Jenny Inzerillo of High Plains Public Radio’s “High Plains Morning” chats with actress/writer Kristen Bush about her film THE GAME CAMERA, the Rural Women Films initiative, and its artistic mission to uplift female voices in rural America.
CONDENSED TRANSCRIPT
Jenny Inzerillo: Folks, you are tuned to High Plains Public Radio. I am so excited to have Kiki Bush tell us about a new film that she created, as well as an initiative called Rural Women Films. The film is called The Game Camera. Kiki, thank you for sharing some time with the listeners of High Plains Public Radio.
Kristen “Kiki” Bush: Thank you, Jenny. It’s a real pleasure to be here with you guys today.
JI: Okay, first and foremost, from where are you calling right now in Kansas?
KB: I am in rural Saline County, Kansas. I’m on 30 acres of really beautiful prairie about 70 miles away from where I was born and raised in Rice County, Kansas, in a town called Sterling. So I am a central Kansas rural girl born and bred. And it’s really nice to be home.
JI: Well, when I checked out the website for Rural Women Films, it says, “women’s stories from flyover country,” narrative films by women in rural areas. There’s a deficit of regional voices, which is something that we work really hard to counteract here on High Plains Public Radio, and share the voices of the people who are from our region, because we just don’t hear them or see the representation that we should have.
Can you talk a little bit about just generally, how did this endeavor come about?
KB: As someone who was from a really small town, one stoplight, I knew at a very young age that I wanted to be an actor. I owe that in large part due to Sterling College, that was right across the street from the house where I grew up. They had a really robust community theater.
I would run across the street and see these plays and knew that I had to get out of my small town in order to make it as an actor. And I did. I was gone for about 20 years. I lived in New York and did a lot of theater and a lot of TV and that kind of thing.
COVID brought me back. And I ended up spending a lot of time during COVID with my parents. We had this really beautiful bubble where we made cookies and watched TV. But I also met my husband, who is a travel writer based in Kansas. And with him, we’ve felt really impassioned about making films by the people who live in these areas about these areas. And I’m speaking specifically to rural Kansas.
And I challenge your listeners — I couldn’t do it before I started this process —to name three films that were shot entirely in Kansas. I don’t think you can do it, because there just aren’t that many. Everybody will go, oh, well, the Wizard of Oz. Nope, it was shot in Culver City about 85 years ago. And yet that is still the film that we’re known for.
And as an actor I’ve done a lot of really great TV and film and theater over the years, but now that I’m back, I would like to continue that on a high professional level here in central Kansas. So it’s a big charge, but I’m hoping with this first film, The Game Camera, we’re gonna make a pretty good stab at it.
JI: Well, it’s funny because one of the things I always do listen for and try to pay attention to is things that did happen here on the high plains, things that were created here. And there’s that TV show, Somebody Somewhere, that is set in Manhattan, Kansas. But I’m curious, do you know, is it filmed in Kansas?
KB: It’s funny that you mentioned that because we actually wanted Bridget Everett to be on some level a part of this, and I reached out to her and had a really lovely conversation with her. I love what they’re doing with Somebody Somewhere. If you’re listeners don’t know it, I highly encourage you to go find it.
It is a beautiful tale set in Manhattan, Kansas, which is about the same size of Salina, the main town near where I’m based. It’s telling the story of a woman who’s over 40 and her ragtag community that includes a lot of different people that you wouldn’t think live in Kansas, but they do.
And to answer your question, no, it’s not shot in Kansas. It would have been too expensive for the protection company to be based in Manhattan where it was set. So they ended up shooting it around Chicago. I’m a little critical of some of the [Chicago-sounding] accents in it and the fact that I never knew the area around Manhattan, Kansas grew so much corn. But when you film in Illinois and pretend that it is Kansas, you have to make some concessions for that.
It’s not filmed in Kansas because of the lack of film tax incentives, which is something that I’ve actually worked on with a lobbying company called Grow Kansas Film. I was asked to speak in front of the Kansas House on behalf of having film incentives here. We didn’t get it done last year, but we’re gonna go back to the drawing board next year.
I mean, my short film alone could have saved some money had we had those tax incentives in place like Missouri does, like Oklahoma does. We haven’t gotten it done yet, but I still, I’ve got hope that we will.
JI: Well, I just actually looked it up and it looks like, yeah, it was, it’s filmed in West Chicago. So Warrenville area, which I have friends from there. And yeah, those accents, really, oh my God, it’s very Chicago.
KB: But I don’t want to denigrate it. It’s a fabulous series. And I think that’s a really good step in the right direction to change what we think of these quote-unquote flyover states. You know, they represent people who are all colors of the rainbow in Somebody Somewhere, all types of different proclivities. I really am grateful for that because we’re, we’re diverse out here. People just don’t know that.
JI: Well, I saw the trailer for your film, The Game Camera, and it is lusciously and beautifully shot. Tell folks a little bit about this film. Like, is it a short? Is it a full length?
KB: It’s a short. And I’ll give you the log line: “When a grieving woman installs a night vision game camera in her mini-horse’s pen on her Kansas ranch, the photographic image of a man’s legs forces her to reconsider her husband’s death.”
JI: I think that from the trailer, it looks really gorgeous. When you were writing it, did you have locations already in your head for this?
KB: Right, well one of the things that is the most expensive part of making a movie is locations. And when you live on a beautiful patch of prairie, it’s like, well, we’re gonna put you to work. We don’t have to pay rent for this or we don’t have to pay location fees for this.
