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Subscribe to iCalendarMarch 2003
Featured Artist
Judith Helfand and “Making Change, Making Movies” (cont'd)
Some of you are crying. Was this pretty emotional? How come? Do you want to comment on that? That was an amazing experience for us too, incredibly emotional, very satisfying as filmmakers. What was really amazing is that this garnered so much press, this was in the Associated Press, this was in major newspapers [like] The Wall Street Journal. It was incredibly healing at that moment in time, and like I said, the mayor got in on it. Frank Beecham was hugging everybody. He made it OK for the day for everybody to do this. That older woman that said that I just want people to know that my father just meant the best for them. She hadn’t been back there since 1934 when they were run out of town. So I don’t even know how everybody heard about it, but they had between 200 and 300 people there. We showed The Uprising of ‘34. There were two sold-out screenings that day. They were both held at the elementary school, of all places. And it was an incredibly poignant day. And there were people from the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Union, which later became United, who would have never in their wildest dreams thought they could set foot in Honea Path, and they came.
One of the people who was unveiling it, he flew in from New York—a radical Jewish former vice president from [an organization] who was so excited about this. This was such a milestone. He thought if you could do this in Honea Path, so much is going to change. Well, not everything actually changed. I don’t think the organizers used the opportunity as well as they could have. There’s a point at which as a filmmaker you’re limited in what you can do. You can help set up incredible venues that are not about which side are you on, but use culture, and art and history and levity and laughter as a way to get people to connect with each other and it’s not during the traditional protest. I mean, most of the time when these folks would get in the paper would be when they’re angry, when they have a bludgeon in their hand, when they’re protesting. And that’s often the only way the press gets to write about them. And it’s the only way that people get to see them. And they only learn about workers’ rights through that veil. So for them to be able to talk about all of these issues, and talk about class and power and inequity along with that in a setting like this was amazing. We were all like, oh God, what are the organizers going to do next? And I was a little disappointed, because I really thought they were going to move in there and do something. But it could be that the memorial is enough for a very long time, and it works in extraordinary ways.
What did happen was that the film was broadcast nationally on a series called POV [Point of View]. Anyway, it was shown all across the nation except in two places. Where do you think it wasn’t shown? It wasn’t shown in South Carolina. That public television station said no way. And it wasn’t shown in two cities in North Carolina. And when it was shown in North Carolina in the other cities, they showed it at midnight on Saturday night, the Fourth of July. Now the only weekend historically that textile workers get off no matter what is July Fourth weekend. It’s like, they’re not going to watch it. They’re partying. You know, it’s Saturday night, midnight. So this movie was shown everywhere but there. Now people, because we had spent a number of years organizing with all these folks using this movie, and creating these workshops called “Using History as an Organizing Tool,” and because of this extraordinary event in Honea Path, the news that South Carolina was not going to carry this was not met with a lot of happiness. And so they waged a 1-800 campaign, and all these folks were calling incessantly to South Carolina public television saying, “How can you not show The Uprising of ‘34? This is our history. This is our story. This is our movie. How could you do that to us? Are you crazy?” So they got a whole barrage of these phone calls. And then a bunch of academics sent in their PBS membership cards and said when you show the movie, I’ll be a member again, but as of now, I’m quitting. Because what does this mean, you’re public television? How could you not do this service for the public?
So that was really interesting. The most important thing it did, I think, was that it gave writers a new way of writing about labor history and workers’ rights. If they had just shown the movie, that wouldn’t have done much. Then they would have had to decide—do they like the movie or do they not like the movie? But because they didn’t show the movie it elevated the story to a question of what is the role of public television. Whose stories get told? Whose stories don’t get told? And what does it mean when working people’s histories do not get told, particularly in a place like South Carolina and North Carolina?
So that was a really extraordinary thing. Ultimately, because of all of this buzz, this huge file was created called the “Uprising of ‘34” that I guess was in a file cabinet in South Carolina Public Television, and a couple of years later the then-president who had been the first president, who was put in place by money from the South Carolina Textile Manufacturers Association, so we can understand why he probably didn’t want to show it—he left and a new president came in. And apparently, the first thing he said was, “Well I’m ought to put that mill movie on TV and I am just going to put that thing to bed.” So he called up POV and said, “I want to run that mill movie.” So POV called us up and said, “You’re not going to believe this but they want to run the movie.” So initially The Uprising of ‘34 was shown nationally in 1995, but it was shown in South Carolina in 1998.
In between that, Frank Beecham was so pissed off that he found this clause in our contract that we didn’t even know about, which says that if public television says they’re not going to show it, then someone else is allowed to show it. So he called up NBC because he had a friend who worked there at the NBC affiliate. And they said, “Sure we’ll put it on.” So between 1995 and 1998 an NBC affiliate put on The Uprising of ‘34 at 11 o’clock at night without commercials and it was paid for by 28 different organizations that grew out of all the organizing that had gone on around the movie. So we created this guide for people in South Carolina to understand how to watch this movie and what to think about it, and to understand all the history that was attached to it. And it went out, which was an extraordinary thing.
One of the organizing—and the fundraising — principles that I got from this entire experience was that you need to get diverse funding. That fundraising is organizing in and of itself. And it’s constituency and audience-building. And the more diverse funding you get on the front end, the more chance you’re always going to have to create the audience and the network of audiences that will do the work that had to be done around The Uprising of ‘34. So we got a little bit of union money, but we also got money from the humanities councils, and we also got money from institutions that fund history, and we got money from public broadcasting, and we got lots and lots of foundations. It was that fundraising that enabled us to say this is not just a labor movie, this is a movie about history, about art, about culture.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
When did you start planning to involve all these groups that you involved? You must have started very early in the planning.
