Tammy & Kelly Rundle pose during a location research trip to Ohio and Kentucky for Sons & Daughters of Thunder.
A special article written by journalist David Burke recently ran in the Quad City Times that we would like to share here. Sons & Daughters of Thunder is among our projects we are “juggling” and we are anticipating our first shoot with Los Angeles actor Mark Winn as Frederick Douglass in January 2013 near Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday weekend. For us, Earlene Hawley, the playwright of the script in which the screenplay is based, and her husband (co-producer) Kent Hawley, this is the beginning of a fascinating and exciting journey. We are grateful to everyone who has signed on to help with this important project--our contributors and supporters, cast and crew, our media suppporters, family and friends. We could not do these wonderful projects without the help of some many people!
~ With deep gratitude, Tammy & Kelly Rundle (Fourth Wall Films)
David Burke’s QC Times article:
I often think that circus jugglers must envy Kelly and Tammy Rundle.
The husband-and-wife team of Moline documentarians, already owning a lengthy list of awards, have several different movie projects at various stages of completion. This past weekend, they won the award for best short documentary with their first entry at the Landlocked Film Festival in Iowa City. That was for “Axman,” a look at Decorah, Iowa, historian Ed Epperly, who has researched the Villisca, Iowa, ax murders that took place 100 years ago this week. (Epperly was their consultant on “Villisca: Living of a Mystery,” the documentary that got them noticed in the early 2000s.)
Before that, they enjoyed their first Midwest Emmy Award nomination for the documentary “Country School: One Room, One Nation.” Meanwhile, they are close to completion of “Lost Nation: The Ioway” parts two and three, the sequels to the 2007 documentary that won them acclaim from film festivals and American Indian groups. That will make its debut early 2013 in Iowa City at the Museum of Natural History at the University of Iowa.
Early in 2013 they begin filming their first docudrama entitled Sons & Daughters of Thunder, about the Lane Rebels of Ohio and the first abolitionists, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, Theodore Weld and Frederick Douglass. The drama, based on a play by Earlene Hawley in Waverly, Iowa, is planned to be shot in the Quad City area and in Ohio.
"Thunder" playwright Earlene Hawley and husband ("Thunder" co-producer) Kent Hawley.
In the middle of next summer, they’re set to release their documentary on Jean Seberg ("Movie Star: The Secret Lives of Jean Seberg" a co-production with filmmaker/writer Garry McGee), the Marshalltown, Iowa, native who became a movie star and whose life was clouded later in controversy. And by next fall they’ll have a documentary on U.S. 6 ("River to River: Iowa's Forgotten Highway 6"), the highway that weaves above and below Interstate 80, covering it from the Mississippi to Missouri rivers.
But talking to the Rundles the other day, they don’t necessarily see themselves as multitaskers. “Villisca,” Kelly points out, took 10 years to complete while the two had day jobs in California, before they moved to the Quad-Cities. “Our first two films, we very much did work on one thing at a time, if you will,” he said. “Country School” took two years to complete, without the juggling act.
The Rundles say they’ve moved back and forth between projects as many as three times a day, but mostly out of necessity. “It would be great if all the funding could come in so we could work on one project. But it doesn’t work that way,” he said.
"The Seberg project will make a big splash next year, Tammy said. “There’s quite a bit of interest in that internationally because she was an international film star,” she added. “We are wanting that to premiere at a large film festival.”
A new project is going to be announced closer to Veterans Day, and it’s a subject with a Quad-City connection.
With the diverse subject matter of a 1912 mass murder, one-room schoolhouses, an Indian tribe, a native Iowa starlet, abolitionists, and a country highway, the Rundles say that no project is ever closed.
“It’s kind of like getting married. It’s a long-term commitment you make to it,” said Kelly, who, we should point out, has been married to Tammy for more than 32 years. “We choose subjects we can live with for a long time. Because we spent two years making them, we make friends while doing the films and hope those friendships also last a lifetime.”
And with The Beatles’ lyrics in mind, the couple said they couldn’t do it without a lot of help, as evidenced in the minutes’ worth of names in the credits of their films.
“The biggest challenge of doing all this, the production and the development, is that we get a lot of help from people beyond Kelly and I,” Tammy said. “The people suggesting the topic are amazing in getting us in touch with the people we need to talk to.”
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