Fielding Alum Wins an Emmy Award for Ruth Weiss Beat Goddess Documentary

by Dr. Elisabeth Montgomery

Dr. Elisabeth Montgomery and Melody C. Miller

We accepted the Emmy Award last Saturday in San Francisco for our film ruth weiss: The Beat Goddess. It’s an honor and dream to achieve this level of recognition from all the Northern California judges.

I started my film training in 1985 at the Chicago Community Film Workshop, a boot camp set up to help accelerate more women and minorities into the once-exclusive field of movie-making.

I always loved documentaries because it is closest to my roots in Appalachian oral history. Even watching a blockbuster movie I would wonder about the story behind the making of the movie. For example, my all-time favorite movie is Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcaraldo (1982) starring Klaus Kinsky and my favorite documentary is Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams (1982), a documentary film about director Herzog making the movie Fitzcaraldo, a story about an opera-obsessed German wanting to bring Caruso’s music into the deepest darkest jungles of Peru.

And I set about for many decades making documentary films about my community development work in Chicago and in Latin America. Over the past 12 years, my greatest joy in filmmaking is partnering with the extraordinary talent of Melody C. Miller, Producer, Director, and Cinematographer. I’ve known her all her life so like family, we love many of the same things. We both adored ruth weiss for her passion as a poet, for her lived stories, her kind friendship, and her gift of living every minute of life to its fullest. In our movie ruth’s message to young people was to embrace the Hebrew cheer L’Chiam or “To life.” In Spanish, we give power to voice with “Gracias a la Vida” or “Thank You to Life.”

In American filmmaking, we say, “Here’s lookin’ at you kid!” The joyous gratitude we feel for receiving this beautiful, fairylike muse award (named after the Image Orthicon- a revolutionary electric TV tube), the Emmy, is the highest recognition of our commitment to masterfully delivering the stories. And so we danced the night away!

Dr. Elisabeth Montgomery and Melody C. Miller