S. T. VanAirsdale at the Reeler talks to Cinda Firestone, the director of the semi-legendary documentary Attica, a "detailed, unflinching chronicle of the 1971 riots at the titular prison — where thirty-one inmates and nine hostages died in one of the bloodiest domestic uprisings in U.S. history — and the inquiry that followed." Well-received in 1974, the movie has spent most of the last thirty years trapped in "distribution hell." It turns out that the director, whose youth and lack of film-school training (and maybe the fact that she's, cough-cough, a woman) inspired scurrilous charges that her movie had "really" been made by her mentor, the radical leftist documentarian Emile de Antonio — had herself been sidelined by illness and career problems, including the death of her distributor. Finally, fed up with politics and burned out on the business, "I moved down to Puerto Rico and I thought I'd just concentrate on my writing and my art. . . After I got well and I married my husband, I did a lot of writing and got very involved in children's theater, a lot of scholarship work and counseling at the school I fought to keep open." She's working on her autobiography and on a screenplay about Madame C. J. Walker, and she's written a musical that's headed for Broadway; meanwhile, on the side, her son has gotten interested in documentary filmmaking and is making a movie about her.
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