Booth Gardner’s Night at the Oscars
by Margie Kelley
GARDNER PARTY: Booth Gardner, center, celebrates at HBO’s Oscar Documentary Nominees party at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills his with daughter Gail Gant (left), President of HBO Documentary and Family Sheila Nevins, and President of HBO Programming Michael Lombardo.
Photo by Jeff Kravitz/Getty Images
Former Washington Governor Booth Gardner (MBA ’63), no stranger to the spotlight, admits to being nervous as he walked down the red carpet at this year’s Academy Awards. As the star of a film nominated for Best Short Documentary, he got VIP treatment.
“It was awesome,” Gardner says of the Oscar nod given to The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner, a 37-minute documentary that followed him for six months in 2008 during his quest to legalize physician-assisted suicide in Washington.
Gardner, a popular Democratic governor who served from 1985 to 1993, was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease soon after leaving office. Although his own condition is not considered life-threatening, in 2006 he took on what has become known as the Death with Dignity campaign, believing that terminally ill people should have the right to make the choice of how and when to end their lives.
The film, directed by Daniel Junge, looks at both sides of the controversial assisted-suicide debate and offers an unguarded glimpse into Gardner’s daily circumstances of living with the increasing debilitation of Parkinson’s. When he talks to the camera, his speech is slurred. Subtitles appear on screen to help viewers understand him. When he walks, he lists ever so slightly. He wonders aloud when his end will come. He knows “it’s not a pretty picture.”
While Gardner’s campaign succeeded by a wide margin — the Death with Dignity Act, a ballot referendum, passed with 58 percent of the vote and became state law in March 2009 — it doesn’t apply to his own circumstances. The law covers only patients with fewer than six months to live. Parkinson’s, he explains in the film, offers no such certainties.
But Gardner isn’t focused on that now. While the small film didn’t win an Oscar, the nomination did give it a big boost. Several festivals are planning to screen the film, and HBO will broadcast it later this year. (Gardner’s auto-biography is also expected in bookstores this summer.)
“It’s a slow haul,” says Gardner. “It’s controversial. But nobody has to do this; it’s an individual’s choice.”
