For documentary filmmaker Randall MacLowry, the Black folk hero John Henry was a natural subject. The mythical 19th-century figure who helped install railroad tracks by way of his sledgehammer skills, Henry has been saluted in literature (Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days), dance (part of a program by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater), and especially music. Bob Dylan named-checked Henry in a 2015 speech, Jason Isbell wrote a song about him (“The Day John Henry Died”) during his Drive-By Truckers days, and Johnny Cash recorded “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer.” On their new duo album, What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow, Rhiannon Giddens and Justin Robinson cover “John Henry” as well.
But thanks to the new Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE agency, it may be a while before we see the planned documentary John Henry: Unmasking America’s Real First Black Superhero — if we see it at all.
On April 2, the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has for 60 years funded historical sites, museums, and documentaries (including a portion of Ken Burns’ The Civil War), announced it was terminating most of its grant projects. The documentary world was hit particularly hard. As Deadline has reported, planned movies about fictional teen detective Nancy Drew and a 19th-century New York City riot are now endangered, along with, as Rolling Stone has learned, a few music docs in various stages of development and completion.
As MacLowry discovered when he received his NEH email, the money he’d been promised last year to develop his John Henry doc was now gone: “The NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda,” the letter (from Trump-appointed acting NEH head Michael McDonald) read, in part. “The termination of your grant represents an urgent priority for the administration, and due to exceptional circumstances, adherence to the traditional notification process is not possible.”
MacLowry and his production partner and spouse, Tracy Heather Strain, weren’t alone in their shock. Last summer, Immy Humes, an Oscar-nominated documentarian who was planning a movie on groundbreaking jazz-world filmmaker Shirley Clarke, received what she recalls as the “miraculous news” that her project had been awarded a production grant. “It was literally life-changing for me,” Humes says. “Every molecule of my brain was like, ‘Oh my God! Joy and rapture!’ My project start date was stated as Feb. 1. I was in heaven.”
But like MacLowry and dozens more documentary makers, Humes too received her NEH termination notice two weeks ago. “It looked like spam,” she says. “It read like spam.” But it wasn’t, leaving her Clarke movie in the lurch.
In a somewhat comical turn, one termination letter was sent to director Augusta Palmer for an NEH-funded film, The Blues Society (about the legendary Memphis Country Blues Festival), that was already completed and released. (That doc’s 2022 NEH agreement extended until this month.) But there was nothing funny about the other notices, which also applied to now-canceled funds for Sounds of the Uyghurs, an in-the-works doc on the traditional music of northwest China.
According to reports, some of those collective NEH funds will now go toward building a patriotic-themed “Garden of Heroes” at the White House. (The NEH did not respond to a request for comment from Rolling Stone.)
While NEH funding doesn’t always cover a film’s entire production costs, the grants play a crucial role in the process. “The NEH is one of the few places you can get that significant amount of money to really push a project forward,” says MacLowry, whose work has been featured in PBS’ American Experience series. “Getting that amount of money really gives us a better guarantee that the project will get made. The NEH was quite unique in being able to be public funding that actually could make such a significant difference in getting a project from the development stage to the screen.”
The NEH once distributed anywhere from low five to upper six figures for such projects (and only after filmmakers completed an intense and arduous application nearly 100 pages long). The doc makers insist that those levels of funds are necessary. “This money employs people,” says MacLowry, who received a $75,000 development grant for his Henry movie and, before the cuts, was planning to apply for a full-production grant closer to $700,000. “It’s not just a filmmaker getting lots of money to do what they want. You’re hiring camera people, sound recorders, editors and composers. One filmmaker has 14 people working on that one and getting paid. For John Henry, we want to use the Johnny Cash song, and that’s not going to be cheap.”
In keeping with the NEH’s past goal of enlightening history and telling untold stories, MacLowry says his goal with John Henry was to “investigate how this mythical Black figure wielding a hammer in the afterlife of slavery becomes an American hero.” He adds, “It’s a powerful lens revealing how Black people interpreted their world in social status, expressed discontent and fantasized escape and resistance. John Henry also delves into issues of myth making, industrialization, racial exploitation, and cultural appropriation and Black masculinity.” As MacLowry says, Henry’s story — about a worker who has to prove his worth against a machine built to replace men in those jobs — even speaks to concerns over AI.
Although Shirley Clarke was a peer of renowned filmmakers D.A. Pennebaker and Jonas Mekas, she hasn’t received nearly enough attention, a situation Humes had hoped to remedy with her film. Clarke’s 1985 doc Ornette: Made in America took an unconventional approach to chronicling the life and music of saxophonist Ornette Coleman. The Connection, from 1961, was a fictional found-footage “doc” about jazz heroin addicts that included pianist Freddie Redd and saxophonist Jackie Maclean in its cast. Clarke’s 1964 The Cool World featured a score by Mal Waldron and performances by Dizzy Gillespie.
“She’s considered by many to be the greatest jazz filmmaker who’s ever lived,” Humes says. “My film is about a filmmaker, but it’s really a lot about music. She was way, way into jazz, and a lot of people say she was trying to make films that were like jazz composition.”
Now Humes — who was told last year she’d received a $600,000 production grant for her untitled Clarke doc — is scrambling for replacement funding, along with many of her peers. “It’s been an intense two weeks,” Humes says. “We’re trying to support each other and brainstorm ways to help each other. I’m trying to figure out how to continue working, and I haven’t gotten there yet. It’s pretty disastrous.”
