“It’s about beautiful images and telling a story,” says neighborhood resident Chip Richie as footage from his current project, a Trail of Tears documentary, flashes across a computer monitor in his Preston Hollow office.

            Richie, the man behind Richie Film Productions — the website says it’s the oldest production company in the Southwest — is no beginner when it comes to filmmaking. He has been exposed to the business pretty much his entire life. His father, Robert Yarnall Richie, started Richie Productions in 1939. The company’s first film was a still assignment for Fortune Magazine documenting the effects of 20th century technology on ’s native population.

Since then, Richie Productions has made its name shooting still and motion pictures for business and industry — doing “business-to-business communications, sales and marketing films, TV commercials and corporate documentaries,” Richie says. 

Richie became part of it as a young boy, first following his father on assignment, and eventually working his way up to director and cameraman. In 1984, his father passed away, leaving Richie to take over the business.

            Nowadays the company consists of three men: Richie, president, producer and director; Steven Heape, producer; and Steven Burks, who takes care of editing and the more technical aspects of filmmaking. Some of their more notable corporate clientele include Infomart, the Perot Group and American Airlines.

            But their interests don’t stop there.

            Richie is also somewhat of a history buff and has more recently taken to producing films of a different, more personal nature. “Sea Warriors,” for instance, which was released in January 2004, documents the history of the British Royal Navy.

            “I loved the [Horatio] Hornblower series, [a sequence of books by C.S. Forester] and the series the film ‘Master and Commander’ is based on,” Richie says. “I thought a documentary about that would be fun.”

            Richie also started a second film company with Heape. The pair met in 1981, when Richie did a film for Heape, who was in the oil and gas industry at the time. The two became friends and eventually started working on films together. In 1996, Heape, a member of the Cherokee Nation, approached Richie with the idea of forming a film company devoted to Native Americans. They did, naming the company Rich-Heape Films, and have since produced several pictures about the Native American community.

            The first of these taught people how to trace Native American heritage.

            Says Richie: “We wanted to do just that. We had no idea we’d get letters from people saying we’d changed their lives; that they had found pride and family.”

            From there, Rich-Heape Films won an award for Best Family Video in 2000 from Parenting Magazine for “Tales of Wonder, Native American Stories for Children.”

            Next, the company tackled a topic that had really never been approached before: Black Indians.

            “Who’s ever though about black Indians?” Richie asks. “Up until the ’80s and ’90s, there was no political currency in being an Indian. There was a whole group of black Native Americans with no culture to recognize.”

            The film, “Black Indians: An American Story,” was narrated by James Earl Jones — part Cherokee himself — and won numerous awards, including Best Native American Film of 2001. 

            For the past eight years, Richie and Heape have been working on a Trail of Tears project, documenting the forced removal of the Cherokee tribe by the U.S. government in the late 1830s, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Cherokee.

            “We are trying to tell the story through native eyes,” Richie says.

He and Heape hope to finish the film by September — just in time to enter it into the Sundance Film Festival, a first for either one of the companies.

“That’s our greatest wish,” Richie says.

            Right now, the men are working on editing 30 hours of footage they shot for the film in Georgia and North Carolina last October and trying to enlist some recognizable names (such as Jones and James Garner) to help narrate and do the re-enactment voices.

            In the future, Rich-Heape plans to do another documentary concerning the increasing problem of diabetes in the Native American society — another subject both men feel very strongly about.

            “By giving them [Native Americans] a history of how it came to be, they can know it’s not their fault, but they do have to take control, responsibility,” Richie says.

            He also has ideas for a few more projects like “Sea Warriors.”

            “I’d like to make one on the birth of the American Navy, because that’s never been done before. I’m interested in doing one on alternative healthcare,” says Richie, referencing topics such as acupuncture and yoga. “I think there’s a wonderful story to be told there.”

Although Richie fancies himself a storyteller, that’s not the only thing keeping him in the business of filmmaking.

“The greatest thing about this job is that you get to be in another person’s business for a short time,” he says. “I get the opportunity to work in a number of different businesses while doing what I love to do, which is to produce and direct films.”