We are cooking along here this winter, trying to fundraise to support summer 2013 travel to shoot more and interview more for the documentary. We have two grant proposals out, so we’ll see what they yield. And we are still logging footage from our Oakland shoot last summer. Lots of great material is emerging!
Erin is in school, Lydia is building her practice, and Julie is focused on another media project about police brutality in Portland, so everyone is a bit busy. But expect big developments on The Gentleman Bank Robber movie come summer!
Lydia made this awesome program for the event!
Last week’s event at the Red & Black Cafe in was awesome! We raised money, shared some uncut footage from our first shoot in Oakland this past summer, and had great conversation with a few dozen people. It is so encouraging and exciting to see a community building around this documentary. Thank you, Red & Black, thank you interns, thank you interviewees, and thank you community!
Thursday, December 13, 2012
7:00pm - 10:00pm
Red & Black Cafe
400 SE 12th Ave., Portland, OR
The Gentleman Bank Robber is a to-be-completed documentary chronicling the life and times of rita “Bo” brown. This December 13th you will have the once-in-a-lifetime chance to view footage that will not be included in the final product. Join us for a night of behind-the-scenes interviews, uncut footage and a Q&A session with the producers.
Thank you, amazing interns, Jessica Montes, Brooks Fuentes, and Erin Ruthe (not pictured)! Thanks to you we are logging and organizing hours and hours of footage from our shoot in Oakland this past August. And we’re having some good conversations as we do it!
We had a great day today at Julie’s production headquarters in SE Portland. ”How do we tell this amazing life story?” has been a question guiding our production since the beginning. Today we started to answer that question, by dividing bo’s story into chapters such as “Seattle/GJB Years,” “Prison Years” and “San Francisco Bay Area 80s & 90s.” Lydia came up with a helpful color-coding system which will come in handy when our new interns (!) come into the studio in the next few weeks to work on logging over twenty hours of footage.
When we were in Oakland this past summer, bo gave us a small stack of VHS tapes to transfer to digital video and include in the documentary. We’ve digitized these tapes, reviewed them and are excited to have video material from the 1980s and 1990s to incorporate into our project. One tape was from the Out of Control Lesbian Committee to Support Political Prisoners, a San Francisco-based organization that began in 1987. Out of Control joined a national campaign to protest the inhumane and brutal conditions inside of a prison in Kentucky where many women political prisoners were held. Out of Control hosted an annual fundraiser, Sparks Fly, and the stills included here are from a tape that was screened during the event.
We are excited to announce that we spent 3 jam-packed days in Oakland, CA filming for the Gentleman Bank Robber Documentary in late August 2012. We interviewed 10 of Bo’s loved ones and comrades, and got over 5 hours of interviews with Bo herself. We learned so much about Bo, and about the struggles and movements that have informed (and been informed by) Bo’s life; we can’t wait to show the world all that we learned!
We are not-so-excited to report that things are moving forward much more slowly than expected. As fall encroached, Julie returned to her teaching position at PSU, Erin started nursing school at OHSU and Lydia became over-employed in her new role as a PMHNP. In the midst of all of this, every single piece of video equipment being used in the making of the documentary was stolen out of Julie’s car. This loss has inhibited us financially (the replacement cost of the equipment is more than the three of us make in a month combined) and has stopped the creation of the documentary for the immediate future.
Long story short:
We are moving forward on the project.
We are super excited about the project.
We have recently encountered some barriers.
Stick with us - We deeply believe in the importance of this documentary!
A peek at the work-in-progress! Shot in Oakland, CA this past August 2012.
August 26, 2012 - Behind the scenes of The Gentleman Bank Robber - Oakland, CA
The Gentleman Bank Robber is fully funded!
We’re headed to Oakland to interview Bo Brown! Thank you to all of our supporters!