JUDITH HELFAND:
The goal of this film always was to…the subtext of the film was, what is the impact of young working people who don’t know their own history of resistance? And the question was: If they knew their history of resistance, would it make a difference for them? And so for a while, we were actually going to find—and we even have all this bad footage—of young textile workers who were training to become historians, who were going out and doing these interviews themselves. We were trying to find young textile workers who would find out stories about their own family, and it was crazy. It was like we were attached to this blood connection instead of looking at mythology and looking at how mythology and history really work. And so we started testing the raw elements of the movie at different conferences and with different constellations of people that organize around workers’ rights—union, and people that use the non-union model. And once they started to interact with the material, we started to build this extraordinary connection with them and luckily we realized that it was not about blood, it was about community and where people lived, and that this legacy of this textile strike affected everybody, not just the textile industry. That’s when we started to think like this and build these relationships. Because the movie took so long and it was so difficult to fundraise, we were constantly utilizing these circles to help us fine-tune and to understand how to make the movie really effective. So you don’t just get lucky and make a film that’s effective and resonant, you ensure that a film is useful and effective.
I don’t think all movies should always be made like this, but this one needed to be. But once you know that, it’s your job to, as a filmmaker, to take everything you just learned as an organizer and as someone who really understands the needs of these organizers, and now you’ve turned it into a narrative. I mean once you get it into the editing room, it’s about how you get it into a narrative. And your responsibility is still to the organizers, but now your responsibility is to the quality of movie—and that takes a very long time. And it takes incredible editors who will always hate you and be frustrated with you, because you have this dual responsibility—one is to the movie, and one is to the needs of the organizers. And part of that is then figuring out—what I don’t put in the movie, I can then build it in the organizing initiative. Or we can now these days put it on the Web site, or we can put it on the DVD, or we can be part of the way that we create an organizing campaign to go along with the film.
AUDIENCE QUESTION:
Just to clarify, did PBS ever play that in South Carolina?
JUDITH HELFAND:
Oh it did. And we met this great [journalist who wrote an article]. The cover said something like: Uprising of ‘34 comes home to South Carolina, congratulations South Carolina Public Television for being brave and saying yes. So it did come back and we actually organized a whole symposium with journalists to analyze the press that had been generated around the ban of the movie and to really talk about where that helped them reframe how workers’ rights are actually written about and thought about, and I think to some extent it did. It was great for South Carolina—the organizers had really done their job in advance of that. It was about public television claiming, well this is our movie too, and we’re not going to look like chumps—and now we’ve shown it so leave us alone. It was great. It was really gratifying.
Now that happened right when I was editing A Healthy Baby Girl. So I’m going to show you a piece of this movie and I’m going to ask you to think does this look like a typical environmental health film? Or what does an environmental health film look like anyway?
I was making this movie concurrently with making Uprising of ‘34. Now you can’t make two big movies at the same time. But you can make a big movie and be shooting footage that’s diary footage, that’s very personal, that takes place in your house, that you basically do without a big crew whenever you go home. You can do those concurrently with one another. And I’m actually thrilled that I got the opportunity to do that because they were in deep connection and they were in dialogue with each other.
So, this is a piece of A Healthy Baby Girl. This is me having a conversation with my mother about six weeks after coming home, and I’ve been healing from a radical hysterectomy. And I’m at home healing in the house that my parents brought me home to, literally as an infant. And I’m healing in the same bedroom where I had been brought home to as an infant. And my bed, which I think you’ll see, is where my crib had been. So it was a very—as you can imagine—painful period of time, and a difficult thing to navigate. You know, it’s like how do you and your mother continue to grow with each other and love each other and not be misguided and either feel too guilty or too angry at each other, when clearly the instinct to take all of your feelings either out on them, even though you know it’s about the pharmaceutical industry and not each other. But because it’s a very personal situation, you can easily lapse into that. So the movie that I was trying to document was the long-term impact of chemical exposure on the relationship between a mother and a daughter.
I think I was very lucky because of the Uprising of ‘34 and then later on, that I was able to understand that this was not just a young girl’s gynecological problem. I was hurt by chemical exposure, and despite the fact that it was a pharmaceutical, the chemical worked on me and my development as a fetus, in the same way that pesticides work or dioxins work or other chemicals. At the time I was shooting this, I don’t think I really understood this. All I knew was I had access to this incredible historical moment when reproductive technology backfired. And when human beings had to take the brunt of corporate greed and chemical exposure, and incorporate that into their life and in their relationships. And that’s a heavy thing to realize — that I’m experiencing all of that in my house just when my mother and I have breakfast together. So that’s what I was trying to document, and at the same time, maintain my relationship with my mother so we wouldn’t fall out with each other and lose each other forever. That much I definitely knew.
[BREAK—FILM CLIP - A Healthy Baby Girl, in which a film crew confronts Judith about her demands for attention]
The reason I found out that I had cancer was because I had volunteered to work on a project with another film crew that was working on a film about DES-related cancer. And I really wanted to work on this movie, and I volunteered to do this for free. I said, “I’ll do footage research for you, I have a little bit of free time.” They said, “You’re going to have to go get a check-up if you want to work on this movie, if you’re a DES-exposed daughter.” I said, “I don’t need one I had one last year, I’m fine.” They said, “No, you need to go get a check-up.” And I did, and I wound up having the same cancer they were making the movie about, which was crazy. So lucky for me, I met them when I did, because I would definitely not be here in front of you if I had not met them when I did, because I was not even symptomatic—I didn’t know it.
