Whatever Happened to Ross McElwee?
I was curious, so I tried to find out
Years ago I had seen Sherman’s March and absolutely loved it. Ross did a very introspective documentary about his return to North Carolina, reconnecting with his Southern family roots, and ruminating on the sad state of affairs across the country. He had received a grant from an “arts agency,” as he described in this interview with Vanessa Hope, to make a film that explored the current feelings in the South toward the Civil War, in particular Sherman’s devastating “March to the Sea” that altered the course of the war.
Unless you have grown up in the South, you don’t really understand how this antebellum past is so engrained into people. It’s like a mythical lost world they try to recapture, yet so heavily focused on the Civil War that it is sad they can’t get over it. Kind of like reliving Gone with the Wind over and over in their heads.
Ross began shooting in 1981, shortly after Reagan became president. He noted in the interview that the South had become one of the most militarized parts of the country, heavily steeped in nuclear weapon production. However, he had just broken up with his girlfriend and wasn’t really in the mood for such a heavy topic and his thoughts began to drift. He dropped the original lugubrious subtitle,
A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love In the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation
and truncated it into “An Improbable Search for Love,” having become engaged, so to speak, with the principal female subject of his film.
It helped that he had spent time in Providence and Boston, where he studied creative writing at Brown University and graduate filmmaking at MIT. Here he was trying to get over the loss of a girlfriend and seeing what he could rediscover in the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, his boyhood home. He hooked up with Patricia Rendleman, or Pat, who lent a great deal of sex appeal to this otherwise droll documentary.
McElwee did his film on a shoestring budget. It felt more like a home movie than a typical documentary as he interviewed family, friends and strangers. He got sidetracked in his search for Burt Reynolds, cornering an impersonator before finally having a confrontation with his nemesis. I say this because it was obvious Ross was falling in love with Pat and all she seemed interested in was meeting Burt Reynolds with the hope she could seduce him and get a leg up in her fledgling acting career. Ironically, it was Ross who gave her the exposure she craved.
Ross started out with a 9000 USD grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, coughed up quite a bit of his own money, his parents’ money too, along with some additional sources for a total production cost of 75,000 USD, about the price of a house in North Carolina back then. The film was so personal that you had to figure he didn’t expect anyone to buy into it but they did.
The film received a number of good reviews after its premier at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art in 1986. Jay Carr of the Boston Globe called Ross a “Tarheel Woody Allen.” Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the documentary a “wonderful, goofy, pertinent movie.” Siskel and Ebert gave it two thumbs up. The film went onto win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1987 and was subsequently preserved in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
His greatest reward was his father’s approval. He invited his father to the premier, not sure how he would react. They were a family of doctors, conservative ones, and his father had long been worried Ross wouldn’t be able to support himself filming such arcane subjects. To his delight, Ross found his father laughing throughout the film, as was most of the audience. Afterward, his father said, “I didn’t know you could be so funny, Ross.” He loved the film. Plus, it made money, not a lot, but enough to give Ross a measure of independence.
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I didn’t see the film until 1991. I was leading a team of architecture students documenting Ft. Sumter for the Historic American Buildings Survey. The pentagonal masonry fort was slowly sinking into a sandbar in the middle of Charleston Harbor, notable for having been the flashpoint of the American Civil War. Each day my small crew would be ferried out to the island aboard a National Park Service cutter, where we endured the blistering heat, meticulously measuring and photographing the surviving artillery casemates, the canons long since gone. I struck up a friendship with a park ranger, who recommended the documentary to me. It’s not really about the Civil War, he said, but I think you will enjoy it.
With nothing more than a hand-held camera and an ability to get under people’s skin, Ross McElwee showed how to make a documentary that touched people. It certainly touched me. I found myself going through similar emotional crises and easily identified with his perspective.
The film was a nice break from all the heavy reading I was doing. I had to prepare a historic structure report as well. It was interesting to see how the Civil War was now being exploited for tourism. Each day, boatloads of visitors would come out to the fort to catch a glimpse of this war history. The National Park Service tried to keep their account balanced so as not to offend anyone. Brian said it was mostly bullshit but whatever.
At this point McElwee was hard at work on Time Indefinite, released in 1993. He took the title from a passage of The Bible that a Jehovah’s Witness read to him on the doorstep. Ross filmed everything. That camera seemed glued to his shoulder as he moved through life at his slow, methodical pace documenting the world around him. This film was even more personal as he took a deep dive into his own family. If you like David Sedaris, you will enjoy this documentary. They both come from a similar North Carolina background and have a similar way of digging up their family roots.
McElwee wasn’t new to all this. He had made any number of documentaries before Sherman’s March. It’s just that no one had ever heard of him. Further proof that if you just keep doing your thing, you eventually find an audience for your eccentric blend of personal narrative and pithy observations.
He got his start working for D.A. Pennebaker and anthropologist John Marshall, documenting The Kalahari Expedition. Here he is reflecting on that experience many years later. The end result was the 1980 documentary N!ai, the Story of a !Kung Woman. The exclamation marks represent click sounds.
This also struck a chord with me as I spent my early formative years in Angola, next door to Namibia. My father was a mining geologist working for the Portuguese government in the 1960s. I later became aware of the indigenous people of the Kalahari, which stretches across South Africa, Namibia and Botswana, through the famous books and documentaries of Laurens van der Post. The Heart of the Hunter is a must read.
Ross McElwee is still making documentaries. I was surprised to see he is 79. I thought he was not much older than me. He kind of felt like a big brother. Here is his web page, which has been updated with his latest documentary, Remake.
The film began as a documentary of a proposed Hollywood remake of Sherman’s March, pitched by Steve Carr, who is best known for his broad comedies. Ross was credulous to say the least, but Carr said he had money to back the project. Why not? Ross responded but he wondered how Carr would be able to capture the spontonaity of the original film. Then his son Adrian died of an accidental drug overdose and his world devolved into a nightmare.
This was ten years ago, and it took Ross a long time to search through this grief and find some measure of reconciliation, which he described in his interview with Vanessa, which I link again. He found the best way to do this was to revisit his many films, which Adrian figured prominently in. He also digged through Adrian’s hard drive, finding the short films his son had made over the years, dating back to when he was 12 when he filmed a friendly engagement with a young girl on the street over a skateboard. In this way he was able to find some measure of solace, but the untimely death continued to haunt him.
He’s also restored Sherman’s March, which is enjoying its 40th anniversary this year. The film remains relevant as it shows how hard memories are to let go of, both personal, in terms of his attempt to sort out his life, and group, in the way many Southerners still are not able to let go of their antebellum past. McElwee has always approached his documentaries with a great deal of irony, which I enjoy most.
