First and foremost, Robert Allen Parker wants you to know he is a musician, not a director. Even so, for the better part of a decade, Parker found himself consumed in making a documentary on music in Memphis. That film — Meanwhile in Memphis: The Sound of a Revolution — premiered at the Indie Memphis Film Festival in 2013, and now it’s returning to the big screen for a special 10th anniversary screening at Malco Studio on the Square.
Meanwhile in Memphis, Parker explains, is an “overview of the modern Memphis music community from the late ’70s to roughly 2008. There’s all the old history — with Elvis, the blues, and B.B. King — that’s well-documented, but there’s not much on what’s happened since then. It was a big undertaking, but I had the drive and the ambition. That was kind of a risk and a gamble because I had never done anything film-related before.”
After a meeting by happenstance, Parker enlisted videographer Nan Hackman as co-director. “We were both wanting to promote the music scene and try to get out and do something,” he says. “She had the technical perspective to make it happen. She really made this happen.”
Together, Hackman, who has since passed, and Parker interviewed over a dozen artists and bands, including, among others, Jim Dickinson, Al Kapone, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, Alicja-pop, and Mud Boy and the Neutrons. “We just wanted to tell the story of a couple of musicians, but of course then it grew bigger and bigger as we interviewed more people,” Parker says. “It basically expanded to a point to where it was really overwhelming. … And it became more of a historical document.”
With so much to work with, the direction of the film could have gone in a number of ways, Parker says, but ultimately, the through line that the filmmakers landed on was the “DIY mind” of Memphis musicians. “It doesn’t matter what genre of music they’re doing, just the fact of them being in Memphis and creating something here has an extra magical force to it. Whether it’s rap, garage, rock, blues, alternative, whatever, it’s a certain amount of DIY, like a raw passion. It’s not so much commercially driven. It’s just from the heart and soul. It’s something that you know it when you hear it and see it. … I got a new perspective on everything. It inspired me as musician.”
Because Hackman and Parker had so much footage, they ended up making a series of short films on a few of the artists interviewed, including one on Jim Dickinson which will accompany the Meanwhile in Memphis screening on Thursday. In between the short film and feature, Jimmy Crosthwait, the last living member of Mud Boy and the Neutrons, will perform with Parker and others backing him.
“When we made the documentary,” Parker reflects, “I wanted it to be made in a way where someone could watch it 10 or 20 years from then and for it to still be relevant.” So far, at the 10-year mark, the musician has found this to hold true.
(from top to bottom) Scenes from the pioneering 1922 horror film Häxan, Howard Bell’s Jookin, and Bradford Thomason and Brett Whitcomb's Butterfly in the Sky.
These days, it seems that film discourse is dominated by discussions about the future. But while there are real issues facing the unique combination of art and commerce we call cinema, there’s more to movies than just the multiplex — and that’s what Indie Memphis has specialized in for the last 25 years.
“We are kind of in our own lane,” says Executive Director Kimel Fryer. “Indie Memphis is like no other film festival, because Memphis is like no other city.”
Indie Memphis was founded in 1998 by a group of University of Memphis film students led by Kelly Chandler. Known then as the Memphis Independent Film Festival, it attracted about 40 people to a Midtown coffee shop, where they watched student movies projected on a sheet hung on the wall. Nowadays, the annual festival boasts an attendance of more than 11,000, and the organization hosts programming and events year-round, such as the monthly Shoot & Splice programs, where filmmakers provide deep dives into their craft. The Indie Grants program was created in 2014 to help fund Memphis-made short films. The Black Creators Forum began in 2017 to help address the historic racial inequalities in filmmaking. During the pandemic, Eventive, a Memphis-based cinema services company that began as Indie Memphis’ online ticketing system, pioneered the virtual programming which is now an established feature of film festivals worldwide.
“It took 25 years for Indie Memphis to become an organization that reflects the city,” says Artistic Director Miriam Bale. “But each step along the way has added to what makes it special now.”
Memphis Grizzlies superstar Z-Bo in Michael Blevins’ 50 for Da City.Karbanová and Jitka Cerhová in Daisies.Tahar Rahim is a jilted lover in Don Juan.
A New Leader
Kimel Fryer took over as Indie Memphis’ new executive director only a few weeks ago. But she is no stranger to either Memphis or the world of independent film. She’s a West Tennessee native whose mother has taught at Oak Elementary since the mid-1990s. “My mom was always tough on me, and I’m grateful for it because I ended up kind of inheriting that from her,” she says. “In my mind, I’m supposed to reach for the stars. I’m supposed to overachieve.”
Fryer holds graduate degrees in law and business from the University of Memphis and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. She has worked for companies as diverse as Lincoln Pacific and Pfizer, and left FedEx to take over the reins of Indie Memphis when Knox Shelton resigned after only a year on the job. The mother of two saw it as an opportunity to merge her professional life with her passion for film. “When I was working for Chrysler, I realized that I had this amazing job that I worked my butt off for,” she says. “It was a great company with great benefits. But I was depressed. If I wanna be completely honest, it was one of the saddest periods of my life.”
Growing up, Fryer had tried her hand at writing, and she had been involved with theater and band programs in high school and college. In Detroit, she found a new outlet for her creativity when she volunteered as casting director for filmmaker Robert Mychal Patrick Butler’s Life Ain’t Like the Movies. “The independent film world is very visible in Detroit,” she says.
When she landed Coming 2 America star Paul Bates for a role in the film, Butler promoted her to producer. “I said, ‘What is a producer?’ He said, ‘You’re kinda already doing it.’”
Fryer wrote and directed her own short film, “Something’s Off,” which will screen at Indie Memphis 2022. She says she got her acceptance email just a few weeks before she found out she was going to be the new executive director. “I’ve found this career where I could kind of wrap all my skills into one job,” she says. “I could actually be my full self all the time, which is really my dream.