So they started making a movie about me, and I—who was very deeply appreciative—and wanted them around, because they represented that this was not personal, this was a big public story, and therefore my mother and I would not fall into a horribly dark place. But they couldn’t show up the way that I thought they should. I had not been on the other side of the camera before, and it made me start to realize—oh my gosh, look at the responsibility of a film crew to the subjects. The subjects start to rely on you, the subjects need you because beyond the movie, you represent that their life is really important. You shoot lots of people, but you only use a little bit of them. But that’s not how the people on the other side of the camera experience it. You are validating their life, you are elevating their experience so that it’s not just this painful moment, but it’s part of history, it’s relevant, it’s part of public record. So I wanted them to be around all of the time and of course they couldn’t do that. When this film crew comes back, they haven’t been to my home in like three weeks. At that point I was using a little video camera that my cousin had lent me to do a family history project, it was a regular-8 camera, the battery was broken. Everything I shot with my mother, I had to plug it in. I’m holding a catheter in one hand, the camera in the other. I’m drawing pictures so that I don’t implode because I think I should be documenting every minute of the day, which was crazy, but I really needed to. And they were just never around. So that was the story. It was the first time that I’d ever really understood the responsibility and the role of the producer and the director and the crew and what they might mean. It was incredibly helpful. At the same time, I really needed them, and they weren’t around. So I just said, “Screw it, I’ll make this movie myself”—which of course was the right thing to do. So that’s what you just saw. I’ll let you see a little bit more.
[BREAK—FILM CLIP - A Healthy Baby Girl]
So did that look—since this is an environmental film festival, did that look like an environmental film to you? You’re shaking your…Was it a yes or a no? You’re shaking your head both. Did you want to comment on that—did you think it was an environmental film or not?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yes. Because I saw the film about a month ago on WorldLink TV. When I saw that, I don’t know how you shot that—you were with your camera. It was environmental, but you went further than that because it was the issue of your family helping you make the film. You said in one shot—I took my cousin’s video camera and I started shooting—and I can see your frustration to make a film. So you had more than just environmental issues; you started with that, but you went further.
JUDITH HELFAND:
Does anyone else want to comment or add to that?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
It was definitely powerful and emotional. I guess what might have made it look more like an environmental film was if you get some footage of the perpetrator, which was the pharmaceutical company and the Food and Drug Administration for allowing something like that on the market.
JUDITH HELFAND:
I would venture to say that this is an environmental film because it is about family and I think often the problem of traditional environmental films is that we go straight for the issue, and we often leave out the heart. And in this case, this is also a labor documentary—not because my mom gave birth to me or anything, not that labor—but I would venture to say it’s a labor documentary because what I learned from the Uprising of ‘34 is that workers may get hurt on the job, between 9 and 5, but they experience it between 5 and 9. Meaning from 5 p.m. when they go home until 9 a.m. when they leave the house again, that’s really the time when they experience the impacts of chemical exposure—because it’s what happens to the relationships with your family. That’s really the terrain. You might get hurt in the workplace, but you experience that truly at home, or at least inside your relationships. So from that perspective, I was trying to stretch the definition of both a labor documentary and an environmental film, so that this is really environmental because it’s about reproduction—about [whether] the species is going to exist or not, and it’s about what happens when one generation poisons the next. But I couched it in the most familial terms that I could. So rather than using that language, it’s just about relationships or the challenge that they have to continue and the pain that exists—which was a hard thing to choose.
Will people see this as an environmental health film if I don’t make it overt? Will the labor community choose to see this as a film about worker health and safety and damages that their workers incur actually all the time? So it was a very interesting process to figure out how I can make it really personal and still make it hit the environmental mark and the labor mark. Did you have a comment?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I had a question. What is DES and what was it used for?
JUDITH HELFAND:
Diethylstilbestrol is the long term and it was used as an anti-miscarriage drug. It was used for other things too, but in this case it was used as an anti-miscarriage drug. But it works on the fetus the way other chemicals work on the fetus. So this was a pharmaceutical, but had we just left it in the realm of the pharmaceutical company, we would have done a huge disservice to the environmental health movement. Because the best, most important environmental-health books of the last decade almost all point to DES as the most concrete example of a teratogen, which means a chemical that can harm the developing fetus. And because they all believe in the precautionary principle, which means that if you have enough data to show you have a major, major risk—that you don’t have to wait until you draw a straight line between the source of exposure and the cancer you have. You use the data you have and other data that you have from other like chemicals that work in the same way, and you use that to say this is not OK, this should not be out it the world, this should not be used in commerce, it should not be used as a pesticide, people should not be exposed to chemical weapons. So the DES story has been used over and over and over again.
I could have easily gone into that direction of taking my DES story and everything that I learned and having that analysis. But what we did a la Uprising of ‘34 was we had focus groups of the film once it was in a rough-cut form. We invited the people that we most wanted to be able to use the films so we could understand if the film was really working both as a film but also as an organizing tool. The people that we invited were organizers from labor, environmental groups that were working on toxins, cancer activists and survivors, women’s health activists, teachers, lawyers, members from my DES Cancer Network group, leaders and members of the Jewish community, because that was community I knew I was going to want to work with this movie and try to link faith-based and environmental health organizing. So we got them all together in different machinations and different formations and they would look at the rough cut, and they would both experience it. And the idea was that if we bring really different kinds of people together—someone who’s a worker on a shop floor who deals with chemicals and a Jewish DES-mother from the suburbs who would in their minds—I mean this was my thinking—they think they have nothing in common with each other; they watch this movie together—will they be able to talk to each other and about each other’s damages in a new way and could we build very unlikely allies? And if we tried to build these unlikely allies, will they be useful later on?
