Author: Wheeler Dixon
Date: 2013-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Film; Performing Arts; EBC Converted; History & Criticism
Description: More and more, just a few canonical classics, such as Michael Curtiz’s “Casablanca” (1942) or Victor Fleming’s “Gone With The Wind” (1939), are representing the entire output of an era to a new generation that knows little of the past, and is encouraged by popular media to live only in the eternal present. What will happen to the rest of the films that enchanted, informed and transported audiences in the 1930s, 1940s, and even as recently as the 1960s? For the most part, these films will be forgotten, and their makers with them. Wheeler Winston Dixon argues that even obvious historical markers
Publisher: Anthem Press

Cinema at the Margins

2

New Perspectives on World Cinema

The New Perspectives on World Cinema series publishes
engagingly written, highly accessible, and extremely useful
books for
the educated reader and the student as well as the scholar.

Volumes in
this series will fall under one of the following categories:

monographs on
neglected films and filmmakers; classic as well as
contemporary film scripts;
collections of the best previously published criticism

(including substantial
reviews and interviews) on single films or filmmakers;
translations into

English of the best classic and contemporary film theory;
reference works on
relatively neglected areas in film studies, such as production design (including
sets,
costumes,
and
make-up),
music,
editing
and
cinematography; and
reference works on the relationship between film and the
other performing
arts (including theatre, dance, opera, etc.). Many of our titles will be suitable
for use as primary or supplementary course texts at
undergraduate and
graduate levels. The goal of the series is thus not only to
address subject
areas in which adequate classroom texts are lacking, but also to open

3
up additional avenues for film research, theoretical speculation and practical criticism.

Series Editors

Wheeler Winston Dixon – University of Nebraska, Lincoln,

USA

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster – University of Nebraska, Lincoln,

USA

Editorial Board

Thomas Cripps – Morgan State University, USA

Catherine Fowler – University of Otago, New Zealand

Andrew Horton – University of Oklahoma, USA

Valérie K. Orlando – University of Maryland, USA

Robert Shail – University of Wales Lampeter, UK

David Sterritt – Columbia University, USA

Frank P. Tomasulo – City College of New York, USA

4

Cinema at the Margins

WHEELER WINSTON DIXON

5

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2013
by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Wheeler Winston Dixon 2013

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the
author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under
copyright reserved above,
no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or
introduced into
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means

(electronic,
mechanical,
photocopying,
recording
or
otherwise),
without the prior written permission of both the copyright
owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dixon, Wheeler W., 1950–

Cinema at the margins / Wheeler Winston Dixon.

pages cm. – (New perspectives on world cinema)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-85728-186-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN

978-1-78308-016-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Motion pictures–History. I. Title.

PN1993.5.A1D53 2013

791.43’7–dc23

2013041436

ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 186 9 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 0 85728 186 0 (Hbk)

ISBN-13: 978 1 78308 016 8 (Pbk)

ISBN-10: 1 78308 016 7 (Pbk)

Cover photo © Kristen Glaze 2013

This title is also available as an ebook.

7

For Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

8

It’s the movies that have really been running things in America ever since they were invented. They
show you what to do, how to do it, when to do it,
how to feel about it, and how to look how you feel
about it.

—Andy Warhol

9

10

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
ix

Introduction
xi

PART I. GENRE

1. The Future Catches Up with the Past: Peter 3

Bogdanovich’s Targets

2. Surrealism and Sudden Death in the Films of Lucio 11

Fulci

3. Flash Gordon and the 1930s and ’40s Science 19

Fiction Serial

4. Just the Facts, Man: The Complicated Genesis of 31

Television’s Dragnet

5. The Disquieting Aura of Fabián Bielinsky

43

PART II. HISTORY

6. Fast Worker: The Films of Sam Newfield

61

7. The Power of Resistance: Les Dames du Bois de 77

Boulogne

8. Beyond Characterization: Performance in 1960s 91

Experimental Cinema

9. Vanishing Point: The Last Days of Film

105

PART III. INTERVIEWS

11

10. “Let the Sleepers Sleep and the Haters Hate”: An 119

Interview with Dale “Rage” Resteghini

11. Margin Call: An Interview with J. C. Chandor

135

12. “All My Films Are Personal”: An Interview with 147

Pat Jackson

13. Working Within the System: An Interview with 157

Gerry O’Hara

14. Andrew V. McLaglen: Last of the Hollywood 179

Professionals

15. Pop Star, Director, Actor: An Interview with 195

Michael Sarne

Works Cited and Consulted

205

About the Author

213

Index

215

12

13

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This collection of essays has never been published before in
book form; in addition, when they have appeared in smaller
journals or on the web, they were cut for reasons of space
which, in many cases, severely diluted the impact of the
pieces and made their arguments incomplete. Thus, I’m very
pleased to have the opportunity to bring these essays together in one volume, available for easy reference, so that these texts

– like many of the films they examine – do not become
phantoms themselves.

Versions of Chapters 1, 2, 4, 5, 11 and 15 all first appeared in the journal Film International; my thanks to Daniel Lindvall, editor, for permission to reprint these essays in this volume.

Chapter 10, originally from the Quarterly Review of Film and

Video, and Chapter 12, first published in the Journal of

Popular Film and Television, appear through the kindness of

Taylor and Francis Publishers; my sincere thanks to them.

Versions of Chapters 3, 8 and 13 all first appeared in

Screening the Past; my thanks to Anna Dzenis, editor, for
permission to reprint these essays.

Versions of Chapters 6, 7, 9 and 14 first appeared in Senses of Cinema; my thanks to Rolando Caputo for his permission to
reprint these pieces in this volume. My other thanks must go
to Dana Miller, whose superb typing of all my manuscripts
makes my continued work possible, and Jennifer Holan for
her typically comprehensive index. In addition, I want to
thank Tej Sood of Anthem Press for commissioning this

14
volume and my wife, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, who remains my most perceptive critic and advisor.

15

INTRODUCTION

There can be no doubt that we are in an age in which the
cinema as we know it has been transformed. The era of film is ending and the era of digital cinema is already hard upon us.

