2021-2022

Over these two years of pandemic shutdown, we have managed to successfully complete production on our documentary about Georgia O'Keeffe. This included filming in virtually every location in America where O'Keeffe lived and worked - New York City; Lake George, New York; Charlottesville, Virginia; York Beach, Maine; Canyon, Texas; Palo Duro Canyon; the landscape of northern New Mexico; and her two homes in Abiquiu and Ghost Ranch, New Mexico. We also filmed interviews with every major art historian and biographer in the O'Keeffe "world."

Many weeks have been occupied with the research and collection of images - O'Keeffe paintings and work by other artists, hundreds of archival photographs, and many hours of archival film footage. This has resulted in our discovering rare pieces of film with O'Keeffe on camera that have not been seen in fifty years. In pursuing this research, we have enjoyed the full cooperation of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, NM and guidance from the host of O'Keeffe experts.

In 2022, we began editing the film and completed a rough cut of the two hour documentary. The film promises to be an engrossing and comprehensive biography of America's most important woman artist - the so-called "mother of modernism" in the 20th century. We expect to complete post production on the film near the end of 2023 or early 2024.

2020

In early March, just before the Covid-19 crisis closed down travel and normal business activities, we traveled to Texas and New Mexico where we conducted research for a new documentary about Georgia O’Keeffe. 

In the Texas Panhandle, we visited Palo Duro Canyon, where O’Keeffe spent many days hiking and sketching, and the little town of Canyon, where she taught at West Texas A&M University. We even scouted the attic room where she lived and painted during her time there, as a possible filming location, and met with Amy Von Lintel, one of our project consultants.

Next we spent three days at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, doing research in the fine arts collection and archives, with the expert guidance of a wonderful group of staff people under the direction of Executive Director Cody Hartley. On our team, in addition to Ellen and Paul, were our key consultant UVA Professor Beth Turner, lead researcher Johnathan Chance, and former Curator at the O’Keeffe Museum, Carolyn Kastner. 

On our final day in New Mexico, we had the opportunity to tour both of the O’Keeffe homes in New Mexico – in the town of Abiquiu and at Ghost Ranch – guided by Pita Lopez, who worked for Georgia O’Keeffe over the final years of her life. What a thrill to spend several hours in the rooms in which Georgia painted, slept, and cooked!

Now we’re safely back in Charlottesville, continuing the research and writing a treatment for the film, with the hope that we will be able to film later this summer.

Finally, we were thrilled to present the broadcast premiere of Black in Blue on Kentucky Educational Television, making the film available to everyone in the state so that they would understand the importance of what transpired at the University of Kentucky in the 1960s and its importance to the history of race relations in the south.

2019

This year we completed editing and post production on Fishing with Dynamite, the feature documentary produced in collaboration with Jenny Mead and Bidhan (Bobby) Parmar at the Olsson Center for Applied Ethics at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. The film premiered at the Virginia Film Festival, where it won the Commonwealth Award for best Virginia-produced film, and will go into distribution with Aspiration Entertainment in 2020. 

Fishing with Dynamite vividly shows how corporations and Wall Street…and their obsession with short term profits…are blowing up American capitalism. And how we can put it back together. The documentary exposes the destructive effects of “maximizing shareholder value” capitalism and celebrates “stakeholder” companies that meet the needs of employees, customers, suppliers, investors, and the community and environment.

Featured in the film are political pundits Robert Reich and Arthur Brooks and company founders John Mackey (Whole Foods Market), Jim Sinegal (Costco), and Kip Tindell (The Container Store). The film is based on the scholarship of Darden professor Ed Freeman and features remarkable animation sequences created by Jonah Tobias and a brilliant music score by Ben Sollee. 

2018

This year marks the completion and premiere of Black in Blue, our feature documentary about the four University of Kentucky football players who broke the color line in the Southeastern Conference in the 1960s. The world premiere of the film will be at the Virginia Film Festival the first weekend of November. The film features a fantastic gospel music score performed by the a capella quartet Linkin Bridge.

Good Work: Masters of the Building Arts, which we completed in 2016, will be presented to PBS for national broadcast by WGBH in October. We kick off the broadcast with a special screening at the National Building Museum, featuring a post-screening discussion with three artisans who are featured in the film. We hope our DC-based friends can join us! And visit  http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/good-work/home/

Lined up for release in 2019 is Fishing with Dynamite, our feature doc about how corporations and Wall Street...and their obsession with short term profit for shareholders...are blowing up American capitalism. And how we can put it back together.

2017

This year finds us in the final stages of editing not one, but two, feature films that will be released in 2018.

Black in Blue is the story of the four African American football players at the University of Kentucky who broke the color line in the Southeastern Conference fifty years ago.

The film pivots around the weekend of September 29-30, 1967. That Friday night, defensive end Greg Page died as a result of an accident in football practice a few weeks earlier. The next day, his roommate, teammate, friend, and fellow civil rights pioneer, Nate Northington, broke the color line in the SEC in a game against Ole Miss. In the wake of that tragedy, Nate left Kentucky, and left the task of integrating the conference to teammates Houston Hogg and Wilbur Hackett. Executive Producer Paul Karem and I are making the film in cooperation with Nate, Houston, Wilbur, and Mel Page (Greg’s brother).

Fishing with Dynamite examines how corporations and Wall Street, and their obsession with short-term profit for shareholders, are blowing up American capitalism. And how we can put it back together.

The film contrasts the two great theories of capitalism – the “shareholder value” idea, that companies exist only to create profit, vs. the “stakeholder” idea, that companies should serve the interests of shareholders and customers, employees, suppliers, and the community and environment. In addition to looking at the destructive effects of shareholder value thinking, the film features profiles of three companies that demonstrate the wisdom and productivity of the stakeholder approach. The goal of the film is nothing less than the re-assertion of an authentic, ethical American capitalism.

Look for both films on the festival circuit in 2018!