DOUBLE COVERAGE
Okie filmmaker Bradley Beesley RETURNS TO DEADCENTER WITH TWO DIVERGENT PROJECTS
Bradley Beesley spent much of fall 2015 on the sidelines at Wagoner High School football games, chronicling a state championship-defending season that often boasted as much drama off the field as it did on the gridiron.
The following spring, the award-winning documentarian was in a basement tavern in Savannah, Georgia’s historic district getting to know a flamboyant lounge-singing legend who, like him, also happens to be an Oklahoma native.
“It didn’t seem like a real stretch for me,” Beesley said. “I love both shoots equally for different reasons, but you know, I’m just super lucky that I truly love what I do.”
“It beats having a job,” he added with a laugh.
The Austin, Texas-based filmmaker is returning to his native state and bringing both of his divergent new projects to the 18th Annual deadCenter Film Festival, which starts Thursday in various locales around downtown Oklahoma City.
"Bradley Beesley is one of deadCenter's biggest success stories. We have been screening his films since the very beginning of his career, and now he is one of the most successful Oklahoma filmmakers in the business. To us, he is deadCenter family,” said deadCenter Executive Director Lance McDaniel.
Beesley’s short film “Diana in Savannah,” profiling Southern singer Diana Rogers, will screen at 4:45 p.m. Saturday and 12:45 p.m. Sunday as part of the "The Fringe Shorts" at Harkins Bricktown 16. A special sneak peek of his feature-length sports documentary “Fathers of Football” is set for 5:30 p.m. Sunday at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. Along with Beesley, Wagoner football coach Dale Condict also is expected to attend deadCenter.
Following a football film
Known for spotlighting his home state's top hand fishermen in “Okie Noodling,”
revealing the intriguing history of Oklahoma City-based art-rockers The Flaming Lips in “Fearless Freaks” and getting down in the dirt with Oklahoma’s convict cowgirls in “Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo,” Beesley said he’s actually been planning to make a documentary about the “Friday Night Lights” for even longer.
His father, Paul Beesley, was an Oklahoma high school football coach for more than 20 years, leading squads at Piedmont, Meeker and Little Axe.
“A lot of the projects are just ideas that I’ve had literally for two decades," he said. "The high school football documentary, believe it or not, I actually started shooting one of my dad’s teams in 1994. So, I have footage of my dad coaching on the sidelines … and a lot of these documentary ideas I’ve had forever. I just get tired of thinking about them, so I just eventually go do them.”
When he got ready to kick off production of his football film, Beesley emailed sportswriters in Oklahoma and Texas searching for an interesting gridiron story. He found one in coach Condict and his recordsetting Wagoner Bulldogs, and a teaching fellowship at the University of Oklahoma gave him the chance to return to and follow the northeast Oklahoma school’s quest to defend its Class 4A state title.
For coach Condict, the losses at home made for a challenging 2015 season even as the team racked up wins on the field. Days after Beesley approached him during two-a-days, Condict’s father and fellow coach, Tom Condict, died of cancer. And Condict’s teenage son, Austin, a player on the team, had recently received his own cancer diagnosis.
“The very first thing we shot was Austin’s appointment where he finds out that he’s gonna have to have surgery to get a bunch of lymph nodes removed from his stomach. That was the first day of shooting,” he said.
“It let everybody on both sides of the fence know that we were in it to win it. If we could film that scene, then there’s not much we can’t film."
Along with the trials and triumphs of Austin’s teammates, Beesley was on hand when the coach’s son had healed enough to suit up for the state semifinals, as well as for the finals game, which had as much drama as any Hollywood screenwriter could want. To add an epilogue, he went back for pivotal games the next season, even taking his dad along when Wagoner again made the state championship.
“I’m making these films about things that I care about, and yeah, I care about that team and the kids on the team and the coaches and how they do. That’s all part of it,” he said.
Spotlighting a Savannah singer
When Beesley needed a place to stay while teaching at OU, Amy Young, co-founder and executive director of the Six-Twelve community and arts center in the Paseo Arts District, opened up the living quarters she uses for artists in residence.
When he was done chronicling the Wagoner Bulldogs' 2015 season, she offered Beesley a residency at her Savannah, Georgia, gallery space, where she had a specific project in mind: a short film profiling Tulsa native Diana Rogers, a lavishly dressed lounge singer who has become a fixture performing in the basement tavern of a restaurant
called The Olde Pink House.
“The more I talked to her, the more I related to her because she wanted to get out of Oklahoma to have adventure ... and she wanted to sing, she wanted to play the piano, and she came from a pretty strict family. So, she went to New York to get away. I didn’t really want to get away; I just could understand,” Young said. “She’s magic.”
During the first of his three trips to Savannah to film Rogers, Beesley said the performer made an impression.
“Initially, I just thought, ‘Oh my God, this lady has talked incessantly. I am worn out from just being around her.' Then something just happened where she just kind of grew on me and I just started to really love her. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was all the martinis she made me,” he joked. “No, I like her a lot.”
After Beesley’s first meeting with Rogers, he called Young and told her he intended to make the singer's drinking problem a big part of the short. Although she was
initially worried, Young said she had to let Beesley make the film he wanted, especially when Rogers seemed unconcerned. When the short film premiered last fall at a Savannah film fest, the singer happily attended with friends and family, and “Diana in Savannah” received a standing ovation.
“I should have known not to be worried because he just has a loving filter that he looks through,” Young said. “I knew he would be the right person if that was the angle to take to find the humanity ... and the goodness. And there’s lots of goodness there.”
There are also lots of good stories to be told, and Beesley said he is working on a documentary series about con artists, including a pilot on the late hypnotist to the stars, Dr. Dante, a shyster who was briefly married to Lana Turner.
“I like to be able to travel and meet new people and learn about new places and new cultures,” Beesley said. “But, I mean, it wouldn’t be as much fun unless I was making a film about it.”