Tales of the San Joaquin River — The Valley and the Lake, Part 1

California Water, California Central Valley, salmon, restoration, Friant Dam

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Full-length documentary. Original half-hour version completed in 2003 with periodic updates. Expanded and updated to a full hour in 2022.

As we journey the length of the San Joaquin River with narrator, Michael E. Stone, one question will not go away. Is it possible that the fate of this one river in the most productive agricultural region in the world, California’s Central Valley, offers a chance to restore the historical balance between nature and the mark of humans on the land?

This video is part of THE VALLEY AND THE LAKE – a four-part film odyssey focused on water issues, conflicts, and hopes in California’s Central Valley, the breadbasket of the world and also the most human-altered landscape on the planet.

The four films in THE VALLEY AND THE LAKE are about the American West as it exists now.

The films concern themselves with issues surrounding water and the natural environment. Beyond what one might consider a message, I see the films as portraits of people on the land, each with their own story and intentions for the land in which they live.

To express this idea of people telling different stories about the same landscape, I created these four films as movements and as variations on themes. Each film can stand alone. However, each film adds to the next until we reach the final scene of the fourth film. As with musical themes, People and their situations sometimes appear in more than one film.

In the telling, people often talk about the same landscape as other people, each with their own perspective on what they see and feel—and what the land means for each of them. As I wrote and edited the films, I kept asking myself what each person had to say to every other person in the films.

PRODUCTION NOTES

Most of the cinematography for TALES OF THE SAN JOAQUIN was accomplished by Scott Andrews who created and maintains the website, The Wisdom Archive.
https://www.thewisdomarchive.com

During the production-filming part of making the film, one boiling hot day on my own as I walked in the sandy bed of the dry San Joaquin River, in the twenty-two miles of river converted to desert as shown in TALES OF THE SAN JOAQUIN RIVER, I realized that a certain dream of mine had come true. I had always wanted to make a movie like LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, with people seen in the context of vast landscapes—and now here I was in a desert of my own, filming stories of individual people in what I felt was a mythic landscape equal to that of LAWRENCE's sand dunes and rocky outcroppings.

RESPONSES TO THE FILM

Before TALES OF THE SAN JOAQUIN RIVER played in public, the film faced a concerted effort by water interests in California's Central Valley to censor the film and prevent the film's being shown in public. Political pressure was put on city councils and individuals to disavow the film and for individuals, to withdraw their permission to appear in the film.

The effort was far more reaching and without going into all the details, involved pressure on the PBS station in Fresno, California to withdraw their offer to show the film. The station manager took a stand and showed the film anyway—with two provisos, one to add a panel discussion to the showing and two, that I stay away from the city where the station was located during the time of the broadcast. In addition, an environmental group that had planned to show the film at an informational center they maintained cancelled their screenings under the political pressure.

The effect on me was crushing. I found myself shunned on all sides. An offer from another PBS station to make a film about the history of the Sacramento River in California was quashed. I experienced a deep and lasting financial fear for my well-being. I'm not sure I ever recovered fully from the onslaught.

Except that I learned a great deal about water and as you'll see in the second film in the series, TULARE, THE PHANTOM LAKE, for a few moments, I felt like I could see into the future.