Queens of Documentary
Success from Austin to Timbuktu . . . Literally

By Jennifer Hill

Ellen Spiro wanted to make a movie in New Mexico about a man named Atomic Ed. He was a former Los Alamos National Laboratory machinist who had turned into an atomic junk collector fueling an obsession with all things, you know, "space-agey." Ed was just the kind of subject that Ellen was drawn to. Passionate. Eccentric. A little wild.

Ellen had become known as a sort of free spirited maverick in the competitive world of documentary filmmaking. She had done pretty well for herself on her own, but Atomic Ed would be her first film for HBO. This time, she needed a pro who could help her navigate through the complex web of contracts, copyright clearances and negotiations for her first documentary film for HBO, Atomic Ed and the Black Hole.

She had met a gifted PBS producer, Karen Bernstein, in 1999 through a mutual friend in New York. But it was now 2001, and she decided to ask Karen to produce the big show. The timing was perfect. Karen had been seeking a professional change, and had admired Ellen¹s idiosyncratic style for a long time.

That project launched Mobilus Media, an Austin production company whose roots began with an introduction in Manhattan and ultimately landed in the creative "78704" zip code of South Austin where they operate Mobilus and share a home. Together, Karen and Ellen have over 25 years experience in independent media and broadcast television, a national primetime Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, two Rockefeller Fellowships, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, multiple international television broadcasts in Canada, Australia, Japan, Africa, Europe and festival screenings from Sundance and Berlin to Timbuktu? literally.

Their journeys started from virtually opposite ends of the documentary film world. Karen was a well-known producer who worked on the critically acclaimed PBS civil rights series Eyes on the Prize, as well as producing several American Masters biographies from Ella Fitzgerald to Lou Reed. Her documentary experience included considerable budgets, reasonable production staff and substantial organizational support.

But Ellen generally worked with extremely low budgets and did most of her own production work. She studied video art and experimental film in college and went to New York in 1988 to attend the Whitney Museum's prestigious independent study program. But once the two filmmakers came together, their strengths turned into one of Austin's most successful and diverse creative ventures.

Now, Ellen and Karen are currently in production on three documentaries based in Texas: Are the Kids Alright?, Troop 1500: Girl Scouts Beyond Bars and In Good Faith.

AW: Forming Mobilus was a big step for both of you. How did you form your production company?

Ellen: When we finished Atomic Ed, Karen went back to New York to direct a show for the Sundance Channel and I stayed in Austin to teach at UT and serve as Production Area Head in the Radio, Television and Film Department. When Karen returned to Austin we did a short HBO piece, "The Wrestling Party."

Karen: I had heard of Ellen Spiro for years before I met her. I knew all her early films and remembered when Diana's Hair Ego (about a South Carolina hairdresser doing safe sex education out of her beauty parlor) was the hit documentary of the early 90s "the little video that could," someone on NPR called it. Then she did Greetings From Out Here that I saw on PBS. I was amazed by her inventiveness. She created her own one-of-a-kind method of making documentaries. And they were unlike any documentaries I had seen: playful, profound, visually stunning, and FUNNY. Hers were the first documentaries that had me laughing out loud! When I met Ellen, I was on the verge of doing something different with my career. I had been in a very rewarding, but stressful, series producer job at WNET's American Masters for almost a decade. It was a priceless education, but I was ready to move on.

Ellen: And I was blown away by the films that Karen had produced. Karen was also the most innovative producer I had encountered. I had never been a fan of straightforward biographies but all of Karen's work pushed the envelope and reached deep into her subject's lives and work. Karen was doing docs about rich and famous people while I was doing docs about poor and unknown ones-- but a life is a life and we both love exploring people's lives. Karen's work involved large budgets and big crews and mine involved no budget and no crew. In the practical sense, we really were coming from opposite ends of the spectrum, which made for a dynamic collaboration. Our working relationship has its tensions and moments of friction, but those moments usually result in something more interesting than each of us would have envisioned separately.

AW: Both of you have backgrounds in social issue media and activism. Can you talk about that and how those interests have influenced your professional choices and partnership?

