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Alison O’Daniel, Maya E. Rudolph and Su Kim on Changing Up a Dialogue with “The Tuba Thieves”

The filmmakers discuss how the story of a string of robberies added up to an innovative cinematic experience that allows access for all.

During the release of her debut feature “Night Sky,” Alison O’Daniel realized there was a unique way she could appeal directly to moviegoers that were deaf or hard of hearing like herself while offering something irresistibly interesting to a broader audience, handing people a balloon at the door to blow up and hold in their hands during the screening. Though it was a proper introduction to the filmmaker’s playfulness, the balloons served a practical purpose as those who had ever been to a deaf social club knew when the vibrations of sound could be felt from the trembling latex, offering another sensation to experience the film. When it came time to debut her second film “The Tuba Thieves,” placing a call to Party City was no small part of the prep.

“We’ve done that since our premiere at Sundance and really it was just an exciting idea then for the premiere and then we just got such thrilled feedback from everyone – deaf, hearing, so we’ve just kept trying to provide balloons for every screening,” says O’Daniel.

Audiences can expect them Thursday night at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles when “The Tuba Thieves” is receiving a special screening that at once acknowledges the major cinematic accomplishment of O’Daniel’s wildly innovative film and can also serve as a more intimate local celebration for the filmmaker who took the true-life mystery of thefts of high school marching band equipment across Southern California over a two-year period starting in 2011 as inspiration for exploring both how a community grapples with losing pieces of its soul and how individuals compensate when a part of their perception of the world goes missing. Imagining the entire city as a symphony where each part has its own distinct sounds, O’Daniel tracks the lives of teens at a formative period in their lives where their sensibilities haven’t yet hardened and opens up the same possibilities for audiences no matter what their age when it asks to engage differently with what’s unfolding in front of them, leaning on vivid descriptions in candy-colored captions that set a tone for the overall image and intricate sound design where the absence of one noise in conjunction with another that remains evokes a curiosity that becomes a compelling force throughout as it unlocks other modes of comprehension and evolves into a shared experience.

Creating more points of accessibility only led O’Daniel towards exciting opportunities for a complete reinvention of cinematic language and while “The Tuba Thieves” itself reflects a form that still has plenty of unfulfilled potential, the director, along with producers Maya E. Rudolph (“Shirkers”) and Su Kim (“Hale County This Morning, This Evening”), has also rewritten the playbook when it comes to putting such daring work out into the world when distribution of the film encouraged the same ingenuity to bring audiences into the theater as it took to engage once inside. The filmmaker and visual artist has already started to see the fruits of that labor pay off, not only in extending the reach of “The Tuba Thieves,” which culminated in a national broadcast on Independent Lens on PBS, but consulting on other films such as the recent restoration of Zeinabu irene Davis’ groundbreaking 1999 drama “Compensation” and Shoshannah Stern’s biography “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore” where a profile of the pioneering star of “Children of a Lesser God” is all the more lively because of how her life story is expressed in a way all audiences can appreciate with its shrewd use of open captioning. (Filmmakers looking for guidance need not look any further than the “How to Caption” page on her Web site.)

On the eve of O’Daniel’s big night at the Academy, the visual artist, Rudolph and Kim generously took the time to talk about how the care and consideration that’s been required to properly present “The Tuba Thieves” to the world has only bolstered a feeling of community among those willing to invest their time and energy into it, as well as the decade-long gestation period for the director to piece together such a loving tribute to her city and the even larger project of great benefit to all she has in the works now.

This film has had a long history and I’ve heard Alison describe it as bubbling up as opposed to actually ever starting in earnest. How did it start to take shape?

Alison O’Daniel: I started out the project knowing it was going to be a long timeline and I started out working backwards — with the musical compositions basically. [Ed. note: O’Daniel asked three separate composers to create music for the film] and wrote [a script] to their music. And then there was a very practical reason for why it took a long time, mostly because I didn’t really know how to raise large amounts of money. I just knew how to apply for grants, and based on how much money we got [from those], I would look through the script and try and decide if any [scenes] could get pulled out and stand alone as a short film, like in an art museum or gallery setting. I was doing this piecemeal process.

