How did you get started?
I got my degree in Cinema Studies: film history, culture, and psychology of film. When I was a freshman and about to declare my major, it was actually going to be cinematography, because that’s what I really wanted to do. But, they were canceling that degree program that year [at the University of Illinois]. And so when I went to declare as a cinematography major, they said, well you could continue cinematography studies and have a degree in cinematography, but you would just be taking cinema studies classes. And I’m like, I don’t want to end up on set and I can’t use a light meter, you know? That’s not preparing me to be a cinematographer, they’re two completely different jobs. So I looked into transferring to Columbia College for filmmaking .
At the time, I had a subscription to American Cinematographer Magazine and I read every issue dreaming about when I could have that “A.S.C” after my name. And I was so into it. I was like, this is what I want to be. So I was flipping through that magazine one day, and someone had written an article on whether or not to go to film school for cinematography. I was like, ‘they can hear me.’ It was perfect timing. And so the guy who wrote it was a professor at NYU. And I found the guy’s phone number. I called and I was like, ‘I just read your article, and I got to be honest, it didn’t really help me make a decision. Can I talk to you?’ And he talked to me for like an hour. I love people like that. He clearly wanted to help. But I left that phone call just as confused. And it was time for me to declare a major or transfer. But the last two pages of every issue had a roster of everyone who was a member of the ASC, the American Society of Cinematographers,, and I couldn’t find any female names. So that was what made the decision for me, unfortunately. And I feel like that’s where the story could end — I ‘gave up my dreams,’ so to speak. But now, I’m 44 and I run my own business, and I got there by this winding direction of just trying to find myself; what it is I like to do, and where I can apply it.
It was my dream to be in filmmaking. And I did live it out for a while. After I graduated with my degree in cinema studies, I moved to Chicago, and worked with a bunch of Columbia College grads and students on film sets so that I could get the experience without having to go to school. I made films with them, and I got a full-time job to make money because bills need to be paid. It’s like nobody does it full time because it’s impossible. The money that I made and the health insurance from a “real job” kind of subsidized my filmmaking. So I ended up mostly in documentaries and I found what I liked the most: I liked being behind the camera. But I struggled with narrative filmmaking behind the camera. And maybe it’s just I wasn’t ready for it at the time, I’m not sure, but I know I really liked documentary filmmaking so that’s where I went.
And so I was working on documentary films, both behind the camera and behind the office, as you would say, because I was doing more of the administration work — there aren’t a lot of creative thinkers in fields like filmmaking who are also very data driven, analytical, and organized. So the very first short film I went to work on was as a PA, and I ended up as the assistant director, because I was organized’ And so I just jumped in by making schedules and doing all the budgeting and stuff. The biggest film I worked on was called “Revenge of the Electric Car.” And that was when I got to basically the biggest stage in my filmmaking career. The budget was over a million dollars. It was a great film, and I was brought on afterward toward the end of production for marketing and distribution. So I was the one putting together all of the theatrical distribution, negotiating the windows for DVD sales,streaming, TV, and theatrical, and all of the film festivals.
And it’s funny: When I started doing that, one of the independent filmmaking magazines came up with a title for a new type of job that independent filmmakers needed. They called it ‘producer of marketing and distribution,’ and that’s the person who puts together all the marketing and distribution plans for a film, treating each film like a small business. Nearly every production, every film, has a production company that’s a small business, and that business is only promoting that one film. And so that was my job with that film and it was a great experience. I loved doing what I did. I was one of the first people called Producer of Marketing and Distribution, which they call PMD now.But since I had that new title, suddenly people were emailing me and calling me.
So I could have kept going — I was making a career of it, and I could have. We premiered “Revenge of the Electric Car” at Tribeca, and there were a lot of big names that I was dealing with. I ended up working directly with David Duchovny because he moderated the panel at the opening for the festival. So we had talked on the phone to prep for the event,, and then for like an hour before the panel we were hanging out in the green room together, and he was talking about the new role of PMD and that he was working on an independent film at the time. I got this sense that he wanted to bring me on board with that. I thought, OK, this is it. I could do this. This could be my job now. I could still be in independent film behind the scenes in distribution, I could still have something that is more me, because I don’t like those long days on set, right — they stress me out too much. But there’s something that said: That’s not for me.
You felt it? Knew it wasn’t right for you, in your gut.
Yeah. And with Chicago, there’s the whole ‘you either have to live in New York or LA to be a real filmmaker.’ This city has always been subject to that belief. And there’s some unfortunate truth to that. And I love Chicago and didn’t want to leave.
So transitioning into what I do now: Cinematography and photography are very close cousins. So it makes sense that I got into photography for the art and started my own studio for the business. I had my full-time job for money, working in marketing downtown for a computer forensics company — something that I knew nothing about and gave no shits for, right? But I learned all the skills of running a service-based business in the Chicago professional community.
There was a lot of misogyny in my job. It was in computers, technology, and I was a woman. And this was not very long ago. My boss was an aging Baby Boomer who would walk past the fax machine to ask me to fax something for him. That’s not what I signed up for, you know? It was a small company, and there was no receptionist. There was no assistant for him. There was also no need for one but he decided I should be that assistant because I was a young woman. And then he just started saying, well, we all wear many hats here. And I’m like, not really — everyone’s wearing one hat. And I’m the only one being asked to go pick up your goddamn dry cleaning. But I digress…
My final straw was when he literally took my marketing plan and repackaged it as his own. So I got a new job, and then learned that it really works much differently, and I kind of had this nervous breakdown over it. But I was still working on a documentary film with a friend of mine at the time, and she was really excited about that — that I quit my job. She was like, “Now we can finish the documentary.”
