Julia's Stepping Stones (2024) Movie Script
[typing]
[mouse clicking]
[man speaking indistinctly on phone]
[Julia] The weather is fantastic.
It's a gorgeous day.
Oh, I can talk more or less.
I could even... We could try speakerphone
but it's probably not good for...
This is for you just for...
I mean, this is for, um...
not for so much broadcast purposes
as for note-taking purposes, right?
I'm looking out at my garden.
I was just about to plant sweet potatoes,
uh, which is late, but...
[exhales]
It's been a very stressful time
because of this new film, um...
And just whenever you get close
to a deadline, I guess I forgot, you know,
but there's always these endless decisions
and it's really hard to give up on stuff
you really like, but you really have to.
So we're hitting that wall
for sure, right now.
No, that's okay.
And I... I know I can go for an hour or so.
'Cause this is the stuff I love,
I really actually enjoy talking about.
I mean, not only hearing my own story,
but I love hearing from other people too.
'Cause it's like, how did your life path
turn out the way it did?
And there's, like, social forces,
there's personal forces,
there's, like, historic.
You know, it's always so interesting,
like, how do we all turn out?
[waves crashing]
[soft instrumental music playing]
Did I ever wear shoes in the summer?
Or a shirt, even?
Here's me on a typical day
at the Jersey Shore on our dock.
I was a ball of curiosity and energy
who could lose herself in the bay.
Or in the ocean, on the ocean's edge.
[children chattering indistinctly]
[Julia] Or walking for miles
down New Jersey beaches by myself.
We spent all summer on the Jersey Shore,
living in a trailer,
my brothers, and I, and my parents.
Boats,
fishing,
clamming, spearing, crabs.
Here's me and Mom.
I loved nature.
I hated dresses.
[uplifting music playing]
I was a tomboy.
A geeky, bespeckled girl.
[mouse clicking]
My mom worked 3 to 11 shift at a hospital.
Dad was a butcher,
never finished eighth grade.
He brought his pay home in cash
in a little manila envelope
in his shirt pocket.
There were no books or pictures
in my house
or anyone else's house I knew,
but we had a secure life.
He was a union man, a Republican.
We owned our home.
[smacking lips]
I mean, we were very much
a working-class family.
I have three brothers, family of four.
One... You know, the kind of house that...
Back then we had one bathroom,
three bedrooms, we all shared bedrooms.
You know, just... To me it was a big house.
And both my parents worked,
so we could take vacations
every summer, you know.
[film reel rolling]
Because of the union, we had vacations.
We traveled the United States, Canada.
We traveled to far-flung places
in America.
We even went to Mexico, over the border.
We saw the Grand Canyon,
Native American ruins.
Those impressed me the most.
I read all the guidebooks,
asked questions of the park rangers.
Streams of questions ruled my mind.
This expanded my world so much
beyond the small town
and the other kids I grew up with.
I was a good student.
I loved to write.
I just... For some reason,
I just think I was a little more curious.
I didn't quite fit in.
I wore glasses before anybody else.
You know how something like that
can make you feel different?
I was, like, the four-eyes.
I was kind of bookish.
And I just sort of read more.
I wasn't that pretty.
It was the Cold War.
We'd scan the skies for Russian missiles.
Whispers of the civil rights movement
reached our little town.
I realized I wanted to be a journalist.
I always thought
if we could just understand each other,
there wouldn't be this conflict,
no wars.
Yet in the real world, then,
the top options for girls' futures were
teacher, secretary, or nurse.
Then marriage.
Here's a picture from my life now at 73.
My two grandkids in our nearby woods.
The stepping stones across the stream.
[water trickling]
I've been thinking about
my stepping stones of life.
How did I get to where I am
from where I was?
How did that happen?
[film reel rolling]
My dad got me a camera,
a 35 mm rangefinder Argus
when I was about 13.
I wanted to really learn how to use it,
so I found some old books
about photography at the library.
I learned about f-stops,
depth of field, focus, framing.
I mailed my rolls of color film away
and got prints back in the mail.
Life magazine came to our doctor's office,
and I loved the photographs.
I wanted so much
to get out of my small town on my own.
[soft music playing]
[man] Yes, if you don't make an effort
to understand them,
teenage girls may seem
silly and opinionated,
and with unrealistic ideas
of their own future.
[Julia] I wrote away for flyers
from American Youth Hostels
and various summer camps.
My parents told me summer after summer,
"We can't afford it, Julia.
We just can't afford it."
But then, when my brother turned 17,
my older brother,
they bought him
a convertible Ford Super Sport.
[dings]
Well, the idea of going to college
caught hold of me,
even though I didn't know anyone
who went to college.
In our library at the high school,
there was a book called
Lovejoy's Guide to Colleges.
It gave you a description of each college,
the cost, their address.
So I started sending postcards
asking for catalogs.
I started with the A's.
I wrote away to Adelphi, Albion.
Bates, Cornell, Oberlin, Swarthmore.
All the way through the alphabet.
I had stacks of catalogs in my bedroom,
read them late into the night.