“I’m very eager to learn and eager to meet other people, understand how they do things. But I’m also cognizant of the fact that I am coming back to Memphis, and we’ve always been a different city that has marched to the beat of our own drum. We’ve got to continue that as we continue to grow and strive for greatness in the film community. I’m really excited about what’s next. I believe in Indie Memphis. I believe in the staff. I believe we are headed towards a great film festival.”
The Picture Taker
From the 1950s to his death in 2007, it seemed that photographer Ernest Withers was everywhere. “We keep calling him a Zelig-like figure or like Forrest Gump,” says Phil Bertelsen, director of Indie Memphis 2022’s opening night film The Picture Taker. “He was at every flash point in Civil Rights history, and then some.”
Ernest Withers, courtesy of the Withers Family Trust.
Withers was a tireless documenter of Black life in the South. His work even appeared in publications like Jet and the Chicago Defender. “Some of my favorite photos of his are street portraits — the photos he took of everyday people just going about their daily business,” says Bertelsen.
“I think what made him almost like a father figure in Memphis was the fact that he recorded his community’s lives literally from birth to death,” says producer Lise Yasui. “He left behind an estimated 1.8 million photos. They are of every major event in every family’s life — as we say, it’s celebrations as well as sorrows. He locked that into their histories and made sure that they had these records of the lives they lived. Those photographs are really beautiful. They have an intimacy that can only come from someone inside the community.”
Three years after Withers’ 2007 death, Commercial Appeal reporter Marc Perrusquia revealed that the trusted photographer had been a paid informant for the FBI. The news came as a shock to many in the community, who saw it as a betrayal of the Civil Rights activists who had trusted Withers. “When you go behind the headlines and the surface of it all, you recognize that there’s a lot of nuance and complexity to that choice that he made at that time,” says the director. “What we attempted to do with the film is to try to understand that time, that choice, and the man who was at the center of it all.
“I think it could be said, without question, that Ernest was a patriot who believed in the hope and promise of this country,” continues Bertelsen. “Don’t forget he was a fourth-generation American war veteran.”
Withers was far from the only one talking to the FBI — their reports refer to him as source #338. “I had the privilege and the workload of reading as many of the FBI files as we could get our hands on,” says Yasui. “They tell a story that’s pretty intense and really detailed in terms of names, places, affiliations, and friendships — everything down to personal gossip. The other thing that you have to understand is they are FBI records written by FBI agents. So there’s not a single document in the 7,000+ pages that I’ve read that is a direct quote from Ernest himself. It’s always through the lens of his FBI handler. That’s not to say that what he wrote was not accurate, but it’s filtered through their agenda, which was to root out radicals who were allegedly inside the Civil Rights movement. …We heard testimony that he basically kept people from harm’s way because he knew what he knew. But at the same time, he damaged the reputations of people by informing on them. It was a double-edged sword that he was wielding.”
Ironically, it’s people like Coby Smith, a member of the Memphis-based Black Power group The Invaders, prime targets of the FBI’s COINTELPRO program, who defend Withers in The Picture Taker. “He was a man of great reputation and appreciation,” says Bertelsen. “In fact, we were hard-pressed to find anyone who had anything negative to say about him, even after it was shown that he informed on them.”
For Bertelsen and Yasui, this is the end of a six-year journey. “We are so grateful to the many people of Memphis who helped us get this story, especially the family who really took a leap of faith by trusting us with his images,” says Bertelsen. “They’ve had to face some very painful revelations about their patriarch, and they’re still facing them. I think it shows a certain amount of grace and trust and understanding. There are a lot of ways you can interpret this story, and they haven’t shied away from the truth. They told us they learned things about their dad that they didn’t know before, through this film. That’s very gratifying to us.”
The Poor & Hungry
In 2021, Craig Brewer directed Coming 2 America. It was his second collaboration with comedy superstar Eddie Murphy, and the biggest hit in the history of Amazon Studios.
In 2000, the biggest job Brewer had ever held was a clerk at Barnes & Noble bookstore. That was the year his first feature film, The Poor & Hungry, premiered at Indie Memphis. “I still feel that it was the biggest premiere that I’ve ever been to, and the one with the highest stakes,” he says. “Winning Best Feature for 2000 is still the greatest award I can ever remember winning in my life. … The festival back then was a beacon. It was the North Star. We were all making something so we could showcase it at Indie Memphis. It’s something I hope is still happening with the younger filmmakers today. I had another short that year called ‘Cleanup In Booth B.’ It was a big, productive time for me. But it was also the first time ever to see my work being shown in front of people at a movie theater.”
Craig Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry, which premiered at Indie Memphis Festival in 2000, will return to the festival.
The Poor & Hungry is the story of Eli (Eric Tate), a Memphis car thief who accidentally falls in love with one of his victims, a cellist named Amanda (Lake Latimer). The characters’ lives revolve around the P&H Cafe, a legendary Midtown dive bar which was run by the flamboyant Wanda Wilson, who plays herself. To call the black-and-white feature, shot with a handheld digital camcorder, “gritty” is a massive understatement. But Brewer was able to wring some striking, noir-like images from his cheap equipment, and the film features a series of great performances, most notably Lindsey Roberts’ stunning turn as Harper, a lesbian street hustler.
“I think what I got right on it is something that I tried to carry over to Hustle & Flow, which was, how do you create characters that, if somebody were to just describe them to you, you would say, ‘I don’t think I would like them’? But then, when you start watching them in the story, you find that you not only love them, but you want them to succeed, and you feel for them when they’re in pain.”