Ellen: We were both heavily influenced by the politics of the late 80s. I had friends who were dying in their twenties from AIDS and the streets were filled with homeless people. Thank you, Ronald Reagan. And then I started DIVA (an activist media collective called DIVA TV, Damned Interfering Video Activist Television). It was really out there. We made our own press passes and showed up everywhere with our cameras. We were the eyewitnesses of the AIDS activist movement, a motley but prolific bunch. We produced about 20 documentaries that are housed at the New York Public Library. I learned most of my technical skills by working with media collectives and making video art. I landed in television documentaries by accident, like slipping into a manhole. I had no formal training in documentaries when I made Diana's Hair Ego in 1988. I found a story and it needed to be told. Intuition and urgency are great teachers.

2) You two come from very different backgrounds in essentially the same film genre. How did your varied experiences work for and against you as you began to work together?

Ellen: When two people collaborate and think the same way, you have no real creative tension. It's boring. Friction and tension make the sparks fly. Karen and I share some deep convictions about why we are doing what we do, but when it comes to the process of actually making films, we have very different approaches. I like to be spontaneous and catch moments on the fly, but that does not always jive with Karen's desire to work within a particular shooting schedule. What I've learned from working with Karen is that if you create a solid schedule and work structure, there is actually more room for creative exploration, not less.

Karen: And I've learned that it is possible to do better work with a smaller crew. If you work with a crew of 4 people and each person has 2 or 3 skills, it is much easier than working with 12 people who each have one skill. When we started working together, Ellen insisted that I get trained in location sound recording. To work with Mobilus, you must know how to juggle. We have a small crew that works with us in research, editing and associate producing, but when we go on shoots it is usually to places where we need to be unobtrusive, like prisons and psychiatric institutions. Ellen usually does cinematography and directs. I record sound and produce. But we are both thinking about everything most of the time.

Ellen: When I was editing Atomic Ed and tearing my hair out in the midst of a conceptual crisis, Karen would quietly suggest a way to rearrange the story and, VOILA, it would work! Karen has as much talent for directing as she does for producing, but before we formed Mobilus she was somewhat pigeon holed as a producer. The industry does that to people. It demands a kind of myopic specialization that discourages personal growth and exploration. As independent filmmakers we live riskier but more interesting lives. Because Mobilus is a small enterprise, we both do what we want to do. If Karen wants to direct, she directs but we never switch roles in the midst of a project. I still do some producing, like writing proposals and pitching new ideas. Just keep me away from the money!

4) Ellen, you have been known for your low-budget quirky and humorous profiles on a variety of people and topics. Karen, you have produced some of the most well funded personality/celebrity profiles on PBS. How does your interest in topics ignite and develop, and what kind of documentaries would you like to direct/produce in the future?

Karen: We both say about 10 times a day "Wow, that would make a great documentary." We have lists of all our ideas and usually the ones that get off the ground are the ones that a foundation or broadcaster are interested in, or one that we just cannot stop thinking about. Troop 1500: Girl Scouts Beyond Bars is in full production mode right now. Ellen thought of the idea in 1998 before I even knew her. Her longtime buddy Kinky Friedman introduced her to Julia Cuba who is a Girl Scout troop leader for girls whose moms are in jail. Ellen got to know Julia and started volunteering with the troop and doing media workshops for the girls. When I met her, she did not think she could get the film off the ground; she had become an amazing girl scout volunteer but was not making the film she had wanted to make.

Ellen: I needed a producer! I knew I wanted to make the film but I was terrified of dealing with two of the most intimidating institutions in America-- the Texas Criminal Justice System and the Girl Scouts USA. When Karen came along, she started calling people and setting up meetings and, before I knew it, we had permission from both TDCJ and Girl Scouts USA to film. We made a short trailer with seed money from the Texas Council for the Humanities and then we got full funding from ITVS, an entity within PBS, and the film will be broadcast nationally in 2005. Karen also obtained permissions to do a theatrical release, which will allow us to qualify for an Academy Award nomination.

6) Will you always focus on documentaries, or do you have plans to produce narrative projects as well?

