Directory of Productions

Appalachia, Part I

Project Director: Ross Spears
Grantee: James Agee Film Project
SHMF Award (2001): $40,000

It has been observed that, “More is known about Appalachia that is untrue than about any other region of the country.” The goal of the series is to set the record straight. SHMF is supporting the first of four, one-hour documentaries on the history of Southern Appalachia – a region stretching from northern Alabama to West Virginia. Each part of the series will tell the story of Appalachia as it passes under the control of successive peoples with their differing cultures, technologies, and world views – beginning with the indigenous people in Part I (“Rivers of the Earth”), followed by the European settlers in Part II (“New Green World”), and the industrialists in Part III (“Mountain Revolutions”). The final episode (“Mirrors and Mountains”) will examine Appalachia during the many conflicts of culture, politics, environment, and regional identity in the 20th century. Appalachia will be a complex portrait of a highly distinctive region that is also a microcosm for the forces that have shaped the nation and even the planet. Consulting scholars include Jefferson Chapman, Robert Coles, Richard Couto, Wilman Dykeman, Ronald Eller, Henry Louis Gates, Jean Haskell, Charles Hudson, John Inscoe, Loyal Jones, Ron Lewis, Theda Purdue, Lee Smith, Joe Trotter, and a variety of special area experts.

Information:
Ross Spears, Agee Films
P.O. Box 3441, Charlottesville, VA 22903
(434) 971-2921 / jagee@cstone.net
www.ageefilms.org

BlackSouth – Zora Neale Hurston’s Life Journey

Grantee: Image Film and Video
Project Director: Kristy Andersen
SHMF Award (1995): $40,000

Zora Neale Hurston’s life story, from her birth in Alabama to her death in Florida, is the subject of this 90-minute film. Capturing the flavor of “BlackSouth,” or the essence of life for the “Negro farthest down,” was Hurston’s lifelong ambition, and this project aims to communicate the substance and character of her work. The film will use documentary techniques to explore social and racial change in the life of Southern blacks from 1910 to the 1940s, considering how Hurston documented their experience and creatively employed her observations in fiction, as well as in her letters and essays.

Information:
Kristy Andersen, Bay Bottom News
4309 Watrous Avenue, Tampa, FL 33629
(813) 289-8554

Documenting the Face of America: Roy Stryker and the FSA/OWI Photographers

Grantee: South Carolina ETV
Project Director: Jeanine Butler
SHMF Award: $69,000

Between 1935 and 1943, the Farm Security Administration, which would be absorbed by the Office of War Information, assigned a group of photographers to document the "real" state of the Union and convince Congress that the Federal aid programs of Roosevelt's New Deal were needed. What started as a government program became a systematic documentation of disappearing American culture, resulting in a collection of 200,000 photographs portraying the faces of Depression-era Americans. A small number of the photographs from the FSA/OWI collection have become icons of the American experience, but the vast majority of them have rarely been seen. This High Definition, one-hour documentary will explore these images and elucidate their origins and contexts. Focusing on the person of Stryker and his team of photographers, the film will relate the history of an era and of photography itself, piecing together the pictures of a vanished American culture.

Information:
Jeanine Butler, Butler Films 2212 East Broad Street, No. 2
Richmond, VA 23223
(804) 440-5287 / jbutlr@aol.com

Howard Thurman: In Search of Common Ground

Grantee: Bethel AME Church
Project Director: Arleigh Prelow
SHMF Award: $40,000

Dr. Howard Thurman (1899-1981) bridged barriers among diverse people through what he called the “religious experience.” This feature-length documentary will chronicle the life, work, and times of this African American mystic, theologian, preacher, author, philosopher, educator, and poet, considered to be one of the preeminent intellectual and spiritual figures of the 20th century. The first American-made profile on Thurman, this film will combine archival film, interviews, location footage, and excerpts of his writings, speeches, and meditations to show how he contributed to the spiritual and social transformation of the American South, profoundly affecting persons across the boundaries of race, faith, and culture.

