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Filmmakers Rachel Raney and David Murray discuss their quirky subjects, unearthing surprises and the “new holy trilogy” in America.
We were actually talking about making a film about suburban sprawl in Northern California, which is looking more and more like Southern California all the time — thousands of acres of farmland sold for tract housing developments, home to some of the fastest growing towns in the U.S., etc. So we were searching for the right place to set this particular story. In the meantime, we spotted an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, about this town Livermore losing their Centennial Time Capsule. This struck us as immediately funny, that a town with a nuclear lab could lose a simple metal canister buried in a park just 25-30 years ago. But it also seemed like a powerful if subtle metaphor of a town losing its identity. The film we ended up making was much more about the people of Livermore and only vaguely about sprawl, which just goes to show you how much a film can evolve from your initial inspiration.
We began “investigating” this lost time capsule, talking to folks associated with the burial of it many years ago. The story and the characters just kind of materialized organically. We’d interview one local involved with the capsule who would turn us on to another local who knew all about Livermore’s ranching history, and then another old timer who would fill us in about the lab, and it just kept on like that. And before we knew it, we were hearing all kinds of strange stories… stuff we were never expecting to hear about in what most people would consider a boring suburban town.
We were both working full time on paid projects (David as a video designer at a post house, Rachel as an associate producer or co-producer on other filmmakers’ docs) during the two-and-a-half years it took us to make LIVERMORE. So the whole movie was shot on Saturdays and Sundays over two summers, and we edited evenings, often after long workdays. It was pretty grueling, but the only way we knew how to pull off a completely non-funded project. What didn’t get done? Well we certainly didn’t buy any real estate or have kids while doing it.
We’ve been very surprised, in a good way. First of all, people have laughed during our screenings. A lot, actually. We always thought the material was funny, but we weren’t sure other people would think so. And we were so relieved that people in Livermore embraced the movie. Instead of feeling like we’re poking fun at the town, folks really seemed to appreciate that we discovered what an unusual place Livermore is — not just another 'burb' off Highway 580.
When we set out to make a film on sprawl, we were imagining mind-deadening homogeneity around every suburban corner. But with Livermore, you’ve got a town that’s on the verge of that, quickly filling up with big box retailers, chain restaurants and bedroom commuters who never venture downtown. The quirky Livermore residents that we featured in our movie are definitely becoming a smaller part of the community. Two of the people featured in our movie died a couple of months after LIVERMORE had its film festival premiere.
We had been looking for Adam Fortunate Eagle Nordwall for a few months when we finally learned he had moved out to Fallon, Nevada. We packed up our gear and road-tripped out there one weekend. As we pulled up in front of Adam’s place, we couldn’t help but notice a gigantic, round, temple-looking structure next to his house made out of automobile tires. Our three-hour interview with Adam covered his Earth Lodge construction project along with many of his other outrageous but true tales chronicling his long life as a comedic artist/activist. But it was just too far off from Livermore and the patchwork of stories we were weaving together about the town. So the Earth Lodge was a hard thing to cut. That, and Bill Owens’s quote about the new holy trilogy in America being Starbucks, Jamba Juice and World Wraps.
David would be a fiddle player, Rachel a private investigator, or a farmer.
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