So, I had applied to a handful of colleges
and I got in.
But I picked Antioch College because
it was the farthest away, in Ohio.
Six hundred miles.
I paid my own way.
Antioch. You could work half the year,
travel abroad,
not have to go home all summer.
I'd worked since I was 15,
so that appealed to me.
In our freshman dorm, all the girls
sat around in a circle that first day
and were asked to say
what our parents did, where we came from.
One girl said, "My dad is an engineer."
Another, "My dad and mom are lawyers."
"My dad is a poet."
"My dad is a professor at a university."
"My mom plays in the symphony."
When it came to me, I couldn't say,
"My dad works in the meat department
at a grocery store."
"He's a butcher."
I said instead that
he was the manager of a grocery store.
Even that was below
the other parents' occupations.
Right away, I started developing
a story of who I am.
A false story based on shame.
Who I am is not right here.
There would be more lies to follow.
I went into my college friends' homes
that were much bigger,
much more somehow sophisticated
with books, photos, paintings.
There were actual discussions
around the dinner table
with glasses of wine.
In my house growing up,
dinner was five minutes.
We never talked around that dinner table.
At college, I did find others
who loved photography,
and I learned to develop
and print pictures.
We created the first darkroom at Antioch,
where I spent hundreds of happy hours.
We learned about photographers of the day.
Robert Capa.
Dorothea Lange.
Robert Frank.
Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Bruce Davidson.
Beautiful works of art,
but capturing everyday people.
I didn't realize till years later
that we were not taught about
Black photographers who were working,
like Gordon Parks,
Roy DeCarava.
[indistinct chatter]
[Julia] Seeing certain films
deeply impressed me.
Wiseman's Titicut Follies.
[man] They are the migrants,
workers in the sweatshops of the soil.
[Julia] Edward R. Murrow's
Harvest of Shame
about farmworkers' lives.
[soft instrumental music playing]
[man speaking in French]
Mme un paysage tranquille.
[Julia] Night and Fog.
[man speaking in French] Mme une prairie
avec des vols de corbeaux des moissons
et des feux d'herbe.
[Julia] I did not know about the Holocaust
until I saw that film by Alain Resnais.
I realized that through seeing films,
people could be exposed to
alternative points of view
on history, on life, on themselves.
Because I was.
And the act of making
photographs and films
could be a way of understanding the world.
[man continues speaking
in French indistinctly]
[Julia] A stepping stone.
My first Antioch co-op job.
Cleveland Press copy boy.
Remember, I wanted to be a journalist.
When the writers called "boy,"
that was me.
I noticed right away that
there were no women on the floor,
except in the style and fashion area,
way back there.
I recently came across
this little newsletter,
put out by
the Cleveland Press Composing Department.
And I was so struck by
the casual unexamined sexism.
I was uncomfortable when I saw
this picture published back then.
Embarrassed, but I really
didn't understand why.
They had asked me to pose like this,
with the idea that
I had really good posture.
Do you see up there?
"Don't be fooled, guys."
After about two years of college,
I dropped out.
It was just all too much.
I never felt I fit in.
I felt like an imposter.
Everyone was smarter than me.
The male dean
who I'd gone to talk with said,
"Yeah, you should drop out."
"You should go to a state school.
Keep your grades up for now."
[film reel rolling]
Looking back, I realize,
I began to understand how hard it is
to change one's class background,
to move up, to be comfortable.
By the way, I never had a female
or a person of color
as a professor at Antioch.
In that time as a dropout,
a lot changed in the United States.
[upbeat music playing]
[Julia] The hippies, anti-war.
I hitchhiked to San Francisco
to the sounds of Dylan's
"Like a Rolling Stone,"
not realizing then
this would be called "The Summer of Love."
["Volunteers" playing]
Hey, I'm dancing down the street
Got a revolution, got to revolution
Ain't it amazing all the people I meet
Got a revolution, got to revolution
One generation got old
One generation got soul...
[song fades]
[Julia] Landing
after that hazy California summer
in New York City,
my job was as a waitress
at the West End Bar, Uptown,
near Columbia University.
[man] We call all students, faculty,
and workers of the university
to support our strike.
[Julia] When the Columbia University
strike took place that spring, 1968,
I was serving beer
to tables full of students
talking about politics and issues.
Sometimes I would try to join in.
I was their age.
I was a student too.
But since I was the waitress,
they ignored my questions.
They ignored me.
I was put in my place.
I came back to Antioch after 15 months,
right after Bobby Kennedy was killed.
A big stepping stone,
the radical left came into my life.
It was all around.
The anti-war movement,
the Black Power movement,
the Black Panthers.
Reading Marx, Engels,
Ho Chi Minh, Lenin.
Chairman Mao. Che Guevara.
Studying all this new literature,
I came to understand the word "class"
as an identity.
And more important,
as a motivating force in history.
The revelatory thought
that the working class
has been a driving force in history,
and that I,
rather than being nothing, an impostor,
or my background being
something to hide and lie about,
that I have a part to play
as a working-class person.
That's a major stepping stone.
I was learning about imperialism,
capitalism, socialism, communism.
