[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: Can you tell us the story behind the moment when you decided to make a movie? You’ve written so much.
Brandon Loran Maxwell, Writer, Speaker, Prize Winning Essayist, Film Director, and Entrepreneur: I had written an essay about the history of zoot suit culture, cholo culture, low-riding and I wanted to contextualize it for people because I had grown up around these subcultures.
I wrote this essay and the essay went viral. After it went viral I thought to myself it would be kind of cool to make a visual project that tells this history even a little bit more in depth.
I sort of sat on the idea for about a year because coming up with footage was difficult finding footage from the 60s, 70s, 80s.
Licensing that footage I happen to come across a vault, basically an archive in I think it was San Jose [California]. It was from an old cable access station that had gone defunct. While that cable access station was in operation there was a camera person there named Juan (Juan Espinosa) who would take the camera and he would go out and film all of these events in the 70s and 80s and 60s. He would have his own cable access station show.
When the cable access station went defunct, he donated all of the reels to the city. When I found all of this footage it was amazing. It was early black and white footage of low-riding and the Cholo civil rights era, just really cool footage that I had never seen and most people had never seen.
I talked to the city. They told me that they couldn’t do anything but if I could find him then they’ll give us the reels.
I hunted Juan down, found him in Oakland [California] and we were able to acquire the footage. Then we used AI to restore all the footage. From there I contacted somebody who was a cinematographer for Unsolved Mysteries at Netflix and I basically pitched him my idea of letting me use your $50,000 Red camera for this project. I think you want to be a part of it. They cut us a deal and…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
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About:
Brandon Loran Maxwell is a writer, speaker, prize winning essayist, film director, and entrepreneur. His writings and commentary have appeared at The Hill, Salon, Townhall, The Washington Examiner, The Oregonian, and The Foundation For Economic Education, among others. In 2022, his writings were cited at the U.S. Supreme Court (United States Of America vs. Helaman Hansen). In addition, Brandon regularly speaks on a variety of social topics, and has been cited or profiled by outlets such as The Los Angeles Times, Vox, NPR, The Washington Post, The Blaze, and The Oregonian. His personal essay “Notes From An American Prisoner” was awarded a Writer’s Digest prize in 2014, and his one-act play “Petal By Petal” about drug and alcohol addiction was performed at The Little Theater in 2009. He holds a B.S. in political science and resides on the West Coast.
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