“Saving Marriage” Has Universal Appeal, Massachusetts Roots

(Originally published with slight variation in Bay Windows, October 16, 2008. Photo: Marilyn Humphries.)

Saving Marriage, a documentary about the fight for marriage equality in Massachusetts, will have its Boston theatrical premiere Oct. 17 at the Landmark Kendall Square. The film’s Boston-based editor, Paula Gauthier, couldn’t be happier. “It’s a gift back for the people who participated and gave us their time and shared their stories,” she says.

Saving Marriage opened at the Provincetown Film Festival in 2006, winning the audience award for best documentary. It had its first theatrical release last week in San Francisco.

Massachusetts native Gauthier is glad, however, to be bringing the film back to its roots. “It was shot here, the people who were involved in it are based here, and I think there will be a lot of excitement,” she says.

Gauthier, who has produced her own documentaries as well as television pieces for MSNBC, Nickelodeon, and PBS, met Los Angeles-based directors/producers Mike Roth and John Henning through an e-mail list for professional filmmakers. They were seeking crew for their venture. As a gay woman in Massachusetts, Gauthier found the topic appealing. She had also been looking to move away from her roots in short-form documentary and experimental film, and try something longer. She knew this would take more resources, however. “I really wanted to work with somebody else on their film,” she says, “where I could edit and not have to wear every single hat.”

Gauthier contributed her knowledge of local people and personalities during the shooting of the film between 2003 and 2005. She identified important local political figures to the California-based directors, and suggested crowd members of interest. “I thought I could see kind of the nuance of local characters who might represent the area,” she explains. During one of the Constitutional Conventions, she says, “I remember seeing . . . a man who was a little bit older. He had a Red Sox cap on, and he just looked like the kind of guy who would be against gay marriage — stereotyping by the way someone looks. I could hear what he was saying, and he was totally for gay marriage. I thought, this is going to be a great guy to shoot because he is a classic Boston kind of guy who’s saying something that you don’t expect.” She was also quick to notice the anti-equality groups that had been bussed in from Southern churches, sensing immediately that they were not from Massachusetts.

She adds quickly that “Mike is very experienced, a great cameraman. He has a great nose for where the action is. . . . there weren’t many times when I had to point him in a direction.”

It was hard for all of them, though, to be producing the film while the marriage equality battle was still in full cry. “If you’re doing historical documentary,” she explains, “you know what happens in the Civil War.” In films like her documentary on gay rodeo, Steers & Queers, “I shot for a period of time and told some stories of the people, but there wasn’t a decisive moment where it ended and there was a decision.” While making Saving Marriage, however, they had to cut the film–pulling out 90 minutes of the right pieces from 250 hours of footage–before knowing the ending. “It was a bit of a challenge,” she asserts. “Luckily we got the ending that we wanted.”

Gauthier hopes the film will be of use to the marriage equality battles still going on in other states, but also believes, “it’s important for Boston to sit back and enjoy the victory.” Although she grew up in the Bay State, she has lived in California and New York, and observes, “California and New York are always a lot more ’sexy’ than Massachusetts. Massachusetts is not considered a really ’hip’ state.” When it became the first to legalize marriage for same-sex couples, she says, “all of a sudden, I felt like we’d been validated.”

She shows a further touch of state pride when she notes that California’s marriage equality ruling garnered much more attention than the one in Massachusetts. “We had to do the dirty work,” she says, “and that’s okay. I think Massachusetts would rather be the underdog.”

That same pride in the state has affected her own life choices. After not expecting to live in Massachusetts again, she has married here, and says at this point she cannot live anywhere else. Even though her marriage is now legal in California, she feels a certain hometown loyalty to Massachusetts “for being first and doing the work. . . . I’ll stay here and stick with it because they did us right.”

She hopes people in all states, and of all orientations, will enjoy Saving Marriage, though. “The film is really meant for everyone,” she asserts. While she realizes many non-LGBT people may dismiss it as a “gay film,” she hopes others will help them change their minds. “I think people have to make the film a success in the same way they made the fight for gay marriage a success. One person really can make a difference and spread the word.”

The film, she adds, has a classic storytelling arc, “where there’s some improbable cause, an underdog, and the underdog becomes victorious, which is just sort of the classic American ideal.” An ideal long championed in this Commonwealth.

Saving Marriage will be showing for one week only at the Landmark Kendall Square. See landmarktheatres.com for times and details. It will also be showing in Denver, San Jose, New York City, and Boone, North Carolina, in the coming weeks. See the Saving Marriage site.