O&M's Eyepatch Lends a Hand to 'Booker's Place'
This searing documentary about prejudice, retribution and resolution got a major lift from the agency's in-house production arm.
O&M Lends a Hand to "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story"
Lynn Roer and David Zellerford of Eyepatch Productions get behind
a documentary on race relations, the power of storytelling and a
filmmaker's nagging questions about responsibility and closure.
By Anthony Vagnoni
When the NBC news and current affairs program "Dateline NBC" airs its upcoming episode about the new documentary "Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story" (currently scheduled for Sunday, July 15 at 7 PM EDT), O&M will be playing a key supporting role. What's interesting about this development is not just that the agency helped produce this 90-minute feature doc that's the centerpiece of the "Dateline" broadcast, but that it's about a topic so far removed from the agency's core mission of building brands and engaging them with consumers.
If anything, the production of "Booker's Place" represents an expression of storytelling at its most basic for the agency and Eyepatch Productions, it's in-house production and content creation arm. (To screen a preview of the film, click here.)
The film was directed by Raymond De Felitta and produced by David Zellerford, who's not only De Felitta's producing partner but is also Executive Producer of Eyepatch. De Felitta is a musician, screenwriter and director perhaps best known for his work in feature films. He wrote and directed the 2009 indie hit "City Island," a family drama that, like "Booker's Place," premiered at Tribeca Film Festival. He also directed the 2006 jazz documentary "'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris," which premiered at Sundance and was also produced by Zellerford.
Zellerford works closely with Lynn Roer, O&M's Director of Moving Pictures, Alternative Content and Events, who got behind the project and, along with Zellerford, convinced the agency to get involved.
First, some background on how "Booker's Place" came to be. According to the film's production notes, back in 1965 filmmaker Frank De Felitta, Raymond's father, made a documentary for NBC News about the changing times in the American South and the tensions of life in the Mississippi Delta during the civil rights struggle. The film was broadcast in May of 1966, with predictable results: Southern stations didn't run the special, and many Southerners who did see it were outraged.
The most riveting part of the film was the short, two-minute segment featuring De Felitta's interview with Booker Wright, a black waiter at a "whites-only" restaurant, who detailed the many indignities he had to endure on a daily basis while waiting on customers, all of which he had to take with a smile. The fallout from this, too, was predictable. Wright, who also owned a cafe on the black side of town called Booker's Place, lost his job at the whites-only restaurant and was beaten up by angry locals, who then shunned him. Seven years later he was gunned down in Greenwood, shot by an African-American man.
The new documentary came about when Raymond De Felitta posted his father's film on YouTube, part of his efforts to expose more people to the work his dad did back in the 1960s. Zellerford saw it and was shocked by the raw power of Wright's portion of the film. He was determined to find out what became of Wright, so he set out to do just that and eventually was connected with Yvette Johnson, Wright's granddaughter. Now living in California where she's a writer and blogger, Johnson had never met her grandfather but knew his story and had heard about but never seen the original 1960s NBC documentary.
As a result, Johnson got a chance to screen the original NBC program. "Booker's Place" grew out of her relationship with De Felitta and Zellerford and their joint interest in taking a new look at this ugly and unfortunate episode. It would not only give Johnson a chance to finally learn about her grandfather, but would give De Felitta's father a chance to examine his own role in Wright's personal journey and help resolve his feelings of responsibility.
The film has already been covered by the national media in the US, being the subject of a story in The Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times back when it first premiered during the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in April. The article (click here to read it) called the film "a personal reckoning." In addition to its coverage in The Times, the web site Indie Wire named it not only one of the best docs of the year but also one of the top-rated film festival premieres of the year according to Critic Wire.
SourceEcreative spoke with Tham Khai Meng, Worldwide Chief Creative Officer of O&M, during a screening of the film that was held recently at the agency's offices on the West Side of Manhattan. For Tham, efforts like this are part of the agency's larger mission to be constantly finding new ways to, as he puts it, "make things."
"For us, we're helping create exciting, emotional, palpable content here," he says. "We're involved, in some respects, for the creative exercise; this is an artistic project, not a brand project. But it's also an important story to tell, and it's great to see storytellers like David and Lynn working with Raymond to get this story out, because they know how to do it. Much of the work on the film was done right here at Ogilvy."
The duo are what Tham calls "quiet achievers," and he ought to know; he's worked with them directly on a number of projects in the past, including a curated set of unbranded short films and documentaries that explore the creative process. The series falls under the heading "Create or Else," and they're part of Tham's mantra that companies like O&M need to be constantly in search of ideas. (He discusses the concept in a clip you can find here.)
Zellerford notes that Eyepatch has been doing this kind of pro bono work for clients for years, "so it wasn't out of character for us to get involved with this," he says, "but it didn't start out as a feature documentary."
"We really didn't know what it would be at first," adds Roer. "We just felt it was worth doing."
Zellerford says that Wright's appearance in the NBC film is "something that's impossible to forget." After speaking with both Raymond and his father about the film, "we all felt there was more to Booker's story that we didn't know."
Working with DP Joe Victorine, a videographer who's shot numerous projects for Eyepatch, Zellerford and De Felitta went back to Greenwood with Johnson to conduct on-site interviews and capture footage of where some of the events in Wright's life took place. They visited the original Booker's Place cafe, long since abandoned, and the scenes of neglect and ruin are powerful metaphors for what happened to Wright after his appearance on TV. The film was edited by George Gross, another Eyepatch regular, who was making his feature editorial debut on the project.
What does Eyepatch's involvement with this program do for the agency, besides lend it a halo? "For sure, it allows us to explore long form storytelling techniques," Zellerford explains. "But it also gives us a wider audience for our work. We're no longer limited to the TV spot, or even to TV, for that matter, in how we reach audiences. Our universe is now vast."
While "Booker's Place" needed theatrical release to qualify for various awards competitions, such as the Academy Awards (besides New York, the film has played in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit and New Orleans), Zellerford says they plan to distribute the film in a much wider array of channels, including video on demand, DVD and online.
There's also the aspect of how "Booker's Place" has impacted its audiences. Zellerford says that many African-American families that have seen the film have been prompted to explore their own family histories. "The culture of O&M is all about great storytelling," he continues, "and that extends to thinking outside the box in terms of where these stories go and how big they can be. For a lot of people, 'Booker's Place' had the feeling of a modern-day film noir."
"Booker's Place" is getting some Oscar shortlist buzz in the documentary world, says Tham, the Worldwide CCO, and he's proud of the agency's contribution. "We're made like this, I suppose," he says, when asked what's in it for O&M. "I think getting involved in this took a lot of courage on David and Lynn's part. But that's no surprise. The two of them are always on. They're not 24/7, they're 25/8. I have to take my hat off to them."
Published 10 July, 2012
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