SBU Alum Wins Award for
Jefferson Davis Film
By Tom Missel
Director of Media Relations/Marketing
A 1993 St. Bonaventure University graduate’s documentary film on the life of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War, has won the coveted 2009 Peter Rollins Film Award for Best Documentary from the American Culture Association.
“Jefferson Davis: An American President” was directed, edited, co-produced and co-written by SBU alumnus Brian Gary, co-founder and CEO of Flying Chaucer Films of Los Angeles, Calif.
Gary isn’t the documentary’s only connection to St. Bonaventure. One of the Civil War scholars interviewed in the film is retired SBU history professor Dr. Edward Eckert, Board of Trustees Professor Emeritus at St. Bonaventure and a former academic dean and vice president.
Additionally, Gary’s SBU classmate and roommate his junior and senior years, New York City-based entertainment attorney David Davoli, is the attorney for Flying Chaucer Films and helped secure the recent nationwide release of the documentary on DVD.
The Davis documentary, which was five years in the making, was born from a bit of serendipity – a meeting between Gary and Percival Beacroft, the owner of Rosemont Plantation in Woodville, Miss., Davis’s boyhood home.
Gary and his wife, Wendi Berman, co-founder of Flying Chaucer Films who is also a co-writer and co-producer of the Davis documentary, met Beacroft while visiting Gary’s family in New Orleans about eight years ago. “Beacroft told me that for the past 15 years he’d been trying to get a feature film made of Jefferson Davis’s life,” said Gary.
Gary suggested instead that they do a documentary. “A feature film is a total crapshoot. All it takes is for it not to do well and you’ve lost everything,” said Gary. A documentary, on the other hand, especially one in the Civil War genre, has staying power. “There are whole sections in bookstores just on the Civil War,” said Gary. “A documentary will sit on bookshelves and in gift shops from now until the end of time.”
He and Berman were surprised to learn that their project would be the first of its kind. “No one had ever done a documentary on Jefferson Davis,” said Gary. “As far as we knew we were the first documentary project on the life of the guy who was the president of the Confederacy, and that just blew us away. We saw the opportunity to make something unique here.”
The filmmakers spent months interviewing subjects, researching records at the Library of Congress and National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and shooting film. In the end they had amassed 110 hours of video and some 6,000 still images. Gary and Berman spent more than two years editing the material, writing the script as they went, all the while juggling an assortment of other Flying Chaucer projects.
Their goal in the documentary was to offer a look at Davis that goes beyond the oversimplified characterizations of Civil War figures one gets from high school textbooks.
“Davis could be painted as a villain if you wanted to just have a very black and white look at history, but once you start peeling back the layers it gets very tricky and complicated,” said Gary. “You’re dealing with a West Point graduate, a Mexican War hero, a U.S. senator and Secretary of War – a patriot who shed blood for his country and yet, at the same time, believed slavery was a proper institution.
“We tried to offer a very balanced look at the guy – not apologize, not blow anything out of proportion, but just kind of lay out this man’s life and let people figure out for themselves what they will about him.”
When Gary was assembling his cast of Civil War experts to serve as his documentary’s “talking heads,” Dr. Eckert’s name was high on the list. Gary had taken two courses from Eckert at St. Bonaventure and knew he had written a book about Davis’ years in prison after the war.
Eckert remembers the phone call from his former student. “It came out of nowhere – totally unexpected,” he said. “I remembered him, but I didn’t know he was in the filmmaking business.”
Gary was one of those students you don’t forget, said Eckert.
“He was an excellent student, an honors student. Not only was he very bright, but he was creative as hell,” said Eckert. “The thing that just blew my mind was his honors project. He wrote, directed, produced and starred in his own play. This kid had such creativity and he kept taking things to new levels.”
Gary was already a budding playwright when he graduated from high school. His father, a theater director and professor in the Pennsylvania State University system, encouraged him to find a college with a strong liberal arts program. “St. Bonaventure gave me the best scholarship,” said Gary.
He majored in journalism and mass communication, a decision that has paid dividends time and time again, said Gary. “My skills as a writer were very well honed at St. Bonaventure. Having that journalism degree was especially helpful in writing the texts and scripts for the Davis documentary. We pored over and over the script, making sure every single word was exactly what we wanted to say. That reduction, which I learned in the journalism department, I found to be invaluable.”
