 Janice Engel is an award-winning filmmaker who has made numerous documentaries and nonfiction television specials and series including Jackson Brown Going Home, Ted Hawkins Amazing Grace and the documentary series Addicted. Janice is a professor at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco where she teaches documentary film. She's a long-time resident of Los Angeles and a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Please join me in welcoming Janice Engel. Janice, do you want to take your picture? Do you want to take your picture? Yes, hey, there's something, oh I have a mic on. There's something that I always do and I usually do it before the show, but since you're all still here. Can I get the house lights for a second? I'm going to take your picture because this moment will never ever happen again. So on the count of three, I'm going to yell one, two, three and you're going to yell raise hell because Molly's listening and she wants you all to do that. Are you ready? One, two, three. That was my define y'all. Well Janice, by the way, before we get started here, we're going to have a discussion for a few minutes but I want to introduce Carlisle VanVort who is a producer for this documentary and Carlisle is a native Houstonian and is also happily a graduate of this university. So Carlisle, please stand and be recognized. It's my producing partner y'all. So Janice, you've told me that of course you've never met Molly. No. And actually I think you confessed to me that you really didn't know who Molly was. Is this correct? And out in LA, I'm not going to make any comments about that but at any rate, in New York also that's true. So how did this happen? I mean you didn't know about her. So yeah, I admit that to everybody. I am born and raised in New York and then moved to the other left coast, Los Angeles, to go to college, to go to university at USC. I had heard of Molly but just in passing, you know, I didn't read her columns and ashamed to say I really didn't know about her and I wasn't part of her constituency because like I'm, you know, both coasts. And so in, I had heard of her because I had heard the term shrub. Shrub. Yes. And I knew that she had come up with that. And I think I had seen her probably on Letterman one night but that's about it. In 2012, our other producing partner James Egan had wanted to make a film with me for a while and he called me and said you need to go see this play that's on at the Geffen Playhouse in Westwood in Los Angeles called Red Hot Patriot, the Kick-Ass Wood of Molly Ivins. Do you know who she is? And I said, my name's familiar. He said, just, it's the closing this week. Kathleen Turner's starring it. Go see it. And he knew the playwright. So I went to see it. This is the Kathleen Turner. Yes. I went to see it and I got one ticket and sat in the third row and I was blown away by the material. Kathleen was good but the material was Molly. And I laughed my ass off. It was a laugh a minute and I came home and I googled her till two or three in the morning and I found all these C-span clips. I was like, wow. So I called James and I said, she's amazing. What's the story? He said, nothing's ever been done. I said, nothing's ever been done. He said, nope. No documentary, nothing. And I said, what do we got to do? So through the playwrights, the Engel sisters who by the way spelled their last name the same way as I do, E-N-G-E-L. And we're not related. Put us in touch with Molly's chief of stuff, Betsy Moon, who was here in the audience. Betsy say, hey y'all. Hey y'all. And so Betsy IMDB, James and I found out we were for real. We were who we said we were. And then put us in touch with Molly's estate. And while all this was going on, we were waiting for the green line and approval, which her estate, she left her estate to the Texas Observer in the ACLU. We knew we needed a Texan. We're both from New York. James is from Baltimore. We live in LA. I mean, what do we know really about Texas? And we both had a mutual very, very, my best friend, James's close friend, who was a Texan. And we said, Carlisle Vandervoort. And I think I said she deserves this. And we called her up and James hard pressed her. Gave her 48 hours. She called us back in less than 12. And she said, I'm in. And now what's interesting too is two things. Carlisle, not only is a Texan and a Estonian, she grew up in the same neighborhood as Molly Ivens in River Oaks. And she went to the same private school, St. Johns. She is also a child of oil and gas privilege. And she was an activist in her own right in the LBGTQ community. So it's in her blood. And she likes to tell us we were the carpetbaggers. And basically we needed Carlisle. I mean, we don't know how to talk to people who have money and documentarians who need money to make a film. And Carlisle does and did. And so we got the green light. And I want to say five weeks later I was on a plane to Texas and down to Austin with Carlisle. And we did our first six interviews. And we had our first fundraiser at the church of High Tower, Jim Hightower's office, which is in a church. And we raised our first $17,000. And we were off and running. Speaking of money, other than fundraising, which everybody that has anything to do with the documentary, making a documentary film has to worry about, that's probably the number one challenge is getting funding. What other challenges, though, did you have in making this? I mean, what was the hardest part of doing this? What did you have to do? Were there any problems at all in doing this? Well, there's always problems, yes, you say. Finding the money is the hardest thing of all, for sure. But the second hardest thing or equally as hard is really digging in. When I make films, no matter if they're on a person, and I've made a number of documentaries on people, or a subject, you have to do a deep dive. It's a commitment. It's an archeological dig into someone's life. How long did you work on this? Six plus years. Y'all live in here at the Brisco. Thank you, Don. And his staff, Margaret Schlanke and her colleagues were essential. And Betsy Moon basically brokered that for me. I had to climb a mountain called Molly, and