Originally published in Current, June 7, 1999
By Karen Everhart Bedford
Meet Bill Sims and Karen Wilson: an interracial couple that achieved their own American dream, one that's easy to appreciate if you're willing to explore the unconventional.
Their story, told in Jennifer Fox's 10-hour series An American Love Story, to be distributed by PBS Sept. 12-16 [1999], shows the power of love to transcend divisive social pressures and bring people together. Bill and Karen, a black man and a white woman, happily married, nurturing parents to two articulate, thoughtful daughters, have created their own way of living in a family. An American Love Story shows us how this can work in our society, pervaded as it is with racial prejudice.
"What we have embodied in this family is the history of miscegenation in America," says Fox, who spent 18 months living with the Wilson-Sims family on and off while filming An American Love Story. Bill and Karen "crossed those taboo lines in 1967 when those lines were very strong and hard and fast, and they suffered enormously for it."
An American Love Story shows them some 25 years later, their lives settled into a reasonably comfortable domestic pattern in a modest apartment in Queens, N.Y. The worst times are something to reflect back on, yet those painful experiences influenced how they view the world, and how they live today.
Having broken the rules that divide Americans racially, Bill and Karen tell us what they are and how they're enforced. It's not a pretty picture. They're uncomfortable turning off a highway into a roadside restaurant, wary of small towns where locals may be unwelcoming to a mixed-race family. They ridicule the white-dominated culture of their daughter's university, built on assumptions of privilege and status. "I've seen people kill people for the shit that's happened to us," says Sims, early in the first episode.
In one episode, Bill returns to his hometown of Marion, Ohio, where his son from a teenage relationship has been indicted for drug dealing. "A lot of my friends are in prison or dead," Bill says, reflecting on the life he might have had if he hadn't left Ohio. "It could have happened to me, but it didn't."
Documented in a verite style, the story of Bill Sims, Karen Wilson and their daughters Cicily and Chaney, is not just about race. An American Love Story reveals much about things we have in common: how our families get along, how they come together for celebrations, how they deal with the mundane chores of everyday life, and how they cope with crises.
"It transcends ideas of race and becomes humans in a familiar group, with lots of points of connection for different parts of the audience," says Peter Wintonick, a filmmaker who is chronicling the history of cinema verite for the National Film Board of Canada. "It shows that you can come laterally at these questions and be engaging."
Particularly compelling is the coming-of-age experience of Cicily, a student at Colgate University when the series begins. She goes off for a semester in Africa on what Bill describes as a search for her ancestral roots. She returns having confronted racism among her black classmates from Colgate, who bitterly resented her ability to move between white and black cultures.
"I thought I would be changed in some way--the way I thought about myself and the things around me," Cicily says after her trip. "There was no question that I would be changed, but I thought it would be change for the better, in the end."
A film about "love and race"The genesis of the series was Fox's own romantic involvement with an African-American man. "I was very hurt by the racism I saw around us for no other reason than I was white," she recalls. "I wanted to do a film about love and race, about how people survive the incredible social pressure to split up."
Her initial idea was to film the lives of three successful interracial couples over a year. "It became apparent that I couldn't be two places at once." She couldn't hire film crews because she had no budget.
"I was totally moved by Bill and Karen and their family. They had incredible story elements that seemed very rich and powerful to me." She had been filming for three months when she realized, "This is not just a one-hour film."
"It felt like episodic drama," she explains. "The family would galvanize over a problem; it would be solved or not solved; then a few weeks later, there would be another problem. It really looked like serial television."
Cicily's search for identity, documented in her trip to Africa and her post-graduation job search, is a major drama played out over several episodes. So is Karen's illness with fibroid tumors--she's hospitalized after losing massive amounts of blood; in a later episode, she has a hysterectomy and recovers in time for Cicily's college graduation.
Bill struggles as a blues musician, always searching for that next gig, and battles alcoholism. He returns to Ohio to "reap what I have sown" when his son Alton faces a prison sentence for drug dealing. "It was my failure, not his," he says. "It's an easy thing to say, not an easy thing to live with."
In a light-hearted piece, Chaney, a 12-year old who looks like she's 19, badgers her parents to let her go out with "the boy," a young man from Brooklyn who courts her on the telephone. Both parents are wary, especially Bill, who calls Chaney his baby.
"It's not about high drama, it's about tiny, very small dramas," says Fox. "The subtext to the story is very important. It's the revelation of character, the unraveling of people and what their goals and feelings and drives and back-histories are." She hopes viewers will "get hooked on the characters," allowing them to reflect on their own racial attitudes.
"I'm more interested in getting people subtly to examine themselves than I am in lecturing" about racism, she adds. Long-form documentaries serve this purpose by allowing people to "get emotionally involved and then understand the issues from the inside and the outside."
"The accomplishment of her filmmaking is that there's a tremendous complexity in how these stories are told in a fairly short period of time," comments Marc Weiss, executive director of WebLab, which is producing a web site for the series. "I can predict that some people will love it and others will turn away from it fairly quickly."
