Filmmaker Nora Jacobson waves me into her office. She’s on the phone, smoothing out an equipment deal. I sit on the couch next to a pile of scripts. Empty reels and film canisters litter the floor. This is the archetype of an independent movie-making base camp. Nothing decorative. Nothing superfluous. Nothing Hollywood — including lunch.

“I could warm up some macaroni and cheese if you want.” Jacobson is off the phone, cranking up a mammoth propane heater. She’s ready to talk about her new dramatic film, Letters to My Mother’s Early Lovers, and her plans to shoot it in her hometown of Norwich, Vermont.

“I knew that to make this film, I’d have to spend a lot of time here,” she says of her temporary return to Vermont after more than a decade in Hoboken, New Jersey. Based on a novel by Vermonter Sybil Smith — who co-wrote the screenplay with Jacobson — the film will cover Smith’s mother’s involvement in an early commune experiment near Brattleboro masterminded by Scott and Helen Nearing. Rife with family secrets, agrarian Socialist idealism and early dabblings in free love, the film is scheduled to start a four-week shoot in May — mostly with home-grown talent. It’s the most exciting development in local cinema circles since Jay Craven pulled off Where the Rivers Flow North.

Comparing her project to the popular, independent Strangers in Good Company — beloved for its endearingly unknown cast, and low-key, non-slick approach — Jacobson is aiming for that segment of the American film-viewing public that is “fed up with formulaic Hollywood films.” The $200,000 movie has already drawn backing from some choice state grant-makers, but Jacobson still has the balance to raise. Hence the statewide tour of her 1992 documentary about urban gentrification, Delivered Vacant.

Laid-back and lanky in her jeans and over-sized sweater, Jacobson, 42, looks more like a Vermont farm kid than an auteur. She looks tired — she’s getting over a cold — but focused. It’s easy to believe her when she says “my work pretty much is my life.” Her office is a chilly quonset hut attached to the one-room former train station she shares with her builder-musician sweetheart, his two teenagers and a “bunch of big, huge, black cats.”

It’s a far cry from the life she led on the Norwich farm where her parents still live. When she was eight, her playwright father moved the family to France so he could devote a year to writing. The year turned into seven, and Jacobson grew up in Paris while her poet-actress mother did radio vocal work, and her father dubbed English translations onto German film soundtracks.

Despite her early exposure to the arts, Jacobson had no involvement in film until she made a “kind of a dumb Super-8 movie to get out of writing an English paper” in high school. It wasn’t until she got to Dartmouth that a film course “completely changed my life,” she says. “I knew that was what I wanted to do.” By the time she received a Masters in Fine Art from The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Jacobson was a committed advocate of experimental film. “I never thought I’d make a documentary film of my own. I considered film a very subjective medium, like an art form — not particularly representational.”

But when she entered the work force, it was as an assistant to a documentary maker in Hoboken. While she continued to make short experimental films on her own, Jacobson recognized a need to make herself marketable by learning the documentary form. Prompted by an “interest in people’s lives, how they worked, what they did, I started exploring the city with my camera.”

In the process, Jacobson started hearing about families being forced from rental properties to make way for condominium conversion. As she filmed interviews with homeless people in a new shelter on her block, “I was aware of my own role in the gentrification process and being unsettled by it.” Jacobson recalls, “I wanted to make a film that really looked at the phenomenon — how it works, from every point of view. Anything to do with housing, I’d be there with my camera.”

For the next eight years, Jacobson let her Bolex roll as white yuppies proudly moved into newly converted condos, poor Hispanic families packed to leave, politicians expounded the virtues of free enterprise and buildings made uninhabitable by suspicious fires. What Jacobson didn’t know when she started filming was that she would be burned out of her own apartment within the year.

In 1992, Delivered Vacant was shown at the New York Film Festival. “There are some who feel the film is weighted toward the rights of the tenant,” Jacobson admits. But critics and audiences raved — and by 1993, the film earned a coveted spot in the Sundance Film Festival and a Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival. Jacobson was primed to take her video reporting skills wherever she wanted. So, why did she switch from documentary to drama, with Letters to My Mother’s Early Lovers?

“I got everything I wanted out of this form,” she says of the documentary. “If I don’t know something, I feel very challenged to learn it. I wanted to try a different form.”

Jacobson aims to have her new project in the can by next fall, when she returns to her film-teaching position at the State University of New York at Purchase. Beyond that? “There are so many interesting people out there, and events,” she muses. “It’s this endless thing.”Filmmaker Nora Jacobson waves me into her office. She’s on the phone, smoothing out an equipment deal. I sit on the couch next to a pile of scripts. Empty reels and film canisters litter the floor. This is the archetype of an independent movie-making base camp. Nothing decorative. Nothing superfluous. Nothing Hollywood — including lunch.

