Novato First-Time Filmmaker Nominated for Academy Award

I daresay most 50-something Novato women (this writer included) get ready for Oscar night by throwing a bottle of Muscatel in the fridge, organizing some tasty snacks on the coffee table, plumping up the pillows on the couch and, of course, donning the most comfy sweats available. 

This is not the scenario for 53-year old first-time filmmaker Robin Fryday. The long-time local photographer, teen photography summer camp teacher and mother of two will prepare for Sunday’s award show by sitting patiently as a swirl of professional stylists (a hair stylist flown in from New York City, mind you) work their magic and fetch her jewels. She’ll then slide carefully into a gown designed for her to wear to the event by Alexis Monsanto.

”It’s like a fairy tale,” she laughs. “The only thing I’m responsible for are the shoes.”

“My wardrobe is usually sweatshirts and jeans,” she continues, spending almost an hour with her hometown Patch last week in between flights to Los Angeles. There she'll sit for fittings and attend the Nominee lunch (yes, she is in the same photograph as George and Meryl and all the others), as well as scooting around the country for screenings and receptions for her Academy Award-nominated film, “The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement.” 

“I’m someone who’s very comfortable behind the camera, and I’ve spent my whole career avoiding being on stage or in front of the camera. When Gail [Dolgin] passed, [the film] was at Sundance, so the first time I ever had a microphone in my hand and was on stage talking it happened to be at Sundance, with Robert Redford sitting in the audience.” 

Gail Dolgin was the director of “Daughter from Danang,” an Academy award-nominated feature length documentary from 2003, who joined Robin as her producer early on in this film's development. She died in the summer of 2010 after a decade-long battle with breast cancer.

“Gail called a business meeting from her hospice bed just days before she died and we had an hour and half meeting about the future of the film. That day we made the decision to send our completed 18-minute sample to Sundance, and a couple weeks later we found out we were accepted.

"Once that happened, it meant we had archival footage and music we had to find and license, and a million other things to do. I just put one foot in front of another. It was a tremendous learning curve for me. But here we are."

Fryday points to a whole community of Berkeley filmmakers who came together to help her finish the film, including Chicken and Egg Pictures and Judith Helfand.

Did she ever imagine she would direct an Oscar-nominated film?

“No, not at all. This is my first film and when I started the process at the end of the summer of 2008, it was just to tell the story of the foot soldiers who started us along the process of electing Barack Obama. We know the leaders but we don’t know the thousands of foot soldiers – the men, women and children – who risked their lives and their jobs for the right to vote. It was so important to capture this story because many of these people are elderly and dying.”

In fact, the subject of Fryday’s film, James Armstrong, died in November of 2009 shortly after seeing an early cut of the film.

“James Armstrong was so ordinary yet so extraordinary – he was the first to integrate his children into white schools, he was the first to buy a home in a white neighborhood. As he says in the film, he wanted to live with a purpose, and I carry those words with me.

"The first time I set foot in his barbershop and saw every inch of space covered with civil rights newspaper clippings and memorabilia, I knew I had met the subject of my film.”

What did she learn about herself, I asked her, through the process of having an idea, growing it into a dream, making it happen and seeing it through to the end?

“Each step of the making of this film, it would have been enough. I’m Jewish and we have a saying at Passover, ‘Dayenu’ which means, ‘that would have been enough.’  At each step of the way - meeting the foot soldiers, hearing their stories, then meeting Gail, then bringing this story to the rest of the world - at each step, it would have been enough.

"But now we’re here (at the Oscars) and it’s an incredible honor.

“We faced a lot of challenges during the process – Gail’s declining health, Mr. Armstrong took sick and that changed the focus of the film – but I never doubted it would happen as far as telling the story. As far as going to the Governor’s Ball and wearing a gown - that I never thought about.”

Novato will be rooting for Robin Fryday this Sunday. Now, where can we find a theatre to screen this film?