One of the most compelling scenes in the documentary “The New Americans” takes place in the Uptown apartment of the Nwidor family, Nigerian refugees who have been in America for only a few months. The family has just returned from a nearby health clinic, where Ngozi Nwidor has been diagnosed as a tuberculosis carrier and her husband, Israel, was found to have a serious heart condition.
Israel consoles his crying wife, first with whispers and silly jokes and then a pep talk. The camera lingers on the couple as her mood changes, lightening just enough so Ngozi wipes away her tears and smiles.
Steve James crouches with a camera on his shoulder just a few feet away, and in a gentle voice he asks Ngozi how her husband manages to make her smile. At this point, James has been filming the Nwidor family for two years, and his voice is familiar, unintrusive. “I don’t know,” she answers. “Maybe that is the way God created him.”
Two more years would pass before James finished filming his portion of “The New Americans,” an adventure that took his crew from an African refugee camp to Chicago, then back to Africa to film the Nwidors’ home village. Another two years would pass before James and colleagues at Chicago’s Kartemquin Films would finish editing its 1,100 hours of footage and weave it into the most ambitious project of his 20-year career, which includes the wildly successful “Hoop Dreams” and critically acclaimed “Stevie.”
James says he hasn’t been able to shake the feeling of being in the Nwidors’ apartment on that chilly winter afternoon, mostly because it reminds him why he continues to make films in the brutal documentary genre, even though “Hoop Dreams” could have easily taken his career toward the big-budget films of Hollywood.
“If I had been through what they had been through, getting such bad news, and come home, I think I’d want to go in my bedroom, close the door, and not talk to anybody,” James says. “But the fact that they let us in, and let us witness them, and the way in which they leaned on each other, was one of those moments that really stick with you as a filmmaker. There’s this sort of fundamental human spirit, this will that people have, which has always been inspiring.”
James is already working on another project, “Reel Paradise,” and stealing a few hours here and there to promote Monday’s broadcast of the three-part “New Americans” on WTTW-Ch. 11 and other PBS stations. A recent Wednesday was typical of James’ daily routine and the frugal work life of one of America’s most highly regarded documentary filmmakers: 10 hours in the editing studio followed by a “New Americans” screening and reception at Facets Multimedia. Even though the film is a PBS production, James and Kartemquin Films co-founder Gordon Quinn paid for the refreshments, a simple spread of bottled water, crackers and cheese.
Kartemquin Films, whose lefty zeal and bottom-line-be-damned attitude have bolstered James and his work for 20 years, is housed in a weathered Lake View studio. The former bar, union hall and dry cleaners is a testament to the threadbare world of documentary film: A broken doorbell greets visitors, floorboards creak underfoot, expensive editing equipment sits on resale furniture, and a converted kitchen serves as the reception area.
Elsewhere in the Victorian four-flat, interns hunch over computers previewing tapes or answering phones and colleagues work on their respective projects. James, 49, is tucked away from it all in an editing room, working until he commutes back to his wife and three children in Oak Park.
“My life is not very interesting,” he insists. “Documentary filmmaking is not glamorous.”
Especially in Chicago. The independent films by James, Kartemquin and a small coterie of other Chicago filmmakers are shown at the Super Bowl of independent film, the Sundance Film Festival, and even earn nominations for Academy Awards– “Hoop Dreams” (1994), “Legacy” (2000) and “The Weather Underground” (2003) are recent examples. But there’s nothing very racy going on behind the scenes, as you might expect in New York or L.A. No late-night partying in Wicker Park or million-dollar film deals brokered in skybox seats at Soldier Field. Chicago documentary filmmaking isn’t even a scene; it’s a tiny community whose directors drive minivans and sleep on friends’ sofas when they’re on location, a mutually supportive circle of the pale, bleary-eyed and sleep-deprived. Money is always an issue.
At first glance, “Reel Paradise” doesn’t seem like a signature Steve James documentary. It’s based on independent film mogul John Pierson’s adventuresome idea to leave behind his big-league career–“She’s Gotta Have it,” “Roger and Me,” “The Blair Witch Project”–and move to Fiji to show feature films for free. The film is a departure from the serious, everyman’s sociology of James’ other work. Another difference is that it’s being produced by Miramax, the entertainment colossus, though James is editing the film at Kartemquin.
“Hoop Dreams” chronicled more than four years in the lives of two Chicago basketball players and subtly revealed the urban American Dream. “Stevie,” begun just after the release of “Hoop Dreams” in 1995, is James’ reunion with Stevie Fielding, a convicted felon whom James once mentored when Fielding was a boy in Pomona, Ill. “Stevie” explores the effects of rural poverty and raises the question of who, or what, could have kept Fielding from prison. “The New Americans” follows seven families for four years, first as immigrants from such countries as Nigeria, India and Mexico, then as new American citizens.
“I think Steve is America’s premier storyteller when it comes to documentary film,” says Alex Kotlowitz, a Chicago writer and NPR contributor. “When it’s all said and done, when you look at the body of Steve’s work, it will be this incredible snapshot of America. There’s nothing polemical about his work and yet they are about incredibly critical matters.”
James explains his work in a way that makes its trademark intensity seem almost unintentional. “I am not a political filmmaker,” he says, his voice still carrying a trace of a Virginia accent. “Nothing has ever started out with some sort of great political agenda.”
“Hoop Dreams” began, he says, when he was a Southern Illinois University film student who loved basketball and wondered why the game meant so much to its players, particularly those from the inner city. “Stevie” began when James went to see Fielding in 1995 because he felt bad about losing touch with his “little brother.” “The New Americans” came from James’ penchant for striking up conversations with foreign-born taxi drivers and getting them to share why they came to America. ” ‘Reel Paradise’ is actually ‘New Americans’ in reverse, an American family trying to find something by leaving this place,” he says.
“If you have to find a connection between the films, the one thing I can say is that they’re all about family and people’s dreams. Above all else, that’s what fascinates me, and I’ve spent a good deal of time reflecting on the family I grew up with.”
Few documentary films have ever been as popular or praised as “Hoop Dreams.” But James, always quick to point out the realities of the business, explains that only he and his collaborators–Frederick Marx, Peter Gilbert and Kartemquin Films–believed that the film should be made. At one point, a film executive suggested that they would have a story only if something “really bad” happened to their subjects, Arthur Agee and William Gates, and the filmmakers believed the best the film could do was be shown on television. Still, they kept filming, paying for “Hoop Dreams” with their own money.
“Once you get hooked into other people’s lives, you feel a closeness and an affinity with them and they give so much of themselves in the process,” James says. “So it’s not just a commitment to the story, but a commitment to the subjects. Every film I’ve done has had a point where it was in jeopardy. But the worst thing would be to go up to someone and say ‘Well, gee, we have to stop now.’ “
But no subject would test James more than Stevie Fielding, a deeply troubled delinquent who could hardly express himself, let alone work, relate to his family or get along with his neighbors. Back in the ’80s, James had agreed to be a Big Brother to Fielding, who was unwanted by his mother, molested as a child and shuffled in and out of foster care and group homes. A decade later, Fielding had graduated to spending time in and out of prison. Movie industry types encouraged James to drop the project, saying no audience would pay to watch such a pathetic character.
But he kept “Stevie” going with his own money, much of it his share of the profits from “Hoop Dreams,” and donations from producer Adam Singer and Kartemquin’s Quinn. The crew, who included cinematographer Dana Kupper, were volunteers. “We had no idea if it would ever amount to anything,” Kupper says. “Steve just has this uncanny ability to make you believe in something and go through hell to get it done.”
Two years into the on-camera reunion, Fielding was charged with molesting his 8-year-old niece. James says his first thought was to walk away from the project, but he kept the cameras rolling, even after he decided that Fielding was guilty. “It became clear that so much of his life had set him on a path toward committing that crime. The system, everyone, including myself, had failed.”
Critics, colleagues and even friends accused James of exploiting Fielding’s downfall as well as his 8-year-old victim. Others accused him of condoning the behavior of a pedophile. But James believed the film would have value if it objectively addressed their concerns and described how Fielding could grow up to inflict the same sexual abuse he suffered and wind up in prison.
“I still have mixed feelings about ‘Stevie,’ ” James says. “And any filmmaker who doesn’t wrestle with issues of exploitation is either lying to you or they have a pretty shallow relationship with the craft. Some people feel I made the wrong choice in making ‘Stevie,’ or that I never reconciled that ethical dilemma. I understand that. To this day, I still don’t feel completely at peace with the choice I made. But I believe that the film has social value.”
Growing up in Virginia, James wasn’t political even when it was cool. He was too young for the ’60s and too interested in basketball to get involved in the ’70s. While opposition to the Vietnam War was reaching its apex, the Watergate investigation was getting under way, and the popular kids at Hampton (Va.) High School were ripping varsity athletes for being part of the establishment, James was working on his jump shot and making himself the 1973 MVP of his team.
Not that anyone would confuse James for a conservative, even back then. It was just that he was even more quiet and reserved than he is now. Born with a tiny hole in his heart, he was a stay-at-home kid for the better part of a decade, mostly spending his free time drawing and making his own comic books and board games. His father, Billy, was a high school sports legend, and a halfback at Virginia Tech. He encouraged his four children–three boys and a girl–to play sports at all times. James’ mother, Imogene, also was a sports fanatic, keeping close tabs on the local high school and college teams. James’ siblings followed their parents’ lead and gave their four-bedroom house the energy of a grammar-school recess.
By the time James’ heart defect healed at age 12, sports seemed like the ultimate form of expression. “I played basketball constantly,” he says. “I wasn’t a sociable guy.”
Even so, he wasn’t isolated from the racial tensions of the time. Hampton was still the South, an hour’s drive from Richmond, the capitol of the Confederacy. At high school pep rallies, white students would cheer only when James and two other white players were introduced, and the black students would respond in kind, cheering only when black players were called.
“It became a competition to see who could cheer loudest between the blacks and the whites in the stands,” James says. “And I think that, because I played basketball, I was someone who actually was able to traverse between what were really two different schools.”
He said working for his father gave him a different look at the same problem. Summers would come and the young James, either on summer break from high school or college, would work alongside the black men his father hired for his Billy James Co., a carpeting and floor tile installation business.
“I remember going to this one house with this guy Allen and having the woman of the house turn to me and say what she wanted done,” James says. “Now I’m about 20 and Allen’s about 40, and I’ve got no idea what I’m doing, and she’s going on and on with her instructions, looking at me the whole time. And Allen doesn’t say a word and, at the end, Allen turns to me and says, ‘OK, Steve, go get my tools.’ And the woman’s jaw just drops.”
“Race and class was something I always paid attention to,” James says.
The James family also left an impression on their son. “I’m not going to tell you everything, but suffice to say it was a pretty lively home,” he says. “I’ve seen my share of dysfunction and the way in which families work and don’t work, and the way in which families persevere. The most salient thing about families is that most of them keep trying no matter what–the dreams are always there–and I think you can see that in the films that I’ve done.”
Fascination with film came after he went to college in 1973. He had chosen James Madison University in Virginia mostly because he figured he could make the basketball team. But after one year on the junior varsity, he began to realize that school might have a purpose beyond organized sports. He majored in radio journalism, took a number of English courses and wound up in a film-appreciation class during his senior year.
It was there that a popular professor, Ralph Cohen, introduced James to the films of Ernst Lubitsch, Jean Renoir, Alfred Hitchcock and Arthur Penn. “I completely fell in love,” James says. He borrowed a Super 8 camera from the school and made his first two films. The first was “The Attendant,” a silent movie about a parking-lot attendant with a rich fantasy life, and then “Cold Comfort,” which he describes as, “My attempt to make the Super 8 version of ‘Crime and Punishment.’ It was a very pretentious 30-minute epic.”
James met his future wife, Judy Roth, when they were both in their third year at James Madison, but the two didn’t become a couple until a year later. “When we graduated, and she went off to Southern [Illinois University] to study psychology, I quickly figured out that I wanted [us] to stay together and that SIU had a film department,” he says. “It was a very easy decision to make.”
His most influential professor there, Mike Kovell, encouraged James to work on non-fiction film projects.
James says he enrolled in SIU’s master’s degree program expecting to make fiction films. “But when I got there I found this strong emphasis on documentary and, coupled with my journalistic inclinations, it all came together. “But I never lost the feeling that I wanted to tell stories.”
One summer afternoon in 1986, a year out of college, he and SIU classmate Frederick Marx walked into Kartemquin Films and pitched James’ idea to make a film about what basketball meant to inner-city kids.
Back then, Kartemquin co-founder Gordon Quinn says, James and Marx had hardly enough experience to fill a resume, just a few student films and some commercial work. But the pair had a $2,000 grant, a definite plan and a catchy title, although that wasn’t what impressed Quinn most, he says. “These were two guys with a passion for the game of basketball.”
Kartemquin was founded in 1965 on the concept of “cinematic social inquiry,” promoting social change through film. Quinn had just finished editing a Bob Dylan documentary, and he had made such an impression on Dylan that the singer-songwriter eventually named a song after him, “The Mighty Quinn.” Kartemquin was a combination of the last names of its University of Chicago-educated founding fathers–Quinn, Jerry Temaner and Stanley Karter–and a nod to a favorite film, “Battleship Potemkin,” by Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
After several years in Hyde Park, the group moved to its first legitimate headquarters in 1971, a brownstone at 1921 N. Fremont St., near DePaul University. According to the studio’s official history, “This Yuppie Hell was at that time still a neighborhood fit for actual human beings.”
The studio became a hangout for activists, artists, union organizers and, of course, filmmakers. Kartemquin even had a few years as a “collective,” when its cast of characters joined in to make projects and, in perhaps the studio’s most hippie phase, participate in full-day “structure and identity sessions” that contemplated the current and future state of the collective: Are there enough women involved? Do we have a leader? Are we making the right political choices on our films?
“You couldn’t just come in, finish your project and buzz off,” says Jenny Rhorer, a video producer who was one of the original members of the collective. “The understanding was that you were there to build this entity and, in fact, the collective existed for about seven years.”
But by the time James and Marx arrived, Kartemquin had changed, as had so many of its original members. Social change was still the mission, but Quinn and Jerry Blumenthal, a co-founder who spared the studio the trouble of adding to its name, had settled down a bit, doing away with some of their ’60s-era trappings. Kartemquin was now taking on sports films, corporate instructional videos and other commercial work, and had made enough money to move the studio in 1973 from a basement in Lincoln Park to its current home at 1901 W. Wellington Ave.
Making money was not a matter of selling out but of survival. Even the most accomplished documentary filmmakers will tell you they have a hard time raising money to start or sustain a project
“No matter what level you’re at, no one’s going to just cut you a check that makes the film happen,” says Barbara Kopple, a two-time Academy Award winner for documentary film. “It’s a constant struggle to make something come together. Sometimes you don’t know where your next roll of film is going to come from. But it’s also great, or else we wouldn’t be doing it.”
Documentaries cost from $75,000 to $1 million per hour of finished film, and filmmakers typically turn to federal arts programs or private foundations and contributors for funding. Stick around until the credits of a documentary film and you’ll usually see special thanks extended to a wide range of patrons, from the filmmaker’s grandparents and the publicly funded Independent Television Service, to the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation, one of the industry’s most generous benefactors. Major film studios are wary of investing in usually unprofitable nonfiction films, and federal funding is scarce because agencies like the National Endowment for the Arts have often had their budgets trimmed under political pressure.
Documentary filmmakers typically sustain themselves with commercial work or make documentaries their second job. Even Oscar nominee Bob Siegel (“Weather Underground”) moonlights as director of school programs at the Great Books Foundation. James has done several feature films (“Prefontaine,” “Joe and Max,” “Passing Glory”), and other Kartemquin employees work elsewhere to make ends meet.
But the organization itself struggles to stay above water. Gambling on inexperienced filmmakers and risky projects, often with little chance for a commercial audience, has taken its toll. While it has created award-winning films and an enviable national reputation, the studio has more money problems than its founders care to mention. “Let’s just put it this way,” says Quinn. “We’ve been around since 1966, and probably been near bankruptcy several times. It’s just that our bookkeeping was so bad we didn’t know it.”
When the studio runs out of money, work stops for awhile, says business manager Karen Larson. “We call it ‘hiatus.’ ” All of James’ Kartemquin films have been on hiatus at one point or another and even the PBS-backed “New Americans” reached a point in 2000 when its budget was exhausted. At the last minute, the Independent Television Service gave the money needed to finish the project.
“The ITVS is who we pray to at night because we would have been sunk without them,” Larson says.
At Kartemquin, James typically works in a second-floor editing studio that may have been a children’s bedroom or television den in a former life. Editing monitors and consoles are arranged on a decades-old desk, and the hard drives for the editing computer are stacked inside an adjacent closet with its door, now unhinged, resting against the wall.
One recent morning, James is dressed for work like a suburban father running errands on a Saturday: red button-down shirt, dark fleece vest, blue jeans and those leather “office-casual” shoes that look more like sneakers. His eyes appear glazed-over from staring at video monitors for hours.
“He’s the mad professor of documentary,” one intern says. “He goes in there, works all day and comes out after dark.”
James has been on a tight deadline because the backers for “Reel Paradise” want the film to be ready for the fall film festivals and consideration for Sundance 2005. Just about every minute of his day is spent whittling down a month’s worth of film into a two-hour documentary.
Just before lunch, James puts the finishing touches on a scene, then turns away from the editing computer and takes a visitor’s question about his editing style. He is a few seconds into his explanation when the questioner’s chair gives out, dropping him to the hardwood floor.
“Welcome to Kartemquin,” James says.
THE FILMS OF STEVE JAMES
Hoop Dreams (1994)
The triumphs and setbacks of Chicago basketball players Arthur Agee (pictured) and William Gates.
Prefontaine (1997)
The brief life of track star Steve Fontaine.
Passing Glory (1999)
Racial strife and prep basketball in New Orleans.
Joe and Max (2001)
The Joe Louis-Max Schmeling boxing rivalry re-examined.
Stevie (2002)
An old friend ends up in prison.
The New Americans (2004)
Immigrant families adjust to life in America.
Reel Paradise (to be completed in 2004)
A producer interrupts his career and moves his family to Fiji.
