Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film I Q&A with Marsha Gordon, Jeremy Lezin, John McDonald

down and as they're coming down I just want to say that you know watching these films consecutively this is actually the kind of longest and most I think complicated in some ways curation that we've done of of this material from from the book and I'm just struck and impressed again by the range of approaches that these filmmakers with really different motivations and different methods bring to this material and it's I think particularly interesting to do a program like this in the city in which so many of these films were actually made and there's this very interesting way in which they preserve records of the communities in which these films were made and so I'm sure those of you who are native Angelenos or spent a lot of time here recognize some of the places and the films that you saw tonight so one of the things that has struck me about meeting the filmmakers who make these films in particular those that I've interviewed who have come out of USC and UCLA is how politically engaged and how kind of conscious they were about the importance of thinking about the communities that were maybe being underserved or underrepresented around them and many of the filmmakers that I've interviewed like for example those who made Felicio were very active in like core and the Congress on racial equality etc and so it's really an honor and a privilege to have Jeromy and John with us tonight to talk about the films that they made and I thought I would just start by asking them to tell us a little bit about how they came to their subjects obviously you were both students at the time you made these films and then we can open it up to any questions that you have in the audience so I don't know who wants to start but John did you want to so so John directed cotton-eyed Joe so when I started at USC I was told in the first semester that we had to do six super 8 millimeter films within the semester and they'd be one every two weeks and so I started doing those films and at one point I was hiking through the hills of an Elysian Park and I came across Joe's encampment and I met him finally I kept going back until I found him there I thought he was kind of hiding from me every time I went up there because I sensed that he didn't want to have any anybody to talk to him and I just realized that this would make a really good subject for a film when I got the skills to do so so I actually made the film you saw tonight two years later just kind of kept it in the back of my mind and documentaries weren't really a thing that people were doing at USC so I didn't think I would make a documentary as my senior project but thank you and Jeremy if you could talk so Jeremy's was the last film that we saw a sense of community well first of all you know I never imagined 45 years later that's there'd be a crowd to see this film so it's a lot of fun to be here tonight and I expected six people so I was pleasantly surprised so I had read an article about piecework and people who work at home and I was fascinated by that subject because it really was below the radar and particularly women Hispanic women being taken advantage of for labor and so I went to the woman's garment union and said can you give me some leads because I want to do this film on homework which was just you know basically slavery labor and they said we'll give you all those leads but we also have a subject which might be interesting to you and they told me about this church where the they were making garments for pennies and Sears and you know locked in all day long and I just was fascinated by that subject and spoke Spanish so I was able to talk to the employees during the weekend in the park and they were terrified but when you know kept looking around and they gave me a lot of information and that's where the narration for the employees came from so that's how I found the subject through them and at the end I just wanted to jump to I gave the garment union the film after I completed it and I think that was the end of the church are there questions from the audience yes in the back we do have a microphone running up there and let me let me also say while the microphone is running up there for those of you I know that there are some some PhD students in the audience tonight I think one of the greatest things about doing this research is you know getting to reach out to filmmakers I know I I don't know if you both recall when I first contacted you the reaction is usually like boy what you're interested in what from when from when I was a student I mean and you know once you get over the shock of being contacted for something you did so long ago I mean it's really interesting to get to have these conversations and in the case of you know talking with John about his other films I you know we learned about these other projects that related to this that are now would have been given to USC or are in the process of being given to us I don't remember exactly the circumstances but working with Deano Everett on that and so it's a way that you can kind of perpetuate a legacy of caring for these films and retaining some kind of a record of them by going through this process the Internet has made all this very easy to do by the way yes one thing after seeing all these films consecutively my constant question was what happened to all these people later on did their dreams become a reality with Delicia or the girl who wanted to dance or especially the transgender man I can't imagine at that time but he it was incredible how proud and comfortable he was for that time period so I'm just curious between the three of you I don't know how much you can information you have on that Thanks I don't know oh a Joe well Joe well the film did win a lot of film festivals I went all over the world with it it was great when I was in Germany I actually met my wife I'm still married to and our she said don't say she I'm here - our daughters here anyway and so yeah well he he died in the mid-70s I I came back and you know started working trying to get work with because film school is like living in this different kind of fantasy world where you do whatever you want and you're not worried about making a living and so I got a call from a social worker a couple