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The New York Times
N.Y. / Region
PUBLIC LIVES
A Filmmaker
Triumphant,
a Film About Triumph
By ROBIN FINN,
nytimes.com from the Web, March 7, 2008
CYNTHIA WADE toted her hefty Oscar —
it weighs eight and a half pounds, reminiscent of a healthy newborn, which is
perhaps why her husband calls it their third child — home to Brooklyn on a
red-eye flight. She had the option of leaving the statuette behind to be
properly labeled and engraved, gratis, with her name and “Freeheld,” the title
of the wrenching 38-minute film that won for best documentary short subject.
But she chose not to part with it.
Not when this Oscar had gone straight from the famous hands of Tom Hanks to her
shaky ones — he glanced down from the stage and brought her back to reality with
the words, “Come on up, kiddo, it’s your moment.” Nor when the mortally
ill star of “Freeheld,” Detective Lt. Laurel Hester of Point Pleasant, N.J., who
valiantly fought the (male) freeholders of Ocean County for the right to
transfer her pension to her domestic partner and died of cancer three weeks
after prevailing, counted “Forrest Gump” as a favorite film and named two of
their pets after its characters. It felt karmically correct.
I asked them to send me the label when it’s engraved, and I’ll take care of it,”
said Ms. Wade, 40, a details person. For the record, she wore a Zac Posen
gown and borrowed diamonds worth $200,000 (“It was like wearing a mortgage”) for
the red-carpet procession, where she was between George Clooney and Jason
Bateman.
“When your film is up for an Academy Award, you become a product,” Ms. Wade
said, “but not really the product anybody out there is interested in.
You’re the lowest of the low, the stepsister to the feature documentary.
There are moneymaking films and there are issue films. ‘Freeheld’ is an
issue film. And I was worried it would be the most depressing film ever
made because I did not think Laurel would live to see justice done.”
“Freeheld,” which cost Ms. Wade $350,000 to make and is scheduled on Cinemax in
June, was not intended as a feature-length film or Oscar contender. For
one thing, she did not have enough footage for a longer film. She spent
only 10 weeks with Ms. Hester, living part of that time in her guest room.
She moved out five days before Ms. Hester died “because, as close as we became,
at the end they needed their privacy, and I was not family.” For another,
the short format made it an ideal educational video. “The goal was never
an Oscar; the goal was to bring attention to this issue in other states where
gay rights are on the legislative agenda. This was what Laurel ultimately
wanted and why she agreed to let me film her at all.” Nonetheless, the
film has captured 15 awards.
As for the Oscar itself, at the Governor’s Ball after the ceremony where Ms.
Wade had delivered an acceptance speech highlighting the moral imperative of
granting homosexual couples the same rights as heterosexuals, the statuette wore
a locket containing Ms. Hester’s ashes.
Ms. Hester’s partner, Stacie Andree, an auto mechanic who retained their home
thanks to receiving her partner’s pension, brought the locket to the ceremony.
In a sense, said Ms. Wade, who had given birth to her second daughter just four
months before learning of, being outraged by and deciding to document Ms.
Hester’s struggle, “closure” was achieved in a most unlikely, and formal,
setting. Plus Champagne.
BACK at her bare-bones office on the fringe of Park Slope, Ms. Wade is eating a
takeout salad she picked up after teaching her weekly class in advanced digital
cinematography at the New School. The Oscar, swathed in bubble wrap,
accompanied her on the subway and made the rounds of the classroom. She
also took it to her local latte shop, where one bystander mistook it for a jar
of maple syrup. When informed it was a genuine Oscar, the next question
was, “Whose Oscar?”
Ms. Wade, who shot a documentary for her senior thesis at Smith College and
worked as a shelter coordinator for homeless families in the Bronx to pay off
her loan from her days getting a master’s degree in documentary film production
from Stanford University, was instantly reminded that making documentaries goes
hand in hand, usually, with anonymity. Not that that’s a bad thing.
“The whole point of being a documentary filmmaker is to be the storyteller
behind the scenes,” she said. Although occasionally the story told has
been a story she has lived. Her 1998 Cinemax documentary, “Grist for the
Mill,” chronicled the disintegration of a marriage — her parents’ marriage.
“I guess I did it to exorcise some ghosts,” she said, “but I’ll never make
another personal film again. When people say they don’t like a film
you made and you and your family are actually in the film, it’s a double
whammy.”
Her 2004 HBO documentary “Shelter Dogs” also has a personal connection.
Ms. Wade and her husband, Matthew Syrett, a marketing consultant, were at the
end of their rope attempting to domesticate an incorrigibly surly mongrel
adopted from a no-kill shelter when she did the research that led her to make
that film. “Unflinching” is the word most often used by critics to
describe Ms. Wade’s style, but recapping “Shelter Dogs,” which explored the
pro-euthanasia ethics of Sue Sternberg, an upstate shelter director, unnerves
her. No, she did not have her dog killed; she found him a home without
toddlers. A false Internet rumor generated by no-kill activists claimed
she dumped him on Ms. Sternberg. “Not true and still hurtful,” she said.
Next up? She has been offered seed money for a film on the rights of
survivors of murder victims. It seems, she said, an appropriately grim
topic: “I kind of back into an issue and become this unlikely activist.”
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