Local Treasure: Nan Hackman

The filmmaker and producer was a linchpin of the independent film and music scene.

by

Editor's Note: Nan Hackman passed away this week at age 67. This story originally appeared in our April 2021 issue.

It must have seemed an unlikely scene on that December night in 2005 at the Hi Tone Cafe in Memphis. Several local bands sound-checked. Raucous sonic eruptions punctuated the idle chatter and shuffling of equipment. “Check one, check two” echoed through the room. Robert Allen Parker, the local rock and blues guitarist extraordinaire who’d booked that night’s show, and whose band Amerika was headlining, fit the surroundings, all long hair and leather hat. But he was speaking with someone you don’t often see in such a tableau: a tidily dressed woman, short hair frosted with silver, whose excellent posture was not quite in keeping with the laid-back setting.

She was the most prepared person in the room, sporting three professional cameras and other gear. As with most projects Nan Nunes Hackman undertakes, she would have nothing to do with half measures. And that was precisely why this night would mark her resolute leap into a passion for video and film that had been gaining momentum over the course of her two-decade career as a teacher.

It began when Parker, a mainstay of the Beale Street and indie-rock scenes with a promoter’s penchant for making things happen, spoke with her about some technical matters. Aside from his beloved guitar and amp, a single camera on a cheap tripod was all he had brought to document the proceedings. Meanwhile Hackman, a video “hobbyist,” he discovered, had come to film Sunday Schools, a fledgling band that included her nephew, Nick Redmond (later of Star & Micey).

“That was in 2005,” Hackman recalls today. “And you know what? This is terrible, but I’m an old lady. I don’t go to shows. Rob had put this showcase together, and he said, ‘Your nephew’s band is playing third.’ And I said, ‘Oh, when are they going to go on?’ And he said, ‘Just before midnight.’ And I’m going, ‘Oh god, that’s way past my bedtime!’”

Yet she was determined to find a silver lining in the lateness of the hour. “Rob put up his one camera, partly so he could critique his band’s performance, and partly so he had a souvenir of the show. Meanwhile, I had to wait through two bands until I could film my nephew, and I was just thinking, ‘Give me something to do!’ So I told Rob, ‘I would just as soon film your band. Let me do that and mix it with your footage. I’d be perfectly happy to do that.’”

As it turned out, Hackman’s offer to help Parker marked the beginning of an auspicious documentarian partnership. As Parker recalls it, “Nan took her footage and my footage and edited together a two- or three-camera representation of our set. And I’d never been videotaped like that as a live performer. I was blown away by the quality of it, and the possibility of promoting yourself that way.”

Still, while Parker’s next idea did involve promoting bands, it soon grew into a project spanning years. “After that,” he says, “I asked her to film other shows. For example, Hope Clayburn. And she did really great work with three cameras. And that led to the idea of a documentary about all the bands that I play in. All my musical friends. Since Nan was someone with all these skills — she’s a videographer, she can edit, and she’s really interested in the music scene — I thought I’d ask her to do that project with me.

Meanwhile, she’s been throwing herself into as many other video projects as possible, each one reverberating with local and national impact. As Parker puts it, “Nan really appreciates independent artists in Memphis. She’s a patron of the Memphis arts, supporting the music community, the film community, and also the ballet community.”

“And as we worked on it more and more, it became more about Memphis music in general,” he continues. “I’d seen some documentaries on other music scenes, like the one in Little Rock, Arkansas, and that inspired me. Because Memphis did not have good documentation of the music made after Stax and after Elvis.”

We officially started in 2006 when I was 52 years old and had never filmed a documentary,” recalls Hackman with a laugh. “I had only done videos of ballet dancers. And I had just started to film the Rhodes College plays. But what you discover is that there’s a lot of overlap within these types of live performance. If you’re going to do a multi-camera shoot, the cameras are pretty much going to go in the same places.”

