Most people know Annie Oakley for her incredible sharpshooting skills: hitting dimes in midair and splitting playing cards with her trusty .22-caliber rifle.
But a new documentary goes beyond those famous feats and takes a closer look at the life of the Darke County native — and the women who have spent decades piecing together her story.
“North Star” tells Oakley’s story, while also spotlighting the Garst Museum researchers who have kept her legacy alive: Brenda Arnett, Karen Besecker and Nancy Stump.
The film is screening at Cinema Columbus this month, the Chagrin Documentary Film Fest in October and is available for viewing at the Garst Museum in Greenville.
Filmmaker Bryn Silverman sat down with the Ohio Newsroom to share some of Oakley’s hidden history.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
On what led her to creating “North Star”
“It really was going to the museum for the first time that sparked my interest in Annie. And it was kind of the contagious spirit of the women at the museum, the three researchers who are the heroes of the film, Karen Besecker, Nancy Stump, and Brenda Arnett.
Collectively they've spent over 40 years deep diving into Annie's true story, which most people have never heard before. So it was Karen, who is one of the lead researchers at the museum, who just said to me, ‘Don't believe everything you've ever learned about Annie Oakley.’ From that moment on, I was just hooked.”
On the real Annie Oakley
“At the core, she was always a Darke County girl and grew up in extreme poverty and learned how to shoot as a way to sort of make a living for her family when her dad passed away. Her childhood was really rocky and she was sent to work for a family that we know abused her. We don't know to what extent, but it was pretty profound and I think had an impact on her throughout her life.
She was a survivor and she was a really, really hard worker. She's also an athlete, which I think is another angle to the film that most people don't talk about. She'd wake up in the morning and go work out and exercise and train and a lot of her sharpshooting acts were physical feats.
So she was really a determined person who I think at her core was always trying to figure out how to survive. I think her career became that form of survival for her.”
On telling the story of Oakley’s researchers
“It really felt like a story within a story. After spending so much time with these women at Garst Museum, it was just apparent that the foundations and the building blocks of a legend like Annie are always held up by individuals, like the researchers at Garst.
Without their research and without their perspectives, history is just sort of a stagnant thing. But they're in such relationship with Annie with her story that it makes history feel alive.
To me, that was sort of like the heart of the film. In Annie's story, we see the story of these women and of this place where Annie's from and the endearing legacy of her really is the community now in Greenville and in Darke County.”
On Oakley’s relevance today
“There's so much about her story that's relevant today. I think, for me, it's like the centerpiece of her as a woman in a workforce that was not designed for women. I think that's still really relevant. A lot of the struggles that she had to make and carve a place for herself in that industry are really relatable.
There's also the story about her suing all the American newspapers and there was this libel case that she took up. I think that story of a woman being pilloried in the press or getting to a certain level of their career and not being able to get past that sort of glass ceiling before the public kind of comes at you and looks at every little detail and scrutinizes what you sort of built for yourself. I think a lot of the sort of like gendered aspects to her life and career are still really, really relevant today.”