While some movies are still shot on actual film, the vast
majority of “movies” are created with digital cameras and
hard drives, so much so that one of the industry’s largest
equipment suppliers, Birns and Sawyer, recently sold off their entire collection of cameras simply because no one was
renting them. There are a few holdouts in the area of actual
film production: Steven Spielberg remains a traditionalist, in more ways than one, and no less a figure than Christopher

Nolan, who also embraces film over digital media and whose
reboot of the Batman series proved incredibly influential. As Nolan noted in a recent interview with Jeffrey Ressner in the DGA Quarterly,

For the last 10 years, I’ve felt increasing pressure to
stop shooting film and start shooting video, but I’ve
never understood why. It’s cheaper to work on film,
it’s far better looking, it’s the technology that’s been
known and understood for a hundred years, and it’s
extremely reliable. I think, truthfully, it boils down
to the economic interest of manufacturers and [a
production] industry that makes more money
through change rather than through maintaining the
status quo. We save a lot of money shooting on film
and projecting film and not doing digital
intermediates. In fact, I’ve never done a digital
intermediate. Photochemically, you can time film
with a good timer in three or four passes, which

16
takes about 12 to 14 hours as opposed to seven or eight weeks in a DI suite. That’s the way everyone
was doing it 10 years ago, and I’ve just carried on
making films in the way that works best and waiting
until there’s a good reason to change. But I haven’t
seen that reason yet. (Ressner 2012)

And yet, as Nolan himself acknowledges, he’s playing a
losing game. Digital is taking over; it’s cheaper to shoot, can be viewed instantly, edited with the touch of a button and cuts cost on every level – from production to final delivery – to the bone. It’s a shift that’s been one hundred years in the making, even since film evolved from paper roll film to cellulose
nitrate film and then safety film. Digital is simply the next platform. But make no mistake: 35mm is gone. I predicted
this in a lecture at the University of Stockholm, Sweden on 3

December 2000, after the first movie theater in New York had
just made the shift to digital and Hollywood studio executives attending the inaugural screening were ceremonially
photographed gleefully throwing 35mm film canisters into a
large trash barrel. Digital had arrived and there was no
looking back.

The members of the Stockholm audience – distinguished
academics from around the world – were aghast at this and
couldn’t accept the fact that 35mm was heading for its final
spin. But, as I pointed out, Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer
opened in Manhattan in precisely one theater in 1927 and
revolutionized the industry with the advent of “talkies”; this was just the same sort of platform shift playing out yet again.

The industry is constantly changing and adapting, relentlessly driven by the bottom line, at once an industry and an art form, but one which, in recent years, seems eager to forget its past 17
and exist exclusively in the present – except, of course, for those few cinephiles who still order DVDs of their favorite
titles.

As for the 35mm prints of existing films, they’re being
aggressively junked by the studios in favor of DCPs (Digital

Cinema Packages) that are unlocked by computer codes
called KDMs (Key Delivery Messages) for each individual
screening, giving studios an unprecedented control over their product and taking a great deal of discretional leeway out of the hands of theater owners. Want to run an extra midnight
screening? You’ll have to clear it first. Want to screen a film for a local critic? Again, you’ll have to log in to the studio’s website, get a clearance, pay a fee and then screen it. With

35mm prints, you could just thread them up and go. Now, that
freedom is gone – and, along with it, the ability to shift a film from one screen to another within a multiplex for maximum
profitability. The studios are firmly in charge. If you want to screen a classic film – say Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at

Tiffany’s (1961) – you can no longer get a 35mm print; it’s
either a DVD, a DCP or nothing at all. Then, too, as the prints become scarcer, so also do replacement parts for conventional 35mm projectors; in an all-digital world, the filmic image has been relegated to museums and archives.

This is the last wave of film, the last chance to capture images with dyes and plastics, the last chance to embrace grain and
other filmic characteristics, before the brave new world of
digital, perfect cinema takes over. There are all sorts of issues involved here; in particular, archiving digital cinema – a task that this volume will discuss in the essay “Vanishing Point” –
since the new image capture systems reduce everything to
pixels, ones and zeros, and have to be constantly upgraded to 18
new platforms to make sure that they continue to exist in an uncorrupted form. It should come as no surprise that the
major studios are still creating 35mm fine grain negatives of all their films as a backup in case something happens to the
digital masters and often use them when digital files become
corrupt. This in itself says something about the ephemerality of the digital image. If everything is converted to digital in the future, what happens to the past of cinema? What happens to
the more than one hundred years of cinema that lies in the
studio vaults, most of which isn’t inherently “commercial”

and so will never see the light of day?

For example, one studio in particular – Republic Pictures,
which operated from the mid-1930s until the late 1950s and
produced literally hundreds of films – has all of its films
stored in long-term cold vaults, but almost none of them are
available in screening copies for the contemporary viewer.

When VHS was first introduced, Republic put out much of its
back catalogue on tape, but modern audiences weren’t
interested in the vast majority of their films, simply because they weren’t aware of either the studio or the films’ existence.

William Witney – one of Republic’s most prolific directors
and one of Quentin Tarantino’s acknowledged influences –
created a vast amount of material for Republic, but when the
jump to DVD came, almost none of Republic’s films were
introduced in the new format. Thus, much of Witney’s work
became invisible; it wasn’t profitable enough to warrant a

DVD release and so it was consigned to oblivion. Some titles, including many by Republic – and rather eccentric choices at
that – have been picked up by Olive Films, a small DVD
distribution outlet, but who knows how long that will last?

For most films, if they don’t make money, the studio will put 19
them in a vault and forget about them. Everything must go.

As critic Dave Kehr noted,

It’s bad enough, to cite a common estimate, that 90
percent of all American silent films and 50 percent
of American sound films made before 1950 appear
to have vanished forever. But even the films we
have often live on in diminished states. An
astonishing number of famous titles – like [Ernest B.

Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper’s 1933 film]

King Kong and [Howard Hawks’ 1940 film] His

Girl Friday – no longer exist as original camera
negatives, but survive only as degraded duplicates
and damaged release prints. A great deal of
important material – not just features but shorts,
newsreels, experimental work, industrial films,
home movies and so on – remains on unstable
nitrate stock, and must be transferred to a more
permanent base before the films turn to goo. And
once the endangered material has been stabilized

(the preservation step), it often must undergo an
even more expensive process of restoration to
recover its original luster: the removal of dirt and
scratches, the replacement of lost footage or missing
intertitles, the cleaning up of degraded soundtracks.

(Kehr 2010, emphasis added)

The other thing that’s surprising is that all of this happened in plain sight, so to speak, through neglect and or willful
destruction of films that were no longer deemed commercially
viable. Also, that the complete digitization of the industry
came as such as surprise to everyone – even professionals
within the field. As Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the

20

UCLA Archives, noted in an essay in 2012, discussing the 1993 United States Congressional Hearings on Film

Preservation, “A Study of the Current State of American Film

Preservation,”

having been a witness myself at those hearings […]

I’m struck today by how clueless literally all the
participants of those hearings were about the digital
tidal wave that would wash over the field in only a
few short years. Not one person predicted the end of
analog cinema, certainly not within a little more than
a decade. (Horak 2012)

And yet that time is now here and there’s no going back. The
ruthlessness with which studios are embracing the new digital world should come as no surprise given the enormous cost
savings involved in every area – except, of course, in
archiving the past. More and more, just a few canonical
classics – like Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) or Victor

Fleming’s Gone with the Wind (1939), to name just two very
obvious examples – are “standing in” for the entire output of an era for a new generation that knows nothing of the past and is encouraged by popular media to live only in the eternal
present. What will happen to the rest of the films that
enchanted, informed and transported audiences of the 1930s,

1940s and even the more recent 1960s?