Made for $20,000, which Brewer inherited when his father Walter died suddenly of a heart attack, The Poor & Hungry would go on to win Best Feature at the Hollywood Film Festival, defeating films which had cost millions to produce. It got his foot in the door in Hollywood and earned him the opportunity to direct his second feature film Hustle & Flow, which was nominated for two Academy Awards, winning one for Three 6 Mafia’s song “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp.”
The Poor & Hungry will return to the festival where it premiered as part of Indie Memphis’ 25th anniversary celebration. “When I look at it now, I view it as an artifact of a time in Memphis. There are so many places that aren’t there anymore. The P&H Cafe that it’s named after is no more, and Wanda has left this planet in bodily form but remains in spirit. I’m so glad that I captured all that. It’s good to see a Memphis that may not be there anymore. But most importantly, I hope people come see it because it’s the movie that I point people to when they say that they want to make a movie but they think it’s impossible. Well, I made this with just a small camcorder, a microphone, four clamp lights, and a lot of effort.”
Hometown Heroes
It’s a bumper crop year for the Hometowner categories, which showcase films made here in the Bluff City. In addition to anniversary celebrations of Brewer’s The Poor & Hungry and this columnist’s punk rock documentary Antenna, nine features from Memphis filmmakers are screening during the festival.
Jookin is Howard Bell IV’s story of an aspiring dancer caught up in Memphis street life. The ’Vous by Jack Porter Lofton and Jeff Dailey is a documentary about the world-famous Rendezvous restaurant. Ready! Fire! Aim! is Melissa Sweazy’s portrait of Memphis entrepreneur Kemmons Wilson, founder of Holiday Inn. Show Business Is My Life — But I Can’t Prove It by G.B. Shannon is a documentary about the 50-year career of comedian Gary Mule Deer. Michael Blevins’ 50 for Da City recounts Z-Bo’s legendary run as a Memphis Grizzly. Cxffeeblack to Africa by Andrew Puccio traces Bartholomew Jones’ pilgrimage to Ethiopia to discover the roots of the java trade. United Front: The People’s Convention 1991Memphis is Chuck O’Bannon’s historical documentary about the movement that produced Memphis’ first Black mayor. Daphene R. McFerren’s Facing Down Storms: Memphis and the Making of Ida B. Wells sheds light on the Black journalist’s early years in the Bluff City. The Recycle King is Julian Harper’s character sketch of fashion designer Paul Thomas.
Bartholomew Jones in Andrew Puccio’s documentary Cxffeeblack to AfricaJack Oblivian in the Memphis punk rock documentary Antenna
On opening night is the Hometowner Narrative Shorts Competition. In recent years, this has been the toughest category in the entire festival, where Memphis filmmakers stretch their talents to the limits for 10 minutes at a time.
Janay Kelley is one of eight filmmakers whose works were chosen to screen in the narrative shorts competition. A junior at Rhodes College, she’s a product of the Indie Memphis CrewUp mentorship program, and two-time Grand Prize winner at the Indie Memphis Youth Festival. “This is my first film festival as an adult,” she says.
Kelley’s film is “The River,” an experimental marriage of imagery and verse. “My grandmother told me once that the river that you got baptized in could be the same river that drowns you in the morning. I like that dichotomy of healing and of destroying, of accepting new people into your life and saying, ‘Will you help me or will you harm me?’”
Kelley provides her own narration for the film, which was based on a prose poem she wrote while still in high school. “I take a lot of inspiration from my Southern heritage, especially from the women in my family,” she says.
The visuals reference several Black artists of the 20th century, especially the painting Funeral Procession by Ellis Wilson, which was famously featured on The Cosby Show. Kelley treats the many women, young and old, who appear in the film with a portraitist’s touch.
“Before I started in films, I was really into photography, and you can see a lot of that still in my work,” she says. “I come from a very poor background. There is a specific picture of my mother, my grandmother, and my aunt, and they got it taken at the fair. Back in the day, they used to take people’s portraits there, so some families would get dressed up to go to the fair to get their portraits taken, because they couldn’t afford to get it done any way else. What you need to know about being poor and Black in the South is that a lot of us don’t live long. So some of the stories I’ve heard about my family members, I’ve heard after they have died, and I’ve had to kind of stare at their pictures. I think it comes out of a genuine love of the history of photography, and what it meant for people like me.”
Witchcraft Through the Ages
Indie Memphis’ October spot on the calendar means that it coincides with what Bale calls “the spooky season,” when many horror movie aficionados embark on a monthlong binge watch. For this year’s festival, Bale programed a pair of rarely seen horror classics that have significant anniversaries. The first is Ghostwatch, a British mockumentary which debuted 30 years ago.
In the tradition of Orson Welles’ infamous Halloween radio broadcast of “War of the Worlds,” Ghostwatch was presented as a Halloween special in which real-life BBC journalists Sarah Greene and Craig Charles would broadcast a live investigation of a supposedly haunted house. But their goofy Halloween jokes turn serious when the house’s real ghosts show up and start causing mayhem. When it was first broadcast on Halloween night in 1992, the BBC switchboard was jammed with more than 1 million calls from viewers concerned that their favorite newscasters were being slaughtered by ghosts on live television. “This is a staff favorite,” says Bale.
The second Halloween special is Häxan, which has its 100th anniversary this year. Indie Memphis commissioned a new score for the silent film from Alex Greene, who is also the music editor for the Memphis Flyer. For this performance, Greene’s jazz ensemble The Rolling Head Orchestra — Jim Spake, Tom Lonardo, Mark Franklin, Carl Caspersen, and Jim Duckworth — will be joined by theremin virtuoso Kate Taylor. “We’ve been wanting to work with Alex for a long time, and this was a great opportunity,” says Bale.
Indie Memphis honors the 100th anniversary of the pioneering 1922 horror film Häxan with a new live score from Alex Greene and the Rolling Head Orchestra.
