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Emiko Omori and Wendy Slick's "Passion & Power"

In the backroom of a Bernal Heights café where mothers and toddlers and holding court, filmmaker Wendy Slick cannot contain her own happiness at the news that a Texas law banning the sales of sex toys has been overturned, a decision made Feb. 13, 2008 — just in time for Valentine’s Day. The film she and the Bay Area’s Emiko Omori made together — a history of the vibrator — is itself a Valentine for self-loving women. “Passion & Power, the Technology of Orgasm,” opening this week at the Roxie New College Film Center and the Smith Rafael, gives Rachel Maines’ entertaining academic book on the subject a new life onscreen. Slick and Omori spoke with SF360.org about the passions behind their project, as well as using jellyfish as a metaphor and the unexpected audiences taking a shine to the film.

topics: bay area, directors, documentary, producers, q&a

Andrea Sperling, powering up

Producer Andrea Sperling’s kept pretty busy over the past few years; starting by making a very productive friendship with professor/director Gregg Araki straight out of college, she has built a strong reputation with her many (17, to be exact) fresh, original films. While she strives to create outside the Hollywood box in all her work, Sperling had become a shining star of the queer-cinema landscape not only through films like “D.E.B.S.,” but also for her constant community support through her involvement in POWER UP!, an organization designed to support and fund lesbian filmmakers, where she sits on the board of directors. The producer has also received her fair share of honors, named one of Hollywood’s most powerful women by POWER UP! and was commended with a career retrospective at the Vienna Film Festival. This weekend she adds to her illustrious list with 2007’s Frameline Award, appearing at the Castro Theatre (Sun/24) to close the festival with the film she most recently produced (with director Jamie Babbit), “Itty Bitty Titty Committee.” We spoke with a very pleasant Sperling on her drive to pre-school with her daughter, who made a few appearances on the line to give her mother some additional “warm and fuzzy” cred.

SF360: How did you get into film production?

Andrea Sperling: I studied film at UC Santa Barbara and I studied film theory, history, and criticism, which isn’t production, but during my summers I would intern at production companies or on movies. So when I graduated college, Gregg Araki was my professor, and he asked me if I would come work on ‘The Living End,’ and I said ‘Yes.’ That was sort of my second real production, I had made one short in college and then I had produced a short right before ‘The Living End’ and then I did ‘The Living End,’ and from there Gregg asked me to produce his next movie, and then my career just sort of took off from there.

SF360: You’re often identified as a ‘queer’ filmmaker, but you’ve also produced a number of films, like ‘Harsh Times’ and ‘Pumpkin’ and ‘Prozac Nation,’ that don’t fall into that category. Do you find yourself or others identifying you more with one side than the other?

Sperling: Definitely not. I feel like I definitely kind of go from one world to the other really smoothly. I’ve been lucky that way. Unfortunately I probably wouldn’t be able to make a living just of off — erh erh — queer movies, so although it would be great to be able to do that, I also have to branch out. And also, when I first started making movies I really wanted to just make movies that pushed the envelope in any direction, whether it be gay or politically progressive or really stylistic. Anything that was kind of alternative and not Hollywood was what I was interested in doing.

SF360: You and your partner have collaborated on a number of films. Is it ever difficult to separate the professional from the private? Do you guys still get along during that period?

Sperling: It’s definitely challenging to work together, for sure, just because she becomes a director and then I’m a producer, so there’s always issues in that relationship. But then combined with the fact that we’ve been together for 12 years and we have a child, it all kind of comes into play and we definitely would fight more than the average producer-director relationship. But it’s also rewarding because it’s great that we can stay together, like we see each other a lot more than maybe other couples do because we can work together, so we also get to spend a lot more time together.

Closer: Sperling’s “Itty Bitty Titty Committee” closes the SF International LGBT Film Festival, at which Sperling — 17 films strong — receives the Frameline Award. (Photo courtesy Frameline)

SF360: And you probably just fight more than the average director and producer because you’re living together, so you’re there with each other all the time.

Sperling: The biggest problem we actually have, which is strange, is that we end up not

topics: castro theatre, producers, q&a, queer cinema, women filmmakers

Brazil!

