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Welcome To The Show: A Conversation With Filmmaker Dorie Barton

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Independent filmmaker Dorie Barton has only been in Richmond for a couple of years, but she’s definitely made an impact. Her latest movie, Welcome To The Show, is the first she’s made since arriving in RVA. It features a group of college kids stuck in an immersive game with shifting rules while lost in and around the city.

Dorie already had a pretty significant career in Hollywood before she moved to Richmond in order to teach in VCU’s theatre program. She not only acted in everything from classic soap opera One Life To Live to indie movies like Bobcat Goldthwait’s underrated transgressive film, God Bless America, but also found time to write and direct a feature film called Girl Flu. But when she got to Richmond and started making her new movie, she quickly fell in love with all the city has to offer.

Welcome to Richmond, Dorie Barton! Welcome to your show.

Dorie Barton: I am a multi-disciplinary artist. First I was an actor, and I worked on stage since I was quite little. I studied at CalArts to be an actor, and then I spent 25 years in the film and television industry in Los Angeles, as an actor on stage, film, television, and voiceover.

And then I’ve dabbled in a lot of other things in the industry — I’ve been a script consultant for 15 years, I worked in development for a while, then I became a screenwriter and then, finally, a filmmaker. I’ve written and directed two feature films now.

R. Anthony Harris: What do you enjoy about acting specifically?

DB: That’s changed over the years, but I’m also teaching now and other things at VCU. And it’s really very sweet for me to encounter the young actors — reminds me of how I felt, with that really raw passion for the storytelling. So it’s very inspiring to be around the young people. I think that that is ultimately what most of us that do this like the best, because we get to tell stories in all kinds of forms.

But I also think that what I love about acting, and has really been true ever since I was little, is getting to become somebody else. [Laughs] Getting to become a different person, spend some time not being myself, and really feeling like I’ve lived a different life, or are part of a different life. I think it’s fun. Actually, I didn’t know that I would feel this way, but becoming a filmmaker, I realized [that] by being a writer and director, you kind of get to be everybody. You get to have that experience of playing all the parts, as when you have a dream and everyone in the dream really is kind of some version of you. So even though as a filmmaker I’m not literally being the actor — in that situation, it still feels the same. So I get to feel like I’ve lived this whole other multilayered life.

RAH: That’s amazing. You have a couple of films, Girl Flu from a few years ago and your newest, Welcome To The Show, which you wrote, acted in, and directed. Is there a part of the process you enjoy more? Or is it like you had mentioned just before, being able to set up your own fantasy and work within that.

DB: I love all the different phases of it. And all the phases of making a film are really different. I do love prepping for it, and at that stage where it’s just pure imagination. I really like organizing and prepping and planning, preparing for the shoot. Doing all the shot lists. I actually enjoy scheduling as well, because it really helps me visualize how to create all the pieces of the film.

I recently picked up quilting again and it reminds me why I like both forms so much. Filmmaking is like quilting. You chop up fabric into all these little pieces, and you take all these little pieces and rearrange them in different patterns over and over, and you keep moving them around.

That feels so much like with filmmaking. You gather all of these assets, all these little pieces, all these little scenes and pieces of scenes, and then you you edit it. You edit your film by deciding where the pieces all go and then at some point, you just have to make a decision that it is done.

But yeah, I really like the prep. I think everyone likes production the most. The actual shooting is kind of the most universally loved, and of course, yes, I’m absolutely like “Any day on set is my favorite day.” [Laughs] But I also co-edited this film [Welcome To The Show], and I was deeply involved with the editing process of Girl Flu as well. And I love editing. I absolutely love that part of it. It’s really so much more isolated than being in production. I really love how painstaking and patient [it is], without making perfect the goal, because it’s art and there’s nothing that’s perfect in art! But yeah, really finding out what’s going to make make the story, down to the frame.

RAH: Where did the idea for Welcome To The Show come from?

DB: The first idea when it started cooking in my mind was literally the first day I was ever in Richmond. When I came here, it was in May, and it was absolutely beautiful here. Even though I had grown up in Northern Virginia, I had never been to Richmond before. I came here to find an apartment and I drove in past the Main Street Train Station and drove into Manchester — and I was like, oh my god! It’s beautiful! I must make a movie here. [Laughs]

And I was just so taken with the look and the feel of the city and how beautiful I think it is. All of its contradictions are really, really interesting to me, and really that day, ideas started cooking in my mind about — how can we get people out into this city? What kind of story would take people out into the city, into parts of it that they would never normally go? I’m not quite sure how this entered my brain, but the idea of doing a piece of immersive theater about exploring Richmond.

