Hey All,
I don't know if I've blathered on quite enough about the high level of DIY documentary film being made in the Pacific Northwest of late. Its a dangerous breed of filmmaking, as all it takes is modicum of patience, an ounce of discipline, at least one video camera, a love of puzzles, and a sterling sense of vision.
As of last night I've seen three documentary films within the last year, produced in the Pacific Northwest that moved and rattled me beyond measure; PIRATE RADIO, USA, BLOOD ON THE FLAT TRACK, and GIRLS ROCK!
While writing for boxoffice.com I had the opportunity to pitch my own articles and not simply wait around for the editors to call me with an assignment. Being the champion of the undergod I feel obliged to to be, I sought every opportunity to promote two of the films listed above.
One article that was entirely aborted thanks to the editorial collapse of boxoffice.com was my coverage of the Leakey-Sleazewell production, BLOOD ON THE FLAT TRACK: The Rise of the Rat City Roller Girls. You can find out more about the film itself at the site below.
http://www.ratcitymovie.com/betasite/
I had the good fortune to have friends in common with the filmmakers, Lainy Bagwell and Lacey Leavitt, so convincing them to meet me for an interview was rather uncomplicated. My interview session with these two women was a peak moment for me, a peak moment of Seattle living; sitting in a faux-punk/cabaret club, drinking beers, talking with two brilliant, creative women about making their movie about Roller Derby chicks and their culture.
Man, it don't get much more "Seattle," than THAT.
I'll post the interview transcription below, with the intent of posting the actual article drawn from it at a later day.
Enjoy.
Interview, Lainy Bagwell, Lacey Leavitt
Writer/Director Team of BLOOD ON THE FLATTRACK: The Rise of the Rat City Roller Girls
Q: Tell us a little about your background(s) in documentary filmmaking. So, were you two AV Club Geeks high school?
Lainy Leavitt: I totally wasn’t (an AV Geek) I was a journalism student. I edited my school paper at Lake Stevens High School (just north of here). I’ve always been into writing. I wrote for the Everett Herald when I got out of high school. I always thought that I would go into journalism, but at a certain point in high school I realized films were more something that you could do—you could actually make films. I was like, “Why wouldn’t I want to do that, that’s a lot more fun and creative,” so I immediately set my sites on screen writing. I went to UW and did the cinema studies program but determine that I am just too bossy to let someone else take my script and do what they want to do with it. But I also wanted to direct. My mom had daycare kids in our basement and I got them together with a video camera and got them to do a re-enactment of A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN which we still cannot find the VHS tape for…. it’s going to be an Easter Egg on one of my DVDs someday.
Oh—sort of a side note-- But while I was home for the holiday, my mother found these old Barbersol commercials I’d mocked up with Barbies when I was nine—remember those awful Barbersol commercials? Barbersol mated with Barbies, it was awful with my home phone number as the phone number to call.
After graduating I went to New York and worked on The Squid and the Whale. Seattle didn’t have a lot of film stuff going on so I decided I would just move to New York! I became assistant producer on The Squid and the Whale, I started working film festivals and I worked for the IFP New York, I’m on the board here in Seattle now, but I’d been working and then I went to Slamdance because I knew someone out in LA which where I met Lainy who was also from Seattle. I was living in LA by that point, but she was in Seattle. I had a couple of screenplays, but we kept in touch and I went back to New York and was working a documentary production company that was a really terrible experience because the guy was crazy and I hated it. So, I decided I would come back to Seattle for the summer and work on a documentary project. We decided to go check out the Rat City Roller girls and that’s kind of everything up until this point and how that all worked out.
Lacy Bagwell: I’d been a film fan since I was about 10 or 11 years old. Didn’t do anything in high school other than smoke a lot of pot and drink a lot of beer.
I was not in the AV Club; I was kind of a bad kid. My parents didn’t really know I was a bad kid because I hid it well.
After high school I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. All I knew is that I really like film, so I went to the video production program at Seattle Central Community College for two years and after that there just wasn’t a whole lot of work in Seattle so I went out and did a variety of other jobs, still thinking, in the back of my mind that this (film) is what I want to be doing at some point. I started working for film festivals; volunteer for SIFF for six or seven years and then got a job with them. I’ve worked for them, now, for five years and I knew the woman who was the director of the film festival at Slamdance because I had worked with her in Seattle. I went out to work with her in Park City and that’s how I met Lacy.
