 I'm James Milan. Welcome to this episode of Talk of the Town. One I have been looking forward to having an excuse to do for quite a while and now I have one. I am talking today with Eric Stange. Eric is a local filmmaker who has been plying his trade here in Arlington for many years. We'll find out perhaps just how many years. But one of his most recent films, because you never can tell in terms of when films come out versus when they're made. I know. Anyway, Pony Boys, which we will talk about to a much greater degree later in this conversation, has just shown at the Arlington International Film Festival, which just wrapped up yesterday. And will soon be shown at the International Children's Festival, I think. Is that right? I like the fact that you actually use kids there. So Boston International Kids Film Festival, there's another showing of Pony Boys coming up there. And so that, again, has given me a great reason to invite Eric into the studio and sit down for a talk just for me to figure out and for you to figure out a little bit more about what does it mean to actually be a filmmaker as your profession, especially when you're based here in Arlington, not in New York, not in Hollywood, not in, you know, Bollywood or anything like that, that we're all used to. So, again, with that lengthy introduction, as usual, I want to really thank you for being here. Thanks, James. It's great to be here. And I love talking about this kind of stuff, so I'm looking forward to it. Good. I'm very glad that you do, because I'm going to make you do so. And, again, as I said, I do want to just know, like, what is life as a filmmaker, like, from the inside? So, start by just telling us, you know, how long have you been in Arlington? Is this where you've been the whole time that you've been filmmaking? And then just start to tell us a little bit about the decisions that brought you to that point. And then how do you do it? Well, my wife and I moved to Arlington about 33 years ago, I guess. And I had already started my career as a filmmaker at the time, but just barely. I actually started as a print journalist working for the Boston Herald and freelancing for The Globe and other journals and papers and magazines. And at a certain point, I started writing about documentary filmmakers. And I got to know a few of the local people in Boston, which this was back in the early mid-80s. There was a pretty big community. There still is of filmmakers in Boston. And I realized they were all having more fun than I was. The more I got to know them, I thought, what a nice tribe of people. I mean, they're really committed and they work very collaboratively and doing all these interesting stories. So I decided to somehow get my foot in the door of documentary filmmaking. And I did it by going to a community media organization. A lot like this one happened to be in Newton. Is that right? Yeah, but that's where I started. And they didn't give me any money, but they gave me gear. They gave me a camera and someone who knew how to run the camera. That's what we do, right? Yeah. I ate a story I wanted to do and they helped me figure it out. And that's how it all started. So you hadn't, at that point, as you said, you'd been a print journalist up to that point. Did you have any experience with filmmaking as a medium? No, not really. I mean, I'd written a lot of film reviews. I'd been a movie reviewer for the tab and did stuff like that. But no, I'd never had my hands on a camera. I didn't take any film classes in college or anything. Well, I love the fact that part of this story is that local community media, Newton, Arlington, you name it, gave you that initial leg up and looked what you've made of yourself. Yeah, it's been only 35 years. Yeah, but it was a great opportunity. And you got to start, I always tell young people who want to become filmmakers, you can go to school, you can get a job as a production assistant, this or that, but you can also just get your hands on a camera and make a little film. It doesn't have to be an hour, it could be 10, 15 minutes and we'll still get into festivals if it's good. You got to make it good. But the best thing is just make the film. Yeah, because a lot of times, if you're spending time as a PA or you're in school or something like that, you are learning an awful lot of stuff that isn't going to necessarily go right to what you need to do in order to make a film. Yeah, I mean ideally you do both because it's great to learn from more experienced people. I mean I did that too. I was an associate producer for an English producer, documentary producer, I just kind of lucked into it. But that made a huge difference. I learned a lot in a very short time. So I'm not saying you can learn everything doing your own film, but you kind of have to do both, I think. So let's talk about your films first. You've been at it for, as you said, more than three decades. You've amassed a body of work for sure and one to be proud of. You initially decided to be a documentary filmmaker and that's what you have done ever since, is that right? Were you ever tempted to get into feature filmmaking of any sort or something more creative? Well, I think three of the documentaries I've