RAH: I saw the movie a few weeks ago and saw so much of Richmond in it. You actually answered my next question, which was: how important was the city to the film?

DB: I mean, you could make this film, or a film, in a lot of different cities. It’s sort of like a form for exploration. But there were definitely specific things about Richmond that I find especially inspiring.

One of them is part of the story: the challenge of having to cross the river. When you get up on a tall building, and you look down at the James River, this big, beautiful river is just tearing through the middle of town. There’s 25 ways to cross it, but in this film, because of the rules of the show, they can’t cross it over a place that either trains or cars can use, so they have to find, like, the hard way.

And Belle Isle is the answer, with the pedestrian bridges, and then the rocks. And so, in some ways it very much has to be Richmond. I think it’s a introduction to this beautiful place that I would like people to know about, and to see and to admire.

RAH: The film is mixed in with the city, and it just ends up ends up being such a big part of it.

What was it like working with, I would assume, first time actors? In your role as a teacher, you probably deal with young actors all the time, but trying to direct them in a film — was that an easy experience? Or did you find it really challenging?

DB: I mean, I wrote this script for them. Even though I wrote a script for a movie that I wanted to see, I wrote it for these specific actors. I knew going in that I wanted to write something that I felt like we could all really succeed at. We would have the highest chance of hitting a home run with. So I wrote the script to match the story and the city that we were shooting in. I think that they’re all kind of playing… not themselves, but sort of a version of themselves that are not quite as good as humans as they are in real life. They are much better humans in real life. [Laughs] But I wrote their parts to be what I thought they would be just amazing at playing. So I tried to give everybody the best chance of doing great work.

And then, because I was their teacher, when I met the main cast, I was just starting to teach them in an Acting For the Camera class. So from when I met them to when we went into production was like three months, but because I was in class with them twice a week, that time ended up… not intentionally, but it ended up being practice for how it was going to be on on a set. Where we had a lot of shorthand built in from class, and just knew how we worked.

I’m really grateful for rehearsals for the scenes that I knew would be the hardest on the day. We couldn’t afford to shoot anything too many times — you’ve got to keep moving. There were a lot of things that we actually got in a single take, because we had rehearsed so thoroughly.

RAH: I thought you got a couple of really good performances out of this group.

DB: Proud of them. They’re all wonderful in it and I feel like they all took a leap of faith to work together.

dorie barton by kimberly frost
photo by Kimberly Frost

RAH: After you spend so much time planning, writing, shooting and everything else — how does it feel when you get done with a feature film? You are like, “Okay, we’re finally done.” Is there a sort of separation anxiety? Or is it relief? [Laughs]

DB: Have you felt that way before? [Laughs]

RAH: Oh yeah! I’ve worked on projects where I was intensely involved for so long and then it’s finally done. And then there is this period of “What do I do now?”

DB: Well, because the film was immediately at the Richmond International Film Festival, and I love film festivals. It was fun to go to a film festival where the film was shot, and have it open the festival. It was really inspiring just to be around other filmmakers and see other people’s films. I would like to be more part of a community, and not just a maker.

[Laughs] Oh! Immediately after the film festival, I sat down and wrote a screenplay. I can’t have any downtime. Yeah, separation anxiety is a good way to word that.

But yeah as an artist, we’re always going to be doing gig work. Basically, it’s like: you’re in a play, the play ends. You read a script, that part is over. You shoot a film, that comes out, and it’s over. It’s always this cycle, and I’ll probably always cry when something is over. Like, I don’t want to ever get to a place where I’m not that sad about it ending.

RAH: Now that you are in Richmond, and having had your experience in Hollywood, what do you think the city needs in terms of production of films to support independent filmmaking here?

DB: I guess it’s a little hard, because of the timing, and the pandemic stopped so many things — so it’s not always easy to identify, like, who is Richmond-based. When you’re in Los Angeles, pretty much everyone around you is somehow, even tangentially, employed in the film, television, or theater industries, or the music industry. Pretty much everybody in Los Angeles is an artist of some kind, and it’s very easy to pick a conversation up with just about anybody. It’s very easy to, like, crew up in LA. If you have an idea for a weekend, you just get on the phone and, “Let’s find a crew!”

I have a team of people that I work with here that I absolutely love, and I’m super grateful for all the people that worked on Welcome To The Show with me. [They] are phenomenal. And of course, they’re the first people I’m going to call. But I’d like to get to a more expanded view of more people in production and producing. People making things happen.

