Pioneers of Queer Cinema: Coming Out Under Fire | Arthur Dong

please help me in welcoming back to the stage at the billy wilder theatre the director of tonight's film arthur dong wow thank you so much for this film um it's really a pleasure to watch it on a big screen um and to see it with an audience so um and it's your first time like you said seeing the restoration uh blown big so what are your impressions on seeing it again it's just absolutely beautiful thank you indie collect ucla film and tv archive um and also joe milner who did the whole entire re-recording mix of the the tracks uh and going from film elements to digital was i didn't expect for the audio to be a problem but there was i'm not sure how how it didn't work but joe made it work and so it sounded great and everything was just quite wonderful so um yeah i'm just quite pleased i'm so glad we get to share that with you um i want to take it back obviously the the film takes us back to a moment uh during which uh hearings are happening around uh gays and lesbians openly serving in the military uh in 1993-94 i want to take it back a little bit before then just to tell it ask you a little bit about how uh you got started and you you're a production company deep focus you founded in 1981 or 82. um tell us about deep focus and what you set out to do i know just in the very beginning yeah i i was um unceremoniously fired from my uh dream job at kgo tv in abc in san francisco uh i was sent out on the shoot i was a producer i was sent on the shoot by the executive producer to get certain kinds of shots for a story uh that was my job for that assignment and i did that with the crew and the next day the manager of the station called me and says you're fired because uh we're in union house you can't tell the crew what to do i said yeah but i was told by my executive producer to get the shots and i said fu corporate world and started my own company defocus productions amazing yeah so that's why that's really what happened so there was a discharge in your own past that brought you to working independent of the stories yeah because i said um you know i i don't need this yeah uh could you and i'm glad you mentioned that it was kgo yeah i'm uh yeah i was in my dream job you know i was doing film school at san francisco state university and i said whoa you know and back then in the eight early eighties independent film jobs were just not to be had i mean they they weren't even in a lexicon there was it was not in the vocabulary so for me to get a corporate job in one of the major stations news stations doing documentary work was just incredible i i want to call out a i mean as a native bay area and i was like i was appreciative of that and i wanted to know a bit more about the filmmaking and video making ecosystem at the time uh in the san francisco bay area um because a lot of the filmmakers in the pioneers of queer cinema series have roots in the bay area also active in los angeles uh as well as elsewhere but could you tell us um when you were starting out in that uh in that scene or after you had left uh what was it like trying to get a project uh like this or uh like forbidden city usa off the ground well this one in particular this is this commander fire was my second um feature documentary uh and the climate we started i i first learned about the project from an editorial or review i think a book review of allen's book in la times and what struck me immediately was the correlation that the discrimination of the the lgbt community at that time world war ii was experienced experienced under the government under public policy under governance and i've always been interested in governance and public policy and how it affects groups of people and i said well they were doing not exactly this but they were they were regulating japanese americans during world war ii and i didn't know they were doing that to my community as well the gay community and it immediately struck me as a civil rights issue and and that the government was very busy really um discriminating against classes of people in war two and i that's what attracted me to the story and um and you know the struggle that alan had and i found later as a filmmaker trying to raise money particularly within the gay community was that no one wanted to support this because it was like oh why are we supporting someone's right to go to third world countries and kill babies you know to uh be in the military the same thing happened with when there was the marriage equality issue that came up in the beginning was why we want to be institutionalized by heterosexual you know into marriage uh you know there's that argument for me though it was always about civil rights you know i'm from this i was brought up in the 60s san francisco hate ashbury uh flower children that whole counter-cultural environment so i had certain feelings about the military as well sure you know i protested second war in the 60s and that carried on with me today but i said no this is not about joining the military it's about equality it's about access as citizens and it's about governments and and how how can our government do that to us it was more about that but the gay community at that time i was we tried to go after gay money i said well you know this no why won't you support this documentary that's because well we don't believe in the cause sending with marriage equality when that happened uh and it wasn't until uh the national endowment yards at that time uh this is have to bring you back to the early 90s or even late 80s when there was the gang i think they called them the gang of four tim miller from the highways and three other karen i forget her name or three other artists that were just karen finley yeah karen finley and two other artists thank you