done had fairly substantial dramatic elements to them. I call them dramatized documentaries, not docudrama. I don't like that term. And so I had a taste of that. And in fact, the most recent one I did that with is called Edgar Allan Poe Buried Alive. It was on PBS a few years ago. They still show it around Halloween. Usually, not sure if they did this year. And that had a substantial amount of drama in it. It's hard. To go from that to a real career in feature filmmaking is a big leap and it's tough to do in Boston. But let me ask you, what was it like in those three films that you did kind of incorporate these kinds of elements? That meant that you were working with actors, right? And that's fundamentally different from the kind of filmmaking that you're generally doing, I assume. Obviously, you're working with interview subjects and subjects of the films and things like that. But what's different about... It's very different. Part of it is just technical. You can't just turn on the camera and film an actor doing something you've got to have told the actor exactly what you want him or her to do. And the camera operator has to know exactly what that person's going to do and the lighting setups have to be just right. People forgive crummy lighting or bad sound or other things that happen in a documentary. It's all part of the process. Dramatic feature films, even if they're part of a documentary, people expect a certain level of production value that's tough and takes a lot more people, makeup, costume. All these departments, I had no idea about when I started doing it, people would start saying, well, who's doing the makeup? Who's doing the hair? Who's doing the props? I'm like, I don't know. But I learned quickly. My family joke the day before I was going to do it for the very first time on a film called Murder at Harvard about an 1849 murder at Harvard. Was that the Parkman? Yeah, the Parkman Webster case. So I did a film about that. We dramatized the courtroom scenes. We dramatized the murder. We actually dramatized quite a bit of it. And the night before the first shoot I was in bed reading a book called How to Direct Actors. My wife said, are you sure you're ready for this? It went okay. I had a lot of help. Well, again, it's a little bit like what you were saying earlier about filmmaking in general. I mean, there is the reading of the books. There is all the preparation. But then you just got to get in there and do it, right? And I was working with a really good director of photography named Boyd Estes who's been around Boston doing this kind of thing for many decades, many more than I. And he knew he was just such a huge help. Right, able to help you a lot. In everything, in direction, in blocking and all the things that I had no idea how to do. Yeah, I do think that people should kind of, you know, stay mindful of the fact that there are these dramatized aspects or elements of a lot of documentary films that we see these days. And that that, you know, as they're watching, there's, if it's done well, it's fairly seamless, etc. It's really pulling attention to itself. But that's a very, like you said, just a whole different kind of involvement there. Yeah. So let me ask, I was talking about your body of work. Your drive was to be a documentary filmmaker. That's what you have been. Do you have, are there other unifying elements to your body of work that, you know, in other words, do you want to, focus on certain kinds of stories? Are you very kind of historically inclined, for instance, because you've mentioned Edgar Allen Poe, Francis Parkman, etc. So just tell us, what are the things around which, the themes around which, your oeuvre? Yeah, I'd say history is the common thread for most of my films. American history, for the most part, because it's much easier to get funding in the U.S. for films about American history. It was a history major in college, and I loved those documentaries that I would see on PBS, usually, that covered some aspect of history. So that's what drew me into it. And that's what ended up leading to the drama part, because if you're trying to do a film about just an historical subject that happened before the advent of photography, you've basically not got a whole lot to work with. I mean, you can have interviews, of course, with experts and people, but you might have a handful of prints, or paintings, or etchings, or something. Something very static. Yeah, very static, and very hard to fill an hour with. So that's what led us to dramatize the murder at Harvard Film. That murder happened in 1849, and daguerreotypes had just started, but barely. So we did have portraits of a lot of the people involved, but that was it. And so we had to fill in a lot of gaps, and then that led to other dramatized parts of history, which is always tricky, because you're trying to be as accurate as possible, relying on the documentary record, so you don't want to take liberties that aren't somehow supported by the evidence. But nonetheless, you have actual people, actual faces, and expressions, and things like that, and instructions, and the dialogue, and all that. It's very difficult not to convey some kind of impression that you either mean to