Still, live performance experience couldn’t help the two documentary rookies when it came to the big picture. “It just started getting bigger and more unwieldy,” Hackman says. “Oh. My. God. I didn’t realize, and I don’t think Rob did either. He just started interviewing people, and everybody kept saying, ‘Well, have you interviewed so-and-so?’ It spiraled. And then we lost the story. So that was probably the biggest challenge to us: finding a story when it started to spiral out of control.”

Ultimately their film, Meanwhile in Memphis: The Sound of a Revolution, expanded to include groups spanning roughly 30 years of local music, from Jim Dickinson and his sons’ North Mississippi Allstars, to absurdist-provocateur Tav Falco, to alt-rockers the Grifters, to rapper Al Kapone. And, as it turned out, Parker and Hackman made a good team. “We had different points of view,” says Parker. “I was an active musician in my own world, and she was someone looking from the outside in. She would say, ‘Wait, we have to add some extra information for someone who doesn’t know anything about Memphis music.’”

The result, as described by Grammy-winning writer Bob Mehr, was “a sprawling, important document of the city’s modern musical underground” that premiered at the Indie Memphis Film Festival in 2013, winning the Audience Award that year. Seven years after that Hi Tone sound check, the two fulfilled their vision. For Hackman, it marked a personal apotheosis.

“I had wanted to go into psychology and be a therapist,” she recalls, speaking of her college days at Vanderbilt in the 1970s. “My mother-in-law was a teacher in Clarksville, Tennessee, who had come down to Memphis to take the summer course offered by the Creative Learning in a Unique Environment [CLUE] department, for teachers all over the state. She got me to take the same course, and that was an excellent fit for me. And one of the big emphases was, in order to justify our existence, we had to be doing something unique and different.”

The work dovetailed nicely with Hackman’s personal life. Though she was raised in Nashville, her husband Béla, whom she had met in the Nashville Youth Symphony (“he was a bassoonist and I was a very poor cellist”), had recently started medical school in Memphis, and she was looking for a way to carve out her own niche here. As she began teaching CLUE classes, one unique subject she chose to emphasize was film. “It is completely different from what’s going on in a regular classroom,” Hackman explains. “It requires both critical thinking and creative thinking. You’ve got hands on the equipment. It’s extremely student-focused, because they’re the ones doing the filming. And I was of course learning along with them.”

In the early days, she and her students used Super 8 film. “You were literally editing it by cutting it and piecing parts of it together,” she says. “And it was so darned expensive to purchase just three minutes of unexposed Super 8 film. Three minutes!”

Still, Hackman persisted, teaching CLUE for nearly two decades. “There were breaks to have children,” she laughs, “so it wasn’t an uninterrupted career. But there was a second phase with at least a good ten years of consistent teaching.”

Over that time, she experienced what she calls “the steady advance of technology” in consumer video. “When we transitioned to VHS, almost no school owned their own camera. I was having to use my own personal equipment. But because I valued the experience so much, I was willing to do that. Tape was cheap, so you could film lots of scenes, but editing was a bear. It was so difficult in those early days of analog. You had to have a friend in the University of Memphis Film Department or at a TV station. When I was getting ready to quit teaching in the late ’90s, I was doing all the editing. So the students would do all the filming, and I’d take the raw footage and edit everything. But I knew it was only a matter of time before editing programs would be on computers.”

The transition to computers also marked the growing importance of another production partner in her life: her husband. “I couldn’t do any of this without Béla,” she says. “He supports me financially, gives me moral support, and he keeps my computer running. A very important part,” she laughs. In addition to being a practicing cardiologist, he also co-produces many of her projects, including her ongoing work with Parker’s music and music video projects.

“Béla is also the graphic designer for Rob’s albums,” Hackman says. “He’s self-taught and very good at it. He has some wicked Photoshop skills and has studied design principles. And he’s meticulous. So all the graphics are extremely clean and professional looking. Whereas, I have some rudimentary skills, and I am quick and dirty. You do not want me doing the final version of your graphics. I will slap something together quickly. But that makes for a good partnership, because I can get stuff done on a deadline, and he can do it correctly. We work well together.”

