Kamala Lopez Produces Movie About America’s First Congresswoman

A Single Woman is about the first U.S. Congresswoman and lifelong pacifist, Jeannette Rankin. She ran for Congress in Montana in 1916 and won, against all odds.  Women in Montana were given the right to vote in 1914, six years before the U.S. Congress ratified the 19^th amendment. Rankin was also a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union in 1920. As a U.S. representative, she voted against the first and second World Wars, and later stood up against the Vietnam War. The film, based on a popular play, features contributions from Joni Mitchell, Martin Sheen, Patricia Arquette, Karen Black, Peter Coyote, Mimi Kennedy, Margot Kidder, Elizabeth Peña and Cindy Sheehan.

Jeannette Rankin was re-elected to U.S. Congress 22 years after her first election and spent her life as a pacifist and working for peace even into her 90’s. At age 92, Jeannette returned to Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War.  She died in 1973.

“So much of her (Jeannette Rankin) life was remarkable, but one thing is very clear, however, that it is never too late in life to do important work that has a meaningful impact on society,” said Producer, Kamala Lopez.  Jeannette was 88 years old when she led a group of five thousand women and children to Washington, D.C. to protest the Vietnam War.  “She never stopped working and never threw in the towel.”

“A Single Woman” Trailer – Jeannette Rankin Movie from Heroica Films on Vimeo.

About the Director/Producer/Editor

Kamala Lopez was inspired to tell the story of Jeannette Rankin after seeing the play A Single Woman off Broadway in New York.  Kamala was “utterly astounded” that she had not heard about Congresswoman Rankin and believed it was an important subject for women.  “I feel honored to have been a part of bringing the incredible life story of this unsung American heroine into public view,” said Lopez.  “Jeannette Rankin is an inspiration to me and hopefully will become, through our film A Single Woman, to many more women and girls.”

 Kamala Lopez is an actress, screenwriter, director and producer. Born in New York City to an Indian mother and a Venezuelan father, Lopez lived with her parents in Caracas until the age 14 when the family returned to the United States.  While still in high school in Brooklyn, she was cast on Sesame Street as Mercedes, Maria’s cousin, a role she portrayed for two seasons before being accepted to Yale University.  

Lopez has worked as an actor in over thirty feature films including Born in East L.A., Deep Cover, The Burning Season (winner of 2 Emmys, 3 Golden Globes and the Humanitas Prize), Clear and Present Danger, Lightning Jack, and I Heart Huckabees.  She has starred in over sixty television shows including Medium, 24, Alias, NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, 21 Jump Street (winner of the Imagen Award). She also recently hosted the PBS series Wired Science.

Order The Movie

A Single Woman is only available on DVD for $29.95.  To purchase, click here:

http://www.asinglewomanmovie.com/

Read About the Film Production

by Kamala Lopez, Director/Producer/Editor

In the summer of 2005 I saw the play “A Single Woman” at The Culture Project, a small theater Off-Broadway in New York City.  I was both amazed and inspired by this woman I learned about that night and shocked and appalled that I had never heard of her before.
 
Jeanmarie Simpson, the writer and star of the original one-woman show, told me how throughout their two year run, in hundreds of grassroots venues and theaters, audiences had been equally stunned by how a woman of such historical significance could have slipped through the cracks into obscurity.  A repeated request from her audience that Ms. Simpson could not accommodate was:  “Do you have a video of this?  How can I share this story with my [sister, husband, mother, child, friends…]? “  
  
I knew that a film about Jeannette Rankin would be an important project, and one that could potentially reach millions of people, but I had seen filmed versions of plays before and they never had the same impact as the live performance.  Theater and film are such different worlds; the play would have to be adapted to serve this new medium if it were to reach a film audience and serve its purpose.

The major obstacle, of course, was financial.  Even a low budget independent film can cost millions of dollars and we had none of those financial resources available to make our film.  I felt, however, that if I concentrated on finding an innovative, creative way to take the two-actor stage piece and open it up as much as possible without trying to make the play into a full blown film epic, we would still be able to accomplish our goal – bringing the life and work of Jeannette Rankin to a broader audience.

Heroica Films, my production company, took on the production of “A Single Woman” and I luckily had a great many friends, resources and contacts that I could beg, borrow and barter with. One of my early philosophic allies and supporters was Richard “Sven” Shelgren, who was a consciencous objector during the Vietnam war, and was attracted to the message of “A Single Woman.” Sven and his production company, RCR Inc., jumped in with production insurance while the Nevada Shakespeare Company and Cameron Crain, who had developed the play with Jeanmarie Simpson, their then artistic director, got the ball rolling with a small grant.