For the most part, they will be forgotten and their makers
forgotten with them. As someone who teaches a film history
class on a regular basis, I can confirm that even such an
obvious historical marker as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho

(1960) is unknown territory for a vast majority of my
students. And yet – and here is the nub of my argument with

21
this book, which is an act of historical recovery – once they are exposed to these films that they would never seek out
otherwise, they are enthralled by them and wonder why
they’ve never heard of them before. Even with films that are
readily available as either digital downloads or on DVDs, you have to know that they exist in order to seek them out. In the 1980s and 1990s, at least, the more adventurous video stores
served as a useful tool for browsing through the annals of
classic cinema, encouraging patrons to sample films they
would never have heard of otherwise. Now those stores are
gone, along with bookstores and record stores as well, and the days of browsing are over. Much is available, but you have to know it’s there; if you don’t, then how on earth would you
even know that it existed? But, as my students’ continued
interest demonstrates, it’s still worthwhile to examine these non-mainstream films and filmmakers. They, as much as any
of the more popular titles, have something to offer us, and
their claim on our memory is more persistent precisely
because they have often been neglected in conventional
cinema histories.

In the first section of this volume, “Genre,” I discuss Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets, a prescient film that chronicles the
shooting spree of a young Vietnam veteran and is based on
real life events from the 1960s – which, in light of recent
events in Newtown, Connecticut and elsewhere, seems more
relevant than ever before. I also examine the violent and
surreal horror films of the late Italian director Lucio Fulci –
reviled during their initial appearance, but now acclaimed as classic example of Gothicism – as well as the world of
constant peril inhabited by the protagonists of motion picture serials in the 1930s and ’40s, such as Flash Gordon and other films that inspired many of the comic book blockbusters that

22
fill today’s cinemas – George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) and its many sequels, for example, as well as the continuing series of entries in the Marvel superhero canon. I take a look at the genesis of the television series Dragnet, which is usually
credited solely to Jack Webb, but which, as the reader will
see, had many hands involved in its creation – not the least of which was Anthony Mann and Alfred Werker’s He Walked
by Night (1948), in which Webb appeared as a police
forensics expert, and then appropriated the entire structure of the film to create his long running series. And, finally, I cover the more recent, more sophisticated caper and crime thrillers of the late Argentinean director Fabián Bielinsky, who was
most famous for his 1998 art house hit Nine Queens, but who
found greater depth and resonance in what would sadly be his
last film, The Aura (2005).

The second section, “History,” begins with the works of
director Sam Newfield, the most prolific director of the

American sound cinema. Newfield labored for the
bottom-rung

Hollywood
studio

Producers

Releasing

Corporation, making sharp and efficient films in every
conceivable genre throughout the 1940s – sometimes, as
many as fifteen per year under his own name and two
pseudonyms. “The Power of Resistance: Les Dames du Bois
de Boulogne,” meanwhile, recounts the production and
reception of a key work of French Resistance cinema. Created
under the Nazi-directed Vichy government in WWII-era

France by director Robert Bresson and scenarist Jean

Cocteau, Les Dames marks the pair’s only collaboration on a
film. “Beyond Characterization: Performance in 1960s

Experimental Cinema” examines the fringe world of 1960s
experimental filmmaking in New York and the ways in which
these filmmakers and performers used their own lives as

23
material for the films they created. Finally, “Vanishing Point: The Last Days of Film” considers the end of actual film
production and distribution and the rise of digital cinema, a momentous shift that is taking place even as I write these
words and which raises numerous archival, distribution and
exhibition questions – all of which are still quite unresolved.

The final section, “Interviews,” features discussions with the prolific music video director Dale “Rage” Resteghini – who is now moving into feature films – and examines how changing
distribution patterns are changing the face of cinema; J. C.

Chandor, the director of the excellent 2011 film Margin Call, which considers the 2008 financial meltdown on Wall Street
from the vantage point of one hectic night at a brokerage
concern; the final interview given by pioneering British
filmmaker Pat Jackson, whose credits range from one of the
first Technicolor documentaries to the cult television series The Prisoner, starring Patrick McGoohan; director Gerry

O’Hara, who talks about his long career in cinema working
with such luminaries as Laurence Olivier, Ronald Neame,

Michael Powell, Carol Reed and Otto Preminger; Andrew V.

McLaglen, perhaps the foremost exponent of the commercial

Western in the last half of the twentieth century; and, finally, director and pop star Michael Sarne, whose notorious film

Myra Breckinridge is just the most visible work of a long and varied career.

All of these essays and interviews explore the careers and
works of filmmakers who operated in an inherently
commercial medium to create films of lasting worth and value

– filmmakers who bridged the artificial gap between “high”

and “low” art to reach audiences through genre films,
commercial television or underground films in the 1960s and

24
really get their vision out before the public. Sometimes their works were coded as mainstream entertainment and
sometimes they were presented as unvarnished bulletins from
the front; but, in all cases, these are films and filmmakers who are vanishing from the cinematic record, unjustly and through no fault of their own.

The marginalization of these artists – and all of them, no
matter how commercial they might have been, merit that
distinction – is convenient for mainstream historians, but
distorts our picture of both the past and present of cinema. As Geoffrey O’Brien, one of the most instructive of all film
critics and theorists and something of an enigmatic figure in academia, noted:

[The] decades slid by so quickly in the dark. What
year was it, anyway, in which of the worlds you’d
lived in simultaneously? A life spent watching
movies could best be described by certain movie
titles: A Double Life, I Died a Thousand Times, I’ve

Lived Before. Caught up in the shifting celluloid
waters, living in reverse and playback, you ended up
craving an anchor, something that had definitely
happened at a definite time, a Great Real Thing
providing ballast for the phantoms. Could anything
real be inscribed on those liquid surfaces, anything
harsh and durable? If you could find your way back
to it you could trace another route, a road on which
the world could be seen truly as it was. (O’Brien

1995, 78–9)

Val Lewton, producer of some of the most evocative
commercial films ever made – a series of dark and deeply

25
personal Gothic films made on shoestring budgets and breakneck schedules at RKO Radio Pictures during the 1940s,
such as Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943) –
once remarked to an associate in an echo of Keats’ famous
self-composed epitaph, “here lies one whose name was writ in
water,” that “making films is like writing on water” (Dixon
and Foster 2011, 20). In other words, nothing is permanent.

Everything is fixed only for the moment and only comes to
life for that brief fraction of a second when the cinematic
image is projected on the screen. If a film isn’t available, it can’t really be said to exist.