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Can you talk about [the film release?]
JUDITH HELFAND:
I had a really good relationship there. And basically, I knew lots of organizers through the National Organizers Alliance, which is based here in D.C. And so I knew how to find people who were working in the environmental health world, and I knew that some of them were connected to the labor world, and I was already a member of the DES Cancer Network, so I knew the women’s health organizations and the whole network of cancer support groups. And I knew the legal world a little bit. Basically you decide, OK I’m going to bring this constellation of people together, I’m going to also ask them if they can bring people to the party, and I’m going to do it in a lot of different places, because if I just show a movie like this in New York, I’m only going to get a New York sensibility. So it might make sense that we’re using klezmer music, it might make sense that we’re a very loud, middle-class, brash Jewish family, to some extent, and that our jokes read and they’re not just Jewish jokes but they’re universal, or it might not. Now if I only do that in New York, I’ll never find out. So I did this in Minnesota. I did this in San Francisco. I did this in Tennessee. I did it in North Carolina, and I also brought the film to some environmental health events where it was just environmental health activists and I also brought it to some labor events where it was just labor people. And what I found out was that the Jewish music worked. The ethnic identification was really, really important because people really liked knowing that we were Jewish. And it was amazing because, you know, African-American folks would say your mother reminds me so much of my mother—when my mother is mourning, you know, that’s what she would talk about, and I love the fact that you’re talking about your Judaism because that means my mother will like it because my mother only likes people who are religious. I was amazed to find out how tiny little bits of ephemera about our identity would be so useful. I had a non-Jewish editor on purpose so if she understood it and it was contextualized, then I knew everyone else would understand it, too.
But you know there were risky things that were going on in this movie—was it too Jewish? Was the music over the top? Would people think it was nostalgic, or would they be able to make connections? Was it too personal? Were people too uncomfortable? What was my role in taking people along a very, very uncomfortable ride, and how could I make their discomfort part of the story, and enable them to see that if they felt vulnerable it was because as consumers we’re really, really vulnerable? And how could I ensure that if they were comfortable with that, they would say, you know, that discussion about infertility is exactly the discussion that I have with my wife every single time that we try to have a baby and we can’t because we both know it’s because of benzene exposure—it’s my fault, I didn’t read the label—that sort of thing. So it was a very interesting set of discussions and the way that we did it was we would watch the movie, and we didn’t have people introduce each other beforehand, and they would introduce each other as they had the discussion. They would have to say, “I’m a lawyer and I do this, and this is what I think of this.” Or, “I work on worker health and safety, you know, at the Gillette Plant in Minnesota, and from my perspective this is what I think.” And they would learn from each other. We gave them a sheet with all the scenes written on it, and they would write which ones didn’t make any sense, which is what you always do in a rough-cut screening. My editor would venture to say that the only thing we got out of this—I think she’s wrong—is that we say “white.” I say in the finished film: “My mother is your typical DES mother: white, middle-class, and confident that she had given me the best prenatal care money could buy.” Up to that point, I didn’t say white, and I was always asked, where are the people of color—why aren’t they in the story? And for the most part, this was very a white, middle-class drug. And for a while, I really took that criticism to heart and I started to write narration that said stuff like—and it was true—by the time I went to my fourth DES cancer daughter meeting I couldn’t believe that there were no people of color, and I started to ask, are we doing the right outreach? I created a character that was asking all the right questions and it actually fell flat, and it felt like I was really forcing a politically correct question—which was a politically correct question—but it just didn’t quite work. And it became a question, well if you don’t necessarily see yourself visually in this movie, can you still see yourself? And the answer that came back again and again, is, Yes we can. So we put the word in—”white,” which helped contextualize it—so at least everyone knew that I knew that we were white.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I think that you touched upon this issue, that when you take an environmental film, and this film in particular, you left the definition of what an environment does to a relationship up to what viewers want to get out of it. What does environment mean in your relationships? You know, you were presenting to us what it was for you, and I think in a way it very much unites both you and us, because we see ourselves in that, we see our relationships in that, no matter if you’re black, white, no matter what other ethnicity you are, it’s something that very much brings people together because everyone has these relationships, everyone has this environment that affects these relationships.
JUDITH HELFAND:
Definitely. And I think the other piece that was so important, was that we couched it all in family, which often doesn’t happen.
AUDIENCE MEMBER:
In a very familiar setting, which helps people connect.
JUDITH HELFAND:
Well we work really hard to do that. Let me tell you also what was really great about having these focus groups. I could never begin to imagine that this movie could support what I think is one of the most cutting-edge environmental health movements of our time, and would actually launch Blue Vinyl. I do want you to know that we documented all of those sessions, and those rough-cut sessions helped us identify what our strategy would look like when the film was launched. It had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, then it went on to be on POV and then it went on to have a really, really strategic very, very focused organizing life for about a year or two before I got too involved with Blue Vinyl and stopped working with A Healthy Baby Girl in the intense way I was doing.
