We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Margaret Irwin a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Margaret, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
The mission of co-producing/co-directing my first full-length documentary is two-fold – there is a profound challenge in telling a story of deep loss for many families and to tell it honestly and compassionately.
First, it is a film that needs to be made before the stories are forgotten. It is the story of compassion in the face of deadly, and very intentional, silence – set during the first decade of the AIDS crisis (1980s-1990s). Second, it is the story of inspiration led by the most selfless rebels who cared for the dying while disobeying the interpretation of theology within their own churches,
This story must be told and the heroes must be brought out from the shadows. For all who died during the decade, our mission as filmmakers is deeply personal and deeply humbling.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Since I was 9 years old growing up in Nashville, I have wanted to tell stories on film by directing. Even at 9, I knew this was my calling. My hardworking Southern mother, a lover of the old movies, always said I can do anything I set my mind to. She was the first to believe in my longshot dreams.
The day after receiving a Religious Studies degree, and many film courses, from Southern Methodist University in 1984, I moved to Los Angeles with very little money, no friends or family here, no place to live, and no job, I just knew I needed to be one of the creators in the illusive world known as Hollywood.
My mother found me an apartment with a view of the Hollywood sign and said this $425/month one-bedroom was perfect. She returned to Texas and I was left all alone in the real Hollywood. I found ads for USC and UCLA student films and worked over 16 hours most days just for meals and $10 in gas. I loved every second of the training!
Fast forward 30+ years and mostly time spent working my way ‘up’ in theatre management as a Board Liaison and Chief of Staff, I found a different creative world. But now, in 2023, with my film partner, Stephen Hale, I am finally co-producing/co-directing my first documentary film. We are heading into producing and anxiously fundraising for every penny needed.
The road has been long and hard, with high ups and low downs, yet I would ask for no other life.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
During the early years (1980s), I struggled to get paying film work, so I snuck onto the old film lots – MGM, Universal, Radford/MTM, Paramount – and pretended to be where I was supposed to be. I waved my way onto the Radford lot in Studio City during the heyday of Mary Tyler Moore and Grant Tinker. I snuck on so many times to watch exterior filming of Remington Steel, St. Elsewhere, Hill Street Blues, etc., I was offered my first real job in LA! I was hired as a PA on a CBS Afterschool Special. I worked long hours and was so sure of myself that insisted that I, as a PA, needed to receive a screen credit! My first on a TV program. I am still so grateful for the people who believed in me, the nobody.
I went from an optimistic young woman to an overnight realist. The world around me changed. During my years backstage at The Music Center in the mid-1980s and 1990s, the HIV/AIDS crisis became very real for all of us in theatre. Our gay male friends began to die in those early years without medications or even hope. I stopped counting at a dozen in only a few years. The celebrations of life services were heartbreaking and inspiring all at once. I was with Chip, a Disney producer, and his 2 best friends and family hours before he passed. We chatted about our friendship, his death, we laughed, we hugged, we said goodbye.
Thanks to my mother who drove meals to AIDS patients and sat with them in the hospital as an RN when others would not, I watched how to be compassionate and caring for the stranger. For the past nearly 4 decades, I have wanted to honor Chip and so many we lost. This documentary is the story I have deeply wanted to tell. I finally have the chance and I will fight to get it made.
How’d you meet your business partner?
I met my co-producer/co-director, Stephen Hale of Capital Hope Media, as colleagues at my job in the Episcopal Office of the Bishop of The United Methodist Church. Stephen makes videos for churches and has wanted to make a documentary. He came to me after a chat about filmmaking and asked if I wanted to tell the story of the Strength for the Journey HIV/AIDS camps that have been going for 30+ years. A ‘Christian camp’ movie was not interesting to me so I said, “If we can have Act 1 be about the Church’s resistance from the 1950s-up to the early 1980s when HIV/AIDS hit… and Act 3 being about how the face of AIDS changed (the statistics for black women, celebrities like Arthur Ashe, Magic Johnson, Halston, and the painful loss of Ryan White, et al), and ask where is the Church since the 1990s, then I am in.”
I knew we had to tell a truthful story of a religion that more-than-not intentionally turned away from its own parishioners in the pews mostly because of church politics and an interpretation of theology. We have found the heroes and will tell their stories throughout Act 2 to a new generation as we honor a lost generation.
With Stephen and his deeply rooted knowledge of Christian denominations and love of research, our pairing has been nothing short of miraculous.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.thebodyofchristhasaids.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebodyofchristhasaids/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100087683236096
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/margaret-irwin-94447330/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0KKbsie2nE
- Other: https://www.thefilmcollaborative.org/fiscalsponsorship/projects/ – type in The Body of Christ has AIDS
Image Credits
Silence=Death original artwork by Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Soccarás