Unlocking these phantom visions, then, and seeking the work
that comes from the margins is the task that I have set for
myself with these essays and interviews. My goal is to
document the films that have moved me deeply and yet have
been omitted from the dominant canon of film history. Film
history is dynamic, not static, but values that we have
inscribed in our hearts and minds – values that often have
been passed on to us and which we have accepted without
fully understanding – keep us from a deeper understanding of
our cinematic heritage. No, everything must not go. Instead,
as film archivists around the world are fond of saying,
everything must be saved. Not all films will be, certainly, and many of the films described in this volume are phantoms
already, but brought to light, these oft-obscured titles can
teach us much about life as it really was during certain eras –
life not as the dominant cinema wishes us to remember it, but rather, as it actually was.

Even as I write these words, the present is inexorably
receding into the past. Film, by its very nature, is the
sarcophagus of the eternal return of the past, resurrected with 26
each new screening again and again on demand, but only if that demand exists. This is the realm of the cinema, which
captures life or, in the words of Jean Cocteau, “photographs
death at work” – a machinery of phantoms, dreams and
desires in which constructed realities compete with each other for our collective attention. The world presented here is at
once remote and omnipresent, tactile and elusive, present and inextricably linked to the past. And, yet, by the very act of discussing these films and their makers, we can bring them
back to a sort of life and celebrate both their existence and their collective hold on our imaginations. The cinema is
endless, boundless, too rich to be encompassed by any one
history, or even any one set of histories. But, with this book, there is the hope that at least a part of that history is brought to light.

27

Part I

GENRE

28

Chapter 1

THE FUTURE CATCHES

UP WITH THE PAST: PETER

BOGDANOVICH’S TARGETS*

Targets are people … and you could be one of them!

(Tagline for Targets)

Peter Bogdanovich got his start as a critic and historian,
conducting interviews with some of cinema’s most illustrious
directors in their twilight years and publishing them first in a variety of books and magazines, then as a collection in his

1998 volume Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with

Legendary Film Directors. Bogdanovich realized early on,
however, that these interviews were not enough; he wanted to
do more. So he moved to Los Angeles, fell in with the Roger

Corman circle at the height of its creative brilliance and soon found himself working on such landmark exploitation
vehicles as The Wild Angels (1966), doing double duty as an
assistant director and an extra.

After this, the next logical step was directing a movie himself and Corman – then able to green light films with modest
budgets that would actually wind up in a theater as opposed to going straight to tape, VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray or VOD –
famously offered Bogdanovich a deal. The actor Boris

Karloff, famous for his roles in the Frankenstein films, owed Corman two days of work on a multipicture deal and Corman
offered the fledgling director these two days with Karloff,
twenty minutes of footage from the recently completed film

29

The Terror (1963, ostensibly a Corman film, but one which
nearly everyone in Corman’s circle – including Francis Ford

Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and Jack Nicholson – had
a hand in directing), a minimal budget and a shooting
schedule. Corman told Bogdanovich that if the finished film
was any good he’d distribute it through Paramount; if not,
he’d dump it in drive-ins through American International

Pictures.

Figure 1. Targets.

Source: Author’s collection.

Absorbing this, Bogdanovich went home and, working with
his then-wife, Polly Platt, and an uncredited Samuel Fuller,
who contributed considerably to the final script, drafted a
screenplay about the last days of an aging horror star, Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) who wants to quit the business because
he’s sick of starring in one rotten horror film after another.

Orlok feels that his brand of Gothicism has become outdated

30
and that he should exit gracefully while he’s still in demand.

At the same time, in a parallel story, young all-American

Vietnam veteran Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly, in a
terrifyingly
realistic
performance)

is
having
trouble
readjusting to society after his hitch in the service; he goes on a murderous rampage as a sniper, picking off unsuspecting
people from the top of a huge oil refinery tank and, later, from behind the screen of a drive-in theater. Thompson does all of this quite casually, as if the entire rampage was simply a
sporting event – which, of course, it is for him. He is
incapable of empathizing with his victims – he has no feeling for anyone. All of his victims are simply targets, as the title states with succinct finality.

It is at this point that the two stories converge: Orlok is
persuaded to make one final public appearance at the drive-in to plug his final film and, during the screening, Bobby starts killing attendees in their cars with a high-powered rifle.

Taking command of the situation, Orlok summons all of his
strength and confronts Bobby, knocking him down in front of
the screen. He benefits from the fact that Bobby can’t
distinguish between on-screen Orlok, striding through the
opening of The Terror, and Orlok in real life, walking towards him in a similar outfit (Samuel Fuller suggested this touch
and it’s a brilliant one). Once Bobby is subdued, Orlok looks down at the pathetic figure before him and murmurs, “Is this
what I was afraid of ?” And thus the film ends. When Corman
saw the finished product, made for less than $100,000 and on
which Karloff wound up working five days instead of two –
the three extra days were a gift to Bogdanovich from Karloff, who correctly sensed that the project would be an important
film – he immediately realized that he’d gotten a much better film than he’d originally bargained for. Corman sold it to

31

Paramount, where it received a desultory release before vanishing into oblivion, resurfacing on DVD and VHS only
years later.

But Targets (1968) was and remains a brilliant, stunningly
prescient film and perhaps Bogdanovich’s finest work,
precisely because he had nothing to work with. When you
have nothing, you have to give everything to a project to
make it work – unless, of course, you don’t care and

Bogdanovich certainly cared. He even cast himself in the film as Sammy Michaels – the man who desperately wants Orlok
to make another film and secure Sammy’s big break as a
director – simply because he had no money for anyone else.

Despite the fact that the film got only a limited release, critics quickly recognized it for the masterpiece it was. Thus, the
film ultimately fulfilled its primary function: getting

Bogdanovich on the map as a director. Shortly after that,

Bogdanovich directed The Last Picture Show (1971) and his
career was assured.

The topicality of Targets was also a plus because, for the
sniper section of this bifurcated film, Bogdanovich didn’t
have to go far to find a story line. The inspiration for Targets was utterly contemporary: the reign of terror inflicted on the citizens of Austin, Texas by Charles Whitman on 1 August

1966 when Whitman, armed to the teeth with an arsenal of
legally acquired weapons, ascended to the top of the

University of Texas Tower and began randomly shooting
anyone who came into view. Before this attack, during which

Whitman killed 14 people and wounded 32 others with
deadly, methodical precision, Whitman killed both his wife
and his mother, leaving behind a suicide note as more than
ample evidence of his unbalanced mental state. The partially

32
typewritten note, which was later recovered by police, is dated 31 July 1966 and begins with these chillingly prophetic words: “I do not quite understand what it is that compels me
to type this letter. Perhaps it is to leave some vague reason for the actions I have recently performed. I do not really
understand myself these days. I am supposed to be an
average, reasonable and intelligent young man. However,
lately (I cannot recall when it started) I have been a victim of many unusual and irrational thoughts” (Whitman 1966).

