How to Get There: LGBTQ+ Experimental Filmmaker

As a teen, being an adult and choosing a job feels like a dark looming challenge with many obstacles. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Top people in all fields had to start somewhere, right? The mission of the How to Get There series is to explore the journey and simplify the process, therefore bringing it to the growing-up-21st-century audience.

It was a sunny April day and there was a showing of United in Anger at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Center in downtown Manhattan. After the powerful documentary, I spoke with Jim Hubbard about his career and immediately wanted to share his inspiring story with you.

The Position:

I am an independent and experimental filmmaker.

The Person Behind it:

Jim Hubbard

The Process:

I grew up in NYC. I lived for several years in Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, and San Francisco. I moved back to NYC in 1982.

Ever since I was little I was interested in film. I only wanted to become a filmmaker.

When I was a kid in the 1950s/60s/70s the only movies I knew were made by Hollywood film companies. As I grew up I realized that mainstream filmmaking wasn’t for me.  I had to find another medium.

I didn’t have an initial plan when I graduated high school. I wish I had. It took me a while to figure it out.

So when I graduated I went to a four-year college, but I was miserable there. I had a horrible time. In a fit of desperation, I moved to San Francisco to try to find myself.  One day, I was walking down a hill in San Francisco and I said to myself, “Well, you always wanted to be a filmmaker so you might as well do it.” And then I began looking around and researching to find what was available.  I did some research, but since this was 20 years before the internet, I’m not really sure how I found out about the summer film course at Stanford University. The course was perfect for me. In 8 weeks, I learned everything I needed to know technically about how to make films -- how to use a camera, how to record sound, how to edit picture and sound.

After Stanford, I moved back to San Francisco to try to become a filmmaker.  One evening I went to a screening of Stan Brakhage’s film Texts of Light.  It’s a completely abstract film.  Brakhage was introduced by James Broughton who entranced me.  Broughton had made the film “The Bed,” a delightful romp where a brass bed makes its way down the hills north of San Francisco and is filled with all sorts of people -- straight couples, gay couples, groups of people of every age, race, gender, and sexual desire.  That is when I decided to go to the San Francisco Art Institute for a few years and study film as art. At SFAI I studied film through an art lens, so we covered film aesthetics and the philosophy of making them.

While I was studying, I met a man named Roger Jacoby who was also an experimental filmmaker and we fell in love. He was living in Pittsburgh and I was in San Francisco, so I moved to Pittsburgh. In the 70s Pittsburgh was actually a place where there was a good deal of support and money for experimental filmmaking, but it dried up before I got there. So our lives became impossible there, so I only lived there for a year.

In 1979, Roger and I moved to Minneapolis where there was more support for the experimental filmmaking we wanted to do. After a couple of years, Roger and I broke up and since I couldn’t stand the winters in Minneapolis, I decided to go back to NYC.

To support my living in NYC I did temp work.  In the 80s you could get (relatively) high paying short term assignments typing documents for large companies. I was paid $15-20 dollars per hour for that. So all through the 80s and early 90s, I could work half-time, support myself and have enough time to do my film work.

When AIDS erupted in the Gay Community, I tried to make a film about it.  I wasn’t interested in doing what the mainstream media was doing -- barging into people’s hospital rooms, filming them on their death beds, in the worst light possible, literally.  I wanted to make a film that was sympathetic to people with AIDS and showed them in their human complexity. I struggled with this until two things happened. First, Roger Jacoby was diagnosed with AIDS and wanted me to film him in the last years of his life, which I did.  When he died in 1985, I inherited his outtakes which included a good deal of footage of him. Second, ACT UP burst onto the scene. Suddenly there was a visually striking strong grassroots political response to the AIDS crisis. I wanted to be part of that and I wanted to film it.  I started going to ACT UP meetings every Monday night at what is now known as The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Community Center on West 13th Street and 7th Avenue. I went to a lot of ACT UP demonstrations, but I mainly filmed them. I wasn’t one of the activists who wanted to be arrested; my part of it was documenting the crisis. It was an odd mixture of being a bystander and a participant.

Early on I would try to find the meaning of filming those turbulent times. What does it mean to be a part of the Queer community and to force the government to accept us as full citizens, to respect our rights, to provide the healthcare and other services necessary to keep people alive?

I started filming ACT UP in 1987.  I made two short films that featured ACT UP -- “Elegy in the Streets” and “Two Marches.”  I also made two other films about AIDS called “The Dance” and “Memento Mori.” In 2002, Sarah Schulman and I started the ACT UP Oral History Project.  By that time, AIDS had become part of the landscape and people had forgotten the immense amount of work that activists did to force the U.S. government to provide services for people with AIDS and to force the mainstream media to treat people with AIDS with dignity and humanity.  Sarah and I decided that we could give people a chance to tell the history of their work in the movement and provide the raw materials for a more complex and truer history of the period. We conducted 187 interviews that range in length from 1 hour to 4 hours. Complete transcripts and video clips are available on our website actuporalhistory.org.  Using excerpts from the ACT UP Oral History Project and archival footage from the AIDS Activist Video Collection of the New York Public Library, I made a documentary about the US AIDS crisis. The film is called United in Anger:  A History of ACT UP.  The film took 4 years to edit from 350 hours of interviews and over 1,000 hours of archival footage.

Things to Keep in Mind:

I edit, film and interview for my films. I have done everything from production to the final edit. I even used to process the film myself, though now I do everything on video and computer.

I make my own daily schedule since I work for myself.  It demands discipline and persistence and constantly fighting distraction, inertia, and procrastination.

I wish I’d known that you can’t rely on outward factors to motivate you; you have to motivate yourself to do your work. There won’t always be the recognition or acclaim that one always hopes for with films.  

I make films for the LGBTQIA+ Community so if the films are an asset to the community I feel that my films hold meaning.

Today I was working on a trailer to promote the alternative march that will take place on the 50th anniversary of Stonewall called Reclaim Pride. I took my footage of NYC Pride Marches/Parades and tried stitching it together and the first edit just didn’t work. I keep having to come up with new schemes and approaches. I have footage from the 1980s to the present day.  The sizes of the files and the resolutions don’t match, so I’m working to try to eventually blend it seamlessly. You can see many examples of my work on my website jimhubbardfilms.com

Unique Experiences:  

I originally thought, “Of course I need to go to school to learn how to make films.” And I began looking at schools and I went down to UCLA and was horrified at what I saw. All the students I met thought they were going to be the next Spielberg, and probably a few are now, but I certainly did not want to have to deal with multi-million-dollar budgets, raising them or being accountable to the people who provided the money.

Also, in the 1970s it was almost impossible to make films about a gay subject matter, especially if they took the community’s point of view. If it was a film about some closet case that killed himself then you’d have a chance of it getting produced. But if you wanted to talk about someone who was out of the closet and enjoying their life you would never get it considered, much less produced. Even documentaries about what was then called the Gay Community but is closer to what we think of now as the Queer community could not get funding.

Advice:

Are there types of films only you can make? Are there films you have to make? Or do you want a career in filmmaking or in one of its sub-industries? You can be an editor, director, the list goes on. You can go to school and become a Production Assistant and start doing the low-level work in the industry you want and work your way up.

Cameras used to be large and heavy and now you have lightweight point and shoot cameras. And if you need to film something immediately, smartphone cameras have evolved enough to where the resolution is higher than the 16mm cameras I started my career with.

My strongest advice is “Just Do It!” and “Make It New!”