By Bruce Barton

Photo by Monique Schoenfeld, Town Crier

Elizabeth Thompson’s documentary film ‘Blink’ rewarded for thoughtful look at racism and rage

You won’t find Elizabeth Thompson making predictable, comfortable documentaries with simple narratives and happy endings. What you will find from the Los Altos filmmaker is work that is edgy, challenging and thought-provoking.

“Blink,” Thompson’s 53-minute probe into the mind of a former white supremacist, successfully articulates the vision of a filmmaker who won’t settle for superficial explanations. Where prior media coverage of Gregory Withrow portrayed a before-and-after figure - a man who used to hate, now reformed - Thompson uncovered a man who still exhibited violent tendencies and had used racism as a way to vent his rage.

Making the film was as challenging as the subject matter. It took Thompson four and a half years to make “Blink,” a timeline extended by the filmmaker’s yearlong illness and lack of cooperation from Withrow. But the documentary, released on the Public Broadcasting System last year, played to glowing reviews. The crowning accolade came last month when “Blink” won an Emmy award for best coverage of a continuing news story.

“I thought it was too controversial and edgy for mainstream acknowledgment,” said the 37-year-old resident. “When it was nominated in July, I thought, ‘This is great.’”

But Thompson also thought nomination would be as far as it would go. After all, she was up against heavy hitters, such as fellow Stanford alum Ted Koppel and ABC’s “Nightline.”

“I simply couldn’t believe it,” said her father, John, who along with her mother, Peg, had traveled to New York for the Emmy ceremony Sept. 5. “There was a lot of applause for the others, and when her name was announced, it was just her mother and father (applauding). She was kind of a loner up there. She was one of two recipients who acknowledged her parents.”

“I’m very close to my family,” said Thompson, who grew up in Los Altos with three sisters. The Thompson family has lived in the same house off Los Altos Avenue for 39 years.

A graduate of Duke and Stanford universities, Thompson was working at Hewlett-Packard when a co-worker asked, “If you could be anything, what would you be?” Thompson recalled. Without a second thought, she blurted out, “a documentary filmmaker.”

A sympathetic boss said he would hold her H-P job for a year while she tested the filmmaking waters. But once she was in, she never went back.

In 1989, she began working as a production assistant. She eventually co-produced the PBS documentary, “For Better or For Worse,” which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1994. Another Thompson film, “Bookends,” won several awards internationally.

In 1995, the seeds for “Blink” were sown when Thompson came across an article about Withrow, a former Aryan Resistance leader who renounced his ideology when he fell in love with a woman whose parents fled Nazi Germany. Withrow was already somewhat of a media darling, appearing on numerous talk shows during and after his white supremacist period. Story after story projected Withrow as a man reformed and suddenly nonracist.

But Thompson sensed there was more to the story than that. After much difficulty, she tracked down Withrow at his secluded Northern California home and convinced him to work with her on the film.

“I wanted the interview to reflect who he really was,” Thompson recalled, noting the Withrow was savvy with the media and wanted to control how he came across.

At one point, Thompson hired a private investigator because she doubted some aspects of Withrow’s story, particularly one account of his crucifixion by white supremacists when he announced his intention to leave.

Then she decided, “I didn’t want to bog the film down in, ‘Did he do it (stage his crucifixion), did he not do it?’ I was more interested in, ‘What do these things mean?’ … I was more interested in the symbolic language of violence including violence to oneself.”

The title “Blink” refers to a line in the film, “in the blink of an eye,” but Thompson makes clear that change in one’s personality doesn’t occur so abruptly.

Thompson observed that being born a white male traditionally held the promise of entitlement, advantage over others. But when white males are brought up poor, as Withrow was, resentment often settles in.

She interviewed white Aryan leader Tom Metzger, acknowledged as the principal mentor for the neo-Nazi skinhead movement that emerged in the 1980s. He was a father figure of sorts for Withrow who was being groomed at one point as Metzger’s right-hand man. Withrow’s own father had taught young Greg not to make friends with African Americans and other minorities.

“If you are born white and work hard, you can have anything,” Thompson said. “Metzger - had been denied his God-given right to repress others. The privilege of entitlement had been denied.”

Thompson then drew connections between these denied privileges and the resulting violence and hate that went beyond racism to self-hatred.

“What’s the connection between violence and some kind of redemption?” Thompson asked.

She had “these dark nights of the soul” when she questioned the validity of the project. Thompson also was confronted by her own physical limitations when she fell ill and was unable to work on the film for a full year. But once healthy, she was determined to finish the work.

“I’m fairly tenacious,” Thompson said. “I always felt - ‘I was this close.’ The great thing is that I worked with the most wonderful, committed people.”

Composer Spencer Critchley of Palo Alto was one of those people. He wrote the music for “Blink” with Marco D’Ambrosio. He was on hand at the New York Emmy ceremony to share in the honors.

“It was great working with Elizabeth,” he said last week. “She’s very talented and insightful.”

In most cases, film composers are brought in at the end of the project. But Thompson involved Critchley early in the film’s production.

“Working with Elizabeth felt like a real collaboration,” D’Ambrosio said. “She was open to our ideas. It felt like working with someone and not for someone.”

Critchley said Thompson’s film, involving the emotional space of the main character, required nontraditional scoring completely lacking buildups and climaxes. He described an “egoless approach to music” that has “the same presence as an overcast sky.” The music wraps around the film gently and unobtrusively, combining unusual elements, such as Indian tablas and American blues guitar.

As an independent filmmaker, Thompson’s challenge is not only making provocative work but securing the funding for it. For “Blink,” she turned to the Independent Television Service, the funding arm of PBS. Patrick Wickham, director of production for ITVS, said the film, funded in 1998, was “one of a very small number selected from 300 proposals.” The trailer, or preview of the proposed work, went through a panel before funding approval. ITVS provided the majority of the film’s funding, approximately $318,000.

“I was ecstatic,” he said when “Blink” won the Emmy. “She had worked tremendously hard in terms of sweat labor and emotional labor.”

Thompson said she made a “passionate plea for public television” as part of her Emmy acceptance speech. “I was out of my body at that point,” she laughed.

The success of “Blink” may open more doors for Thompson in terms of securing funding. But it likely won’t compromise her desire to make challenging, thoughtful films.

Currently, Thompson is producing a film about women monastics, priests who live in a San Francisco monastery and practice Buddhism. Another Web-based project further explores the roots of violence. A third project involves a fiction screenplay.

For Thompson, who is currently teaching a graduate class at Stanford University on documentary filmmaking, there are no longer any unfulfilled career fantasies as she had indulged in at H-P. The young filmmaker has found her calling and the validation of her work from critics, and the public have convinced her she’s good at it.

“I really like the documentary form a lot,” Thompson said. “I want to continue working on films I find rich and meaningful.”

For more information about “Blink” and other Thompson films, logon to www.thompsonfilms.com.