Gary minored in fine arts at St. Bonaventure and after graduation set out for New York, hoping to carve out a career as an actor. Meanwhile, his SBU roommate, Davoli, landed a job as an assistant to actor Alec Baldwin in Los Angeles. Gary followed his friend to L.A. where the two were roommates again. Gary got his Screen Actors Guild card and chased acting parts, landing roles in episodes of TV’s “Coach” and “My So-Called Life,” and small parts in movies, including a role in “The Net.”
Eventually, Davoli went to law school and Gary tired of the acting profession. “You’re just constantly waiting around, waiting for things to happen,” said Gary. “So I really started focusing on directing and a natural evolution out of that was producing, and another natural evolution out of that was editing.”
Gary produced and edited the New York Film Festival award-winning film “Frankie D.” As a producer, his other projects include the independent feature “Local Color” and the upcoming feature film adaptations of Stephen King’s “Bag Of Bones” and James Ellroy’s "Clandestine." Gary has also worked extensively in television, most recently directing and editing the television series “SpeedFreaks” (ESPN and MavTV).
Professor Eckert said the Davis documentary will only enhance the reputation of his former student.
“It’s an excellent documentary he’s put together,” said Eckert. “Brian’s going to be pretty well known by the time he’s done with this career.”
History is an interpretation of events, Eckert continued, and the Davis film “is an excellent interpretation from Jefferson Davis’ point of view. It’s an accurate, but dated interpretation of the causes of the Civil War. It’s not a position the majority of today’s historians would espouse. But it tells the story of Jefferson Davis from his own view of himself as a man, as president of the Confederacy, as a senator, as a legend and so on. I certainly see it being used in college courses on history as a viewpoint of the war and how we got into the war. I think it’s highly accurate, I think it’s entertaining, and the cinematography is excellent.”
It’s also a feather in the cap for St. Bonaventure University, said Eckert. “I think it’s great that coming from Bonaventure is this type of individual who is going out and making a name for himself.”
Gary is also proud of that Bonaventure connection.
“It’s a great campus story,” he said. “You have two students, roommates, who have stayed friends and who work together, and then you also have a student who felt comfortable enough with a former professor that he could call him after eight years – and the professor remembers him and is more than obliging to be part of his project.
“At a larger school or one that doesn’t have that really good personal connection between the students and the faculty, that might not happen. It’s one of the things that makes Bona’s special.”
Director of Media Relations/Marketing
A 1993 St. Bonaventure University graduate’s documentary film on the life of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy during the Civil War, has won the coveted 2009 Peter Rollins Film Award for Best Documentary from the American Culture Association. “Jefferson Davis: An American President” was directed, edited, co-produced and co-written by SBU alumnus Brian Gary, co-founder and CEO of Flying Chaucer Films of Los Angeles, Calif.
Gary isn’t the documentary’s only connection to St. Bonaventure. One of the Civil War scholars interviewed in the film is retired SBU history professor Dr. Edward Eckert, Board of Trustees Professor Emeritus at St. Bonaventure and a former academic dean and vice president.
Additionally, Gary’s SBU classmate and roommate his junior and senior years, New York City-based entertainment attorney David Davoli, is the attorney for Flying Chaucer Films and helped secure the recent nationwide release of the documentary on DVD.
The Davis documentary, which was five years in the making, was born from a bit of serendipity – a meeting between Gary and Percival Beacroft, the owner of Rosemont Plantation in Woodville, Miss., Davis’s boyhood home.
Gary and his wife, Wendi Berman, co-founder of Flying Chaucer Films who is also a co-writer and co-producer of the Davis documentary, met Beacroft while visiting Gary’s family in New Orleans about eight years ago. “Beacroft told me that for the past 15 years he’d been trying to get a feature film made of Jefferson Davis’s life,” said Gary.
Gary suggested instead that they do a documentary. “A feature film is a total crapshoot. All it takes is for it not to do well and you’ve lost everything,” said Gary. A documentary, on the other hand, especially one in the Civil War genre, has staying power. “There are whole sections in bookstores just on the Civil War,” said Gary. “A documentary will sit on bookshelves and in gift shops from now until the end of time.”
He and Berman were surprised to learn that their project would be the first of its kind. “No one had ever done a documentary on Jefferson Davis,” said Gary. “As far as we knew we were the first documentary project on the life of the guy who was the president of the Confederacy, and that just blew us away. We saw the opportunity to make something unique here.”
The filmmakers spent months interviewing subjects, researching records at the Library of Congress and National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and shooting film. In the end they had amassed 110 hours of video and some 6,000 still images. Gary and Berman spent more than two years editing the material, writing the script as they went, all the while juggling an assortment of other Flying Chaucer projects.