Director Benjamin Christensen based Häxan on his study of the Malleus Maleficarum (“The Hammer of Witches”), a guide for clergymen conducting witch hunts, published in 1486. Upon its premiere in 1922, Häxan was the most expensive silent film made in Europe. Christensen’s meticulous recreations of witches’ Sabbath celebrations, complete with flying broomsticks and an appearance by a mischievous Satan (played by the director himself), still look incredible. Its frank depictions of the Inquisition provide the horror. “I was shocked by how much of it is framed by the torture of the witches,” says Greene. “It implies that a lot of this crazy behavior they described was just victims trying to make up anything to stop the thumbscrews.”
Released a decade before Dracula ushered in the modern horror era, Häxan is a unique cinema experience. “I think of it as kind of like Shakespeare’s time, when the English language was not as settled in spellings and meanings of words. It was a fluid language,” says Greene. “This film came at a time when the language of cinema was very fluid and kind of up for grabs, which is why you could have this weird hybrid of documentary/reenactment/essay.”
“It’s within the Halloween realm, but not necessarily a horror movie,” says Bale. “That’s part of what’s so interesting about it. There are some silent films that just feel so fresh, they could have been made yesterday. Häxan is one of those.”
The 25th Indie Memphis Film Festival runs from October 19th to the 22nd at the Orpheum Theatre’s Halloran Centre, Crosstown Theater, Black Lodge, Malco Studio on the Square, The Circuit Playhouse, Playhouse on the Square, and virtually on Eventive. Festival passes and individual film tickets can be purchased at indiememphis.org. The Memphis Flyer will feature continuing coverage of Indie Memphis 2022 on the web at memphisflyer.com.
At a gala party last night at the High Cotton Brewing Company, Indie Memphis announced the lineup for their 17th annual film festival, which will be held October 30 to November 2. More than 40 feature length narrative and documentary films, as well as dozens of short subjects, will screen over the course of the four-day festival.
Friday night of the festival is Halloween, so it is appropriate that the work of one of America’s greatest horror directors, John Carpenter, will be honored with two gala screenings, beginning with his 1988 science fiction classic They Live, starring Rowdy Roddy Piper and Keith David.
Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup (3)
At midnight, Carpenter’s Halloween will screen. A direct descendant of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Jamie Lee Curtis’ film debut defined the 80’s slasher genre and holds up better than ever today.
Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup (2)
The festival will also celebrate the 20th anniversary of one of the best documentaries ever made, director Steve James’ Hoop Dreams.
Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup (4)
Hometown filmmakers are well represented at the festival with three narrative features: Chad Barton’s comedy of filmmaking errors Lights, Camera Bullshit; Anwar Jamison’s workplace comedy 5 Steps To A Conversation; Marlon Wilson and Mechelle Wilson’s Christian drama Just A Measure Of Faith. The sole local documentary is Pharaohs Of Memphis, director Phoebe Driscoll’s history of jookin’.
Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup (5)
Twelve films will compete for Best Narrative Feature, including the Brooklyn heist comedy Wild Canaries, Onur Tukel’s vampire comedy Summer Of Blood, the time travel drama Movement & Location, and the Texas-based crime drama Two Step.
Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup (6)
The thirteen films up for Best Documentary Feature include the kenetic sport doc American Cheerleader; The Hip Hop Fellow, tracing producer 9th Wonder’s experience as a teacher at Harvard; Man Shot Dead, an intimate history of a family torn apart by an unsolved murder; and Well Now You’re Here, There’s No Way Back, about Quiet Riot drummer Frankie Banali’s fight to keep the heavy metal dream alive.
Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup (7)
Other notable films include Sundance winner Whiplash, a music drama starring Miles Teller as a young jazz drummer and J.K Simmons as his demanding teacher, and The Imitation Game, an early Oscar contender starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the eccentric British codebreaker whose work in World War II led directly to the invention of the modern digital computer.
Indie Memphis Film Festival Announces 2014 Lineup (8)
The festival, which will also include numerous panels, special events, and parties, will take place in venues around Overton Square, including Playhouse On The Square, Circuit Playhouse, the Hattiloo Theater, and Malco’s Studio On The Square. The Memphis Flyer will have an in-depth examination of the festival as the cover story for our October 30th issue. Go to indiememphis.com for details on how to buy passes for Memphis’ greatest film weekend.
No salute to Sweden, the honored country for this year’s Memphis In May, would be complete without recognizing its considerable contributions to film and, specifically, a few of the works of its cinematic genius, Ingmar Bergman. One of the medium’s true legends, Bergman made movies that were about what it’s like to be human, souls and bodies stripped of artifice and considered in all their glory and dysfunction.
In honor of the occasion, Memphis In May and Indie Memphis are partnering on “Sweden @ 24 FPS,” weekly screenings of 35mm prints of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries and the modern Swedish films Beyond and Sound of Noise.
Bergman was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won another three. He’s best known for 1957’s The Seventh Seal, starring Max von Sydow as a knight returning home from the Crusades who encounters Death, a sinister black-clad figure. Trying to avoid his fate, the knight challenges Death to a game of chess, spawning the film’s most famous imagery. The Seventh Seal is scarily compelling but still considerably charming. In it, Bergman expresses an earthy appreciation of small things, like the knight considering a bowl of fresh milk, fragile and bound to spill, like all life.
Wild Strawberries — also 1957, I mean, c’mon, son — stars Victor Sjöström (the great Swedish silent film director, a major influence on Bergman) as a bitter, old professor traveling to receive an honorary degree and forced to confront his mortality and the lack of meaning in the life he’s led. The film is a road movie and contains a number of flashbacks and dream sequences. It’s an all-time classic (and you could do a lot worse than making it a personal double feature with its unintentional companion piece, Kurosawa’s Ikiru).
