Everybody's Welcome: The Story Of Fannie Mae Duncan And The Cotton Club; Harvest Of Love: The Story Of The Venetucci Family; Prisons: They Ain't What They Used To Be

Do librarians make good filmmakers? If the work of the Pikes Peak Library District is any indication then the answer is a resounding "yes"! Since its inception in 1987, the Community Video Center of the PPLD has produced a number of award-winning documentaries under the able hand of writer/producer/director Steve Antonuccio. We watched three of their latest. Nominated for an Emmy Award, Everybody's Welcome: The Story of Fannie Mae Duncan and the Cotton Club is the inspiring story of a Colorado Springs business woman who said no to the prevailing segregation codes of the 1940s. After running a successful restaurant which provided a place for black customers to come and spend money, Fannie Mae Duncan bought a whole building for $25,000 at the wizened age of 30, and ran her restaurant (Duncan's) downstairs while opening a nightclub (The Cotton Club) upstairs. During the 1950s, Duncan's Cotton Club would host standing room only performances by Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and many others. Since white people were uncertain about entering Fannie Mae's establishment, she made a huge sign which read "Everybody Welcome." Combining contemporary interviews with Fannie Mae Duncan and historic stills from the period, Everybody's Welcome does an excellent job of telling an inspiring story. Harvest of Love: The Story of the Venetucci Family is a wonderful video portrait of Nick Venetucci, the 80-year-old scion of a Colorado Springs farm. A man for whom self-sacrifice has been a way of life, Venetucci gave up a chance early on to play major league baseball and returned to help his father steer the farm through the Depression years. He never left it again. Deferring ideas about a family, he waited until he was 74 to marry Bambi, the girl of his dreams (a retired teacher who taught at a school for deaf and blind students for 30 years). An interview with Nick is combined with historical stills and contemporary footage of an annual practice Nick and Bambi have become locally famous for: every October they invite the local schoolchildren (now some 35,000) to come pick up a free pumpkin at the farm. The children are a joy to the Venetucci's and a substitute for the one thing Nick regrets about his life...that he never had children. The final program, Prisons: They Ain't What They Used To Be, chronicles the changes in the Colorado State Penitentiary as seen through the eyes of both past and present wardens and guards, and the inmates themselves. Comparisons are made between the stricter days of "Cowboy Warden" Roy Best in the late 1940s and early 1950s (he played himself in the feature film Canon City, clips of which are shown throughout the documentary) and the more relaxed modern times (for instance, prisoners who were formerly called "convicts" are today called "inmates.") There is a macabre fascination to the anecdotes that both inmates and prison officials tell (one official recalls a gas chamber execution in which the condemned man jokingly asked if the gas would bother his asthma and was told "not for long.") On the other hand, some viewers will be uncomfortable by an interview in which identified murderers and rapists sit and joke about homosexuals and bestiality. This qualm aside, Prisons is unflinchingly real in its insider's look at a modern penitentiary. Finally, we should mention that Pike Peak Library District has also produced a half-hour overview and highlights tape, Preserving the Time Machines, which outlines the philosophy behind the productions, offers a few tips on creating video portraits, and includes clips from other video programs. Everybody's Welcome is highly recommended. Harvest of Love and Prisons are recommended. (Available from: Pikes Peak Library District, Community Video Center, 5550 N. Union Blvd., Colorado Springs, CO 80918; (719) 531-6333, ext. 1170.)