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Eileen Douglas |
"When the lights go dark, and the audience gathers.
When the film is yours.”
Going to the movies.
We all know what that’s like.
You find your seat. The audience gathers. Anticipation builds. Lights
go dark. The screen flickers to life. The film begins to roll. You sit
back, relax, and enjoy the show.
Unless the film they’re showing is yours.
Then it’s a whole new ballgame.
What does it feel like to sit in the audience when the film the
audience is watching is the one you made? The one you spent hours,
weeks, months in the edit room running over and over, staring at,
snipping and pasting together?
The one you put your heart into?
For much of my life, I covered the news. That meant I never saw any
real people as they listened to or watched the stories I was telling.
For the last few years, however, as the films I have made with my
producing partner Ron Steinman have reached the screening stage, I
have sat through many a gathering where the film they are showing is
ours, and it leaves me with a whole new perspective. And lots of war
stories.
First question, of course, is will there even be an audience?
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Ron and Eileen at the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC. |
There is nothing like the moment when you realize a
crowd is showing up. And people who don’t know you-- not just your
mother and relatives! We’ve had our triumphs. One freezing, snowy day
in January when you wouldn’t expect a dog to come out, we had the New
York premiere of our documentary “My Grandfather’s House.” We were
shocked to find people streaming in and more lined up literally out
the door. In fact, they had to turn people away. There wasn’t an empty
seat in the house. That is the kind of moment you live for.
And then the film begins.
Clearly, when the film is one you made, the experience of sitting
there-- in the audience—but not “of” the audience—means as the
audience watches your film, you watch the audience. At first we did
sidelong glances, sneakily. Now, not wanting to be caught, we have
taken to positioning ourselves at the rear so we can watch the people
without looking as if that’s what we’re doing. After all, we’ve seen
the movie. For us, they are the show.
Are they watching intently? Paying attention? Coughing and shifting?
Are they, goodness, we hope, “into it?” Surprises come. The first time
an audience laughs when you never realized a bit of business was
funny…or the times when you can see faces rapt at what you’ve created,
tears streaming, clapping enthusiastically when the credits roll, all
of that is a tremendous kick.
Then there are the disasters. Let me count the ways.
The time in Baltimore when the tech who set up the DVD machine on
Friday and left for the weekend was not the person who had to push the
button for the screening on Sunday. The room was filling fast and no
one could figure how to get the image up. With minutes to spare, they
got a picture. But the sound, for the full 72 minutes that followed,
was the most horrible, muddiest, scratchiest, nearly incomprehensible
audio track I have ever heard. And, not knowing any better, still the
audience listened. But I was a wreck.
The time for a screening of our documentary “Luboml:My Heart
Remembers” when, halfway through, the tech absentmindedly touched a
button --- and skipped an entire chapter. He shot me a glance, like
“uh-oh.” We both knew he’d done something wrong. Amazingly, the booboo
made a perfect edit. But as the rest of the film rolled on, I sat
there in the dark running over and over again in my mind exactly what
we’d missed. Fifteen minutes worth of the heart of the material. With
the lights out and the audience engaged, however, I kept my mouth
shut. Only I knew what they weren’t seeing. But it was killing me.
Worst of all was the time in Los Angeles, for a screening of “My
Grandfather’s House.” We were rolling along beautifully when, before
the halfway point, the image on the screen began to falter. Then
freeze and die. The tech signaled for the lights to come up. He
tinkered with the DVD. We waited, Ron and I and the 300 people in the
audience, through an awkward eternity. The tech got the film rolling
again. The lights went down. A mere handful of scenes later … kaboom
…the DVD froze up again and this time died for good. What to do? The
audience had gotten less than half a film.
Slowly, I walked to the stage, gripped the podium, and for the next 45
minutes, raiding my memory bank to remember all I could, hoping not to
forget the telling details and to spool it all out in the right order,
acted out every scene for the rest of the movie.
“Next, in this scene, we land in Lithuania.”…
”When we get to where the house once stood, we see it’s now a parking
lot…”
“After my return home, I fly all the way back to Russia to meet my
long lost relatives, and I say ‘here in St. Petersburg, where the
Tsar’s once ruled, we are family again’…”
Thank goodness the audience was with us. It was a low point that has
since become a high point in my fond memory bank. If only because I
survived to tell the tale.
Also in my fond memory bank are the things that happen in the question
and answer sessions. There are things you learn, connections you find
you have with people you don’t know that you didn’t know you had.
 “My
Grandfather’s House” tells the story of my search for the house my
grandfather lived in before he fled Kovno, Lithuania in 1911 to avoid
conscription in the Tsar’s Army and made the life I knew with him as a
kosher butcher in Syracuse, New York.
At a Q & A in Salt Lake City, one man stood up in a crowd of 600
people to tell me that my grandfather used to be his butcher when he
lived in Syracuse. The next man stood up to tell me his father used to
be the photographer in Kovno and if I looked on the back of the old
photographs I used in the film I would see the Moderne Studio marking
that meant his father had taken some of those photos. Which turned out
to be true.
After a screening in Washington at the Library of Congress, a woman
from the Lithuanian Embassy rose to say Kovno was her home and how
important it was for her and all people to learn the sad history of
the city during the Holocaust, which cost a dozen members of my
grandfather’s family --- and many thousands --- their lives. I could
only admire her attitude for such a painful part of her own country’s
history.
There was also the young man in Los Angeles who asked from the back of
the auditorium if I could help him find his long lost family as I had
done in my search. I am thinking Minsk. Pinsk. Someplace on the other
side of the world. “Where were they from?” I asked, ready to direct
him to vast resources in Eastern Europe. “Syracuse, New York,” he
answered. A reality check, for me, on how longing for family does not
require exotic destinations.
Most striking, and from the “who would ever believe this” annals, was
the frail, white-haired elderly gentleman, one of hundreds with arms
raised I could have called on — or passed over --- as you point to
questioners from the stage. After the war, he said, he had lived in
Kovno. In fact, he had lived in the very house that was once my
grandfather’s family’s home. And he had a photograph to show me if I
would come to his home. Which, most happily, I later did. What are the
chances of that? I will be forever grateful. He gave me back a piece
of a puzzle. Making the film led me to more than I ever imagined.
That can only happen when the film they are showing is yours. The one
you put your heart into.
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Eileen Douglas is
a broadcast journalist-turned-independent documentary filmmaker.
Former 1010 WINS New York anchor/reporter and correspondent for ABC
TV's "Lifetime Magazine," she is the author of "Rachel and the Upside
Down Heart," and co-producer of the films "My Grandfather's House" and
"Luboml: My Heart Remembers." She can be reached at
www.douglas-steinman.com.
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