FEATURED FILMMAKER OF THE MONTH

Sam Wainwright Douglas wears a burnt-orange beard about the size of Texas but even bigger is his accomplishment, CITIZEN ARCHITECT: SAMUEL MOCKBEE AND THE SPIRIT OF THE RURAL STUDIO, a documentary that transfixed us at this year's Little Rock Film Festival.

CITIZEN ARCHITECT explores the life and work of the late architect, artist, and Auburn University professor Samuel "Sambo" Mockbee, a fifth-generation Mississippian, who founded the Rural Studio in rural Alabama in 1993 with fellow Auburn University professor D.K. Ruth.

The Rural Studio enlists students of architecture to design and build low-cost, high-aesthetic structures based on the real needs of poverty-stricken communities in Hale County, Alabama. Douglas’s film captures the spirit of a man who uses architecture to shelter the body as well as the soul; the affluent as well as the destitute; the white side of town as well as the black; and who created an outlet for students to capitalize on architecture's power to improve lives.
 
Unfortunately, Mockbee died of leukemia in 2001, just after receiving a MacArthur Genius Award. In 2004, the American Institute of Architects honored Mockbee with a posthumous Gold Medal—their highest honor.

CITIZEN ARCHITECT appears on PBS August 23rd, 10pm Eastern and 9pm Central.

For more information on Sam, visit his website www.bigbeardfilms.com
For more information on CITIZEN ARCHITECT, check out www.citizeenarchitectfilm.com
For more information on the Rural Studio, go to www.cadc.auburn.edu/rural-studio/

THE OXFORD AMERICAN: How did you get started?

SAM WAINWRIGHT DOUGLAS: I, like a lot of other people who went to film school, went in thinking I was going to be the next Martin Scorsese. I thought I only wanted to make fiction. I was going to be the next auteur. Which was fine, of course, but then I got bitten by the documentary filmmaking bug and I was opened up to this type of filmmaking that I never really thought much about. I was just blown away by some of the films I was watching by D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles Brothers, people like that. The whole cliché of life being stranger than fiction was really made apparent to me.

So I kept watching a lot of documentaries and, when I got out of school, some classmates and I really wanted to get going making a movie and no one was going to hand us 500,000 dollars to make some fiction film, so we started borrowing cameras from production companies and places where we were working and we started making a movie called THE HOLY MODAL ROUNDERS…BOUND TO LOSE, and that came out in 2005.

THE OA: What do you like about making documentaries?

SWD: I saw documentary filmmaking as a way to jump right into making a movie—to start capturing footage and shaping a story and deciding what you care about to put on the screen. There was something immediate about it, something surprising and unpredictable. Whether you’re exploring a place, a political campaign, or an artist, you feel like you go on these long adventures and you get really deep into the subject, which has always been very attractive to me, much more so than sitting around on a set for three months in the scalding heat with huge lights and carpenters and stuff.

THE OA: What kind of subjects get you excited as a documentarian?

SWD: I’ve noticed that I’m really drawn to people—artists and characters—who aren’t afraid to break away from the pack. I’m drawn to free-spirited people who follow their muse and not the mainstream; people who care about more than just themselves, and want to leave the world a better place. I’ve always found people like that fascinating.

So with the Rural Studio, I was particularly blown away by Samuel Mockbee and the way he uses his talents and skills to make the world a better place in the most powerful way he could. Not only did he have an immediate impact on a community, which continues to happen today, but he impacted a whole wave of designers and architects in terms of figuring out what they can do to make the world a better place versus just collecting a paycheck.

“Sambo” created an experience in which students leave believing they can take on the world. It’s hard to graduate from the Rural Studio and keep building homes in impoverished communities—I mean, we all have student loans and bills to pay—but students leave the Rural Studio bitten with the desire to use their talents in a way that benefits society. In some ways their core values are changed.

THE OA: I read that you and Jack [Jay] Sanders agreed to do the film at Sambo’s funeral, which must have been a very powerful moment for both of you. Were you two able to retain that type of spiritual energy throughout the long process of making the film?

SWD: Yeah, it has been a long process. I shot interviews with Sambo in 1999 and I was young, just a year out of school, and wanted to see how he would interview and if maybe I could get some grants or something to make a film. When he passed away in 2001, he had been trying to get me and Jay to meet each other, because he thought we would really hit it off and that we might be able to do a film on the Rural Studio the right way. Sambo must have thought we had good energy or something.

Jay and I finally met at Sambo’s funeral. We said, “Well, I think we know why Sambo wanted us to meet; let’s figure out how to do this.” We shook hands and decided we would do something.