and um they had got small funding from the nda and there was this uproar or how the na was supporting pornography and all of this and um and and i had i think i had applied to dna a couple times for this film and this is what i've learned as a fundraiser if you get rejected and i get rejected a lot for fundraising is that maybe i didn't do my homework to craft this proposal in a way that they can see it and what i learned was that i needed to not talk about this as gay and lesbian history but as as american history and i framed it in that with that point of view and at that time at the nea the new director i think she was fairly new was ann bradyche did i get that and who's going to correct me but correct me if i'm wrong andre dj i think what's her name and she i'm not sure if she was openly gay but she was a lesbian and people we knew that i'm not sure why we knew that and we were pretty ah we didn't think it would come through but it did go through and there was no controversy it was very interesting and then we i don't i forget the chronology and then we got to make got the uh most of the money from itvs which is a cpb public tv source of money but not nothing for the gay community so that was kind of disheartening but that was the environment so it sounds like on the one hand it was you know fortuitous that there was someone who was sympathetic to the project but you know and on the other hand it was in a way kind of a for the themes of the film kind of like a closeting or kind of yeah it was a safe project for the nea to fund but at the same time say hey you know we're funding gay projects too but it wasn't like it was a gay project it was a historical project um tell us a bit about um your collaboration with allen vera so the the his book length um study coming out under fire came out in 1990 you'd read the review uh what was it like um getting to know him getting in touch with him and then collaborating with him on the phone i think this is kind of the chinese part of me is that you don't go directly to somebody you kind of try to get an introduction so i had known um bob epstein because we were both from san francisco and both filmmakers so i said do you know this guy alan berry and and um he goes yeah yeah and and i said can you introduce me to him and and he did and then allen wrote back and said oh i know arthur dong i've been using his film forbidden city usa about chinatown nightclubs in the 40s in my course on gay community at uc santa cruz and he was using that film to talk about gay communities even though they're not overtly gay so he had already known about my work so there was the immediate uh what respect for each other's work and that helped a lot and so the relationship start from there and he goes yeah let's do this together and he was a very active uh partner i mean he moved down he was in san francisco he moved down to la where i still live and said you know i want to make this my job for a while and see how a film adaptation works and we worked really intensely on the adaptation uh you know his book is like that thick it's very dense but for me what struck me were the oral histories were the stories of the veterans and the personal stories and i said you know for me as a filmmaker the way i would adapt is to look really at these personal stories and and we reframe them within the larger history um and he agreed and but then with him i was able to he was able to point out the major historical points and constitutional points to put in the film and make sure those were infused in the story uh and it was a wonderful collaboration um and and he then he wanted to be part of the production which is great we were having so much fun together because alice was a very sweet guy and he's just really easy to work with and wonderful to work with and so he became a location manager and he coordinated all the travel and make sure we all got fed and and he was like our production manager it was really great i was wondering about the location scouting credit that he yeah yeah he did all that because you know the writing part of it was kind of done you know it got done and uh um and um the you know because of him i was we were able to find all the other veterans you know he had interviewed a lot more veterans that are in the film and that are in the the book and i think a few of the veterans in the film i i don't have in my head right now we're not in the book but he had interviewed them personally anyway so we looked through all the uh profiles that he had of the people he had met and you know we you know we we cast the film i mean quote we cast the film to have different kinds of experiences the only um uh you know we there were a couple uh african-american lesbians that he had we had contact with but they in the end didn't want to be a part of the film because of their concerns of exposure uh and then we're again talking about the 1990s for an older generation of people like stuart loomis said on screen you know even now on screen i feel kind of apprehensive talking about this but that was his generation uh and even bruce lee the african-american veteran we have on camera he came at the last minute it was we really worked hard and i'm not sure how we finally got him to say yes but he said yes at the very last minute it's remarkable it kind of comes across in the film um the different kind of terminology or language or comfort with fully coming out even though they may have lived out or sending out lives in this subsequent you know three four five decades um just the the not quite ability um or the discomfort with naming you know who or what you were um which is something to respect i mean that's something that they lived but um something that was remarkable about that and yeah and that's something i had to they said