In a time when online media is taking the stage and holding its own against traditional television and the Hollywood film industry, stereotypical notions of various demographics are brought into question by independent filmmakers every day. For Professor Jennifer Burton of the Department of Drama and Dance and her filmmaking family, stereotypes about aging offer an important opportunity for dialogue amongst people of all ages. To spark such a universal discussion, Five Sisters Productions, run by Burton and her four sisters, began work on one of its most recent projects, "Old Guy."
Currently consisting of six episodes, "Old Guy" is a web series featuring an 85-year-old actor who is often given narrow character roles based upon common stereotypes of the elderly as senile, cranky, boring or simply out of touch with society. The "Old Guy" character is inspired by and played by Roger Burton, the father of the five Burton sisters. After a successful career as a professor, Dr. Burton became an actor at the age of 75. As he opened his life to a new line of work, Dr. Burton noted the common issue of being offered constrained, generic roles rife with ageist stereotypes and devoid of the complex personality traits that can be found in younger characters. Working with his wife Gabrielle - who plays the wife of the main character - and their five daughters, Dr. Burton is responding in parody to the negative aspects of his acting experience.
Dr. Jennifer Burton, the second of the Burton sisters, brought "Old Guy" to the attention of the Tufts community as a response to her students' desire for experience in film production.
"When I was talking with students before starting the class, the students told me that they really wanted to work with professionals and have a kind of next-level-up experience in making a film," she said. "I'd started this 'Old Guy' project with my company, so I brought it into Tufts and now we're making it all together."
Listed in the Tufts Course Catalog as "Independent Film Production: The 'Old Guy' Project," this class offers specialized production work to students interested in garnering experience in the film industry. Students in the course have varying levels of prior production experience. For some, however, this is not a first-time project. Tufts senior Sam Plasmati is taking on "Old Guy" as a student enrolled in the course. As a history major and film studies minor, Plasmati discussed his original interest in the class.
"I'm a little bit older than the other students in the class and I've done some other filmmaking stuff. I've done Tufts University Television (TUTV) and I took the Making Movies class," Plasmati said. "But I actually took a film theory class with Professor Burton last semester, so I got to know her through that class and I really enjoyed it last semester."
Tufts senior Lai-San Ho is minoring in film studies and is also a member of the "Old Guy" project.
"I have been really involved in doing filmmaking stuff since I was a freshman, and I'm thinking that I might want to try to get a job in the film industry when I graduate. So it was the perfect fit for me," Ho said.
The students contribute directly to "Old Guy's" production through teamwork.
"It's really hands-on, which is what makes it so exciting. Basically, we have 10 to 12 people in the class and we're all doing the job of producing. We break things up into all the teams that you'd normally have, so a locations team, casting team, publicity and marketing. Then we sort of each do our own thing that we're responsible for," Ho explained.
As a member of the publicity team, Plasmati shared details on how "Old Guy" will be marketed.
"We drafted a pitch letter, media inquiries, and sent those out to blogs and publications,
so we're waiting for that to
develop," he said.
Part of a public relations kit that Plasmati shared with the Daily included a tagline: "By taking on these stereotypes directly, Old Guy has the potential to improve how older people are perceived by themselves and others, with concrete benefits for old and young alike."
"For PR and marketing, we've been running a Facebook page and throwing up our social media stuff," said Plasmati.
However, the publicity team's work is not solely in social media; the entire class worked on a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for the web series' completion in early March.
"Old Guy" is both the first Five Sisters Productions project in collaboration with Tufts students and also the production group's first-ever web series. Dr. Jennifer Burton discussed a few of the group's previous projects, while explaining its origins.
"We came together just to work as family on the first film, 'Just Friends' (1997), that my sister Maria directed. It was sponsored by Panavision and Kodak and was a 35mm film that was really a wonderful opportunity for many people to come together and make a creative project. I came on board to help and it went really well, so we decided we'd make another film, 'Temps,' which was a story about the other side of 20-year-olds who were trying to figure out their lives. We made that here in Boston, actually, in 1999, way back when," said Dr. Burton.
According to the Five Sisters Productions website, the Burton sisters have employed the talents of well-known Hollywood stars in their films, such as Academy Award winners Shirley Jones and Cloris Leachman in "Manna from Heaven"(2002).
Employing the skills of all five Burton sisters and both parents, Five Sisters Productions splits its work between Boston and Los Angeles. Ursula Burton, one of the sisters, explained the benefits of working in the production group.
"We each have careers also working with other people. I work in productions all the time with people that were just hired. Sometimes they're just one-off projects and sometimes they're with people I've worked with before," Burton said. "Those can be really wonderful experiences, but part of why we started our company was to have some type of control over the projects that we're putting out there, and I think that when you're in a creative field, people tend to find people they can work with regularly who are kind of like a family or sort of become a family. I think for us, since we already were a family, we sort of started with that base."
Using family experience as a base and ageist stereotypes as a challenge, Dr. Jennifer Burton easily described Five Sisters Productions' goals and target audience for "Old Guy."
"This topic is of importance to older people and young people, because you find that older people will watch these images on television and feel that they can't do as much as they probably could do, so it limits people's ideas of what is possible as they get older. For younger people, they often have these stereotyped ideas of what it's like to be old, which will limit them when they get older and limit their positive interactions with older people, which can be wonderful richnesses in life," Burton said. "So I think it's important to know that it's not just an idea that is not just of importance to older people. It's really important to everyone in our society."
Employing social media techniques in their production of "Old Guy," students in the course recently created a Twitter handle to give viewers glimpses of their work with the actors and various crew members. Even prior to its release, "Old Guy" has proven itself a unique collaboration with filmmakers of various ages to address through online video a prejudice that has long gone unchallenged in the film and television industry.
