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“So Many Sequins!”: Penny Lane on Her Tribeca-Debuting Docuseries Mrs. America
Mrs. America Kudos to Anonymous Content and Fremantle for putting together a project focused on the most wholesome of beauty pageants and thinking, “We need the director of Hail, Satan? for this!” Indeed, while the idea might seem absurd on its surface, it’s no more so than the notion of married women from 18 to 80 (and up) going toe to toe (or heel to heel) in evening gowns and swimsuits, sacrificing precious time and exorbitant amounts of money for the chance to wear the Mrs. America crown. And veteran filmmaker Penny Lane, whose 2023 doc Confessions of a Good Samaritan followed her own quest to donate one of her kidneys to a stranger, if nothing else has a knack for always deploying patience and compassion in the face of the seemingly absurd.
A few days before the June 8th world premiere of market title Mrs. America (parts one and two of a four-episode series, screening as a work in progress) Filmmaker caught up with the busy director who’s currently in production on her HBO doc Flaco, starring the titular Eurasian eagle-owl that broke free from the Central Park Zoo.
Filmmaker: How did Mrs. America originate? Creating a docuseries centered on the Mrs. America pageant struck me as an unusual project for you to pursue.
Lane: Initially, Nick Shumaker and Jessica Grimshaw at Anonymous Content connected with the pageant. They made some inroads in terms of access and saw something truly special there. After teaming up with Fremantle they brought me in to direct. They were very clear they weren’t looking for a typical “TV” approach (hence hiring me!) and were otherwise very supportive in terms of just letting me develop my own unique vision.
Immediately I was very excited by this world. I found my preconceptions challenged at every turn, even as I was mesmerized by its beautiful surface. (So many sequins!) And let me tell you, I love an assignment! It’s like being in art school again – being asked to solve a creative problem someone else has invented. Art is mostly problem-solving. A good assignment can push me out of my comfort zone and into new territory.
In this case I saw an opportunity not only to dive into a world I knew nothing about, but also a chance to do something big and epic – the scale really appealed to me. Not to mention practice a more observational style of filmmaking, which I had long wanted to do.
Filmmaker: How did you go about casting (which seems like it might have been an overwhelming process)? And how did you choose which states to follow in the first place?
Lane: Yes, it was pretty overwhelming. It took us a very long time to settle on our main cast. And we had to wait and see how the national pageant shook out before we could even decide.
In the beginning, I was very focused on two things: seeing what the process was like from the moment someone decided to enter the pageant at the state level, and then representing how different the regional pageant cultures are. Each state pageant is unique, with its own culture and attitude and aesthetics. I knew I wasn’t going to make a series called “Mrs. America” and just film it all in one state or two states!
So we selected our five state pageants — Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Colorado, New York and Florida — with an eye towards trying to represent that diversity; and also we were identifying state pageant directors that we felt were good guides into this strange new world. Once we had the winners from each state, we had our main cast of competitors for the national crown.
We could have easily chosen five different states. And let me just say that if I get another season, I already know which I would choose!
Filmmaker: Did you feel that any of the folks you followed were competing to be in the series as well? (And if so, was it hard to cut characters and storylines?)
Lane: We cut way, way, way more characters and storylines than we kept. We met and filmed with so many more incredible women along the way. It’s always excruciating for me to make those cuts, but this was brutal on another level. (Welcome to the aforementioned “observational style filmmaking” I was so eager to explore!)
I have no idea if they were competing to be in the series. Probably some of them were, but not any more so than any other filmmaking enterprise I’ve been involved with. The complicating factor was more in the sense of what kind of performance I was trying to elicit and capture. They were already performing for the pageant, so sometimes I had to work hard to figure out whether I wanted to capture that performance, or to direct them to perform for me / “the camera” in a different way.
Filmmaker: Could you talk a bit about the editing and structure of the series? You seem to almost be playing with the reality TV genre, or perhaps commenting on it.
Lane: We found the unique voice of the series through the patient approach we took to putting it together. I approached this as a purely observational effort for over a year, building scenes that went through the whole process: from signing up, to competing in states, to preparing for nationals. And then of course the ultimate competition. I wanted very much to let the world speak for itself whenever possible.
We didn’t shoot any formal interviews until after the dust had settled and the new Mrs. America had been crowned. It was only then that the various storylines we were actually going to include became crystallized. We then went back to the main cast for a round of formal interviews, which created a thematic and character-driven frame for the whole series.
I mention all this detail about the process because what makes reality TV different from documentary is just that we use the same tools, but employ a very different process to get from A to B to C. It’s a slower, more ever-evolving process. We didn’t have a format we were following.
Filmmaker: Have all the participants seen the episodes or rough cuts? What’s been the various reactions?
Lane: We haven’t shown it to every single person we filmed — that would be hundreds and hundreds of people! -—but we have shown it to the main featured cast. And while it’s always very awkward to speak for other people, the reactions have been extremely positive so far. I think they have been fairly relieved to see we weren’t making something exploitative, that either just made fun of them or focused on infighting or interpersonal conflict.
