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“Maverick” is a word that can be overused in the film industry, but with the release of Precious, producer Sarah Siegel Magness earns the title.
Marc Piscotty
There’s a look the photographer captures on Sarah Siegel Magness’ face. The portrait was taken during a mid-January session at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. The Colorado native is centered in the frame; her husband, Gary Magness, is to her right, partially embracing her, and their friend, filmmaker Lee Daniels, is on her left, his arm around them both. In that moment, as she is looking directly at the camera with her husband at her side, beaming, Daniels leans down and brushes a kiss on her blonde head. Her smile is bemused, the look one of subdued joy, perhaps even a hint of anticipation. Their lives are about to change — this close-knit triumvirate — because all of them took a chance on a movie that no one else dared to make. The film is Precious, and this year, it’s the little film that has already garnered critical acclaim and taken home some of the industry’s biggest awards. The movie opens the 2009 Starz Denver Film Festival that runs from November 12 through 22.
Based on the searing 1996 novel Push by Sapphire, the film stars 26-year-old newcomer Gabourey “Gabby” Sidibe as Claireece “Precious” Jones, an illiterate, obese, Harlem teenager coming of age in the 1980s. In many ways, she has already lived harder in her short life than anyone should have to. She has been physically and emotionally abused by her mother (Mo’Nique) and has two children by her father who raped her. (The film also stars Mariah Carey, Lenny Kravitz, and Paula Patton.) It’s a difficult story to tell, and if it had stayed there — in that seemingly unspeakable realm of abuse and incest — it may well have never made it to the silver screen. But Sapphire deftly moves the story from one of abuse and dreams deferred to one of hope and breaking through. It’s that positive story that first captured the attention of team Magness (Sarah always refers to she and Gary as a team) and Daniels.
“Everybody who is involved in making movies decides where they want to be,” says Siegel Magness, who met her cable TV–heir husband 11 years ago when she moved back to Denver after a stint at EMI Music Publishing in New York. “My husband and I are both very positive people, so we decided that if we’re going to invest the time and the energy into making films, we wanted to make films that had some positive impact in some way. With Precious, there are quite a few issues that are taboo, but in the end, the story is triumphant and positive.”
Backing the film as producers through their Denver-based company, Smokewood Entertainment, was a risk to be sure, says Siegel Magness, 36, but one worth taking. This type of movie, with an unknown African-American female lead, with subject matter that’s
rarely spoken about in any community, would have been unimaginable for any big-time Hollywood studio to green light. But because of the relationship the Magnesses fostered with Daniels — he of Monster’s Ball (which won Halle Berry an Oscar), The Woodsman, and Shadowboxer — it was easier to move forward.
The three met through mutual friends just before pre-production on Daniels’ 2008 film Tennessee, which also starred Mariah Carey. Siegel Magness says they came in as executive producers at the eleventh hour on that film because they were “intrigued” by Daniels’ process. After production wrapped, they decided to partner on a new project. They looked at several scripts before being drawn to Geoffrey Fletcher’s adaptation of Sapphire’s novel. “One of the reasons we became involved in this project is because I knew that it would resonate,” says Siegel Magness, who graduated from the University of Colorado, Boulder with a degree in marketing in 1995. “It goes back to us being from diverse backgrounds, Lee, Gary, and I. I knew that if it could affect all three of us on the same level, that we were not the only ones.”
Being on a project from beginning to end, as with Precious, was a new, rewarding, and insightful experience — one she hopes the audience will share. She says the key to the film’s success was embracing Daniels’ vision for the film and staying true to that vision throughout the process. “We knew this story had to be told and that Lee was the one who had to tell it,” says Siegel Magness, who was a constant presence on the set of the film, which was shot on a reported budget of $8 – $12 million in The Bronx and Harlem.
