Bay Area filmmakers scramble after Trump, Musk axe arts funding

San Francisco Chronicle​

01-05-2025

Baseball — once proclaimed by a famous advertising jingle as American as hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet — is now apparently too woke.
Or at least, a documentary about the sport by San Francisco filmmaker Yuriko Romer, whose funding got pulled because the project doesn't fit 'the president's agenda.'
Her film 'Diamond Diplomacy' is among the casualties of recent federal cuts to the arts by President Donald Trump 's administration, specifically his Department of Government Efficiency. Known as DOGE and headed by Elon Musk of X, Tesla and SpaceX fame, the department drastically instituted mass firings from government entities such as the National Institute of Health, the Internal Revenue Service and the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Before marking his first 100 days in office, the president and his administration also laid waste to the National Endowment for the Humanities, which supports museums, educational institutes, filmmakers and many other projects intended to illuminate American history.
After reducing staff by up to 80% and a mass cancellation of grants already awarded, several Bay Area filmmakers are now scrambling for alternative ways to finish their projects.
'I have a lot of people working for me, and I currently have some licensing fees and (other project expenses) sitting on my credit card because we can't pause the production,' Romer, who has been working on the documentary for a decade, told the Chronicle.
'Diamond Diplomacy' chronicles how the United States and Japan helped foster their relationship through a shared love of baseball. A part of the film focuses on the San Francisco Giants ' first Japanese player, Masanori Murakami, who played in the 1960s alongside Willie Mays and company.
Romer had been awarded a $600,000 grant for the project from the NEH, but only received about $250,000 of that before DOGE wielded the axe. Now she's working frantically to complete the film as it is scheduled to be screened at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., on May 22.
'This is money that was allocated by Congress that through both liberal and conservative governance for decades and decades and decades has continued to allocate money for this kind of stuff, but the decision to terminate these funds did not go through Congress,' said Berkeley documentarian Jason Cohn, whose own project, a profile of Japanese anime and manga pioneer Osamu Tezuka, was also victim to the sudden cuts. 'It was a very capricious move that was done by an unelected bureaucrat in the DOGE office, and it's affecting people's lives.'
Romer, Cohn and Berkeley filmmaker Elivia Shaw — whose documentary 'The Invisible Valley,' about climate change and fieldworkers' health in California's Central Valley is now searching for new funding — were three of many local artists who received a 'Notice of Grant Termination' letter.
'Dear NEH Grantee,' the form letter read. 'This letter provides notice that the National Endowment for the Humanities is terminating your federal grant effective April 2, 2025. … The NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda.'
'It's not like it was going for my salary even, or even just the crew I hire to do production,' said Shaw, who had applied for a $50,000 grant. 'It's not just the producer and the director that it impacts. Obviously it impacts getting the production made, but also the people who have given their time and energy as protagonists in the film … It makes the stories harder to tell.'
The NEH's website notes that since its founding in 1965, it has awarded 'over $6 billion in grants to museums, historic sites, colleges, universities, K–12 teaching, libraries, public television and radio stations, research institutions, independent scholars, and to its humanities council affiliates in each of the nation's 56 states and jurisdictions.'
Those grants are really hard to get. Obtaining one is an arduous process, and can take years. The applications can be 50 to 70 pages long, and include letters of recommendations, resumes for all primary personnel, the approval of a panel of scholars who are knowledgeable on the subject and it must include a clear indication of the humanitarian themes of the project and how it will reach individual audiences.
Also, the grants are not awarded to individuals directly but to overseeing organizations who then dispense the funds to individuals. For example, Romer's and Shaw's grants were distributed by the Center for Independent Documentary, based in Massachusetts, which has supported hundreds of projects since its inception in 1981.
'This is a whole ecosystem that's in the middle of really profound upheaval,' said San Francisco filmmaker Arwen Curry.
Curry is a past NEH grant recipient (' Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin,' 2016) and has served on panels reviewing other filmmakers' submissions. She's also written grant proposals for other filmmakers' projects.
'Those folks have been put on leave and basically lost their jobs,' Curry said, referring to NEH employees. 'These are dedicated lifelong civil servants, really top people, so it's affecting all kinds of livelihoods, and it's taking a lot of really important work out of the pathway of American audiences.'
The Trump administration, Musk and many who voted for Trump have long decried what they perceive is a liberal bias in publicly funded arts. They have called for pulling the funding for PBS, where many of these film projects are broadcast, a move that aligns with a broader conservative belief that art should not rely on government funding but instead thrive or fail based on its performance in the marketplace.
'I think it's good for society to ask those questions and to wrestle with the role that public money should play in the creation of culture,' said Cohn, whose award-winning NEH-funded documentaries include ' Eames: The Architect and the Painter ' (2011) and ' The First Angry Man ' (2020). 'I think if we leave our culture entirely to the market, we end up with cultural product that is designed for the broadest possible market. You can say 'We don't need ballet,' or 'We don't need documentary films in the world, they don't pay for themselves, they're too niche,' but let's have that discussion as a society.'
In other words, Cohn said, the decision shouldn't be made by one person operating outside of Congress.
Despite these challenges, Romer, Cohn and Shaw said that they will press on and complete the passion projects they have already spent years on. They are looking for outside funding, such as grants through foundations, private donations and even crowdfunding campaigns, and are restructuring their projects to come in at a lower budget.
'It's horrible, but we're all going to keep moving forward,' Shaw said. 'Documentary filmmaking isn't easy to start with, so this makes it harder.'