Howard Thurman will chronicle Thurman’s life from his boyhood in Daytona, Florida, to the building of monuments that commemorate his legacy. Thurman’s life passage will unfold in small segments, self-contained mini-stories, like travel stops. At each stop, Thurman faces a conflict and leaves with a revelation that impels his journey and/or inspires a new insight for himself and for viewers. At the forefront of the documentary are Thurman’s first-person remembrances and those of individuals who accompanied him along his journey; the voices and images of those Thurman influenced, like Coretta Scott King and Jesse Jackson; and those who have studied and written about Thurman and the times in which he lived – among them, Luther Smith, Walter Fluker, Lerone Bennett, and Vincent Harding. Relying heavily upon Thurman’s own voice, culled from interviews, sermons, and correspondence in the family collection, this project will explore the life and culture of the American South during the early and middle decades of the 20th century. The project will examine the broader church and predominantly black institutions, exploring the challenges to Thurman’s thought and work, particularly during the Black Power phases of the Civil Rights movement. In addition, the documentary will critically examine Thurman’s thought and writing and its profound impact on individuals and social activism – particularly on the Civil Rights movement and its leaders.

Information: Arleigh Prelow, In Spirit Productions
65 Dartmouth Street, Belmont, MA 02178
(617) 489-9956 / aprelow@theworld.com

Let it Roll: A History of the Texas Penitentiary

Grantee: The Austin Film Society
Project Director: Susanne E. Mason
SHMF Award: $30,000

Let It Roll will be the first film to explore the struggle for civil rights that took place behind prison walls in states across the country in the 1960s and 1970s. The one-hour program will center on Fred Cruz, an inmate in the high-security Ellis prison unit, who studied law in order to challenge prison conditions in Texas. In telling the story of nearly intolerable prison conditions, a bloody prison riot, stirrings of reform, and jailhouse lawsuits, the hour-long documentary will link the days of the old southern plantation-style prison farms to conditions that prompted the emerging prisoner's rights struggle of the 1960s. The program will explore how Cruz's victories against the prison system launched a movement of inmate revolt statewide and led to a class action federal lawsuit that resulted in the most comprehensive court-ordered state prison reform in U.S. history.

Information:
Susanne E. Mason, Passage Productions
c/o The Austin Film Society
1901 East 51st Street, Austin, TX 78723 (512) 476-0930 / passage@io.com

Morristown

Grantee: Appalshop, Inc.
Project Director: Anne Lewis
SHMF Award (1998): $40,000

Surveying labor history in Mexico and the U.S., this program will explore how economic and social changes are threatening the lives of eastern Tennessee factory workers at the very moment when a new group of “foreign,” racially distinct, and often legally vulnerable people are arriving in the area. The newcomers are following a migrant stream from south of the Mexican-American border into the fields, factories, and communities that “native Tennesseans” call home. The first border defining relations between these peoples is the political border between the U.S. and Mexico, where hope of economic and social betterment brings people North. The second border, the heightening psychological and economic divide between communities within Tennessee, is a result of on-going local and global structural changes that are eliminating large numbers of blue-collar positions there. Such changes have created a spiral of racial tensions that the project will explore. The goal is to provide a starting point for discussion, by dramatizing peoples’ circumstances, allowing them the opportunity for self-expression and exploration, and documenting institutional responses to the situation.

Contact:
Anne Lewis, Appalshop, Inc.
91 Madison Avenue, Whitesburg, KY 41858
(606) 633-0108 / appalshopsales@appalshop.org
www.appalshop.org

This two-part, four-hour historical documentary series will focus on the series of forgotten conflicts between the United States and the Seminole Nation. In the broader context of white-Indian conflict in the 19th century, no struggle was more dramatic, more complex, or larger in scope. The Seminole Wars were the longest, bloodiest, and most costly of all the wars of Indian removal. The US army, navy, and marines engaged in a grueling and unpopular conflict in inhospitable terrain, in a disease-laden climate, and against a determined foe skilled at the art of guerilla warfare. The conflict ultimately was abandoned only when our nation’s leaders realized it was a war that couldn’t be won. To this day, the Seminole tribe remains the sole unconquered Indian nation, having never signed a formal peace treaty with the U.S. government.

Shot on 16mm film, this production will explore in detail the dramatic story of the Seminole Indians’ fight for independence and the effects of that prolonged struggled on the South and on the United States. This understudied and misunderstood conflict prompts serious questions about how warfare is begun and prosecuted by a representational democracy and exemplifies the milieu of racial intolerance in 19th-century America. Among the legacies of the conflict are the expansion of U.S. territory and the foreshadowing of the forces that would later precipitate the Civil War. This production is designed for a general audience and for use in secondary schools and colleges and is intended for major national broadcast on PBS.

Information: Dave Porfiri, American University School of Communications
4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20016
(202) 885-20223 / dpvision@yahoo.com

Thurgood Marshall Before the Court

Grantee: American Radio Works
Project Director: Misha Quill
SHMF Award: $30,000

Thurgood Marshall is best known as the first African American appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Justice Marshall may also be known to many as the lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. Yet even well-educated Americans are often unfamiliar with the full scope of Marshall’s 30-year career, during which he struck at the legal framework of Jim Crow and helped establish the foundation for modern civil rights law. In the 1940s and 50s, Marshall was perhaps the most recognized Civil Rights leader in the country.

