Robinson Devor Discusses ‘Suburban Fury’

In 1975, an unusual would-be presidential assassin emerged. Sara Jane Moore, a middle-aged five-time divorcee and mother of four, a suburbanite turned informant for the FBI on various radical groups turned radical herself, attempted to shoot Gerald Ford. She served more than 30 years in prison before being released in the late 2000s. 

Robinson Devor is no stranger to unusual subjects. He’s previously profiled Los Angeles billboard queen Angelyne, the denizens of the Coachella Valley in Pow Wow (2017), and most infamously, a secret group of zoophiles in his debut doc feature Zoo (2007). In his new film, Suburban Fury, Devor sits with Moore to learn her story. Through her eyes, the film presents the immense social and political turmoil of the early to mid-’70s, interlacing copious archival footage into interviews with Moore taking place throughout San Francisco. Not long after the movie’s premiere press screening at the New York Film Festival, Documentary sat down with Devor over Zoom to discuss how he approached Moore and then weaved her story into the broader one about the period. Suburban Fury also screened last week at SFFILM Doc Stories. This interview has been edited and condensed for time and clarity.

DOCUMENTARY: What brought you to Sara Jane Moore? Was she a way into the story of the Ford assassination attempts, or were you interested in her as a character first?

ROBINSON DEVOR: It’s funny, I actually started with Oliver Sipple, who deflected Moore’s shot and saved the president’s life. He was a Vietnam veteran, disabled, happened to be gay, and was outed by the press in the hopes that there would be a gay hero for the times, and that messed up his relationship with his parents. A friend was urging me to do a documentary about Sipple, and I thought it was a great subject. Right around then, Moore was let out of jail, so I started researching her story, and it had so many layers that interested me. And since she was alive while Sipple was not, I hoped I could interview her.

D: When did the film sort of start getting produced in earnest? And was this around when you first were able to confirm with her that she’d be willing to do the film? 

RD: This was around 2010, I believe. It was not a difficult negotiation. She was interviewed by many people, but I don’t think anyone else pitched her a longform documentary. I was coming off my film Zoo (2007), which is about people who have sex with animals, and we were very empathetic toward our subjects. I was hoping that that would be a calling card for any other subjects who were wary about the press or documentary filmmakers being sympathetic to their causes. We had a pretty good understanding that it would be her story, and it was fairly quickly ironed out.

D: The film disclaims that she’s the only interviewee, by her request. Was she always adamant about that? Did you resist it at all before agreeing to it?

RD: When I made my very first film, a short about Angelyne, she had the same stipulation. “I don’t want you to talk to my family, I don’t want you to talk to people, I want this to be my story.” And so you think to yourself, “Well, am I doing a piece of propaganda here, or can I work with that constraint?” And of course, you get control in the edit suite. So I didn’t see it as a negative. The standard “he said/she said” in documentaries with talking heads is not the most interesting thing in the world to me.

D: Is there anyone you would have sought out if she’d allowed it?

RD: I think one of the most compelling aspects of the story is that she was the mother of a young boy throughout this whole time. You ask anybody who knew her, no matter what they said about her as a person, they always said the boy seemed happy, was well taken care of, even when she was isolated. And I of course was curious about him. At the same time, I don’t want to bring somebody into the spotlight who might be uncomfortable.

D: What guided the archival sources you drew from for the historical footage?

RD: I always imagined the film by imagining a person who is hearing strong opinions, philosophies coming from the right and left, strong people, compelling people, convincing people, charismatic people. We wanted to bring in as many people as we could who she had interacted with, or influences she was absorbing, and give a diverse array of them. It’s people she knew, people she was listening to, people whose rallies she attended, people who she was taught by.

