On Dec. 20, 2017, in Memphis, Tennessee, down goes Forrest...then Jefferson Davis.
On a personal level, standing there in the misty night and watching as surreal an event as ever, I could hardly believe "the right thing" was being done. That activists and a community behind #TakeEmDown were going to prevail in spite of a racist President, a Republican legislature and a foot-dragging and paranoid mayor.
It was stunning.
Knowing there's many a slip between cup and lip, I was not convinced until we saw Forrest's statue teeter at the end of a rope. While I had followed the movement, written often about it in Daily Kos and had recorded much video footage, I never set out to make a film -- until that moment of a final victory. Then, I had to.
Today through Jan. 1, free, online viewing of #TakeEmDown, our 60-minute film which documents the national movement and drills down in Memphis, Tennessee. Password: Memphis
As for the park where Forrest stood for more than 112 years, its renaming in 2013 to Health Sciences Park had less support and more uproar than the statue removal four years later as Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris explains in the film. A possible use of the park today might be a summer film series or theater-in-the-park or concert series, subject to the subsiding of the pandemic. #TakeEmDown the doc would be an appropriate film to kick off such community events.
Not counting filming during 2017, the film took more than a year to complete in post-production, with interviews added after a focus group viewing sponsored by Dr. Tony de Velasco of the University of Memphis. We had no grants or no funding for this project; everything was funded out-of-pocket by the filmmakers, who further had no outside income during this time.
We have offered it as an instructional and educational piece, a conversation maker, to every local university and college; to Shelby County Schools; to the National Museum of Civil Rights; PBS and affiliated independent film outlets; various film festivals, and to other institutions, organizations and nonprofits. There have been no takers and no feedback. Feedback matters, so, if someone said, We saw the film and it sucked, that would sit better with me than indifference or being "too busy to." Everyone is busy; we get that, and we are all wrapped up in our own projects.
To publish the film officially just online and charge a small fee or no fee would take $12,000-$16,000 -- which cost would include legal fees and insurance. But, that seems to me like "self-publishing," like a vanity press book, and unless someone else or some other entity see the worth of doing this, the official release is not going to happen. That doesn't stop me from slipping it out on the sly from time to time. Like now, on the 3rd anniversary of #TookEmDown.
Perhaps in the future this and other locally made docs will be seen as more important recordings of a history that we are not going to get in this form and in mainstream media or anywhere else.
