Robert Redford died last week and there’s been a lot in the media about his passion for independent filmmaking. That passion changed my life because, in its early days, the Sundance Film Festival was a low profile gathering of the indie filmmakers’ clan – which turned out to be my clan.
The Sundance Institute Screenwriters Lab invited me, screenwriter/filmmaker Anne Makepeace (my friend) and producer/editor Kenji Yamamoto (my husband) to Utah to work on our script, THOUSAND PIECES OF GOLD. Ever since Kenji and I optioned the novel, people in the film business told me some variation of, “What? A period piece with a Chinese woman in the lead? What are you, crazy?”
Lucky for us, the folks at the Lab saw those things as plusses. Over the course of a week in those beautiful mountains, Anne, Kenji and I met with Academy Award-winning and -nominated screenwriters, each of whom had carefully read the script and shared their perceptive thoughts about it.
Anne’s next draft was so great, PBS’s American Playhouse and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting invested in the production.
But that still didn’t cover the budget, barebones as it was. Kenji and I kept trying to raise the balance.
Finally, in LA one day, I met a producer, Sidney, who knew about the project because, years before, he had given the PBS station in New York, WNET, the air fare to fly Kenji and me from San Francisco to New York to discuss partnering with us on the production of GOLD. When the rights to the novel became available, the station was among our competition, but Kenji and I moved faster and beat them to it.
I handed the script to Sidney on a Friday and on Monday morning, he called to say he loved the script and bridged the gap. Suddenly, we were in preproduction! From there, the Institute continuously supported the project, including introducing us to casting director Lora Kennedy, who found the terrific actors Rosalind Chao and Chris Cooper.
IndieCollect’s 4K restoration of THOUSAND PIECES OF GOLD was released by a breathtakingly honest and accomplished distributor, Kino Lorber, a few years ago.
Robert Redford, gone but never forgotten.