Mary (L) and Joe (R) in Happy Campers. Courtesy of Grasshopper Film
Though veteran director-producer Amy Nicholson has crafted feature-length films (2012’s Zipper: Coney Island’s Last Wild Ride, 2005’s Muskrat Lovely), she first appeared on my radar in 2016 with her memorable short Pickle, which was nominated for an IDA Documentary Award and the Cinema Eye Honors, and went on to be featured in the New York Times’ Op-Docs as well as on the Criterion Channel (alongside Errol Morris’ Gates of Heaven no less).
And while Nicholson’s latest work of cinematic nonfiction does include her trademark approach of “chuckling along with” (never at) her sometimes offbeat characters, Happy Campers is actually much more elegiac in tone. This is understandable since this 2023 DOC NYC debut follows the final years of the soon-to-disappear blue-collar community of Inlet View, an RV park off the coast of Virginia that the director herself embedded with (i.e., bought a camper and moved in); and has since been sold to developers looking to cash in on its multimillion-dollar locale. But rather than focus on any battle against The Man (spoiler alert: there is none), Nicholson instead chooses to train her lens squarely on the longtime denizens to be displaced, many of whom have been summering there for generations and have morphed into one big loving family. And thereby capture a view money can’t buy.
Documentary recently caught up with Nicholson, fresh off the film’s festival run, to learn all about Happy Campers, which has journeyed from a 2022 DocuClub NY work-in-progress screening all the way to acquisition by Grasshopper Film. It plays theaters in NY and LA this month. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
DOCUMENTARY: I read in the press notes that you embedded with the Inlet View community for three years—but what did that entail? How long did you plan on living there?
AMY NICHOLSON: Yeah, I rented a place. I would still be there if it was still there, that’s how great it was. I wasn’t really sure if there was a film there or not. I had taken a bunch of pictures and I just loved the community. So the first summer, I rented a place for the last half of the summer, and at the end of that time, I had met all these people and I just fell in love with it. And regardless of whether I was going to film or not, I started looking for a camper.
What happens is you rent the spots, but you buy the camper, basically buying whatever’s in that spot to get the spot. My husband thought I was out of my mind—I bought a camper that needed a lot of work, but I spent the winter fixing it up. I didn’t stay there full-time because I had to leave whenever I got commercial projects. But I stayed as much as possible during the summer. But I was there, on and off, eight months of the year for two full years.
D: Yeah, that’s definitely embedding. Were there characters you filmed there that didn’t make the final cut, or Inlet View residents who didn’t want to appear on camera? How did you decide who to film?
AN: Well, I think that they decided. Everybody knew me. All my equipment was in a garden cart, so I would constantly walk around, and simultaneously meet people and talk to the people that I had met the first summer. And the second summer that I was there I actually didn’t film, I just took pictures with my Hasselblad. And then once I got to know people, I would frame and send those pictures to them in the wintertime and say, “Hey, can’t wait till next summer.” Because that’s what you do in a community. You keep in touch with people.
But through that process I got to know the people who were really talkative; and the people who’d been there the longest, and the people who were most passionate about the community. Then I started to ask people if they would do a sit-down interview with me. Nobody ever said no. Though there was one man who I really wanted to interview because he had been there 40 years, and their place was one of those that had been passed down through the generations. He just was not feeling well the summer that I was filming. But everyone else said yes.
There were some people that I didn’t include in the end, and not because they didn’t say wonderful things. It’s just because we had a lot of people and we were very determined to represent the community as a group. If I had a dollar for every time someone said to me, "Aren’t you going to pick two or three people to represent all of them?” I would have paid for the film ten times over.
But John Young, who’s the editor, and I really felt like it wasn’t appropriate. And yes, that’s what you do in documentary: you find someone who represents the larger population. But in this case, it felt wrong because everybody felt equally important.
D: Did you reach out to the developers responsible for the camp’s eventual shuttering?
AN: I didn’t. I knew who they were because they had bought other family campgrounds in the area. They have basically taken over a very large portion of the East Coast. There were people that I met and are in the film who had been kicked out of other campgrounds purchased by that same developer.
So I knew who they were, their business model, and what they were going to do. But I didn’t want to make another “evil developer” film. I didn’t think that was the important part of what I was learning there. I felt like what I was seeing there was a really simple way of life, with a level of acceptance for other human beings, and a level of contentment when you don’t have a lot. Those were the things that were life-changing for me, so that was what I wanted to put on film.
D: I did notice these “happy campers” seem to be a rather homogenous group: blue-collar, straight white couples or widows. Does this aspect perhaps make you wary of romanticizing the community?
AN: I filmed who was there. I filmed who had been there the longest and who was the most passionate about how special the place was. There probably wasn’t another outwardly gay man there besides Ricky, who everyone called the mayor. Everyone loved him, and he knew everyone in the campground. So while there were other people and it had started to become more diverse, it’s just a working-class getaway place.
I remember after Nomadland came out I read a lot of interviews with director Chloe Zhao. I was laughing because the book’s author Jessica Bruder did the exact same thing I did —she got a camper and moved in to write Nomadland. But then Chloe Zhao was confronted multiple times with, “Well, there’s so many white people. Why didn’t you cast people of color? Why didn’t you cast more diverse people?” And she said, “Because that’s who lives that lifestyle.” So should you be changing what’s real to make other people comfortable? I don’t know.
D: How much did you collaborate with the participants?
AN: It was all me for the most part, and I really only started filming in earnest when we all found out that we were getting kicked out. But I did do multiple things. First, I never shot anything without asking. I took a lot of pictures that I shared with anyone; if they wanted to see footage, I would happily share it. But I was really kind of busy just capturing as much as possible while everyone else was very busy trying to just have the best last summer they could and pack up their shit. If you’ve been there for 30 years, that was a really hard thing to do.
So the one thing that I always talk about is the importance of just giving people space. It was really, really heartbreaking for a lot of those people to leave because they knew they would never again find cheap rent in a shitty place that they could fix up themselves; and it was on the water in a really beautiful place. It was never going to happen and they knew it. And so I just wanted to give them space.
D: And did you screen a rough cut for the community?
AN: We went back to the island for a rough-cut screening. There is an amazing historic theater there called the Island Theater in Chincoteague, which the local arts organization runs as a not-for-profit. So they allowed us to host a screening before the film was finished. And if anybody had problems I’d say, “You can tell me and we’ll take it out.” So yeah, they’ve been very involved.
D: You also screened a rough cut at DCTV [as a selection of DocuClub NY].
AN: It was the IDA screening that really pointed out a huge flaw in the film. What people expected was what they would normally see in a documentary, because most are out to right a wrong in society. So they were expecting that narrative, and that wasn’t the narrative at all. But because we had made kind of a big deal about getting the letter saying we were all going to get thrown out, and it was right there in the first eight minutes of the film, it set an expectation.
Then we went back and took that out of the beginning. But I still get people at festivals who say, “I kept waiting for the big ta-da, and then I just relaxed and got what you were trying to do.”
D: That David vs. Goliath battle is so ever-present in so many documentaries that it’s almost as if people are trained to look for it even when it’s not there.
AN: Because 99.9% of the films that are made are trying to solve social issues, trying to address them. And they’re very serious and it’s very dramatic. And this just wasn’t that, and it was never meant to be that. So we had to figure out a way to trick people into not expecting it, I guess.
Lauren Wissot is a film critic and journalist, filmmaker and programmer, and a contributing editor at both Filmmaker magazine and Documentary magazine. She also writes regularly for Modern Times Review (The European Documentary Magazine) and has served as the director of programming at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and the Santa Fe Independent Film Festival.