MAKING 'PROMISES'

LOCAL OSCAR NOMINEE GINNY DURRIN

The first film Ginny Durrin produced was not very glamorous: the story of a waste water treatment plant in Richardson, Tex. But she did what she could with it, with shots of water trickling to background music by Leo Kottke, and interviews with the mentally handicapped people who made up some of the work force.

But of such modest efforts is a career as a Washington filmmaker made. Today, nearly 20 years after examining waste water, Durrin has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for her hour-long portrait of homeless advocate Mitch Snyder, "Promises to Keep." The film will be shown nationally tonight on public television stations (including here on Channel 32 at 10 and Channel 26 at 10:30).

Winning the award, which will be announced March 29, is a long shot -- she's up against Marcel Ophuls' epic "Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus Barbie," among others -- but for someone who refinanced her house to pay the bulk of her movie's $265,000 cost, even garnering a nomination is a gratifying moment. (Two other local filmmakers, Marjorie Hunt and Paul Wagner, won the Oscar for Documentary Short Subject in 1985 for their film "The Stone Carvers.")

"Promises to Keep," which recounts the battle by Snyder and the Community for Creative Non-Violence (CCNV) to acquire, keep and renovate the former federal building at 425 Second St. NW and convert it into a shelter for the homeless, turned into a four-year struggle for Durrin. "The story would not end," she said. "It was a masochistic adventure; but once I got into it I couldn't leave it. I thought it was a really good story and my gut feeling was that it would turn into something."

She started in 1984 with several essentially simple ideas: to do a film on a compelling social issue, with a central figure and an ongoing struggle that would lend itself to a dramatic story. For family and financial reasons (she has two teen-age daughters), it had to be in Washington. Mitch Snyder attracted her attention when he and other CCNV members began a fast to force the Reagan administration to open the federally owned building to the homeless.

"I was very intrigued by this idea of fasting," she said. "You could call it a temper tantrum, you could call it a Robin Hood type of thing ... but I started there and just had to keep going."

She followed the CCNV members during the ensuing battles, as Snyder nearly died from fasting before the building was opened, as they were later faced with eviction, were denied money for the renovation, competed for federal funds with other groups, courted the press, found a temporary kind of glory in a made-for-television movie, held holiday parties for the homeless and continued the daily job of feeding and sheltering 600 to 1,000 homeless people. The film ends with scenes of the newly renovated building, which is held up as a model of its kind.

The process was not without tension, as both Durrin and Snyder agree, primarily over the question of privacy. "Mitch and Carol {Fennelly} and I had problems at the beginning, but we don't now," she said, a sentiment with which Snyder concurs. She took her cameras into the shelter against his wishes and CCNV rules, for example, which produced some of the most effective footage but also trouble with the CCNV leaders.

"The filming she did inside the shelter she did without our permission," said Snyder. "We had words afterwards. For us it's a very difficult thing -- we communicate visually and publicly but we walk a fine line. If you invade someone's home you are not treating them with respect and dignity ... Ginny is a very aggressive person, but I know that sometimes obnoxious people produce great work. I remember telling everyone at the time that I was sure the film would end up winning some prize." Snyder prefers the film to the already-aired CBS television dramatization of his story, which he refuses to watch. "I prefer reality," he said.

"What is good in a film you get because of proximity," Durrin said. "But there's a lot of tension when you get closer than they want. But I admire their toughness in respecting the residents' privacy."

And indeed, some of the scenes shot inside the shelter are those that accomplish what Snyder is particularly pleased with -- "giving some flesh and dimension to these humans."

One woman, Anne McDonald, ran the night staff in the women's shelter and is shown painting an immense mural of notable women. Jackie Kennedy, she says as she dabs paint on a portrait of her, is a particular favorite of the women in the shelter.

Another, an elderly white-haired sprite known as Granny, was filmed in her room at the shelter, a room so packed with things she had collected on the streets that Durrin and her camera crew had to sit on the windowsill to film her. Granny pulls out a crumpled pink evening gown from a plastic trash bag, and as she talks about the panel in the back and the sequins and beads she's going to sew on it, she becomes a voice of dreams and a vision of a happier time.

