PESHTIGO – In an effort to highlight the widely-forgotten history of the 1871 Peshtigo fires that killed hundreds and burned thousands of acres, Fourth Wall Films has partnered with Wisconsin Humanities and the Peshtigo Historical Society to create “Peshtigo: American Firestorm.”
Hailing from Eau Claire, Wisc., Kelly Rundle entered the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. During seven of his 18 years in the city he worked for Columbia Pictures, a sub-unit of Sony Pictures, while his wife, Tammy, worked for the Los Angeles Magazine.
While Rundle was working on major motion pictures, he said that he “was maybe only proud of two or three films that the studio put out every year.”
This sparked a conversation with his wife on how they could take charge of their own artistic abilities and enter into the film industry without studio backing as independent filmmakers.
Rundle explained that independent filmmaking gives the pair much more creative freedom, “We choose to work only on the things that we’re interested in. We are lucky that we’re able to do that. We’re never just going through the motions.”
However, that kind of freedom does not come without difficulties.
“For better or for worse, we make all of the choices. If we make a bad choice, that’s our fault,” Rundle said.
Their first introduction into independent filmmaking was the 2004 documentary “Visillica: Living With a Mystery,” which explored the 1912 Visillica, Iowa, axe murders.
Despite taking nearly a decade to complete, the film premiered at the Des Moines State Historical Building and saw an opening weekend of over 1,400 attendees.
Rundle shared that this first piece “kind of formed the basis for everything that we’ve done” in their independent filmmaking careers.
Over the next two decades the Rundle’s would direct their area of expertise on the history of the midwest and Wisconsin, such as “The Amish Incident: Wisconsin vs Yoder” as well as collecting five Mid-America Emmys, a dozen Mid-America Emmy nominations, countless Official Selections from a variety of film festivals and many Humanities Media Grant awards.
For the Fourth Wall Films pair, receiving these honors is more important than simply winning.
“[The awards] help us to keep going, they help us to continue to do the work that we love to do,” Rundle said.
Most recently, the filmmakers received a $10,000 grant from the Wisconsin Humanities towards the making of “Peshtigo: American Firestorm.”
Their desire to create a documentary about a “story that has a local or regional awareness that deserves a much wider audience and awareness,” described the historical situation of the Peshtigo fires, which is often overshadowed by the smaller Great Chicago Fire that occurred on the same day.
The Fourth Wall Films pair traveled from their home in the Quad Cities to Peshtigo in the summer of 2023 to meet with members of the Peshtigo Historical Society, visit the museum and begin preliminary research on the film to establish their story.
The Rundles aim to not only tell the story of the fires and examine the damages that occurred, but to find the significance of the story today.
“The thing is, we focus on history. History is only meaningful to us if we understand how we are connected to it,” he said.
“Peshtigo: American Firestorm” will tell a local story to a wider audience by combining “vintage photos, artists renderings, limited re-enactments and archival materials with eye-witness accounts and perspectives from present-day historians and scholars,” their website explains.
As the project moves from pre-production to production, the Rundles conducted their first interview with historian Dr. Jerry Apps. Dr. Apps authored “When the White Pine Was King: A History of Lumberjacks, Log Drives, and Sawdust Cities in Wisconsin” and served as the first of many key on-camera speakers for the film.
While production of “Peshtigo: American Firestorm” will keep the Rundles busy, Kelly shared that they are excited for the journey that is becoming so different from their past experiences.
When filming and interviewing for their first film “Visillica: Living With a Mystery” he found that “the town struggled with the tragedy and never really found a way to tell that story. It’s something that people were curious about, and they sort of rejected the idea of people being curious. Even our documentary project took a while to be accepted by the community.”
This emphasizes the way that communities deal with tragedies in different ways.
Rundle said “The Peshtigo story certainly is an incredible and horrible tragedy, but I was struck by the way the focus is on a narrative of rebirth, rising up from the ashes. That’s an interesting element of the story that might be different in a different community.”
To follow the journey of Kelly and Tammy Rundle as they continue their work on “Peshtigo: American Firestorm” visit their website www.fourthwallfilms.com or their Facebook page Fourth Wall Films.
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