First we didn’t get funding for a very long time—that was a gift, believe it or not, because if I had gotten full funding I probably would have gotten a movie that was about the first two years. But because I got a rejection every year that I could count on, from ITVS or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, I just extended the life of my documentation. So I wound up filming for five years, which was really important and a really good thing, because it enabled my mother’s character and my character and everything we were doing to really develop. It also meant that I really had to think about where this funding was going to come from and what it would mean. So this movie, aside from getting money ultimately from the Independent Television Service or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, got a little bit of money from the National Foundation for Jewish Culture. I showed you the most Jewish part of the movie, but believe me, it’s been a very long and hard battle to get this movie to be considered in the ranks of Jewish documentary filmmaking, and it is now. It has a really lovely life in the Jewish community, but I really had to fight for that. So I was thrilled to get this funding, because it meant that I had the equivalent of an “OU” which is like the kosher seal of approval at the bottom of a can of [gefilte] fish. But I also got money from the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, and I guarantee you it’s the only documentary film that OCAW and the National Foundation for Jewish Culture both funded. Between the two of them I got $15,000. It’s not a lot of money; I mean, the movie cost probably $325,000 ultimately to make and lots more for the outreach and organizing, but that $15,000 meant that I could then make sure that the film went to Jewish audiences, and at the same time they can say wow, we funded a film—I mean they didn’t actually fund it, but they would think—wow we funded a film that the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers funded, what does that mean? And then the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers would be like, we funded a film about DES and this woman’s reproductive problem, and the Jews funded it, too. What does that mean? And that’s great, because when you can start to mix everybody up, you’re building a very diverse audience that can start to have links with each other because they have buy-in, because they literally bought into it, and then they have buy-in to the legacy of the movie and what you do with the movie.
The working philosophy for our organizing strategy for the movie once it went out into the world was based on a quote by Mark Twain, which was: “History doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes.” So whenever we would have a public screening, we would look for the rhymes, meaning like what is A Healthy Baby Girl’s story in this community? It was never our intention to create more work for overburdened local activists, but we wanted to give them a hook so that they could say, This movie is about us. And this movie is linked to our community in some very strategic way. We were most excited about doing that around the time of the broadcast, so that if this went out—we tried very hard to find these local hooks so that we could tell local press about this so that they wouldn’t just write about it as this young wacky Jewish girl running after her mother for five years with a video camera because she had cancer, but they would be able to make a very serious link between my cancer and their community.
For instance, when we went to Utah, for A Healthy Baby Girl’s launch, a big hook that we made was between the DES story and the impact of incinerating chemical weapons, which is what we should do with them instead of using them, but Utah has the largest stockpile of chemical weapons, and they incinerate them in the Tooele Chemical Weapons Incinerator, which is about 60 miles from Park City. So here we were in Park City having this fabulous launch of the movie, but whenever we possibly could we would make a link between my damages from DES exposure and the damages that can occur to the community who will be exposed with dioxins that happen when you incinerate medical waste. And this was like, no one could have imagined that we would make a local link—that we would bring local people into every single one of our screenings or almost every one to have a talk during the Q & A about Utah—and no one would have anticipated that the Mormon newspaper would run this really big two-page color article because of that or that we’d get on the local news a couple of times in a row. But it really worked effectively. We didn’t win a traditional award at Sundance that year, but we did win this really great two-page article which I could Xerox, which you can’t do with Lucite, and I can Xerox and can give it to all these activists and say, “Look what we did in Park City. You can do this at the time of your broadcast when we’re on POV”—which is exactly what happened. So I wound up going on this toxic tour of the United States with A Healthy Baby Girl to make a link between the DES story and local issues.
[BREAK—FILM CLIP - A Healthy Baby Girl]
What she’s putting up there is my vinyl IV bag. So right after my surgery—which I’m sure they used a ton of vinyl IV bags to take care of me because the surgery is seven hours long—so no doubt there was a lot of vinyl was used to save my life. And then I was in the hospital for like seven days, so there were tons of IV bags—one after another—that would be used to pump saline into me or whatever, and then it would get thrown into a red bag, and then it would get thrown into an incinerator, and then it would get burnt up. And then it would get turned into dioxin, which is a horrible human carcinogen that is produced when you produce PBC or vinyl or when you incinerate it. At the end of A Healthy Baby Girl my parents ruined the continuity—yet again the continuity was ruined, but this time it was the movie, not my ability to have a child—my parents decided to take the redwood off my house which was rotten and put up blue vinyl. So when I showed this movie, actually here in Washington, to a group of women health activists, one of them, Charlotte Brody, said to me—and I knew her from the Uprising of ‘34 because she was a labor activist—she said, “You are so brilliant, how did you know? And I said, “How did I know what?” “You put an IV bag up at the top and then you put the vinyl siding at the end—you covered like both bases. You’re dealing with health care and vinyl in health care, how did you know?” I said, “I didn’t know, but I’m going to definitely leave it.” So that complete and utter serendipity, it was like it was just I had a little camera for a while in the hospital so I shot her doing that and of course my parents because my parents were ruining continuity, I shot then taking the redwood off and putting the blue vinyl on. I understood that it worked narratively—but I had no idea that it would be this pivotal organizing moment, that I would be able to say with all my senses and with a real like, yes it’s true, that the DES story, which is a precautionary tale in a sense about dioxins, is framed in A Healthy Baby Girl by vinyl and the dioxin story. So it enabled me to then utilize this movie to support a movement that I absolutely care about and this movement at the time was called healthcare without harm. So after the film was on television and after it had its festival run, the big question for me was: Now that I really understand how it works from an organizing perspective, what’s the one organizing initiative I’m going to absolutely throw this movie into? And so I wound up throwing it into healthcare without harm.
So backtrack one second. So I said, “That’s great, Charlotte, I’m so glad. I’ll definitely keep that vinyl IV bag in the front and I’ll keep the vinyl at the end at the back.” If you see all of A Healthy Baby Girl you’d see that the other reasons to keep the vinyl siding at the end, was because the guy who put the vinyl siding up on the house—his girlfriend was DES-exposed.
