The University of Arizona Alumnus / Fall 2009
I had to make this film
Bev Seckinger: Interim Director of the UA School of Media Arts and Documentary Filmmaker of Laramie Inside Outby Margaret Regan
On a clear morning in Laramie, Wyo., 10 years ago, Beverly Seckinger stood face to face with Reverend Fred Phelps. Phelps is the media-savvy minister who travels the country delivering his message that God hates homosexuals. He was in Laramie that morning to proclaim that Matthew Shepard — a 21-year-old gay student at the University of Wyoming who’d been savagely murdered the year before — was burning in hell.
The minister and his disciples were demonstrating outside the courthouse, where one of the two men accused in the murder was about to go on trial. Dressed in a white cowboy hat and a red, white, and blue jacket, Phelps carried two signs. One read “Matt in Hell”; the other said “Fag USA.”
Seckinger, a filmmaker and professor in the UA School of Media Arts, was on the scene to make a movie about the 1998 murder and its aftermath. She approached the minister and boldly asked, “Rev. Phelps, have you considered the possibility that you’re wrong?”
Phelps turned and looked coolly at Seckinger.
“You’ve got kind of a dykey look to you and we smell you people, the whiff of brimstone,” he told her on camera. “You have been taken captive by the devil to do his will and spout his lying message.”
The exchange became a riveting scene in Seckinger’s documentary, Laramie Inside Out, about Laramie, its famous murder, and the sometimes precarious status of gays in America.
“I had a big responsibility to do the film,” Seckinger says. “Everything I had done before was coming back around to this.”
Seckinger had a reason to be particularly interested. She had grown up in Laramie. She had gone to the University of Wyoming. And she is gay herself. Shepard’s murder was “one gay murder among hundreds of thousands, but this one was in my hometown,” she says.
The killing had been especially gruesome. Shepard was lured from a bar by two men, taken to the outskirts of town, savagely beaten, and strung up on a fence. He died of massive brain injuries five days later. (Both killers are now in prison, serving double life sentences.)
Yet Seckinger’s movie is not angry. Part personal journey and part documentary, the film took a tour through her growing-up years in Laramie and then considered whether things have changed in Laramie. She interviewed older gays, parents, students — and Phelps. And she tracked down Shepard’s friends in a campus gay and lesbian group. When Phelps raged outside the courthouse, the students and their supporters stood silently in front of him, dressed as angels, witnesses to the power of love to combat hate. It became one of the strongest images in the film.
Seckinger has made several movies but this one is closest to her heart.
“I had to make that film,” she says. “The personal, the political, and the moment in time all converged.”
Seckinger at the UA
On a warm day in June 2009, light years away from volatile Laramie in 1999, Seckinger sits at an outdoor café in Tucson, near her UA office in the Marshall Building. She nibbles a sandwich and peers over her sunglasses, warily trying to deflect any and all questions about herself.
As a documentary filmmaker who’s used to asking questions, Seckinger is a reluctant interview. She’s proud of Laramie Inside Out, she allows. Since its debut in Tucson in 2004, the film has played many times on PBS, including in the big markets of New York, San Francisco, and Denver. It has screened at universities all around the country, and it’s part of the collection “in the libraries of over 200 colleges and universities.” This fall it will screen again in Tucson, as part of a series of commemorative activities around the 11th anniversary of Shepard’s murder.
What Seckinger really wants to talk about is the achievements of the UA School of Media Arts, where she serves as interim director, and about the accomplishments of its students and faculty.
“It’s a strong program with a carefully thought-out curriculum that we’ve worked on over the years,” she says. Students screen their own work at the university and get jobs through a required internship. “Our alums are working in every aspect of the media biz.” Among them are “several high-profile Hollywood folks [see story on John Kilkenny, page 36], independent producers, community media activists, scholars, and teachers.”
Students who go to grad school “go on to the best M.F.A. programs in the country.”
Academy Award winner Ari Sandel, just for instance, earned a B.F.A. degree in the School before earning a master’s in directing at the University of Southern California. His 2005 short film, West Bank Story, premiered at the competitive Sundance Film Festival — and won at least 20 awards at other festivals worldwide before picking up the Oscar. Jonny Pulley, media arts ’06, had a success rare for an undergrad: His film, Move Me, made while he was a UA student, aired at the Sundance Film Festival.
And then there’s the School’s faculty. Some professors publish scholarly research, while others make movies, creating experimental and commercial works alike. Last year, Seckinger exults, the School snagged big-time veteran independent movie producer Larry Estes.
Now a professor of practice, Estes produced the acclaimed Smoke Signals, directed by School alum Chris Eyre. Estes’ many other movies include sex, lies, and videotape. Last fall, he took seven eager undergrads to Seattle for the filming of his movie, The Whole Truth. The students didn’t just watch the pros at work: They made a “making of” documentary while they were on set.
Another professor, filmmaker and screenwriter Lisanne Skyler, is “developing two features, one from a Joyce Carol Oates piece,” the novel Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon. In July 2009, Skyler had several students intern under professional crew members on the set of her new film, Capture the Flag. Her debut film, Getting to Know You, also premiered at Sundance and won raves, including two thumbs up from Ebert & Roeper.
