Talent X Relationships / Knowledge: An Interview with Roy Campanella II

Roy Campanella II is one of the most prolific black filmmakers of the last fifty years. Despite his extensive credits as a director of film and television (including a DGA-nominated episode of I'll Fly Away, and several episodes of Beverly Hills, 90210, and Frank's Place), he remains an underrecognized figure in the history of black cinema. Scholarly absences in the study of black life are nothing new; within the context of this Close-Up, however, his life and work reflects some of the complicated questions that surround the New York Scene and its ever-in-flux makeup.

For five decades Campanella has sought to change the film and television industry, both on screen and behind the scenes. His career includes time at Boston's WGBH (a PBS affiliate), work at CBS News, where he helped found the CBS Black Employees Association, and an independent production deal with BET, where he produced ten original movies in 1998. His life and experience reveals the intricate balance required of black filmmakers eager to have a career within the industry and also create independent work. Still at work today, he has never abandoned the directing chair. Within the industry he has been recognized for his creativity: in 1992, he won the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Dramatic Shows for Brother Future, which aired on PBS affiliates in 1991. More recently, he has won awards for directing two romantic comedies: Masquerade (Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, 2003) and The Company We Keep (Urban Media Makers Film Festival, 2011).

This transcript is an edited version of more than five hours of dialogue that focused on the earlier part of Campanella's career spent on the East Coast. We discuss his formative education at Harvard and his subsequent efforts as a director, cameraman, and editor on WGBH's news and documentary series Say Brother, before moving on to his experience as one of the first African American film editors at CBS News. The conversation then turns to the challenges of being a black independent filmmaker in New York, before concluding with a thorough discussion of the production histories behind Campanella's early narrative works Pass/Fail (1978), Impressions of Joyce (1979), and The Thieves (1979). While scholars including Nelson George and James Snead have championed Pass/Fail in the past, the film remains difficult to see and is seldom screened. This interview is meant to reignite interest in a cross-sectional world of artistic labor in the history of black image making.

Nicholas Forster:

Rather than begin with your father (the famous baseball player) or the first film you worked, I want to begin with your formal and informal education. I know you grew up in New York and then attended Harvard at a time when Boston was undergoing a number of political, social, and artistic changes. You were there just before the major desegregation of the public schools and busing programs. The city was a locus for documentary filmmaking and important programs like Say Brother—how did your time in Cambridge inform your interest in filmmaking?

Roy Campanella II:

I began at Harvard in 1966 and graduated with honors in 1970. My major was anthropology, and I took courses in archaeology, paleontology, and linguistics. But my primary area of concentration was cultural anthropology.

Historically, relationships within and between cultures have determined how we adapt, change, and progress. As a student of cultural anthropology at Harvard, my primary focus was ancient and modern tribal life. In general, the term "tribal" relates to all kinds of human interactions, such as rituals, ceremonies, myths, politics, economics, psychology, the arts, social relations, and belief systems. The life that we depict on film is both fiction and nonfiction, and it often reflects the tribal nature of human experience.

So, the discipline of cultural anthropology has had a very strong influence on the kinds of creative choices I've made in my film work. Good storytelling, whether drama or comedy, often involves the examination of personal conflict. The more intimate, the better. And when we look at tribal...