They
Shoot Mimes Don't They? - Filmmakers Christine and Mark Bonn
They
Shoot Mimes Don't They? - Filmmakers Christine and Mark Bonn
We
are not quite sure how we first met documentary filmmakers Christine and Mark
Bonn, except to say that the introduction came through social media. Like so
many who work hard at their craft, it did not take look to understand that
Christine and Mark are very passionate about filmmaking, they are very good at
storytelling and they really do care about the people whose stories they tell.
While their Second World War documentary series about the lives of veterans,
serves as a fabulous tribute to the those men and women who served America and
preserved our freedom, it may very well be their next release,
They Shoot Mimes Don’t They, which
garners this husband and wife team the most notoriety. The film, which they hope
will be released at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2013, chronicles
the life, career and escapades of mime Robert Shields a native Californian who
came to the attention of those in San Francisco through both his performances
and what some might consider to be outrageous acts at Union Square in the 1970s
and many will know him as one-half of the mime team Shields and Yarnell (Lorene
Yarnell). Shield and Yarnell had their own television program for one season
during the seventies and appeared on significant shows of the day including,
The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour,
The Red Skelton Show,
The Muppet Show and
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
“We were thinking that we really have vetted ourselves
as documentarians doing these types of stories and a weird thing happened when
we ran into Robert at a local art fair. He is an artist now and he travels
around. We told him what we do and he told us about the Sedona International
Film Festival (in Arizona). We ended up entering that with Vi’s film (Wings
of Silver: The Vi Cowden Story) and we won the Audience Award. This is a big
festival, a really big festival. For us to win we were blown away. The next
year, Robert was back at the art fair again. We had communicated back and forth
and we had sent him all of our films. We said thanks again, we won. He said Oh
My God, you guys are those filmmakers. Somehow it just came out and we said if
you ever think about doing your story and before I even got story out, he’s like
yes! That was very cool. We started thinking that this is the type of story that
might get us more national recognition, as far as television and stuff like
that. Then we can go and say, here is what we are also doing and we really need
help doing this. Maybe we will be able to find funding to finish the
In Times Of War project,” says Mark.
The three films already completed for the
In Times Of War project
Letters To Defiance,
In Times Of War: Ray Parker and
Wings Of Silver: The Vi Cowden Story
have to date won twenty-two awards at film festivals in the United States and
Canada.
The following year the Bonns ended up at the Sedona Film
Festival again and got permission to enter some of their older films including
the film about Ray Parker, which won an Audience Award. Robert Shields, who now
sculpts, is a metal Art craftsman and he designs jewelry lives outside Sedona
and so Christine and Mark Bonn filmed him for four days.
Mark says, “It all started to come together quickly and
then like a VH1 behind the scenes, tragedy struck. Christine was thrown from a
horse and she was laid up for a good five months. We have just started getting
back to this project and it is going like gangbusters.
This will be our first
feature film and the way that it all kind of weaves together, it is going to be
neat. Luckily Robert kept almost everything that he has done and that has been
recorded. He sent us a box of tapes.”
Christine laughs, “He sent
us three boxes.”
“There are about forty or
fifty hours of just amazing stuff from the sixties and the seventies,” says
Mark.
Christine and Mark Bonn
have also been able to utilize a lot of vintage film and television clips of
Robert Shields, due to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and fairness of use,
because they are not repackaging it and selling it, but simply using the clips
to tell a story. They say that at most they might use thirty seconds from a
particular scene.
Apparently Robert Shields is not a very sedate
individual during filming. “He is hard to keep in his chair. Usually we are
shooting someone who is eighty-six and Robert is up and down, up and down. I
couldn’t take my hand off of the camera, whereas a lot of the time I can stand
back and just relax,” says Mark and he laughs.
Christine says there are
so many layers to the
Robert Shields story, “It is weird how one thing after
another keeps coming into play. There is a whole side of it that we just
discovered in the last two or three weeks and we had no idea about. That is the
Popping Community. They call it Underground dance, but now it’s not so
underground, because you see it on So You
Think You Can Dance and that kind of thing. It is a style of dance.
We have Madd Chadd and he claims that Robert is his inspiration. He
thinks Robert is really considered by the Popping Community to be the
grandfather of Popping. Here Robert is from the late seventies and early
eighties and he is still a huge sensation with kids.”
