At 54, I Hit My First Film Festival Entry Out of the Ballpark

In 2003 I unknowingly embarked upon my accidental career as a filmmaker when I enrolled in a video production course at Berkeley City College. I wanted to learn how to operate a video camera in order to document the reminiscences of my father as he walked through Hyde Park, Chicago where he and my mother had grown up. The results were primitive, but I was glad I had gotten them on tape. He died of bladder cancer the following year.

Video Production One taught me far more than how to operate a camera. It was an introduction to the art and technique of filmmaking. We made little movies, crewed for one another, learned about sound, lighting, even served as “talent” in front of the cameras. It was fun. And writing scripts, though alien and artificial as a literary form, came naturally to me. I had a good ear for dialogue. My final project was an overly ambitious short narrative using students from the BCC multimedia program, filmed at a friend’s house, and buried as juvenilia until its resurrection this month as the Shoga Treat, “Regendered.”

Video Production One led fatally to Video Production Two. More of the same but extending and refining our knowledge. Also we had access, during class time, to a fully equipped studio. I already had a suspicion that I would become a documentary filmmaker. I had been a professor of African and African American literature the previous decade, before the constraints and politics of hiring for tenure-track positions drove me out of academia. Creatively and intellectually I was at loose ends, but documentary film promised a new outlet for the exercise of these interests.

At age 54, I wasn’t contemplating a new career. I was twice as old as the typical film student. However what I had that they didn’t was life experience and a subject matter about which I had thought long and deeply. I had realized while still a professor that the Queer Harlem Renaissance needed to be excavated and promoted. (In 2003 this concept was relatively new.) My research had led me to “Prove It On Me Blues” by Ma Rainey, now widely regarded as an anthem of lesbian affirmation but barely known outside of blues histories at the time. I determined to shoot a music video, a cover of the song whose original 1927 Paramount recording was so shoddy that the lyrics were well nigh impossible to understand.

Went out last night with a bunch of my friends.

They must’ve been women ‘cause I don’t like no men.

Now that I had my project, I had only to realize my vision without contacts, technical knowledge, or money. The first thing I did was to introduce myself to Ronnie Stewart of the West Coast Blues Society. To my delight, and for reasons I’ll never understand, he jumped on with both feet. It was he who made the music video happen. He knew the musicians and persuaded Donny Koontz (drums), Ron Joseph (bass), Spiderman Robinson (keyboard), and singer Tia Carroll to drive out to a home studio in Fairfield, perform the song in one take, and then mastered it for the video shoot.

Now it was up to me and my video production class. I was friends with the directors of the Lorraine Hansberry Theater, a Black gay couple, and they arranged for the use of costumes, black suits for the musicians, and the one prop, a 1920s microphone. Tia was outfitted in a splendid blue and gold dress. On the appointed day, everybody showed up at the studio, submitted to costume fitting, hair and makeup. Once the musicians were on the floor with their instruments, we students took them through four takes with three cameras, two stationary, and one in motion, a basic dolly we set up using a board perched on the arms of a wheelchair.

We had to work quickly as we only had use of the studio for the length of the class period. However, by the time we broke we had plenty of footage. I asked another classmate, Carlo Kamin, to edit, and by the time he put together our music video, we were pleasantly shocked by how well it had turned out. Unlike “Regendered” which bore the ineradicable stretch marks of our firstborn, this sophomore effort appeared positively professional.

I gave it a name, “Ma Rainey’s Lesbian Licks,” and sent it out on the festival circuit. It garnered 18 acceptances, including spots at the relatively prestigious Black and queer festivals, Frameline, the London LGBT Film Festival and the Pan African Film Festival. As you might imagine, this early success completely skewed my sense of what was possible in the film world. I tripped blithely from one non-commercial project to the next, ignoring licensing conventions that would have quickly ballooned the cost of my historical docs beyond affordability. I continued to excavate the Queer Harlem Renaissance, and because I was tilling relatively virgin soil, my acceptance rate in film festivals remained high (140 and counting).

Once I stumbled on to narrative filmmaking, my ability to keep production costs reasonable flew out the window, but I had already been infected. Another story for another time.

And so Shoga Films was launched. I didn’t know it at the time, but my little film endeavor would eventually grow to take the lion’s share of my time and energy. This monthly newsletter is but one of the results. I turned 75 last month, and I’m more prolific now than at any time in my previous life. I’m not sure anybody cares, but it keeps me out of trouble and an assisted living facility.

Of course I was way to old to embark upon another career, but my life has gave me one attitudinal gift that has served me well — I don’t know when to quit.

-- Robert Philipson

Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, A Catastrophic Start

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