Then, after adding several additional sections of text to his note, some in ballpoint pen, Whitman went out to kill. In the end, the Austin police finally stormed the tower and shot

Whitman dead. He was 25 years old. The weapons the police
found at the shooting site included a machete, a Remington

700 ADL 6mm rifle, a Universal M1 carbine rifle, a 12 gauge
semi-automatic shotgun, a Smith & Wesson M19 .357

Magnum revolver, a Luger PO8 9mm pistol and a

Galesi-Brescia .25 ACP pistol.

At the time, the Whitman rampage was seen as an utterly
aberrant act. If we look at the era more closely, however, we can see that, alongside the Peace movement and Flower

Power era many remember with affection, dark events were
occurring in American society with regularity, including the
endless Vietnam War itself, the assassinations of John F.

Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Robert Kennedy and

Malcolm X, the Watts riots and numerous other societal
disruptions – all of which, in their own way, pointed
inexorably to an ever more ominous future. Violence became
the cultural currency of the era and, even then, the nation was split between those who embraced guns and the culture they
were a part of and those who sought to restrict guns to
forestall a repeat of the Whitman incident. Now, in 2013, we

33
confront in the United States a similar wave of terror brought on by gun violence – by a series of mass shootings too
mind-numbing to recount and too terrifying to fully
comprehend.

Bogdanovich himself has confessed his own bewilderment
over the current state of affairs surrounding the gun culture in the United States and the protests that seem to grow ever
more vocal every day, essentially deaf to the wishes of the
majority of Americans for stricter gun control. As

Bogdanovich wrote in an op-ed piece for the Hollywood

Reporter shortly after the massacre in Colorado at a midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises on 20 July 2012,

We made Targets 44 years ago. It was based on
something that happened in Texas, when that guy

Charles Whitman shot a bunch of people after
killing his mother and his wife. Paramount bought it,
but then was terrified by it when Martin Luther King
was killed and Bobby Kennedy was killed. The
studio didn’t want to release the film at all. So they
released it with a pro-gun-control campaign, but that
made the picture seem like a documentary to people,
and it didn’t do too well. It was meant to be a
cautionary fable. It was a way of saying the Boris

Karloff kind of violence, the Victorian violence of
the past, wasn’t as scary as the kind of random
violence that we associate with a sniper – or what
happened last weekend. That’s modern horror.

At first, some of the people [at The Dark Knight

Rises] thought it was part of the movie. That’s very
telling. Violence on the screen has increased tenfold.

34

It’s almost pornographic. In fact, it is pornographic.

Video games are violent, too. It’s all out of control

[…] Back in the ’70s, I asked Orson Welles what he
thought was happening to pictures, and he said,

“We’re brutalizing the audience. We’re going to end
up like the Roman circus, live at the Coliseum.” The
respect for human life seems to be eroding […] It’s
too easy to show murders in movies now. There are
too many of them and it’s too easy. There is a
general lack of respect for life, because it’s so easy
to just kill people. Nothing’s changed in 44 years

[since Targets]. Things have gotten worse when it
comes to the control of guns. This guy in Colorado
legally had an arsenal. What’s an AK attack rifle
for? What is that for but to kill people? It’s not for
hunting. Why is it for sale? It boggles the mind.

(Bogdanovich 2012)

And, of course, there’s much more to it than that. The Saw
films, the Hostel series and the Texas Chainsaw films all deal in the “cheapness” of human life and invite the audience to
vicariously identify with the killer. These nihilistic slasher films degrade both the audience who watch them and the
people who make them, but neither group will stop, especially in view of the genre’s continued profitability. There is also the issue of the essential emptiness of American culture on a mass basis; we have become a landscape fueled by fear and a
desire to consume, consume, consume, even as the “news,”

skewed either to the left or right, is so stage-managed and
leveraged with “expert opinion” that the facts in any given
situation are often impossible to discern.

35

What makes Targets an altogether different experience from the films mentioned above, however, is that it relentlessly and with scalpel-like precision examines the complete failure of

American society to either address the social causes behind
such rampages or provide audiences with print, television or
cinematic material that has any real content – essentially, to stop functioning just like an endless diet of junk food. In

Targets, Bobby’s father, Robert Thompson, Sr. (an
appropriately militaristic Tom Brown) knows only guns and
mindless television as recreational activities; in a scene early on in the film, Thompson Sr. goes out on the practice field of a shooting range to pick up some targets during a session and Bobby levels the sight of his gun on his father, idly
considering whether or not to kill him. Bobby’s father catches him in the act and severely reprimands him. Bobby sheepishly
apologizes for his “error” in judgment, but it’s already been rendered clear what will happen as Bobby’s mental state
continues to spiral into free fall.

At night, in a superbly executed dolly sequence through a
house utterly barren of any intellectual sustenance – no books in sight other than cookbooks and the Bible, mass produced
paintings on the wall and conversations that never go beyond,

“Hi, how are you?” and, “What’s on TV tonight?” – Bobby
and his family watch television. We never see what’s on the

TV, but it’s obviously a late night talk show à la Johnny

Carson. There is no real contact between any members of the
family.

As the camera prowls the barren, air-conditioned nightmare
that is their Southern California dream home, we hear them
chuckle mindlessly at the antics on the screen, their faces
illuminated only by the bluish glow of the television screen.

36

At length, the family members peel themselves away from the electronic hearth to go to bed, but there’s no real
conversation, no communication, no sense that this family is a unit or that they even know each other. They’re just four
people in a room, thrown together by chance and
circumstance: a son who’s about to go off the deep end, a
by-the-book father with no emotional or intellectual depth, an equally blank slate for a mother, Charlotte (Mary Jackson),
and Bobby’s similarly uncomprehending wife, Ilene (Tanya

Morgan).

Shortly before going out to kill, Bobby makes one last
desperate attempt to break through to his wife in a scene that is as economical as it is chilling. He tries to explain to her that something is wrong – he doesn’t know what, but something is
happening to him that he can’t explain – and, though Ilene
tries to listen, she simply doesn’t have the depth to understand anything more than fashion magazines and Southern

California pop culture. As the pair slouch against a wall in
their bedroom, Bobby’s face lit only by the glow at the end of his cigarette, it becomes clear to the viewer that nothing will stop Bobby now because the people around him lack the
social reference points – indeed, any real feeling for anything other than the instant gratification that throwaway culture so relentlessly provides – to provide him with the understanding that he craves. Fittingly, Bogdanovich lights the scene so that Ilene gets some illumination, but Bobby is shrouded in
darkness – the darkness that will soon consume both himself
and those around him.

