How The Work, and Thus The Legacy, of Kathleen Collins Resurfaced

Black writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins was almost lost to history. Here's how her legacy resurfaced.

By Jamie LammersPublished 3 years ago • 13 min read

One afternoon in 2013, Dennis Doros received a call. The call was from a young woman wanting to pitch a movie of her mother’s to Milestone Films. Dennis, along with Amy Heller, co-founded the distribution company in 1990 and became world-renowned for their efforts. At first, the call didn’t particularly excite Dennis. However, as the woman explained what the film was, he realized they had just found the cinematic equivalent of gold.

The woman was Nina Lorez Collins, daughter of Black author, playwright, and filmmaker Kathleen Collins. She had retrieved copies of her mother’s only completed feature film, Losing Ground, in 2010. DuArt Film and Video, a Manhattan lab responsible for the processing of the film, was closing its doors. They contacted Nina and asked her if she wanted surviving prints of the film, and she enthusiastically accepted. She eventually pitched the film to Milestone, which had expanded its mission in 2007 to include the distribution of “lost” and independent films about or created by those obscured from the mainstream. Nina’s pitch hooked Milestone, and Dennis and Amy accepted a DVD copy of the film.

Milestone was successful in submitting the film to the Lincoln Center as part of the film series “Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986,” which took place between February 6 and February 21, 2015. Upon this public re-release, the film received universal acclaim and played beyond February 21 due to popular demand. It is one of the few films on Rotten Tomatoes to receive the perfect 100% critic consensus. Vulture.com, a subsidiary of New York Magazine, named its ending the 77th greatest film ending of all time. Publications such as the New York Times and the New Yorker praised its intimate look into the domesticity of a Black family. In 2020, it was even selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

There is so much that is astonishing about the film’s resurgence, not the least of which is that Kathleen stumbled into filmmaking and writing completely by accident. Born on March 18, 1942 in Jersey City, Kathleen Conwell Collins Prettyman was raised in a religious family. As a child, Kathleen never thought about making movies or writing as careers. After graduating high school in 1959, she attended the all-women’s school Skidmore College in Saratoga, New York, intending to major in French. During her time there, she would become Skidmore’s class president, travel to Southwest Georgia to participate in activism for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and write editorials for the school paper, The Skidmore News.

Kathleen graduated from Skidmore in 1963 with a BA in Philosophy and Religion, moving to Massachusetts to attend Harvard at night and teach high school French in Newton during the day. In 1965, she won the John Whitney Hay scholarship, allowing her to pursue a masters in French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris. One of the electives she took there was French Literature and Cinema. The class’s objective was to encourage students to analyze film adaptations of famous French literature, such as Madame Bovary. Through this elective, Kathleen found herself captivated with the process of translating literature into film and developed an eye for analyzing movies. She would graduate from the Sorbonne with a degree in French literature and cinema.

The moment that would permanently cement her passion in filmmaking occurred during her time as a researcher for National Educational Television, a broadcasting corporation in New York City. During production on a documentary, she was asked to help organize the footage, as the company lacked a production assistant. She was ushered into the cutting room, where she first experienced the process of film editing. It became her first obsession, one that she would continue pursuing as she took other editing jobs at corporations such as the BBC, William Greaves Productions, and the United States Information Agency, among others.

Through this newfound passion for filmmaking, she would develop an interest in writing. Throughout the 1970s onward, she would write six plays, a novel, many short stories, and four screenplays, some not completed before her death. Her first major project, a screenplay titled Women, Sisters, and Friends, was completed in 1971. However, she was unable to find a production company willing to let a Black woman direct and produce her own film. Dissuaded, she continued writing on her own, taking a teaching position at the City College in New York in 1974. She would teach screenwriting and film history there, and her students, especially a young man named Ronald K. Gray, encouraged her to try directing again. A speech student of hers, Gray was also pursuing film, winning first prize in a film festival for his short Transmagnifican Dambamuality. Upon seeing the film, Kathleen asked him if he wanted to join her production team if she were to pick up directing again. He eagerly accepted.

