Rachel Rinehart
The film remains a work in progress, but the archival documentary stands as a testament to the filmmaker’s friend, Carla Beck.
(spoilers ahead for the film)
At the beginning of Mara Rago’s film, “Carla,” a message in bold, slabbed text reads, “all efforts have been made to restore the footage to its best quality possible.” Though a simple statement, there’s something else between the lines: the archive will have some defects, but the subject on the screen will demand your attention, and she’s not going to let go when you leave the theater.
Rago met Carla Beck in the late nineties, after seeing her ride around Shadyside on a sleek scooter, looking like a rockstar with her big hair and leather jacket. After kindling a friendship for a few years, Rago approached Beck in 2001 with an idea for a documentary about her life. That’s how we meet Carla Beck — tooling around town, discussing her love for music, for classical literature, and for Pammy, her partner at the time.
Framed in the middle of shot with her guitar tuning pegs under her fingertips, she says: “If gender wasn’t such a constricted thing, I would not have gone through life like a buzz saw.”
Beck described herself as an actress between two worlds. She was raised by an atheist father and conservative Christian mother in West Virginia. She grew up knowing deep down there was something different about her and lived as a boy into late adulthood. Before she could fully transition, Beck formed the band Rubaiyat as the lead singer and songwriter.
“After I got to know her and what she had to say about her life, I just really wanted her to take off. I wanted her to do something with herself, with her music. I wanted her to get out and shine and become the rockstar that she is,” Rago said of her friend and the subject of her first film.
The initial concept relied on Beck’s intellect and “gift of gab,” as Rago put it. She could tell her own story and the film could position the audience alongside her, buzzing around, talking about her passions, and her own life. Split into five parts, “Carla” tells the sometimes difficult stories of childhood, her pre-transition attempts at dating, her time making music in Rubaiyat, and when she fully transitioned.
She’s razor sharp, witty, and relaxed about her journey in a way that reaches into the present and causes the film to feel like it was made this year. Sprinkled in-between the interview are reflections about Beck from Pam and from Rago herself, as well as B-Roll of Beck talking about Pittsburgh drivers, Kit Kats, and her right to shop.
When Rago finished filming, she moved onto other projects and set the “Carla” footage aside. Over time, she forgot all about it.
“Life just kind of got in the way,” Rago said.
Rago came to filmmaking late, but she always carried a camera around. She was a photographer on the side of other jobs like bartending and working at a tanning salon. She was the photographer for OutPittsburgh, the LGBTQ paper in Pittsburgh for many years. The photography bug sunk its teeth in and never let go.
“I was never home. I was always off in the dark room,” she said.
In addition to still photography, Rago started filming back in the early 2000s. She mainly shied away from being a filmmaker because it was a scary feat.
“Back then, I always believed I was just Mare from Rankin,” she said.
Two things happened to kickstart Rago’s final push to finish the documentary she first began in 2001. First, an instance of transphobia by a friend who, in 2021, wanted to dress up as Rachel Levine as a joke. After Rago expressed her concerns, the friend ended that friendship.
“It fired me up,” she said.
“It made me think about Carla, and that’s when I decided to find the tapes and put them on my old-fashioned camera and record them for Jim. I asked him if anyone would be interested in watching it and he told me yes.”
Jim Towns worked with Rago and is the editor on the film. He’s a horror filmmaker based in California, who has worked with Rago in her studio. They’re close friends and he is co-producer on the film; he has been her guide in the filmmaking space ever since Rago wanted to remake the film.
The tapes, buried between twenty-three years of family gatherings and other in the wild encounters, were flattened and half unusable. Most of the tapes contained unsalvageable footage and others were of limited use due to sound problems, but some film was intact. Rago and Towns traded digitized clips of the tapes and powered through the footage they had, gathering enough in the editing interface to piece “Carla” back together.
“There’s a lot of people out there who don’t know what it’s like to be trans. The way she explained it needed to be heard. It was never really even supposed to be about that, but somewhere along the way, it just became the story,” Rago said.
Through this process, Rago realized she needed her subject to come back, to speak about her life now, with time and distance, and about the current climate. In hopes of adding to the already-taped footage, Rago reached out to Beck in order to catch up on where she was now. She called Beck’s old number, but the line was busy. She hung up and thought nothing of it, only to wake up the next morning to find an email from Beck’s partner Pam instead: Carla died from cancer in 2019.
“At that moment, I freaked out. I knew I had to finish making the film,” Rago said.
Rago got together with Towns and Pam, using a rented AirBnb to film updated interviews. They planned to interview Star, Beck’s daughter, but she was unable to come due to the pandemic. Rago wanted to hold off on filming until they could hear from Star, but Towns was of the belief they needed to strike immediately, and strike hard.
In October, Rago showed the film titled for the woman at its center at Pittsburgh’s ReelQ Film Festival and won Best Documentary category. Despite the loving and warm reception, Rago still has some things she wants to get right. Regrets swirl and there is a little bit of guilt, too.
“You could say the film was kind of a first draft. We aren’t messing with the beginning or the end, but we want to add more and do more,” she said.
They are preparing to interview Star, as well as Star’s mother — one of Beck’s ex-partners. They want to cull through some footage of Beck before her transition, in order to really tie the whole documentary together.
Archival footage documentaries are some of the hardest to make, simply because of a lack of footage, little to no B-roll, nothing to insert as footage for coverage (shots that get the subject from multiple angles), and the time it takes to digitize and edit out any maladies. Combine that struggle with first film anxieties, and you’ll have something like Rago’s experience of making “Carla.”
Of course, there’s footage from the first days of filming that Rago misses. The original ending was supposed to be a parallel scene to the beginning, in which Beck rides up the steep incline of Polish Hill into the sunset. Sadly, the two tapes it’s on are some of the unsalvageable ones. There’s footage where Beck doesn’t look camera ready, but she chose to hold onto those for herself in order to do her best in honor of her friend.
“I’m pissed off that I didn’t do anything with the tapes. I’m pissed off that she died. But I’m glad I still did it because this is the time this film needs to be seen,” Rago said.
On my way to meet the filmmaker for the first time, I saw a bright cherry red Vespa kicked up on its stand on Coltart Ave. Once, when she was sitting on her couch thinking of Beck, Rago caught a cold chill, and overwhelmed by emotion, breathed Carla’s name. There is no doubt that ever since the film was released, these little things have been happening in Rago’s life.
She’s uncomfortable with her own presence in the film and is embarrassed about how she worded some of her memories of Beck, yet the work is on-going.
Her advice to other artmakers is to do what you want to do, even if you don’t believe you are ready.
“Just because — I think if you’re going to do something, do it for your future self.”