It’s also interesting to note that there’s no music in the film other than synthetic top 40 pop music – complete with a
motor-mouthing disc jockey pouring forth endlessly from the

37
radio in Bobby’s car – and, if one wants to count it, Ronald Stein’s original score for The Terror. Like Hitchcock’s The

Birds (1963), which used only “sound patterns” created by

Bernard Herrmann, Remi Gassmann and Oskar Sala based on
the sound of birds in flight calling to each other, Targets is set in a world that is all the more realistic because it eschews the extra-diegetic music that audiences have come to rely on for
emotional response cues. Even the nature of the film itself
mirrors Bobby Thompson – it’s never apologize, never
explain.

The other thing that’s remarkable about Bobby, of course, is
his complete lack of remarkability. Bobby Thompson seems
like an utterly reliable, responsible, straight-ahead citizen who smoothly engages in idle chit chat with both his family
members and those outside the home so casually and easily
that his ferocious eruption is made all the more terrifying and all the more credible as a result. As he prepares for his
shooting spree by buying even more guns and ammunition at
a local gun shop, for example, Bobby seems to be an
absolutely balanced individual – hiding in plain sight, a
normal, easy going guy who has nevertheless completely lost
touch with reality. And, indeed, there’s nothing for him to
hang on to. The society that has created Bobby Thompson is
one in which there is nothing more to fill his mind with other than guns, violence and junk culture; significantly, he’s a
horror movie fan and early on in the film recognizes Byron

Orlok outside a Los Angeles screening room (while
purchasing still more weapons). It is this sighting that later influences his decision to pick the drive-in where Orlok will be appearing for his last murderous stint as a sniper.

38

Clearly, there is nothing here that’s even remotely sensationalistic. Targets is a masterly depiction of the
emptiness of conventional American life – sports, guns, video games, junk movies and junk television, plus junk novels – a
life that offers nothing for something and that leaves the
reader,
listener
or
viewer
both
unsatisfied
and
undernourished, still empty after two-and-a-half hours of a
mind-numbing spectacle at the multiplex, or knowing nothing
new or useful after consuming yet another pop culture serial
killer novel. It’s all junk and there’s nothing to be gleaned from it. Bogdanovich’s film all too accurately depicts what
the world was becoming in the late 1960s, even as many
struggled against the idea of a culture ruled by mob
consensus, fear and conspiracy theories, all of which people
with nothing better to do were more than happy to propagate.

In the late ’60s, we began the move toward where we are now
in American society: total emptiness. There is nothing
challenging, nothing sentient, nothing to believe in. One
might try to dismiss Orson Welles’s comment that “we’re
going to end up like the Roman circus, live at the Coliseum,”

but the fact is that we’re already there. This is the terrifying prophecy of Targets – a vision that now has come to be true
after decades of cultural neglect and the devaluation of both the humanities and humanity itself. Karloff ’s final
courageous act in the film – confronting the sniper at the
drive-in – is the act of one of the old guard; the rest of the patrons, however, run for their lives, heedless of offering any aid or assistance to others. In showing us the future of

America – whether he knew he was doing so or not –

Bogdanovich has given us a clear blueprint of what happens
and what will continue to happen unless we take steps to rein 39
in both the violence and the culture that embraces and glorifies it.

Footnote

*

A version of this chapter was first published in 2013 by

Film International (online) as “The Future Catches Up With

The Past: Peter Bogdanovich’s Targets” (17 January):

http://filmint.nu/?p=6778.

40

Chapter 2

SURREALISM AND SUDDEN

DEATH IN THE FILMS OF

LUCIO FULCI*

The films of Lucio Fulci, the Italian horror filmmaker, are
usually lumped in with those of other “gore” specialists. It
seems to me, however, that this gore is just one component of Fulci’s work. Also running through all his films is a strangely dreamlike, hyper-violent abandonment of narrative which
seeks to disrupt normative social preconceptions, perhaps as a result of Fulci’s youthful excursions into Marxist political
thought. In such films as The House by the Cemetery (1981),

The Beyond (1981), City of the Living Dead (1980) and other
works,

Fulci
continually
operates
against
audience
expectations in terms of both characterization and plot. In The Beyond, for example, a young blind woman’s faithful guide
dog turns on her without warning, tearing her throat out; in

City of the Living Dead, a young couple is caught making out
in the front seat of a car by the girl’s father, who promptly drags the young man to a drill press and uses it to push a huge bolt through his skull.

Zombies roam hospitals, highways lead into the ocean with
no end or beginning in sight, protagonists discover
themselves trapped inside oil paintings and there’s no logic to any of this. Fulci usually makes some desultory stab at a
framing story, but once a central premise is set forth, the rest of the film is given over to unconnected and seemingly
unmotivated sequences that follow with no discernible order
or reason. I would argue that the chaotic non-narrative

41
structure of Fulci’s films is very much like the work of Luis Buñuel or Jean Cocteau; he creates a walking dream state
from which the sleeper never awakes.

Born in Rome on 17 June 1927, Fulci studied medicine in
college before becoming an art critic, then a screenwriter and then, oddly enough, breaking in as a specialist in comedy –
although, when one considers it, perhaps this isn’t so odd
after all. Fulci had studied at the famed Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (the Experimental Film Center, or Italian

National Film School, founded by none other than Benito

Mussolini in 1935) and, as he later told Robert Schlockoff:

I studied at the Experimental Film Center in Rome,
with teachers
like Antonioni and Visconti.

Incidentally, when I took the oral exam to be
admitted to the Center, Visconti asked me what I
thought of his film Ossessione [1943; actually an
uncredited film version of James M. Cain’s novel

The Postman Always Rings Twice; MGM, who had
purchased the rights to the book, was not amused,
and a flurry of lawsuits ensued. Ossessione was soon
withdrawn from circulation, finally resurfacing in
the 1980s], which was then regarded as a
masterpiece and, with the unconsciousness of my
youth, I pointed out that he had “ripped off” quite a
few pictures from Renoir’s films! The rest of the
jury looked at me as if I was a monster, but Visconti
told me: “You are the first person to have told me
the truth; you know films and you have a lot of
courage – which is what a director needs to have!”

And so they took me in! (Schlockoff 1982, 51)

42

Figure 2. Lucio Fulci.

Source: Author’s collection.

After this auspicious beginning, Fulci provided the story for A Day in Court (1953) – I’ll confine myself to the English
titles for this chapter, in the interest of simplicity – then scripted an additional ten comedy/genre films up until 1958,
when he finally got the chance to write and direct The

Thieves (1958). The film created very little impact and was
followed by his work as an associate producer on Mario

Bonard and Sergio Leone’s scrumptiously over-the-top 1959
version of The Last Days of Pompeii starring Steve Reeves
and with Fernando Rey as Arbacès, the high priest and villain of the piece.

