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Connecting the dots
Filmmaker aims to educate, entertain, empower
with 8-part documentary of D.C.’s historic struggle
(Published September 22, 2003)

By JOHN DeVAULT
Staff Writer

Sitting in her cramped editing studio, Rebecca Kingsley watches the familiar footage on the monitor with a spark in her eye.

A United Nations human rights panel in New York City is grilling a senior U.S. Justice Department official. The U.S. official is defending his government against the charge, brought by D.C. resident Timothy Cooper, that the U.S. is violating U.N. human rights statutes by denying District residents full Congressional representation and voting rights.

Kingsley suddenly points at the monitor.

"That’s all wrong," she says. "He’s presenting information that’s simply false."

The Justice Dept. official, she notes, has just told the U.N. panel that D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton has congressional voting rights.

"That’s not true. … We have a non-voting delegate, not a representative," she says.

The U.N.’s verdict is expected to come next month. But Kingsley already considers Cooper’s to be one of the stand-out stories in her yet unfinished film "The Last Colony."

"He had the imagination to bring the issue of D.C. citizens’ lack of voting rights before this international forum, and the tenaciousness to see it through," she says.

Kingsley’s "The Last Colony"—actually a series of eight 30-minute documentary films—is nothing less than the history of the District of Columbia, told through the prism of its citizens’ struggles to obtain full democratic rights. The irony, of course, is that the fight has been mostly with the U.S. government.

Kingsley tells that history, she says, through the stories of the people who made it.

Those interviewed in "The Last Colony"— which Kingsley says she hopes to find the funding to finish by the end of the year — include such well-known figures as former mayor Marion Barry; the city’s first mayor after achieving partial home rule, Walter E. Washington; and the city’s first congressional delegate, Walter E. Fauntroy.

Kingsley underlines that the series features interviews with or about such less-remembered but crucial figures as well, such as Cooper’s late mentor Josephine Butler, whom he describes as having had "revolutionary patience." Also in the film are Butler’s complementary opposite and one of the city’s first elected council members, the "in your face" agitator Julius Hobson, and John L. McMillan, the late U.S. representative from South Carolina who ruled the House of Representatives’ District of Columbia Committee for almost three decades with such an iron hand that he was widely known as "the mayor of Washington."

"I want to go beyond the usual rhetoric one hears about the District’s disenfranchisement," Kingsley says. "I want to deconstruct the (District’s) story to such an extent that it not only provides a plausible thesis as to why the situation persists, but provides activists with enough ammunition that with the proper outreach, circumstances might actually change."

But, she insists, her film series is not political propaganda.

The history of the District’s struggles for democracy, she says, "is a storyteller’s dream."

And, like Cooper, she believes it’s a story relevant far beyond the District’s boundaries.

Kingsley is already in talks with C-SPAN about showing the series nationally. And she is working with the National Council for the Social Studies to help get the series into high school and college classrooms.

She also plans to produce a 90-minute stand-alone version, for screening at film festivals.

"The District’s history is connected to American history," she says. "This story is about race and class. And it’s about power -- who has it, how do they keep it and who are they keeping it from."

She also notes that a recent poll showed that 57 percent of Americans, and 70 percent of recent college graduates, were unaware of D.C. citizens’ limited rights.

For now, Kingsley spends much of her time in her small editing studio off an alley in Cleveland Park, painstakingly choosing from and editing together the vast amount of sound and visual material she’s compiled.

And she keeps up her search for ways to finance the work.

She says she’s become "the ultimate cliché of independent film-making," trying to produce a work that she guesses will end up costing more than $250,000.

That is, though she’s won some grant money for the project and held a couple of fundraisers, Kingsley says she has spent all of her personal savings and emptied her 401(k) retirement fund to pay for the film. She’s also run up bills on seven credit cards, she says.

"You become passionate about what you do, and you don’t want to be constrained by the fact that your resources are limited," she says.

Kingsley got her start in documentary films working as a sound engineer for Academy Award-winning filmmaker Charles Guggenheim, and she has held herself to a high professional standard.

All non-archival footage has been shot on film, not video, and she says she has hired a professional cinematographer for all of those shoots.

Also, the film’s audio interviews were done in professional sound studios whenever possible. Kingsley says she did almost 200 informational interviews for the film; about 30 interviews were recorded for actual use.