And it was like,
"Okay, there's another way to go."
"It doesn't have to be like this."
We read stuff,
we talked in study groups and all that,
but it was all men who talked.
It was all men, and...
Or if there was the occasional woman,
it was like, clearly,
she had to struggle to speak.
It was just very... Not that we were
conscious of that, of course,
but, you know, it didn't take much
for you to stop and realize,
"What the hell is going on here?"
I met Jim Klein in a film class.
He was three years younger.
I had a boyfriend.
We kind of hung around together.
He played the piano.
He loved working on the radio.
I loved being at the radio station.
Later, we fell in love
after a screening of Cassavetes' Faces...
[chuckles softly]
...which I know is a little funny.
[guitar music playing]
From that day on,
Jim and I were inseparable.
Here we are on the porch
of his comfortable, Long Island home,
a very Jewish community.
Bagels and lox on a Sunday morning,
Chinese Friday night,
music, books in the house,
the Seder, Holocaust stories.
I learned so much
from his parents and his life.
I became a radio geek
working at WYSO FM radio.
I learned most of the skills
of being a filmmaker.
How to edit, how to mix music,
how to do interviews,
how to think about the audience.
How to tell a story in a time frame.
May we hear
from the newspaper reporter, please?
You know you'll never open
your morning newspaper
and read something like this.
"Mr. John Smith,
a trim young father of three,
who wears his silky brown hair
attractively parted to one side...
[all laughing]
...has announced that
he's a candidate for the presidency."
"Mr. Smith was wearing a smart gray suit
that set off
his well-proportioned figure admirably."
[all laughing]
"He enjoys impressing friends
with his special blueberry muffins."
- [all laughing]
- [chuckles]
[Julia] The biggest influence,
the one that made the most sense,
was the Women's Liberation Movement.
Saying that Women's Liberation, for me,
was transformative is too small a word.
We believed the personal is political.
A basic building block of the movement
was consciousness-raising groups.
I was in the first one at Antioch College.
There were five of us.
We met for months
before there was a sixth.
Our consciousness-raising group
took on so many topics.
What are our feelings about men?
What are our feelings about our mothers?
We talked about our bodies, about sex,
about menstruation,
about our intelligence.
How we felt about so many things.
We sat around one night a week,
for as long as it took,
each of us in turn,
to say what we had to say
and feel what we had to feel.
Every time, it turned out,
that what we thought
was our own personal shame
was really an oppression of a group.
A huge group,
women.
All the institutions around us
shaped our own image.
I came to understand
self-censorship, the self-hatred.
Women's Liberation was radical
to its core.
It went to the heart of how people
think about themselves and others,
and all the structures of our society.
Women's Liberation demanded change
in the bedroom, the kitchen, the office.
We looked at
popular culture's images of women.
And we saw that
all the images, movies,
magazines, ads,
television were made by men.
White men,
privileged men.
Imagine that.
[punching]
[Julia] We realized that
we had to create our own images,
form a kind of alternative culture,
since mainstream culture
was so impenetrable for us.
Creating images
telling stories of real women,
that was a radical act.
So I started a radio show on WYSO,
I first called The Single Girl.
Wish I was a single girl
Oh yeah...
[Julia on radio] The Single Girl is
an hour of music and commentary
focusing on the problems of women today.
I'm Julia Reichert on WYSO FM,
91.5 in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
We'll start tonight with
a song that I've liked for a long time.
It's called "Michael From Mountains."
The man described in the song
used to represent a sort of ideal to me,
a very romantic ideal, of course.
But still, I envy the woman
who could have a relationship
with such a sensitive,
affectionate man.
Recently, though, I've changed my mind.
Let's listen to Judy Collins singing
"Michael from Mountains."
Michael wakes you up with sweets
He takes you up streets...
[Julia] It didn't even occur to me then
that the word "girl" would be questioned,
as so many words were back then,
like "chick," "doll," "baby."
The show basically
looked at popular music,
like The Rolling Stones,
like the women's blues singers, and asked,
"What is this song saying about women,
who we are,
what our lives are, what we want?"
We all said to ourselves,
"We wanted to be liberated women."
But we really didn't know what that meant.
[film reel rolling]
[Julia] Alongside this,
I took my one and only film class.
David Brooks blazed into town,
24 years old, and right out
of the Film-Makers Cooperative
in New York City.
An experimental filmmaker.
David opened us up
to the world of Stan Brakhage.
It is to make you feel
what you're doing to me.
[Julia] The Kuchar brothers.
[man continues talking indistinctly]
[Julia] Jonas Mekas.
[funky music playing]
[Julia] Ken Jacobs.
[man] Um, I needed some music for this.
[Julia] Maya Deren.
We saw all their films.
[film reel rolling]
[Julia] We shot 8 mm film.
David empowered us just to shoot.
Shoot what interested us,
edit from our gut.
January 1st, 1970,
I was talking on the phone with a friend.
I had an idea
for my senior project at Antioch.
Why not make a film?
A real film with sync sound.
Film combined radio and photography,
and a film could reach
more people than either.