I didn’t work on any productions up to that time at all. I think I had this fear for a while that since I didn’t have a resume, who was going to take me? I don’t have any experience; really, all of my experience is old. I figured I might as well start from scratch, and start on my own, and come up with an idea and work with someone who has experience and knowledge and go from there…I just thought it would be easier to do something with someone else start from there and gain experience that way.
That’s really it. I PA’s on a film in the middle of working the Roller Girl film to get some knowledge on how film sets work. I didn’t get paid for it or anything…
Q: In reading your biographies, you mention you had begun work on a documentary on Meth addiction. That sounds like a very ambitious project for two new filmmakers.
LL: It would be a big thing. I still want to do it some day. I’m from Snohomish County and my dad used to work for the Granite Falls school district and I think at one time they were the number one Meth capitol of the whole of the United States. My aunt actually runs the anti-Meth coalition in the Ellensburg area so I had been talking with her. But I actually know someone from my hometown, my next-door neighbor’s son-in-law. I once had the biggest crush on him; totally attractive, totally good looking, had a wife and two beautiful kids, they were adorable, just like the perfect family, and he ended up getting a Meth addiction. It started out and he was doing cocaine and went to meth while he was doing construction jobs to stay awake. He wound up just completely throwing everything down the tubes and ended up in jail for armed robbery after he held someone up at knifepoint—a whole family up at knife point, actually, after he broke into their house.
I’d been talking to my neighbor and thought I would do this documentary over the summer. That turned out to be a much more ambitious project. We actually did one interview with the police chief at Lake Stevens and with the wife. That was intense. Of course they are friends of the family so that was very intense—I also have some cousins who are meth-addicted-- I want to do it at some point but it’s pretty big.
So, then I figured I was just there for the summer we’ll just shoot the Roller Girls and we’ll be done in three months. I figured I’d just stay until the end of the season, and by that time we’d just begun to learn about what was going on so then we decided to wait until the end of next season and so on and here we are two years later. I’m still here.
Q: What drew you to this particular project?
LL: We brought Lainy’s camera to the first bought we ever went to—I’d been back in Seattle for a week and I heard about the Rat City Roller girls least three times within the week I was back. We were turned on to the idea of doing a film about them so we decided to bring a camera to our first bought and see what happens. If you’ve seen Roller Derby and, especially if you are someone interested in the spectacle of the cinema—how would you not want to film this, its so big and beautiful and sexy and funny—it was just obvious, immediately, to both of us, that we had to make a film about this.
Q: As a duo, how did you negotiate a single vision that was going to go into the film?
LL: Man, if we’d only done Deal Memos back in the day.
LB: Loaded Question.
LL: Being a writer I loved documentary filmmaking, but never had any idea I would go into documentary filmmaking. Going into the second season we talked a lot and we had a pretty clear idea of what we thought the story should, what we wanted to show people about the league. We used some footage from that first year, but it was only after being around the girls for so long that we could put together the parts that we wanted to show. There are so many girls that we wanted to show that aren’t in the movie because there were just too many amazing personalities. Going through and strategically looking at each of the teams, looking at the relationships this makes the most sense to show this part of the league and that relationship makes the most sense to show that part of the league. Eventually it ended up that we were in the culture for a long time and we came to a decision on what we wanted to do.
LB: I think even more of it came out toward the end after we’d shot everything. After looking at all of the interview footage we got a better idea of where we could go with this—its almost like the story kind of writes itself with the girls from what we got out of the interviews and the things that they do. A story can take a 180 degree turn depending on the situation.
LL: And along those lines, sometimes of the footage would inform the interviews. We’d seen something and asked them to talk about it or in an interview they’d sometimes they’d point out things that we never even noticed about the league or about a game. That turned out to be interesting too. We had a clear, but fairly nebulous idea but of course in documentary you’re kind of at the mercy of your subjects
Q: A great deal of time in this film is devoted to the players’ personal stories, in particular, their relationships to their partners in and outside the league, rather than the actual blood and guts aspects of the sport. What type of feedback did you get after the fact with regards to these choices?
LL: The majority of the feedback I’ve received has been that people really liked the amount of time we spent on the players. I’ve only heard two nay-sayers talk about how much time we didn’t devote to actual bouts and plan strategy—but they were the most hard-core derby fans they know a lot l about roller derby already and really get in to the strategy. You may not get it from our film and I don’t think you get it from watching just watching two bouts, but once you start to really pay attention to roller derby, the strategy is so amazing and actually very subtle. It’s a very subtle sport that is actually really funny when you are watching all that is going on, but there are actually some very subtle strategies going on. But the vast majority of people we talked to really like the amount of time we spent with the girls.
