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Interview
with Brother to Brother’s Rodney Evans
By Joel Dossi, January 4, 2005
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At
a gala showing of Rodney Evans’ Brother to Brother during
the Tribeca Film Festival last year, a would-be ticket buyer was
turned away from a sold-out showing. He was told he’d just have
to wait for the movie to be released theatrically. “Sure,” the
man replied, “a black gay movie. That’ll come to the theaters
really fast.”
Brother
to Brother is now enjoying a limited theatrical release. And
because of its strong opening in New York, the film is doubling
its original 10-city schedule to play in 20 cities across the
U.S. “And with additional strong openings,” Evans wrote in a recent
email, “we can expand even more and get out deep into those red
states where they need this film the most.”
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Brother to
Brother recounts the Harlem Renaissance, as seen through the memories
of Bruce Nugent, the out black writer who co-founded the revolutionary literary
journal Fire!! with Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Wallace
Thurman.
In the film,
an elderly Nugent meets a young black gay artist struggling to find his
voice and together they embark on a journey through Nugent’s past, which
includes writing the poem “Smoke, Lilies, and Jade,” possibly the first
glimpse of homoeroticism between Black men ever written by an African-American.
AE: It
took six years to complete Brother to Brother. That’s pretty unusual,
isn’t it?
RE: Well,
I started writing the script at the end of 1998, when I got my first development
grant. It took about 2 years to do the research and writing, then I started
sending the script out to get the funding to shoot it.
Production
was done in two chunks, basically. 25 percent of the film was shot in
the fall of 2001, and then I used those scenes to cut together a sample
tape to raise more financing.
After I spent
about a year raising money, we were able to shoot the final 75 percent
in the fall of 2002, pretty much a year later.
AE: Didn’t
shooting in two parts cause problems?
RE: Yes.
Shutting production down for a year to raise more money brought a new
set of complications. It was definitely a very unorthodox way of making
a movie, but it was made that way out of necessity. It was the only way
to make the kind of movie I was passionate about and that I really wanted
to see on the screen.
I was profoundly
moved by the stories of the Harlem Renaissance — stories that had never
been told. That was my motivation. I never thought if whether it was going
to open on 2,000 screens and make like, 25 million dollars. That just
wasn’t the point.
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