Why not a film looking at
women and girls, at different ages,
how they see themselves,
like we did in our CR group, in a way.
That senior project became
Growing Up Female.
[gentle music playing]
Now, how could that happen?
We didn't have a real camera.
We didn't have a tape recorder.
We didn't have money for film stock.
I will admit that we begged, borrowed,
and stole what we needed
to make this film.
But that's another story.
[indistinct chatter]
[Julia] Do you feel it's important
for women to be feminine?
Very, very much so.
I think every woman should be feminine.
I think that every man wants
a woman to be feminine.
Recognizing a man's masculinity
and making him feel more masculine.
This is femininity.
When I think about a woman being feminine,
the way she can prove she's a woman,
she can have a child, you know,
and she can cook and she can sew.
[Julia] It was filmed
in basically ten days,
over spring break
in March and early April of 1970,
in towns around Yellow Springs, Ohio.
It has a 2:1 shooting ratio,
so most of what we shot
is actually in the film.
We edited it right after
the students were killed by National Guard
at Kent State and Jackson State.
[film reel rolling]
We edited on an upright Moviola
that broke down every day
and that we had to fix.
One day, I edited. One day, Jim edited.
One day, I edited.
The next day, Jim edited.
We believed that the only way to achieve
equality was to actually live it.
Even though Jim found it easier to edit,
we always made it equal.
With each film, I've imagined my mother
over my shoulder in the editing room
to be sure she would understand
and enjoy the story.
That's kept me grounded.
But what I learned,
and it was probably the most valuable
and motivating lesson of my entire life,
is to use your work
to try to change the world.
I did everything I could
to help the women's movement grow,
to help the ideas I had found
so very powerful spread to others.
But how would we find distribution
for this crudely-made film?
How to get it out?
I'll tell you about an important lunch.
A stepping stone.
A very good distribution company
was interested in Growing Up Female.
They took Jim and I out
to a very fancy lunch
at Rocco's Restaurant
in the West Village of New York City.
They presented the contract.
"Seven years."
"We give you an advance,
you give up say over the movie."
We said, "We want to be sure
we can show the film in women's prisons."
"Do they have any money?"
"We want to get the film
to high school teachers."
"Do they have any money?"
"What about women's centers?"
"What is that?"
We realized that the film
would no longer belong to us.
We'd have no say over cutting the film,
the advertising, or description.
"Really?"
"No say over anything, period."
"You're the artist, honey.
Let us handle all the rest of it."
Well, that would be a betrayal
of the reasons we made the film.
We realized we'd have to do it ourselves.
Get this movie to audiences.
This actually led to the creation of
New Day Films, which we started that year.
And New Day went on to become a large
filmmaker-owned cooperative distributor
for independent films.
And it still is today.
[inspirational music playing]
Do you know what that is?
Well, here's a true story.
When Growing Up Female was done in 1971,
I carried one 16mm print around
on a Greyhound bus
to find its audience.
I went to Cleveland, Ohio.
First, I called a handful of friends
who were in the women's movement up there,
who agreed to set up a projector,
and a screen, and a sound system,
and invite a few other
women's movement people
to come together in a living room
to watch the film.
And they would say,
"Ah, we have to show this film to others."
And they'd set up
a second screening in their city
in a church basement, in a classroom,
so more people would see it.
Every time I got
people's name and address.
I would then ask them, "Where do you know
other people in the women's movement?"
"Other people who you think
should see this in other towns."
And sometimes I did.
I took a Greyhound to Athens, Ohio,
to Washington, DC.
I went to Pittsburgh.
I went to New York, to Boston.
Have a screening,
collect names, type them up.
The audiences grew and grew.
Discussions were intense after.
I eventually got invited
to Norman, Oklahoma, for some reason.
That's where... I was threatened there.
I was literally threatened
on the stage, physically,
by a couple of guys after the showing.
And it's a very gentle film, you know.
But these were just regular guys.
These were just guys who came
at the University of Oklahoma
to the screening.
The women in the audience
started saying, like,
"This is so true.
This happened to me too."
You know, it's one of those
first-step films where you realize,
"Yeah, the whole socialization has made me
think of myself as a second-class citizen,
and yes, we have to do
something about that."
Women started saying that,
and the men got really upset.
Well, we're oppressed too, you know.
I think the idea of equality with women,
they instinctively knew they were on top
because women were on the bottom...
[chuckles softly]...and they
did not want that changed.
Plenty of men
still don't want that changed, right?
[chuckles]
So...
Jim and I designed and printed this poster
and mailed it out to all those people
and orders started to pour in
for the film.
I learned that films
can help change the world.
Jim and I learned
to do things for ourselves,
learned things ourselves.
We can all do everything.
We can all do anything.
All this carved deeper the path of
choosing to be an independent filmmaker,
to help others remain independent,
to retain control of our work.
To make the films we felt
needed to be made in our own way,
in our own place.
To make films about
everyday people, working people,
always listening to the nuances of class,
race, and gender.
To take the time to get the work
to audiences who can use it.
And that has been my life.