Granny also "collected" the bags, loaded with expensive lenses, belonging to the cameraman and his assistant, Durrin recalled. She saw the bags disappear behind Granny's locked door and went after them, ending up wrestling the 80-plus-year-old woman to get into the room, crawl over her pile of possessions and retrieve the bags. "Then 10 minutes later Granny was back to her engaging self."

A few months ago, Granny disappeared from the shelter. "The rumor was she left in a white Cadillac," said Snyder. "Heading out of town to visit someone." Anne McDonald, he said, is now living in her own apartment.

Another incident occurred on a day Durrin had a new cameraman. A woman resident saw him and became enraged. "How dare you bring someone from my past life in here!" she cried, Durrin said. It turned out she and the cameraman had had adjoining classrooms when they had both been English teachers. Neither Durrin nor the cameraman pursued the woman further, sensing that she had been deeply mortified by the encounter.

For a year during the filming, Durrin worked as a volunteer at the shelter. She helped cut bars of soap into pieces and toilet paper into rations to stretch out the meager supplies. She helped other volunteers collect unused food from restaurants and sort through it, fashioning what was usable into provisions for hundreds, later washing the pots in cold water, all that was available. She talked to the residents and got an idea of "what life was like on the inside." She also acquired a cat.

"One night this dogcatcher in a uniform showed up with a cage and announced he was going to collect all the animals in the shelter. There was this cat, with kittens, and he said if nobody could prove she'd had her shots she'd be killed. So I took her home." She wondered why the man seemed concerned about the animals living in the shelter but not the people.

Durrin, 47, readily concedes that her problems with Snyder were partly of her own making. "I can be tough and assertive but for some reason I was terrified of him. He has a sharp tongue and I had invested so much energy in the project that I was afraid of the possibility of losing it all if I sat down and talked it all out with him."

At the same time, her admiration for the controversial Snyder as a spokesman for an unpopular issue remains undiminished, and it is shown in the film. "He's a very complicated person," she said. "But he performs a useful function, and he had to have a lot of anger to accomplish what he has."

Some of that anger rubbed off, she found one morning when she erupted unexpectedly at a client, using words that would not ordinarily issue from her mouth. "I think I had totally internalized the anger I saw in Mitch, and it suddenly came out," she said.

In a wool pantsuit and white blouse, Durrin looks more like a woman you'd meet at the PTA than either a raving virago or a bohemian filmmaker tracking her quarry through snow, sleet and hostility. She works out of a town house in Adams-Morgan that she bought with advance royalties from her first independent production, a documentary about Margo St. James, the spokeswoman for legalized prostitution. The two-story office holds a staff of five and a lot of equipment; the look is clean, comfortable and functional. The staff distributes her 12 films, four of them the current crop.

She has made documentaries about childbirth, AIDS, teen-age drunk drivers, midwives and workers' rights, as well as specials for particular organizations such as an early film encouraging women to become dentists for the Department of Health and Human Services.

A 1963 graduate in communications and English from the University of California at Berkeley, Durrin learned the basics of filmmaking during a two-year Peace Corps project in Colombia. She and her former husband, cinematographer Kip Durrin, then joined the crew of a 138-foot barkentine captained by their former Peace Corps director for a round-the-world, year-and-a-half-long sailing adventure. The draft board caught up with Kip Durrin in Bangkok, and he ended up in the service at Fort Belvoir. And that is what brought Ginny Durrin to Washington.

Her worst problem during the early years of her career was child care, she said. She and her husband often worked together out of a basement office in their Capitol Hill house, and often depended on a series of babysitters for their two daughters, now 19 and 15. When the couple separated, she got the business as well as the obligation to support the children. Durrin now lives in Spring Valley with journalist Steve Green of Copley News Service.

Currently she is "simmering" several ideas for her next project; all she knows is that it will not be on anything too heavy. "I've done AIDS, alcohol abuse and homelessness -- I think I need a break," she said.

The Oscar nomination is undeniably a thrill, for her and the several dozen people who helped her make the film. Many, including narrator Martin Sheen, donated their services or delayed their fees until she gets the money. With European television sales, she is hoping to break even eventually. "My goal was not to make money but to get it done," she said. "There are other satisfactions."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.