"If you don't like the characters, you're not going to want to stay with it," he adds. "They're not movie stars or people who everyone's going to like. They have a complexity that I like that other people might not like."
The web site, which Weiss plans to have up and running by mid-summer, will feature a collection of love stories that "cross boundaries of one kind or another" (www.pbs.org/lovestories). Weiss hopes to enlist public TV stations in helping to gather these stories before the site's official launch, so that when visitors go there "they'll find something there that tells them what we're looking for."
The site will also invite visitors to participate in in-depth dialogues among small groups of people over a few weeks. The idea is to avoid the "drive-by postings" nature of most online discussions. Participants who sign on are told "this is your group to make or break," Weiss explains. "We want people to own it, and feel like it's up to them to make it work."
Not a "fly on the wall"Fox and her coproducer, sound recordist Jennifer Fleming, shot more than 1,000 hours of footage over five years for the series. The bulk of that is verite film covering 18 months of the life with Wilson-Sims family. Friends, family members and coworkers also sat for interviews, which are woven into the series, providing context and insights into what's happening in the drama.
Fox and Fleming slept on the floor of the girls' bedroom, so they were there to film unexpected moments, such as the morning Bill comes home from a night on the town, clearly soused as he makes himself breakfast. "Jennifer Fox, you should be dead right now," he tells her. "We're going to see if Miss Fox makes it out of this movie alive."
It's one of several sequences in An American Love Story in which Fox allows her own presence to be acknowledged, a central tenet in her approach to filmmaking.
Fox rejects outright the notion of "fly on the wall" cinema verite, in which the subjects pretend to ignore the presence of the camera and crew. This technique was used explosively in An American Family, a landmark 1973 PBS documentary to which the project is frequently compared.
These comparisons are "inevitable" because the two series have parallel titles, and each is an in-depth, longitudinal study of one family, explains Weiss. "The filmmakers live with a family for a really extended period of time, and they have access to this family's unfolding story with all the drama and day-to-dayness of it. Both elements are there."
"The one thing that most people noticed about An American Family is the incredible dysfunction of the family," he continues. It "disintegrated before your eyes, which is not the case with An American Love Story."
"We know from physics that everything affects everything," explains Fox, referring to the many ways a film crew's presence can affect its subjects. While filming, she did not attempt to detach herself from the family, nor did she avoid analyzing what went on around her. "I'm both in the family and trying to understand the family in an analytical way that informs how the series gets constructed."
"I'm trying to understand them as deeply as I can so the series can be a reflection, hopefully, of some deeper truth about them."
The family agreed on the need to show the complexities of their lives in the series, over which they had final approval. "That was based on their trust in me and my ability to perceive and tell story their story," adds Fox. "We had to form that deep trust."
"Everybody who knows us, or means anything to us, knows way more than was in the film," says Sims, in an interview with Current. He agreed to participate in An American Love Story because he saw it as a "way for me to open up a little bit and let people see that we're just like they are, trying to do the same things they're doing to raise a family."
"For its courage and depth and stalwart craziness on behalf of the filmmaker this seems to be a unique project," says Wintonick. "The subjects become more like collaborators."
He describes the series as "neo-verite" because it doesn't rely on a "monotrack level of letting things happen in front of the camera." It provides another level of formal interviews "layered on top in a more reflective way that allows you to get into the characters in a way pure verite film wouldn't allow you to do."
"It's a nonfiction drama with the attractions of a soap opera," he continues. Its cross-over appeal and unique approach make it "the most important documentary of this decade, not just for its scope, but for its courage and depth."
Not surprisingly, it wasn't easy for Fox to convince funders of the genius of her vision for a long-form public TV documentary that challenges deeply-held American racial attitudes. Her previous work, while internationally acclaimed, hadn't attempted to be quite so bold. Fox produced, directed and wrote a feature-length family study, "Beirut: The Last Home Movie," a documentary portrait of an aristocratic family living in war-torn Beirut, Lebanon. It won two Sundance prizes in 1988, including best film, and aired on Frontline.
The National Endowment for the Arts and Britain's Channel Four provided initial backing for An American Love Story. "The whole thing was shot on that--that's why I ended up being the cinematographer," recalls Fox. "Then I took the tapes around because I didn't have any money to edit."
Lindsay Law, executive producer of American Playhouse at the time, recognized the dramatic elements of the story, and was the first to back the project as a long series. ITVS is a major funder and copresenter. CPB and PBS also put in monies, along with numerous foundations and European broadcasters. The final budget for all 10 hours totalled some $3 million.
"It's been her whole life for five years," says Ward Chamberlin, chairman of Playhouse, which makes its last contribution to the PBS schedule with An American Love Story. "She's carried it through under difficult circumstances, and likes to do it all herself, working day and night."
The series was screened at the Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals earlier this year, and was warmly received by audiences. Variety weighed in with a strong review: "In a perfect world, the over-worked accolade 'landmark television event' would be reserved exclusively for the likes of Jennifer Fox's An American Family ... . By turns enormously engaging, deeply affecting and profoundly unsettling, Fox's magnum opus is a cinema verite study of an exceptional family."
Web page posted Aug. 20, 1999
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