Ruby Oliver’s career arc goes like this: naval officer, postal clerk, day-care provider, movie director. It’s an unlikely resume, but Oliver, whose first film, “Love Your Mama” (or “Leola,” as it was called in 1989 film festivals), is playing area theaters, has been defying expectations all her life.
A Chicago native with no previous theatrical experience, Oliver says she was thoroughly unintimidated by the prospect of sitting in the director’s chair. “To me, it’s not at all amazing,” she says. “I’m the type of person who sees something someone else is doing and I say, `I can do that.’ “
Six years ago, Oliver was ready to spend the rest of her days writing novels in semiretirement after selling the five day-care centers she had operated since the mid-’60s.
But “Love Your Mama,” a melodramatic tale about a long-suffering mother coping with an alcoholic, philandering husband, two aimless sons and a pregnant teenage daughter, wound up taking form as a film script after Oliver enrolled in a screenwriting course at Columbia College.
Unlike most neophyte writers who might put their first effort in a drawer, Oliver decided her next step was to turn the script into a movie.
“The straw that broke the camel’s back was when the chairman of the film department (then Tony Loeb) told me it couldn’t be done. `They just don’t distribute films by black women.’ When someone tells me I can’t do something, it just makes me say, `Oh, yes, I will.’ “
Once Oliver made up her mind to finance and direct the movie herself, she approached the project as a business proposition. “I went to the union and hired a DP (director of photography) and told him, `I want African-American men in the crew, I want women in the crew, and just balance it from there.’ So I didn’t have to know any of the technical stuff. His job was to give me what I wanted. My job was to sign the checks.”
To cast the film, Oliver was unconcerned about acting credits; she wanted the real thing. “During auditions, I just sat and waited and waited and waited until I saw the characters come in,” she says. “I wanted people who could give the movie an everyday feeling.”
When Audrey Morgan walked through the door, Oliver knew she had found her title character, even though it was Morgan’s first acting job. “She had the hips, the dress, the hair pulled back, the gap in her teeth,” Oliver says. “You know, my mother’s teeth weren’t perfect either. Audrey was Mama.”
Oliver’s mother, a stern disciplinarian, also provided some of the film’s most memorable lines of dialogue. “You have to write what you know, so it was just natural to write a story about my mother, and once I started, all these things came out of me that I had forgotten, and they became lines in the movie. Things like, `If you lie, you’ll steal,’ or `Let me look you in the eye so I can tell if you’re lying.’ “
In 1988, Oliver shot the film in and around her childhood home at 39th Street and Prairie Avenue. Then she moved to Los Angeles and spent the next four years trying to find a distributor. “I had a drawerful of rejections, then a roomful. But I knew I couldn’t quit. I’d take a `rejection break,’ then start again.”
Her perseverance paid off, Oliver recalls. “I went to Hemdale and they said no. I went back (six months later) and they said yes.”
Tom Ortenberg, president of distribution and marketing for Hemdale Communications, an independent producer that has presented movies such as “Platoon” and “The Last Emperor,” says: ” `Love Your Mama’ breaks the mold. It’s not a typical Hollywood film, but at our screenings, people have been reacting on a gut, emotional level. Spike Lee and then John Singleton opened the door for young black filmmakers. If this movie makes money, Ruby will make it palatable for mainstream Hollywood studios to search out black female directors. All it takes is one hit.”
Although its setting is an impoverished neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, Oliver hopes “Love Your Mama” will strike a universal chord.
“This movie is not really about racism, it’s not about poverty,” she says. “Things like alcoholism, that’s a world situation; teenage pregnancy, that’s a world situation; boys who aren’t really bad but hang around the wrong crowd and start getting in trouble, that happens everywhere. `Love Your Mama’ is really about struggling to hold a family together.”
