The Flagstaff Mountain Film Festival is underway this week and among the films playing is About Damn Time, the story of how women broke into the male-dominated world of Grand Canyon river guiding. The film’s director Dana Romanoff spoke with KNAU's Melissa Sevigny about how a Flagstaff outfitter, OARS, inspired the story.
What made you want to tell this story about women boating in the Grand Canyon?
Well, OARS came to me with this idea. You know, there’s been so many stories about men as boatmen and men in Grand Canyon running the rapids, and they had this idea of telling the story of the women that rode dories down there, and specifically Cindell Dale, because she is the last person — women of the first generation, the first wavers of women, that rode dories down there… and they called Cindell and said, you know, Cindell, we’re thinking about telling a story about the women who rode dories down in the Grand Canyon, how do you feel about it? And she said, well it’s about damn time.
Can you tell me a little bit about the history? When did women start rowing those boats?
Women have been in the Grand Canyon for a long, long time. My knowledge is of the women recorded in history, which are the white women, and I’m sure there’s many women that come before that as well. … They started in the Grand Canyon as cooks…. The reason women starting coming down there, one, people were drawn to it, but often it was the boyfriends that were down guiding all summer, all season, and they wanted the girlfriends to join in…. And then also these dories, these delicate wooden boats, they’re really beautiful, they truly are the ballerinas of the river, the sportscars of the river, but they break easily, especially back then. They really did. So men who were guiding would row all day and then at night they would have to be fixing their boats, so they wouldn’t have time to cook for the guests, so that position of being a cook opened up…. But they got to sit on the dories and learn from watching other people and learn to read the water. By the time they were granted the opportunity to be oarsmen, they were really, really competent oarsmen.
I can only imagine the technical challenge of doing a film about whitewater river rafting in the Grand Canyon, how did you go about capturing the footage you needed?
It’s a challenge. We wanted to shoot on nice cameras with nice lenses… and we didn’t do any downloading. So we had a limited amount of space. I think we estimated, okay, 3 to 4 hours a day is what we can really be filming. If you’re in documentary world, you kinda shoot nonstop, so we had to be a bit more selective with what we were capturing. Jessie on sound—how do you get clean sound, you always have a river behind you? But the river’s a character, so it was okay constantly hearing the river and the sounds of the canyon. She was inventive, she waterproofed her mics by wrapping them in condoms. Doing what you could.
You said the river is a character. How so? Tell me a little bit about how you made the Colorado into a character in the film.
It’s always present. Everyone’s there because of the Colorado River, because of the Grand Canyon and its beauty. Everyone there had a different type of connection with the river… In the audio, we wanted to record the echoing of the canyon, the sound of the canyon wren as it’s flying above, and really create that sense of place. And then also show these epic adventure shots through the rapids.
Dana Romanoff, thank you so much for speaking with me today.
Thanks so much, Melissa.
About Damn Time will play Friday at the Orpheum Theater as part of the Flagstaff Mountain Film Festival. Find the schedule on the event website.
