<Begin Segment 15>

MN: Well, let me ask you about Rabbit in the Moon. How did you and your sister come up with the concept for this?

CO: Well, so much in life is accidental. And the accident in my life is that I happened to be working with these people in Seattle for redress. And mostly it was other JACL people. I think finally at the end I was the only non-JACL member and I refused to join because I said, "I have to represent all non-JACLers." So it became kind of a joke, but I was accepted and everything. Well, after redress, Ken... what the hell is his last name? Anyway, he said they were forming study groups and they wanted to study the "No-No Boys." And he said would I want to do that, and I said, "Not particularly." [Laughs] But anyway, he roped me into it and he said, "I want you to give us a report on the questionnaire." So I said, "Okay," so I wrote to Aiko and I said, "Send me a questionnaire, 'cause I've never seen the whole thing." So she did, and she sent me not only her own questionnaire and somebody else's, but a whole bunch of documents about the questionnaire. That was really good of her. Anyway, so suddenly I started reading up on the questionnaire, and that was my "aha" moment. I thought, "Here's the document. This document is really crucial in understanding what happened to us." So I began to do a lot of research on my own and talking to William and Aiko and everybody, had a lot of resources to talk about it. And I said, "I didn't know about this, most everybody else doesn't know about this, and the American people don't know about this. The least we can do is bring up the fact that they did this to us in the camps." So my sister is a filmmaker, and I said, "There should be a documentary about this," only we didn't want to make it. So we were contemplating, "Who could make this?" So we started contacting various people, and nobody wanted to do it. And my sister really didn't want to do it either because she wasn't that all interested, and she didn't feel capable of doing something like this. But then I said to her, "Well, if nobody else wants to do it, I guess we have to do it. I mean, it was starting out on a very naive note like, "Well, I want to get this information out, so if nobody else is interested in doing it, we got to do it." And what did we do? Oh, I know. We wrote a grant proposal to the National Institute of Humanities, NIH, yeah, right. And that is a bear of a form. I worked a year on filling out that grant proposal. And then they turned us down, of course. So my sister said, "We don't want to go with these guys. They're so scholarly and academic anyway." So after that, we started writing smaller grants. And after working on the NIH grant, we didn't have to write other grants except to pick pieces out of the original grant proposal. So we assembled a whole bunch of 'em and I said, "We should send these to every..." what do they call them anyway? They're branches of the NIH, every state has its own council. "We'll send them to every state that had a camp in it." So we sent out ten different proposals, and we won some of the grants.

So with the initial money we started interviewing. And so that got us rolling, and I went through an obsession with camp for a while because it was really interesting talking to all these people and getting people like Shosuke on camera. So just by bits and pieces we started gathering all these interviews and getting these small grants that kept us going. You know, it took us eight, nine years to do it. So we went to the National Archives. I did a lot of reading. And then, when we would get really discouraged like saying, "Man, this is too much. How can we finish this thing?" And then we would run into some of the people that we had interviewed, and they would say, "How's it going?" We'd say, "Oh, we're still working on it, we're still working on it," and we would feel kind of shamefaced about, we can't let all these people down. Because we've interviewed them, and they had told us their stories, and they're expecting to be in this documentary. So we kind of work for a while on it and not for a while. Kept writing grant proposals and things like that. By that time, you know that redress fund that they had? That was around. So we applied for that. I applied for a separate grant in that round, 'cause I wanted to do Violet de Cristoforo's story. So I got a grant to do write that story. Emi got a grant to continue with the documentary. Not a very big one, but something. So that enabled us to continue. And luckily, my sister is part of the Bay Area documentary industry or whatever, so... I mean, she'd been working in it all these years and so she had a lot of friends and resources. So these are all people who help each other. So she got a lot of help from all the friends that are in the business, and so we managed to go on with really professional help, like Pat Jackson, who is the second-name editor who is a Hollywood editor. So we had some really expert help. And we staggered over the finish line.

Oh, and they, her friends, insisted that we enter Sundance. And my sister says, "No, it will never make it." But I don't know, they all really put the pressure on her, so she entered. And one day I get a phone call saying, "Guess what? We made it into Sundance." It was sort of like a miracle. What? We got into Sundance. And then again, a bit of good luck brought that around. Do you know Gene Oishi? Gene Oishi has a daughter... what is her name? I'm getting old. I used to be able to name all these things and I can't anymore. But she is a professor in Long Beach State or someplace down there, she is a lesbian, her partner is a person who works for Sundance and screens entries. So she knew something about the whole camp experience. So when they saw it, she knew what it was about. So if you read the panel in the Sundance brochure about the entries and stuff, it's a really good rundown about the real meat of the matter. And we just lucked out, because if somebody else had been a screener and not known anything about it, it may not have been very interesting. You know, like I say, life is a series of accidents. So that's how we got into Sundance.

MN: And you won the award.

CO: Well, we won... my sister won an award for best cinematography for that and also for another one that she had worked on that was in competition. The one about Vietnam, Vietnam widows. Regret to Inform, yeah, that one. But people from television had come -- everybody's there at Sundance -- and they wanted it real bad. They wanted to show it. POV, Point of View, that series, wanted it real bad. So we said yes. [Laughs] They wanted to show it on the Fourth of July or very close to Fourth of July. They wanted to provoke some comment. So Pat Jackson said, "No, no, no, we want to go for an Academy Award." Well, that seemed pretty far-fetched. And I said, "You know, we'd be better off going the television route because we don't want to just be has-beens at the Academy Awards." Who knows, but anyway, we had a choice to make, so we went with television.

MN: You won the Emmy.

CO: Yeah, and then we won the Emmy. Not only that, but we won lots of awards, so it paid off. And it's still being used in a lot of schools. I'm still selling it out of my bedroom, fulfilling orders. [Laughs] Still get two or three orders a week. So it's still out there. It's alive.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.