With a budget of $5,000-$7,000 gathered from friends and credit from DuArt Labs, Kathleen and Ronald began working on her only completed short film, The Cruz Brothers and Miss Maloy. Fittingly for Kathleen, the short was adapted from The Cruz Chronicles, a short story collection written by her friend Henry H. Roth. The film centers around three brothers from Puerto Rico struggling to survive while dealing with the looming presence of their father’s ghost. Despite the criticism she faced for focusing on a Latino storyline instead of one discussing the hardships of women and Black people, Kathleen pressed on, believing it was important to pursue the stories that inspired her. The film, a local affair, began shooting in 1979 in nearby Piermont, with a crew composed of New York residents. With a miniscule budget during a time when digital filmmaking did not exist, Kathleen and Ronald battled to make the film. Ultimately, however, they finished it, releasing it in 1980 and winning first prize for the final product at the Sinking Creek Film Festival. Working on the project together as co-producers, co-editors, and director and cinematographer, Kathleen and Ronald developed a camaraderie. Finishing the film gave them the proof they needed that they could finish another one.

Soon after, Kathleen began work on Losing Ground. The film stars Seret Scott as Sara Rogers and Bill Gunn as her husband Victor. The story follows the couple at a marital crossroads as both partners struggle working on their own personal projects -- Victor’s paintings and Sara’s research. While the film had a much larger budget than The Cruz Brothers at $125,000, the budget was still small and the production was still local, taking place in Piedmont, Nyack, Haverstraw, and New York City. Kathleen and Ronald’s motivation from finishing The Cruz Brothers carried them through filming, and the movie was completed in 1982.

The feature won first place in the Figueroa International Film Festival in Portugal, but received little attention in the United States. It was never given an official theatrical release, only being screened a handful of times during Kathleen’s life. It screened once at the Museum of Modern Art in 1983, once on WNET’s Independent Focus in 1987, and once on American Playhouse between 1987 and 1988. For the remainder of her life, Kathleen would primarily focus on producing her plays, with all six of her completed drafts being either published or produced.

In 1980, Kathleen developed breast cancer. She kept it a secret for much of the rest of her life, dying in 1988 at the age of 46. Most of her writing had never been seen by the public, as she was rejected the few times she tried to get her fiction published. During her life, her daughter Nina recognized that Kathleen was a writer first and foremost. While she respected Kathleen and would often watch her teach at City College, she didn’t know her well personally because she was constantly writing. On top of that, elements of her childhood were traumatic. In 1975, Kathleen divorced Douglas Collins, her first husband and biological father of Nina and her brother Emilio, and raised the kids on her own with little money. Nina often had verbal altercations with Kathleen and witnessed her initiate physical altercations with Douglas. In 1983, Kathleen remarried with fellow SNCC colleague Alfred Prettyman, who Nina did not get along with. Nina’s experiences witnessing Kathleen’s physical altercations with Douglas resulted in her developing a violent streak. As an adult, she would be arrested three times -- once for assaulting her first husband, once for assaulting his next girlfriend, and once for violating his protection order.

Struggling with violent tendencies, suffering from depression, seeking help from therapists, and angry at her mother for keeping her breast cancer a secret until two weeks before she died, Nina needed answers. In the immediate aftermath of Kathleen’s death, Nina had gathered every artwork of Kathleen’s that she could find in a trunk and took them with her as she went to college. She kept herself busy once she left, marrying her first husband, birthing four children, and starting a few businesses. In the aftermath of her arrests and divorce, at a low point in her life, Nina finally opened the trunk to search for resolution within herself and her mother’s work. As she read Kathleen’s writings and browsed her photos, she saw a personal and psychological side of her mother that she had never seen before.

