EEEEEEK!!! I’m so excited (and terrified) to announce …. (drum roll please) I’m heading to New Orleans this week to begin filming and the Kickstarter for my documentary is NOW LIVE!!
But what the heck is this documentary about and what is Marci Darling up to now?
This documentary explores the extraordinary lives and legends of 1920’s New Orleans acrobatic-contortionist-dancers, Nita & Zita, their brave journey across the sea as young girls to escape antisemitism in Hungary, and their rise to international stardom, before settling in New Orleans in 1947. There, they lived their lives together as reclusive sisters who painted their house top to bottom with polka dots and patterns, repairing their own roof with tin can lids and hammers, sewing fabric over the holes in the walls, and for those of you wondering what they were doing in their little house all day every day for 40 years, after they died, their neighbor found thousands of hand-sewn costumes, handmade shoes, even burlesque costumes sewn onto dolls, that were then sold piece-by-piece in a 5-year yard sale. So many people in New Orleans own Nita & Zita costume pieces, a crown here, a pair of shoes there, they are now literally woven into the fabric of the city.
The Nita & Zita documentary could be described as Grey Gardens meets Gypsy Rose Lee meets Sisterhood of the Traveling Underpants with a dash of Fiddler on the Roof.
I don’t know why I woke up one chilly morning in January and knew deep in my bones that I needed direct a documentary on these women, but I did.
Why? Three reasons:
1. To tell the story of these exceptional marginalized women who left everything they knew in their home country to blaze their own trail and create a life for themselves.
2. To illuminate this story for all the courageous women who have created their own lives on their terms, regardless of what society tells them they can and can’t do.
3. To create a love letter to Kim. Anyone who knows me, knows that after losing Kim, I now want to interweave aspects of her, my love for her, our life together into the fabric of my daily life. Nita & Zita had a profound impact on our performing life together.
But it wasn’t just us. Nita & Zita had a profound impact on many artists. There have been award-winning plays written about them, many dance show tributes, paintings, poetry, and more.
Up to now, there was very little factual information about these two incredible women. This documentary is going to change that.
Nita & Zita started as a story I would film on my phone for free, a story I just needed to tell. I began my research with multiple doors closing in my face, only a few surviving photographs, and no one knowing where any actual documented information existed. I changed tactics and decided the project would be about Nita & Zita’s mythology, their impact on artists, but then, something changed.
Each day, as I researched, knocking on doors, making phone calls, visiting archives, the project grew with incredible synchronicity. The proverbial doors flung open and never-before-seen photos, newspaper articles, and unknown information fell right into my lap. Incredible artists have joined the project, and my little free phone documentary but has now grown into a story with a fantastic camera crew, music, editing, and all the collaborators that give a film the best chance at telling a compelling story.
The Journey
What is it about these women that compels people to fall in love with them?
In researching this question, I began contacting artists who had created projects based on them, researched archival databases across the country for Ziegfeld GIrls, Vaudeville Circuits, Motion Picture Libraries, and Performing Arts Libraries.
In an extraordinary twist, a few days later, I was connected to the Curator of Rare Books at the New Orleans Historical Society, who informed me they had just received a large donation of items belonging to Nita & Zita, never-before-seen photos, newspaper articles, show programs, costume pieces, and collage posters they had made themselves.
There has been new incredible information arriving every single day, with more and more information coming to light for the first time.
Hop on over to our Kickstarter page to watch the video and learn more details on the project.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/marcidarling/the-nita-and-zita-documentary
