Principal Production Credits
- Directed, Written and Produced by
- Laurie Coyle and Rick Tejada-Flores
- Featuring
- Will Barnet, Elizabeth Catlett, Carlos Fuentes,
Laura González Matute, the Orozco family, Gobin Stair, John Wilson
- Narrator
- Anjelica Huston
- Voice of Orozco
- Damián Alcázar
- Director of Photography
- Vicente Franco
- Editor
- Ken Schneider
- Visual Effects
- Robert Conner
- Original Score
- David Conte
- Excecutive in Charge for KERA
- Sylvia Komatsu
- Executive Producer
- Rob Tranchin
- Executive Producer for ITVS
- Sally Jo Fifer
- Voice Coach
- Joy Ellison
- Associate Producer
- Jane Greenberg
- Production Manager
- Gregorio Rocha
- Sound Design & Mix
- James LeBrecht
- Scholars
- Jacquelynn Baas, Susannah Glusker,
Edward McCaughan, Renato González Mello, Diane Miliotes, Francis Valentine O’Connor, Victor Alejandro Sorell
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Making of "Orozco: Man of Fire"
By Laurie Coyle, Co-Producer/Director
(originally published in VOZ Magazine, Summer 2007)
It was 5 AM when the flight attendant announced our descent. Through the airplane window, I could make out the faint glow of daybreak to the east. We were on Mexicana Airline’s “tecolote” flight—the “red eye” from San Francisco to Guadalajara. There were no tourists on board; instead, Mexican immigrants going home to visit their families. As the plane approached, ‘canned’ versions of Mexican standards played over the intercom. When “Guadalajara, Guadalajara” came on, a man in the back of the plane burst into song. Other passengers let it rip with whoops and whistles, crying out “es bueno ser mexicano, que no?!” By the time we got off the plane and through customs, the terminal was packed with anxious onlookers waiting for their loved ones, who were hauling enormous suitcases and boxes overloaded with gifts.
We were excited too: after three years of fundraising and preproduction for a documentary portrait of the Mexican muralist José Clemente Orozco, we were finally in production. We’d heard, “You want to do what?” from North Americans who’d never heard of Orozco, Mexicans who considered him passé, and crews wondering why we wanted to hike up a mountain to film a volcano, or how we could hang neutral density gels a hundred feet above the ground. But incredulity had given way to support, and we were poised to begin two grueling weeks of shooting in some of Mexico’s largest and most important public buildings.
Like any film production, OROZCO: Man of Fire was a journey. Why Orozco? What inspired us to make a film about an artist who had been dead for over half a century? On a research trip to Mexico, we scoured bookstores for sources but the results were disheartening: the average art section carried five titles about David Alfaro Siqueiros, ten on Diego Rivera, and even more about the recently idolized Frida Kahlo (selling a large selection of chácharas like clay Frida figurines). As for books about Orozco, we usually found none at all. But piecing his life together from out-of-print books, conversations with people who had known him, and his own writings, we discovered an extraordinary individual with an ambitious and humane vision of the role of art in society.
In making OROZCO: Man of Fire, there were times we felt we were retracing the artist’s steps, fighting an uphill battle for recognition, convincing broadcasters that Orozco was not too obscure or foreign for public television. When we started out, the environment was rather “chilly” with PBS under intense government scrutiny and calls for “blockbuster” programs with mainstream appeal that could attract more corporate underwriting.
Public funders embraced the project and provided 98% of our funding. Our first grant came from the National Endowment for the Humanities, who would become our largest underwriter. Our first production dollars came from Latino Public Broadcasting, (LPB) with funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They were our second largest funder. We also received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and The Independent Television Service (ITVS). Artist biographies are a hard sell to private foundations, but we did receive small grants from Brown Foundation, LEF Foundation, Nion McEvoy and Nu Lambda Trust.
KERA Dallas came on board as our co-producer and provided High Definition equipment that would have been unaffordable otherwise. We wanted the viewer to have the experience of being in the presence of a great work of art, so we shot in wide screen format with moving crane and dolly shots to envelope the viewer in the world of the murals. DP Vicente Franco’s camerawork included use of a jib crane, dolly, tracks and stedi-cam to capture the three-dimensional quality of these huge public buildings. It was the first time Rick Tejada-Flores and I had worked with such large lighting and grip crews of nearly twenty people.
