“Look out Haskell, it’s real!” The Making of Paul Cronin DIALOGUE TRANSCRIPT www.lookouthaskell.com © Sticking Place Films 2001 (revised 2015) Cast of characters in alphabetical order Muhal Richard Abrams – musician Michael Arlen – journalist Bill Ayers – antiwar activist Carroll Ballard – cameraman Peter Bart – Paramount Pictures James Baughman – historian Peter Biskind – historian Verna Bloom – actor Peter Bonerz – actor Alan Brinkley – historian Edward Burke – Chicago police Michael Butler – screenwriter Ray Carney – historian Jack Couffer – novelist Ian Christie – film historian Jay Cocks – critic Andrew Davis – filmmaker David Dellinger – activist Bernard Dick – historian Bernadine Dohrn – antiwar activist Jeff Donaldson – actor/artist General Richard Dunn – Illinois National Guard Roger Ebert – film critic Linn Ehrlich – photographer David Farber – historian Richard Flacks – activist Robert Forster – actor Reuven Frank – TV news executive Bill Frapolly – Chicago police Todd Gitlin – activist Paul Golding – editors Mark Goodall – historian Terrence Gordon – Marshall McLuhan scholar Mike Gray – cameraman Dick Gregory – activist Roger Guy – sociologist Duane Hall – photographer Dan Hallin – historian Tom Hayden – activist Jonathan Haze – production coordinator Neil Hickey – journalist www.lookouthaskell.com 2 Thomas Jackson – historian Tom Keenan – student reporter Douglas Kellner – media theorist Peter Kuttner – cameraman Paul Levinson – media theorist J. Fred MacDonald - historian Philip Marchand – Marshall McLuhan biographer Michael Margulies – cameraman Arthur Marwick – historian Paula Massood – historian Al Maysles – documentary filmmaker Eugene McCarthy – presidential candidate Eric McLuhan – media theorist Chris Newman – sound recordist Steven North – producer Robert Paige –artist D.A. Pennebaker – filmmaker Felton Perry – actor General John Phipps – Illinois National Guard Gordon Quinn – cameraman William Rainbolt - historian Jonah Raskin – media theorist Michael Renov – historian Don Rose – activist Richard Schickel – film critic John Schultz – historian Bobby Seale – activist Paul Siegel – historian John Simon – film critic David Sterritt – film critic Lance Strate – media theorist Studs Terkel – Chicago historian Peggy Terry – activist Ron Vargas – cameraman Nicholas von Hoffman - journalist Francis Ward – historian Val Ward – actress Haskell Wexler – writer/director Leonard Weinglass – attorney Irwin Yablans – Paramount Pictures Quentin Young – Medical Committee for Human Rights www.lookouthaskell.com 3 Chapters Prologue History and Film Page 6 1 The Spontaneity and the Messiness page 7 2 The Road to Cataclysm Page 12 3 Protest in the Concrete Wilderness Page 17 4 Appalachia in Uptown Page 23 5 Moving with the Firepoints page 35 6 “They were doing theatre” page 52 7 The Former Invisible Man Lives page 56 8 A Nice Day in the Park page 77 9 The Woman in the Yellow Dress page 82 www.lookouthaskell.com 4 10 The Whole World is Watching page 87 11 The Medium is the Message Page 100 12 The Corpse at the Accident Page 119 13 The Living Room War page 128 14 “Look out Haskell, it’s real!” page 135 15 The Arrangement with Warren Page 138 16 Hitting Them Where They Live Page 140 Epilogue Mrs Wexler and the IMAX Camera Page 149 www.lookouthaskell.com 5 Prologue History and Film Haskell Wexler History is written by the people who own the pens, the typewriters, the printing presses, the movie cameras, the TV cameras. In 1968 in America, history was being written by people who were ignoring history. It was a crazy, mixed up time in America where the establishment, the status quo, was ignoring a ferment in the people. I’d made a lot of documentaries and I had an opportunity to make a feature film. The feature film I was assigned to make didn’t have anything to do with what was really happening in my country, and in the case of Chicago in 1968, nothing to do with my city. So I decided to make a film which reflected the energy and the excitement that was being ignored, and which I felt so passionately about. www.lookouthaskell.com 6 1 The Spontaneity and the Messiness David Sterritt There has always been a current within the cinema of various different countries, including the United States, that has wanted to rebel against the cumbersome, almost unwieldy commercial cinema with its big cameras and its fancy sound stages, its highly paid performers and this whole aura of glamour and unreality. There have always been filmmakers who want to react against that and to bring cinema back to having something of the spontaneity and the messiness and the unpredictably of life as we actually live it. Certainly Jean-Luc Godard was one of