandstanding on their positions. That was incredibly eye-opening for us,” Workman notes of the bipartisan approach of the politicians. “George Michaels represents that…he was somebody really thinking about the issue, not what is best for his party or his career.”
Michaels didn’t set out to be a hero. He was simply acting in accordance with his conscience. “This wasn’t his issue. [But] this was an issue he realised he needed to take a stand on, to put his voice on, for the betterment of a larger group,” Workman adds. “That really inspired us. We thought this was our opportunity to do something like what he was doing.”
Deciding Vote has won several awards and qualified for its Oscar run through the Woodstock Festival where it won the prize for Bets Short Documentary. The directors are delighted by where the documentary has now ended up.
“When we started making this film three years ago, we dreamed of it landing on the New Yorker. It’s just the perfect audience for our film and has such a great track record with short documentaries,” Lyons enthuses. “It is the perfect initial audience for this film.”
