There’s a modest and charming irony in Molly Longwell’s plan to shoot a film in her hometown.
Living in Brooklyn during the coronavirus pandemic, Longwell, a Thetford native, found herself thinking about isolation and about how a life-changing event can cause a person to embrace it.
And it caused her to think about how she felt growing up in a small town and how she wanted to get out of it, to break free of the feeling that everyone knew her.
After the lockdown ended in New York, Longwell wrote a script for a short film set in Thetford. Bad Mother follows a woman who learns her spouse has been unfaithful and feels the rage and sorrow of someone whose world has been upended.
But to get that sense of isolation on film, Longwell needs to come home and reach out to the community, both of which she had wanted to escape.
Bad Mother isn’t autobiographical in any way (and it’s not to be confused with Ayelet Waldman’s 2009 book of the same name), but it’s “a story that’s so closely linked to my experiences growing up in the Upper Valley that I wanted people to know about it,” Longwell said in a phone interview.
She contacted me about the project. This space generally concerns itself with art that’s available to the wider Upper Valley audience. Longwell, who will turn 29 before filming starts in May, is at the other end of the process, but before the film makes it to local screens, whether in theaters or living rooms, the local audience has a role to play.
Vermont and New Hampshire haven’t lacked for writers, poets and visual artists. But aside from a handful of success stories, filmmakers are fewer and farther between. Florentine Films, in Walpole, N.H., of which Ken Burns is the most notable name, is the outlier as a company of national stature despite being out in the sticks, and Norwich’s own Nora Jacobson has made a career out of filmmaking on a local scale. Jay Craven, John O’Brien and others have turned out films that tell stories from northern New England.
While there’s a community of filmmakers, there isn’t a big infrastructure. But it’s growing.
Samantha Davidson Green, who earned an MFA in filmmaking at UCLA, has been where Longwell is now. When she moved back to Plainfield in 2013 with her husband and their three boys, she wasn’t sure how she’d be able to keep making movies.
But she found a supportive community that ranged from actors at Parish Players to other filmmakers such as Jacobson.
“I just think we have a very high density in the Upper Valley of people with those relationships,” she said. Even so, as an independent filmmaker, “you have to be really scrappy and resourceful.”
With the help of that community and some UCLA classmates she was able to releaseThrasher Road, her first feature, in 2019.
That production, and Longwell’s, highlight a central fact about filmmaking: It’s a collaborative art. A filmmaker has to bring other people into the project from the beginning, then keep adding them until the camera starts rolling. Both Longwell and Davidson Green relish that aspect of their work.
“I love working with people and I love being around people and it’s just the most exciting thing in the world,” Longwell said. She enjoys immersing herself in a story, but also the moments of discovery that actors and others involved with the production bring to it.
Hiring all those people requires funding. So far, Longwell has cast two of the five actors, and has brought on a producer — her partner, Nabil Elbehri — and a director of photography, Jackson Eagan. The number will grow until May, and then Longwell will need to transport and house them all. She’s raised $8,000 toward the film’s $20,000 budget and is planning a crowdfunding campaign.
Whether online fundraising is a durable way to bankroll the arts is a subject of debate. Women setting out to make films have more trouble raising money, Davidson Green said. That’s true all over the industry.
To make Thrasher Road, Davidson Green went to 25 funders to raise money to shoot and then complete the film. Crowdsourcing might fund a project, “but it’s not a career,” she said.
Longwell also has reached out to Davidson Green, who led White River Indie Films and is now executive director of CATV, the White River Junction-based community television station. At both organizations, Davidson Green has been working to build up the area’s capacity to support filmmakers. Longwell can see it.
“I wanted to immerse myself more in the filmmaking community in the Upper Valley, because it’s blossoming,” she said.
Her main shooting location will be her childhood home in East Thetford. Her parents, Jan Henshaw, an interior designer, and Don Longwell, an architect, have been supportive.
But other needs will crop up. Places to stay, cars and props to borrow, food for cast and crew. All of it helps get a small film off the ground.
The world of filmed entertainment is alarmingly vast, but our corner of it, movies about Vermont, New Hampshire and the Upper Valley subset of the Twin States, are not. Davidson Green likened support for local film to buying local craft beer or small-batch yogurt.
“What people are capable of creating at a local level is art,” Davidson Green said, and it’s every bit as compelling as what comes out of Los Angeles and New York.
Where else are stories that reflect Upper Valley lives going to come from, if not from us?
Longwell plans to have a website up at mollyvlongwell.com and to start a crowdfunding campaign by the end of the week. She can be reached at mvlongwell@gmail.com.
Looking through Photo Booth, the excellent photography chronicle that The New Yorker publishes on its website, I stumbled across an artist unknown to me.
Judith Joy Ross has quietly gone about making portraits of ordinary Americans since the 1980s. “Over the years,” Vince Aletti wrote for Photo Booth, “her presence has been flickering rather than steady, and it was easy to lose sight of her.”
Aletti was writing about a catalog of her work that accompanies a show now on view in Madrid and traveling elsewhere in Europe, “with, maddeningly, no U.S. dates as yet,” he added in a parenthetical aside.
Reading that made me wonder whether the Hood Museum of Art wouldn’t be the ideal place for that show. John Stomberg, the museum’s director, specializes in 20th century American art and culture and recently curated an excellent show of photographic portraits. The newly enlarged Hood is a busy place and plans exhibitions far ahead, but this show sounds like a catch.
This drama has played out via email, so I’ll be brief. The Howe Library has told Bruce Posner, who for years has held his eclectic and free film screenings on Monday nights in the library’s Mayer Room, to find a new time for the screenings. Posner feels aggrieved, hard words have been exchanged, but he doesn’t appear to have much recourse. If he wants his 25-year-old film series to continue, it seems likely he’ll have to pick another day and time if he wants to keep them at the Howe.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