I really need a community of artists to feel like I’m fully thriving because it is easy to get like trapped in your own echo chamber. I am still in community with my friends from Los Angeles, but it’s not the same.

And so yeah, I would like to see more filmmakers getting together, maybe in writers’ workshops. Like, I would totally do a writers’ workshop right now. Or just a way for us to support each other’s goals. I feel like it would look like a salon. A filmmakers’ salon, to get together and talk about what we’re working on. Or to watch a movie once a month and get together and discuss.

dorie barton by kimberly frost
photo by Kimberly Frost

RAH: Last question: for this year, what are you working on, and what are you looking forward to? What are you working on now?

DB: I am working on developing my next film to write and direct. I’m also writing a film, just to write it. I have a really good feeling about 2022. There’s been a lot of ideas marinating during the past couple of years, and we’re moving into a time to take action. To take positive action and think about [how] a lot of us have changed to some extent, and learning things.

RAH: I love that, Dorie, and I also have a feel really good about this year.

DB: Even today, I feel that way.

RAH: That’s awesome. Thank you. I just really appreciate the time.

DB: Thank you so much. It has been so lovely to talk with you again. I really am quite serious, but I think it’s I feel like it’s going to take some like formalization of film people. A plan where people get together and provide support and encouragement and empowerment and feedback. I think that that would be great.

RAH: No, no, I completely agree. Well, that’s it. Thank you, Dorie.

DB: Thank you so much.

Find out more about Dorie Barton HERE
Follow her on Instagram HERE

Photos by Kimberly Frost

VCUarts MFA Thesis Exhibition: Round One

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April 5-18, 2019

The MFA Thesis Exhibition is a signature event in the VCUarts annual student exhibition calendar. The 2019 MFA Thesis Exhibition will showcase ambitious and challenging works by some of the most talented emerging artists and professionals in the country. Participating departments include: Craft/Material Studies; Graphic Design; Kinetic Imaging; Painting + Printmaking; Photography and Film; and Sculpture + Extended Media.

TICKETS: https://arts.vcu.edu/calendar/event/mfa-thesis-exhibition-round-1-opening-reception-2/

What Happens When A VCU Employee Calls Security On A Black Professor

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There’s been a recent, yet not new, trend in people calling the police on black. Whether it be for falling asleep in their own dorm, brushing their backpack up against a white woman in a store accidentally, waiting for a business meeting in Starbucks, or having a barbeque at the lake — black Americans have had the police called on them for many reasons.

The latest example: last week at Virginia Commonwealth University, an associate professor in the School of the Arts called campus security on artist and visiting professor Caitlin Cherry. 

Cherry was invited to teach a graduate critical theory seminar course and conduct graduate studio visits for painting and printmaking grad students during the fall semester. She commutes from New York to Richmond every two weeks to teach at VCU. Last week, she was beginning her day by sending out emails, sitting in the adjunct lounge of the Fine Arts Building. The room is code-access only, for faculty, administration, and graduate students.

As Cherry was working, an older, non-black gentleman entered the lounge. 

“I say hello and he sort of comes in, doesn’t do anything, doesn’t verbally acknowledge me and walks back out of the room,” Cherry said. 

Minutes later, campus security arrived to ask Cherry to show her VCU identification card. After providing it, Cherry began to absorb what had happened.

“I left the classroom to walk around, and I saw the same gentleman in a classroom. I realized he was a fellow painting and printmaking professor,” Cherry said. “I didn’t know his name, so I looked at him to make sure I could say who it was. I was going to send an email to the chair of my department and tell him what happened.”

Cherry sent an email to Painting and Printmaking Chair Noah Simblist, who apologized for the incident and said they would look into the matter.

After giving security the name of the man she thought made the call, Simblist confirmed it was associate professor Javier Tapia. The reason why Tapia, a Peruvian-born Associate Professor in VCU’s Painting & Printmaking Department, called campus security is still unknown at this point. Tapia did not respond to RVA Magazine’s requests for comment.

“If I didn’t have my ID on me at the time, it would have been possible that I would have been removed from my own classroom — or removed from the building until somebody identified me,” Cherry said.

“It’s a greater issue of what Javier Tapia had to have thought… To think that not only did I not belong in this locked classroom — but that I wasn’t even given the privilege of looking like a graduate student, or any student in the building. I think he was shocked to find out that I was a visiting professor.”