Then I showed 10 short films in 2018 at the Hammer Museum as part of Made in LA and at that point, things shifted a little bit more into the independent film space. Someone from Sundance saw those installations and recommended that I start applying for some of the labs and the funding. At that point, I started working with a producer and then we really shifted into raising much larger chunks of money and we got a significant funding from PBS through ITVS and moved into the feature production. Once the film finished editing, that’s when we shifted and Sue and Maya came on board, so it was a long process of navigating the art world and then the independent film and documentary space.

Maya E. Rudolph: I met Alison at IDFA in 2022 and I had actually heard of the “Tuba Thieves” [story] because I live in Los Angeles and have lots of friends who work in production. This film had been floating around for years and I was intrigued and tickled by it, but didn’t know to look deeper. And in many ways, Alison and I met a perfect moment for us to begin working together. We had to jump into a very intense and very creatively demanding post-production process in a fairly short amount of time. Both Su and I actually come from backgrounds as post supervisors. That was our on-ramp to producing documentary features and because the project was already quite advanced at the time when I met Alison and we broached the possibility of working together, I was able to like go back to my Airbnb in Amsterdam and watch a cut that is not radically different from the finished film. Immediately, I felt the air molecules around myself rearranging themselves and had this feeling that I’ve had very few times in my life, like, “Yes, I’m here, we’re doing this. I will rearrange heaven and earth to be part of this project. I was completely drawn in by Alison’s vision and her vision of L.A.

Su Kim: I met Alison around the time that the film got funding from public television and what I thought was so interesting when I watched some of the shorts that were made earlier was the structure of this was so unconventional. There was this disruption that was mirroring the experience of navigating the world with different sensory inputs. The way the sound dropped in, dropped out, and scenes unfolded in fragments, it reflected a disorientation and a nuance that I had never experienced before. For me, it was really about the sounds that were heard or used, and then the ones that were not and what does it mean to to have this absence? That was what drew me to the film. And then as we were getting to the finish line, Alison had asked both Maya and I to join the producing team and it’s been one of these flawless experiences as a team, one of the best of my career, because I think we went into it with the same shared sense of where we wanted this to be and I am incredibly proud of this film because I think we managed to achieve all of those goals.

Maya brings up something important here – it’s such a great movie about Los Angeles and just the fragmentary nature of living in a place with so many various communities that can feel separate and together all at once. What was it like figuring that out?

Alison O’Daniel: Something I think about a lot is that I am a visual artist, but I know so many people who work in the film industry and maybe not right now in L.A., but in the past, it’s felt like there’s this huge population of people to pull out of their more mainstream projects into what they crave that they could be working on, which is something like “The Tuba Thieves.” There are those people who are really expansively minded about film and also this population here that I think knows intimately a version of L.A. that consistently is not shown in films that are made and produced in L.A., so when we get to experience a very authentic vision of L.A., which I think [is in] “The Tuba Thieves,” it’s such a breath of fresh air because we see all the time this strange, uncanny representation of L.A. that we all know isn’t totally authentic and sometimes is recreating this false version of it.

I just felt like there had to be this very deep authenticity about the diversity of deaf experience within the film and the diversity of Los Angeles experience within the film, inclusive of so many sonic experiences of L.A., including our vibrant radio population. All the DJs and the radio stations here have this importance in L.A. because of car life and then also the animal life here, we do live in this very natural space that’s become an urban environment, so it was fascinating to be able to draw upon things like animal enthusiasts who were watching the drama unfold with P-22 or adjacent to that, people who go set up animal camps in the Angeles National Forest and [simply being around] Santa Ana winds and fires and the threat of earthquakes. I felt there was a way to dial down and get more specific rather than the general conversation that’s always happening about L.A. in so many films, and to actually breathe life into it through its specific cracks and crevices.