No single program could encompass the breadth of Thurgood Marshall’s life. In concentrating on the first phase of Marshall’s career, this one-hour radio documentary project will reflect a deeper, richer assessment of his achievements and challenges, particularly the impact his work had on race relations in the South. The program will also convey the varied characters and social forces that led to the Brown decision and feature interviews with people who knew Marshall, including those he worked with at the LDF, Supreme Court justices, and surviving family members and friends, legal scholars, civil rights historians, and biographers, as well as excerpts from Marshal’s speeches and interviews. A companion book and web site will offer significant additional documentation, reflection, and analysis, giving readers and web-users access to archival material not included in the radio program.. Acquainting millions of public radio listeners with Marshall’s towering character and his accomplishments as a Civil Rights crusader, Thurgood Marshall Before the Court will describe a pivotal era in American politics.

Information: Misha Quill, Minnesota Public Radio
45 East Seventh Street, St. Paul, MN 55101
(651) 290-1049

Up From Slavery: Booker T. Washington and the Emergence of Militant Black Protest

Grantee: New Images Productions
Project Director: Avon Kirkland
SHMF Award: $46,000

In the absence of any major documentary on Booker T. Washington, once considered the most famous, influential, and revered black leader in American history, this 90-minute film project has been developed to explore Washington's central and often controversial role as a onetime spokesman for black America. Because Washington's triumphant rise as a leader paralleled the most repressive and violent post-slavery period in the history of race relations in the U.S., his story is a powerful tool for examining the larger issues of his age. The film will present a comprehensive and balanced portrait, examining competing forms of black leadership and the complexities of the African American struggle within the confines of a once prevailing system. Themes will include the evolution of race relations, how they affected Washington's development as a leader, and how they shaped our common history.

Information:
Avon Kirkland, New Images Productions 2600 10th Street, Berkeley, CA 94710 (510) 548-1790

Waiting to be Sung

Grantee: Media Working Group
Project Director: Rachel Liebling
SHMF Award (2000): $50,000

This 60-minute video documentary will offer a compelling view of the world of country music songwriting, presenting a culturally inclusive and historically accurate portrait of a quintessentially American musical form. The program will draw on interviews with songwriters, fans, scholars, and music industry insiders and will incorporate vérité-style sequences, recorded music, and archival film and photos. Through the prism of such material, Craft will explore notions of country music as an essentially Southern form and of the South as a cultural region. The film will consider the diverse backgrounds of the songwriters who write country music, and the “crafting” of songs to fit established country music conventions. The program will thus work to dispel stereotypes, examining how the South became a laboratory where many musical traditions met and gave rise to what we now call country music.

Information:
Rachel Liebling, SuperSmith Films
333 East 34th Street/14k, New York, NY 10016
(212) 679-4045 / craft@nyc.IT.com

A Joyful Noise / Sing It, Tell It

Project Director: Michael Fried
Grantee: Film Arts Foundation, San Francisco, CA
SHMF Award (2001): $20,000

Sing It, Tell It is a three-part documentary series that will illuminate the historical and living heritage of African American music, both as one of the nation’s richest indigenous art forms and as a powerful tool for shaping and extending democracy from the post-Civil War era to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. SHMF is supporting the pilot, A Joyful Noise, which centers on the never-before-told stories of the contributions by African American communities and musical artists in the South and elsewhere in the country to the WPA Federal Music Project. The Project was a showcase for the work of the first generation of black musicians born after the abolition of slavery and the succeeding generation, who came of age before and during World War I. Via archival footage and contemporary performances, “A Joyful Noise” will take viewers from the giddy heights of the Roaring Twenties to the depths of the Great Depression. As the New Deal dawns, black musicians take to the national stage and use their art to force America and its citizens to begin to see the contradictions of waging war for democracy abroad while denying it at home. Consultants include Jacqueline Cogdell Dje Dje; Michael Eric Dyson; Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; Antoinette Handy; Alferdteen Harison; Glenn Hinson; Lawrence Levine; Leon Litwack; Sylvester Oliver, Jr.; James Payne; Thomas Rankin; and Olly Wilson.

Information:
Michael Fried, Public Interest TV Films
2741 Ninth Street, Berkeley, CA 94103
(510) 644-4465