Brazilian director/producer Lina Chamie (second from right) traveled to Cannes for “A Via Lactea” (“Through the Milky Way”), which is screening in Critics Week. Joining Chamie for a nice lunch at Plage Razo (basically a beachside restaurant—a great day to spend the day) along the Croisette is assistant director Carolina Goncalves (right), co-producer Andre Klotzel (left) actress Andrea Estrella (“Both”), lead actor for “A Via Lactea” Marco Ricca, and “Both” director Bass Beche. Breche’s short is also screening in Critics Week. (Photo and text by Brian Brooks/indieWIRE. Reprinted with permission, copyright 2007.)

topics: cannes film festival, directors, producers

Fighting for Freedom: Exploring Vachon's "Killer Life "

With some 38 films under her belt in a film business that continues to change, leading independent film producer and Killer Films partner Christine Vachon is pondering the future. In "A Killer Life," her essential new memoir (written with Austin Bunn), Vachon bolsters the role of the producer as the driving force of independent film, particularly in a star-driven system that is increasingly tough on the sorts of movies she continues to make. "At this point, I want to reclaim the business for myself," Vachon writes (in an excerpt published by indieWIRE), "I want to say producers are the ones who find the material, make the challenges for actors, create career pinnacles and opportunities to do meaningful work." But she wonders, "Why are we always at the mercy of this star system? Why can’t the stars be at ours?"

[indieWIRE Video: a Q & A with Christine Vachon (at the Film Society of Lincoln Center – In a new indieWIRE video clip (available via YouTube), Vachon talks about making movies within a changing business and explains how she maintain enthusiam for moviemaking amidst shifts among audiences and in production, including the new Todd Haynes film about Bob Dylan.]

[Editor’s note: This story was originally published by indieWIRE Sept. 26, 2006.]

Since the publication of John Pierson’s "Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes" in 1995, few film books have risen to immediate must-read status among industry insiders and aspiring filmmakers alike. Peter Biskind’s "Down and Dirty Pictures" two years ago stirred interest due to its sometimes salacious stories from within the independent and specialty film business, but some charged that it lacked a passion for the films themselves. Enter Vachon and her new hardcover title which has just hit bookstores. While her 1998 effort "Shooting To Kill" offered practical insights and a few war stories, Vachon’s new book (featuring a forward by Pierson) ties it all together with a mix of personal background, opinionated insights, detailed behind-the-scenes tales, diary entries, practical advice, first-person contributions from notable colleagues (like Bob Berney, David Linde, Todd Haynes, her business partner Pam Koffler, among others), and of course plenty of passion. The subtitle for this compelling new work: "How an Independent Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond."

"In the end there’s only one thing that really seems to matter to [Christine Vachon] and that’s a passion for movies that are worthwhile," writes John Pierson, on the opening page, "Movies that stick to your ribs or, in one famous case at the outset of her career, spit in your face. If you’ve got that passion, she’s your fellow traveler. But on most days it’s likely that her flame will burn the brightest of all."

Now a proud member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Vachon has come along way since "Shooting to Kill" (including an Oscar win for Hilary Swank for her role in 1999’s "Boys Don’t Cry"). Now one of the leading independent producers in the U.S., she continues to work on passion projects, but on a much higher scale. Now more than ever, as budgets grow and star attachments drive certain projects to financing, Killer Films serves a crucial role.

"Killer is the catalyst," Vachon explains in the book, for filmmakers like Haynes, Todd Solondz, Kim Peirce, Mark Romanek, among others she cites, because her company has the reputation of protecting a filmmaker’s vision. In fact Vachon holds up Romanek as the example when offering a new definition of the term "indepedent." She explains, "If a real creativity is allowed to get what it wants, that is independent film: the freedom of the vision behind it."

But preserving that freedom can lead to countless battles, at every stage of a film’s life, as Vachon explains in example after example from her own career. Among the most entertaining and particularly insightful episodes detailed in the book include edge-of-your-seat drama when the film’s bond company wrestles control of "Far From Heaven" from Vachon (after a down-to-the-wire drama to raise financing in the first place), and tales of "hell" while making Killer’s first studio-backed movie with an unnamed "problem director" (probably "Crime and Punishment in Suburbia" director Rob Schmidt). Also there are wild stories from the set of "Kids," the background on Kirsten Dunst and "The Shaggs," the ups-and-downs of Todd Haynes’ Bob Dylan project amidst changes at a studio, Colin Farrell’s penis in "A Home At The End of The World" and then, the other Truman Capote movie.

Covered in detail, the "Infamous," "Far From Heaven," and "A Home At the End of the World" stories are particularly informative as case studies of what can go right and wrong within today’s studio-supported specialty film business where projects are more often than not referred to by insiders as product in a pipeline, rather than films.

So what exactly is a Killer Film today? Vachon was asked Monday night during a Q & A at Lincoln Center. "Something I want to see," she explained, but quickly adding, "and something I can sell."
"These days, it’s getting harder to remember that film is an art form," Vachon explains in "A Killer Life." "Movies get treated like a commodity business, some abstract uptick or spiral down on the Hollywood stock exchange… For me, film isn’t about the margins, boffo weekend numbers, or the back end. (Well, back end would be nice…) Film is about the process — a long, complicated, passionate process toward something larger than the sum of its parts."

(Reprinted with permission, copyright Eugene Hernandez, indieWIRE 2006.)

topics: independent film, producers, q&a