“They are all of a sudden
using this mime that Robert does. His mime isn’t traditional mime. He did the
robot first. It is kind of a weird style, but these kids have taken it and moved
it into dance. They may have heard that Michael Jackson watched the Shields and
Yarnell show and taped it to try to learn the robot. He got Robert to teach him
how to do the robot and then he took that and turned it into dance,” says Mark.
“As Robert is wont to say,
Michael would phone Robert and ask Robert to come over and teach him that, but
Robert says, I have to tell you that Michael took it to a whole new level.
He gives credit where credit is due and he understands that he was an
inspiration, but…,” says Christine.
Mark adds, “This is what
the Popping community sees, this is the guy who taught Michael Jackson the
robot.
Robert told us that he had
been arrested four or five times doing his act in Union Square. One of the
newspapers (we looked at) had two of the arresting cops names, so Christine
contacted the San Francisco PD and she found one of the cops. We went up to San
Francisco and we interviewed him.
He was hysterical. The guy was so funny, because he was such a cop. He was
great. He worked in San Francisco in the sixties and the seventies and he saw a
lot. (He recalls the officer saying) ‘We show up (where Robert had been
performing) and he’s not talking and (an attitude of) I don’t have time for
this. We removed him from the situation. I don’t speak mime (Christine and Mark
laugh). He was a card. That was great. We found him. During the interview,
Robert had mentioned he had one photo of a woman named Amy Hill and while
Christine was laid up, I just started doing searches on the web for people and
stuff like that and I found a letter to the editor that she had written five
years ago and it had her email address on it, so I emailed her and said is this
the same Amy Hill who knows Robert Shields? It turns out she was.”
Christine says, “Robert
credits her with helping to bring him to San Francisco. That was the start of
his career pretty well.”
“She was the first female
reporter for Rolling Stone Magazine and she wrote a big article about Robert.
After writing the article about street performers in San Francisco and (after
meeting Robert), she told him that he needed to move to San Francisco. This one
gesture is probably the biggest thing that has ever happened to him in his
career. The years that he did up in Union Square made him pretty well famous,”
says Mark.
“That is where Red Skelton
discovered him,” adds Christine.
Mark recalls, “Francis
Ford Coppola put him in The Conversation
(1974, starring Gene Hackman).”
“The mayor of San
Francisco gave him a proclamation for being one of the biggest tourist
attractions for San Francisco, second only to the cable cars,” says Christine.
“Amy told us you have to
talk to Billy Skudder. It is kind of
neat this whole path. It turns out that Billy is really important, because he is
the first one to ever put Robert into mime makeup. Robert showed up at the
renaissance fair and Billy was a mime. This is the late sixties and Robert asked
Billy what are you doing? Billy did a little finger motion, come here, and put
white face on him and they walked around all day together,” says Mark.
“Billy is famous for being
Charlie Chaplin in the IBM ads during the eighties,” Christine informs us.
Before starting their own film production company My
Monkey House in 2002, both Christine and Mark Bonn had already established solid
reputations in the film and television industry.
“Christine and I originally worked together at WNED TV
in Buffalo, New York, back in 1986 and we really enjoyed working together, but
it was for a brief time. On Labor Day weekend 1986 I moved to L.A. and began
working for Fox. After 9 / 11, it was a weird time here in the States, things at
work were slowing down and we thought well, we either take what is given to me
at work or we try to find our own work, so we started talking about it and we
decided to buy an editing system. We started doing at home, what I did at work.
Right away we got very busy, which was great and then work started picking up
again, so we were trying to do both and there was a period of four months when
there was so much work, I didn’t think that I was going to make it,” Mark
remembers.
Mark talks about the work he was doing away from My
Monkey House, “I do work for the on air promotion department of Fox Network. I
ended up getting some work with UPN at the time doing shows for them and then
Warner Bros. I was working for a couple of different companies, but cutting
promos again. It is an art, but it is also a grind. You are taking a forty-five
minute show and telling the story in twenty seconds, fifteen, ten or five.
For example at Warner Bros., ER was doing an international launch and it
was season nine, so they needed all the promos cut for the entire season. That
was a thirty, twenty, ten, fifteen, five seconds for every episode. There were
twenty-four episodes and they needed those done in three weeks. When it was
presented to me they said we have the scripts, all we have to do is cut them. I
thought, I can easily do that in two weeks or less. Well that’s not what it was.
