Capital City Film Fest: MSU grad's "Down by the Riverside" spotlights Pete Seeger, Hudson River cleanup

For a documentary movie, you need talent, luck … and a bucketload of patience.

Dan Messina, an Owosso High and Michigan State grad, and Jodie Childers can tell you about that last part, at the Capital City Film Festival. Their “Down By the Riverside” will be at 1 p.m. Sunday (April 14) at Central United Methodist Church — the third screening for a movie they started a dozen years ago.

Capital City Film Festival: Schedule, tickets, what you need to know

For more than a year, they had been filming folk-music icon Pete Seeger and his Hudson River clean-up project. Then came his death – unexpected, even though he was 94. “It was utterly surprising,” Childers said. “He always seemed so up.”

That brought the next question: “We had shot 800 hours,” Messina said. “How do we mold that into a movie?”

They did it gradually, searching for long-ago footage, as their own lives unfolded.

These days, they live in New Orleans, where she’s a visiting American Studies professor at Tulane and he – via modern technology – is executive producer of cable’s “The Real Murders of Atlanta.” They also have a place in New York and roots in the real world.

Messina graduated from Owosso High (1997) and MSU (2001), added a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and then took a gamble.

“When I was 26, I sold my car and moved to New York City,” he said. “I had no job, no place to live. (But) I really fell in love with New York.”

Many small-town Midwesterners hate the place, but Messina was predisposed to like it. His dad is from New York (moving to Owosso for his work as a doctor). And Owosso is no ordinary small town. It’s been the home of writer James Oliver Curwood (whose work has been the basis of 180 movies), Thomas Dewey (the almost-president), Frederick Frieseke (an impressionist master) and more.

It also has a river. As teenagers, Messina and friends finished last in the raft race; two years later, they won.

That may have been good preparation for filming Seeger’s river efforts and singalongs.

Childers was struck by “how participatory it was, how volunteer-driven. Pete was never the center of it; he didn’t want to be.”

They filmed Seeger singing, chopping wood, hauling logs. When he died, Messina said, they decided to tell the full Hudson clean-up story. “We really needed to go to the start in 1968 …. Jodie found hundreds of hours of film.”

It wasn’t easy, because Seeger had faced an informal blacklisting that dated back to the McCarthy era, keeping him off most TV-network shows. But there was lots of footage from Canadian TV, from New York stations and from Daniel Seeger, Pete’s son.

That was blended with Seeger’s final years and with current footage. A portrait emerged:

Related: 'Camp RicStar,' a documentary about MSU music camp, opens Capital City Film Festival on Wednesday

Parts of the Hudson were in wretched shape. “It was used as a dump,” Messina said.

Then Seeger had his grand plan: Re-create a classic ship, fill it with singers and sailors, then visit riverside towns for music, fun and clean-river talk.

It was an odd notion that actually worked. And it’s a story that sprawls over a half-century of history and a dozen years of patient filmmaking.

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Capital City Film Fest spotlights Pete Seeger, Hudson River cleanup