BY
JUDY LIN-EFTEKHAR
UCLA Today Staff
During six intense months spent with four couples in love, independent
filmmaker Becky Smith nearly lost track of a defining fact: All
of the couples were gay or lesbian.
So, apparently, did many viewers of “Gay Weddings,”
some 2,000 hours of film distilled into eight 30-minute episodes.
The program scored record viewership on Bravo television last
month.
“Gay Weddings” portrayed a wide range
of emotions tied to the subject of marriage — from some
families angrily disowning adult children to others proudly walking
their offspring down the aisle.
“A lot of heterosexual people have told
me that they actually felt tremendous sympathy for and interest
in all of the people,” said Smith, an adjunct professor
of Film, Television and Digital Media. “It wasn’t
just, ‘Oh, isn’t that odd?’ ”
Director and/or producer of more than 40 films
and videos, Smith hails from a part of the world where a gay wedding
— not to mention becoming a filmmaker — would be unusual.
She was raised in Lake Okoboji, Iowa, a town of 350 that didn’t
even have a movie theater. Even without movies on the big screen,
Smith developed passionate interests in reading, writing, drama
and photography.
“The idea that I could be a film director
was beyond imagining,” she said. “It just was very
exotic to me.”
The first in her family to graduate from college,
Smith went on to apply for film school. She was accepted by and
given a full scholarship to attend Stanford’s documentary
graduate program.
After receiving her M.A., she wrote plays and
screenplays, directed theatrical productions, produced films and
commercials and then grabbed her camera and spent her own money
to produce a film that would end up launching her work in documentaries.
“In the Game” followed Stanford’s women’s
basketball team during its national championship year. Aired on
PBS-TV’s “Frontline,” the film was named one
of the 20 best documentaries worldwide in 1994 by the International
Documentary Association. To this day it is used as a teaching
and inspirational tool in athletic departments all over the country.
“The film was so successful because basketball
was a metaphor,” Smith said. “It was really about
women’s rights, about equality in sports.”
In 1991, Smith moved to Los Angeles with her partner,
Craig Manning, who had accepted a faculty position in UCLA’s
Department of Earth and Space Sciences, where he works currently.
She joined the film school faculty in 1994 and now chairs the
undergraduate program. The two travel frequently and have climbed
25 of Colorado’s 14,000-foot peaks together.
Smith is currently editing footage for a documentary
about famous ballet dancers at the end of their short-lived careers.
She would love to work on a feature film, she
said, but continues to find filming documentaries fulfilling.
“You’re in the middle of the drama,”
she explained. “It’s such a gift for people to let
you into their lives.”
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