It was no you need to write them and it was crazy.”
“Because
of that, Mark started out working seven days a week with me helping him out on
the weekends at home with My Monkey House. The problem was it became more than
eighty hours a week and we started to realize about three months in that he was
doing something that he didn’t necessarily enjoy at work, so why were we making
ourselves do it at home. That was the tipping point for us as to whether we were
going to continue My Monkey House as a postproduction thing or did we want to
take it somewhere else,” says Christine.
Mark says, “I still do work for Fox and it is a daily hire position. It is a
freelance union job and next Sunday I will have been there for twenty-four
years. It is a daily hire, daily fire, but I guess I have been there a while (being
just a bit cheek and they both laugh).
When I
started it was only two nights a week of programming and we had
21 Jump Street and a couple of not so
great shows, so I thought, I will do this for a couple of weeks and this thing
will go belly-up.
What has been nice is they (FOX) are very understanding
about the projects that we (My Monkey House) are doing and they have given me
the time off whenever I have needed it, to go shoot or to go to a film festival.
I give them a lot of credit for that and it is really cool. They could
just as easily say, no we need you to work this day and if you are not available
then you are not available and we don’t need you.”
The first documentary of consequence for My Monkey House
was the 2004 film, Letters To Defiance,
based upon letters that Christine Bonn’s Uncle Fran had written home during the
war, while he was serving overseas.
“I had been telling Mark for years about my uncle’s
envelopes. I remember them so fondly. When we started to talk about doing
documentary films, my uncle sent me a copy (of some of his letters). He had
Xeroxed about ten of his envelopes and Mark said, ‘Oh these would make a great
documentary.’ We originally thought the documentary would be just about the
envelopes, not even realizing, which is silly of me, that they were World War II
envelopes. There were 614 of these envelopes. That’s a lot (she laughs),” says
Christine.
“We
sent Christine back to Defiance, Ohio and we would talk on the phone. I was here
in L.A. Every day she would call up and say (something like), I just read his
Mother’s Day letter. Oh my God I just read his Christmas letter. Then the whole
thing just turned and we realized that we needed to have Uncle Fran, not just
talk about the envelopes, but to read the stories. It turned out he was an
amazing writer. In
the movie, he reads about eight or nine of the letters. His
grasp of what is going on in that moment is just so great. It is a time capsule.
He captured a moment in time, wrote them down to his mom and he just truly
poured out his feelings,” says Mark.
“One of the things that hit us the most was the dropping of the atomic bomb. I
grew up knowing that an atomic bomb had been dropped and with them ringing those
alarm bells at school and you would go out into the hall and cover your head. To
me it was a second nature thing. I don’t know if that makes any sense. To hear
Uncle Fran read this letter about that day and the fear of what it meant for the
future and that this was the first time for them that an entire city was wiped
out by one bomb in one second. For us, we grew up with that and it didn’t really
hit me until hearing him talk about it, as it happened and how scary that had to
be. What did this mean for the future? That was the thing too, his thinking
beyond just that day. I think that really hit home in terms of capturing the
time and what it had to be like,” says Christine.
Letters
To Defiance
begat
In Times Of War: Ray Parker.
“Exactly. What is funny about
Letters To Defiance is we thought
this was going to be a one off and we actually had shot a documentary before
this one that we still need to finish.
Letters To Defiance went out to some film festivals and it received really
good reactions. We thought this was great, this is kind of a fun story and we
should share it with everybody. Every town that we went to, we would meet
somebody who would say, oh you need to talk to my neighbor or you need to talk
to my uncle or you need to talk to this person. We were in Durango, Colorado and
a worker at the festival said, ‘Hey you have the World War II film and you
should talk to my neighbor Ray Parker. He’s got a great story. I gave her my
card and Ray called me,” says Mark.
Mark extended an invitation to Ray Parker to join him at
the showing of the film that night and he purchased a ticket for him. Ray Parker
and his wife Ethel sat behind Mark Bonn as the film played.
“At the end of the film Ray leaned forward and he said
to me (Mark imitates a deep voice) ‘Well son that is quite the business card
that you have.’ We went out for coffee and Ray said let me think about it. By
the time he got home he said, yes, I would like to tell you my story. That just
sparked this whole thing and it started us on a roll. We started getting story
after story.
Ray’s story is just amazing. He was a young guy growing
up in Compton, California and working as a copy boy at the Los Angeles Examiner.
