Underdog tells story of Vt. farmer, dog musher, dreamer

ESSEX | What would happen if your dream came true? What would it look like? This is the premise of Underdog, a documentary that follows Doug Butler, a Vermont dairy farmer with dreams of dog mushing in Alaska. Director, Cameraman and Editor Tommy Hyde met Butler through a college assignment where he had to go out into the Middlebury community and find someone to make a multimedia project about. "My professor tipped me off about this kooky dairy farmer on the edge of town who had a pack of sled dogs behind his house," Hyde said. "Me and a buddy drove out and Doug, who really even without knowing who we were, smiled and waved us on and started giving us a tour of his house and showing us his life, and that just kind of opened the door to what became a really wonderful relationship with Doug." That was more than 10 years ago. Even after the project was finished, Hyde formed a relationship with Doug where he continued to show up at his farm with his camera, trying to figure out what intrigued him about Doug's story. He found it was that Doug was a dreamer. "I came to realize that not only had he never been to Alaska, but he'd never left his farm for more than three days, his whole life," Hyde said. "That ability for him to hold that dream, while also managing the intensity of his day-to-day reality, I just thought was really beautiful." Hyde went to see Butler every Tuesday, so he witnessed all aspects of his life. He saw him go to doctor appointments, discuss his farm's finances and spend time with family. He even took a trip to Alaska with him in a truck with the two of them and 22 dogs. As Hyde began to realize this time spent with Butler was becoming a documentary, he thought he should get him to sit down for an interview at some point. But he never really sat down. That ended up reflecting his personality more. "What you see on the screen is a bit of like a reflection of that relationship that I have with Doug over the years," Hyde said. "Eventually I just started to sort of fade into the background and blend it in with the wallpaper and things just started happening as if I wasn't there. That ended up being the most precious stuff." Producer and Writer Aaron Woolf has been making feature documentaries for almost 30 years. When he saw Hyde's footage, he saw a raw, slice-of-life style that he believes is the highest form of documentary. "Every great story begins with a trusting relationship," Woolf said. "Tommy and Doug had built a kind of trust that you don't just get, but you earn." One of the greatest challenges they faced was figuring out how to whittle down 300 hours of footage taken over a decade into a feature-length documentary. Underdog is about Butler's dog mushing dreams, but also the hardship that comes along with owning a farm. Woolf had a window into the industry because he worked on a film in 2007 called King Corn, where he followed corn in Iowa from plants all the way through the food system. Butler's farm, however, reminded him more of the farms he grew up around in the North Country. "Somebody once said that every time you take a step, you're actually falling down and then your foot lands,'" Woolf said. "Doug's farm had a sense of constantly falling and then recovering, falling and then recovering. It was a pretty impressive contrast that he could be in this seemingly chaotic world but so, so positive and so comfortable." Woolf said the film gives viewers an idea of a life they may have never imagined. The film was mostly shot in Middlebury, but edited and produced in Burlington, Elizabethtown and Westport. Woolf and Hyde are excited to show the film in the community where they created it. "When you go off and do something that takes five years or 10 years, people wonder what you've been up to," Woolf said. "The Grange is such an awesome place, to gather and to build community. And it's right there in the midst of all those farms." After showing across the country, Underdog will have its New York debut at The Whallonsburg Grange, Jan. 27. "[Doug] is a talisman for the North Country spirit of harvesting happiness from the nooks and crannies of life," Hyde said. "That's something that a lot a lot of folks in the north country are able to do." For more information, visit https://www.thegrangehall.info/events-page/2024/1/27/underdog.

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Underdog tells story of Vt. farmer, dog musher, dreamer

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