Beyond is the filmmaking debut of Swedish actress Pernilla August (trivia: August played Ingmar Bergman’s real-life mother in The Best Intentions) and stars Noomi Rapace (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) as a woman who must travel to confront her dying mother, from whom she’s estranged. Sound of Noise is a comedy (Swedes can be funny, too!) about a tone-deaf police officer named Amadeus (Bengt Nilsson) trying to stop a gang of guerilla percussionists causing a public nuisance in his city.
“Sweden @ 24 FPS,” 35mm prints presented by Memphis In May and Indie Memphis
Screening on Wednesdays in May at 7 p.m. and 9:15 p.m. at Studio on the Square.
Tickets are $8 in advance and for nonmembers at the door, free for Indie Memphis members.
The Seventh Seal, Wednesday, May 8th; Wild Strawberries, May 15th; Beyond, May 22nd; and Sound of Noise, May 29th.
The third comedic feature from writer/producer Mark Jones (following Eli Parker is Getting Married and Fraternity Massacre at Hell Island), Tennessee Queer stars Christian Walker as Jason Potts, a gay man who left his small Tennessee hometown for New York but is lured back for what he thinks is an intervention for his alcoholic brother. Instead, Jason finds his supportive family angling for a full-time return, insisting that the town has become more gay-friendly.
Tennessee Queer was written in February of 2011 and filmed the following fall. After a one-night local premiere and a festival run last year, it’s getting an encore Memphis screening this week as a fund-raiser for Outflix, Memphis’ annual gay and lesbian film festival.
“I was sort of reacting to events in Memphis and Tennessee over the previous couple of years,” Jones says of the film’s concept, which finds the film’s protagonist petitioning for a gay pride parade in his ostensibly conservative hometown. Jones cites a rally against gay rights sponsored by some Shelby County elected officials and the controversy over the state-wide “don’t say gay” bill as influences.
Back home, Jason seeks to disprove his family’s claims by petitioning to hold a gay pride parade down the town’s Main Street and is shocked to find his petition approved by the positive vote of conservative council member DeWayne Cotton (Billie Worley), who has his eye on a mayoral race and may have ulterior motives.
“I wanted it to have a positive message,” Jones says of a film where his protagonist finds some resistance but also plenty of support. “He’s sort of a reluctant hero, but one person can make a difference.”
Tennessee Queer sketches a legacy of small-town homophobia with a tidy opening sequence that reveals a “smear the queer” wall in the locker room of the high school football team, where the humiliation of suspected gay students — including Jason — has been noted for decades.
“I wanted to do something to get across to the audience that it’s not a new issue in this town,” Jones says of the opening conceit. “It’s a quick way to present the history and establish that Jason has been a part of it.”
The film turns Midtown’s Broad Avenue into its small-town main street and also uses locations such as the P&H Café and Minglewood Hall.
Jones collaborated again here with cinematographer/editor Ryan Parker — whose technical hand is as sure as ever — and a talented crew that includes assistant directors Sarah Fleming and Morgan Jon Fox, both significant figures on the local film scene. Jones was initially set to direct the film but had some health problems on the eve of the shoot, making the direction a collective affair. To acknowledge this, the film is credited to “Earl Goshorn,” a mash-up of Parker’s and Jones’ middle names.
The film debuted last year at the Philadelphia Q Festival and has had screenings at gay and lesbian festivals in Atlanta, Indianapolis, and North Carolina. It’s set to screen at the Oxford Film Festival, in Mississippi, next month. Proceeds from this week’s local screening will go to the Outflix Film Festival, which is sponsored by the Memphis Gay & Lesbian Community Center and which will run September 6th through 12th.
Though it was shot last summer, primarily at a farmhouse in rural Stanton, Tennessee, the road to the local indie feature The Romance of Loneliness began half a decade earlier, in Paris — France, not Tennessee.
Filmmakers Matteo Servente — an Italian — and Sarah Ledbetter — a native Memphian — met at a New York Film Academy workshop in Paris a decade ago. Servente had studied film history in college, and Ledbetter, a dancer, had gotten the filmmaking bug at home working with documentarian Joann Self — a former high school classmate at St. Mary’s School — on Self’s film The WLOK Story.
Servente and Ledbetter’s partnership extended from Paris to another hands-on film program in Australia and back to Europe, where they collaborated on the short film Dammi il La. When the short found unexpected favor in film festivals — and more so in the U.S. than in Europe — Servente and Ledbetter decided to continue their partnership but this time in Ledbetter’s Memphis home and with a feature project.
“The more we thought about things, the ideas we came up with had to do with this region,” says Servente, with Ledbetter adding, “We thought we needed to make an American film and to try our hand at a feature.”
The initial idea that would become The Romance of Loneliness concerned a road trip and a personal transformation but focused on a male protagonist and his mother, says Ledbetter, who penned the film’s screenplay and co-directed with Servente, who, roughly speaking, focused on the film’s visuals while Ledbetter focused on the script and actors.
But, partly inspired by the work of Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar, whose femme-centered feature Volver came out soon after Servente and Ledbetter began working together, Ledbetter evolved her story into a film about women.
“We decided to get all into Southern women and what their lives are like,” Ledbetter says.
The finished product seems to take place over roughly 24 hours, as the restless, uncertain Amanda (Amy LaVere) leaves her boyfriend Richard (Kentucker Audley) with the notion of heading west. But she is instead persuaded to pick up her grandmother Mina (Lynn Cohen) to attend the rural wedding of cousin Cristina (Rebekah Brandes) to another woman.
The film is populated by familiar faces from the local film and music scenes, starting with LaVere but also including actor/filmmakers Audley and G.B. Shannon in small roles and musicians such as Deering & Down, Star & Micey, and Luke White (Snowglobe, Coach & Four).