So far, her instincts have been right. The film opened to rave reviews at the Sundance Film Festival in January, taking home both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award on the final night. Precious followed that triumph with the People’s Choice Award, the top award, at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Precious is reportedly the first film to win the audience award at both festivals. After the success at Sundance, Lions Gate Entertainment paid a reported $5 million for distribution and signed Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey as executive producers in an effort to bring the film to a wider audience and to take it to the “next level,” Siegel Magness says. Some journalists, critics, and bloggers have mistakenly written that Perry and Winfrey made the film when, in fact, they signed on after they saw it in its finished form. Siegel Magness is somehow able to keep that firmly in perspective. To have Perry and Winfrey be moved enough by the film to lend their names to the effort to get people to see it takes it to a level they couldn’t have imagined. “We used to joke on set, ‘Oh, my gosh, what if Oprah Winfrey were to be involved in this movie; it would be so amazing,’” Siegel Magness says. “We really wished for
that moment, and we have to be flat-out thankful. It’s an ongoing story. We came in at a certain point in the book; they came in at a certain part, but it’s all one book.”
If everyone — the producers, directors, cast, and crew — are a part of the book, then Sidibe’s Precious is what turns the pages. The film rises and falls on her performance. The former college student/office worker says the story of Precious is an important one to tell; it’s a story of survival, ultimately. And her experiences on set with Daniels, the Magnesses, and the rest of the cast and crew have convinced her that acting is what she wants to do. Her next project is Yelling to the Sky, a Sundance lab film. “I’ve had a lot of friends, a lot of people in my life who kind of mirror depression,” says Sidibe, who has become “like family” to the Magnesses. “I felt like I owed it to them and to fans of the novel to step outside of myself to be able to play this girl who was being ignored and being abused.”
It’s that story the producers and filmmakers hope will translate to a different audience as the film comes home, in a way, to open in the town the Magnesses call home. The 32nd annual Starz Denver Film Festival is one of the largest in the region. For 11 days, the Starz FilmCenter will be home to red-carpet premiers, international screenings, and awards ceremonies, which include the Krzysztof Kieslowski Award for Best Feature Film, the Maysles Brothers Award for Best Documentary, and the achievement-based John Cassavetes Award. Festival director Britta Erickson says the Denver Film Society, which organizes the 11-day event, tries to showcase films, such as Precious, that would rarely, if ever, show on screens here. “This is the type of film that’s not made in Hollywood; it’s truly an independent film,” says Erickson, who’s headed the festival for 11 years. “Precious is a rare thing to even come out of the independent world.”
But there’s something special this year, and that’s team Magness. To be able to open with a film from Denver-based producers fits right in with the festival’s mission to support projects that are based in or have links to the region. “Sarah’s the real deal; she puts her money where her mouth is,” Erickson says. “She took a risk on a film that I guarantee you no studio was going to take a look at. How incredibly brave and smart she is to fight for the best deal and continue to champion the film.”
Siegel Magness has equal praise for the Denver Film Society. She says they were interested in screening the film before all of the accolades began to pour in. Siegel Magness says she’s proud to bring the film home, so friends and family can see what she’s been working on all this time. “It’s equally as exciting as winning Sundance or Toronto,” says Siegel Magness, who was born in Boulder to Mo and Peggy Siegel, who co-founded Celestial Seasonings Tea. “This is our home, and we’re so proud of Colorado.”
That pride in Colorado and the streak of independence that comes with being from here is what has driven Siegel Magness all these years. From setting up a Celestial Seasonings kiosk on her college campus to founding the So Low clothing company in 2001, the entrepreneurial spirit — the one that says you have to try, try, try — is what keeps her going and what helps keep her marriage and family together. She and her husband relish the time they can spend at home with their children, a 10-year-old daughter and a 5-year-old son. And because Gary is the heir to a cable television company and has started business ventures of his own, it was a natural step for them to go into the entertainment business together. Their next project is a documentary film shot in Brazil, and they’re also in development on the first live-action film based on the “Judy Moody” series of children’s books, which is definitely lighter fare (Siegel Magness says, “It’s PG and fun”).
Siegel Magness did allow herself, at times, to think Precious would be the start of something big. But she never really imagined how the movie would take on a life of its own and change her life in the process. “You have to have hopes and wishes because you can never be too sure in the movie business,” she says.
“And then to see what you hoped and wished it would do, to get the kinds of accolades that we’ve been blessed
to have, we’re just really thankful and want to enjoy every part of it.”