After this, more routine genre films followed in rapid
succession, but Fulci was still, at this point in his career, just another journeyman filmmaker pounding out predictable,
moneymaking entertainments. Among these were Oh! Those

43

Most Secret Agents (1964) and How We Robbed the Bank of Italy (1966) – one of a series of broad comedies that also
included How We Got the Army in Trouble (1965) and How

We Stole the Atomic Bomb (1967). Fulci eventually found
his true métier, however, with the surreal and deliriously
violent A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971) and Don’t

Torture a Duckling (1972). He was traveling in a new
direction, inspired by his contemporaries in the horror field; as he told Robert Schlockoff, “At that time, I would do
comedies and rock ‘n’ roll films, [but] I was a great admirer of Tourneur and Corman – I love Corman’s Poe series. After
a while, I was fed up with comedies and would not do any
more” (Schlockoff 1982, 51). As one of Fulci’s most
perceptive critics, Patricia MacCormack, notes,

While Fulci contextualized the erotics of male
homosociality through comedy and reaffirmation of
machismo in the adventure films, he was
simultaneously venturing into the horror territory
with his gialli. These films adhere to the traditional
giallo narrative structure while questioning and
doubling standard cinematic concepts […] even
though, as in his previous films, Fulci’s mind
strained
against
the
parameters
of
generic
convention, through violence and dream sequences,
special effects and a fascination with perversion

(human rather than specifically sexual) he expressed
a vision at once fascinatingly resonant with its
horror genealogy and unique in its imaginative
vision […] the project of describing the best of

Fulci’s films, his gory horrors, is a paradoxical one.

Being required to describe these films might expose
them as poverty stricken within the constraints of

44
signification of images, narrative and their capacity to be viewed as a readerly text.

In order to evoke the powers of Fulci’s best films,
the reader must let go of: narrative as a
temporalization
of
viewing
pleasure
which
accumulates the past to contextualize the present and
lay out an expected future; images as deferrals to
meaning, signs to be read or interpreted; characters
as integral to plot, both in film in general and horror
in particular as that which must be conceptually
characterized in order to be meaningfully killed off
or destroyed; narrative as intelligible contextualizer
of action; exploitation as gratuitously existing for its
own sake or to affirm and intensify traditional axes
of oppression in society; gore as demeaning or a
lesser focus in the impartation of visual expression;
pleasure as pleasurable; repulsion as unpleasurable;
violence as inherently aggressive; horror as dealing
only with notions of returned repression, infantilism
or catharsis. I ask the reader, in the tradition of

Lyotard’s economy of libidinal pleasure, to shift
their address from why or what the images mean to
how they affect [the viewer]. (MacCormack 2004)

Indeed, the bulk of Fulci’s reputation as an authentic
visionary of surrealist violence rests primarily on a mere
handful of films: City of the Living Dead (1980), The Black

Cat (1981), Fulci’s uncontested masterpiece The Beyond

(1981) and The House by the Cemetery (1982), perhaps the
least interesting and most linear of these four projects. To this list must be added Zombie (1979), aka Zombi 2 – although

Fulci was really piggy-backing on George Romero’s 1978

45

Dawn of the Dead with Zombie, extending Romero’s images of the flesh-eating undead further into the realm of graphic
specificity. Shortly after this, however, Fulci directed perhaps his most violent and repellent film, The New York Ripper

(1982); too over-the-top even for his most hardcore fans, the film serves as a testament to the waning of Fulci’s career. For, after the 1969 suicide of his wife, the death of his daughter Camilla in a car accident in the early 1970s and estrangement from his longtime scenarist, Dardano Sacchetti – the man
responsible for the screenplays of Fulci’s most famous films –
over “credit” issues, the director’s career went into steep
decline.

At his peak, Fulci was compared to such horror experts as

Dario Argento, Mario Bava and Jacques Tourneur and,
though his current “fan” reputation rests almost entirely on
his status as a purveyor of gore effects, Fulci himself viewed his films in a very different light. As he told Schlockoff in 1982:

Horror is not a goal in itself to me. I am basically
interested in the fantastic. As a matter of fact, there
are few horror scenes in City of the Living Dead;
tension is the important thing in this film. I have
given up on horror for horror’s sake; instead, I
wanted to make a nightmare film where horror is
ubiquitous, seen in apparently innocuous forms.

Horror only appears in two scenes in a spectacular
way, let alone the fact that the drill scene is a
warning I wanted to give against a certain type of
fascism, the girl’s father killing the young guy in
such an abject way just because the young guy is
different, a frightened victim who, like the so-called

46
witch in Long Night of Exorcism, does not
understand all this hostility towards him. I wanted to
show this boy as a dropout whom girls protect
because of his kindness, but unfortunately, I was not
able to develop the conservatism of some Dunwich
inhabitants. City, to me, is a visual rendering of the
metaphysical side of bad dreams. […]

I’d like to point out that the audience usually
applauds once a horror scene is over, not while the
horror is on the screen. People are wrong when they
accuse my films of gratuitous horror; censorship is
wrong about my films being an incentive to
violence. Far from participating in this violence, the
spectator, on the contrary, is rid of it, freed from
horrors he holds within himself, the film being the
catalyst for this liberation. [With The Beyond] my
idea was to make an absolute film, with all the
horrors of our world. It’s a plotless film; a house,
people, and dead men coming from The Beyond.

There’s no logic to it, just a succession of images.

The Sea of Darkness, for instance, is an absolute
world, an immobile world where every horizon is
similar. I think each man chooses his own inner hell,
corresponding to his hidden vices. So I am not afraid
of Hell, since Hell is already in us. […]

Curiously enough, I can’t imagine that Paradise
exists, though I am a Catholic – but perhaps God has
left me? – yet I have often envisaged Hell, since we
live in a society where only Hell can be perceived.

Finally, I realize that Paradise is indescribable.

Imagination is much stronger when it is pressed by

47
the terrors of Hell […] This may seem strange, but I am happier than somebody like Buñuel who says he
is looking for God. I have found Him in the others’

misery and my torment is greater than Buñuel’s. For

I have realized that God is a God of suffering. I envy
atheists; they don’t have all these difficulties. It is
true that all my films are terribly pessimistic. The
main characters in The Beyond, for instance,
become blind, as their sight has no raison d’être
anymore in this lifeless world. But humor and
tragedy always join, anyway. If they emphasize the
tragic side of things, it may have a comical effect.

