IFILM Review

Slamdance Preview: The Way-Off Broadway Desert Beauty of "Amargosa" By Holly Willis

Out in the dusty, awesome desolation of Death Valley, California, lives a stage performer named Marta Becket, who, despite being nearly 80 years old, still dances to packed houses. Her performances, a rich mixture of kitsch extravaganza and inimitable American folk art, draw audiences from hundreds of miles away to the remote theater she calls Amargosa. Becket and her venue are the subject "Amargosa," a new documentary by Todd Robinson, premiering at the Slamdance film festival in Park City, Utah. It all started in the early 1960s when Marta and Tom, her then-husband, broke down in a small town called Death Valley Junction (pop. 10) where Marta stumbled on a derelict opera house. Something happened as Marta stood inside the once grand hall, and within a few minutes, she had decided that she was home. The pair relinquished their past lives as New Yorkers, rented the neglected theater and began to restore it. And Marta found a place to completely indulge her passion for painting and dance, and had soon transformed the space into a magical haven for the pursuit of dreams. Cut to early 1999 when filmmaker Robinson learned about this fantastic character from his sister, and immediately imagined a movie. "I understood that within Marta's story was the story of anyone who had had a dream and who had decided to follow it," he says. "And that's the power of storytelling--it's not so much about the specifics of each story, but instead how those details work as an allegory, reaching out and speaking to others." And Robinson knows all about allegory. He is, after all, a screenwriter whose best known work was for Ridley Scott's "White Squall," which he also coproduced. But he knows about documentary filmmaking, too. In 1996, he wrote and directed "Wild Bill-Hollywood Maverick," the award-winning portrait of director William A. Wellman which was featured prominently at the Sundance Film Festival. With his latest film, "Amargosa," Robinson profiles Becket and her theater, constructing an elegy not only for a woman and her commitment to living a life devoted to art, but to our culture's fading understanding of art itself. The Art of Documentary Perhaps due in part to his background in narrative film, Robinson refuses to maintain a distinction between documentary and fictional films. "I don't understand the insistence on making that divide," he says. "What I wanted to do with this film was, frankly, make an art film, but one that would tell a story." Robinson thus set out with a Super 16 Arriflex camera, an old Bolex wind-up camera, a lot of film stock and a desire to create the best looking movie he possibly could. And the film's opening montage is indeed gorgeous, all static images of the desert's details with a hazy panoply of colors off in the distance creating a sense of the mystical. And as we move closer to Amargosa, finally glimpsing Marta, we see her caught almost in slow motion, in a blur of sand. "Ray Bradbury once said that Marta is half mirage and half oasis," says Robinson, "and by collapsing five miles of the desert into that one shot, I wanted to catch that sense of her, and that sense of discovering her for the first time." And it is this sense of discovery that Robinson insisted on maintaining with his cinematography. There are thus many other images throughout the film, and especially of the desert, that are absolutely breathtaking. Roiling clouds and artfully arranged sand dunes . . . "If you want to shoot the desert," advises Robinson, "you have to do it in the winter. All the Pacific storms come rolling in and you get this light and these clouds and these images that you can't get anywhere else." Robinson shot many of the images at 16 frames per second, and took the time and money to get certain key shots. He rented a helicopter, for example, explaining to his investors that if he wanted to depict Marta's true isolation, he needed to be able to get up in the sky and show just how far the sand stretched out from the little compound in the desert. He also rented a crane to get the film's final shot, a sleek retreat that starts inside the theater on Marta, dollies backward and out the door and then lifts upward into the sky, dissolving into a shot taken from the helicopter. "I wanted to leave Marta there on that stage behind those doors in your mind forever," says Robinson. "The treasure shown in the film is still there for people to go and find for themselves." Getting the Story Robinson's attention to style does not preclude his equal emphasis on storytelling. He gets Marta to talk about her life, and she offers a good many details that are both painful and revealing. Uncovering these details took some work, however. "I'm used to shooting from a distance, standing back, using a long lens, making the image beautiful," explains Robinson. "But when I did that with Marta, nothing happened. She wouldn't talk. So I got my friend Frank Dobbs, a Vietnam combat photographer, to come and help out. He told me I had to get in close to her, and when I said the hell with the shot and got right up next to her, I finally got that intensity." Robinson says that he also figured out that distracting his subject allowed her to talk more freely. "I would try to get her to do other things, like paint, and when she was absorbed that way, she would talk to me." Another tactic Robinson tried was having Marta go through old photographs. "It was a very hard thing," he confesses. "She got very emotional, and one of the things that you have to do as a filmmaker is pull people out into these uncomfortable places and keep them there. It is very intense and it can only happen if they are not feeling self-conscious." The filmmaker himself underwent his own sense of discomfort during the editing of the film. "While making a documentary can be very much like making a narrative film," he says, "you feel so much more vulnerable because you're working in a vacuum. You don't have the blueprint in front of you, telling you what to do, so it's all about risk." Robinson notes a large sense of gratitude toward the film's editor. "I may sound sexist here, but there's something intensely maternal that happens with some editors--the director is feeling so insecure, and she somehow is incredibly reassuring, and she puts it all together and suddenly you have a movie." Yes, you do. Now cut to late 1999. Robinson submits the film to Sundance, and gets a form letter rejection. So he opts for a premiere at Slamdance, and in the meantime, makes the Academy's short list of documentary film nominees. He's ecstatic, and, with his partners producer Sidney Sherman and director Ken Carlson, ready to keep making documentary films through Triple Play Pictures, a company devoted to the art of doucmentary filmmaking. In the meantime, "Amargosa" will screen at the Slamdance main venue, Treasure Mountain, on January 26 at midnight, and on the 28 at 3 p.m. It's a gem and shouldn't be missed. Return to Reviews