Now, I didn’t tell him why we were shooting for the first four days that we were shooting him taking the redwood off and putting the blue vinyl up. It was completely anithetical to everything I thought I was at that time in my life, because I was still making the Uprising of ‘34—I was working with workers all the time. I was able to work with them, both in the making of that movie and the use of that movie, in a way that was totally respectful of them, and respectful of me and it worked. And I had actually even had an amazing experience making the Uprising of ‘34 that had pushed me to say that when I make A Healthy Baby Girl I’m going to turn it into a labor documentary, which was early on, the very, very first summer I was working with George.
George was changing a tape with his son who shot most of the movie. This textile worker who had brown lung and was using an oxygen tank leaned over to me and said, “You know, I think it’s great what you’re doing, but it really isn’t work, is it?”—as in making documentaries. And I said, “Well no, it’s work.” He said, “Well OK, it’s work. How old are you?” I said, “Well I’m 25.” He said, “You’re 25, you’re not getting any younger, I’m sure you have a boyfriend at home, I’m just like wondering when you’re going stop all this to go home and have a baby.” And I was three months post-op, so it was like oh my god, I can’t believe what he just said to me, so I had to think what am I going to do? I hadn’t made A Healthy Baby Girl yet. I wasn’t a professional speaker about DES. I didn’t have the language for this really. I could have said, “That’s great, I’ll get around to it after I finish Uprising of ‘34.” Instead I decided to try being honest and see what it would feel like, because I knew I would be a wreck the rest of the day if I didn’t.
So I said, “I’m sure I’ll have children and I’m sure they’ll be beautiful, but they’re not going to look like me.” He was like, You have great eyes, you’ll have beautiful kids; you should have a baby. And he said, “Well what do you mean they won’t look like you?” And I said, “I’m going to have to adopt.” And he said, “Why would you have to adopt?” And I said, “Well I can’t have children, I have cancer and I just had a hysterectomy a couple of months ago, so I’m not going to be able to have children.” And he said, “How could a girl like you get cancer?” So I told him the DES story, and in between puffs on his oxygen tank, he leans over and says: “The pharmaceutical company knew it was carcinogenic and they kept it on the market anyway?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he looked at me and said, “You know like, why would a company do that?” It was like mind-boggling to me. I was like, how could a company do that? You know why a company would do that—look at you. And he lived as close—you know when you saw that mill with the lights that came on at night and looked beautiful—he lived in a house that was within spitting distance of a mill like that, and he was on an oxygen tank and he had no pension, and he was asking me how a company could do that. And I realized when he said it, what he really was asking me, was not how a company could do that because he knew that. But the real question—and I’m sure you can end this sentence for me—was how could a company do that to you, because people like you don’t get hurt by companies, you don’t get run over by companies—which is not true about people like me—but people like you, right, white, who get to go to college, you run companies, you don’t get run over by companies. And that was an amazing moment. And George saw that we had a very honest exchange. And I said to him, “Well, companies do that, and you know how they do that, and that’s what happened.” And of course he was like, “How is your mother, is she OK?”
So George saw that we had this very intimate exchange of sorts, and when we got back and it was time for us to roll camera again, he was like, “Judith why don’t you ask the questions?” And up until that point I felt very, very uncomfortable. How could I, this young girl from Merrick, Long Island, really ask with any real authenticity what it was like to lose your power and your pride at the hands of a big mill? That was not my place. It was—I understood it intellectually—but I felt very uncomfortable. And I’m sure he wouldn’t want to talk to me about it, despite the fact that we were there, but because I had that exchange with him, he was very open to talk to me in a way that he didn’t before. And it gave me this incredible feeling like, wow, you know what, they think I’m so different from them, and I would have originally thought I’m so different from them, but the truth is we both have gotten hurt at the hands at corporate behavior. And worker health and safety and consumer health and safety are really, really inextricably linked. It’s just that I don’t have a factory outside my window, so I couldn’t really see the person or the industry that hurt me, and he can. And so there we might find a difference, but the truth is we’re connected. So I really tried to take those ideas with me when I made A Healthy Baby Girl and into those focus groups.
But then I’m like faced with Jerry who is pulling the redwood off the house and putting the blue vinyl up and I act like a spoiled brat and don’t tell him—I don’t ask permission and I don’t tell him why we’re shooting. Now because it’s my dad’s house and because my dad is paying him, I could get away with it—for four days. And then I realized, I never told Jerry why we’re shooting. So I realized, what am I going to tell him? I’m shooting you taking the redwood off and putting the blue vinyl on because my mother took a drug when she was pregnant with me? That sounds crazy. But I did tell him that, and the second I said “drug when she was pregnant with me,” he looked up as he was putting the vinyl up. He said, “What was it DES or something? Oh yeah, my girlfriend, she’s got the same thing.” And it turned out he had an amazing analysis of the DES story. And I never would have thought it because he was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and wielding a hammer. Of course he’s got a great analysis and how could I not have told him? And he gave this amazing ending to the movie. But that’s why we put the blue vinyl there, not because we really understood that it was toxic and it would lead us to the next movie.
It wasn’t until I took the film, A Healthy Baby Girl, on the toxic tour of the United States and went to 10 different communities and was always looking for that rhyme. And I went to lots and lots of really interesting places—I went to North Carolina, I went to San Francisco, but I also went to Lake Charles, Louisiana, which is the vinyl capital of America, at the invitation of Greenpeace and two local grassroots organizations. And it was there that I showed A Healthy Baby Girl and almost gasped when I realized that my father’s answer to rotten wood was the reason that all these people were sick or were concerned about being sick.