Ellen: Our mission is to tell great stories that need to be told and to go wherever we need to go to tell them and to tell them in whatever way best suits the story. Our stories will not always be in documentary form, although we both love working with real life and real people; we have a list of documentaries we want to make that is about a mile long. Karen made a radio documentary a few years ago that aired on NPR's This American Life called "Mob Mentality" about a bizarre educational experiment that took place when she was in 7th grade. At the urging of Karen's teacher, the entire 7th grade held a totalitarian revolution and ousted the principal. Karen is writing a screenplay for a New York theatre producer who wants to produce the feature film. Some stories are best told as documentary and some as fiction. Or some can be hybrids, like Roam Sweet Home. I am really interested in combining fiction and documentary. One of our current projects, In Good Faith, is about a fundamentalist Christian nurse who euthanized two dying patients and is serving two fifty-year sentences for the crime. Some of the documentary material we dug up is incredible, like the police interrogation tapes from the day she was arrested and the interviews with her in prison. But parts of the story would be better told in fictional form, with actors. The story is filled with dramatic twists and turns. And there is an injustice at the core of the story, the kind of thing we love to expose. There was never any physical evidence to prove her guilt and her confession was arguably coerced.

11) People often cite severely reduced opportunities for women in film. Do you agree with this assessment? Are Austin women in film at an advantage in securing experience in production (directing, editing, producing,etc.)

In some ways Austin reflects Hollywood in feature filmmaking. The major fiction directors here are men and you hear their names over and over, like a broken record, which perpetuates the situation. But there are some amazing women feature producers here. Caroline Pfeifer is running Burnt Orange Productions, a feature film company that is affiliated with UT/RTF. Ellen Wartella hired Pfeifer to start the company with Tom Schatz who is a professor. Elizabeth Avellan is a total visionary and the force behind Robert Rodriguez. They are a real team. But I am not sure how many people know who she is and that may simply be due to the cult of the director and this notion that the director really makes the film when, in fact, without a kick-ass producer, most directors cannot function. You just look at the credits on any Hollywood film or TV show and you will see that the commercial world of film and television are male dominated enterprises. I have a huge amount of respect for people like Elizabeth Avellan, who work in that system. She is like and angel who just soars above the bullshit while dealing with the every day nuts and bolts of producing.

The documentary world, ironically, is filled with women. The upper echelons of HBO documentaries are women: Sheila Nevins, Lisa Heller and Nancy Abraham. Sally Jo Pfiefer is the head of ITVS and Lynn Kirby is in the upper ranks of CourtTV. And of course there's Susan Lacy who has run American Masters at WNET since 1983. I think women have found a haven in the documentary world, a place where they don't have to deal with the sexist bullshit that exists in Hollywood. The reality is that women were leaders in creating the documentary genre and they are pioneers in reinventing and invigorating the genre now. When we go into big executive meetings about our documentaries, it is most often with women. It is nice to be in a little world where sexism is rarely an issue.

AW: What will Mobilus Media be doing in 5-10 years?

Karen: We are both intrepid and eternal explorers and nothing makes us happier than finding a great story that has yet to be told. Making films gives us a way to see the world, not just exotic faraway places, but in our own backyard. We see filmmaking as a passport, a way to go places we would not normally go, and to talk to people whose lives are as fascinating as any fictional character. In 5 - 10 years, we hope to be doing more of the same, minus the fundraising and grant writing. Oh, and Ellen wants someone to carry her equipment and I would like a full-time assistant.

Ellen: My thoughts exactly. I hope in 5 or 10 years that we are still working together. We have a symbiotic relationship, in that our skills are totally complementary and neither of could do what we are doing without the other. The beauty of a dynamic partnership is that it is not a singular identity of one of us. We've had rocky moments, but the longer we work together the stronger and more effective Mobilus becomes and the easier it is to jump over the hurdles. Working collaboratively is really about knowing yourself, your weaknesses and your strengths, so you know when to go with your own impulses and when to let the other person take the lead. I also envision Mobilus growing, in a very deliberate way, such that it becomes a laboratory for inventive documentaries and a way for us to mentor creative young filmmakers, so that we can have a significant impact on the world, and maybe even change it for the better.