“I could warm up some macaroni and cheese if you want.” Jacobson is off the phone, cranking up a mammoth propane heater. She’s ready to talk about her new dramatic film, Letters to My Mother’s Early Lovers, and her plans to shoot it in her hometown of Norwich, Vermont.

“I knew that to make this film, I’d have to spend a lot of time here,” she says of her temporary return to Vermont after more than a decade in Hoboken, New Jersey. Based on a novel by Vermonter Sybil Smith — who co-wrote the screenplay with Jacobson — the film will cover Smith’s mother’s involvement in an early commune experiment near Brattleboro masterminded by Scott and Helen Nearing. Rife with family secrets, agrarian Socialist idealism and early dabblings in free love, the film is scheduled to start a four-week shoot in May — mostly with home-grown talent. It’s the most exciting development in local cinema circles since Jay Craven pulled off Where the Rivers Flow North.

Comparing her project to the popular independent, Strangers in Good Company — beloved for its endearingly unknown cast, and low-key, non-slick approach — Jacobson is aiming for that segment of the American film-viewing public that is “fed up with formulaic Hollywood films.” The $200,000 movie has already drawn backing from some choice state grant-makers, but Jacobson still has the balance to raise. Hence the statewide tour of her 1992 documentary about urban gentrification, Delivered Vacant.

Laid-back and lanky in her jeans and over-sized sweater, Jacobson, 42, looks more like a Vermont farm kid than an auteur. She looks tired — she’s getting over a cold — but focused. It’s easy to believe her when she says “my work pretty much is my life.” Her office is a chilly quonset hut attached to the one-room former train station she shares with her builder-musician sweetheart, his two teenagers and a “bunch of big, huge, black cats.”

It’s a far cry from the life she led on the Norwich farm where her parents still live. When she was eight, her playwright father moved the family to France so he could devote a year to writing. The year turned into seven, and Jacobson grew up in Paris while her poet-actress mother did radio vocal work, and her father dubbed English translations onto German film soundtracks.

Despite her early exposure to the arts, Jacobson had no involvement in film until she made a “kind of a dumb Super-8 movie to get out of writing an English paper” in high school. It wasn’t until she got to Dartmouth that a film course “completely changed my life,” she says. “I knew that was what I wanted to do.” By the time she received a Masters in Fine Art from The School of the Art Institute in Chicago, Jacobson was a committed advocate of experimental film. “I never thought I’d make a documentary film of my own. I considered film a very subjective medium, like an art form — not particularly representational.”

But when she entered the work force, it was as an assistant to a documentary maker in Hoboken. While she continued to make short experimental films on her own, Jacobson recognized a need to make herself marketable by learning the documentary form. Prompted by an “interest in people’s lives, how they worked, what they did, I started exploring the city with my camera.”

In the process, Jacobson started hearing about families being forced from rental properties to make way for condominium conversion. As she filmed interviews with homeless people in a new shelter on her block, “I was aware of my own role in the gentrification process and being unsettled by it.” Jacobson recalls, “I wanted to make a film that really looked at the phenomenon — how it works, from every point of view. Anything to do with housing, I’d be there with my camera.”

For the next eight years, Jacobson let her Bolex roll as white yuppies proudly moved into newly converted condos, poor Hispanic families packed to leave, politicians expounded the virtues of free enterprise and buildings made uninhabitable by suspicious fires. What Jacobson didn’t know when she started filming was that she would be burned out of her own apartment within the year.

In 1992, Delivered Vacant was shown at the New York Film Festival. “There are some who feel the film is weighted toward the rights of the tenant,” Jacobson admits. But critics and audiences raved — and by 1993, the film earned a coveted spot in the Sundance Film Festival and a Golden Gate Award at the San Francisco Film Festival. Jacobson was primed to take her video reporting skills wherever she wanted. So, why did she switch from documentary to drama, with Letters to My Mother’s Early Lovers?

“I got everything I wanted out of this form,” she says of the documentary. “If I don’t know something, I feel very challenged to learn it. I wanted to try a different form.”

Jacobson aims to have her new project in the can by next fall, when she returns to her film-teaching position at the State University of New York at Purchase. Beyond that? “There are so many interesting people out there, and events,” she muses. “It’s this endless thing.”

This article appears in November 29 • 1995.