Ask a New Yorker: You just finished walking the highline. How was it?
Stephanie: It was magical. It was fantastic. It’s such a beautiful day; the clouds are out so we didn’t have direct sun. There was a little slight breeze blowing. There were people walking the Highline together and it was wonderful. Being above the city, above the streets and having grass at your feet and plants, it’s really special.
Stephanie: Where are you from?
Stephanie: I’m from Kappaa, Kauai in Hawaii, the Garden Island.
Ask a New Yorker: I know Hawaii’s state fish and how to pronounce it: Humuhumunukunukuapau’! What’s Kauai like?
Stephanie: They film a lot of movies there. It’s called the movie island. They filmed recently The Decedents with George Clooney. They filmed King Kong, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Thornbirds, and Jurassic Park. A lot of movies get filmed there because it’s so beautiful. It can be any place in the world. You want jungles, you want caves, you want beaches, and it’s there.
Ask a New Yorker: What do you do?
Stephanie: I’m a full time film maker; I make documentaries.
Ask a New Yorker: What brings you to New York?
Stephanie: Well I’m making my tenth documentary. I’ve been making documentaries since 1988.
Ask a New Yorker: What’s it about?
Stephanie: It’s about the New York downtown Jazz scene and an artist in the 80’s and the 90’s that soared with his music. He was an avant garde jazz musician, some call him a master. He was ‘pushing the music’, all jazz fans like that term. This guy was ‘pushing the music’ in an original, exciting way and was known for that. They also called him an “ambassador” to the uptown because he was a bridge to both the downtown and uptown NYC jazz scene. That’s what also made him one of a kind. To know him is to love him. Check out my film’s website at www.thomaschapinfilm.com. He unfortunately passed too soon, before attaining great fame. We think he was on a trajectory, but he got leukemia and within a year and at age fortyhe passed away. This was 1998. So I want to tell the story because he is not here to finish the story. It wasn’t like he burned out. His life was cut short by something that was out of his control. He has so much more that he wanted to do and that he was planning on doing. And then everything got cut short.
Ask a New Yorker: What was his name?
Stephanie: Thomas Chapin.
Ask a New Yorker: Very cool. Out of all your films is there one that you’re closest to?
Stephanie: My favorite of my documentaries is the first one that I made, and it’s called Simple Courage. It was a story of the Hawaii leprosy epidemic back in the late 1800’s and father Damien’s intervention and all the people that were banished and forsaken with leprosy. I drew some parrells with the AIDS epidemic and how we responded to that epidemic, and how we address the AIDS situation with much more compassionate care than with fear and hysteria. So the film was a sort of a model on how we could do that. For Simple Courage I won an Emmy Award. It was my first film out. It took me five years and $500,000 to do it with Hawaii public television. It went national.
Ask a New Yorker: So what else have you been doing in New York?
Stephanie: Well, working on my tenth film. I’ve been doing some pre-interviews with the primary story tellers. I’ve done eight interviews. But in between that I’ve gone to City Island to eat seafood. I went up to the Bronx to The New York Botanical Gardens to see the Monet’s Gardens exhibition. I also went down to Chinatown. One of the people I interviewed has a store called the Downtown Music Gallery on Monroe Street, underneath a Buddhist temple. He is in the basement. It’s one of four independent music stores in Manhattan, and the only one that specializes in avant garde music. Bruce pushes Thomas’ music still. He would go to the Knitting Factory all the time to listen to Thomas’s music. The Knitting Factory or they call it the Old Knitting Factory because The Knitting Factory has moved down to Brooklyn. But the Old Knitting Factory and this guy Bruce Gallanter of Downtown Music Gallery went there to hear Thomas and others.
Ask a New Yorker: What do you need to keep the ball rolling for the Thomas Chapin film?
Stephanie: I’m going to have to make a trailer, a fund raising trailer because I want to put it up on kickstarter.com. It’s where creative projects can get funded. I will start my global funding, which I call my global funding miracle, on February 13, 2013 to raise the money to shoot and edit the film. I don’t know what that number is yet but it’s going to be over $100,000. February 13th we will kick it off and people have 6-9 weeks to support this project.
Ask a New Yorker: Ask a New Yorker supports your vision and dedication to film making and choosing such a worthy subject. Good luck!