But, with the help and urging of local indie producers Nick Case and Ryan Watt, of Paper Moon Films, Servente and Ledbetter also hired a casting director to add some experienced, non-local performers to the mix. Anna Margaret Hollyman (who plays Amanda’s sister, Margot) and Brandes each has a dozen or so titles on her filmography and each brings a strong on-screen presence. But the real coup here is the septuagenarian Cohen, who plays the grandmother of these three women. You probably won’t recognize Cohen’s name, but her face will be familiar: She was Magda, Cynthia Nixon’s housekeeper, on Sex & the City. She was Golda Meir in Steven Spielberg’s Munich, and next year she will have a featured role in Hunger Games: Catching Fire as a veteran winner of the Games.
Cohen grounds the film with a warm but matter-of-fact charisma and offers perhaps the film’s key bit of dialogue early on with some stern advice for Amanda: “You do not need to find yourself. You need to be yourself — whatever you may be.”
“Lynn has some Southern roots. She spent a good part of her growing up in Kentucky,” Ledbetter says. “And I think the script resonated with her. We were blessed in that sense.”
But, like innumerable filmmakers before them, Servente and Ledbetter found their first feature challenging.
They spent three years honing the script and raising money and then spent a year in editing and post-production. In between, actual shooting was done in a tightly budgeted two-and-a-half-week rush that presented some unexpected problems.
“We really didn’t know what we were in for. It was so much bigger than we thought it would be,” Servente admits. “From the script to the final product, it is a different film. We got to a point in the editing where we realized that the story as we first thought about it wasn’t working.” Servente credits the film’s editors (Eileen Meyer and Jenny Myers) with helping them through the process.
Ledbetter says that the production lost a key actor during the shoot and didn’t have time to recast a role that deeply impacted Amanda’s character arc or much time to change the script, which led to having to reshape the film in the editing.
“[We were] green about how much money matters on a day-to-day basis,” Ledbetter says. “We did not realize what a balls-to-the-wall rush everything would be. We care so much about nuance and doing a scene right, but it became about getting one scene right or getting 10 scenes shot that have to get shot. It was a miracle of collaboration to come out with a film.”
What emerges is a film that has engaging performers and an alluring setting but with a central story that is perhaps a bit elusive.
“To some extent, Amanda has accepted that she’s part of a community that cares for her and that she’s not going to get anywhere by just acting out and divorcing herself from that,” Ledbetter says of her protagonist’s journey. “But that’s never going to be the complete picture. There’s still a minor key at the end. That openness, to me, is lifelike.”
The Romance of Loneliness ready for its rollout — which includes a week-long run at Studio on the Square following a premiere at the Paradiso — Servente and Ledbetter will look ahead to new projects while promoting this first feature. Servente, who says he’s settled in Memphis for the moment, is planning on shooting a short film in the next month or so and will then start working on his first script. Ledbetter plans to work on some short dance film, but hopes to collaborate with Servente again after exploring their own paths for a while.
“We occasionally brainstorm,” she says. “After a little breathing space, we’ll discuss it.”
For now, the duo has the satisfaction of having completed their first filmmaking marathon — even if the final product didn’t quite meet their initial expectations.
“This was, in many ways, below everybody’s ideal,” Ledbetter acknowledges. “When they looked at the script and our past work, everybody was so excited. And by the end, we all had everything drawn out of us. But it’s real. It’s an actual film that exists.”
For 75 years, the Memphis College of Art has made a significant impact on local culture that extends even beyond the visual arts. The school’s students and faculty have spread their influence far and wide, contributing to institutions all over Memphis and beyond and touching artistic movements from cubism to postmodernism, which is why True Story Pictures decided to make a film to document the intriguing history behind the small, professional center of art and design education.
“The music is what we’re known for the world over, but the art here is just as strong,” says Joann Self Selvidge, director and producer of The Art Academy: A History of the Memphis College of Art.
Selvidge had previously conducted an extensive series for True Story Pictures called The Arts Interviews, in which she spoke with influential artists around the region and noticed a common, binding thread intrinsic to the lives of all she reached: a deep connection to MCA.
“It’s not strictly like a historical documentary in the chronological sense, but a lot of what we focused on are the people, these iconic figures and their influence on the school and their artwork. It’s more a celebration and homage to what the school has produced,” Selvidge says.
Prolific artists and instrumental instructors like Dorothy Sturm and Marjorie Liebman came from Memphis and left to explore New York’s art world before returning home to teach at what was then the Memphis Academy of Art. Both women were important to the abstract expressionist movement in the ’50s, represented in New York by the same gallery that took on Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. But not every story was so easy to tell.
“When you set out to make a historical documentary, one of the first things you do is try to gather as much imagery as possible that you can use in a film format on the screen,” Selvidge says.
To illustrate MCA’s ornate history, Selvidge unearthed a wealth of old, 16-mm footage captured mostly under the instruction of former administrator and accomplished sculptor Ted Rust. She also used 3-D animations produced by a talented creative team of former and current MCA students, led by art director Ryan McGahan, to portray major events like the walk-out that led to the formation of a truly innovative arts school and Roy Harrover’s original blueprints for a major arts complex in Overton Park. Steve Selvidge and Paul Taylor then composed an original soundtrack for the film, with the addition of a special piece from Jonathan Kirkscey for the opening animation.
The documentary’s one-night-only premiere will take place at Malco’s Studio on the Square on May 2nd at 7 p.m., accompanied by an art exhibit and silent auction of works specifically created for the film in the theater’s lobby from noon to 10 p.m. Promising early ticket sales have indicated the likelihood of a second screening at 10 p.m., but patrons are encouraged to purchase tickets online at theartacademy.eventbrite.com if possible. Tickets for the screening are $12 each.