While Tapia is of Peruvian heritage, there is still a bigger racial issue of non-black people calling law enforcement on black people that must be dealt with. When George Zimmerman killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, many people tried to write off his act as racially motivated because Zimmerman is Hispanic. However, acts of oppression and anti-blackness can be perpetrated by anyone.

After posting about the incident on her Facebook, the response from students, other faculty and friends was swift. Many have e-mailed VCU Equity and Access about the occurrence, demanding that action be taken.

PHOTO: Caitlin Cherry, Facebook

“Later that morning, I started my studio visits and felt like I had to suck up a little bit to continue doing my grad student visits,” Cherry said. “Probably the saddest thing is that I had to walk past the man who called security to go to the bathroom, so there was a moment where I had to use the restroom, and I tried to hold it in so that I could avoid him.”

Cherry is taking this experience as an opportunity to not only foster a dialogue about racial tensions in the School of the Arts, but also put measures in place so that this doesn’t happen to any other professor or student. In a political climate hostile to many minority communities, this is an opportunity for a bigger conversation to take place about the power that other people feel over marginalized groups.

Entitlement over spaces and who can be in them is an issue that America needs to address: because it’s not new, and it’s getting black people killed. While it’s a more extreme version of these situations, the shooting of a black man, Botham Jean, in his own apartment in Dallas, Texas is a perfect example of power and entitlement. If someone can have such a strong sense of ownership that they can claim someone else’s home as their own, then kill them, where are black people safe?

“I think that’s why the response is so strong — not because of what could have happened,” Cherry said, “but the fact that there is anxiety around people in positions of power feeling possessive of spaces that they feel are theirs.”

An email was sent out internally by VCUArts Dean Shawn Brixey informing VCUarts students and staff about the situation at hand. It read:

“In light of a recent event involving individuals in one of our departments, which was reported to the School of the Arts administration on Thursday, October 25, we have asked VCU Equity and Access Services to conduct an inquiry into the matter.”

Cherry is making her formal complaint this week with VCU Administration, and says that both the Chair of Painting and Printmaking and the VCUArts Dean have been supportive.

Top image by Jeff Auth at English Wikipedia, CC by 3.0/via Wikimedia

Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to reflect new information regarding the race of the VCU professor in question. 

Fashion, Murder, and Smashed Guitars: VCU Cinematheque Screens Counterculture Classic

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VCUarts’ Cinema is screening Michelangelo Antonioni’s bizarre counterculture masterpiece, Blow-Up, this Sunday at Grace St. Theater as part of VCU’s fall Cinematheque series. The film was hugely influential at the time of its release in 1966, and was the influential Italian director’s only brush with mainstream success.

The film, based on a short story called “The Devil’s Drool” by Argentinian writer Julio Cortazar, follows a hip London fashion photographer as he embarks on a labyrinthian murder investigation, taking him into the seediest corners of London’s mod underground. 

VCUarts’ Cinema visiting professor and film critic Josh Tyree said that Blow-Up was one of the key films of the 1960s.

“It brought high modernist European filmmaking into a commercial framework,” Tyree said. “It also provided the final nail in the coffin of the already very rickety Hollywood Code, regarding censorship of film content.”

The film was a critical and commercial success, despite its (by mid-60s standards) sexually explicit content. It led major Hollywood studios to abandon the Motion Picture Production Code, which set strict limits on what was acceptable to show in a movie released in the USA, in favor of the MPAA rating system that is used today.

Blow-Up is one of 12 Antonioni films being screened by VCUarts’ Cinema this fall. All the films are being presented in their original format: 35 mm film.

“This series provides focused knowledge not only of Antonioni but also of how his films were designed to be seen, in 35mm projections on large screens as collective movie-going experiences,” Tyree said.

The film’s soundtrack was composed by Herbie Hancock. It also features an outlandish live performance by The Yardbirds in which Jeff Beck destroys his guitar and throws the bricolage into the audience, causing a frenzy.

Antonioni’s classic films were groundbreaking at the time of their release in the early 1960s, and have had far-reaching impacts on the world of cinema. Films like L’Avventura, La Notte, and Il Deserto Rosso questioned traditional storytelling narratives, examining existential and modernist dilemmas of life in post-war Europe.

“He challenges almost every element of what Hollywood tells us makes for a good cinematic story,” Tyree said. “It’s simply impossible to fully understand later works by major global directors across the commercial and arthouse spectrum without studying Antonioni’s classics.”

The department presented two of the films, L’Avventura and Il Deserto Rosso, at The Byrd Theatre in Carytown, Richmond’s oldest operating movie theater. Todd Schall-Vess, general manager of The Byrd, works frequently with Richmond film institutions like VCUarts’ Cinema to bring special screening events to the city.

