“It’s Victorian times, so she has to be hidden and accept all these parameters,” said Blackwood. All three films have a common theme: “women and the struggles they have in their time and place,” as Blackwood puts it. “Films about women seem to be what interest us.”
Blackwood added that Magnolia Mae, which she and Tana started in 1997, is “a strange little company. We’re neither like the independents out of New York nor Hollywood. We’re doing European films,” with funding coming mostly from Britain.
Blackwood got involved with the film industry first as a writer, when she was married to Christian Blackwood, a famous documentary film director, in the early 1990s. “He had a script that needed to be written, and I volunteered to do it,” she said. Sadly, Christian Blackwood died only five months after they were married – the couple had been together for five years – and the movie never got made. Blackwood wrote a second screenplay and presented it to Tana, which led to the founding of Magnolia Mae. She has written many other screenplays, and is writing one now, which is based on the book Sixteen Pleasures, about the rescue of Florence’s art treasures after the disastrous 1966 flood.
Film production is just one of Blackwood’s many interests. In artistic circles, she is known for her fine art photography. She is represented by the Alan Klotz Gallery and is currently working on a museum show and book about her photographic expedition to the Arctic for three weeks last summer aboard the Coast Guard’s largest icebreaker, the Healy. Some 50 scientists were on board, studying everything from mammals to birds to tiny marine organisms to the ice.
“There were 75 Coast Guardsmen running the ship and there were no martinis on the lido deck,” Blackwood said. “It was so physically challenging. You’re going up and down these ladders and holding onto the railings for dear life. I lost 14 pounds in three weeks and didn’t know it.”
But the physical hardship was well-worth the opportunity to experience the extraordinarily beautiful landscape, she said. “We were on a plate, with a 360-degree horizon. We passed through the Bering Strait, between two islands separated by two miles. One side was Siberia and the other was the US, and they just looked like two little lines on the horizon.”
Blackwood also visited Anchorage, where she spent the first two years of her life. “I felt so at home there,” she said, noting that she loves winter; one of her favorite subjects as a photographer is the ice on the Hudson River. She has traveled up and down the river on Riverkeeper’s patrol boat, sometimes for several days at a time, and also goes out on the Coast Guard’s icebreakers.
She and Quinn were living in New York City when they purchased their farm in Clinton in 1999 as a weekend house. But after witnessing the planes hitting the World Trade Center from her apartment on 9/11, Blackwood escaped to the farm to be with Quinn and her son and discovered a newfound peace in being close to nature. “I didn’t know anyone, but nature was so reassuring,” she said. She moved upstate full-time, eventually giving up her New York apartment.
Quinn, a horticulturist who taught at the New York Botanical Gardens and also has written several children’s books, wanted to make the farm economically viable and decided to grow blackcurrants, creating a new market for a fruit virtually unknown in America. He made national headlines when he successfully lobbied Albany to overturn an 83-year-old ban on the fruit, which was believed to be a transmitter of a blight affecting white pines. The couple produces juice and other products from their blackcurrants, which is popular in Europe and exceptionally nutritious.
Blackwood’s relationship with the Hudson River intensified after she bought a house in Rhinebeck in 2006 as a separate place to work. “It’s on top of a 100-foot cliff, and I can look up and down the river 150 degrees,” she said. “I can see the Catskills, the Rhinecliff Bridge, the cement plant, the Kingston lighthouse.” She has been active in environmental causes, has served on the board of Scenic Hudson, and is currently on the advisory board of Riverkeeper. She is also on the advisory board of the Fisher Center for Performing Arts at Bard College and Bard’s two-year-old sustainable MBA degree program. Her son is one of the MBA candidates.
Blackwood is now fighting a proposed 135-mile electrical power line from Mount Marcy to Pleasant Valley that if approved would cut across her land and through the village of Clinton. “It would ruin one of the most beautiful agricultural towns,” she said. “They want to take the land by eminent domain and build 12-story-high towers. In Europe and California, they’re burying the wires, but they’re saying that’s too expensive. Concerned citizens all along the line are fighting it.” Given that a powerful electrical power cable from Quebec to New York City to be submerged in the Hudson River is also being proposed, Blackwood said that the situation is “a big mess. There’s not even a study of what [New York City’s electricity] need is.”
Blackwood’s environmental activism reflects her deep sense of rootedness in the region, even as her flourishing career transcends not just regional, but also national boundaries. “This area and the river are in my blood. I could have lived here my whole life,” she said. “I have never felt so happy in a place.”