A Filmmaker’s Path
Seckinger herself came to filmmaking by a serendipitous route. Her original life plan was to become an anthropologist. “I was born in L.A.,” the capital of movies, she says, “but I came to consciousness in Laramie.”
When she was in fifth grade, her father became a professor at the University of Wyoming College of Education, and the family moved to Laramie. Seckinger enrolled at her father’s university and majored in English and French. In her senior year, a Peace Corps officer came recruiting in a French class, and Seckinger thrilled to the idea of living abroad. She signed up, and after graduation found herself in Morocco. She learned Moroccan Arabic, and the immersion in another culture triggered her interest in anthropology.
She ended her Peace Corps stint in 1983 and came west to enroll in a grad program in linguistics and anthropology at the UA. But her plans to go on for a Ph.D. were changed by a return trip to Morocco.
During the UA master’s program, she took two years off to work on a University of Pennsylvania literacy research project in the North African country. Her job was translator and driver, but what interested her most was the video that the researchers were making.
“I said to myself, ‘I never thought of this!’ People can learn to do this. Filmmaking tied everything together that I wanted to do: anthropology, journalism, creative nonfiction.” Through filmmaking, she thought, she could spend her life “stereotype-busting and saving the world.”
Determined to retool as a filmmaker, she finished her master’s at the UA but then went east to get an M.F.A. in filmmaking at Temple University. (“I cried all the way from Tucson to Philadelphia.”) Her thesis film was a personal documentary about her time in Morocco; in the way that it used her own story to illuminate a larger issue, it presaged her Laramie film.
It was about a “white, middle-class American working in Morocco,” she says. “There was no equality from the get-go. I realized I was a person of privilege.”
Her original plan after graduation was to work in film or TV production, but she came across a UA job announcement for a “documentary producer and assistant professor in media arts,” she recalls. “It was written for me.” She went west again, this time with her life partner, Susan, whom she’d met in Philadelphia. “I came here the moment I graduated from Temple.”
Seckinger has been at the UA ever since. Besides teaching students and making movies, she’s made a name for herself bringing little-known films to campus for screenings. Seventeen years ago, she started Lesbian Looks, an annual festival of independent films about lesbian life.
Her current film project, Hippie Family Values, focuses on a distinctive subculture, the “Southwest hippie diaspora.” She lit on the topic during gigs around the Southwest with the Tucson band, Wayback Machine. A longtime musician, Seckinger plays bass for Wayback, performing Grateful Dead and other 60s-era music. Many of the band’s fans are graying hippies who headed out of Haight-Ashbury years ago and landed in Arizona or New Mexico.
Seckinger was struck by the strong families she met in these transplant communities.
“They have an alternative value system to the consumer mainstream,” she says. “They’re about sustainability, creativity, community.”
With a $5,000 grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and $5,000 from the Hanson Institute, Seckinger started filming in Tucson and in an intentional community in New Mexico. Since she was tapped to lead the School, she’s often had to put her camera aside to make time for administrative duties, especially during the difficult university reorganization in the past year.
The film is “a vast and unwieldy project,” she cheerfully admits, and right now, “I have no time.”
But she hopes Hippie Family Values, when it gets done, will shed light on a misunderstood population. Like Laramie Inside Out, the movie will “focus on anthropology, political differences, and translating between groups.”
She still believes in the filmmaking ideal that bowled her over long ago in Morocco: Movies can change the world. And she’s willing to do the hard work to get to that place of changing consciousness — even if she has to confront the fiery likes of the Rev. Fred Phelps.
The Hanson Film Institute
The Hanson Film Institute, affiliated with the School of Media Arts, is a story in itself, Seckinger declares. Funded by an endowment and directed by Vicky Westover, the institute produces two film festivals a year for the Tucson community. Both of them, Native Eyes and Cine Mexico, are “focused on supporting underrepresented voices,” Seckinger says.
Last spring, Cine Mexico staged six days of movies in Tucson theaters and staged a coup, screening a preview of Rudo y Cursi before its debut in theaters nationwide. The movie reunited the popular stars of the movie Y Tu Mamá Tambíen.
Seckinger says the media arts program offers students a balance between the creative, hands-on work of the studio, and the scholarly, critical thinking of the classroom.
“Creating work cannot be done in a vacuum,” she says firmly. “UA media arts has always interwoven theory and practice.”
Students must specialize in one of three concentrations: production and hands-on filmmaking; producing, which entails learning the legal and business end of film; and academic critical studies in film and TV. But every student must take classes in all three fields.
Like the other four arts schools within the College of Fine Arts — music, art, theater arts, and dance — media arts “offers preprofessional training so the students can go to work in their fields.” But with every business enterprise in America now clamoring for digital know-how and setting up streaming video on its Web site, media arts is teaching up-to-the-minute skills valuable in almost any career.
Equipment-wise, the School has gone in recent years from a closet full of clunkers to “professional cameras,” Seckinger says. “We’re making the shift to HD (high definition). We have a 20-station editing lab, a sound studio, a recording and mixing room in the Marshall Building, and a small sound stage in Harvill.”
Still, the slick equipment is not the be-all and end-all. Far more important are the knowledge and skills the students learn.
“Technology changes fast,” Seckinger says. “The core of our program is not the latest toys, but the ability to say something in the medium.”
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