Organizing a bi-national (U.S.-Mexico) shoot of murals located in Mexico’s most important public buildings required the active cooperation of countless institutions and individuals, beginning with the Mexican government. There were multiple levels of permits and, like a feature film, coordination of large numbers of people. One time location scouting at the Supreme Court in Mexico City, we were lying on the floor trying to “frame up” a low angle shot of a mural. An elegant gentleman approached and asked in English what we were doing. He chatted amiably with us, and wrote his name on a slip of paper. We later found out he was a justice of the Supreme Court, and he became instrumental in convincing the Court to grant us permission to film, which we did in the middle of the night when they were not in session.
At the other end of the shooting spectrum was the intimacy of the interviews with the elderly artists and Orozco family members. Will Barnet, Elizabeth Catlett, Arturo Garcia Bustos, Gobin Stair and John Wilson (all between the ages of 76 and 96) shared their wisdom of a whole lifetime spent creating art. Their spirit and spunk inspired our work and gave us a more personal connection to Orozco.
We didn’t want to make a conventional bio-pic, and were blessed to work with talented people who helped us make a film that would do justice to Orozco’s passion and irreverent humor. After much searching, we met visual effects artist Robert Conner, who created whimsical visual tableaux. Our composer David Conte’s orchestral score gave the documentary the majestic sweep Orozco’s murals needed. Our editor Ken Schneider brought a masterful hand to structuring an unwieldy script into compelling narrative. When we chose Damian Alcazar to do Orozco’s voice over, we were unaware he had won almost every major acting award in Latin America that year. We hired him because he brought great depth and dimension to how he read the lines. And when Anjelica Huston agreed to be our narrator, we had no idea she was married to the famous Mexican sculptor Robert Graham. We just felt she had the right touch for Orozco’s irony and was the perfect muse. As they say in the book business, we thank them for their contributions—the program’s limitations are ours alone.
The public broadcast climate has really shifted since we started our journey with Orozco. There’s much more a spirit of renewal, embracing diversity. OROZCO: Man of Fire presents the human drama of one artist’s struggle for recognition. It is also a story of cultural exchange between two peoples in which Orozco and his fellow muralists were trailblazers. With the birth of a new civil rights movement headed by Mexican immigrants, there’s an urgent need to create awareness of the contributions of Mexicans to American society. In making this film, we hope we have succeeded in drawing attention to a significant, overlooked chapter in American culture. Orozco is indeed an American Master and we are pleased that he has found his rightful place.
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Director/Producer/Writer Laurie Coyle
Director/Producer/Writer Laurie Coyle has worked as a producer, writer, and researcher on numerous documentaries, including Culture Clash’s experimental comedy Columbus on Trial, Bill Moyer’s Circle of Recovery, WGBH’s Straight Talk, and Lourdes Portillo’s La Ofrenda – the Days of the Dead. Coyle teamed up with Rick Tejada-Flores on The Fight in the Fields, Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Struggle, for which she was Chief Archival Researcher and Associate Producer. She served as Associate Producer for The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It and the AMERICAN MASTERS special Ralph Ellison: An American Journey. Coyle directed the documentary short Fenix Rising, and co-authored “Women at Farah, an Unfinished Story” in Women and Power in American History (Prentiss Hall).
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Director/Producer/Writer Rick Tejada-Flores
Director/Producer/Writer Rick Tejada-Flores’ produced Rivera in America and Jasper Johns: Ideas in Paint for the PBS series AMERICAN MASTERS and co-produced and directed the PBS primetime specials, The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers’ Struggle, and The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It. The Fight in the Fields had the highest PBS viewer ratings ever among Latino households, and the companion book published by Harcourt Brace, website and curriculum continue to be used by thousands. The Good War aired nationally on PBS on Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday in 2002 and went on to win best documentary of 2002 from the Organization of American Historians and the Association of American Historians. Tejada-Flores has produced for the Smithsonian Institute and received the James Phelan Award for Filmmaking.
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Director of Photography Vicente Franco
Director of Photography Vicente Franco was a 2003 Oscar nominee for Best Documentary and Emmy nominee for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography for Daughter from Danang, winner of the Sundance Film Festival 2002 Grand Jury Prize. He won the Silver Apple/Latin American Studies Association for Cuba Va: the Challenge of the Next Generation. In addition to directing, he is an accomplished cinematographer of documentaries, drama, news and public affairs who won a Peabody for coverage of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake. His credits include the Academy Award nominated Freedom on My Mind, POV specials Discovering Dominga and Thirst, and the PBS series In Search of Law and Order and Making Peace. He has worked extensively with Tejada-Flores and Coyle, shooting The Fight in the Fields as well as The Good War.
