Nicole Newnham has found that a big career may be nurtured in small settings.
The documentary filmmaker, who appears at the Bainbridge Library Speakers’ Forum on Oct. 6, grew up on Bainbridge and first discovered theater and film on the island.
Newnham had already directed her friends in plays she authored, when she became active in Greasepaint, the teen theater company that was a precursor to Bainbridge Performing Arts.
Former Greasepaint director Susan Glass Burdick recalls being as impressed by Newnham’s precocious ability to shape the program as by her contributions to the company.
With Greasepaint, Newnham learned to improvise onstage and helped write and direct plays.
“It definitely gave me huge confidence,” she said. “It taught me how to put a story together and how to have patience with my art.”
At the same time, Newnham discovered movies.
“I remember her dragging me to see foreign films at Lynwood Center when she was in junior high,” said father Blaine Newnham, associate editor at the Seattle Times. “She’s a storyteller, and I write a sports column for the Times.
“We’ve been a very verbal outfit.”
After graduating from BHS in 1987, Newnham got a degree in history at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1991.
She was briefly a student at San Francisco State University, but was put off by the school’s emphasis on the commercial side of the film business.
She learned about Stanford University’s documentary film program while working at Telluride film festival in Colorado.
“I saw that most of the documentaries we were screening were by filmmakers from Stanford,” Newnham said, “and that got my attention.”
Newnham applied for and received a scholarship to attend the Stanford University documentary program, a small graduate department with about 10 students.
“It was run by two women,” Newnham said, “and while that might seem of no consequence, it was key, for me. If I’d been at (the University of Southern California) or one of the other big film schools, I would have sat back, and the men would have been doing the filming.”
In the small, supportive environment at Stanford, Newnham says, she was able to learn all the aspects of film-making.
“Because it’s such a small program, you had to get over whatever trepidation you felt about rolling up your sleeves and getting involved with all aspects of the process,” Newnham said.
“Unforgettable Face,” a film Newnham made in graduate school about the Japanese-American unit that helped liberate the Dachau concentration camp, was screened at the Sundance Film Festival.
Graduating from Stanford in 1994,
Newnham went on to become associate producer and line producer for Discover/Learning Channel’s “Survivor,” (1996), a four-part series on the art of survival science; the Emmy-nominated “The Human Sexes with Desmond Morris”; and “The Eye of the Storm,” a profile of United Nations Secretary general Kofi Annan.
She also produced “They Drew Fire,” a project instigated by old family friend Brian Lanker. A Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, Lanker had an idea for a documentary about the cadre of artists hired by the Army to record World War II soldiers in action.
“He offered to partner with me,” Newnham said. “It was a good opportunity to have a hand in the whole creative process.
“And it was a fascinating research challenge. We had to go on a detective hunt to find paintings that hadn’t been looked at since World War II.”
Newnham convinced Albert Laboratories, the pharmaceutical lab in Chicago that had originally sponsored the combat artists, to sponsor the documentary. The outfit wrote a single check for $750,000 to cover the total cost of filming.
“It never happens that you get the funding from one source,” Newnham said, “but I just told them that sponsoring the artists was a great moment in their corporate history.”
Newnham, who is currently making a documentary about U.S. deportation of Cambodian refugees, says that every documentary opens a window on a world.
“It can be sad,” she said, “like today, when one of our subjects was turned in to (Immigration and Naturalization Services.) But it is work that is always, always interesting.”
* * * * *
Filmmaker and former Bainbridge resident Nicole Newnham speaks on “Documentary Film in America: An Insider’s Perspective,” at 4 p.m. Oct. 6 at the library as part of the Speakers’ Forum series. Tickets are $12 at the door, $40 for the series. Information: 842-4162.