this is actually the film right before this about the chinatown nightclubs was about the 40s and what i had learned was especially with this film was i had to really honor the history uh the one of the earliest cuts of this film interspersed those 1993 hearings and those sent the hearings throughout the film and it was um commenting on on history and present day and back and forth back it was uh i probably have a vhs tape of that version somewhere and but in the end it was like no you know the history stands for itself it tells its own story and and who am i to to reframe and revision that history and so we took all of it out and it's funny because we we submitted a version to sundance with that inner cutting and they loved it and accepted the film and you know they accept films months before the festival and we said oh um you know we changed the whole film and and we don't have those hearings throughout the film now and they were like really concerned uh and i said we said we just have to trust us it's gonna work and i think we did the right thing yeah i think there's certainly a way in which that works where it doesn't make it so present to east and it's you've um of course there's a tremendous amount of archival research that both alan did in preparing the book the archival footage research and helen weiss i don't know telling rice is still working but if you ever find helen weiss and you need help at the national archives she's the one she just dug up stuff and this is where you know money really helps um you know it's great to be have to be an independent filmmaker but without the money from the nda and particularly itvs i think our funding was over 200 000 and you know we're talking about how many years ago was this 30 40 years ago 30 years ago and that's a lot of money 30 years ago and but that helped pay for that intense research of stationing her at the national archives and this is before things got digital just being there digging through whatever keyword searches we could give to her to find that some just really wonderful footage and so were things that's kind of tricky to think about were things then telecity there or they would create they would create access copies and then she would courier them or ship them back to you in l.a or were you visiting her while she was doing the research in washington well first you all know what telecini is okay i mean i i have to say it because you know i was mentioning tomorrow thomas and a couple of people here didn't know who marlo thomas was or danny thomas i said oh okay anyway um uh uh yeah it was very complicated uh and very expensive because a lot of the material that we wanted to see not use we don't know we didn't know we wanted to use them yeah until we could see them right it's all these index cards paper index cards and or microfiche and uh we had to order up work prints of these negatives and i think a few of them were nitrate and that um and in order even to see it so that that took a a it was a long process it took a lot of money as you can imagine and finally we then decided on what to actually make prints good prints out of and yet none of it feels like padding or i mean for not having footage i mean what was really interesting to rewatch was the footage of the drag shows that in a way were celebrated as part of you know troop morale or camaraderie um but for having i mean basically no archival footage that you know of of out you know obviously out people who are serving the military during world war ii um everything feels as though it should be there and i guess maybe you could tell us a bit about um some of the different sources that were in national archives so that you had like uh those shows for example i'm kind of curious about um the that's the kind of celebration of queerness for for for fun or for you know r r um where did those who thought to record those were those mostly newsreel yeah this is military footage right um some of them were newsreels um in the the there's this i think is it the mental health right the mental health in this video was march of dimes no in march of dimes marcia times all right you know and uh yeah and a lot of it was military footage like the naked men and being examined those are all military that's military footage official military footage and luckily because it was military it was um public domain it was the so the rights didn't cost us anything uh the um you know we would we would give helen um well one of the key words we told her to research was sodomy and that's how we found that there was only one as far as the research at that time that was conducted for the film there was only that one piece of film in which sodomy is even mentioned the word sodomy although it's throughout the directors you know sodomy this on me that you know and but that was the only time we found it on film and we made sure to use that um so yeah the the research was pretty intense it was um but a lot of it mostly was government film um yeah the process of assembling it all together once you had your your footage what um and you talked about other versions so kind of how did you know when you arrived at the version that worked was it a question of timing and submissions or um had you had i had noticed some of the special things what were um i imagine you had shown some early versions what what were some some what was some of the feedback that you got about the the structuring of making this film well the i first have to mention the editor veronica silver she's uh part of the mario posa uh film group that produced word is out so which is part of the series coming up um so she was our editor and and we're editing film now on a steam back okay so do for those who don't know what that is you know check it out there's actually a steam back thelma