The Bang Straws draws its vision from the production history of The Good Earth (Sidney Franklin, 1937) which was one of cinema’s most notorious cases of casting discrimination, with American-German actress Luise Rainer winning the high-profile lead of the Chinese farmer’s wife O-Lan. To do so, she wore racist “yellowface” as so many Hollywood actors did. Despite Anna May Wong’s talent and clear desire to play O-Lan, MGM only offered her the role of sex worker Lotus instead. While the focus on Anna is now no longer directly present, the casting discrimination she faced in 1930s Hollywood remains, as does the violence of the casting process, a recurring motif in Williams Gamaker’s work; The Bang Straws re-casts O-Lan with performer Dahong Wang and reconstructs its innovative analogue VFX: filming locusts in hyper close-up, a storm sequence and locust swarm made from tea leaves.

In 2020, Williams Gamaker was awarded the Stuart Croft Foundation Moving Image Award and a Jupiter Woods Herstories & Feminisms research and development grant for The Bang Straws. These pages invite you to take a look at the research material for the work, including behind the scenes photographs, a selection of the annotated script, drawings and film stills to uncover some of the processes involved in the film's production.