LAURA BROWDER

If This Is Tuesday, It Must Be Montgomery:
Adventures in Documentary Film Making

Well, thank you so much for all coming out on a drizzly Friday afternoon, and what I wanted to talk about today is how I came to turn a book—a sort of quasi-academic book, Slippery Characters, which is all about people who change their ethnic identities and recreate themselves—into a couple of documentary films

The story kind of starts three years ago, but it really starts back in 1994, when I was finishing up as a graduate student at Brandeis University, and one of the professors I was working with told me about this kid who was doing a senior thesis on The Education of Little Tree and wanted to interview me as his talking head—because back then, if you were an undergraduate, a graduate student was about the best talking head you could hope to get for a documentary.

I don’t know if anyone remembers The Education of Little Tree, which was a huge, huge bestseller—touching story of a Cherokee orphan’s growing up in the mountains during the great depression with his wonderfully supportive Cherokee grandparents. This was a huge national sensation, it was kind of a New Age classic, Clint Eastwood was making a movie, there were Little Tree fan clubs all over the country, when—boom—in 1991, historian Dan Carter published an op/ed piece in the New York Times that said guess what—Forrest Carter is not only not a Cherokee orphan, he is not even Forrest Carter; he is actually Asa Carter, who was a rabid white supremacist Klan leader in Alabama during the 1950s and 60s, head of many White Citizen’s Council groups and speech writer to George Wallace.  He wrote the famous “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” speech.

Now, needless to say, this news came as a huge shock to a lot of people, perhaps even including those people who had read it the first time in 1976 when another journalist had exposed Forrest Carter as Asa Carter.  But memory is short, people forgot, and to make a long story short, Douglas Newman, this Brandeis student, had read The Education of Little Tree in a class on autobiography where it was being presented as a real autobiography and had told his professor, “Hey guess what, this really isn’t a Cherokee autobiography,” and that started him on the road to his senior thesis. 

I had started my book right around the same time—what would become my book, Slippery Characters—which was about a whole range of people, from whites who pretended to be runaway slaves in the 1840s and wrote fake autobiographies, all the way up to more recent impersonators like Little Tree. So, Douglas interviewed me using one of those enormous video cameras that were current in 1994—and he presented his senior thesis, and that was that.

Ten years later, I got an e-mail and then a phone call from him. In the meantime, I had gone on to publish the book, he had gone on to become a producer for ABC, making documentaries for A&E Biography, things like that. He had gone on to become independent and was looking to make his first documentary, which he wanted to be based on Slippery Characters. We ended up collaborating; I became the writer and co-producer—and we’ll talk in a little while about what being a writer on a documentary means when there’s no narration—because I still don’t really know what it means. I embrace the title, but it’s something of a fiction.

 Before we knew it, we were out there raising money—soon thereafter, driving around in a minivan with three guys from New York and me, who at the time had a very small baby and hadn’t really left the house in a year except to go teach classes, suddenly out there interviewing old-time Alabama journalists and politicians and eventually people with white supremacist leanings.

This is what came out of that experience. We had originally decided to make a movie based on three ethnic impersonators, of which Asa Carter would be one: Mezz Mezzrow who was a Jewish immigrant’s kid from Chicago who decided to reinvent himself in the 1920s as a black jazz musician because he thought that the only way to be an authentic jazz musician was to be African American, and a third impersonator, Danny Santiago, who started life as a wealthy W.A.S.P. screenwriter for Charlie Chaplin and by the 1980s had become a twenty-eight year old Brown Power Chicano activist (So impersonating both in time and space, as it were).

This was the documentary that we have gotten furthest on so far, the one that we’ve spent most time, most energy on, and gotten the most grants for.  We started off in Alabama interviewing people who had known Asa Carter, eventually went to Abilene, Texas to talk to people who knew him as Forrest Carter, went out to southern California to interview Clint Eastwood’s producing partner who worked on The Outlaw Josey Wales, which was another Forrest Carter production, to Boothbay Harbor, Maine where Forrest Carter’s agent lived and who told us a fabulous story about Forrest Carter coming to her house to stay overnight—her apartment, with her four young daughters—at a time when he was about to film the Barbara Walters show, and started the evening by making an incredibly racist remark about her doorman in her apartment building and ended up by making passes at at least two of her barely pubescent daughters. So, that was a vivid story.

We went to Columbia, South Carolina to interview Tom Turnipseed, who had been George Wallace’s national campaign director and who had reinvented himself since then as an anti-racist activist. We went all over the country collecting material, doing interviews, and eventually put them together into a twenty-minute promo, which we entered into a contest to be shown at the IFP Market, which is one of the big independent film showcases that’s held every year in New York. Fortunately, we got accepted, showed it, and got ten buyers interested: HBO, and PBS, and POV, and BBC, and a few others. Right now, we’re just finishing up making the rough cut. We’ve got one more trip to Alabama, and then we’re going to be showing it at the James River Festival of the Moving Image in April [2007], and then looking to scrounge up more money.

What I’ve really learned about filmmaking, as very distinct from writing, is how much money it takes, and how you’re constantly involved in scrounging money.  That being a writer and co-producer mainly means riding around in a minivan, schlepping a lot of equipment, and also schmoozing all the time, schmoozing people who you want to talk to because you want them to be in your movie, and schmoozing people who you hope will give you money so you can continue making the movie. So that’s what it mainly involves.

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