[soft instrumental music playing]
[music stops]
[mouse clicking]
[man speaking indistinctly on phone]
[Julia] The weather is fantastic.
It's a gorgeous day.
Oh, I can talk more or less.
I could even... We could try speakerphone
but it's probably not good for...
This is for you just for...
I mean, this is for, um...
not for so much broadcast purposes
as for note-taking purposes, right?
I'm looking out at my garden.
I was just about to plant sweet potatoes,
uh, which is late, but...
[exhales]
It's been a very stressful time
because of this new film, um...
And just whenever you get close
to a deadline, I guess I forgot, you know,
but there's always these endless decisions
and it's really hard to give up on stuff
you really like, but you really have to.
So we're hitting that wall
for sure, right now.
No, that's okay.
And I... I know I can go for an hour or so.
'Cause this is the stuff I love,
I really actually enjoy talking about.
I mean, not only hearing my own story,
but I love hearing from other people too.
'Cause it's like, how did your life path
turn out the way it did?
And there's, like, social forces,
there's personal forces,
there's, like, historic.
You know, it's always so interesting,
like, how do we all turn out?
[waves crashing]
[soft instrumental music playing]
Did I ever wear shoes in the summer?
Or a shirt, even?
Here's me on a typical day
at the Jersey Shore on our dock.
I was a ball of curiosity and energy
who could lose herself in the bay.
Or in the ocean, on the ocean's edge.
[children chattering indistinctly]
[Julia] Or walking for miles
down New Jersey beaches by myself.
We spent all summer on the Jersey Shore,
living in a trailer,
my brothers, and I, and my parents.
Boats,
fishing,
clamming, spearing, crabs.
Here's me and Mom.
I loved nature.
I hated dresses.
[uplifting music playing]
I was a tomboy.
A geeky, bespeckled girl.
[mouse clicking]
My mom worked 3 to 11 shift at a hospital.
Dad was a butcher,
never finished eighth grade.
He brought his pay home in cash
in a little manila envelope
in his shirt pocket.
There were no books or pictures
in my house
or anyone else's house I knew,
but we had a secure life.
He was a union man, a Republican.
We owned our home.
[smacking lips]
I mean, we were very much
a working-class family.
I have three brothers, family of four.
One... You know, the kind of house that...
Back then we had one bathroom,
three bedrooms, we all shared bedrooms.
You know, just... To me it was a big house.
And both my parents worked,
so we could take vacations
every summer, you know.
[film reel rolling]
Because of the union, we had vacations.
We traveled the United States, Canada.
We traveled to far-flung places
in America.
We even went to Mexico, over the border.
We saw the Grand Canyon,
Native American ruins.
Those impressed me the most.
I read all the guidebooks,
asked questions of the park rangers.
Streams of questions ruled my mind.
This expanded my world so much
beyond the small town
and the other kids I grew up with.
I was a good student.
I loved to write.
I just... For some reason,
I just think I was a little more curious.
I didn't quite fit in.
I wore glasses before anybody else.
You know how something like that
can make you feel different?
I was, like, the four-eyes.
I was kind of bookish.
And I just sort of read more.
I wasn't that pretty.
It was the Cold War.
We'd scan the skies for Russian missiles.
Whispers of the civil rights movement
reached our little town.
I realized I wanted to be a journalist.
I always thought
if we could just understand each other,
there wouldn't be this conflict,
no wars.
Yet in the real world, then,
the top options for girls' futures were
teacher, secretary, or nurse.
Then marriage.
Here's a picture from my life now at 73.
My two grandkids in our nearby woods.
The stepping stones across the stream.
[water trickling]
I've been thinking about
my stepping stones of life.
How did I get to where I am
from where I was?
How did that happen?
[film reel rolling]
My dad got me a camera,
a 35 mm rangefinder Argus
when I was about 13.
I wanted to really learn how to use it,
so I found some old books
about photography at the library.
I learned about f-stops,
depth of field, focus, framing.
I mailed my rolls of color film away
and got prints back in the mail.
Life magazine came to our doctor's office,
and I loved the photographs.
I wanted so much
to get out of my small town on my own.
[soft music playing]
[man] Yes, if you don't make an effort
to understand them,
teenage girls may seem
silly and opinionated,
and with unrealistic ideas
of their own future.
[Julia] I wrote away for flyers
from American Youth Hostels
and various summer camps.
My parents told me summer after summer,
"We can't afford it, Julia.
We just can't afford it."
But then, when my brother turned 17,
my older brother,
they bought him
a convertible Ford Super Sport.
[dings]
Well, the idea of going to college
caught hold of me,
even though I didn't know anyone
who went to college.
In our library at the high school,
there was a book called
Lovejoy's Guide to Colleges.
It gave you a description of each college,
the cost, their address.
So I started sending postcards
asking for catalogs.
I started with the A's.
I wrote away to Adelphi, Albion.
Bates, Cornell, Oberlin, Swarthmore.
All the way through the alphabet.
I had stacks of catalogs in my bedroom,
read them late into the night.
So, I had applied to a handful of colleges
and I got in.