shoemaker's steam bag is on display at the academy museum it's a huge machine and it's on it's on lifts right too yeah so um uh anyway so we cut on film and um our assistant was marilyn moore um and she was a great assistant um but it was going through the process we went through was we actually i i'm trying to remember i think we gave everything to veronica that's the way she liked to work she was let me figure it out so she did the first cut we came in it was a lot of back and forth the um putting in the seat the center hearings was complicated because that was on video so we had to in order to cut at that time we had to transfer all that video into film film elements and in fact that's why you can see now that the film clips are kind of blurry i mean because they were what you're seeing here now is video clips and this is three quarter inch now okay it's not it's like okay it's way below what you're using on your iphone and um in terms of resolution three quarter inch transfer to film and then now what you're seeing here is that transferred back to video digital elements so it's like a lot of generations away uh today you know it'll be chris pristine um but we had to get all those elements to veronica and to into cut and you know it wasn't i think it was just a lot of back and forth like what can we do this should we do this i don't remember what how we finally said take out all all that stuff from 1993 uh but i'm glad we did yeah but veronica she she just worked endless hours uh in the editing room because uh you know it was long process in terms of finding these stories and sort of eliciting them out from these world war ii veterans um could you tell me did you run into any instances maybe allen did uh around declassification i mean it's kind of another kind of coming out where there's a quest to find the truth or documentation of what really happened did you run into that in terms of research or probably not anyone's personal stories but there was no conflict it was just a matter of knowing where to look like the newspapers uh the murder beach little beach or the newspaper yeah well clark didn't have those but he remembered them very clearly and remembered the names and uh we went how did just research we went through his papers got the official case number went somewhere it's like i was talking a long time ago went to the archives or national archives the military records and found the court papers for martial as court martial and they were in his court martial case papers all those newspapers so we got copies of his newspapers and that's how we found those uh so that's just one example we didn't ever have to declassify anything i don't know we didn't go we didn't have to do that but it's it's all public record that we went to uh clark as you know didn't i'm not sure you noticed he didn't have a last name because at that time he was a little apprehensive about revealing his identity totally and you can see some black marks in some of his court martial papers that's by his request um dw uh rd winter uh is in silhouette um and there's because he was nervous about that and just this is a little trivia rd winner the reason why he's already winner because uh it's the character in rebecca i mean he chose that himself because i want to be called rd winter it's a good software backup the movie well the novel anyway yeah so you talked a bit about the uh process of adapting you know a documentary feature-length documentary from a book and you've also subsequently directed documentaries that you've either turned into a book or made in concert so um continuing with kind of paper research um what what has what have you learned from that and i guess also the making of this movie but what have you what is sort of your approach to paper documentary research or or um physical non non-film collections i'm not sure i understand all right well i'll try to i think i know what you asked but tell me if i'm not answering your questions just stop me just stay stopped i love it already i love research i look here i think that's why i'm a film a documentary filmmaker and if you see all my films except for my very first film when i was made is well i had not required teenagers research they all require research and it's heavy research and some paper some visual imagery i just love the thrill of finding something that i never knew before that's historical i love the thrill of seeing images from the past i've always uh in fact i once we wanted to be a film historian was when i was a teenager because i just love the fact that you can see a time way before i was born or alive and um and be brought back to that by moving images or still pictures even um so i'm not sure if i'm answering the question that i didn't understand i think you answered a question i didn't even know i was asking i mean when people ask how do you get into the film preservation field it's like yeah why why why am i doing that and i think that that is interesting because it that speaks to me personally it's like i the ability to recreate that time uh through still images or moving images or just being brought to that time it's like going into a time machine uh and i remember the moment i can tell you the moment when i was when what happened happened to baby jane was out in 64 64 16. someone in the last audience 64. okay so i was 11 years old okay and do the math and and uh i saw of human bondage which is betty davis in 1930 30 what someone else early 30s okay and you know she's skinny and you know slender and uh she looked like she was a lot younger 30 30s and then i saw what happened to baby jane in 64. i said whoa it's like i'm being brought back to when she was her in the 1930s i was just amazed at that i mean i was just 11 but i just like i want to see more of that and i want and