“We are particularly proud of the partnerships that we have with cinema-based institutions,” Schall-Vess said. “Of course, that would not be complete without our ongoing relationship with VCUarts’ Cinema.”

VCUarts’ Cinematheque provides a unique opportunity for students and the public to see Antonioni’s work on the big screen. This Sunday’s presentation of Blow-Up is free and open to public, and will be shown at 7 p.m. at Grace St. Theater, located at 934 W. Grace St.

“Viewing these films in 35mm color projection on a big screen is a feather in the cap of any cinephile,” Tyree said. “It’s difficult to believe how different this can be until you’ve seen it with your own eyes.”

Rejecting Consumerism with New Media Artist Mitchell Craft

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Technology for Mitchell Craft isn’t just a form of engineering or applied sciences, it’s a sense of hope and a means for expression.

Craft saw the advantages of technology at a very young age, and wanted to explore that talent. While growing up, he was introduced to making art with technology through his parents and his guitar teachers, Mathew E. White and Scott Burton.

“I decided I’m just going to get all smooth in highschool, pick an art and look cool,” Craft said. “My thought process was I was just bored at school so I should make art at home.”

Craft was working with family friends and other visual artists since childhood, gaining experience, inspiration, and learning what methods and techniques he could use within his own work. He started making his own videos when he was about 13, but as a young child, he worked with family friend, writer and producer of One Ring Zero, Michael Hearst. Another major influence in his career is singer-songwriter, producer, arranger, and founder of Space Bomb Records, Matthew E. White, with whom Craft assisted one of White’s earlier projects, titled ‘Fight the Big Bull.’

As a graduate from VCU, Craft edits his videos by combining 3D programs, creative code, and manipulated videos. He explains this style is categorized as ‘New Media Art.’ The psychedelic images and optical illusions create an uneasy, yet hypnotic viewing experience as his work is both unsettling and captivating.

“Now that I’m out of college, I’m a freelancer,” he said. “So I do videos for artists and I do professional work, as well.”

Much of Craft’s motivation for his work revolves around nature and redundancies in nature, which is clear in his videos that offer repetitive, albeit bewildering, images. He likes to poke fun at our consumerist society that has an overwhelming amount of product output, yet fails to meet our actual needs.

“I think a lot about the continued series and how we buy the same things over and over again,” he said. “When you go to a big department store to buy toothbrushes, and all [you need] is a toothbrush, but there are hundreds of them, that always baffles me. So I’m trying to explore that and make abstract work about it.” Humans replicate redundancies in nature, similar to the repeat appearance of a type of tree, in their daily lives. Craft uses this theme throughout his work.

Despite his current success, Craft has experienced his own surprises outside the redundancies he feeds on. Life experiences bring out different emotions and different perspectives on things. It’s what defines our character even if it means learning how to redo the usual stuff you’re used to. And for Craft, he managed to constantly evolve through fighting the odds.  

“I was in a bike accident about three years ago and I don’t remember it at all,” Craft said. “That’s the crazy part, I only know stories based on what people told me.”

Craft was diagnosed with a serious concussion and experienced amnesia, losing basic motor and cognitive memory skills such as reading an analog clock. It still didn’t stop him from pursuing his long life goal.

I used video-making as a way of communicating how I felt when I didn’t know how to,” he said. “There’s one piece I made called ‘The Shift,’ because of my depression while I was crippled from the bike accident.

Craft’s solo show recently debuted at Black Iris. The show is based on the idea of arbitrary combinations of images and distortions of reality.

He said he was inspired by the grapple (grape-apple) fruit product in some grocery stores. He explained the whole show revolves around the idea of being surrounded by the things we don’t need, like an unnecessary fruit, yet made to feel like we do.

“I think the show is meant to kind of make fun of the idea that we’re just being thrown things we face all the time, saying consume, consume,” he said. “So I just tried to make weird things for people to look at and say, what the hell is this?”

Mitchell Craft Instagram

In the future, Craft wants to do more immersive set-ups. He likes the idea of filling a space entirely with art, and since he works with new media, he wants to work more with interactivity as well as immersion within architecture. As excited he is for what the future holds, he’s also worried about where it may take him.

“My biggest concern is that I’ll have to get a full time job and not have time to go,” he said. “Luckily, I’ve been okay doing freelance so far but you never know what could happen later.”

Craft said he’s learning to “flow with the wind,” wait for what comes next, and not to think too hard about it.