Gift of Reality : In His Documentaries, Orlando Bagwell Keeps His Eyes on a Prize: the Lives of Children

Ultimately, what documentary film maker Orlando Bagwell does always seems to be for the children--his and others.

The producer and director of what one critic called the “most charged segments” of the award-winning Civil Rights documentary series “Eyes on the Prize,” and, most recently, “Roots of Resistance” for the PBS series “The American Experience,” Bagwell first used film to “introduce children to new worlds,” he says.

He was a teen-ager then, organizing sensitivity sessions for the Catholic Youth Organization in Nashua, N.H.--the “woods” to which his parents had fled from Baltimore’s inner city in the ‘60s. He showed other people’s movies then, and hadn’t any notion of becoming a film maker. He thought he was headed for a career in medicine.

But after attending Boston University for a year--where he was roundly criticized by fellow black students for having a white roommate whom he refused to abandon and for being totally ignorant of “Soul on Ice,” the “Autobiography of Malcolm X,” and other de rigueur texts of the militant ‘60s--Bagwell dropped out of school for a year to find himself.

A friend introduced him to jazz, Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew” for starters. After that, there was no turning back, says the boyish-looking Bagwell, 38, who is the father of two.

He bought a conga drum, learned to play and, for the fun of it, picked up a 35-mm camera. Almost 20 years later, he can point to a long apprenticeship as a cinematographer for numerous PBS programs, stints as a producer and director of documentaries for the PBS series “Frontline,” and the Alfred I. DuPont and Peabody Awards for his “Eyes on the Prize” efforts.

Television and film producer Topper Carew first worked with Bagwell when he was a cameraman for Carew’s show “Say Brother” on WGBH in Boston in 1974. He has watched Bagwell’s career develop since then. “Orlando made an enormous contribution to ‘Eyes on the Prize,’ but Henry Hampton (the executive producer) gets all the credit. He made an enormous contribution to ‘Frontline,’ but David Fanning gets all the credit,” says Carew.

“I think Orlando is under-recognized,” he adds. “But I think he is going to be an important film maker because he is one of the most gifted and industrious film makers I know. . . . He has a point of view: He brings an African-American male’s perspective” to the depiction of the nation’s social and political battles.

Even though most of his work is generated on the East Coast, Bagwell has strong ties to Los Angeles and is reluctant to leave. His parents moved here years ago and provide a support network for his children, says Bagwell, as well as his wife, Rosa, whose family is in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

But East Coast or West, documentary films seldom have large followings.

“I could be doing other types of film,” says Bagwell, his arms protectively wrapped around himself, the muscles of his sharply angled face occasionally easing into a shy smile, “but I think we need nonfiction stories. There are a lot of make-believe stories out there. We are attracted to them, but you need nonfiction stories to anchor yourself in what’s real. . . . It’s especially important to young people.”

Says “Eyes on the Prize” executive producer Hampton: “Some people make wonderful, intellectual movies. Orlando starts with the emotions and allows that to let you enter the material.”

The historical films Bagwell has done “are films my kids will grow up watching, their kids will watch these over and over again. In them, they learn something about themselves, about a time that they didn’t experience but that they can get in touch with through these films.”

America seems to be a country intent on forgetting its history or only accepting a comfortably sanitize version of it, he laments. And since America refuses to learn from the past, it seems destined to repeat its errors. He points to overt acts of racism in the news of late: Boston torn apart by the murder of Carol Stuart, apparently at the hand of her husband, Charles, who claimed a black man did it and then committed suicide when he became the suspect; the rash of racially motivated mail bombings in the South; the rise of racism on college campuses.

His latest effort, “Roots of Resistance,” traced the origins of black resistance to slavery, the development of the Underground Railroad, and the rise of the abolition movement. Reviewing the film in The Times, Robert Koehler wrote that “Bagwell is a judicious, resourceful documentarian with a sense of poetry, which provides his film . . . with a dimension of the epic.”

Sitting in the dining room of his Los Angeles home, an “Eyes on the Prize” poster hanging on a wall next to one of jazz legend John Coltrane, Bagwell asks rhetorically, “Why go back and do a film in the 19th Century about slavery? Something nobody really wants to confront.” Well, he says, “the roots of contemporary racism lie in the institution of slavery. If you don’t understand that context, how racism was used to justify and maintain slavery, you are not going to be able to deal with these things today.”

His manner of speech--short, punchy sentences--suddenly turns to fast-forward phrases without periods.

“I’ve been really fired up about all this lately, people looking around at things going on and saying, ‘Why are we seeing these acts of overt racism taking place again?’

“What’s going on in this country now is that there is no leadership saying, ‘Look, we are better than this. This is not what we should be about.’ Instead, leadership is saying that the gains of the Civil Rights movement were selfish gains for black people, therefore we need to attack it. . . .”

Racial turmoil in Boston has been particularly disturbing to Bagwell, a man who almost became a statistic in that city’s protracted racial conflict.

He might not have found himself on the busiest street in Irish South Boston--Broadway--if it hadn’t been for the kids he loved so much.

Bagwell had been the director of the Harriet Tubman settlement house in Boston, teaching kids about photography, film . . . life. He left Boston for Los Angeles, but decided to return in 1974 and get a job teaching in a South Boston high school.

“It’s like having your own children,” he says. “If you are going to be an important part of someone’s life, you’ve got to come through for them.” He was going to be there to help his kids through the desegregation trauma. He taught history and political science for “a week.”

What happened?

He walked to a bus stop, school books piled in his arms, thinking about all he had to read “because I was just one day ahead of my student’s assignments. I was young looking, just out of college, looked like one of the kids in senior high.”

As he approached the bus stop, he smiled a greeting to an old woman, but she backed away.

“I saw on her face something was wrong,” Bagwell said.

When he turned, he saw a white mob behind him. “They’d obviously been following me for some time. They surrounded me . . . kicking . . . pushing me in into the middle of the street. Cars stopped, people got out. But not to help, they joined the mob beating me . . . that was scary, realizing that people are getting out of their cars to hurt not help you. I’m down on the ground. I’m feeling like this is it . . . “

A city bus driver saw the attack, Bagwell says, and forced the bus through the white mob.

“He opens the bus door and yells for me to grab on. I do . . . he drags me out there with people still kicking, still pulling on my legs . . . “

If he recognized a face from that mob today, there’s nothing he would want to do to hurt the person, he says. “I certainly was angry after the attack. But I was angry because the experience forced me to confront something I didn’t want to accept in other people. As much as you read about lynchings and things like that, you never want to believe people can do that.”

Bagwell, who recently formed his own production company, Roja Productions, is considering making a documentary film of the Stuart case.

“Once, racism was peculiar to white people in America. Now racism is part of everyone in America. It’s part of the American personality. That’s very disturbing.”

With every film, he tries to chip away at the ignorance and fear that nurtures racism. But with his children, as with all children, he says, showing films and lecturing about right and wrong do not get the job done.

It’s how you live, it’s how “you love them, “ he says. “If they realize love is something you are not afraid of, then they needn’t be afraid of giving and receiving it. And, he adds, “that to hurt or hate is not a good feeling, there is very little gratification in it.”