or don't mean to when you start dramatizing, I'm sure. You have to be very careful. It's an interesting challenge. But I still am interested in historical documentaries. I've just branched out a little and done a few more contemporary things. But I still get drawn back to history for the most part. I understandably so. I'm a history teacher myself. I love this very same thing. American history in particular, very rich, very full. Could be doing this for several lifetimes, right? So one of the other distinctions, though, between feature filmmaking and documentary filmmaking, I would imagine is that on the whole, in feature filmmaking, people are looking for things to be of a particular length. And of course, there are short, creative works. But documentary, it seems like there's a lot more flexibility about the whole process, perhaps, and certainly what the end result, whether that end result's going to be 30 minutes, 57, whatever it is. Often. But most of my career, I was doing things for PBS. And there, there's not a whole lot of flexibility. It's either 60 minutes or 90 minutes. They always prefer 60. It's easier to program, which is really 52 minutes by the time they do all their stuff, fundraising around the edges. So in a way, it's hard. You've got to hit it right on the nose. I mean, they tell you 53 minutes, 42 seconds, which is 12 frames, kind of thing. You get the letter. Wow, interesting. There's not a whole lot of flexibility if you're doing it for broadcast, for a series or something like that. If you're doing an independent film that might end up eventually on PBS, that can be more flexible. But they don't like things that don't fit into their scheduling blocks. I don't know if you've, you know, when you're aware of how many films you have made over time. But whatever that number is, and, you know, happy to hear it if you want to share it, how do those, what is the proportion there between the independent films that you're talking about that might find their way to television at some point, but that aren't being made under those constraints, versus when you're either contracted or, in some other way, working for a PBS series, for instance. Yeah, that's a good question. I think I've made about 20 films. I would say every single one, except the two most recent, were done for broadcast of some kind or other. Now, sometimes they're commissioned. That's the best. They just give you the money and let you go. Often I've had to go out and raise the money with some money in hand and say, can you make up the rest? And they often do. On a couple of occasions, people have come with me with money, not the broadcaster, but somebody else. And it hired me to make a film. I've done that two or three times, so that's the best. But yeah, I've never... I'm trying to make sure of this. I don't think I've ever done one until these two shorts in the last few years that weren't specifically for broadcast. And what's changed in the last few years that has either allowed you to do something that you always wanted to do or meant that this is what you're doing right now? Well, I'm... I'm at a certain age. I'm almost 70. Figure I can afford to not take all that time to go out and raise money again, but it's gotten harder to raise the money. So, in a way, I'm kind of glad that at this point in my life I can afford to step back and just do things I want to do. But I've also... It's funny, my career's kind of made a big loop in that I'm trying to teach myself how to shoot and edit myself. So I don't have to raise so much money. I don't have to hire crews. Pony Boys, you mentioned. I edited myself. I just have to give a shout out to Katie Chang, who helped me figure out Adobe Premiere problems along the way. So thank you. Because I was just... It was during the pandemic. I was stuck at home and no one around to kind of call in and help me, but I was able to contact and get some help. So it's funny. I feel like I'm kind of a kid again from the stuff that I'd kind of known many years ago, but it's all changed. So that's... In a way that's a good change, is that the means of production have gotten easier and cheaper and you can make a film with an iPhone. I mean really, you can. It's amazing. But also I've discovered shorts. Technically I guess shorts are films under 40 minutes. I think that's usually the definition. And I never used to do those because they weren't suitable for broadcasts. Broadcasters don't like that sort of odd links, but when I decided... Except they CMI, we're fine with it. Yeah, good. But yeah, when I decided I didn't care that much about broadcast, because frankly, I shouldn't say this on TV, but so many people get their media now other ways. They're not watching TV. And so the internet doesn't care how long something is. In fact, generally. And so I've really had a good time. Well, I mean, you know, that's an elephant in the room kind of statement. Basically, we're all aware, even us here at ACMI doing very important work on the community level, things are only headed in one direction in terms of the way that people are consuming their media these days. So you're certainly right about that. And PBS, if any, among the channels out there, PBS has a very loyal