MICHAEL CAMPBELL IS WILLING TO TAKE SOME OF THE BLAME.
In the 90’s, when he was a big-shot New York ad man, he put Donald Trump in a Pizza Hut commercial, helping revive the real estate investor’s career.
Yeah, he knows what he did.
He came out to Santa Fe on a lark and got entrapped in the Land of Entrapment. He started a documentary film company, Docufilms, as a philanthropic venture.
When many people reach a certain level of success, they stop trying new things – they are comfortable in their domain and avoid tackling anything novel. Michael’s the opposite; he relishes venturing into new things.
His first feature-length film is Eating History: A Taste of New Mexico.
Michael, I’m the worst person to interview you because I know nothing about food. Do you have a history in the food industry?
I was a dishwasher. My father died when I was 14, in February. In May I turned 15 and my mother decided that it would be good to ship me off for the summer to get me distracted. She got me a job at a summer camp in Connecticut, it was called, I think, Trinity Boys Camp.
So I’m thinking, well, okay, fine. I’m completely depressed, my father’s dead and they’re shipping me off to be a dishwasher. So right from the start, I’m fucked. They drive me up, my grandfather and my mother dropped me off, and they take me up in the kitchen and it’s massive, I think they serve like 150 meals for the kids. They trained me how to be a dishwasher, and I just hated it. Now all of a sudden I’m feeling like I’ve got the worst job in the whole wide world, my father’s dead, I’m by myself, and I’ve worked my way down to being a dishwasher.
The woman who was the manager came in and she says You gave everybody in this camp diarrhea because you didn’t clean the dishes correctly.
I didn’t understand the connection between diarrhea and doing dishes at that point — I was 15. So they blame me for a camp-wide outbreak of diarrhea, and I figured, oh, this is my chance. So I said, Well, fuck you. Fuck you and your job, fuck you and your stupid dishwashing job. I hate it. I hate you, I hate the camp.
That was my experience in the food industry. I knew nothing about food.
Then how the hell did you come to do this film?
I had done a project with the nonprofit Cooking with Kids and Michael Knight, who is the board chair, was about to become the board chair for the New Mexico Museum Foundation. He’s also chair of the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market Institute, and he calls me up out of the blue and says, How would you like to do a documentary about the impact that food has had on the cultures of New Mexico?
So of course I said, Fuck you.
First of all, who does that? Okay, let’s take 22,000 years of history and condense it and tell this story about food and its culture in all the different constituents.
But then I said, let me think about it.
Maybe you’ve experienced it too, but I’ve always believed in doing things that I’m afraid of, because it’ll be hard, I could fail, but the success potential is really high. Like the Albert Brooks’ movie, Defending Your Life. The whole premise is that you only succeed in going to the next plane of intelligence by facing your fears. When you face your fears and you do things that you’re afraid of and you succeed, that’s how you evolve.
What made you most afraid?
Getting it wrong.
Well, that’s a relief.
I’m the least likely person. First of all, I’ve only been in New Mexico since 2016. Secondly, I’ve given up gardening here because I just can’t figure out the soil. I mean, it’s just impossible. I didn’t know that you could actually grow food here, because you land in either Albuquerque or the Santa Fe airport, you get out and you just basically see moonscape.
But you knew about film?
I know about film. My partner Paul and I started DocuFilms, which is a nonprofit film company, and it’s our way of doing philanthropy. Movement was our first film and that was about 20 minutes, and it came out really good. We won an Emmy, a regional Rocky Mountain Emmy, just last month. So it wasn’t a big leap for Michael to think that I could do a long format film.
So you had a great team.
The director, Zac Cornfeld, this is his second big film. The first time out, he won a regional Emmy. So I’m pulling out his natural talents and pushing in my experience in terms of filmmaking and knowing that it has to be great, you just hold yourself to this.
For those of us who haven’t seen it, what is it about?
Eating History is not about food. We use food as the catalyst to tell a complex story, that there’s still tension right underneath the surface between our colonial past and our indigenous past. I think that if we had just gone and done a history film, nobody would be interested. But by telling it through food, there’s a universal connection, it’s something we all share. In New Mexico, there’s French, German, Spanish, Mexican, New Mexican cuisine.
The food and the state are the same.
In the film, we talk about pre-contact with the native peoples. We talk about the colonial aspects of it, where the Spanish came in in the 1500s and the 1600s, how they came in and enslaved the native peoples here. We talked to Spanish people who go back 14 generations. We talked to a lot of indigenous chefs, and native people hiding seeds in caverns because the entire agricultural aspect of the Pueblo people may be wiped out. We talk about how hornos are actually Moorish.
Look, what I think we’re doing here is telling the story of Santa Fe through the people who live here. So it’s not just beautiful shots of enchiladas and tamales. But we do have those, too.
What’s been the reaction?
Fantastic. What I love the most about the reaction, is, it made me proud to be a New Mexican.
What are you gonna do when you grow up?
We’re going to finish the next film we just shot, Moving Arts Espanola.
Moving Arts was started by Roger Montoya, a Paul Taylor dancer who was in that first wave of guys to become HIV positive and thought he was going to die. So he came back to New Mexico, and he didn’t die.
He’s also a painter, so he started painting and then he started looking around Espanola and said, you know what? The kids here are in trouble because you’ve got grandmothers who are raising kids, you’ve got parents who are in jail or drug addicts or sexual abusers. So he wanted to help these kids.
His mantra became ‘art is medicine’. He’s been doing this now for 25 years.
We just finished six days of shooting and I was talking to Zac this morning and he said, Man, this film is hard. I said, What do you mean? He says, I’m going through all the transcripts and it’s just so emotional. Because you have these kids talking on the film — I mean, this one kid, Chris, was talking about how his grandfather, who was raising him, killed himself when he was only seven years old.
Chris tried to commit suicide four times before he was nine. Then through happenstance, he found his way to Moving Arts. He loved dance and he loved gymnastics. They just leaned into that and it saved his life. He went off to college, came back, started his own homeless shelter, and now he’s basically being positioned as the next successor to take over the whole organization.
Santa Fe has become home?
I measure how much I love Santa Fe by how my love for New York City is diminishing.
I always thought that this would be like a nice little exotic adventure. But I’m interacting with people that I never would have interacted with before. You get vested in a place. You start to see, yeah, you see the poverty, you see the difficulties.
But at the same time, a friend of mine is a teacher over at the Rio Grande private school. She said they’re doing a drive for the Food Depot, and they showed them the film this week and she asked if I’d come over and just meet the kids.
It was the most incredible morning because all these first-graders are asking questions about the Food Depot. This is my experience with Santa Fe — not just as a tourist skimming along the top, but being able to get in and smell the piñon. You start to really have a passion for the people and the struggle. I mean, there is a struggle. You want New Mexico to succeed because it’s an underdog.
There’s the dilettante charities, and people will say, I’m a philanthropist because I donate to the opera. Now, those things are great. I mean, we need art, but also we need to take some of that money and spread it around to where the action really is.
In the film, for the Food Depot, Shirley Hooper, who was the executive director, she quotes Desmond Tutu about people falling in the stream and how we have to go upstream and figure out why they’re falling.
There’s a great churn of people who have fallen through here, but there’s not a lot of success that’s seen in terms of helping them. You see people on a Thursday morning lining up along Siler and all the way down to Agua Fria and then back up again for another mile waiting for a food handout.
These are not homeless people. They’re our neighbors. That’s what’s gotten into my heart.