Two Towns of Jasper: Press

The divergent responses of the two friends continued all through the making of their documentary, "Two Towns of Jasper," which was screened to packed audiences at the Sundance Film Festival last week.

Dow and Williams, 45, each took segregated film crews to the town of 7,000 to document the reactions of each racial community. For a year, Dow filmed the white side of town while Williams filmed the black side of town - though on occasion their paths crossed - with little joint discussion about subject or theme.

The result is an unusual level of candor in the always-touchy discussion about race. There is a comfort level evident among those being interviewed, whether it is a local white family frowning on James Byrd for being drunk on the night of his murder, or the women at the local black beauty parlor confiding that Jasper has a lot of "skeletons in its closet" in terms of race.

But the project took its toll on the relationship between the two filmmakers, who found they were not immune to the tensions laid bare in Jasper. They discovered that the racial divide between them was deeper than they'd realized, and they learned that despite their friendship and their joint good intentions, ultimately they were as divided as the town itself.

"It was extremely difficult," says Dow, perched in a hallway at the Shadow Ridge Hotel in Park City. "We were two filmmakers with two different agendas, different visions. It was a bruising process." A pause. "We learned the art of dispassionate warfare."

In the nature of the footage they shot, in the all-important editing process of the film, the two friends clashed, often heatedly. If Dow saw the heart of the film as a portrait of a town coping with a wrenching but isolated incident of racist brutality, Williams tended to see it as part of the continuing story of black subjugation.

"There were times when it was really raw," agrees Williams, who teaches film at New York University. "And it became clear that where we diverged was in our racial differences."

The filmmakers each shot footage from January to December 1999, during the trials of the three men ultimately convicted of killing Byrd, and had no substantive contact during the shoot.

The unique insight gained by the segregated approach became immediately evident. Dow interviewed African American workers at a garage, and a few days later Williams - who wears dreadlocks that fall below his shoulders - did the same. The first time the men stood straight and spoke in full sentences to the camera as if, as Williams put it, they were talking to "The Man." When Williams came, the same men gossiped casually and continued working while they discussed the Byrd case.

Similarly, it is difficult to imagine that Williams might have elicited the same soul-wrenching confession recorded by Dow, as one of the killers' fathers tearfully admitted to grasping at "anything, anything" that might help lessen his son's culpability in his own mind.

Still, some may be surprised to find that even with this approach the filmmakers did not find overt, virulent racism in the black and white communities in Jasper. Instead, there was a more subtle recognition of the coexistence of two equally divided communities. For instance, there's a black mayor as well as an undercurrent of Ku Klux Klan.

After Byrd's murder, several attempts were made to demonstrate interracial unity in Jasper. In the cemetery, an old fence that divided whites and blacks was removed (many locals did not realize the fence even existed). An interracial church service was held.

In a telling way, the very same differences in attitude that emerged among the townsfolk plagued Williams and Dow. When they returned to New York after a year of filming, they looked at each other's footage and were dismayed by the difference in tone.

"My first reaction was: 'We can't make a film out of this.'" Says Dow. The thematic content, he felt, was too divergent. "I went more to character. He went more to issue. It wasn't clear that we could connect the dots."

They decided to try anyway. By coincidence, Dow edited with a black editor, and Williams with a white editor. Again, it was tough.

"This dynamic would rear its head again and again in the editing process - I'd say this section feels 'white heavy,'" says Williams. "If a sequence started with whites and ended with whites I'd say, 'I have a problem with that.' Black people are more conscious of race, so it would often be me who would introduce this thought."

Ultimately they decided to assemble separate final cuts, then brought in a third editor to combine them to create the final film. Despite the enthusiastic audience response at Sundance, the film does not have a distributor. It will air, however, on PBS in the fall.

For Williams, who thought he knew most everything about race, the experience was a chastening one. "All my optimism, my belief that some aspect of this divide was bridgeable - I concluded this film feeling really uncertain, with a more sober view on whether the chasm could be bridged," he says. "I have a lot of white friends. But when it comes down to it, we're very far apart. They don't understand me. Probably I don't understand them."

Dow says he and Williams are still friends, but in a different way. "In some ways we're closer, in some ways further apartŠ I didn't go into this very optimistic about the ability of blacks and whites to bridge the gap between them. I leave the film less optimistically."

Says Williams: "What Whitney and I discovered was that when all is said and done, our own personal history did not overcome our racial differences. I see this really clearly nowŠ Because we don't really live in each other's worlds. And our film provides glimpses into those other worlds.

For Dow, the solution is pretty basic. "Fornication," he says. "Because you can't hate your own kids. The browner we get as a society, the better off we'll be."