that's what I'd been doing for six plus years. And her archive is enormous. Somebody once said that Molly knew she was going to be famous. I don't know about that, but she was a pack rat. And she had notes that her father had left her on the kitchen counter from when she was a kid. So I don't think I really... I mean, I'm an instinct intuitive person. I would look through the Brisco and I would say, I want this, I want this. I was always looking for pictures. I was looking for video. I was looking for the journal entries, diary entries, things that would reveal who she really was. And I had to come back, and that takes money. And I had to spend time. And I don't have that luxury of time. I did, obviously. But I mean, I had to work while I was making this to pay my mortgage. And I would come back and I would basically live in the archives for periods of time. And I also didn't have the luxury to read through stuff while I was there. So what I cleverly did was bring a really nice little camera and put it on a stand. And I would find her documents. And I did hire a boots on the ground researcher to help me. And we would just go through stuff. Minneapolis Tribune. We'd look for certain key points in our life. And I would take photos. Raw and JPEG. I didn't want to have to come back. I didn't want it to cost you guys money. And I took raw photos because I knew if I'm going to use something, I could then blow it up. And it would be good quality for a feature. And I said, I came back after. I don't know. I think I've spent probably a total of six to eight months at different times over the past, I'd say five years. From 2012 to 2018. Is that why we had a chair with your name on it? Can I get that, please? And anyway, so I came back and I said to my producing partners, they said, well, would you guys, you know, I took all these pictures. And when I really started to assess it, I thought I had maybe 500 to 1,000. I had over 3,000. And I went through each and every one of them. And I cataloged them. And I organized it by not only themes in Molly's life, but also Molly's life. Everything had, it was very, very specific how I went through. And I made copious notes. And that actually process, it drove my producing partners crazy. Carlisle can attest to that. It took me 18 months to do that. And that's a lot of work. But it also helped the process in terms of, then I edited for five years before I brought an editor on, culling, culling, culling down. And I think that's, we started talking about two years ago. Yes. You know, the thing about Molly, I talked to Molly for years about her papers. And she really expressed to me that she had no interest in that whatsoever. And just really, but she had this, as you say, this pack rat aspect to her, that thankfully, from a historian's point of view, she did keep stuff. But she always downplayed it. And I just need to give credit to John Henry Fox, the widow, Liz Falk, who you've interviewed on this. Liz became Molly's assistant. Yes. And Liz called me several times and would go, I've got a whole bunch of stuff in a box. It's coming to your way. And she really saved a whole lot of Molly's material, with Molly's blessing. But she, I just want to give credit in terms of the stuff that you had. Well, I just lost my microphone. I wanted to give Liz credit. The filmmaker. I'll just tell you. I got you. I got you. I got you. This is so nice. I did. Yeah, we lost our... Well, at any rate, I wanted to give credit to Liz. Yeah, we just switched roles here. That's good. So what do you want people to take away from... When they see this documentary, what do you want them to take away from it? I mean, what kind of impact... What are you looking for here in terms of impact? I'm just going to give credit to Betsy Moon, too, for basically also after Liz Falk, it was Betsy Moon. Yeah, that's true. I want to give credit to Betsy. I want people... Molly was a First Amendment warrior. And she loved y'all. She loved Texas. She loved people. She loved the process and she loved democracy. And we were living in very threatening times. She's more relevant now than when she was alive. And she said it, you know? You know, it's up to us. You know, Jim Hightar says it's up to us to do the heavy lifting. You know, she says, this is our deal. In that speech that was on Idaho Public TV. And when she said that this is our deal, the first time I saw that and I still to this day get chills because she was talking to the interviewer. And when she said this is our deal, she was talking to the camera. She was looking at all of you and me. It is our deal. We are the deciders. Those people up in your state capitals, Washington, they're just the people we've hired to drive the bus for a while. And we have to have campaign finance reform. We must overturn Citizens United. So the takeaway is that it is up to us and for y'all you got to tell your children and your grandchildren. This is somebody said in one of the newspapers we've had a slew of amazing reviews that this is a gift to the online generation. And I have showed it to some of my students and they are knocked out because they understand they're being handed a pile of shit. And they need a blueprint of what to do. Well, bang them pots and pans. Get out in the streets. And basically get rid of the, I'm sorry, but toppling of the white male patriarchy, no offense to my friends. But it is time. We have 101 freshman congresswomen. We're moving in the right direction. But it's got to happen faster. So in conclusion, people ask me, I've seen this three or four times now and I get something out of it different every time I see it. But people are always asking me as since you hit the festival circuit where they can go see this film. So you may not want to talk about this, but how are we doing on that? I mean, where do you hope that people will be able to see it in the future? Very soon, hopefully, by the summer or within the summer coming to a theater near you. We've just, I'm happy to say that we have picked a distributor. And it is somebody who basically is a major distributor for documentaries and knows the playbook because they distributed RBG. Okay, on that note, thank you.