Now the thing that we fought for the most ultimately with A Healthy Baby Girl was to put a 1-888 number at the end of the movie. Now you might think that that’s like a simple thing—oh, it’s a story about an illness, and people who are going to be upset about that illness will want to be able to contact that organization, so of course it’s going to get a number on it. But PBS was really adamant and they said that it wasn’t considered a public health crisis at the time. And so we had to get senators to write these intense letters, and they were on the appropriations committee, and essentially strong-armed PBS to say yes. But there were no more 1-800 numbers left, so we had to get a 1-888 number and the problem—it wasn’t such a big problem—but, you know, was that if we let it stay on too long, then we would have to cut out of the credits sooner, and I had too many thank-yous. So I just got, I don’t know, maybe 11 seconds of 1-888 DES-NET41. So the morning after, the movie was on TV, and I felt like I could sleep in, how great, we really did it, this movie’s on TV, I got a frantic call from Lisa Heller who now works for HBO and she said, “Judith, it doesn’t work.” After all that work, and I mean I personally wrote a check to the organization that was going to answer all the phone calls to make sure that they would be there and the phone would work and the whole thing. She said, “It doesn’t work.” I said, “What do you mean, it’s not working?” And she said, “It’s not working.”
And so she said, “You have to try this, you have to figure this out, we’re going to get in a lot of trouble if PBS finds out that this 888 number doesn’t work.” So I called 888-DES-NET41 and it worked. And then I thought maybe they read it wrong, maybe they thought the 8’s were 0’s. So I called up 1-800-DES-NET41 and I got this very exhausted man on the other end of the line, and he said hello. And I said hello, and he said, “Is this about that DES thing?” And I said, “Yes, yes, yes, what’s your name?” He said, “I’m Calvin Smith. This is Smith’s Services.” And he sold fire extinguishers and oxygen tanks from his garage in Central Pennsylvania. And he had gotten like 300 phone calls on June 17 and he had to turn off his phone to go to sleep. And every time the phone rang, he had to pay between a quarter and 50 cents, so he was irate because this was his business line. So I said to him, “Don’t worry I’m going to work this out.” And talked to his phone company, and I told her the whole story. And I talked about it in terms of relationships. And she said, “OK, we’ll pay half of it.” And then I got POV to agree to pay the other half of it. And then I had to call back Calvin and say, “Listen, I know that you think in this time of great technology that we should be able to work this out, but we can’t, so you are the human link—you are the only thing that now stands between very scared DES-exposed people and information that they could get. So if you could quickly say, try 888 and you won’t get charged a lot of money and we’ll pay for your bill for the next month.” And so he actually did that.
And I would call him every night and say, “How’s it going?” Or the morning, and he’d say, “You know last night it was Washington, D.C.” It was so funny—and it was mostly men who were calling and they were very polite. He started to become like this advocate—”Oh you should call 888.” And I said, “Remember, do it fast so you don’t get charged a lot.” But he said, “They were very nice people, Judy.” So I sent him the tape to make sure he’d see it so he’d understand why he was getting all these phone calls.
But you never know, does this really make a difference? So one thing that did happen was that a woman in Florida who had the cancer when she was 14 years old, her husband cut out this little ad that said this movie was going to be on TV and what it was about, and she was really depressed because they didn’t have money to adopt children and she was at a very devastated place in her life. And he said, “Come on we’re going to watch this together.” And she said, “I don’t want to.” And he said, “Come on, I’ll hold your hand.” So he held her hand and they watched the length of the show, and I met her sixth months later at a meeting of the DES Cancer Network, and I asked how she found out about the network. And she said, “I don’t know, I called this guy and this guy gave me the number of the DES cancer hotline, and that’s how I found it.” And I realized it was Calvin Smith. Now hundreds of people called him, but this was one person who desperately needed to be connected because she had this cancer when she was a baby, she was 14, and for 20 years she had never talked to anybody about it, she had never met to another DES-exposed person in her life. She lived in a very rural part of Florida. So she came to this meeting and at the support group meeting, we introduced her to this longtime DES advocate and lawyer who happened to have some money. And she told this powerful story of how she couldn’t afford to have a baby—to adopt a baby, and no one would give her one, and she was borrowing from everyone. And this person just wrote her a check, and she got a healthy baby girl, which is very exciting. So, it’s just one tiny example of the movie actually making impact, which is very different than the impact that Honea Path had.
At the same time that all that was happening, I went to Lake Charles, Louisiana. I went back first in September, for a Labor Day event and I sang in Yiddish. I don’t know, they thought I’d be helpful in some way. And I talked my good friend Dan Gold into coming and shooting that with me, and coming back with me the following summer. I actually put off telling that story for a year, because I was just committed to using A Healthy Baby Girl and I didn’t think it was fair to start another movie until I really learned how A Healthy Baby Girl worked. And that’s all I did for a year, and then some organizers from Lake Charles came to my house and said, “You have no idea what you missed this year, you have to come back.” And so this is the beginning of Blue Vinyl, which is essentially rewriting the outside of the box, and it’s completely built on all the work of A Healthy Baby Girl.
That’s really interesting about this film is it’s “Uprising of ‘34 meets A Healthy Baby Girl.” In Uprising of ‘34, it’s certainly not my personal story, and none of me was in there, but my healing from cancer probably had a lot to do [with], on some level, how I was able to hear what they were saying and help my direction in the editing room. Everything that I learned in the making of that, I then brought into the making of A Healthy Baby Girl and really could have only made A Healthy Baby Girl as a labor documentary because of Uprising of ‘34. But in this movie I actually got to pick everything I learned for both of those films and actually put it in the text of this movie. So it wasn’t just going to be about how the film was perceived or used in the organizing world. But it was also how you could really and truly make the links authentic links between workers, and residents, and unsuspecting consumers.