First off, I decided to take the Everyman character (who is the only other onstage character in the play besides Jeannette Rankin and who portrays fifty seven different people) and divide the role into as many actors and actresses as I could afford.  Even under the Screen Actors Guild Ultra Low Budget Agreement I obviously couldn’t afford fifty seven of them, so many of my actors play several roles. 

I also felt that the parallel story within the film of the American Indians’ confrontation with the settlers was critical and needed to be set apart from the rest of the movie.  Besides being the only part of the story that moved forward chronologically in time, it functioned as both a fable and ultimately as a through-line that ties the whole piece together.  I knew that I could not begin to afford to actually shoot the story, with horses and Indians and wagon trains!  I began to envision the sequence more abstractly and came upon the notion that the segments should rendered by an artist.  I searched for a style that would best serve the film, looking at artists’ work that included cartoons, watercolors, even complete abstractions until I was introduced to award-winning Nevada artist Paul Mellender by Jeanmarie, who knew him from Reno.  His meticulous and almost breathtakingly real drawings felt exactly right.  He began the long task of drawing the extensive exquisite plates that illustrate the tale.

 

Then I decided that while the play takes place in one location, the kitchen of Jeannette Rankin’s home, I would need to vary the visual experience for the audience or they would become bored.  So while I didn’t have the resources to actually go to Montana, or Georgia or India or any of the many places where our story takes place, I did have to come up with a low-budget solution. 

We were able to secure a full blown 7,200 square foot soundstage, thanks to Mikel Elliott, owner of Quixote Studios, who donated the space to the production – with one caviat:  we only had four free days to shoot the whole film – and that was the Thanksgiving weekend of 2006.  This was great news, that studio rented for tens of thousands of dollars a week (!) and one major bugetary hurdle for production was surmounted; now I just had to figure out how to utilize that one location and inexpensively turn that into an illusion of many different places. 

The production designer  and I designed the kitchen set as the primary location, the only one we could actually afford to “build” on the stage. I decided that scenes where Jeannette was either introspective or felt more “in control” of the situation would take place there.  It also was where the ongoing bread-making, an important metaphor that I retained from the play, needed to occur. We decided that the kitchen décor would change throughout the film to reflect the time period so we spent a good deal of time and expense recreating kitchens from the 1970’s all the way back to 1880.

We built two large windows into the kitchen set and had them “green screened” [ie., outside the window was painted with a special green paint that the computer would later recognize and could remove cleanly]. Later we would replace the green in the windows with whatever we needed, be they images or people, stock footage, actors or animation.  This would be very helpful in terms of giving us some flexibility as well as establishing an unusual visual style that would key the audience into the fact that this film was going to be a little different that what they may be used to.

Next to the kitchen set was a large completely green screen area which would have to substitute for any actual locations in post production. I felt it was important to occasionally get out of the kitchen and into other spaces visually, even if we couldn’t actually afford to actually be there in reality.  Hence, for example, the scene with Judd Nelson that appears to be outside is completely filled in with environmental photographs that give the illusion of three dimensionality in post-production. Again, there was a certain “surreal” quality to this decision that started to cement the particular visual language of this film.

Finally, we created a completely black area with strong theatrical lighting as another distinct visual “place” where we could set scenes, generally those where Jeannette Rankin is in confrontation with a hostile environment.  Again, the clearly “unrealistic” visual language of these scenes re-emphasizes the theatrical roots of the production as well as distinct film language being created.  And so, within these three simple arenas, all in one actual place, we designed the visual palate of entire film.

Shooting a ninety-minute feature film in four days is, most would say, an impossibility, most films occur over the course of months — but necessity is the mother of invention and if I couldn’t pull it off in that time period, there would be no film – we just could not afford it. There were several factors that were critical to making a complete shoot even plausible, and I could at least make sure that these were in place in advance:  shooting digitally instead of on 35mm (we used the SONY HD F900 camera), pre-rigging, pre-lighting, rehearsing and extensive storyboarding. 