Much of the footage was related to her. For instance, in her rationale to the court, she cited the overthrow of Salvador Allende. She said, “Any government that uses assassination as a tool must expect that tool to be turned back against themselves.” So we made sure to build Allende into the movie. In that comment, she also mentions Attica, various Black Panthers. She was involved peripherally. Members of the American Indian Movement were present in the San Francisco area at the time. There were all sorts of people that she was informing on. It’s difficult to even know how many groups she touched; we don’t have the records. Patty Hearst was reading The Dialectic of Sex when she was kidnapped, and I bet those kinds of things trickled into her consciousness. Sometimes it’s a guess on our part.

D: The film is structured around an ongoing conversation that’s retracing her steps around San Francisco at the time of the incident. What led you to this not quite recreation, but almost restaging? Especially considering that the ballroom where you speak with her is where she was interrogated after the assassination attempt, and now you’re interrogating her again there, in a way.

RD: I think it’s a matter of stylistically trying to do something fresh. It wasn’t just that we wanted to bring her to a house she lived in; she’s speaking through glass, encased in her house. We were trying to push the limits of the way somebody can speak on camera. It’s touching on elements of her life, but it’s a way to maybe make the film a little different, maybe something that can engage the audience.

D: How long did you film with her? Was it shot in the same sequence we see in the film proper, with her relating her story in sequence? Or was that flow created in the edit?

RD: We spent eight days in San Francisco shooting on location with her, and then three days in New York doing audio-only interview. Going in, we had all our questions and imagined the arc of the film. She’d start with her life in suburbia, work in the inner city, get engaged in the Patty Hearst kidnapping, become an informant for the FBI, and eventually give up her suburban home and live in the Mission District. We positioned our questions per our location, splitting them up in a way that paid off pretty well. The car was always kind of an X factor because it represented her constant back-and-forth between suburbia and the city. Putting her in the backseat of that station wagon gave us a lot of flexibility. 

D: The film mostly focuses on the buildup to the assassination attempt, and not so much on what came after. Was that a deliberate choice, or shaped by what she was willing to talk about?

RD: That felt like a natural ending point. I felt the film naturally fell into this classical story structure, with the climax being the attempt and the denouement being her statement in court. She did speak about being in prison, and audio from some interviews done with her in prison are in the movie. But her life in prison was not as compelling to me, though I’m sure it was interesting. We do include her brief escape at the very end.

D: What new official materials, if any, were you able to access about her and her case?

RD: Well, it’s fascinating and outrageous that her records were sealed for all time by the judge. We filed multiple Freedom of Information Act requests, but all of her reports, all the things she filed on behalf of the FBI, all that stuff which would have been amazing and would’ve given us definitive answers about things—completely sealed. However, we came across documents that were startling. Late in production, we found one that helped us realize the framework of the film was really about her and her FBI handler. It was a document from an FBI internal review that was done to see if she was in cahoots with another country or what groups she might have been aligned with. The last paragraph, which is in the film, says that also under review is the nature of her recruitment and the relationship between her and her control agent, whose name is redacted.

We also spoke with Dr. Gustave Weiland, who was the lead psychiatrist for the defense, and got some good insight from him, along with some interesting documents about her personal history—things that were not in the public record. 

D: Did she ever speak about her portrayal in pop culture, like in the Sondheim musical Assassins? 

RD: I think she’s not pleased with how it portrays her as a bumbling fool. She’s a very intelligent person, has a lot of complexity, and she never talked about that musical, which is the nadir of all the portrayals of her. But she’s also not happy with the way she was portrayed in the media at all.

D: In the press notes, you say she still seems skeptical about how she comes across here.

RD: I think it’s because of all the questions we were asking her, a lot of which related to her personal life, which she emphasized were not relevant to the political aspect of her story. And in the end, those topics weren’t relevant to the film. There’s not much about her marriages, for example. Maybe she just thinks the story can never turn out heroically. I can’t speak for her.

Dan Schindel is a freelance critic and full-time copy editor living in Brooklyn. He has previously worked as the associate editor for documentary at Hyperallergic.