Haney Crafts New ‘American’ Drama

After 15 years as a high-tech entrepreneur and a brief stint at the Harvard Kennedy School studying environmental policy, Bill M. Haney ’84-’86 decided to start making movies.

“I didn’t go to school for it, didn’t study it. I just found people who were thoughtful and who knew a lot about film and I listened to them,” Haney says. 13 movies later, the writer/producer’s new feature film, “American Violet,” combines political and social advocacy with old-fashioned dramatic storytelling, two cornerstones of Haney’s approach to film.

Though he founded his first start-up, Fuel Tech, when he was an 18-year-old freshman in Straus, his film career took years to begin. His first documentary, “Gift of the Game,” explored U.S.-Cuba relations through baseball and Ernest Hemingway. Later documentaries centered on other social, political, and environmental concerns, covering topics from ocean preservation and whale biology to the Caribbean sugar cane industry.

In 2002, Haney was listening to National Public Radio on the drive home from work when he heard a piece that drove him to tears. The story was about a 24-year-old single black mother in Texas who had been wrongfully accused of dealing narcotics after a raid on the housing projects where she lived. She was given two options: a plea bargain, which would release her as a convicted felon in exchange for pleading guilty, or 15-25 years in prison. In the face of a tyrannical district attorney with a racist bent, and a push to convict in order to receive state funds, the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” quickly fell by the wayside.

“It was just so emotional—the story of this young woman assaulted by the criminal justice system and given such a horrible set of choices,” Haney says. “American Violet” is closely based on the story of this woman, who, in the film, quickly realizes her situation is not unique and teams up with an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer to fight the district attorney and reverse the court’s wrongful convictions.

Though roughly half of Haney’s movies are documentaries, he felt this material was more suited to a feature film. “Because it’s based on a real-world story, because many of the characters are still alive, and because many of these issues are so important, we had to find a way to tell the inspiring and dramatically compelling truth, and to root it in authenticity,” Haney says. “So that the reaction would be almost visceral, so that you would feel it more than think about it.”

To this end, Haney cast actors that he felt would cut straight to the core of each character.

“The best actors have a shorthand for expressing the emotional life of a character that even the real character can’t quite express as comfortably,” he says. Haney cast up-and-comer Nicole Beharie as female protagonist Dee Roberts. Joining Beharie in the film are veteran actors like Alfre Woodard, Tim Blake Nelson, and Charles Dutton.

The 2000 U.S. presidential election constitutes both the political and visual subtexts of the storyline, with frequent shots of the campaigns of George W. Bush and Al Gore ’69 spliced into the film. Not only does this maintain the historical accuracy of the story, it also reveals a disturbing layer of irony in campaign rhetoric.

“At the very time that George Bush was running for president, talking about how he didn’t believe in quota systems, he was using quota systems for distributing money in Texas,” Haney says. These systems—which allocate state funds based on the number of convictions made by the state’s drug task force—are indirectly responsible for the heroine’s conviction in “American Violet.”

But Haney insists that “American Violet” will transcend its moral and political content. “One of the challenges of filmmaking in America is that generally, movies like ours get presented to the public as ‘important,’ and to the public it’s kind of like eating your vegetables,” he says. “It’s good for you, but you’ll probably go for ice cream instead.”

“American Violet,” Haney says, will engage and entertain its viewers more than the theatrical equivalent of broccoli might. “And there are some great performances, about things in life that matter to young people,” he adds.

“The essential point of this story for me,” Haney says, “is the inspirational leadership of this one ordinary woman.”