One of the reasons I wanted to spend so much time with these girls was when you think of roller derby, you automatically think they must all be crazy, they must be drunk, bartenders, barflies and aren’t doing anything else with their lives—just crazies—of course, there are some of those of those—but they’re lovely, too, it doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. But there is just such a wide spectrum of women who are in roller derby and for us to have been involved in the league for so long we really wanted to capture that. We were as interested in the girls personally as we were in the stuff going and hoped that would translate to the audience.
LB: I think what we did was do away with a lot of the stereotypes. You see these women and you figure they must all drink beer and kick ass and take heroin or whatever. But this film takes away all that because you get to know them and see what they do for a living and what their families think and the things that they go through. I only heard one or two people complain about the bout stuff, and it was the same thing, it was people who were already derby fans. But we weren’t making a movie for derby fans we were making a movie for people who don’t know what its like to play derby and don’t know what these girls are going through. A lot of people had never even heard of roller derby who came to see the film, so they got an education at the same time. And it’s across the country, its everywhere, that’s the nice thing about it, you can go see it anywhere even outside of the country.
Q: Roller Derby went into a lull for several decades as a popular spectator sport. What’s your take on the process of reviving roller derby as a part of a subculture?
LB: I do know that what culture in which it has never lost its popularity is Japan. In Japan its men and women combined. They’ve been around constantly there’s never been a break for them. That’s the only place that I know of and I’ve done a little bit of digging. They started, again, in Texas in 2002.
Q: How long did principal photography take?
LB: We shot for two years and we shot a little over 250 hours of footage. We shot everything that the girls did—followed them around; we went to practices, we went to meetings, we went to the bouts, we went to the bar nights that they had—karaoke, everything that they did, that we could possibly go to, we went. We went out of town with them a couple different times. We shot every single thing that they did.
Q: Tell us about some of the unforeseen challenges in making this film?
LB: That we shot way more footage than we could ever use. There was a point where I’d tell Lacy, “We’ve got to go shoot this, and she’d be like, ‘Why?’” And there were time’s she’d say “We’ve got to go shoot this, and I would ask, ‘Why?” It was because we had enough footage and we needed to stop at some point. Finally we did, but there were so many things out of 250 hours and film was 95 minutes. Do you know how much crap I have at home and she has at home? We have a ton left over, and a lot we’ll use for the DVD. That was it for me—we shot a lot of really, really good stuff, but a lot of it we’ll never use. I guess the only other challenge would be that we really should have looked into raising some sort of funds before we got started.
LL: Just to ad to what Lainy said, I wanted to say that, toward the end, I was more about what I didn’t want to be shooting because I had an idea of what we were using and what we’re not going to be using and we’re not going to use that. So I had to ask, “Do we really want to be spending another $20 on tapes because I know we’re not going to use it.
One of the challenges for sure, when we first started out, we brought our cameras to our first bout-- we’d called ahead to make sure it was okay. We just show up saying, “Hey we’re two people who want to make a movie about you guys so you’re going to let us film everything you do, right?” And they were like, “No.”
In the beginning, especially, Darth Skater who was the head of media at the time, was very much, like, “Wait minute, who the heck are you people, what the heck is going on…” and was very concerned about what we were doing and what we were all about. The Roller Girl reality show has just come out and there was a lot of concern about just letting strangers film them all the time—“Look what they make those girls look like all of the time—we don’t want to look like that kind of thing.” But finally, by the end of the first season, we finally had won over enough trust, they knew who we were, they knew what we were about, they knew we totally respected their community, and the fact that we were women also really helped, by that time we had finally established enough of a trust that they invited us to a lot of the stuff too, certain teams more than others. We would get calls, “Hey, we’re doing this, do you want to come out?” “Yeah, thank God, we didn’t know about that,’ when in the beginning we would have been dying to know about those things.
Q: And how long do you think that took to get incorporated into their family?
LL: We started shooting in June of their very first season, so basically, half way through the first season. Four to five months? We were totally in by the second season.
LB: By the time we stared the second season, we were gold. And Darth Skater now is like our greatest advocate. She was the one person in the beginning who was most leery of us.
LL: She was just doing her job. We kind of got on just before the big media wave hit-- right when we came they started getting bombarded with media requests and photography requests, it was way too much and nobody could really discern what was going on. At the premiere we did a private screening for the girls before we showed it. It was in our contract with them. It went really well. Darth Skater came up on the stage and said, “I’ve just got to say that I gave these girls so much shit in the beginning and look what they’ve done –they’ve done such a great job!” It was sort of the perfect little bow to tie up the package at the end of the story.