We went on this paper trip — we were working on a documentary about a letterpress artist. He was actually just in town — I hadn’t seen him in years — and I went and bought some posters from him. He was doing an artist talk and I walked up to him and was like: Do you remember me? And he’s like, no way! We went to Italy together because his girlfriend at the time was Italian. It was a lot of fun — I have fond memories of my film filmmaking days. So I started, and that’s what I was doing for my job-job. My roommate at the time needed head shots to audition and asked me to help her out. So I took a roll of 36. We walked around town, and I took pictures of her, and developed them in the basement. I printed a couple eight by tens, and we wrote her name in Sharpie on the bottom and she got the part.
That’s around when I started charging, around 2004 or 2005. I built a website, and then I switched to digital — I realized LinkedIn was really big and started shooting business professionals and started to market myself that way. While working on independent filmmaking, on the side, it was kind of like two or three branches; the main branch was my source of funding and health insurance, but I realized how much stress and anxiety it was causing me and that it was clearly not a good fit, so I had to get rid of it. And I just kept those two little ones going because they kept me alive. I loved filmmaking, but it wasn’t really doing it for me either; I did love running a business and watching it grow and honing a craft —and always improving on it and keeping up with it — that’s been the thing that’s excited me. And at one point, when someone asked me, what would you do if you won the lottery and you didn’t have to work another day in your life? And I was said, ‘I would still do what I’m doing, but I would take more vacations, and I would get a bigger studio.’ It felt so good to answer that.
I was talking to a friend about this recently. I feel like we’re sold this idea growing up, and it starts in kindergarten: What are you gonna be when you grow up? And we’re sold this idea that you have to ‘be a thing.’ And you have to ‘pick a thing to do.’ And that thing is your lifelong goal. It is your life. It’s you. Your desire. And it feels as if anyone who doesn’t have a passion or doesn’t follow said passion is a failure in some way. But in reality, human beings are complicated things. We are — all of us, especially creative types in filmmakings. We’re a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And every job and almost every industry has a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And it’s okay, and it’s actually normal and probably healthier to pursue different things because of those differences. I don’t think human beings were meant to do one thing for the rest of time.
My business now, as I’ve built it: Including myself, there are four portrait photographers, five event photographers, 10 makeup artists, an operations manager, a photo assistant, and a bookkeeper. It’s happening now. We have a 3,000 square foot studio in the West Loop. It’s a lot of work on my part now because it isn’t just photographing people anymore: It’s to market the business — sell it, tweak it, so that it’s something people want and feel proud of. Actually, if you told me that that’s what I would be doing 15 years ago, I would have been like: I just want to take a picture. But now, I’m really excited by it. The fact that I still get to take pictures — it’s like a cherry on the top.
Maybe that’s why I’m a small business owner, because I’m definitely not meant to do just one thing. And that’s what a small business owner does: It’s constantly doing so many different things. You’re the cleaning person, then you’re the fix-it person, and you’re the marketer, then you’re the bookkeeper.
So when you said it just didn’t feel right about continuing with filmmaking, what was it that didn’t feel right?
It’s hard to put into words, and I think that it’s because of that idea that we’re supposed to have a passion, we’re supposed to follow it. You don’t do filmmaking unless you’re passionate about it. You know? It’s a business, but that’s secondary. If you don’t follow your capital P passion, you have to have a damn good reason. And so I struggled to come up with a damn good reason. But now, it’s like, OK — hindsight is 2020.
And I feel like, especially in my age group, you either followed your passion or you didn’t. And people act as if it’s too late to change gears. And that’s just not true. I can’t tell you how many clients we have who are changing careers later in life. And I mean left-turn careers. And rather than everyone else measuring your success, can’t you just look at it and ask yourself: Is what I followed what I want to do? And if you answer yes — isn’t that success? You can’t use a yardstick to measure the success that you do or don’t have in life or business; whatever it is you do that makes you happy and that you do for a living, so to speak. But you also can’t measure how you feel about it. And I think it’s kind of toxic that we spend our lives trying to measure how we feel about it. How other people feel about it. How well you’re doing it. Your life is like a film. Does your storyline have the proper arc or not? In reality, we make our own narrative arcs; they change as our life continues and become more experimental film than pure documentary or pure fiction or non fiction.
What’s one of the very first questions that someone will ask you when you meet them? ‘What do you do?’ They want to understand you and to define you, right?
Right. ‘Oh, they’re a filmmaker.’ ‘Oh, they’re a writer.’ And it’s just: There you are. But I know lots of people who do filmmaking, and they’re not often just the filmmaker. The older you get, the more you realize how multifaceted people are in general. If you spend another 10, 15 minutes talking to them, you learn that they also make pottery on the side; or that they got really into archery for a while, or cosplay. Everyone’s got something — whether it’s artistic or not — everyone has an outlet, and it’s part of their identity. And that ties into everyone’s life being like an experimental film. It doesn’t have to be liked by audiences. And if you don’t like it, you can edit it.
Is there anything that you wish could be edited in your life film?
I think the only regret that I have that I hope doesn’t continue is the fact that being a woman was part of that decision factor — that should have never been part of that. And I feel like every woman, every person who identifies as a non-white heterosexual straight man, has had moments like that. And I would love to see a world in which that feeling doesn’t exist anymore. Where people don’t have to feel that sense of exhaustion; when considering a path that they want to take or might take and know that it’s an uphill battle, I want it to not be an uphill battle for anyone. No one’s job, or passion — capital P or lowercase P — is an uphill battle for anyone but themselves and their own abilities and creativity. It shouldn’t be because of who they are or where they fit in in that industry. We should all have the freedom to make our experimental film: Experiment with who we are, find out what it is we like, find out when and how that changes and adapt to it and not have that extra societal pressure.