The logistics of executing this plan were daunting, to say the least.  There were more than 80 scenes; each shot had to be filmed exactly as planned and rehearsed — there would only be time for one take, or if absolutely necessary, two. The main character was literally in every scene and had to age 70 years over the course of the film, therefore time consuming prosthetic make-up effects were a critical factor in dictating the schedule; every moment that the lead actress was in make-up, production had to be shooting another actor, either in front of the green screen (for later plates) or in close-up.  Each of the three areas were pre-lit and dressed prior to the first day of shooting and adjusted at the end of each day in anticipation of the first set-up of the following day. Essentially, the four-day shoot was a huge moving puzzle in which every piece had to be properly inserted at an exact moment or the whole picture would never be complete. 

We pulled it off.  The film was completed on time. The small crew, all of whom worked for well below their rates and over the entire holiday weekend (Thanksgiving dinner was shared by cast and crew on set) gave it their all and worked seamlessly together to make the impossible come true.  Visitors familiar with typical Hollywood sets remarked that they had never been on a shoot with a more involved and positive group of people.

Then came time for Post Production, and the speed with which the film was shot was in inverse proportion to the length of time it would take to complete.
By now, the small grant was long gone and the scrambling for funds began in earnest. I began the long editing process, first on an editing system borrowed from Sven and later, thanks to Virginia Bass, I was able to borrow funds to secure my own editing system.  Editing took place in my breakfast nook and took over my life for more than two years. 

One portion of the film that I struggled with was the reading of the letter by the Chinese child detailing what had happened to her family during the Rape of Nanjing.  Initially I had wanted a black/white/red animation sequence to accompany the narration.  I also cut together an extremely graphic war montage that would play immediately after the narration during earlier incarnations of the film.  Both of these ideas were ultimately substituted for the very simple version that is in the final film – just the Chinese actress recounting the story in Chinese with English translation on screen over black. I believe it is most powerful this way – nothing added, just exactly what happened.

As post-production continued, it became obvious why there are so many names listed in the credits at the end of a movie – the entire process of completing a film is remarkable in its sheer depth and scope. Securing rights to photographs and stock footage was shockingly expensive and the legal aspects were painstaking.  The green screen compositing was complex, time consuming and very hard to pull off with the resources we could afford.  The sound aspect had so many separate, complex and costly elements; recording narrations, creating sound effects, designing and composing original music, getting licenses from existing music, mixing the tracks together, etc., etc. 

All in all, it was a process that necessitated infinitely more funds and personnel than I had at my disposal.  And yet, throughout this seemingly endless process, many people stepped up and lent funds, moral support and their talents, including the entire post-production team who worked for little or no money for the many months it took to animate, composite, design, build the website and do all the computer effects that usually cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and utilize teams of hundreds of people. And the list of well-known actors who wanted to participate and support the project kept growing:  Patricia Arquette, Karen Black, Peter Coyote, Frances Fisher, Mimi Kennedy, Margot Kidder, Judd Nelson, Elizabeth Pena, Martin Sheen, Cindy Sheehan, Chandra Wilson… And in one of the many strokes of good fortune that “A Single Woman” has benefited from along the journey, Joni Mitchell agreed to donate the songs “Circle Game” and “Woodstock” to the film. 

Making a film, especially a completely independent one, is a full immersion experience; not for the faint of heart or for those lacking in persistence or even perhaps a certain deranged stubbornness.  There have been times when I have wanted to throw the whole thing over a bridge and move onto a job that might actually involve a paycheck.  But somehow, even in the darkest of times on this long journey, the underlying truth, the seed that was planted when I first learned about Jeannette Rankin, kept me going and fighting to get the film out there.  Jeannette Rankin deserves to be known.  To be celebrated.  To be taught.  Especially now – her voice and her example are needed. 
 
When the film finally premiered, on October 30^th, 2008, at the United States Capitol for members of Congress, and its subsequent invitations to screen at the Smithsonian Institution, the United Nations and the National Arts Club started to roll in, I began to feel a load being lifted off my back.  Perhaps all of the hardship and sacrifice that has gone into the creation of this film was worthwhile.  We will be able to achieve our main goal, which has never changed – give the public a tool with which to rediscover America’s Real First Lady – Jeannette Rankin.

I hope that, in the coming years, the film will have a continuing impact through dissemination in our schools and libraries, our colleges and communities, among families and friends, to spark debate and discussion about the principles that Jeannette Rankin stood for and how we can participate in keeping that legacy alive and continue her work into the future.

I thank you for being a crucial part of this journey that is really only just beginning.  While “A Single Woman” is complete, its main purpose will only be fulfilled if it serves as a spark to ignite us in a continued struggle to achieve peace, equality, justice and non-violence throughout our world.