Their goal in the documentary was to offer a look at Davis that goes beyond the oversimplified characterizations of Civil War figures one gets from high school textbooks.
“Davis could be painted as a villain if you wanted to just have a very black and white look at history, but once you start peeling back the layers it gets very tricky and complicated,” said Gary. “You’re dealing with a West Point graduate, a Mexican War hero, a U.S. senator and Secretary of War – a patriot who shed blood for his country and yet, at the same time, believed slavery was a proper institution.
“We tried to offer a very balanced look at the guy – not apologize, not blow anything out of proportion, but just kind of lay out this man’s life and let people figure out for themselves what they will about him.”
When Gary was assembling his cast of Civil War experts to serve as his documentary’s “talking heads,” Dr. Eckert’s name was high on the list. Gary had taken two courses from Eckert at St. Bonaventure and knew he had written a book about Davis’ years in prison after the war.
Eckert remembers the phone call from his former student. “It came out of nowhere – totally unexpected,” he said. “I remembered him, but I didn’t know he was in the filmmaking business.”
Gary was one of those students you don’t forget, said Eckert.
“He was an excellent student, an honors student. Not only was he very bright, but he was creative as hell,” said Eckert. “The thing that just blew my mind was his honors project. He wrote, directed, produced and starred in his own play. This kid had such creativity and he kept taking things to new levels.”
Gary was already a budding playwright when he graduated from high school. His father, a theater director and professor in the Pennsylvania State University system, encouraged him to find a college with a strong liberal arts program. “St. Bonaventure gave me the best scholarship,” said Gary.
He majored in journalism and mass communication, a decision that has paid dividends time and time again, said Gary. “My skills as a writer were very well honed at St. Bonaventure. Having that journalism degree was especially helpful in writing the texts and scripts for the Davis documentary. We pored over and over the script, making sure every single word was exactly what we wanted to say. That reduction, which I learned in the journalism department, I found to be invaluable.”
Gary minored in fine arts at St. Bonaventure and after graduation set out for New York, hoping to carve out a career as an actor. Meanwhile, his SBU roommate, Davoli, landed a job as an assistant to actor Alec Baldwin in Los Angeles. Gary followed his friend to L.A. where the two were roommates again. Gary got his Screen Actors Guild card and chased acting parts, landing roles in episodes of TV’s “Coach” and “My So-Called Life,” and small parts in movies, including a role in “The Net.”
Eventually, Davoli went to law school and Gary tired of the acting profession. “You’re just constantly waiting around, waiting for things to happen,” said Gary. “So I really started focusing on directing and a natural evolution out of that was producing, and another natural evolution out of that was editing.”
Gary produced and edited the New York Film Festival award-winning film “Frankie D.” As a producer, his other projects include the independent feature “Local Color” and the upcoming feature film adaptations of Stephen King’s “Bag Of Bones” and James Ellroy’s "Clandestine." Gary has also worked extensively in television, most recently directing and editing the television series “SpeedFreaks” (ESPN and MavTV).
Professor Eckert said the Davis documentary will only enhance the reputation of his former student.
“It’s an excellent documentary he’s put together,” said Eckert. “Brian’s going to be pretty well known by the time he’s done with this career.”
History is an interpretation of events, Eckert continued, and the Davis film “is an excellent interpretation from Jefferson Davis’ point of view. It’s an accurate, but dated interpretation of the causes of the Civil War. It’s not a position the majority of today’s historians would espouse. But it tells the story of Jefferson Davis from his own view of himself as a man, as president of the Confederacy, as a senator, as a legend and so on. I certainly see it being used in college courses on history as a viewpoint of the war and how we got into the war. I think it’s highly accurate, I think it’s entertaining, and the cinematography is excellent.”
It’s also a feather in the cap for St. Bonaventure University, said Eckert. “I think it’s great that coming from Bonaventure is this type of individual who is going out and making a name for himself.”
Gary is also proud of that Bonaventure connection.
“It’s a great campus story,” he said. “You have two students, roommates, who have stayed friends and who work together, and then you also have a student who felt comfortable enough with a former professor that he could call him after eight years – and the professor remembers him and is more than obliging to be part of his project.
“At a larger school or one that doesn’t have that really good personal connection between the students and the faculty, that might not happen. It’s one of the things that makes Bona’s special.”
.jpg)
Comments