From what I understand, it was also a really diverse crew you put together in terms of people from the deaf and hearing communities. What kind of environment did that create for the production?

Alison O’Daniel: This film has the longest credits because it wasn’t always the same crew because I made the 10 short films from 2013 to 2018, and then we did like a more slightly conventional feature shoot, so for us to get it down, we were at six or seven minutes of credits for a really long time and we also chose to not have any sound during the credits, so hearing people [would always say], “Ooh, are you going to have people sit through these really long credits?” Some shoots we had a lot more deaf people, some shoots we had a lot more hearing people and we weren’t trying to hit a total half and half, but it was really important that we always had a mix and that’s also really important to me that the audiences are always a mix. Every so often, we’ll have a screening that’s only hearing people and a few where it’s like more deaf people, but I always try to have it be really integrated from the very, very beginning of production all the way through now.

What has getting this out into the world been like?

Maya E. Rudolph: That really has been the breakthrough I’ve experienced as a producer on this project. When I joined, I was so moved and impressed by the way it’s so evident that this is a community-built film, especially when we have exhibited the film in Los Angeles. The cross-section of friends and collaborators and people from different worlds [such as] the music scene, everyone shows up and there’s so many different footholds to get invested and excited about this film. That is something that does come out of community filmmaking.

We premiered at Sundance, played at festivals all over the world in a way that was incredibly satisfying and exciting, but always wanted to have a theatrical distribution for this film. We were looking at different possibilities or potential partners and there came a point at a year-and-a-half ago where we realized no one is going to do the work of connecting with the audience for this film that we are going to do. We know that there is an audience for this that may be more obvious. And then there’s an audience for this film that is so much bigger than those who typically come to see artistic documentaries or creative nonfiction and finding the strategic partners in the field who really understood and championed the film and then it was rolling up our sleeves and doing the work of making sure that the film was in cinemas with the best possible projection and sound.

Su Kim: The turning point was, “I want to see this film, so do others? And one of the first partners that we came to work with on the theatrical side was BAM. When they said, “Yes, absolutely, we’ll program it,” I think that gave us the courage to go out there with the film and to find its audience. As a team collectively, we knew there was an audience that was interested in this and wanted to see it and it reflected them and their voice. I felt like sometimes you have to do it yourself and that’s what we did.

Maya E. Rudolph: But also the way we were talking about the film and how it was being advertised — the discourse that was happening around it — was all very deliberate and something that would allow us to have really direct connections to the audience. To have the satisfaction of experiencing the way audiences were reacting to the film and circulating it through their communities was something I hadn’t been with a film before where that was the the correct way to distribute the film. And for this film, it absolutely was, from this idea of community fueling this film to expand infinitely from there.

Alison O’Daniel: Over and over, my experience with this film is that you find your champions and you can’t force a sensibility on people who don’t understand something like this. I’ve always had this feeling there are people who crave a film like this, so when we went to Sundance, the programmers who were on the team that year were such champions of the film. Then with the team at ITVS through PBS. They were just so thrilled about the film and so willing to double down and learn anything that they needed in order to support the specificity of this film, like its activist disability justice component or the language of the film that is much more cinematic and lyrical. I always say that it’s a film that like you cannot spoil. I can tell you exactly what happens in the ending and it doesn’t matter at all. It’s not a didactic film, it’s an experienced film and I think like people who want to be communicated to in that way are the people who are craving this kind of expansiveness in cinema and that’s who we’ve consistently paired up with, either through audiences or screening partners or funders.

One of the things that I’ve so appreciated about Su specifically is that Su always asked us, “What do we want? Just say what we want in this situation.” So we’ve collectively always made sure that we were making choices with integrity rather than following any “right way” to do something. Then the flip side to that, which is really important to say, is that every single phase of the project, we’ve also been faced with having to be educators about accessibility and different problems that exist in the world that just haven’t been defined or worked around.

Su Kim: I think the most important conversation that this film opens up is about ableism, not just in society, but at large, and how we consume and make media.