i started studying film and and film history and silence and going to art retro houses in san francisco which at that time there were many of theaters real big you know screens and watching old movies and silence and and i wanted to be a film historian that until everything changed i became a filmmaker well yeah it's a the perfect transition in in a way you have maybe more in the way that you're and it's a tremendously valuable service to a gay person like me and to many other people um and to veterans in the case of this film uh and especially queer veterans is to be able to see uh people who had gone through something to record those stories to assemble them in a meaningful way you've contributed to the historical records so and now in an odd sense you probably didn't maybe you weren't thinking about it at the time but you've created another kind of time machine back to that time to see what it is that people were going through so it's like a time machine to a time machine yeah now you're starting starting to collapse in yeah we just yeah i never thought of that that's really that's cool i like that yeah we're so fortunate to have you here um i'm wondering if there are any audience could you feel like answering some audience questions about the making of the film do we have any uh questions from the audience there will be microphones coming down from our sisters to the theater so just be sure to wait for them um we'll start over here in the middle for the first although my voice can carry without a microphone but i'll certainly use it thank you hi there a wonderful film and i was wondering from the time that you met alan to the time that let's say it was finished even with the clips from 93 throughout it what was the period of time i'm going to say four three years um yeah i'm pretty sure it was because uh as i mentioned he knew me from my film forbidden city usa which was uh released in 89 and of 89 and his book i don't have the exact publishing date but my guess is it was published in 1990 because uh i was probably the way i find ideas for films is i do a lot of reading of periodicals and what whatever i could carry my hands on and that's where i read the review and the fundraising took probably about two years let me think yeah because we started filming in 93 when the right before the hearings exploded you know nationally and so that was 93 so it took us about two years to fundraise um we worked all through 93 once we got the money and it premiered at sundance 94 january january 94. we had a question over here is it on there excellent i remember seeing it at outfest i'm assuming it was probably at the pantages in 95 i think i think it went from sundance to outfest that summer i think outfest was only we started here in 83 at ucla very very moving tonight i do have a question about the loss of images when you're working with jpeg files you lose every time an image is used it gets less and less so i'm very curious on the restoration process what process did did you play in the part of the restoration i just don't know how that process works with ucla oh um well for example did you have to go through frame by frame is there software that does it i just don't understand that um well we have experts in the audience thing i can summarize because it's a very complicated process they took the negatives original not the uncut negatives but the now i think they took an ip right yeah which is an eyepiece into positive negative which is made from the cut negatives to make prints out of so it's kind of a generation away from the original and they scanned each frame right i mean if you can imagine this 24 frames per second they scanned each frame in 4k so that took forever probably and i'm getting a knot from top head of reservation because i'm kind of guessing this and um and and then indie collect took those scans and time and colored and conte all those wonderful things you do in photoshop they did it to each frame and and then i came in and stirred up a lot of trouble because i was i'm just so picky and uh and then covet came and stopped everything and uh so it's it's a it's a long process but we i think what you saw here was from those um what indie collect produced from those um original scans so it um yeah well um yeah i think so um well you know coincidentally last friday i got an email from a distributor so we don't know where it's going i mean you know it's just like do you have the rights i said yes i do they say well let's talk so so we don't know what's going to happen though you know those things always go one way or the other but there is interest so that's great i see in the back their second last row hi arthur that was david seikert hi my neighbor and mary ann yeah my name is wife um i'm curious it was really interesting that you talked about people um kind of uh pushing back against even making the film because of the the military issue uh that's very familiar um but then after the film was made how how was it received how did people see that because i just from my own perspective the fact that it's so it's so much about personal stories and and you get so involved with the people and so committed to those people it uh you know all those other issues seem to just kind of drift away in the course of it is that how it was received or did you still get a lot of uh kind of pushback about that well i think with the help of the okay the 1993 senate uh committee hearings uh on gays military that was a pretty explosive event for media for america i mean it was crazy because it was the first time the story of gay and lesbian people were on national tv in a big major way not just one movie of the week not just maybe a supporting character in some sitcom but in the news constantly for months it was and it was broadcast live i