But I picked Antioch College because
it was the farthest away, in Ohio.
Six hundred miles.
I paid my own way.
Antioch. You could work half the year,
travel abroad,
not have to go home all summer.
I'd worked since I was 15,
so that appealed to me.
In our freshman dorm, all the girls
sat around in a circle that first day
and were asked to say
what our parents did, where we came from.
One girl said, "My dad is an engineer."
Another, "My dad and mom are lawyers."
"My dad is a poet."
"My dad is a professor at a university."
"My mom plays in the symphony."
When it came to me, I couldn't say,
"My dad works in the meat department
at a grocery store."
"He's a butcher."
I said instead that
he was the manager of a grocery store.
Even that was below
the other parents' occupations.
Right away, I started developing
a story of who I am.
A false story based on shame.
Who I am is not right here.
There would be more lies to follow.
I went into my college friends' homes
that were much bigger,
much more somehow sophisticated
with books, photos, paintings.
There were actual discussions
around the dinner table
with glasses of wine.
In my house growing up,
dinner was five minutes.
We never talked around that dinner table.
At college, I did find others
who loved photography,
and I learned to develop
and print pictures.
We created the first darkroom at Antioch,
where I spent hundreds of happy hours.
We learned about photographers of the day.
Robert Capa.
Dorothea Lange.
Robert Frank.
Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Bruce Davidson.
Beautiful works of art,
but capturing everyday people.
I didn't realize till years later
that we were not taught about
Black photographers who were working,
like Gordon Parks,
Roy DeCarava.
[indistinct chatter]
[Julia] Seeing certain films
deeply impressed me.
Wiseman's Titicut Follies.
[man] They are the migrants,
workers in the sweatshops of the soil.
[Julia] Edward R. Murrow's
Harvest of Shame
about farmworkers' lives.
[soft instrumental music playing]
[man speaking in French]
Mme un paysage tranquille.
[Julia] Night and Fog.
[man speaking in French] Mme une prairie
avec des vols de corbeaux des moissons
et des feux d'herbe.
[Julia] I did not know about the Holocaust
until I saw that film by Alain Resnais.
I realized that through seeing films,
people could be exposed to
alternative points of view
on history, on life, on themselves.
Because I was.
And the act of making
photographs and films
could be a way of understanding the world.
[man continues speaking
in French indistinctly]
[Julia] A stepping stone.
My first Antioch co-op job.
Cleveland Press copy boy.
Remember, I wanted to be a journalist.
When the writers called "boy,"
that was me.
I noticed right away that
there were no women on the floor,
except in the style and fashion area,
way back there.
I recently came across
this little newsletter,
put out by
the Cleveland Press Composing Department.
And I was so struck by
the casual unexamined sexism.
I was uncomfortable when I saw
this picture published back then.
Embarrassed, but I really
didn't understand why.
They had asked me to pose like this,
with the idea that
I had really good posture.
Do you see up there?
"Don't be fooled, guys."
After about two years of college,
I dropped out.
It was just all too much.
I never felt I fit in.
I felt like an imposter.
Everyone was smarter than me.
The male dean
who I'd gone to talk with said,
"Yeah, you should drop out."
"You should go to a state school.
Keep your grades up for now."
[film reel rolling]
Looking back, I realize,
I began to understand how hard it is
to change one's class background,
to move up, to be comfortable.
By the way, I never had a female
or a person of color
as a professor at Antioch.
In that time as a dropout,
a lot changed in the United States.
[upbeat music playing]
[Julia] The hippies, anti-war.
I hitchhiked to San Francisco
to the sounds of Dylan's
"Like a Rolling Stone,"
not realizing then
this would be called "The Summer of Love."
["Volunteers" playing]
Hey, I'm dancing down the street
Got a revolution, got to revolution
Ain't it amazing all the people I meet
Got a revolution, got to revolution
One generation got old
One generation got soul...
[song fades]
[Julia] Landing
after that hazy California summer
in New York City,
my job was as a waitress
at the West End Bar, Uptown,
near Columbia University.
[man] We call all students, faculty,
and workers of the university
to support our strike.
[Julia] When the Columbia University
strike took place that spring, 1968,
I was serving beer
to tables full of students
talking about politics and issues.
Sometimes I would try to join in.
I was their age.
I was a student too.
But since I was the waitress,
they ignored my questions.
They ignored me.
I was put in my place.
I came back to Antioch after 15 months,
right after Bobby Kennedy was killed.
A big stepping stone,
the radical left came into my life.
It was all around.
The anti-war movement,
the Black Power movement,
the Black Panthers.
Reading Marx, Engels,
Ho Chi Minh, Lenin.
Chairman Mao. Che Guevara.
Studying all this new literature,
I came to understand the word "class"
as an identity.
And more important,
as a motivating force in history.
The revelatory thought
that the working class
has been a driving force in history,
and that I,
rather than being nothing, an impostor,
or my background being
something to hide and lie about,
that I have a part to play
as a working-class person.
That's a major stepping stone.
I was learning about imperialism,
capitalism, socialism, communism.
