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Jane Anderson and Michelle Boyaner talk “Packed in a Trunk” and new projects

Having considered Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson one of the best queer documentaries of 2015, I’m thrilled to have been able to chat recently with director Michelle Boyaner and her co-writer and star of the movie, Jane Anderson (If These Walls Could Talk 2, Normal). These out filmmakers and friends have CVs that speak for themselves, but I was happy to chat with them about Jane’s also gay great-aunt Edith.

Leading up to the film’s release on DVD and VOD by Wolfe Video, we spoke about Edith, the filmmaking process, what’s happened since the film’s initial release and what big projects are ahead for them both.

images via Wolfe Video

Warning: Spoilers ahead

AfterEllen.com: Jane, most people don’t know who Edith Lake Wilkinson was. Hopefully they’ll watch the movie and that will change. But tell us, who was this woman and why is she so special?

Jane Anderson: Edith was a young post-Victorian woman who had the courage and the ambition to leave her town in Wheeling, West Virginia and venture out on her own in 1889 when young women didn’t do such a thing. She got herself to New York City and studied with great art teachers. At a time when most young women were still tied to either their family homes or getting married and then tied to their husbands, Edith was unique at that time for having gone out on her own. She was a pre-liberation woman.

What else makes her unique is that she was a really gifted artist. Not only technically, but once she discovered the Provincetown art scene, her palette, her vision, her style became really unique. As an artist, she distinguished herself as having her own particular style. Fortunately, now she’s being recognized by the art community as an important contributor of the Provincetown scene at that time. Tragically, she was put away before she could continue on with exploring her art. She might’ve gone into other styles—Cubism or Expressionism. But her artistic life was cut short, and that’s why I’ve always felt this need to bring her work back out and share it with the public and the art community.

AE: What was it about her story that told you, “It’s not enough to just share her story.” Through an article, or even through a short video. You had to bring her back to Provincetown. Why was that so important to you?

JA: How do you revive a life? How do you save a person’s legacy? And, really, the best way that I found was to make a documentary. That’s when my spouse Tess [Ayers] and I approached Michelle and her partner, Barb [Green], who’s our wonderful cinematographer. And by partnering with them and going to Provincetown under Michelle’s fabulous direction and Michelle creating the narrative, that’s how we got her known. That was my initial intent, to revive Edith’s reputation, but then because Michelle created such a beautiful film, it’s a wonderful doc in its own right. So it’s one art form meeting the other.

AE: Michelle, how did you get involved in this project with Jane?

Michelle Boyaner: I was in no way educated about art. What drew me to Edith’s story was I had heard—I saw the paintings for years hanging in Jane and Tess’ home. We were personal friends with Jane and Tess for almost 20 years. I had seen the artwork in the background and I knew Jane was also an incredible artist and I didn’t know what artwork was Jane’s, what artwork was her great-aunt’s, anything. And then Jane several years ago had a website built that kind of told Edith’s story—gave a chronology of the events in Edith’s life. She really wanted to get the facts about Edith out into the world because, again, it was about creating this legacy of this lost artist. Something that has stuck with us throughout this whole filmmaking process was this kind of theme of “Here’s to being seen.” We wanted Edith to be seen. She was hidden away. She was snatched from her life and her artwork. Everything was hidden.

So when Jane and Tess came to us and said, “Would you guys be interested in making a documentary about my great-aunt Edith?” we, of course, loved the idea of working with them, but what felt compelling to me was to create a story where we were following Jane and Tess while they tried to find out the answers to all these unknown things that were hanging out there. “What happened to Edith? When was she in Provincetown? What did she do there? Who knew her? Why wasn’t she a part of the known history there? Why was she put away?” You know, how did that all happen? So the idea that really compelled me to want to do this was if they would be willing to let us follow them and create a journey of the two of them trying to unlock the mystery. So that rather than just a straightforward, academic documentary about a lost artist, we made kind of a mystery—a road trip film that mixed their desire for redemption for Edith with the history.

AE: Especially in the case of Jane, a fellow filmmaker who’s very much used to being behind the camera, why was it so important for you to get her in front of it? What was convincing her like and, had she said no, do you think you would have been able to go forward with the documentary in another way?

MB: I don’t know how, unless through the use of puppets or Claymation, we could’ve done it. But I sort of, again, was lucky to have our friendship at such a strong place that we built that trust. I think after a few conversations we were able to convince Jane, “You’ll forget the camera is there. You’re doing it for Edith. You have Tess.” Because for me, it was very important for them to be doing this together.