mean uh it's like the uh what other hearings we've heard recently you know they what's that kavanagh hearings i mean it was just broadcast live and the nation was riveted so i think the nation and which includes the lgbt community was riveted with this footage on tv where senators were talking about well we can't have gays in the military because they're going to pork every other soldier with in the showers you know and they were actually saying things i didn't say pork but they're actually saying things like that it's like i was just like and we were in the middle of production not in the middle but just the beginning of production we had just been in production a month i think yeah january mid-january when uh what's his name bill clinton announced this don't ask don't tell thing it was like exploded in national news i mean every i mean alan baraby was so busy giving interviews it was crazy because he's the only one that knew about the history and um i think because of that national attention and then of course i have to mention that having these gay soldiers you see they weren't the only panel in descent herrings there were other panels of gay soldiers speaking up on national tv having the whole nation hear their stories really influenced i think the way people thought of this issue i didn't help politically as much but i think what the gay community saw yeah these are people these are people being really discriminated against and oppressed and and through the system that's so totally unfair so i think by the time the film came out uh uh the people who were giving us pushback were ready to see that what we were trying to do was not talk about the rights to go to third world countries and kill babies but really about equality in america uh and and that's the story that came out and so it was it was pretty fully embraced to answer your question the reaction was we didn't get any more pushback i mean just just won all sorts of rewards from both gay and non-gay events and uh we have time for like one last question over here yeah fourth row from the back height thank you again for the film and the screening um i was curious if there was anything that you had to leave on the cutting room floor that you wish you could have worked in and just like there wasn't a place for it anything like that yeah there were a few interviews if you get the dvd and there are a few more copies left on amazon uh there are some outtakes of interviews uh we interviewed a woman named edna rossdale and i think she was a clinical psychiatrist like psychologists or in that department uh and the interview just didn't work uh within the film uh we did you know we luckily had nicola uh again uh his name certainly he's the doctor that's herbert greenspan uh that we had um in the film and he worked well with the editing and sometimes with the film and it's it's it's not like the person didn't do what we needed the person to do it's just that in in the cuttings things just get taken out uh so i regret that we didn't have her in it because she was a wonderful interview she was a much older woman and won the same age bracket as her greenspan was so um we there were oh there was bert garrett another veteran that had just great stories and great pictures but uh it just didn't work out um so there were a few interviews that just didn't work out that um i um yeah it just didn't work out so i kind of regret that but but that's how it that's what happens in the editing room where your subjects kind of scattered out west coast where were they yeah we were traveling it was a lot of fun actually yeah uh yeah it was um actually this is this was the third well the first no yeah yeah yeah we had to go everywhere to find them but they were mostly in california but we had to go to the west coast clark was in mobile alabama uh that's where i could introduce the waffle house oh yeah remember waffle house yeah yeah [Music] well you've you all know waffle house yeah i guess so yeah oh was it nobody i noticed that seafood place that chain yeah long john silver oh yeah yeah yeah yeah that's my memories of mobile alabama it's a very informed audience tonight um you've amassed an incredible body of work um an archive of your own uh through film and uh and now where does it where does it reside now if i could oh oh well you know the reason well not the reason i'm here tonight but it all started actually a long time ago when i first met may uh at and she was an intern at outfest right at a conference here at ucla about archival preservation for film and i don't know why i was on the panel but i was and i spoke about how one of my first student films was eaten by termites because i thought um termites wouldn't eat film well they don't you film they eat cardboard apparently and my elements were in cardboard boxes and i guess that story resonated to ucla and um what year and then finally uh it was time to take care of stuff and luckily i'm not sure how it happened but todd weiner had the preservations here said what about having your collection at ucla film and tv archives faults to make sure your termites don't attack them again so i forget what year was that many years ago 12 years ago yeah anyway so he came over to my house and packed all my stuff away and now they're safe in santa clarita and the new facilities and the first film that was restored was forbidden to the usa we did that in 2015 and then this last year we did uh when we finished coming under fire and we um just about one step away from finishing sewing woman yeah but everything's safe and the videos are safe um stuff that i don't really want to see again are safe [Laughter] well i am heartened to hear that and i think we are all wealthier for that so thank you so much for your contributions and for this wonderful film tonight