these people who wanted to go out with a small crew and lightweight equipment, and make movies that blurred the boundary between what was being done as storytelling and what was being done as “doing cinema in the world.” Carroll Ballard It all started with the situation that existed at that time, the early Sixties, where most of the film that was being done was with these gigantic cameras and huge crews. It was the old Hollywood club. You had a few people who were starting to break the surface of that. David Sterritt John Cassavetes is one of the crucial figures in all this with his idea of constantly changing a movie as it went along, of using improvisational techniques as a route toward developing a script. And of course Haskell Wexler is one of those cinematographers who even as a Hollywood director of photography was involved in bringing this kind of look of reality into even the studio film. Mike Gray When Haskell arrived in Hollywood he was an outsider, an absolute outsider. The cameraman’s union wouldn’t even consider him. That was a closed society. The only way you get into the cameraman’s union here in Hollywood was to have been born into it, if you were the son or grandson of some famous cameraman. So Haskell sued them under fair labour practises, and won. When he hit Hollywood, people were dazzled because they’d never seen footage like that. Cameramen were used to a crew of thirty people with booms and cranes. Here comes this guy who’s actually shooting natural light, which nobody could ever imagine you could do. Haskell Wexler My first legal job in Hollywood was a picture called The Best Man starring Henry Fonda. They had a scene in the back of a limousine. It was supposed to be a process shot with the car in the foreground and the process screen in the background. I didn’t www.lookouthaskell.com 7 know how to do that, but I did know how to do what I did in documentaries, having a small camera in the front of the car, and so I said “Look, why don’t we just shoot it outside in the car and then we can break for lunch in fifteen minutes.” Henry Fonda says, “Yeah, let’s do it like the kid says.” And so I was able to do a shot that I know how to do, rather than a process shot that I didn’t know how to do. Al Maysles All this change began really in 1960 when a group of us – Bob Drew, Leacock, Pennebaker and myself – came up with some new equipment that allowed just two people, a sound person and a camera person, in a very mobile fashion, without tripods or any of the paraphernalia that still encumbers news people in television, to make a film. This revolutionised the art of documentary because of this new equipment and this new philosophy of no narration, no host, no music to jazz it up. Simply to film directly – that’s why it became known as “Direct Cinema” – what’s going on. The viewer could rightly feel that he’s exactly there when it was happening, but with the added insight that a really good cameraman could add to it by noticing what most people wouldn’t notice. Mike Gray We were very fortunate that Kodak had come up with a Tri-X black and white film. That gave you enough sensitivity. If you pushed it in the laboratory process you could film a scene by a light bulb and it would be perfectly sharp and in focus. Hollywood didn’t even know about this because they never had a problem with lighting. They had crews with barns full of lights and they had to be used anyway. Carroll Ballard If you look at these older films, you see that it was just really boring filmmaking. It was pretty flat-lit, so you could see everything that was there. It was a master shot, a two shot and a close-up, and that was it. Rarely did you see anything that really had anything fluidity or movement. Al Maysles We got all excited about the new possibilities, the philosophy and also the equipment. The equipment changes at that time are 16mm. Forget about 35mm, it had to be 16mm. You could get a ten-minute run instead of a minute or two or three before you had to change the magazine. The camera no longer had to be on a tripod, it could be firmly on your shoulder and you got an extremely steady shot. So it was the equipment and the philosophy. Go ahead and film things in such a fashion that you could say, at the end of it, when you put the film together, “That’s the truth.” www.lookouthaskell.com 8 D.A. Pennebaker It’s like a paintbrush, as if you’d invented the paintbrush, or the pencil. People could write novels and paint pictures. Up until then they had to do stained glass. You could get characters who weren’t trained or schooled or paid to recite lines. You could get characters in real life on film so that what they did and said drove a story.