Another thing that we really wanted to showcase were women’s talents. I’ve got so many statistics about how women are still, they only comprise less than a fourth of all directors, writers, executive producers, producers, editors, cinematographers for the top grossing films in the United States and actresses fair, hardly better.
Only about a third of on screen speaking characters are women and after you turn 40, it decreases big time. Apparently when you’re in your 40s and 50s and 60s, you decide to be mute according to Hollywood.
So I was really impassioned and emboldened to have five out of seven of our characters be women and the majority of behind the scenes crew, the director, the producer, a lot of our department leads were all women and that felt really good to get that done. It just feels really great, when I look at the credits and I’m like, “oh, wow, we set out to make a rural woman film and we did.”
JI: You know, it’s wild to like, now we’re in this golden age of streaming, there’s so much content, so much going on — and then when you check, it’s like, oh look, it’s a woman director, oh look, you know, it’s still not that common.
KB: I think that that’s the problem with something like Barbie, which I loved, thought it was fabulous you know, Greta Gerwig has done something really remarkable but the truth is there’s a report from San Diego State University that comes out every year, called “It’s a Man’s Celluloid World” and the most striking thing about this report is the lack of any progress for women in film. Just statistically speaking across the board, it just isn’t happening.
Barbie took a lot of the glory ,and rightly so, but instead of being emboldened to make more movies about women, they’ve taken that statistic and I think Mattel Films now is making 14 movies about toys.
JI: Well, having a platform like Rural Women Films, not just as someone who can give some advice and mentoring to young women who don’t know really where to start. Just having groups like yours, I feel like, is going to be a game changer for young women that are coming up.
KB: I hope so and that’s, thank you for mentioning that. That is one of the things that I wanna do with Rural Women Films. If there’s a young woman in rural Montana and she comes across our website, like, maybe we can help her out, help guide her to how to get donors or say, “have you heard about this young filmmaker who’s back in your area?”
Everybody talks about the collaborative nature of film, and I would love for it to be a place where people can really lean on each other because it’s a huge country and I think a lot of folks, myself included, from smaller towns think, “well, I’ve gotta get out of here. I’ve gotta go to a big city, I’ve gotta meet like-minded people.”
Had there been, you know, your iPhone in your pocket, like there is now back when I was younger, the ability to go outside in your backyard and shoot a film is bigger than ever. That’s really thrilling, but you still need the know-how, and film is such a collaborative medium. My husband’s a writer, I saw him write an entire book on his laptop, just him and his laptop. You can’t do that in film. You can’t do that in the performing arts. You need a group of people who can help you.
JI: Well, I feel like more people that know about things like Rural Women Films just kind of changes how you can think about the arts in the state of Kansas, where things are a little more spread out, people are spread out all across the high plains, intensely creative, brilliant people making really, really great art that you could put up against anything. But just having a platform and having a, “hey, there’s someone in Salina doing this thing.” You never know how many seeds that’s planting within people’s minds.
KB: I hope so, you know, I had I been told, as a young woman, if there had been an actor, executive producer, who had come back to my town and had done things a bit on her own, I would have really perked up at that and just been probably inspired to just keep going.
I’ve been on a lot of TV shows and films and I’m so grateful for the work that I have done, but it is really hard. And that’s why finding your collaborators is just so paramount. I’m so grateful for the people that I’ve met.
That’s something that’s different than in a bigger place. Like New York, you throw a stone and you hit 50 aspiring actors, but when you come back home, you realize that, okay, we’re small in numbers, but we’re really determined because there’s just not that much of it yet.
JI: Well, this is extremely cool that you’ve got this film finished and I love that on ruralwomenfilms.com, you’ve got a little chunk that just says, “Got a script?” So you’re encouraging people to reach out, you want people to visit ruralwomenfilms.com, check it out, find out what you guys are doing.
Because like you said, we live in a place where the community does come together and does support interesting endeavors and the people in this region are smart and cool and they read. They live in a space that is really like expansive and it gives you a lot of room to think about the world that you wanna create.
KB: Yeah, I think so too. I also think that to speak of this beauty that we live in that is so easy to discount. Kent Haruf is an Eastern Colorado novelist who wrote about the plains as being the country that he loved the most. He said that it wasn’t “pretty,” but that it was beautiful if you know how to look at it. And I think there’s something so true about that.
This is, to quote a Kansas writer, Chloe Cooper-Jones, this is “difficult beauty” out here, but I think it’s so worth it. And I think that the art that we make from it is redolent of that. I think this expansiveness, like you said, we have more time to sit and look at the sky. I think that it’s just as inspiring as being in a city with bright lights and big city energy.
There was an article that came out in the LA Times about how they should start making movies in Kansas. And I think it was in part because the author was so thrilled that Kansas voted to retain abortion rights. But like, no, really. Let’s not have that be a metaphor. Like come film in Kansas. So let’s not film it on a sound stage in LA anymore. Let’s film it at the source.
JI: Yeah, down with Culver City up with Junction City.
KB: You’re great at coining these phrases, Jenny, I like it.
JI: Thanks, I’m a copywriter by trade. I just weaseled my way into radio. Well, it has been so great speaking with you, Kiki. Thank you so much to you and your partner, Emily, for putting this together I encourage everyone to just hop on ruralwomenfilms.com and check out the trailer for The Game Camera. You can check it out, and man, it starts out feeling like it’s almost gonna be a horror film, but then it looks really beautiful.
KB: Good. We wanna have the beauty and the horror, because that’s what life is made up of, isn’t it?
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