Alison, I’ve noticed you actually have now served as a consultant on several other films, including the recent revival of “Compensation” and “Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore,” which both involve very innovative uses of captioning. Has it been exciting to extend the work you started to other films like this?

Alison O’Daniel: Yeah, one of the things that I really ran into when I was captioning “The Tuba Thieves” was this sense of inadequacy in embedded in the editing software and within the international distribution process. After we went to Sundance, our next screening was at MoMA Doc Fortnight and I sat in the back of the theater and I could not read my captions [during a screen test]. They were too small and I thought my prescription on my glasses needed to be changed. It was a tight turnaround and what that meant was I spent 19 hours changing the size of the captions and the reason for that was because our captions are not the standard closed caption software thing within Premiere. I did them as individual text files because the closed captioning software was not robust enough for what I needed and wanted it to do. What I realized in that 19-hour timeframe was that what I was experiencing was a disability tax. If we wanted to be able to screen the film in other countries on broadcast or translate the film, I was going to be at the mercy of people who I hoped would follow all of the templates of what I had done, so I made these really elaborate spreadsheets that were overwhelming for me to hand to people and be like, “Please match every single one of these specs,” like the color of the font, where it is, et cetera.

I was invited to be a visiting scholar at UCLA to work with coders around the time of “Compensation” and the Marlee Matlin documentary and I’m in the middle of developing a technology called Opening Captions that all those visual and creative specs can be changed it with a button. [For example] you can click a button, it’ll just translate everything to Spanish. You’d have to work with a translator and make sure everything is up to speed. But there’s no uniform rules for captioning globally, so [as an example] if in Spain, someone’s speaking off screen, they have to be italicized in yellow. But then in France, it’s red and it needs to be a certain font or something like that. In opening captions, we’re hoping to have a dropdown menu of every single country’s specifications so that you could literally build your captioning and then click on “Spain” and it would be a tool that would just remove that basically disability tax of people who are thinking about accessibility and wanting to do interesting things with captions. But I really love this software. With the Marlee Matlin documentary, there’s like 2000 captions in that film and they’re going to run into the same thing with “Compensation.” Anybody who tries to do this is going to be convinced to go back to the default of just very simple, boring captions if somebody doesn’t create something that just solves it, so I just got to a point where I was like “I think that’s me.”

Maya E. Rudolph: What Alison is describing — this idea of having some understanding that we were doing something in quite a different way, or maybe doing something that had not been done in this exact way before, encountering challenges or maybe institutional ableist attitudes or barriers, [led us] to figuring out [with “The Tuba Thieves” specifically], “Okay, how do we make this a learning moment for everyone? One good example of that is we’ve had the balloons at every screening since the premiere at Sundance and somewhere along the line, we realized that the balloons were also a great conduit to talk about ableism in film exhibition spaces. So now the balloons that we distribute at screenings have a QR code that links to our impact campaign, which is called heavy-air.com. So we’ve found ways to integrate what was challenging with this playful and hopefully lasting innovation that brings people’s consciousness into different directions.

And when Alison and I started working together, I understood the power of the captions in the working rough cut or the working cut that I had seen at that point. But it wasn’t until we were really ensconced in post-production that I understood that when Alison would disappear for a couple of hours to caption, she wasn’t simply transcribing, she was writing something and I had not considered captioning as a creative process or something transformative in the language of cinema, and I don’t ever want to watch films without really, really strong, clear, and creative captioning again.

Alison, what’s it like to screen now at the Academy Museum?

Alison O’Daniel: It’s so funny and maybe this is too casual of an answer, but I always feel like no one’s going to come, so I’m not in that zone of excited yet. I’m in the zone of “It’s so beautiful. It’s going to look amazing, the sound will be amazing and I hope people experience it.” We’ve had some really good screenings, but I think this one is probably going to be the best because of the Academy’s technical capabilities, so I just hope people come see it.

“The Tuba Thieves” will screen at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles at the Ted Mann Theatre on June 26th at 7:30 pm. For those outside of L.A., more ways to watch the film can be found at the film’s official Web site here.

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