Partially based on the 860-page memoir, “A White House Diary”, and on the actual audio recordings Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson made during her time as first lady, The Lady Bird Diaries is an intimate reworking of a past we still know very little about. Told from the vantage point of First Lady Johnson candidly and in detail, the audio track shapes the whole film. All the archival footage is nicely complemented by hand-drawn animations to fit the missing images, but all the visuals are always in service of the narration. In this way, the documentary becomes a piece of history and an archive in itself, its illustrative functions – a crucial storytelling tool for posteriority.
"The result is an extremely multi-dimensional portrait of a First Lady, one who, you can’t help but think, was the most significant at that point since Eleanor Roosevelt in her accomplishments and her influence on policy."
— Christian Blauvelt
From award-winning filmmaker Dawn Porter comes "The Lady Bird Diaries," a groundbreaking all-archival documentary film about Lady Bird Johnson, one of the most influential and least understood First Ladies. The feature film looks at the 123 hours of personal and revealing audio diaries that Lady Bird recorded during her husband’s administration. The film reveals Lady Bird as an astute observer of character and culture and a savvy political strategist. It recasts her crucial role in LBJ’s presidency and brings viewers behind the scenes of one of the most tumultuous and consequential periods in modern American history.
Lady Bird's audio diaries made into a feature documentary tell the story of a First Lady as she herself experienced it.
This film is already a documentary within the documentary, its core consisting of footage and voice recordings trimmed down from over 123 hours of chronicling her time in the White House. Released after Lady Bird's death in 2007, these audio-memoirs are a unique artefact as an insider's look into the US politics of the 60s, its figures and its overlaying contexts. The figure of Claudia Johnson (Lady Bird) is not more than just an addition to her husband, The President's, name and status, instead, she emerges as a documentarian in her own right. Therefore, director Dawn Porter's mission is to liberate Lady Bird's narration from the audio track and pair it with evocative and fitting images to match.
Behind every great man...