And it was like,
"Okay, there's another way to go."
"It doesn't have to be like this."
We read stuff,
we talked in study groups and all that,
but it was all men who talked.
It was all men, and...
Or if there was the occasional woman,
it was like, clearly,
she had to struggle to speak.
It was just very... Not that we were
conscious of that, of course,
but, you know, it didn't take much
for you to stop and realize,
"What the hell is going on here?"
I met Jim Klein in a film class.
He was three years younger.
I had a boyfriend.
We kind of hung around together.
He played the piano.
He loved working on the radio.
I loved being at the radio station.
Later, we fell in love
after a screening of Cassavetes' Faces...
[chuckles softly]
...which I know is a little funny.
[guitar music playing]
From that day on,
Jim and I were inseparable.
Here we are on the porch
of his comfortable, Long Island home,
a very Jewish community.
Bagels and lox on a Sunday morning,
Chinese Friday night,
music, books in the house,
the Seder, Holocaust stories.
I learned so much
from his parents and his life.
I became a radio geek
working at WYSO FM radio.
I learned most of the skills
of being a filmmaker.
How to edit, how to mix music,
how to do interviews,
how to think about the audience.
How to tell a story in a time frame.
May we hear
from the newspaper reporter, please?
You know you'll never open
your morning newspaper
and read something like this.
"Mr. John Smith,
a trim young father of three,
who wears his silky brown hair
attractively parted to one side...
[all laughing]
...has announced that
he's a candidate for the presidency."
"Mr. Smith was wearing a smart gray suit
that set off
his well-proportioned figure admirably."
[all laughing]
"He enjoys impressing friends
with his special blueberry muffins."
- [all laughing]
- [chuckles]
[Julia] The biggest influence,
the one that made the most sense,
was the Women's Liberation Movement.
Saying that Women's Liberation, for me,
was transformative is too small a word.
We believed the personal is political.
A basic building block of the movement
was consciousness-raising groups.
I was in the first one at Antioch College.
There were five of us.
We met for months
before there was a sixth.
Our consciousness-raising group
took on so many topics.
What are our feelings about men?
What are our feelings about our mothers?
We talked about our bodies, about sex,
about menstruation,
about our intelligence.
How we felt about so many things.
We sat around one night a week,
for as long as it took,
each of us in turn,
to say what we had to say
and feel what we had to feel.
Every time, it turned out,
that what we thought
was our own personal shame
was really an oppression of a group.
A huge group,
women.
All the institutions around us
shaped our own image.
I came to understand
self-censorship, the self-hatred.
Women's Liberation was radical
to its core.
It went to the heart of how people
think about themselves and others,
and all the structures of our society.
Women's Liberation demanded change
in the bedroom, the kitchen, the office.
We looked at
popular culture's images of women.
And we saw that
all the images, movies,
magazines, ads,
television were made by men.
White men,
privileged men.
Imagine that.
[punching]
[Julia] We realized that
we had to create our own images,
form a kind of alternative culture,
since mainstream culture
was so impenetrable for us.
Creating images
telling stories of real women,
that was a radical act.
So I started a radio show on WYSO,
I first called The Single Girl.
Wish I was a single girl
Oh yeah...
[Julia on radio] The Single Girl is
an hour of music and commentary
focusing on the problems of women today.
I'm Julia Reichert on WYSO FM,
91.5 in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
We'll start tonight with
a song that I've liked for a long time.
It's called "Michael From Mountains."
The man described in the song
used to represent a sort of ideal to me,
a very romantic ideal, of course.
But still, I envy the woman
who could have a relationship
with such a sensitive,
affectionate man.
Recently, though, I've changed my mind.
Let's listen to Judy Collins singing
"Michael from Mountains."
Michael wakes you up with sweets
He takes you up streets...
[Julia] It didn't even occur to me then
that the word "girl" would be questioned,
as so many words were back then,
like "chick," "doll," "baby."
The show basically
looked at popular music,
like The Rolling Stones,
like the women's blues singers, and asked,
"What is this song saying about women,
who we are,
what our lives are, what we want?"
We all said to ourselves,
"We wanted to be liberated women."
But we really didn't know what that meant.
[film reel rolling]
[Julia] Alongside this,
I took my one and only film class.
David Brooks blazed into town,
24 years old, and right out
of the Film-Makers Cooperative
in New York City.
An experimental filmmaker.
David opened us up
to the world of Stan Brakhage.
It is to make you feel
what you're doing to me.
[Julia] The Kuchar brothers.
[man continues talking indistinctly]
[Julia] Jonas Mekas.
[funky music playing]
[Julia] Ken Jacobs.
[man] Um, I needed some music for this.
[Julia] Maya Deren.
We saw all their films.
[film reel rolling]
[Julia] We shot 8 mm film.
David empowered us just to shoot.
Shoot what interested us,
edit from our gut.
January 1st, 1970,
I was talking on the phone with a friend.
I had an idea
for my senior project at Antioch.
Why not make a film?
A real film with sync sound.
Film combined radio and photography,
and a film could reach
more people than either.
