Making War Bonnets Old Hat

Several years ago, Hanay Geiogamah surveyed the movie business and noticed a lack of Native American filmmakers in Hollywood.

“We’re not going to attain success just because we’re Indian,” says the 54-year-old Kiowa-Delaware playwright, producer and newly promoted professor at UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television.

“We can’t expect our ethnic uniqueness to accomplish it for us. That’s not going to happen.”

But Geiogamah and a handful of other Native American producers and directors are now creating their own niche in Hollywood. With the release of last year’s “Smoke Signals” and several television and theatrical features currently in the works, today’s Native American filmmakers are making headway into the motion picture industry. A few are even producing non-Indian-themed projects.

But many years ago, Edwin Carewe (1883-1940), a movie director of Chickasaw descent, had charted the long road to Hollywood. Carewe (born Jay Fox in Texas) made more than 60 films during his career, the most notable being the 1928 version of “Ramona” starring Delores Del Rio. Yet few in Hollywood recall his heritage.

“You’re as good as what you write,” says UCLA English professor Greg Sarris, who’s also a tribal chairman of the Federated Coast Miwok. Sarris should know: He wrote and executive-produced HBO’s “Grand Avenue,” a contemporary story about California Indians shown in 1996. He’s now working on his sixth novel while developing a Mexican American-themed project for Showtime.

Ultimately, Sarris explains, a movie’s marketability--and not a filmmaker’s ethnicity--will cut it in Hollywood.

“If you’ve got seven toes and three heads and you’re pink and purple and green and it [the movie] has appeal, they’ll love you,” he says.

Native American filmmaker Chris Eyre knows that a movie’s appeal depends upon the right box-office formula. The 30-year-old Cheyenne-Arapaho made his feature directorial debut with the critically acclaimed “Smoke Signals,” based upon a collection of Sherman Alexie’s short stories. It won the 1997 Audience Award and Dramatic Filmmakers Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival.

“Smoke Signals’ ” universal theme of boy-forgives-father was able to cross over into mainstream audiences and take in $6.7 million at the box office.

“The humanity of it touched everyone,” says Miramax’s senior vice president of acquisitions and “Smoke Signals” co-producer Amy Israel.

Eyre, who received an MFA in filmmaking from New York University, bristles when people suggest that Hollywood automatically opens its doors to Native Americans.

“As Indians, we need to be better than average to be recognized,” he explains by phone from his New York City-based office of Riverhead Entertainment. “There’s an expectation that we’re not as good because we’re Indians.”

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This summer, Eyre is scheduled to direct “Roustabout,” his second feature project, for New Line Cinema. The non-Indian-themed movie is about a young woman’s adventures with a traveling circus. Winona Ryder will star and serve as producer.

“I think that Indians are [natural] storytellers, but the hard part is couching that into a commercial structure,” Eyre says. “There’s no lack of stories, but a lack of production knowledge [among Indians]. We have to fit into an apparatus that we have to fit into just like any other filmmaker.”

Recently, aspiring Native American writers and filmmakers have had some help in fitting into

Hollywood’s apparatus. The Sundance Institute’s annual Native Screenwriting Workshop, sponsored in cooperation with UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center, is committed to helping Native North Americans develop the art and craft of screenwriting.

“Sundance has put their money where their mouth is,” says Sarris, who’s also one of the workshop’s advisors. “They provide a great opportunity for Native people to sharpen their skills to get out there and learn the business.”

Geiogamah--whose credentials also include producing duties on the five-part dramatic series for TNT’s “The Native Americans: Behind the Legends, Beyond the Myths,” shown from 1993 to 1996--believes that Indian filmmakers must take the reins into their own hands.

“If Hollywood wants to do an Indian thing, it will do its Indian thing, which is not ours,” Geiogamah says. “Hollywood’s Indian thing is ‘Dances With Wolves.’ Ours is our own screenwriters, our own producers, our own actors telling our own stories in film without a superstar presence to assure it will all happen.”

Geiogamah is trying to make sure it will happen with “Grace,” a one-hour TV drama funded by San Francisco’s Independent Television Services. “Grace” is in development for the Nebraska-based Native American Public Telecommunications (NAPT), and it’s part of PBS’ overall effort to create more dramas for its ethnic programming.

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“Grace,” a drama about two young Native American orphans in the Pacific Northwest, will be produced by Geiogamah and written by Cherokee author Vicki Sears. NAPT’s executive director Frank Blythe, a Sioux-Cherokee, will serve as executive producer.

“There’ll be no cavalry, no buckskins, no lances and arrows, no war paint,” Geiogamah says of “Grace,” which will begin production this fall. “Instead, there’s human concerns, human values. People struggling to improve their surroundings. Stories that all human beings can share in.”

Geiogamah points out that while a film like “Smoke Signals” did indeed touch upon human concerns and values, it wasn’t the first Native American-made movie to do so.

“There’s been work in this direction all along,” he says.

Michael Smith, the Sioux founder-director of San Francisco’s annual American Indian Film Festival, has seen work in this direction for more than two decades. Since 1975, the festival has showcased 675 films by or about Native North Americans. This year, the festival will open at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts on Nov. 11 and run through Nov. 19.

“When we first started, we primarily presented documentaries,” Smith says. “From there, we saw short narrative pieces coming out.”

But Native American-made features, Smith says, are few and far between.

“I can probably only recall three or four. We’ve seen the Indian stories out there, but we really haven’t seen the faith of distributors getting behind a film and promoting it,” he adds.

But one former festival participant, Native Canadian filmmaker Shirley Cheechoo, is now producing, directing and writing her first feature. “Backroads” is Cheechoo’s journey into the harsh contemporary life of Cree women. The movie is financed and executive-produced by Offline Entertainment Group, the New York-based company behind last year’s “Slam.”

Cheechoo, herself a Cree, who speaks briefly by phone from location in Manitoulin Island (north of Michigan), says that few production companies will look at a first-time director.

“You can’t get anyone who’s willing to take the risk,” she says.

But Offline was willing to gamble, even without a distributor.

“We’re now making the film in a rolling-the-dice sense,” explains Ezra Swerdlow, Offline’s chief operating officer and “Backroads” executive producer. “Obviously, we believe in her as an artist.”

Like other first-time independent filmmakers, Cheechoo struggles on a shoestring budget.

“I feel like I’m making a $2-million film for $500,000,” she says. “There are so many people in this crew who are making next to nothing.”

But small-scale, low-budget movies are precisely what Native Americans should be producing, Geiogamah says.

“Not movies in the smash $100-million earnings category at all,” he says. “That’s ‘Star Wars’ dreams. Forget that.”

But for these few at least, the dream of making movies is coming true.