Q: Where did you get your financing?
LL: It came from out bank accounts. We worked temp jobs. The nice thing about doing a documentary about roller derby is that roller derby is not the girls’ full-time job. The girls are playing and practicing on nights and weekends so we were there nights and weekends. I worked on two films during the production as location manager here in town. But at a certain point I decided I couldn’t be spending 10-12 hours a day on someone else’s film because we needed to devote time to our own film. So, financing came from other crappy jobs.
My parents gave me a couple of bucks.
The nice thing was that Lainy owned a camera and our second cameraman, Wes, owned his camera. We had to rent green screens a couple of times for the credits, which was, like, $20 from a camera store. We have gurus, like my friend Joe who helped us out on all the post-production stuff. Otherwise we did everything else on Lainy’s computer or my computer.
LB: That’s the beauty of modern technology. DV Tapes are cheap.
LL: We’ve had three fundraisers so far where we had a bar night; we had two at the Funhouse, one at the Highway 99 Blues Club, the Socket Wenches Bar—one prior to completion and two after the fact. Really, the biggest cost for us has been in transferring it on to screeners, besides road-tripping down to Vegas or flying to Tuscon for the tournament.
Q: Did you consider the cut screened at SIFF to be the final version, or have their been cuts since that point in time?
LB: We’ve edited since then, but it was minor, very minor. We just fixed a couple of things. We had the sound redone, and maybe two or three little edits.
LL: When we did the last edit, or eyes were pretty blurry—we couldn’t see straight. We only finished editing it four days before we showed it and SIFF was like, “Alright, give us your tape NOW or we’re not showing your movie.” There was like one pause we thought was a little too long and two others that we shortened. Other than that it’s the same movie.
Q: How many festivals has the film traveled two thus far.
Both: Eight, so far.
Q: This film continues to make the rounds to film festivals, but how are you planning to distribute to the general public?
LB: Through working at the IFP and Film Market I’ve contacted several people through those organizations. There are a couple people who have seen the screeners who are interested. We’re obviously not too coy about handing out screeners because obviously we’ve had our premiere. Of course we would love to have a small theatrical release or DVD release, but if not, we’ll do it ourselves. We get so many emails from the derby leaguers wanting to know when the DVD will be done so they can sell it at their merch (merchandise) tables, but we wanted to wait and make sure we had exhausted all of our other options before we look into self release.
Q: That being said, is there a criteria you are following when it comes to shopping the film around to distributors?
LB: We’re just sending it out to film festivals right now. We sent it out to some of the larger film industry film festivals and waiting to hear back from them right now. The other scenario is that we have potential to tap is that there are over 200 leagues worldwide. You average 70-80 girls to a league—somebody in there knows somebody that runs a theater who works in distribution. I think we can get some kind of, at least, minor theatrical run.
LL: I’d say in terms of criteria, obviously any filmmaker would love to be in the position they have several people banging on their door wanting to distribute your movie and you can pick who wants to spend the most on P&A. But the only really major concern is that we wouldn’t go with a distributor that’s going to try and sell it as some schlocky sex-piece or something like that. Just as long as it’s not someone who would try to treat it like a B-Movie, and was someone who was willing to treat it well.
Q: What have been some of the biggest stumbling blocks in getting this film distributed and how did you overcome them?
LB: The biggest challenge is that we are up here in the Northwest without a lot of resources to be down in LA or to be in New York a lot. I think if we were in LA right now it would be a lot easier to get this done. Right now everything is over email and phone, but I don’t think its anything that’s insurmountable. There are so many documentaries about roller derby popping up.
LL: At this point we need to beat everyone to the punch.
LB: I don’t want this to be pegged as a regional film, that it’s just a Seattle film. I don’t think many realize that there is this awesome subculture of derby going around. I guess it’s about making sure people realize what big potential there is here. I think this film is very accessible to all sorts of people, just as roller derby is more accessible now to more fans than you think. The fans are pretty diverse, just look at how diverse are the fans in the movie.
Q: Where do you go from here?
LB: I’m producing a feature film featuring Aiden Quinn and Alicia Silverstone. I’m also writing a fictional script about roller derby and another comedy script as well. I think documentaries are great fun, but not really part of my skill set. I do want to got back to the Meth project some day.
LL: I have ideas on my brain and on paper, but nothing solid. I want to do a horror film. Totally 180 degrees.
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