‘Super exciting and an amazing surprise’

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This article was published 13/08/2020 (1941 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

In pandemic-era Hollywood, Kathryn Robson was in an ideal situation when she learned she had been nominated for an Emmy —in the category of writing for a non-fiction program — for her work on the Netflix documentary Circus of Books.

She was working on another project.

“To be honest, I completely forgot the nomination announcements were coming out,” she says in a phone interview from a mountain cabin outside Los Angeles, where she has been decompressing after discovering, yes, indeed, she was nominated alongside director Rachel Mason.

“I’m full-time editing on another project right now and I have a major deadline this week,” she says. “I had very carefully planned my schedule to meet these deadlines, so that completely threw me for a loop. But obviously it was super exciting and an amazing surprise.”

Getting to the Emmys will have been quite the journey for Robson, 38, who was born in the River Heights neighbourhood of Winnipeg, the daughter of former Free Press staffer Barbara Robson Bond.

“We moved to Toronto when I was about five,” she says. “But those are my roots for my whole family. My dad was brought up in Dauphin, my mom was brought up in Winnipeg and my grandparents are all from Winnipeg.”

In Toronto, Robson went to York University and then Ryerson. “I was doing my graduate degree in communication and culture with a kind of a focus on documentary,” she recalls.

“In my last year, I lined up an internship with a documentary production company in Los Angeles. It was supposed to be a four-month internship, but they ended up hiring me and agreeing to sponsor a visa for me, bringing me back to work for them full time. That’s how I ended up in L.A.”

Robson’s university studies ultimately connected her with director Rachel Mason.

“My thesis was an interactive online documentary that looked at the heterosexual female use of online pornography,” she says. “I had spent five or six years working in L.A. as a producer and as an editor. Then a friend of mine, who is also a Canadian producer was chatting with me about school and work and I mentioned my thesis topic.

“And she said, ‘Oh my God, I know this director who is making a documentary involving her parents’ gay porn store and she’s looking for an editor. You guys have to meet each other.’”

That resulted in a meeting with Mason.

“She told me the whole story of her parents which was so remarkable, and I thought: ‘Oh my God I have to work on this project.”

In Circus of Books, Mason profiles her own parents, Barry and Karen Mason, who ran the landmark West Hollywood bookstore — with a specialty in gay porn —  for more than three decades.

“Rachel’s family story is so rich,” Robson says. “In our first meeting, all I knew is that she was making a documentary about her parents’ store which was closing. And then she started telling me that they had this FBI raid and (faced) federal charges. And that her brother who is gay had struggled to come out because her family was very religious.

“I thought: Oh my god this is so layered and so dynamic and what an amazing story.

“I came onboard as a producer and editor and we spent several years working to make this film come together,” Robson says. “In the end, (Glee producer) Ryan Murphy came on board as an executive producer and Netflix picked it up. It was all kind of amazing,” she says.

Since the director was very close to the subject, Robson provided her with some valuable outside perspective.

“When she first started, she didn’t really see it as a story of her own family,” Robson says. “She really thought (about it) as documenting the store and how important the store was to Los Angeles and to the gay community.

“But I think over time, through our conversations, she really came to understand that this personal story was really important,” Robson says. “So that was the part that we really composed together and figured out: what stories are we telling here?

“Yes this is one story about what was happening with this one family in Los Angeles, but it is analogous to so many larger things that were happening politically and culturally,” Robson says. “As we were piecing it together, we really had three different storylines: the story of the store, the story of her family and then this broader story of gay history. And the trick was weaving those three things together.”

Robson gives credit to Mason for making a private story public.

“She was really game to just put it all up there,” Robson says.

“We often used the analogy of neonatal care nurses,” Robson laughs. “There was a very vulnerable infant that we were trying to birth into the world with great care.”

The Prime Time Emmys will be awarded Sunday, Sept. 20.

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing