Interview of Bruce and Christine Toy, creators of The Wat Misaka Story

I had the amazing opportunity to spend time with the makers of the film Transceding: The Wat Misaka story. Bruce and Christine Johnson, a couple from New York discovered Wat through a picture on a Wall. When they learned of his achievement being the first person of color to be drafted to an NBA team, they wondered why his story hadn’t been told already. Christine herself is Japanese, andshe and Bruce noticed a lack of Japanese stories in the media.So they set out to get his story out there. Both Bruce and Cristine have a background in theatre, Christine makes her living as an actress and Bruce as a photographer. They worked on a short film, but consider this their first real film. For being new to the film scene, they worked quickly with a low budget. They spent two years on the project, compared to the ten to twenty five years some of their fellow film makers spent on their documentaries. Working from money donated by grants, their equipment was limited. But these two are thrifty; since they could not afford a dolly, they bought their camera man a pair of roller skates so that he could pan shots. They did wonders with the limited amount of material they had. Theier crew was just the two of them, with help from a few others. Christine joked about how for the credits of the film, they put people that had worked just a few hours on the project to make the list of names longer than just their own two names.
I asked them how difficult it was to get the old footage that included home movies and basketball games. The University of Utah allowed them access to Wat’s basketball footage, but Christine spent hours poring through movies in a library to pick out the clips of Wat’s young adult life.
These two turned Wat’s story into more than just a “trivia question.” Because of the publicity from the film, Wat gained a place in the NBA Hall of fame just a few months ago. The filmmakers are pleased with their project, and are surprised about how far it has come. Christine expressed excitement at the fact that people were inviting them to show their film. They never imagined that the message of their film could reach so far. According to Christine, in the beginning of the process, Wat said that no one outside of Utah would care about the story, but this film is proving him wrong. Bruce and Christine traveled to Hawaii, Arizona and Utah and are heading down to California in the next week to show their film. They have been chosen out of thousands to be featured in RIIF this coming summer. The pair deserves to be honored for this film, because of all the work they put into it and the story it tells.