Frequently Asked Questions

Our working together really came together organically. We each had different careers, and we had also worked together at times. Ursula and Maria produced and acted in the LA Premiere of the show A…My Name Is Alice, which ran for a year, and after that, they were approached to develop films. A year later, we all came together to work on the first film, Just Friends, primarily as sisters to help Maria, who was helming the project. After that, Gabrielle had written Temps, and it fell into place that we could make the film in Boston, so Jennifer and Charity came in, and we all decided we would do that full-time for a year. We really enjoyed working together, so we kept going.

In filmmaking, one sort of creates a family during the making of a film, and we’ve got our own — which expands and retracts depending on the stage of production, but we’ve always got this base family and support. We get along very well, which is a good foundation in filmmaking, where good partnerships are hard to find. We also can communicate in shorthand, which saves time.

Our parents used to ask the same question — but now we’ve roped them into it too. (Our mother, a novelist, wrote Manna From Heaven, and our father retired from his job as a professor at the University of Buffalo to join our company.)

We believe that film is one of the most powerful mediums today, and we feel a responsibility as artists to make films that are entertaining and also have a sense of hope on a personal or social level. Our father was a professional jazz musician, and our mother is a writer, so we grew up in an environment which highly valued the arts. Films and television are now even more present and influential in the world; and it also synthesizes all of our artistic interests — music, visual arts, writing.

We talk in shorthand, like most close siblings. We work like an inner democracy, where everyone in our family has an equal vote, and then we speak as one voice. We each have our realms of responsibility in the company (one sister deals with financial work; another with PR, etc.). However, all major decisions are made together. Most of the time, we are all in agreement without much discussion; when we disagree, we feel strongly about trying to come to a consensus.

When we were growing up, there were seven people in the family, and seven days in a week. Our parents set up a system called First Turn, which started out as a way to make pecking order not always revert to birth order. When a guest would, say, bring a box of chocolates, whoever’s day it was got the first choice. That developed into that person also having chores on those days. The system gave us a sense of interdependence and of working together as a unit. (By the way, we still use First Turn all the time.)

Yes, now that we’ve established the company, we hope always to continue to make films together. At the same time, we continue to work separately, and we see the company as an umbrella for us, or a point of central gravity to which we can return. It is a wonderful way for us to make films we care about.

Charity continues to teach in the LA city public school system, which we all believe is extremely important. Jennifer also continues her work in academia, editing literary anthologies with Henry Louis Gates. The others continue their work separately as actors, directors, and writers too.

Yeah, sure.

(No we don’t, says another sister. Sure we do, another says. No we don’t, retorts the other sister quickly — and then they all laugh.)

Obviously, everyone fights — but as sisters, we can disagree and still know that we’re on the same side. At the end of the day, we’re spending every holiday together, so we have a base level of trust on top of our shared artistic values. We also complement each other artistically — some sisters loving action films, others, romantic comedies — so we broaden and strengthen each project with our different perspectives.

Our parents inspire us sisters a great deal. They enjoy the process of living, and this business can be very hard at times, and they always enjoy the small pleasures along the way.

We were very fortunate as children in that our parents used to save up and take us on long trips in the summer. We backpacked in Asia, and retraced the Donner Trail another summer for a novel our mother was writing. We learned that the only way we could do these extraordinary trips was making choices throughout the rest of the year, and also keeping to a very limited budget — which was probably the best preparation for independent filmmaking someone could get.