They took a big leap of faith with trusting that. But I think there were times when they almost forgot we were there.

JA: We trusted Michelle and Barb enough as filmmakers. It didn’t take enormous amounts of convincing. My concern, I just didn’t want it to be an ego trip about me. I wanted it to be about Edith. As soon as that was straightened out, as soon as it became clear that me being in this film would help the cause, then I let go of any hesitation.

AE: Michelle, the idea to include the parallel in their art styles in the film, was that your idea?

MB: No. That’s something that Jane has lived with, the parallel. As a storyteller, as a filmmaker, you’re just looking at what evidence is in front of you.

JA: The fact is whenever I traveled anywhere with my sketchbook, and this had been happening for decades, I always felt that Edith was standing behind me and, not quite guiding my hand but showing—I felt like I was always recording these different parts of the world for Edith.

I always felt she was there with me when I was a young woman in New York. And it was never spooky, it was never an imposition. I always felt she was a friendly presence with me as a fellow artist.

AE: What was different this time around versus when you first started looking into Edith’s story in the 1970s?

JA: There are two elements. One is in the 1970s I was a kid with a bunch of slides and who’s going to take me seriously? When you walk into a town with a film crew and a résumé, people are going to pay attention to you. And, in a way, I used the power of Michelle and Barb as filmmakers, plus my own reputation as a writer and filmmaker. It gave me the legitimacy so that people took notice.

The other thing is back in the ’70s, you just didn’t talk about being gay. I was just putting it together that Edith might’ve been a gay woman. And the various gallery owners were mostly straight and I didn’t even tell them about Edith being put away in an asylum so that all they did was look at slides and then dismiss the work. But because we came back with Edith’s personal narrative at a time in our social history when everyone was paying attention to what happened to gay people then and what’s happening to gay people now, and Provincetown obviously is a very gay-centric town, because I was able to finally talk about that, that other element is what also made people pay attention to Edith.

AE: Michelle, early on in the process of trying to make this happen for Edith, did getting new information come easy, i.e. did things snowball or did it look like it was over before you’d even started?

MB: Jane had done so much research and legwork over the decades that she had lived with this. So we had all her research that she had done. But we had only one photograph of Edith.

I believe at the end of all of this research, and we still expect to find more, mind you, I believe we have something like 13 photographs now, which for us feels like a mother load of images of her. What happened was we were researching—and Tess, Jane’s partner, was incredible in leading the researching online through Ancestry.com, through the archives. Any online archive database that had any tie to the subject we were scouring. And then as word sort of started to hit Provincetown about this then the most wonderful, generous archivists and historians started offering up things that they had.

JA: Bob Bridges is at the University of West Virginia and he’s one of their main art archivists and he had Blanche Lazzell’s photo albums. He found a couple of photos of Edith that Blanche, her buddy back then, had labeled “Wilkinson.” They were photographs of Edith in her fifties. Forties and fifties. So then we could see what she looked like in middle age, which is very different from when you’re young. Then we were able to match that look to other archival photos.

MB: Imagine that basically it would be like finding the Instagram of someone that was much more famous and then seeing the person you’re looking for tagged in their photos, so now you know what they looked like. Now you can search for this obscure person who nothing would be labeled under her name certainly. But now we went through the Archives of American Art, which had all the famous Provincetown artists of the time. We went looking through all their photographs and suddenly it was like Forrest Gump. I mean, she appeared in numerous things of all the really famous artists of the time.

Then again, as you see in the movie, it was just like once the initial connections were made, the town just opened its heart and people dug through their archives and through anything they could.

AE: What does the movie not show?

MB: For me, what’s happened after the fact has been pretty miraculous. First of all, the audience response once it aired on HBO, well at film festivals too—we had no idea what was going to happen. She’s an unknown artist. There were lines around the block.

We didn’t show at that many places because we were very lucky that HBO came in and acquired the film pretty early on. So we only played a few festivals, but the public’s response, the emotional response to Edith and her story and the injustice and the redemption, was overwhelming for all of us. And when it aired on HBO, we received hundreds if not thousands of emails and social media postings of how inspired people were to either research their relatives, or that spinster aunt, or “I’m going to pick up my sketchbook again”. I don’t think any of us were expecting that.

JA: No, not at all. And then since then a couple of new pieces of hers have shown up and that’s been really, really exciting. That was one of my hopes with this documentary, that people would come out of the woodwork and say, “I think I have an Edith.” And also because of the doc, the largest art museum in West Virginia, which is, of course, Edith’s home state, contacted us and this summer they’re mounting a major, major retrospective of her work and publishing a catalogue of her work, which is a major feat because now a legitimate art museum is recognizing Edith as a historical art figure. And this museum is in Huntington, West Virginia and just a mile or two away from the asylum that Edith was put away in. So there’s just a fantastic, beautiful irony in what’s happening.

Edith Lake Wilkinson

AE: Have you received anything belonging to Fannie, or any leads in regards to her?

JA: Nothing about Fannie. She kind of disappeared.

MB: So many people that we heard from could relate to Jane and Tess and their journey and the parallels with Edith and Fannie. We did hope that we would hear from someone from Fannie’s family. That hasn’t happened yet, but we’re hoping now that the film will be out on DVD soon that it’ll make its way somehow magically, like so many other things have happened with this film and production and everything, that we will hear from somebody.

AE: Is the word out in the art scene? Are there gallery owners and collectors that maybe are looking for the name Wilkinson now?

JA: I don’t know. We have our one major collector in Provincetown who is finding things, but I haven’t been contacted by any other galleries.

MB: But we have definitely been contacted by lots of museums, lots of people wanting, you know, “Would you bring her work here?” The story has resonated with a certain level within the art community, and the hope is obviously to really, really solidify Edith’s place. But Provincetown’s art scene and established art community have absolutely accepted her and this narrative and her part in history.

AE: Michelle, the scene with the medium—it goes against the typical fact-based narrative of most documentaries that fall within your genre. I’m sure you were aware of this, so why’d you go ahead with it anyway?

MB: Here’s the thing: it was put out there in a way, and we tried to say this in the film, which was take this or leave it. Jane herself was a skeptic. This was another one of those, “Please trust me on this. Just let’s do it.” And the reason is my own personal belief system allows that that is a tool that could be of use to us.

We worked for about a year to try to get to Lisa Williams without providing any of the backstory or anything, to really keep everything completely with a clear palette so that it could be an even playing field when we did it.

Ultimately as filmmakers, yeah, it is our job to definitely present to you the things that occur and the events that occur. You definitely have documentary filmmakers who have different methods of things. This was just a risk I wanted to take and I was very grateful that my partners allowed us to take it. The response overwhelmingly has been positive.

JA: The reason, Daniela, I like it and, as Michelle said, I was skeptical and I was worried about how it might not be good as documentary filmmakers to include something like that, but I think ultimately what that section does is that it throws an extra bit of narrative possibility about the relationship between Fannie and Edith. Because up until then, everybody had been idealizing this relationship.

Michelle Boyaner

AE: So what’s next for both of you in terms of projects?

JA: I’m back doing my other projects. I have a new project with HBO that I’m partnering again with Frances McDormand, and we’re going to do a miniseries. I’m also going to be directing a film I’ve written about a woman named Ann Weldy. I don’t know if you’re familiar with The Beebo Brinker Chronicles.

AE: Yes!

MB: Hold on to your hat, Daniela!

JA: Yeah! So Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner bought the rights to this book and they came to me to see if I wanted to make a film. I saw that there’s a wonderful story in the woman who wrote those, Ann Weldy, who was living a straight life, living in the suburbs of Philly with her husband and two little girls. And she was running off to the Village to live the gay life and secretly having affairs. She wrote these lesbian books under a pen name. So I’m very excited about that project.

AE: Your project with Frances, the miniseries—can you tell us any more about that?

JA: It’s a pioneer story seen through a woman’s point of view, and it’s really about how in America we settled these beautiful woods, and eventually 100 years later they turned into big box stores. It’s going to be three two-hour segments. So it’s a giant, giant project.

Jane Anderson

AE: What’s coming up for you, Michelle?

MB: I do narratives as well, but documentary is what’s coming up over and over again right now. So our current project is a feature documentary called It’s Not a Burden: The Humor and Heartache of Raising Elderly Parents. It’s all about this journey that I find that I’m in the middle of that I find so many of my friends in the thick of, which is helping our aging parents.

As of this moment right now, it happens to be that all the—we’re following different storylines—all the adult children happen to be gay. Different gay friends that are helping look after their parents. For some reason it sometimes seems that it falls on the gay kid to help with the parents. So we’re right now following three storylines locally and are in the midst of fundraising to go across the country and gather just a patchwork quilt of stories of people that are on this path of kind of the heartbreak and hopeful humor of helping our parents as they age.

Packed in a Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson will be released on April 26 on DVD and digital platforms, including iTunes, Vimeo On Demand, and WolfeOnDemand.com.

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