Janice Engel is an award-winning filmmaker and showrunner. Engel has made numerous documentaries, non-fiction television specials, and series including “Jackson Browne: Going Home,” “Ted Hawkins: Amazing Grace,” and “Addicted.” Under her own banner, she co-created “What We Carry,” an ongoing multi-media documentary series dedicated to preserving Holocaust survivors’ stories.
“Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins” will premiere at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival on January 28.
W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.
JE: “Raise Hell: The Life And Times of Molly Ivins” tells the story of media firebrand Molly Ivins. Often compared to Mark Twain, Ivins was six feet of Texas trouble who, despite her Houston pedigree, took on Good Ol’ Boy corruption wherever she found it. A best-selling author, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, and popular TV pundit, Molly had a nation of fans and frenemies. She courageously spoke truth to power, and it cost her more than once.
But Molly always served up her quality reportage with a heaping dollop of humor. The gal was funny! Her razor-sharp wit left both sides of the aisle laughing and craving ink in her columns. At the height of her popularity, 400 newspapers carried her column.
She railed against “big bidness” in government, and often said, “Texas is the national laboratory for bad gub’ment.” Molly’s words have proved prescient. She knew the Bill of Rights was in peril, and said, “Polarizing people is a good way to win an election and a good way to wreck a country.”
Molly spoke from the heart. She was not a cynic. She gave voice to people who didn’t have one. She called her constituents her “beloveds” and she never stopped raisin’ hell. When she died of breast cancer in 2007, the nation lost a true champion and a woman who seemed to be afraid of nothing.
America is in crisis. Who today can fill Molly Ivins’ size 12 shoes? Why all of us, of course! It’s time to raise hell. Molly Ivins certainly would.
W&H: What drew you to this story?
JE: Six-plus years ago, my soon-to-be producing partner James Egan told me to go see the one-woman play “Red Hot Patriot: The Kick-Ass Wit of Molly Ivins” starring Kathleen Turner. So I did, the last week it was running in Los Angeles. I was knocked out by who Molly Ivins was, how she spoke, and who she so brilliantly skewered. Both James and I could not believe there had never been anything done on Molly Ivins, so we jumped in full throttle and here we are.
As I dug into Molly’s life—practically living in her archives at the Briscoe Center for American Studies at the University of Texas—her friends, family, and colleagues took me in and shared incredible stories and nuggets of this larger than life, warm-hearted, fantastically funny, and brilliant woman who was an absolutely prescient equal opportunity satirist and a serious political wonk.
I also discovered on a much more personal level that both Molly and I shared a similar trajectory: a deep distrust of patriarchal authority and a need to stand up for the underdog. Her politics are my politics, and as her pal Kaye Northcott so aptly says, “Molly hated anyone who would basically kick a cripple.” Me too!
Her rallying cry to “Raise hell, that this our deal, this is our country … that those people up in your state capitols, up in Washington, they’re just the people we’ve hired to drive the bus for awhile” resonates deeply.
She said, “If you don’t vote, you can’t bitch—that’s in Article 27.” Ya think! That alone cemented our kinship and my overwhelming passion to share her story.
W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?
JE: How important it is to vote! To learn and take their civic responsibility with pride and action. It is up to us to do “the heavy lifting,” as her good friend columnist Jim Hightower says.
And how important Molly Ivins was and is to our democracy, our sense of finding a way to agree to disagree, and getting back to bringing together our country. Democracy demands this and depends upon this. Molly knew that!
W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?
JE: The biggest challenge, as in all documentary filmmaking, is finding the money to fund your vision. After being told early on by certain industry colleagues that I pitched to that “this is a biopic, and she’s dead,” we knew that this was going to be a long haul. From what I understand, the average time to make a documentary is seven years — at six and a half years, we’re doing pretty good!
W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.
JE: Because we were not going to get funded via a traditional media network or avenue, we knew that we were going to need to do boots-on-the-ground fundraising. So with my other producing partner Carlisle Vandervoort, the only Texan of our tiny team of three, we did a variety of down-home fundraisers via some “connected” pals in various political and geographic hubs: Los Angeles, Texas, and Washington, D.C.
But our biggest push came when we started doing social media outreach to Molly’s people, her readers—AKA her “constituents”—who missed her unique voice and wry wisdom. Through their donations, Kickstarter, and a couple of political angels, we were able to fund this documentary.
W&H: What inspired you to become a filmmaker?
JE: My father Marty Engel, may he rest in peace ignited by passion for movies. When I was a little girl growing up on Long Island, New York, my dad would make a big deal of watching old studio classics on TV on rainy Sunday afternoons. It was called the “Million Dollar Movie” series.
I would sit nestled in his lap and the images from Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, and Greta Garbo movies lit up my world, and I was hooked. I became obsessed throughout my adolescence into my teenage years, cutting school to take the Long Island railroad into New York City to see films at the Bleecker Street and Carnegie Hall cinemas.
W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?
JE: There’s way too many, but one of my favorites that falls into best and worst is, “You need something to fall back on.” So I focused on editing, which is a great craft and probably one of the best positions to learn how to be a director and tell a story, especially in documentary filmmaking.
W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?
JE: Be true to yourself, stand up for what you believe in, and don’t let some person in authority be dismissive or talk down to you. Call them on it in a professional manner if they do — because if you don’t, you’ll always feel like you were taken advantage of and didn’t get to speak your truth.
If someone is abusive—no matter how much you are being paid—it is not worth staying in a place that is toxic. Follow your gut: first choice, best choice. Stick to your guns and learn to read the room, but always stand by your gut instinct.
W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.
JE: There are way too many talented women filmmakers, past and present, who get overlooked or rarely seen, and we just need to all support each other’s filmmaking efforts.
W&H: It’s been a little over a year since the reckoning in Hollywood and the global film industry began. What differences have you noticed since the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements launched?
JE: There is buzz and more attempts to create parity in the mainstream entertainment industry in regards to directors, cinematographers, and the overall creative positions available. The industry is very much like high school and it is hierarchical regardless of whether you are male or female, but it is particularly egregious toward women. I’ve been a recipient of this attitude my entire career.
That said, Hollywood is still moving very slowly to “allow” the other gender into the clubhouse. So why would you want to be a member of a club that doesn’t want you? We must forge our own pathways and create an environment where people are not jockeying for approval and acceptance. This is the fly in the ointment of creative endeavors.
I actually think that the world of documentary filmmaking is way ahead of its narrative counterpart as a I see more and more fellow female directors doing their craft and starting to be recognized for that effort.
Now is the time for women to strike while the door is slightly ajar. It is our job to kick it wide open off its hinges, re-arrange the entrance way in, and restructure how it’s been done, from the bottom up. Otherwise, we will be destined to repeat the cycle.