The Art Academy: A History of the Memphis College of Art
Studio on the Square, Wednesday, May 2nd, 7 p.m.; $12
In June 2008, a Denver resident named Desiree returned home from work to find this note on her door: “Call us about your dog.”
Her pit bull, Coco, was missing from the backyard. The note came from Denver Animal Control, which had taken Coco under a city ordinance banning pit bulls. Desiree protested but to no avail.
“The hardest thing while Coco was on death row was going to visit him,” Desiree said. “He didn’t understand what was going on. He thought we were there to take him home. It broke my heart every time. He was in their 3-by-5-[foot] cell for nearly two months.”
Desiree’s tragic story is one of several profiled in Knoxville resident Libby Sherrill’s documentary Beyond the Myth, which looks at breed-specific legislation. Denver, Miami, and Cincinnati have outright bans on people owning pit bills, even as pets.
“The only way to determine a pit bull is to go by physical characteristics, and many rescued shelter dogs that have some pit bull in them get tossed into that,” said Sherrill, who has two pit bulls, Fern and Joey.
Beyond the Myth screens in Memphis on Wednesday, June 15th, at Malco’s Studio on the Square. Part of the proceeds will benefit Mid-South Spay & Neuter Services’ “Dog Days of Summer” program, which offers free spay and neuter services to pit bulls and pit mixes until the money runs out.
Seating is limited, so attendees are encouraged to purchase tickets in advance. Advance tickets can be purchased for $12 exclusively at www.beyondthemythmovie.com and at the door that night at Malco Studio on the Square. Tickets for the VIP after party hosted by the Slider Inn are $30 and can be purchased online or at the door that evening. The after party features free Food, drinks, and entertainment by Kimber Cleveland, who recorded the music for Beyond the Myth‘s soundtrack.
“Beyond the Myth” Screening, Studio on the Square, Wednesday, June 15th, 7 p.m. $12 advance/$15 door. After-party: $27 advance/$30 door. Call 324-3202 or go to www.beyondthemythmovie.com for more information.
To this day, Jackie Fargo swears he could take Sputnik Monroe easy. In Memphis Heat: The True Story of Memphis Wrasslin’, the silver-haired wrestling legend looks into the camera and bluntly declares that anybody who couldn’t beat Monroe had no business in the ring. At age 72, Fargo can still strut. And he still knows how to bring the heat.
In the world of professional wrestling, “heat” is the expression used to describe public animosity between wrestlers and the resulting fan frenzy. Heat is desirable. It’s the currency of professional wrestling, and once upon a time, Memphis, Tennessee, had heat like no other city in America. All of that energy is encapsulated in Memphis Heat, an always entertaining and surprisingly enlightening film co-produced by Sherman Willmott and Ron Hall, the creative team behind the books Sputnik, Masked Men, & Midgets: The Early Days of Memphis Wrestling and Playing for a Piece of the Door: A History of Garage & Frat Bands in Memphis1960-75.
Ask Hall how he became a wrestling fan, and he answers succinctly. “It was a blast,” he says. Hall’s family moved to Memphis in 1959 as he was starting fourth grade. Sputnik Monroe and Billy Wicks were laying the foundation for their 1961 feud, and since all the kids at Hall’s school watched wrestling on TV, this classic battle of good vs. evil was a hot topic of conversation on the playground. In one corner there was Wicks, the blond hero type. Monroe — the loud, abusive bully — shouted taunts from the other.
“I was hooked,” says Hall, a lifelong collector of memorabilia. “I cut out clippings, bought pictures, watched every week: The Baby Blimp, Mighty Jumbo, Rowdy Red Roberts, Treacherous Phillips, Mario & Spider Galento.” Hall cuts his list of Memphis wrestlers short. Had he gone on, it could have included some of the pseudo-sport’s biggest names: Hulk Hogan, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Jerry “The King” Lawler, and WWE attraction turned Hollywood action hero Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, many of whom make at least cameo appearances in Memphis Heat.
Professional wrestling evolved from carnival strong-man attractions, once a standard sideshow con. Burly roustabouts would take on all comers, offering a substantial bounty to any man in the crowd who could lick him in a fair fight. But nobody could win against the house, because, as several wrestlers interviewed for the documentary observe, the fight was never fair. A second man always hid behind a curtain with a blackjack, ready to finish off tough challengers.
As wrestling moved from the carnival midway to gyms and arenas, it became more theatrical. Novelties like midget and female wrestling gave way to the development of larger-than-life characters and ongoing feuds and story lines that often reflected political and cultural insecurities. In the years after World War II, the most effective bad guys were sadistic Germans like Kurt and Karl Von Brauner or heartless Japanese villains like Tojo Yamamoto. Likewise, during the energy crisis of the 1970s, heels from oil-producing countries became popular in the ring. Memphis Heat touches on this brutal kabuki, but it also shows how Sputnik Monroe used his star power to take on racism.
When Monroe was arrested for drinking in blacks-only bars on Beale Street, he fought back with heat, hiring African-American attorney Russell Sugarmon and trash-talking segregation like he was trash-talking one of his opponents. “What kind of communist country would tell a man where he can and can’t have a drink?” he’d ask. Monroe lost his case, but he won the fight to further desegregate Memphis wrestling, and when any of his fellow wrestlers complained, Monroe would tell the bookers, “Don’t give that man any black money.”
Former wrestler and promoter Buddy Wayne doesn’t think Monroe intended to treat his case like a wrestling match. “He was the kind of man who, if you really needed something, he’d make sure you got it,” Wayne says. “And I think he really loved black people. And they loved him.”
Memphis expanded its reputation as a wrestling town in the 1970s and ’80s due in no small part to the contributions of a fire-and-flour-throwing antics of Lawler, whose feud with comedian Andy Kaufman climaxed with an explosive appearance in 1982 on Late Night With David Letterman that helped to mainstream professional wrestling.