audience and a very consistent one, I would say. Even there, though, I imagine that they're feeling the impact of all of this. Oh yeah, I think so. I mean, all broadcasters are trying to figure out how do we adjust to these new demographics, new technologies. Yeah, so I've enjoyed doing shorts. It's also just so much easier. I mean, to do a 25-minute film versus a 55 or an 85-minute film, it makes a big difference. I bet it does. So just a couple more questions about life as a filmmaker. One is how, basically as you look back on the body of work you've produced, you said some of its commissions, some of it was done kind of, you know, mindful or in corroboration, collaboration with PBS in a particular series or something like that. Do you feel always that you've been able to choose your subject or have you kind of is the reality of being an independent filmmaker or making your life as a filmmaker such that sometimes you just got to do what they ask you to do? Yeah, sometimes you just take something because you need the work and they're offering a particular subject and you say, oh, that sounds pretty good. They're going to pay me to do it, I'll do it. Yeah, so I'd say it's both. And the ones that have been my ideas or often with a collaborator, those are the ones that take often two or three years to raise the money. So you have to say yes to something else along the way. And I've done science films. I did a film for NOVA. I've done a bunch of things for the Discovery Channel at one point. So it's whatever you can get when you're in the thick of it, which is why I'm enjoying the luxury now of not having to do that. Right, absolutely. Another thing I was wondering about, well actually before I get to that let me just ask you, you've mentioned raising money at various times and of course that's part of the sausage making, that's largely hidden from view. What are the sources that you go to? Yeah, for history films, really the main source is the National Endowment for the Humanities, which is a government organization funded by Congress, established by Congress I think in the early 60s. There's a National Endowment for the Arts and one for the Humanities. And the Humanities one is the main one that funds history films. And if you look at American Experience on PBS, many of them will have NEH funding. Those proposals are an absolute bear to do. They take forever. You have to bring together a bunch of scholars. You have to have an advisory panel. You go through many several stages, usually of writing proposals starting for asking for a little bit of money that will then fund you to write the bigger proposal. So it can be three years. It's not something you have an idea today and get the money next week. But, on the other hand, they give you up to $700,000. And you can make some movies for that. Yeah, although often these days it's more than, takes more. But if you get an NEH grant and then you go to PBS. It's much easier to... They'll be very happy to see you and they'll be very happy to give you some more money. They won't match it and they'll give you something. So some tough grant writing is also part of this whole process. It is. And for something that's less ambitious, you're not trying to get an hour long thing on PBS, there are foundations. You can go online and research private foundations that support film in particular areas. Environmental, social justice, criminal reform, there are lots of areas that foundations specialize in that they might be interested in funding a film. So, you know, it's worth that's a possibility at least. Gotcha. So my last question about filmmaking then we'll talk briefly because things are times flying, surprise. We'll talk briefly about Pony Boys to wrap things up. But Arlington, you've been here for all this time. Is there anything particularly good, particularly challenging, or does it not really make that much difference for you as your lifeline filmmaker to be here in Arlington? I mean, there's a nice community of filmmakers in Arlington. I didn't move here because of that. I mean, came for the usual reasons. It's a great town. But over the years I don't know if they've moved here after I did or they were already here, but quite a few people who work in the general same orbit I do and actually that film, Murder at Harvard I mentioned the co-producer with me and co-developer of it lives in Arlington, Melissa Banta. She's not a filmmaker, but she, anyway, it's a long story, but we worked great together. So yeah, I feel like I'm in a community and I've worked with several of the people in Arlington too. So it's always nice to be surrounded by people of like mind and who understand what it is you're trying to do and then you guys are great. You're very much in the community. Arlington Independent Film Festival International Film Festival, excuse me. Yeah, it's a small festival, but it brings a lot of good films. So there's some good stuff going on here for sure. Right. It is, as we know, Arlington's very vibrant community when it comes to the arts and that obviously includes film films, filmmaking filmmakers. Yes. And I think what you just said, I just want to reiterate, it seems so important when you're doing something like