Sifting through the archives, she wanted to release her mother’s work. After years of compiling, she would edit a collection of sixteen unreleased short stories and publish it in 2016 under the title Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? This collection included the short story “Interiors,” which was published for the first time the previous year in the magazine A Public Space. In 2019, she released more of her mother's miscellaneous writings under the title Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary. However, the release of her writing would not have been possible were it not for the redistribution of Losing Ground, possibly the first film ever directed by a Black woman. Its popularity in 2015 increased interest in Kathleen’s work, allowing Nina to share it with the world.

Of all of the serendipitous events that led to Kathleen directing films and Nina finding lost prints of Losing Ground, perhaps the most significant of all was the late success of that feature film. During its initial release, no one was interested in distributing a film centering around the unfiltered and authentic lives of a Black family. Initial attempts to release the film resulted in distributors coming back to tell representatives of Kathleen that they had never seen Black people act like they did in her script. White audiences had experienced caricatures of Black people, often women that acted as nannies for white families, for decades. From Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar-winning turn as Mammy in 1939’s Gone with the Wind to Nell Carter’s Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated performance as Nellie Harper in the ‘80s sitcom Gimme a Break!, these kinds of portrayals were commonplace in pop culture. Kathleen’s writing intentionally avoided portraying Blacks as housekeepers or thugs or victims of crimes, developing them based on her own experiences in order to create authentic personalities.

Even modern day audiences almost did not get to appreciate Losing Ground. While many sources seem to cite Nina’s call to Dennis Doros as taking place in 2015, the same year Losing Ground was rereleased, the call actually took place in 2013, as Dennis has said that it took two years for anyone to accept the film for theatrical distribution. Even in the 21st century, Milestone struggled to find a distributor comfortable with a film that authentically portrayed the Black experience. When the film was originally screened in the ‘80s, Black audiences were the primary target that fell in love with the film. They understood the film’s portrayal of modern Black marriage, artistry, and vernacular, even while white audiences weren’t on board, and that was almost the case in the 21st century, too.

Because writing was so personal to Kathleen, many people have claimed there are autobiographical parallels between her and her characters. In a review for Losing Ground, New York Times writer J. Hoberman questioned if Kathleen was the basis for the main character Sara. Reflecting on his experience with the film, Ronald K. Gray claimed he instantly knew it was Kathleen’s story. Even Nina Lorez Collins was finally able to connect to her mother through her stories because she recognized them as autobiographical. However, Kathleen would argue that her characters were never truly autobiographical. She fed their attributes through her own experiences to create traits that felt right for the characters and environments she wanted to portray. She would argue that the characters did not represent her, but were rather a result of her process to prevent the mythologizing of Black characters. She wanted to prevent portraying them as completely good or evil, as a saint or a sinner, instead creating lifelike, imperfect, and flawed human beings. Kathleen Collin’s approach to creating characters allowed Black audiences of both the 1980s and the 2010s to empathize with characters that actually felt like real Black people, and her character techniques are universal to any aspiring writer, even today. Without Kathleen’s accidental stumbling into film, the serendipitous events that led to the redistribution of her only feature, and her daughter’s pursuit to seek the truth about a person she only connected with posthumously, this important piece of Black culture and beautiful voice of Black art would most likely be forgotten today.

Sources Used:

Kathleen Collins: A Rivertown Film Discussion of Losing Ground & The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy on Vimeo

About Us – Milestone Films

Kathleen Collins – Women Make Film (tcm.com)

Tell It Like It Is: Black Independents in New York, 1968 – 1986 (filmlinc.org)

Losing Ground (1982) - Rotten Tomatoes

The 101 Best Movie Endings of All Time, Ranked (vulture.com)

‘Tell It Like It Is,’ a Chapter of New York From 1968 to ’86 - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Kathleen Collins’s Lost Masterwork, “Losing Ground” | The New Yorker

Complete National Film Registry Listing | Film Registry | National Film Preservation Board | Programs | Library of Congress (loc.gov)

Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary by Kathleen Collins, edited by Nina Lorez Collins

Biography — Kathleen Collins