THE OA: Your involvement with Samuel Mockbee reaches further back than that. Tell me about your earlier memories of Sambo and the Rural Studio. When did you know you wanted to do a film about it?

SWD: Yeah, my father and Sambo did a bunch of work together in the ’80s and ’90s. They worked together on the Mississippi Pavilion for the world’s fair in New Orleans in 1984 and they had a lot of fun doing that. So that’s how we knew Sambo; he was a family friend and we lived in Houston and he would come through every once in a while and he was just one of those fun adults who did magic tricks, told funny stories, and talked to you like you were an adult.  He always had these sketchbooks going and I would be eight, or nine, years old and he would look through my sketchbooks with me and comment on my drawings and I just thought he was a really cool guy.

Then, when I was in college, my parents and I were driving through Alabama and we stopped at the Rural Studio. I think it was about 1995. They had just finished the Yancey Tire Chapel, which is so beautiful and I was just blown away. He also took us to meet Shepard and Alberta Bryant, the homeowners of the first Rural Studio project, and I had never seen architecture working with communities like that.

THE OA: I love the title of the film. Can you define what it means to be a Citizen Architect?

SWD: Citizen Architect is a term used in a lot of architecture circles to refer to an architect who’s more concerned with applying his or her skills and problem-solving ability to the needs of the community; someone concerned with how the building will affect those who will live it. Rather than an architect whose only concern is chasing down the next job and building something fancy, wild, crazy, or shocking.

THE OA: Is that how you see yourself as a documentarian? A “Citizen Filmmaker” of sorts?

SWD: Well, I would love to do some big films eventually, but I want to do films that have heart to them and say something about social responsibility. I get really sick of seeing all these documentaries that present these horribly downer subjects and no positive alternative. I mean, they might say, “This is what needs to be done,” at the end of the film. Meanwhile, I’ve watched an hour and a half of just how corporate America and the corn wheat is all going to kill us and we’re all going to drown in oil.

I’m not ignoring those problems, I just want to see more films that have some hope! Stories about people doing things to combat this stuff and make a difference. We live in a twenty-four-hour echo chamber of incessant news and pundits talking about how horrible things are and how everyone is messing this up or messing that up. I just really wanted to be involved with a story like Sambo and his Rural Studio that shows someone being positive and hopeful in this day and age when we seem to have so many problems overwhelming us.

THE OA: Your film does a good job of presenting the hopeful message inherent in Samuel Mockbee’s life and work in a balanced manner. The film never feels sentimental. Was that difficult to do considering your intimate connections with Sambo and the Rural Studio?

SWD: You would think that considering our close connections to the subject of our film—my wife, daughter of Samuel Mockbee, co-produced the film along with Jack Sanders, a Rural Studio alumnus who studied under Sambo and a featured instructor in the film—you would have to restrain us from becoming too sentimental or maudlin, but you know the thing about it is that we’re just not very sentimental people. [Laughs.]

THE OA: I cannot think of a more pungent interview than the one given by Peanut Robinson, a native of Newbern, Alabama, at the outset of your film. Can you tell us how that came about?

SWD: We wanted to get the opinion of someone from the town who doesn’t work at the Rural Studio, someone who is not a part of it every day, and we started talking to him and he had a very skeptical point of view. I thought it was really important to show that, because someone like Peanut represents a lot of people in the area who are skeptical of these newcomers who have come in and are doing all this work, building all this stuff, and the locals want to know what they really want, and I think that shows an obstacle that students have to overcome. As Sambo says, they have to learn how to communicate with people and I'm not going to give away the end of the film about how that plays out with Peanut.

But with Jimmy Lee Mathews [better known as Music Man], we wanted to delve deep with a client over the course of the project and show him and the students really getting to know each other.

THE OA: What are some notable audience reactions to the film?

SWD: There have definitely been some people in the audience who missed the point. An older man in the audience, talking about the Native American couple in Utah we visited who had a house built for them by Hank Louis (an architect who was influenced by Sambo), asked something like, “Well, if all they wanted was water, why didn’t they just give them a mule?”

THE OA: Have you received a similar sort of critique from viewers about the Rural Studio, one that questions the program’s ability to effect true change? Something like, “So you build them a house but allow them to live in it any way they please. What good is that?”