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Editor Ken Schneider
Editor Ken Schneider has edited numerous documentaries, including Regret to Inform, which was nominated for an Academy Award and an Emmy as well as winning the Peabody, Sundance and Indie Spirit awards. Ken recently edited POV’s(Point of View) Freedom Machines_ and Ralph Ellison: An American Journey for the PBS series AMERICAN MASTERS. His other credits include Judy Ehrlich and Rick Tejada-Flores’ The Good War and Those who Refused to Fight It, as well as Store Wars: When Wal-Mart Comes to Town, and the PBS primetime series FRONTLINE’s Columbia-Dupont-winning School Colors.
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Narrator Anjelica Huston
Narrator Anjelica Huston is the daughter of director and actor John Huston and Russian prima ballerina Enrica (Ricki) Soma. Huston’s first major role was in Bob Rafelson’s remake of the classic 1940s noir movie The Postman Always Rings Twice. A few years later, Huston won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance as the calculating, imperious Maerose in John Huston’s film adaptation of Richard Condon’s Prizzi’s Honor. Huston thereafter worked prolifically, including co-star billing in Francis Ford Coppola’s Gardens of Stone; Barry Sonnenfeld’s film versions of the Charles Addams cartoons The Addams Family and Addams Family Values, in which she portrayed Addams matriarch Morticia; Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums; and The Life Aquatic. One of her finest performance on-screen was as Lilly, the veteran, iron-willed con artist in Stephen Frears’ The Grifters, for which she was nominated for Best Actress. A sentimental favorite is her performance as the lead in her father’s final film, an adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead.
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Voice of Orozco, Damián Alcázar
Voice of Orozco, Damián Alcázar is one of Latin America’s most renowned actors whose most recent accolades include the 2006 Ariel (Mexico’s Oscar) for Best Actor in Las Vueltas del Citrillo, for which he also won Best Actor at the 2005 Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano in Havana, Cuba. That same year, he won Best Actor awards at the Miami Film Festival, Guadalajara Film Festival and San Sebastian for his role in Crónicas. He previous won the Ariel for Best Actor in Herod’s Law, and Best Supporting Actor in The Crime of Padre Amaro and Lolo. Alcázar has starred in numerous Mexican films, including Bajo California, El Limite del Tiempo; El Anzuelo; Katuwira; Tres Minutos en la Oscuridad; Two Crimes (Best Actor, Cartagena Film Festival); No Juegues con el Amor; Arturo Ripstein’s La Mujer del Puerto; Sexo por Compasión; Pachito Rex, me voy pero no del todo; Héctor; La Habitación azul; Caza humana; Abuelito de Batman; La Leyenda de una Mascara and La Ciudad al Desnudo. He can also be seen in U.S. films like John Sayles’ Men with Guns; Alex Cox’s Highway Patrolman and the TV movie Nurses on the Line: The Crash of Flight 7. He was a founding member of the Veracruzano Theatre Forum at the Veracruzana University, where he served on the faculty, well as the Center for Experimental Theatre.
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Production Manager Gregorio Rocha
Production Manager Gregorio Rocha is a noted documentary director based in Mexico City. His videos have screened internationally, including the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley. He received the Award of Merit in Film from the Latin American Studies Association, Best Fiction Video at Vidarte in Mexico City and the Mesquite Prize for Best Experimental Work at Cinefest San Antonio. Rocha received a Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation and is visiting professor of cinema studies at New York University and the Centro de Capacitacion Cinematografica. His most recent documentary Los Rollos Perdidos de Pancho Villa (The Lost Reels of Pancho Villa) received a post-production fellowship from the Banff Center for the Arts, and screened internationally, including the Margaret Mead Film Festival and Pacific Film Archive.
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Associate Producer Jane Greenberg
Associate Producer Jane Greenberg has been working in the documentary field since earning her Masters degree at Cornell University in 1996. She has worked in various capacities, as producer, director, associate producer, fundraiser, writer, sound person, cameraperson, outreach coordinator and post production supervisor. She produced Fenceline: A Company Town Divided, which was broadcast nationally on the 2002 POV season, and served as Associate Producer for the Emmy award-winning program School Prayer: A Community at War. She first worked with Coyle and Tejada-Flores as postproduction supervisor and researcher for The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It.
