Jenni Olson: Filmmaker links butch identity, nostalgia, ‘Vertigo’ to state’s early history.
Jenni Olson’s California feature follows 3 paths from history to ‘Vertigo’
Jenni Olson moved to San Francisco in 1992 to become co-director of Frameline, the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival. At the time, the Minnesota native had no real attachment to her new city. A programmer and a film historian, she was not a filmmaker, but as she strolled around, learning the environment, she was laying the groundwork for a body of work, which includes “The Joy of Life” and her new feature, “The Royal Road,” which makes its world premiere next month at the Sundance Film Festival in the New Frontier section.
“The origin of my wanting to shoot was my walking
“You get this sense that San Francisco is always changing, and there are always people lamenting that.” Jenni Olson, filmmaker
around the city going, ‘Wow! That’s such a great shot,’ but then going, ‘But what would you do with a shot like that?’ then realizing, ‘Well, I could just make a great shot and put them in a movie!’ ” Olson, 52, says during a recent chat at the Mission’s Cafe La Boheme. “It’s really from my daily life.”
“The Royal Road” is built around a series of landscapes shot primarily in San Francisco, but also in Los Angeles and points in between, particularly Mission San Juan Bautista and Mission Santa Cruz along the El Camino Real (the Royal Road). Olson’s voice-over relates three intertwining story threads. One skein chronicles California’s early history from Father Junipero Serra’s foun-
ding of the missions that dot the state to the 184648 Mexican-American War that ended with the territory becoming part of the United States. Another muses on Alfred Hitchcock’s classic, San Francisco-set drama of love and obsession, “Vertigo.” The last is a contemplation of unrequited love for two women, one in San Francisco and one in L.A.
“I’m very influenced by a poet, a French symbolist poet named Jules Laforgue,” Olson says. “He has this one particular poem called ‘Solo by Moonlight,’ which is about a journey on a road, and he writes in a persona, a kind of ironic persona of a guy pining over unavailable women, which is a persona that is easy for me to take on and identify with.
“I’m also always interested in undertold history, underrepresented history, particularly with some kind of social justice aspect. But I never wanted to make traditional social justice documentaries, so it’s tricky to bring that in a way that’s not too heavy-handed, especially the history of the Spanish colonization of California and the Mexican-American War.”
“The Royal Road” is very much a San Francisco creation, beginning with a Bay Area crew that includes Olson’s wife and producer, Julie Dorf; cinematographer Sophia Constantinou; editor Dawn Logsdon; and Academy Award-winning sound mixer Lora Hirschberg. The San Francisco Film Society was “The Royal Road’s” fiscal sponsor.
The film is also a chronicle of a changing and, in some ways, disappearing city. One section of the film is called “In Defense of Nostalgia,” and it is hard not to feel that emotion when the 17 Reasons sign that once loomed over Mission Street or the BofA clock tower since supplanted by the One Rincon skyscraper appear onscreen.
Olson herself was part of the first Internet wave when she co-founded PlanetOut.com in 1995. Today, she is still tied to the Internet as vice president of e-commerce and consumer marketing at Wolfe Video. But as with so many other city residents, the new tech boom and the changes it has wrought give her pause.
“We’re losing the character of what the city is or was. In some ways I think, ‘Oh, yeah, it is nostalgia’ in a bad sense of I just want it to be what it was,’ but then I think, ‘No, it’s not that simple.’ The thing about nostalgia and the changing face of the city, there’s a great line in ‘Vertigo’ where Gavin Elster says — and this is in the ’50s — ‘San Francisco is changing.’ You get this sense that San Francisco is always changing, and there are always people lamenting Pam Grady is a freelance writer. that.
“I go for very simple compositions that I hope reveal the beauty of the everyday. I hope that people will leave the film with a new way of looking at the world and looking at the city.”