Charting a course through heavy court battles, hate demonstrations and a few sweet victories, Ben Cotner and Ryan White’s documentary “The Case Against 8” made a stop at TheWrap’s Awards Screening Series on Monday in Los Angeles.
Cotner and White brought the film’s subjects, plaintiffs Jeff Zarrillo and Paul Katami in the landmark case to overturn California’s same-sex marriage ban, composer Blake Neely and editor Katie Amend to the Landmark Theaters for a screening and Q&A moderated by TheWrap Editor-in-Chief Sharon Waxman.
Dustin Lance Black, who won an Oscar for his original screenplay for “Milk,” introduced the film to a packed house, saying “I was thrilled when, at the start of this journey, Ben and Ryan just showed up with their cameras.”
Over 600 hours of footage and five years later, the film is a equal parts emotional and educational in its depiction of two families struggling for equality. Zarillo and Katami were joined by Kris Perry and Sandy Stier in suing the state after Proposition 8 invalidated their marriages.
Backed by the American Foundation of Equal Rights, the two couples moved their case up the judicial ladder with the help of two unlikely allies: Theodore Olsen and David Boies, two pedigreed litigators who represented President George W. Bush and Al Gore respectively in the 2000 Supreme Court case that decided that year’s election.
They also had some star power in director Rob Reiner and wife Michelle. An interesting anecdote from the film recounted a November 2008 lunch at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where the Reiners commiserated with AFER co-founder Kristina Schake after Californians voted “yes” on Prop 8.
The three drowned their sorrows at the legendary Polo Lounge, when an acquaintance of Rob’s approached the table and after hearing the bad news recommended her former brother-in-law Olsen to help overturn the proposition. Interesting that the unlikely recruiting of conservative Olsen to fight for marriage equality happened at the Beverly Hills Hotel — which came under fire in 2014 after its owner the Sultan of Brunei instituted Shariah law in his country, which calls for flogging and stoning of homosexual activities.
Working harmoniously under the agreement that Prop 8 violated a fundamental constitutional protection, Olsen and Boies went on to battle both sides of the political spectrum in a case that played out in headlines, but what “Case Against 8” achieves is a significant feat in revealing the human stories behind the list of defendants.
“It just shows how normal and boring our lives really are,” Katami said. “We decorate Christmas trees in the gay community, we empty the dishwasher in the gay community.”
Black spoke of Prop 8 proponents and their efforts “to silence these stories, to [take] them out … so what became very important for us on the team was to continue to make our stories heard — our plaintiffs’ stories, the people on the witness stand, their stories.”
“They know that when our stories are heard and people get to know us, they vote two-to-one for us. They change their minds toward an equality stance,” Black said.
Amend, the film’s editor, admitted to a dense amount of footage from the long legal process — the film itself is largely shot in neutral-colored conference rooms where the occasional catering tray is the only eye candy — but indulged herself in the film’s upbeat ending; the documentary captures the courthouse nuptials of Zarrillo and Katami and Perry and Stier after state attorney general Kamala Harris gives the greenlight, and Amend would cut wedding scenes to feed her spirit.
“We have hours and hours of people at desks or on laptops,” Amend said, ” …but there were some very, very powerful moments that happened.”
“We hired Kate in May for a Sundance deadline in November,” said Cotner, who with White took the 2014 U.S. Documentary Directing Award. “It was very collaborative process, we would give Kate assignments at the beginning and say, ‘Let’s try this scene in the legal room.’ And Kate was secretly editing the weddings!”
With good reason: If “Case Against 8” is about anything, it’s about the perfect wedding.