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Composer/Arranger/Conductor David Conte
Composer/Arranger/Conductor David Conte is Professor of Composition and conductor of the Conservatory Chorus at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He is the composer of 4 operas, and many works for orchestra, chorus, and chamber ensembles. He specializes in choral music, and his work is in the repertories of choruses throughout the world. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Paris, where he studied with the legendary Nadia Boulanger. With Todd Boekelheide, he wrote the score for the documentary Ballets Russes, shown at the Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals, and is the composer for the documentary “Orozco: Man of Fire” for television.
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Will Barnet
Painter and printmaker Will Barnet was born in Beverly, Massachusetts in 1911. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston from 1927 to 1931 and the Art Students League, where he was appointed professional printer of the institution. Concentrating on lithography, Barnet became a greatly respected teacher at the League in 1941, and disseminated his appreciation of art history, modernism, and Native American art to many inspired pupils into the 1980s. Barnet also taught at Cooper Union, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Cornell University, Yale University, the University of Minnesota, and George Washington University. Barnet is an acclaimed painter and printmaker, whose work has been exhibited in prominent museums and galleries in the United States and Canada and is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
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Elizabeth Catlett
Elizabeth Catlett, sculptor and printmaker, is an African American artist who has made Mexico her home for the last 50 years. Catlett was born in Washington, D.C. in 1919. She attended Howard University where she studied design, printmaking and drawing. In 1940 Catlett became the first student to receive a Master’s degree in sculpture at the University of Iowa. In 1946 Catlett received a fellowship that allowed her to travel to Mexico City where she studied painting, sculpture and lithography. There, she worked with the Taller de Gráfica Popular, a group of printmakers dedicated to using their art to promote social change. After settling in Mexico and later becoming a Mexican citizen, she taught sculpture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City until retiring in 1975.
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Carlos Fuentes
Author Carlos Fuentes was born in 1928 and is Mexico’s leading novelist. He cites many Latin American writers as influences, as well as Cervantes, Faulkner and Balzac. His many novels include Terra Nostra, The Old Gringo, The Years with Laura Diaz, The Eagle’s Throne, Inez, and Where the Air is Clear. His nonfiction books include The Buried Mirror and A New Time for Mexico. Fuentes was editor of the Revista Mexicana de Literatura from 1954-58, Mexican ambassador to France 1974-77, Simón Bolívar professor at the University of Cambridge in 1986, and Robert Kennedy Professor at Harvard University in 1987. Fuentes has received many awards for his accomplishments, among them the Mexican national award for literature in 1984, the Cervantes Prize in 1987, and Légion d’Honneur in 1992. The author of more than twenty books, he divides his time between Mexico City and London, and is a guest professor at Brown University, Rhode Island.
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Gobin Stair
Painter and publisher Gobin Stair was encouraged at an early age by his grandmother Ida Stair, a portraitist. His interest in art found its path when he was hired in his senior year at Dartmouth College to assist muralist José Clemente Orozco while he painted his 24-panel mural series “The Epic of American Civilization” in the Baker Library on campus. Stair was worked as a designer and later as executive director of Beacon Press from 1956-75. It was his leadership and commitment to a free press that moved Beacon Press to publish The Pentagon Papers in 1972, helping to bring an end to the Vietnam War. A few years later, Gobin retired from publishing and devoted himself to a second career in painting.
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John Wilson
Painter, sculptor, and printmaker John Wilson was born in Roxbury, Boston in 1922 to a family of middle class blacks from Guyana. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and studied in Paris with Fernand Leger. He moved to Mexico on a fellowship to study with the Mexican muralists and lived there from 1950-56. Wilson taught art at Boston University from 1965-86 and set up a visual arts program for the Boston black community in the late 1960s-1970s. Among his better-known works is the massive sculpture “Eternal Presence” at the National Center for Afro-American Artists in Boston. Wilson combines influences such as the bold, sculptural forms of the Mexican muralists, the scale and presence of Pre-Columbian Olmec heads, and the serene energy of the Buddha statues. He also created the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. commissioned for the Capitol grounds in Washington D.C.
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