Raw Daisies Production Company Briefly Calls Pittsburgh Home
For one snowy weekend in December, New Jersey-based Raw Daisies called Pittsburgh home. They’re self-described as a “seize the means of production” company that believes in the power of artistic expression, production, distribution, and appreciation. Storytelling is as essential as air, and Raw Daisies has built its entire ethos around making art, and all steps of the process, available to the people. While co-founders Katie Elle Weinstein and Michael Feder may call Princeton, NJ, home, it’s hard to ignore how many of their tenets align with the spirit of Pittsburgh. Both are rooted in grit, passion, and people.
Courtesy of Katie Elle Weinstein
“As you can probably guess, we belong to several very New York art scenes. Among certain sects, we got a few sideways glances when we talked about coming out here to film. It was a six-and-a-half-hour drive to Pittsburgh from Jersey, then back home through the snow. I’m not saying we walked there, but there are easier things to do,” recalls Raw Daises’ Weinstein.
What brought Raw Daisies to Pittsburgh was the production of writer/director Calyssa Lavery’s newest short film, Carpet. A born-and-raised Pittsburgh-area woman herself, despite residing in Brooklyn, Lavery knew that Carpet needed to be shot in the place she grew up. The film takes place during the Great Recession of the early-aughts and centers on a young girl, Kryn (Ella Victoria), who convinces another little girl, Paisley (Nora Elizabeth Shute), to run away from home.
Lavery is a creative producer with Raw Daises and founder of the NY-based writers’ collective Dead Cattle Stampede. It would have been far easier for Lavery and team to find a place closer to home, but it was Lavery’s previous work, also about Southwestern Pennsylvania, that pushed the Raw Daisies team west.
“When we saw Callie and Director of Photography Sam Lasiter’s gobsmackingly incredible short, What People Burn to Stay Warm, filmed around Callie’s hometown, we could tell why everyone we met over the course of this shoot loves this place,” explains Weinstein.
Lavery’s script is based on themes, characters, and general life experiences of growing up in Southwestern Pennsylvania during the mid-2000s. It’s a period marked by the burst of the housing bubble and, specific to Appalachia, the second wave of the opioid epidemic mixed with the decline of the coal industry. In Carpet, Kryn has been deeply impacted by the Great Recession, while Paisley has not. The duality of the lives of these two girls is a reflection on how this era had such devastating impacts on those on the bubble. Those who lived paycheck-to-paycheck, and worse. Despite the fact that it’s set over a decade ago, the current climate feels as though another era like the Great Recession looms, and that makes Carpet all too relevant again.
Courtesy of Meg Mann
The Raw Daisies team drove in from the New York/New Jersey area, but they relied on many local crew members to fill out the production team. Script Supervisor Chris Pugh is one of the crew members who call the greater Pittsburgh area home.
“We just really wanted to shoot a film in Pittsburgh. Opportunities for artistic production expression ought to be distributed by virtue of merit, not by concentrations of money and power. Pittsburgh is all merit. We would not have been able to kick this production into gear if it were not for the incredible local crew that assembled to make this thing happen.”
With filming wrapped on Carpet, Raw Daisies plans to return to Pittsburgh to screen the film. Part of the ethos of the production company is in the release of films. Of doing right by those who played a role in the creation of a piece of art. As they say on their website, Raw Daisies believes that “if you bring good shit to people at a price they can afford, they’ll come.” Pittsburgh may not be the place Raw Daisies calls home, but there will always be a place here for those who believe in the intersection of hard work and treating your neighbors with kindness.
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