filmmaking, which is an intense activity that really takes up just your whole self in a lot of ways and may or may not see the light of day, so to speak or you just don't know what's going to happen. It's great to have people around you who know how that feels and who can support you and you can support in that process. Absolutely, yep. So speaking about knowing how something feels, Pony Boys, which again is the way I got you up to this desk, you were saying before we went on air that it often will, it's a short film that will often be part of a series of shorts at a festival and usually be the last one. And I think I know why, but I'd like to ask you to tell us. Well, it's a great story. Pony Boys is about two boys, nine and eleven years old brothers who in the summer of 1967 took their pet Shetland Pony and a pony cart from Needham, Massachusetts to Montreal, 325 miles or so alone, just the two of them because they wanted to go to Expo 67, the World's Fair in Montreal and their mother not just allowed them, she enabled the trip. She made them prepare, she trained them, she showed them how to the routes and how to read the map and how to take care of the pony and then she sent them off. And they made it, took them 27 days and it's a hilarious story in a way, I mean obviously it could have gone horribly wrong, but it didn't. They had a wonderful time, they tell the story in a very genuine and funny and self-deprecating way. Charming film, people are just find it delightful, it's a great story, it's nostalgic, it brings up serious questions about parenting and how much is too much freedom and this and that, but it doesn't dwell on that, it's really just the two guys recalling their summer 55 years ago and how much fun they had. So yeah, it's been a lot of fun to make, it's a lot of fun to show people. People just love it, I mean it wasn't called a comedy. But it is fun to watch. It's fun to watch. I have to say, absolutely, the time just flies. And most documentaries I've made, there may be a few late moments in them, a few laughs here and there but this is the first one I made that's just kind of laughing all the way through. And like you said, it's kind of like a hit, right? Yeah, it's doing really well, festivals. It was in the New York, it still is New York Times website. It's in New York Times op docs so if you Google and NewYorkTimes.com slash op dash docs you'll find it, just look for Pony Boys. And yeah, everyone can see it now. Yeah, I think it really is, it's kind of heartwarming. But you're right, it also evokes, it's interesting because we've been talking about history and you were saying you're doing stuff that's a little bit more contemporary and this is from the recent 20th and relatively recent 20th century 50 years, not 150 or more but nonetheless it is kind of a historical artifact in a sense because it does invoke this time when such a thing was ludicrous but possible. They did it, right? And again, it's hard to imagine in our current world just this all coming together in a way that would make it possible. Yeah, it is hard to imagine although I find myself wondering is it hard to imagine because we've become more frightened in general? I don't know that there was less violence back then I mean, the summer of 1967 was pretty fraught although not in Vermont and New Hampshire where these kids were and they had no cell phones of course no way of staying in touch nowadays have cell phones so I don't know, hard to know whether it would be harder or easier this time around. Anyway, it's great that you've captured the story as it is. So very last question and then we'll let you go What are you working on? Good question. Well, my stock answer to that right now because I get asked a lot when we show pony boys is that I say I'm quizzing my neighbors trying to find another good story from a neighbor it all came about through a neighborhood barbecue but so far none of the neighbors have come through with as good a story I'm beginning to write a grant to the National Endowment for the Humanities even though I swore I'd never do it again about the film about the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who were the American volunteers who fought in the Spanish Civil War and he has very reminiscent of American veterans who are going to fight in Spain. These were not necessarily veterans but they were young Americans who felt the need to go fight fascism in the mid-thirties and a lot of them died. Absolutely. Tough stories there. A lot of idealism and a lot of death and destruction and brutality unfortunately as well. And the war was lost by the bad guys won. The bad guys did win. They felt the need to go. We do wish you good luck with that. You may be back talking about that at some point. I hope so. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you very much. Thanks James. I have been speaking with Eric Stenge. He is a filmmaker that has been based here in Arlington for a long time made as he said at least 20 films. I'm sure he probably underestimated it. It's been our pleasure. We hope that you've enjoyed it as well. We thank Eric for his time. We thank you for yours. I'm James Milan. This is Talk of the Town. We'll see you next time.