Director Chad Schaffler and editor Prichard Smith set a brisk pace, and Memphis Heat covers a lot of ground, including the birth of WMC’s live-studio wrestling, which outperformed the World Series locally. The film touches on behind-the-scenes feuds between rival promoters who shaped the business of wrestling. It also explores the pre-MTV relationship that developed between area wrestlers, musicians, and TV personalities, which made the emergence of former Gentry Jimmy “The Mouth of the South” Hart an inevitability.
But will Memphis Heat appeal to non-fans? Hall thinks it’s possible.
“My wife was never a fan and thought all the pictures I got in the mail while working on Sputnik, Masked Men, & Midgets were gross,” he says. “But this movie changed her mind. It’s a hell of a story.”
Premieres at Malco Paradiso with shows at 7 and
9 p.m. on Thursday, March 24th;
March 24th also will be named National Sputnik Monroe Day in honor of the wrestler.
Memphis Heat starts a week-long run at Studio on the Square beginning Friday, March 25th.
“Why should a financial engineer be paid four times to a hundred times as much as a real engineer? A real engineer builds bridges. A financial engineer builds dreams. And when those dreams turn out to be nightmares, other people pay for it.” — Andrew Sheng, chief adviser, China Banking Regulatory Commission, in Inside Job.
Political scientist and author Charles Ferguson made his film debut in 2007 with No End in Sight, an account of civilian mismanagement in post-war Iraq that stands as the very best of the many nonfiction films that have emerged from the Afghan and Iraq wars. No End in Sight is a thorough, sober account of a man-made tragedy, and so is Ferguson’s second film, Inside Job, which examines the global economic crisis that erupted in the midst of the 2008 presidential election.
Ferguson takes on multiple roles as writer, director, and producer here, and while he never appears on-screen, his voice is sometimes audible, pushing hard — but never grandstanding — against interview subjects such as financial industry lobbyists, Bush administration Treasury Department officials, and biz-school academics attempting to downplay their conflicts of interest.
Ferguson’s film is a relentless, merciless search for accountability based on a simple, clearly stated premise: that the economic crisis was not an accident, but rather a predictable result of an out-of-control industry.
In telling this story, Ferguson doesn’t begin in late 2008, when Lehman Brothers and AIG fell. He starts, instead, in the early ’80s, at a period following 40 years of post-Great Depression economic growth. Ferguson cites Reagan-era financial deregulation, which allowed once small, traditional investment banks to go public and fueled the savings-and-loan crisis of the late ’80s, as the beginning of a 30-year process.
The erosion of economic stability, as Ferguson tells it, was continued during the Clinton administration by figures such as Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, and Alan Greenspan and accelerated during the George W. Bush administration, when practices such as subprime mortgages and predatory lending exploded in an increasingly corrupt, risky, and leveraged financial system.
None of this is new, but what’s special here — okay, stomach-turning — is the concision and clarity with which Ferguson marshals his arguments.
There are subgenres of documentaries. Some, like Hoop Dreams or the films of Barbara Kopple (Harlan County U.S.A.), put you in the middle of intimate but resonant stories as they’re happening. Others, most notably the films of Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11), present the filmmaker as on-camera focal point. Others — such as the works of Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, Fast Cheap and Out of Control) — are character or subculture studies.
Inside Job, like No End in Sight before it, belongs to a doc subgenre that doesn’t tend toward dynamism — the big-issue overview rooted in talking-head interviews. But based on these two towering films, no one is making this kind of documentary at a higher level. These films move Ferguson into the very top ranks of nonfiction filmmakers.
Ferguson organizes Inside Job like a legal brief in five sections —”How We Got Here,” “The Bubble (2001-2007),” “The Crisis,” “Accountability,” and “Where We Are Now.” The film assembles its information and constructs its arguments using interviews, on-screen charts and graphs, and Ferguson’s calm but forceful writing, voiced here by actor Matt Damon. The talking heads on display are a distinguished lot, among them, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker, financier George Soros, Congressman Barney Frank, foreign statesmen, and various academics, governmental officials, and industry insiders.
There is also the “Wall Street Madam” and a therapist with industry clients, who testify to some of the sketchier aspects of the industry’s culture. But Ferguson also moves past the insiders at times to show the wider impact of the financial collapse — linking corrupt actions at Goldman Sachs directly to the job losses of millions of Chinese migrant workers, then interviewing one of these workers; juxtaposing aerial shots of Hamptons estates with a Florida tent city and talking to a laid-off construction worker living there.
Ferguson doesn’t dumb down any of this material, but his presentation is lucid and clear enough for most attentive viewers to follow. Even after seeing the film, I’m not sure I could really explain the difference between derivatives, collateralized debt obligations, and credit default swaps (and even Soros seems confused). But you don’t have to master industry terminology to see how the system was corrupted and then collapsed.
The tone of Inside Job is one of simmering anger. Rage emerges from an accumulation of facts, not from operatic prodding. And this full-scale undressing of the American financial industry leaves us in a present where not enough has changed, with five financial services lobbyists for each member of Congress and a president who campaigned on reform but has, so far, delivered minimal change.
All the details in place, Ferguson pivots to advocacy at the end: “For decades, the American financial system was stable and safe. But then something changed. The financial industry turned its back on society, corrupted our political system, and plunged the world economy into crisis. At enormous cost, we’ve avoided disaster and are recovering, but the men and institutions that caused the crisis are still in power. And that needs to change.”
Inside Job ends with a sense of hope — or tries to — but its depiction of a permanent government beholden to the financial industry is so thorough that the suggestion that we can truly reverse this 30-year wave feels, sadly, like the film’s only false note.