Kingsley says "The Last Colony" won’t be filled with "talking heads," with history-makers and historians sitting in armchairs opining about past events.

That’s because Kingsley has followed the example of mentor Guggenheim: all of her interviews are sound, not film interviews; her films’ visual tracks are devoted entirely to archival film and photo images of the events being described in the story.

"Guggenheim hated talking heads. That was probably the most revelatory thing I learned from him," Kingsley says. "He felt they were a waste of screen time, and they took the audience away from the story."

But that strictly documentary approach also poses a challenge. "I have to go and find images to fill all that space," she says.

Kingsley has scoured sources both near and far for documents and images of McMillan — not only the Library of Congress and National Archives, but also such repositories as the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library in Texas and the University of South Carolina.

Some useful material, such as news coverage of Marion Barry in his days as a charismatic, dashiki-clad militant, can be expensive. Defunct TV station WTOP, one of the few local TV stations to retain old news footage, sold its considerable archives to CBS News, which charges about $700 to find and copy its minimum accepted request for 30 seconds of film.

Some of Kingsley’s favorite finds came from the subjects themselves, such as the 1940s home movies contributed by Larry Rosen, who grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in Southwest that was wiped from the city by the massive urban renewal projects of the early 1960s.

One clip shows Rosen’s father, a kosher butcher, demonstrating the prescribed, humane kosher manner for killing a chicken. Standing in a Southwest storefront block that no longer exists, he dangles a full-feathered chicken from his grasp, deftly slices its throat and drains its blood into a pail.

Later, we see Rosen himself in front of his beloved pharmacy on 14th Street NW, a shop soon to be lost to the looting and burning of the 1968 riots — a loss Rosen blames less on the looters than on the feeble federally controlled city government, which took few steps to control the situation and only sent in National Guard troops two days after much of the city’s old commercial corridor had burned to the ground.

"Jewish history is a huge part of D.C. history," Kingsley says. "Showing the people of the city is a vital part of the films’ overall theme. Who lives here, why they came here and why they stayed."

Another one of Kingsley’s prized finds shows the late activist Hobson handing out home rule literature to few takers on a downtown street corner in the 1960s. At the time, President Johnson had recently announced with great fanfare the appointment of the un-elected Mayor Washington and the equally unelected new city council, replacing the long-standing three-member Board of Commissioners.

In an interview for the film, Hobson’s widow remembers the first time he attracted her attention, with his response to a question about that newly appointed council. "He just said, ‘Well, now I have 11 people not to represent me instead of only three,’" she recalls. "I knew he had to be brilliant."

Kingsley says the story of "The Last Colony" is about power — "the power of Congress over local [council] members of the District: how they maintain it and the effects on D.C. residents."

She says today’s fight over the District’s attempt to legislate a "commuter tax" on Maryland and Virginia residents working in Washington is an example.

When Congress was drawing up the city’s home rule charter in the early ’70s, Kingsley notes, Virginia and Maryland congressmen inserted a clause forbidding the District from taxing suburban commuters, "unlike any other jurisdiction in the U.S."

Such interference is a product of the naked exercise of power, she believes.

"Why is Orrin Hatch trying to overturn the District’s gun laws now? Because he can," she says.

She draws a parallel to the notoriously powerful Congressman McMillan.

"The more power a congressman gets, the more he wants to hold onto it," Kingsley observes.

She says she found that a less obvious kind of power politics is played by "the white elite." Its members, she says, can be found on the rosters of the Greater Washington Board of Trade and the Federal City Council — the latter, a secretive Washington Post-connected organization of business and professional leaders that had a large hand in spearheading such big projects as the Metro system in the ’70s and MCI Center in the last decade.

"The white elite know how to work within the current system. They know who to go to, who to talk to. So they don’t have much interest in changing the status quo," Kingsley contends. "But that doesn’t bode well for those who don’t have access to those levers of power."

When it’s finished, Kingsley says, she hopes her series of films will connect the dots of D.C. history in a way that educates, entertains and empowers.

"I like to use the old analogy of the blind man and the elephant," she says, referring to the old fable about the four blind men who try to identify an elephant by touch. Each wrongly guesses a different animal based on which part of the elephant he’s touching.

"Everybody has their own take on the statehood movement, voting rights and so on, and each person looks at their own piece, their own issue in isolation," she says. "I feel like what I can do is put various events into their broader context.

"I hope what I can do is present the elephant."