A Bee Worth Buzzing About
The Oscar-nominated 'Spellbound' holds true to its name
By Anne S. Lewis, Fri., June 6, 2003
Who'da thunk that following eight kids under the age of 14 along the arduous, dictionary-strewn road to the National Spelling Bee in D.C. could be riveting -- spellbinding even? Admittedly, the prospect felt a lot like anticipating the 75-minute cricket match at the end of Lagaan, last year's four-hour-long Bollywood hit. As it turns out, both prongs of Spellbound's double-entendre were appropriate -- which explains why rookie filmmaker Jeff Blitz's first feature and doc also walked off with an Oscar nomination, to boot.
The whiz kids we follow are a veritable rainbow of cultural, socioeconomic, and ethnic diversity; several are children of first-generation immigrants. And sure, Spellbound, which premiered and took top honors at SXSW in 2002, is about the American dream and how anyone that fixes it in his sights has a shot -- damn the limitations of the hand life has dealt him. But those of us in the audience who happen to be on a first-name basis with a middle schooler might wanna know: What was in the water those kids were drinking? How many kids do you know would spend their extracurricular hours memorizing the dictionary?
And yet that's what it takes to first snag top honors at one's own regional spelling bee and then start gunning for the big one, the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee (now in its 76th year) held at the D.C. Hilton. Blitz and his friend and producer Sean Welch profile overachieving spellers plucked from the multiculti American landscape -- from Perrytown, Texas, (hometown of Angela Arenivar, whose ranch-worker parents were illegal immigrants and did not even speak English), rural Missouri, and the D.C. projects, to the economically affluent San Clemente, Calif., and the scholastically advantaged New Haven, Conn.
We watch the months of preparation these kids put themselves through and also get a fascinating window on the varying parental attitudes toward the whole endeavor. The latter seems to run the gamut from a universal baseline of overwhelming pride and amazement to occasional doubts about whether this is really a good thing (or, as one parent puts it, a form of child abuse) to that slippery slope of overinvestment, where the march to the finish becomes a joint-venture between parent and child.
Austin Chronicle: How did you know, when you were picking your subjects, who would eventually make it to the National Bee -- and wasn't that a little nerve-racking for a doc-maker?
Sean Welch (producer): We had a pretty good idea who would make it into the regional bees from the research that Jeff had done, but it was always a gamble. We'd spent five days in Perrytown, Texas, with Angela's family before the regional bee. Then at her regional bee, she battled back and forth for 54 rounds -- this, of course, made Jeff and me very nervous, wondering what would happen if she did not win that competition because we'd spent all of that time with her.
We shot a total of 160 hours of film, 80 hours of it before the nationals. We couldn't get to the regionals for some of the kids, so we picked up their stories afterwards and then in Washington -- and we always hoped that they'd last into the late rounds of the nationals.
AC: I especially liked the round at the National Bee when Neil, one of the Indian kids, gets the word "Darjeeling" and seems to be thrown by it; then the camera zooms to Dad sweating bullets in the audience. To me, this said so much about the ironies in the Americanization of these immigrant families.
SW: Yeah, there were lots of other ironies in the luck of the draw of who got what words at the nationals. Harry Altman from New Jersey who gets the word "banns," and his mother recalls the clueless boy from Texas who got the word "yenta," and Ashley, from D.C., who is a self-proclaimed prayer warrior chances to get the word "ecclesiastical."
AC: What were some of the other challenges of making this film?
SW: Neither of us [Welch and Blitz] knew how to work the camera; we had two days to learn and then hit the road. The challenge was for two no-names, like us, to gain the trust of these families so they'd let us into their lives. We wanted to keep the crew small but we also had to for financial reasons. We ended up funding the film on a dozen credit cards. So, in some ways, our story parallels that of the spellers: They're both stories about the American dream and show that focus, dedication, and hard work can't guarantee that spellers will win at the national level, or that we as filmmakers would get nominated for an Academy Award -- but it's always a possibility.
Spellbound will be presented as part of the Texas Documentary Tour on Wednesday, June 11, 7pm, at the Alamo Drafthouse Downtown (409 Colorado). Producer Sean Welch will introduce the film and conduct a Q&A session following the screening. Advance tickets are available online (www.austinfilm.org) for AFS members. Tickets will go on sale at 6:15pm on the day of the show. Admission prices are $6 per show for the general public; $4 for AFS members, KLRU members, and students. The Texas Documentary Tour is a co-presentation of the Austin Film Society, the University of Texas RTF Dept., The Austin Chronicle, KLRU-TV, and the Hotel San José.