of years later after the film was done and she said do you know Joe Wagner I said yes she because he's in the county hospital dying of cancer so I went and lugged a 16 millimeter projector down there and showed him the film in his hospital room with all the doctors and nurses there he had pancreatic cancer and the film finished and he said you mean we spent all that time filming and it's only 12 minutes long so I can speak to Felicia in particular so I do try when I'm doing research on films like this to also find the subjects and it's interesting I wrote I found an address for Felicia and I wrote her a letter and 18 months later I got an email back and she had moved a couple of times and the letter chased her and she actually went to UC Santa Barbara she was one part of like the first cohort of color at UC Santa Barbara and she recalled I interviewed her with Allie we met with her in Los Angeles where she still lives and so she got a degree in history from Santa Barbara and she she talked with us about what it was like being one of the few women of color at UCSB not easy but they got through it and she went on to do some work in politics and community organizing and when we met with her which was probably now five or six years ago she had just moved not far from where she used to live where she grew up and she was working in community organizing again so it was quite quite extraordinary to interview her and you know we showed her the film she did not remember having ever seen it and she you know we were never we asked the filmmakers about it and they said really I'm we felt like we showed it to her you know I don't know I mean a lot of time has elapsed between 1965 and when we interviewed everyone but we showed the film to her and it was a home movie to her this was her family this was her life and it was very emotionally moving and difficult and wonderful all at the same time for her to watch this because it was so much her story and I will just say one thing that she mentioned as she was washing it she started laughing at one point and we kept pausing it and she said oh my gosh you know my mom made us wear our Sunday clothes for that getting ready for school scene where they're eating the cereal at the table we had to wear like the Sunday church clothes like we would never run school like that so yes what drew me to this program was the fact that an Iranian filmmaker was making a film on the east side I'd love to have more information on him and if you can speak to this Nexus which i think is really interesting because he makes the film or it's released in 1974 this is a kind of nascent time for the Iranian American community and there are a lot of echoes and Residences in this program we we see we see liminal space how how important it is in your film and in mr. reso Annie's film and it's it resonates a lot with me to see a film that is in a way attempting to you know there's a booster assign a McKinsey Penney's American film which in some sense is trying to grapple with our collective history and I would say that amnesia is firmly in the American grain so this this work that's being made outside of the mainstream is doing something doing a number of things that are really interesting and it seems to me given what Iran Ian's are dealing with at border points really interesting to see how one film is dealing with the japanese-american community another film is being made by an Iranian filmmaker about the east side there's a lot to unpack there but I suppose what I'm trying to do is throw things out there for for conversation but would be really interested to know more about Reza you know Yetta I know he works in sound yeah I wish I could answer that question better that I regret that Ali is not here because she actually wrote the section on that particular film so she is much more expert about it than I but I will say I do think one of the things that a lot of these films share is precisely that idea of space how do you carve out space at both literal space and then this kind of larger idea of cultural space and inheritance and many of these films are grappling with assimilation versus you know kind of cultural heritage and holding on to that and you can kind of weave through this which we do this work partly in the introduction to the collection to thinking about the way the film's approach this in in different ways and I do think East Side Story is interesting because you know all of these films have you know they're on a kind of documentary spectrum actually even though that one I think is probably the most kind of fictional if you were to put a put these in a kind of lineup but just in terms of thinking about the way that it imagines a sense of community dissolving and reforming and how do you claim it I mean these are all really interesting relevant questions on kind of both of those levels and I really I like the way these films kind of speak to each other in that way even though they're all about different communities and they approach the subject so distinctively right none of them kind of shares a methodology that's right that's right you know and it is quite extraordinary and again I wish I could answer more specifically about that Fellman about him and the history of the making of that particular film I know much more about some of the others we looked at but but what was I gonna say oh but the way that so many of the the people who are making these films had their finger on the pulse of the change of the city I mean this is a very la centric program deliberately because we are doing it here and you know there's about I would say a dozen to 15 others that we've shown in different contexts and they're really trying to understand and get in front of what's happening in these communities there's a really wonderful film called the savages that's about Venice that was made by one of the falesha filmmakers that's looking at you know kind of the other ghetto of the time besides watts which was Venice and thinking about the way that community was changing in the way that there was an attempt to kind of have a black middle-class in Venice that was being somewhat undermined by by some of the kind of criminal activity in the community that was making it more of a kind of police state presence there and so I think a lot of especially again the student filmmakers