All of the teletypes went off and he went oh my gosh, what is that? The editor
asked what it was and he said that the Japanese have just bombed Pearl Harbor.
Ray looked at the editor and said, where is Pearl Harbor?
He signed up the next day and he joined the air force.
He flew his first mission with Jimmy Stewart. He got shot down on his tenth
mission and he was taken to a prison camp. At the camp they found out that he
had worked at a newspaper, so they put him in charge of the underground
newspaper. Everybody was organized at these camps, just in case they tried to
take over at some point. Ray ran an underground newspaper for thirteen months,”
says Mark.
“It was a daily newspaper. Ray got caught right before
the war ended,” says Christine.
“Christine found five of
these papers and we had Ray read his old paper,” Mark says.
“We don’t actually know
for sure (how the papers were saved). I am assuming somebody hid them in a wall
or something and once they were liberated someone took them out. The papers that
we still have are major events, (like) D-Day, the liberation of Paris and the
end of the war. We think that somebody saved them and our theory is it was the
guy who was doing the cartoons. The D-Day one has his name on the cartoon, which
I doubt he would have done, while he was still a prisoner, so I can see him
adding his name after the fact,” says Christine.
As one can imagine, there
were times when it became difficult for the veterans to recall their experiences
and Mark acknowledges that at times they would talk for perhaps ten minutes and
then would start to break down.
Christine says, “My Uncle
Rog, who was in anti-aircraft, looked me in the eye at one point and he pointed
to his head and said, I know this was sixty years ago, but I tell you, and then
he pointed to his heart and with tears were starting to come he said, but it
feels like it was last week.”
“A lot of these guys did
go through a lot of trauma, so that is the hardest thing about doing these
stories. I will watch their eyes, while I am filming and I can tell alright, we
need to wrap up in about five minutes. I have little signs that I give to
Christine and that means we are coming towards the end, so get the questions out
that you want. The last thing that we want to do is to put these guys through
anymore trauma,” says Mark.
Christine and Mark Bonn
are self-funding the In Times of War
documentary films and so even though they have shot interviews with a lot of
veterans, which still have not been released, they are up against time, because
so many of those who served our country have passed on or are very, very old. It
is the opinion of this publication that even in difficult economic times there
are enough wealthy individuals and companies and departments of the government
that could collectively invest in preserving for this generation and future
generations the stories of the men and women who ensured a free nation exists
and that created the environment for the accumulation of that wealth. It is time
to give back. Christine and Mark Bonn already have.
Wings Of Silver: The Vi Cowden Story
is a great example of why it is important for these documentary films to be
made. How many people today know about The Women Air Force Service Pilots
(W.A.S.P)? During the Second World War the government created a division of the
air force for women to test fly the aircraft being built and to fly them to
their points of departure, because there were not enough men left to do so, as
they were serving overseas. Vi Cowden was one of those women.
Why is it important to
Mark and Christine Bonn to tell these stories? “It’s
history told by the people who lived it. Once it’s gone, it’s hearsay. What we
are doing is capturing the person’s actual tell and it is important to learn
from history, because if you don’t we are going to repeat it. I think too, you
see all of the stories on the history channel about the big battles and the big
ships and the big bombs, but we (also) think that it is important to get that
individual story. The telling of the story personally, so that you can see it in
their eyes. You can really feel it. I would hope that Vi’s is a testament of
that. For her it was more that joy and you could really see that. She has been
such an inspiration to so many women, young girls and men as well. We have had
high school students come up to us after watching the film played at festivals
and say to us, we so wish this was in our schools, because we learned so much
more watching this,” says Christine.
After watching
Wings of Silver: The Vi Cowden Story,
this writer wishes that she still remained with us, but she passed away in 2011.
We would have liked to have said thank you, instead we will say thank you to the
veterans of all wars who still remain with us and a special thank you to
Christine and Mark Bonn for making sure that we never forget that armies and
navies and air forces are made up of men and women, who are the sons and
daughters, and fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers of real people and
they have made and continue to make tremendous sacrifices.
Top Photo: Christine and Mark Bonn at the Sedona International Film Festival, holding their Audience Choice Award for Best Documentary Short 2011
Middle Photo: At the Yanks Air Museum with Vi Cowden
Bottom Photo: Mark Bonn films from inside a B-24 bomber as Vi Cowden flies in the P 51
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