SWD: Yeah, that’s what I was going to say about some people missing the point of the film. When I hear a response like that, I just think to myself, “Did you not just watch the last five minutes of the film?” I think some people have these misconceptions about poverty, class, and race and they just see things from their little world. They see Music Man moving into this house, a total pack rat who’s got all his stuff there living the same way he’s always lived. And people say, “Oh they’ve failed, they didn’t change this guy’s life.” And I’m like, you know what, dude? I’d probably live in your apartment different than you would right now; my refrigerator looks different than your refrigerator. I just get sick of that bourgeois notion from well off people that everyone else has to drive the same car and have the same furniture and keep their house perfectly clean the same way they do.

THE OA: On a similar note, Samuel Mockbee talks about architecture’s ability to provide not only creature comforts but spiritual comforts as well. Do you sense that at all?

SWD: As far as a physical home providing spiritual comfort, you can sense it in people’s personality, their demeanor. Music Man is a much calmer person than when we first met him. He’s healthier; he’s much less agitated. When he was living in this trailer where the floor was rotted out, there was no running water, and the roof was caving in, he was a very agitated, nervous person. He would repeat himself constantly and ask and ask and ask; he’s much more mellow now and happier to be in a good place.

THE OA: Do you have any other memorable Music Man quotes that didn’t make the film? He must have been full of hilarious moments.

SWD: He has these great phrases and ways of putting things. Like he doesn’t say chill out, he actually says, “Chill up! Come on buddy, we fixin’ to chill up!” I’ve also heard him say when someone is full of bull, “That man is more full of crap than a stopped up commode!” [Laughs.]

There's this footage of him that we were trying to work into the film of us sitting around and he was going through all the songs he was writing and what they were about. How this song was going to be a hit. He said, “When this song becomes a hit, I’m going to buy you a van with a pool in it and a TV and a hot plate.” [Laughs.] It was great.

THE OA: You mentioned how inspiring Samuel Mockbee’s sketchbooks were to you as a child. What other visual artists have inspired you? Photographers? Painters?

SWD: Let’s see, yeah, photographers I like—I really like William Christenberry and the crazy guy from Memphis, William Eggleston; and I also like the photography and painting of Ed Ruscha and other artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Smithson.

THE OA: Let’s run through a list of Sam Douglas’s favorites. Favorite film?

SWD: My favorite movie is 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, I don’t know, it’s a religious experience; anytime it’s on the big screen, I get lost in it.

THE OA: Favorite book?

SWD: GERONIMO REX by Barry Hannah. Love that book, got lost in that, too. I also love Mark Twain’s LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI. I also love all the heavy hitters like Beckett, Miller, Kerouac, Faulkner, and Jonathan Lethem’s THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, love that book.

THE OA: What about music?

SWD: Music, let’s see: Merle Haggard, The Sex Pistols, the new LCD Soundsystem album.

THE OA: What’s the film scene like in Austin?

SWD: The film scene here is full of really talented, motivated people and it’s really easy to get to know everyone and it’s very supportive, very collaborative. I have friends who make bizarre comedies, friends who make dark thrillers, etc. I mean, I’ll act in a friend’s movie or I’ll edit a friend’s movie and he’ll shoot for me. Blah blah blah. So that’s cool.

THE OA: It seems like you left New York headed for Texas and haven’t looked back.

SWD: You know we have all this green space in the city, parks, and springs, all that good stuff to keep your brain on track and it’s such a good place to be creatively, because there’s just not as much hustle. When I lived in New York, there was just so much hustle to pay the bills. It’s just hustle, hustle, hustle.

THE OA:  What’s next for you?

SWD: I’m hoping to do a film on Land Art. Starting with the work from the late ’60s, you know, huge sculptural, monumental pieces that have been done in the desert like the Spiral Getty and following how that has evolved into today—all the issues of land use and how we see the history of the American West and how we react to it culturally and what we do with it. All those kinds of issues associated with Land Art.

THE OA: How long have you been rocking the beard?

SWD: I’ve had a beard since I was about eighteen. It hasn’t always been this large, but when I was a senior in high school, I remember this freshman asking me, “Hey man, seriously, you can tell me…are you a narc?”

“No. I’m not a narc, go on to class.” [Laughs.]

So the beard grew out. As I got older, it got bigger and bigger and I realized one day that I’m never going to shave this beard off. Being a beardo is a lifestyle. It ain’t going nowhere! Even in the summer, I just trim it back a little. You got to jump in. You got to dedicate yourself. You can’t halftime this thing.

For more on Samuel Mockbee and for a list of the architect's favorite Southern monuments, read "Samuel Mockbee's Vision in an Invisible World" from THE OXFORD AMERICAN’s Hidden South Issue #41 (fall 2001).