who were very active politically were thinking about about the kind of consequences for justification and the way police were involved in communities and economic disparity in ways that are just they're just absent and in any other form of filmmaking and it makes me remember that one of the things I didn't say in the introduction about felici is that that was film was actually shot in the spring of 1965 so it was before the August rebellions that happened that summer and so this film was marketed as a film that captured this this moment prior to what would completely redefine watts ever since right I mean so so it's it's it was really pitched as if you want to understand what was happening in that community here's somebody from within the community who is actually speaking it yeah this question is for both John and Jeremy I'm very curious I kind of like Marshalls comment about sort of the getting the phone call and what do you want to talk about since you made these films how often or when sort of in what situations have you encountered these films and like looking back on them how do you see them sort of fitting in either a professional or your personally how do you how do you feel looking back on them well you know I haven't really seen this film for 40 years so it's it's really surprising and it's fun to see it but you know I think it really our family was involved in civil rights my grandmother co-founded the ACLU so and I really it was brought up really I think sensitive to different people different different races different cultures and you know when I when I made the film I really was incensed I think by the fact that these people were really locked in and it was just a sweatshop and and it was just all on the surface I mean it was easy to see and he didn't know he didn't hide anything so looking back on it I'm really pleased to have done it I think it was you know was the right subject for me yeah for me I will actually have my film online at my website now so anybody can go and see it so I wanted to keep its life out there so that because I think it's so much of it as relevant today as far as homelessness goes I mean it was he was the only guy on that hillside he had that whole place to himself now if I were to go back there I'd bet there be homeless encampments all over the place and so it was the story about this guy who kind of lives on the edge of society is something that actually continued through my career and I match working on a project now about a man who lives outside for 35 years traveling with his three pack mule see 72 years old and he just chest chosen to live outside and I followed him for 27 months and we're editing the film right now and then about 2009 I did a film called the ghost Mountain experiment at about a family who went and lived off the grid during the Depression and World War two down the Anza Borrego Desert so I seem to go back to these stories about people who live outside the norm of society so I think it all started with cotton eyed Joe I guess I must have just I don't look for those stories they just kind of happen upon them I mean when they're there I tend to gravitate towards them in the back so I really appreciate their interest that you're going to do new subjects and try to bring others you know subjects Authority so if that's that that's the way how the society is willing this kind of matters change your kind of creative style how are you gonna portray these films are you're asking this of the filmmakers yeah yeah I'm not sure I understood the question I'm sorry so like because the society is changing and how people are winning subjects are really changing with the political situations that's going on the backstage so does it kind of change how you would portray these subject matters no I don't know I just to me this Joe is that just the story of one individual who lives a different kind of lifestyle and I guess now that I'm doing this story about the man who actually refers to himself as mule he wants to have the freedom to live his lifestyle to without having laws and people who say that it doesn't fit into society and it doesn't he doesn't follow our you know the norm of the laws that have been established and you know he's not he's yeah that's what I find so interesting about it so I think I if I found Joe today it might be a very similar film because I just want to tell the story through this man's Mules voice have him tell the story and it's on words approach it almost like Joe in a way where it's almost like a a almost like an experimental piece in a way like Joe you know you never really have any narration or or even hear him talking and so that's kind of how I would do that in today's landscape I guess and and I don't think I would show it differently when I the the point then and the point today would be kind of a point counterpoint and I think that the the same conditions continue that illegal aliens below the radar are afraid and afraid to ask for the rights or to to go to help to go to the Union and really so little has changed in many ways and I think that speaks to the earlier comment about amnesia you know that these films I think at the time the spirit of making some of them was like okay here's here's an issue here's an inequity here's something that we need to grapple with and I would say the the depressing part of watching these films is thinking about how little has changed and when things have changed often it's been for the worse so what I wanted to say - it's interesting you talk about Joe going to jail for two months well he went he just as we were beginning filming we find out that he's gone to jail for two months chairman of the USC cinema school went down to talk to the judge she goes I can't release him he's got a stack of crimes that and all the crimes are like loitering right those kinds of crimes and he was a black man and then I'd like to point out that mule is a white man but in some of the context of the situation's he's been caught in with the police if he was a black man he would probably be dead well I would like to thank both John and Jeremy for coming tonight by the way Jeremy came down from Santa Cruz which i think is incredible so thank thank them very much and thank you all for coming tonight and thank you UCLA and thank you projectionists for doing such a wonderful job