Why not a film looking at
women and girls, at different ages,
how they see themselves,
like we did in our CR group, in a way.
That senior project became
Growing Up Female.
[gentle music playing]
Now, how could that happen?
We didn't have a real camera.
We didn't have a tape recorder.
We didn't have money for film stock.
I will admit that we begged, borrowed,
and stole what we needed
to make this film.
But that's another story.
[indistinct chatter]
[Julia] Do you feel it's important
for women to be feminine?
Very, very much so.
I think every woman should be feminine.
I think that every man wants
a woman to be feminine.
Recognizing a man's masculinity
and making him feel more masculine.
This is femininity.
When I think about a woman being feminine,
the way she can prove she's a woman,
she can have a child, you know,
and she can cook and she can sew.
[Julia] It was filmed
in basically ten days,
over spring break
in March and early April of 1970,
in towns around Yellow Springs, Ohio.
It has a 2:1 shooting ratio,
so most of what we shot
is actually in the film.
We edited it right after
the students were killed by National Guard
at Kent State and Jackson State.
[film reel rolling]
We edited on an upright Moviola
that broke down every day
and that we had to fix.
One day, I edited. One day, Jim edited.
One day, I edited.
The next day, Jim edited.
We believed that the only way to achieve
equality was to actually live it.
Even though Jim found it easier to edit,
we always made it equal.
With each film, I've imagined my mother
over my shoulder in the editing room
to be sure she would understand
and enjoy the story.
That's kept me grounded.
But what I learned,
and it was probably the most valuable
and motivating lesson of my entire life,
is to use your work
to try to change the world.
I did everything I could
to help the women's movement grow,
to help the ideas I had found
so very powerful spread to others.
But how would we find distribution
for this crudely-made film?
How to get it out?
I'll tell you about an important lunch.
A stepping stone.
A very good distribution company
was interested in Growing Up Female.
They took Jim and I out
to a very fancy lunch
at Rocco's Restaurant
in the West Village of New York City.
They presented the contract.
"Seven years."
"We give you an advance,
you give up say over the movie."
We said, "We want to be sure
we can show the film in women's prisons."
"Do they have any money?"
"We want to get the film
to high school teachers."
"Do they have any money?"
"What about women's centers?"
"What is that?"
We realized that the film
would no longer belong to us.
We'd have no say over cutting the film,
the advertising, or description.
"Really?"
"No say over anything, period."
"You're the artist, honey.
Let us handle all the rest of it."
Well, that would be a betrayal
of the reasons we made the film.
We realized we'd have to do it ourselves.
Get this movie to audiences.
This actually led to the creation of
New Day Films, which we started that year.
And New Day went on to become a large
filmmaker-owned cooperative distributor
for independent films.
And it still is today.
[inspirational music playing]
Do you know what that is?
Well, here's a true story.
When Growing Up Female was done in 1971,
I carried one 16mm print around
on a Greyhound bus
to find its audience.
I went to Cleveland, Ohio.
First, I called a handful of friends
who were in the women's movement up there,
who agreed to set up a projector,
and a screen, and a sound system,
and invite a few other
women's movement people
to come together in a living room
to watch the film.
And they would say,
"Ah, we have to show this film to others."
And they'd set up
a second screening in their city
in a church basement, in a classroom,
so more people would see it.
Every time I got
people's name and address.
I would then ask them, "Where do you know
other people in the women's movement?"
"Other people who you think
should see this in other towns."
And sometimes I did.
I took a Greyhound to Athens, Ohio,
to Washington, DC.
I went to Pittsburgh.
I went to New York, to Boston.
Have a screening,
collect names, type them up.
The audiences grew and grew.
Discussions were intense after.
I eventually got invited
to Norman, Oklahoma, for some reason.
That's where... I was threatened there.
I was literally threatened
on the stage, physically,
by a couple of guys after the showing.
And it's a very gentle film, you know.
But these were just regular guys.
These were just guys who came
at the University of Oklahoma
to the screening.
The women in the audience
started saying, like,
"This is so true.
This happened to me too."
You know, it's one of those
first-step films where you realize,
"Yeah, the whole socialization has made me
think of myself as a second-class citizen,
and yes, we have to do
something about that."
Women started saying that,
and the men got really upset.
Well, we're oppressed too, you know.
I think the idea of equality with women,
they instinctively knew they were on top
because women were on the bottom...
[chuckles softly]...and they
did not want that changed.
Plenty of men
still don't want that changed, right?
[chuckles]
So...
Jim and I designed and printed this poster
and mailed it out to all those people
and orders started to pour in
for the film.
I learned that films
can help change the world.
Jim and I learned
to do things for ourselves,
learned things ourselves.
We can all do everything.
We can all do anything.
All this carved deeper the path of
choosing to be an independent filmmaker,
to help others remain independent,
to retain control of our work.
To make the films we felt
needed to be made in our own way,
in our own place.
To make films about
everyday people, working people,
always listening to the nuances of class,
race, and gender.
To take the time to get the work
to audiences who can use it.
And that has been my life.
[soft instrumental music playing]
[music stops]