August 1, 2021
by Ed Rampell
In her documentary Bring Your Own Brigade two-time Academy Award nominee Lucy Walker is a bit like Alexis de Tocqueville, her fellow European who came to the USA and observed its exotic inhabitants early in the 19th century. If the French philosopher observed how Americans’ mentality affected democracy in the 1830s, almost 200 years later the London-born Walker is studying how the character of Californians is being brought to bear on the increasingly common and fierce phenomenon of wildfires.
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Ed Rampell was named after legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow because of his TV exposes of Senator Joe McCarthy. Rampell majored in Cinema at Manhattan’s Hunter College and is an L.A.-based film historian/critic who co-organized the 2017 70th anniversary Blacklist remembrance at the Writers Guild theater in Beverly Hills and was a moderator at 2019’s “Blacklist Exiles in Mexico” filmfest and conference at the San Francisco Art Institute. Rampell co-presented “The Hollywood Ten at 75” film series at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and is the author of Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States and co-author of The Hawaii Movie and Television Book.