Since the triumph of Meanwhile in Memphis, Hackman’s videography skills have continued to evolve. For one thing, Parker hasn’t forgotten his original vision of capturing and promoting his own music, often recorded with Beale Street legends like Earl “The Pearl” Banks or the late Preston Shannon, through video. And the Hackmans have been right there with him.

“Robert Allen Parker keeps me busy with his fertile mind,” Hackman notes. “We have continued to meet once a week, post-movie, to work on other projects. Sometimes we just solve the problems of the world [laughs], but in the last year and a half, we’ve created three music videos. They’re based on a new album, called The River’s Invitation. This was his dream and it took five years to get everything recorded.”

She’s also continued to record dance programs for local dance schools and for the Rhodes College drama department. She credits her daughter, Olivia, with sparking that interest. “I started filming ballet because nobody was doing it,” she says. “I wanted footage of my daughter dancing from early on. So I trained myself to follow dance. The subject matter is so inherently gorgeous that it’s a pleasure to film it and edit it and watch it. You just can’t go wrong. It’s always going to look good. I totally attribute getting started doing that to her. And I also started taking still photographs for the ballet community.”

One can see her stills on the studio walls of the New Ballet Ensemble, but it was her video footage of one star dancer that put him and Memphis dance on the map. “I filmed the very first footage of Charles ‘Lil Buck’ Riley, the jooking dancer, in 2007, doing ‘The Dying Swan.’ It was an improvisation, and the reason it exists is because I lugged a heavy camera to a school show in West Memphis in October of 2007 and filmed him, and then put it up on YouTube. Eventually it went viral, but it literally happened because I lugged a camera. That experience showed me the importance of capturing one incredible performance. It was the first time he had performed it. And it was an improvisation. As he was doing it, I was aware of the importance of capturing it. I will say, it was very satisfying to see that it yielded such great fruit.”

Now that Riley is an international star, performing with the likes of Yo-Yo Ma, Cirque de Soleil, and Madonna, Hackman’s role as videographer is often forgotten, partly because nowadays, everyone is a videographer. It wasn’t always this way: “I can tell you when the dividing line between ‘nobody has a camera’ and ‘everybody has a camera’ came,” she says. “It was approximately 2010, when the first iPhone really got into people’s hands. Sometimes when I read articles about Lil Buck, they might mention ‘an anonymous audience member who happened to capture this with their cell phone.’ No! Not hardly! I was the only person in that auditorium with a camera. Of course now, yes, you can do that. And it’s generally a good thing, and I’m in favor of it.”

Meanwhile, she’s been throwing herself into as many other video projects as possible, each one reverberating with local and national impact. As Parker puts it, “Nan really appreciates independent artists in Memphis. She’s a patron of the Memphis arts, supporting the music community, the film community, and also the ballet community.”

A recent feather in her cap was the comprehensive remastering of director Mike McCarthy’s 1997 cult movie, The Sore Losers, digitized directly from 16mm color film stock, with updated special effects. When the revitalized print premiered at Gonerfest in 2018, it was, like Meanwhile in Memphis, the culmination of countless years of work. “The final result was, we had a Blu-ray of the movie and a DVD of the bonus material, and a CD of the soundtrack,” Hackman says. “It was a super-duper package! But we hired Sean Faust to put together the bonus material, because I’m not that much of a masochist.”

It is with that same combination of good humor, cut with exasperation, that Hackman acts on her passion to this day. When I ask what her advice would be to others hoping to kindle their hidden talents later in life, she says: “One of the things that became evident as I was having to wear all these caps, is that, with the internet, you can find a tutorial on everything. You can learn how to do anything. I’m older, and I never did have a great pair of hands for filming. I was never super steady or super agile, so even in my youth, that was not one of my natural skills. But even I could learn enough to do a pretty good job.

“So it just goes to show you,” she continues. “Dive in. Get on those tutorials. Train yourself a little bit to get a jump-start, and then just do it. It will be its own reward. That is what I’ve discovered. It’s what keeps the fire burning. It’s such a pleasure for me to sit in front of the editing timeline and put these clips together and then watch them back, and feel good about what I’m seeing.”

She breathes a sigh of contentment. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s my advice.”