From the Yellow Springs News • September, 13 2007 • By Diane Chiddister
When filmmakers Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert attended the Emmy awards in Los Angeles last weekend, the last thing they expected was to win. They were thrilled just to be there, to have A Lion in the House, their documentary about children with cancer which was shown on PBS, nominated as one of three in the category for outstanding achievement in nonfiction film.
Also nominated were Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Parts, an HBO special series on New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, a film they greatly admired, and Jonestown, The Life and Death of the People’s Temple, by Stanley Nelson, another well-known documentary maker. “We went there totally expecting Spike Lee would win,” Reichert said in an interview Tuesday. “Our plan was to just go out, get dressed up, have some fun and not sweat it.”
But their plans fell through. Instead, A Lion in the House won an Emmy.
Last weekend’s Emmy event, which covered documentaries and other creative and technical categories, will be broadcast this Saturday at 8 p.m. on the E! cable channel. The Emmy awards for fiction productions will be broadcast on network television this Sunday. Lion shared the award with Lee’s film.
The first clue that their plan to just relax and not win anything was going awry occurred last Friday evening, according to Reichert, when at a party one of the judges took them aside and said she had only one piece of advice: be prepared.
“We thought, ‘oh my god, we’d better write a speech,” Reichert said.
And they did, then rehearsed in the car on the way to the ceremony.
When their names were called, Reichert spoke in her speech about the journey they took while making their film, in which they followed the families of five children with cancer. The children were patients at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, whose chief of oncology initiated the film process soon after Reichert’s daughter, Lela Reichert-Klein, recovered from cancer herself, a fact unknown by the oncologist when he chose the filmmakers.
“You always take a journey when you make a documentary,” she said. “Ours took us to witness the best of humanity.”
In his speech, Bognar thanked, among others, the parents who let the filmmakers spend six years filming as they struggled with the worst that life has to offer, a child with cancer. And they named and thanked the five children, of whom two lived and three died.
“This film is their legacy,” Reichert said. “It’s what lives on.”
Especially gratifying, according to Reichert, was sharing the award with a few of the children’s family members who traveled to Los Angeles, along with an entourage of co-workers and former students who helped on the film, including Los Angeles film editors Jaime Myers and Kevin Jones, former students in the Wright State University film production class taught by Reichert. Also attending the ceremony was the film’s associate producer, Karen Durgans, of Yellow Springs.
After the ceremony, everyone had a grand time at the Emmy gala, which included huge vases of white calla lillies, great food, and a band that played Motown hits.
“We just got up in our gowns and started to dance,” Reichert said. “We were the last to leave the party.”