[BREAK—FILM CLIP—Blue Vinyl]
JUDITH HELFAND:
What you just saw was the opening of the film. And what’s interesting for you, was that I told you the whole background of the story. We tried to actually put all of that background in the beginning of the movie, and it never worked. We couldn’t do it. It was like great for journalists, it was great for workshops, but we had to edit it to be the beginning of a movie and not the end of an organizing initiative and the beginning of another one. Because I have all this access to the organizers, I had a really good idea of what we needed to do to make this film really work. And I also knew that the focus of a lot of the early PBC organizing was on the healthcare industry and a campaign called healthcare without harm. So you can imagine how the DES story worked very well. But because I knew if they were successful, and they were as a campaign, that their next focus four years later would be on building materials and they would need another movie. And I had just the movie.
But in going to lots and lots of organizing meetings and coalition meetings and really understanding who these people were, I had a good sense that what they needed was a movie that was not going to be your traditional environmental health movie at all, but a movie that was going to reach a very big, public, wide, massive audience. It would have to reach the unconverted. It would have to reach the people who are so sick of hearing bad news about toxic pollution and can’t hear one more thing, and who are also buying vinyl siding and vinyl flooring, and all of that. And in order to do that it would have to be very funny, and engaging, and very, very entertaining, and scientific as well. And we would need to get it on a venue that completely played with everybody’s notions about where a movie like this belongs. Does it belong on public television?—maybe. But does a movie like this belong on HBO?—maybe. And if so, what are the implications of that and what constituency could you reach if you did that? And that became our greatest goal. And we met that goal. The movie was on HBO. We really wanted to be in theaters and play next to Bowling for Columbine, but because of money constraints we actually had to be on HBO, which was not a bad thing and it’s a very extraordinary opportunity. We never got to experiment with a true theatrical life, knowing that it was built for that. What we found out was putting it on a sexy cable channel and making it incredibly beautiful, and really injecting it with very high production values and lots and lots of fun and humor, and crossed class alliances and a very authentic narrative that spared no one—meaning that we made as much fun about Greenpeace as we did about myself or my parents, or the Vinyl Institute—meaning that we might really be able to get at something, and the something was average consumers. And by listening to the needs of all of these organizers it was clear that if you could get the attention and the will, the average consumer will, like my parents who play the reticent consumers in this movie, because they were—that we would actually be able to do something with this movie. And that is the playing field that the Vinyl Institute and industry groups like that are always looking for. So they do it with advertising, and they try to get our goodwill. We tried to do it with our movie and link it to really great organizing.
And so this material [refers to report, “Report from the Road,” available at http://www.myhouseisyourhouse.org/report.pdf and Center for Social Media resources) that describes exactly our thinking. It goes into detail about how we used the broadcast and how we used Sundance and how the movie is actually launching initiatives that almost have nothing to do with the movie. For instance, one of them is called “Building in Good Faith,” which is all about getting institutions that are building new buildings [or] renovating buildings to not use vinyl and to rethink what one generation is bequeathing the next.
An interesting little note is that New York state is being sued by the Resilient Floor Covering Institute. They do hard flooring, and they’re suing New York state, because new York state is getting a tax break to builders that build along a very high environmental standard and code, which means that they don’t use vinyl flooring. And these vinyl-flooring manufactures are so incensed by this that they’re doing this big lawsuit because they don’t want this to become a precedent. By the time they do this, we suspect that we will have successfully distributed the rest of my parent’s house.
So this is what we did. You really can’t burn this stuff because you create dioxins. You really can’t landfill it, and what we’re trying to encourage people to do is not to buy it anymore. So we went on this quest. The second half of the movie is this quest to find an alternative to my parent’s vinyl siding that won’t harm anyone in any form in its life-cycle, is affordable and can be recycled. I did not succeed. Well, I did, but it cost a hole lot of money. So we’re not encouraging everyone to take the vinyl off their house and throw it away, but we did want to make the ultimate narrative of the film and the idea of the film, which was to collapse a toxic future into the present and hand it to people so that they could hold the very same burden now that they’re going to be hoisting onto their children later, and make a decision: Do I want to continue to do this? Or do I want to do something to change it?
So we generally give people what we call the authentic official Blue Vinyl tchotchke, which is Yiddish for throw-away or knick-knack, at the beginning of a screening, and then say what it is. They like it, because it has shiny beads, which are made of polypropylene, but they like it because it’s quirky—and we say, “Don’t worry, the narrative is in the tchotchke, you’ll get it by the end of the film.” At the end of the film, you see my parents and I making this in the backyard. So we launched our organizing initiative, which is called “My House is Your House” via these tchotchkes at Sundance, and have gotten amazing press because it’s such a quirky, wacky thing. And the Vinyl Institute hates this I’m sure, because we’re playing with the idea of a chip, which is what you use to sell things, and completely selling a whole other message, and basically a material’s policy for the future, which we hope will be adopted ultimately. Our goal is the launch an effort called “Tchotchkes Across America,” around the time of this lawsuit, and have a small semi-theatrical release in key cities around the country, which we’re allowed to do now, and I just have to raise promotion and advertising money which is going to be tough with the war going on, to try—because there is press that would be interested, but they’re only interested if you’re having a theatrical release. And so the message is, you can try to shut up New York, but a little house from Long Island, New York has been completely redistributed and is out and about on the streets of North America telling people the truth about vinyl. So you can sue in court, but you can’t catch the house. Hopefully you’ll read about it in People magazine or something. Our goal is to have the last tchotchke-making workshop on David Letterman. It will never happen, but it would be fun, right? Can you imagine him saying, “Wait, the flooring institute is suing New York?”
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