Everything considered, having directed so many
comedies when I started my film career turns out to
be very useful for my true cinema, the cinema of the
fantastic. (Schlockoff 1982, 53–4)

The Beyond, of all of Fulci’s films, remains the most
resonantly mysterious and mesmerizing in its insistent
avoidance of logic. It consists of a dreamlike series of set
pieces revolving around a decaying New Orleans hotel, shot
partially on location with interiors completed in Rome – a
typical Fulci tactic, as his films were always made with the
international market in mind rather than for native
consumption in Italy where the market for horror films
remained surprisingly limited. He also used American stars
down on their luck in many of his films, such as Christopher

George in City of the Living Dead, to increase the films’

box-office appeal and worked in English and Italian
interchangeably on the set. As Chas Balun recounts, in The

Beyond:

48
after a sepia-tinted prologue set in 1920s era Louisiana, a renegade [Warlock, who is also a
painter] is chain-whipped, crucified with railroad
spikes and drenched with acid […] [The action then
shifts] to the present day [and] the living dead are
restless and ravenous […] a curious plumber has one
of his [eyes] savagely poked out – [a Fulci
trademark] – only moments before an equally
curious housemaid is trapped by a zombie and
forced to forfeit one of her own eyeballs. It’s no
coincidence that Fulci’s films are full of eyes,
usually seen in extreme close-ups and often sightless
and clouded, in addition to being on the receiving
end of various sharp implements. [As] Fulci
explains, “they are the first thing you have to
destroy, because they have seen too many bad
things” […]

[As The Beyond continues], lips, tongues and eyes
are munched by marauding tarantulas, throats are
ripped open by a guide dog gone to the Devil,
partially dissected corpses run rampant and a little
pigtailed girl has a hole blown clean through her
cranium. All of this seems to support Fulci’s thesis
that ‘life is often a really terrible nightmare, [and]

our only refuge is to remain in this world, but
outside time.’ [The Beyond] ends enigmatically but
triumphantly. The two surviving protagonists, [Fulci
veterans] David Warbeck and Catriona MacColl, are
chased into the basement of the hotel and are
confronted with an eerie, surreal landscape littered
with corpses. The climactic denouement [thus]

brings the film full circle – the survivors, eyes now

49
clouded and sightless, have entered the “Sea of Darkness” portrayed in the painting seen on the

Warlock’s easel during [the film’s] prologue. (Balun

1996, 39–40)

Frozen in space and time, the camera pulls back to show the
viewer that Warbeck and MacColl have become part of the
painting, entombed forever in darkness, death and decay.

Balun is correct in describing the conclusion of The Beyond
as “triumphant,” but it is the triumph of death, evil, violence and mortal immortality that the film ultimately embraces. All of this proceeds with a complete absence of logic or reason,
as if no such concepts existed in Fulci’s universe; things
happen because they do and they obey no other order except
for chance and circumstance. The Beyond’s framing story of
the crucified Warlock is simply the jumping-off point for a
series of grotesque and disturbing set pieces that have no
reason for existence in the film other than the director’s will to bring them to the screen. There’s really no reason why any of what we see should happen; it’s just the cruel illogic of an uncanny world in which human ambition, hope and striving
are all but superfluous. The triumph of The Beyond is the
erasure of causality and the subsequent rule of random events and circumstance that are completely beyond our control. As

Fulci noted, “People who blame The Beyond for its lack of a
story have not understood that it’s a film of images, which
must be received without any reflection.” He complained that

“any idiot” could understand a film with a plot, but that he
was aiming for an “absolute” cinema that existed outside of
narrative constraints (Schlockoff 1982, 54). Yet, after the
completion of The Beyond – his finest film – Fulci’s life was never really the same. Almost as soon as Fulci reached the
summit of this achievement, his cinematic future ironically

50
began falling away from him – just as it had for his doomed protagonists in The Beyond.

Faced with ever-shrinking budgets, trapped in a cycle of
extreme violence as his sole stock in trade with producers and distributors alike and further incapacitated by poor health and depression, Fulci was reduced in his later years to lending his still-commercial name to a series of undistinguished horror
films. These, he had little or nothing to do with other than
appearing in a cameo role in some of them (a practice of long standing with Fulci that dated back to his earlier works –
films he had actually directed), but allowed them to be
released under the banner “Lucio Fulci Presents.” These
productions brought in a little much-needed cash, but further undermined Fulci’s reputation as he was not allowed to
publicly disassociate himself from them in return for payment for the use of his name. The final films that Fulci actually
scripted and directed – A Cat in the Brain (1990), Voices
from Beyond (1991) and Door to Silence (1991) – opened to
scathing reviews and couldn’t hope to match the power of his
earlier works; sadly, they were of such poor quality that one has to agree with their contemporary reviews, which found
the films to be almost amateurishly inept. Clearly, Fulci was going downhill; he had lost the energy and vision that had
propelled him to genre stardom just a decade earlier.

Fulci’s last major public appearance was as a guest of honor
at the Fangoria Horror Convention in New York City in

January 1996. On 13 March 1996, Fulci died in his modest
apartment in Rome. Earlier, he had predicted that, after his
passing, he and his films would swiftly be forgotten, but, if anything, Fulci’s work is now more revered than ever. In fact, Fulci just missed the 1998 United States theatrical re-release 51
of The Beyond in its original uncut version by Quentin Tarantino’s Rolling Thunder Films. I was lucky enough to
attend the midnight premiere at the Angelika Film Center in

New York City and can attest that a discerning yet deeply
enthusiastic crowd warmly received the film. In view of the
fact that Fulci’s films had routinely been recut, retitled,
censored and shuffled off into VHS oblivion during his
lifetime – indeed, even his name was omitted on some
occasions, with directorial credit instead assigned to a variety of pseudonyms, such as “Louis Fuller,” in an attempt to

“Americanize” the films – it’s a pleasure to note that a
plethora of the director’s films are now readily available on DVD and Blu-Ray in their original, unedited form and often
with the original language (Italian) soundtracks as an option.

For someone who grew up admiring the works of Antonioni
and Visconti and revering Renoir, Marcel L’Herbier and other
renowned cineastes, yet spent most of his life laboring in the genre trenches, such posthumous acclaim will have to suffice.

In the years since his passing, no one has come along with a
similarly original vision of malevolent incoherence and
cosmic indifference in the horror genre, and thus Fulci’s
achievements as a director and a genre game-changer have
grown continuously more evident. A monster on the set,
possessing a terrible temper with both actors and crew – “I do not like stars,” he told Robert Schlockoff quite frankly – Fulci worked essentially for himself, an artist seeking to create his films for an audience of one. And, indeed, even at the end of his life, he never gave up the hope of making another film. As he told Schlockoff,

René Clair, once asked what he intended to do after

Le Silence est d’or, simply answered: “Another

52
film.” And for us, film directors, that is the question: to be or not to be able to shoot another film. I ruined
my life for [the cinema]. I have no family, no wife,
only daughters. All women left me because I never
stop thinking of my job. My only two hobbies are
my dogs and my sailing boat. Work is very
important to me. John Ford once said, “I know that
in bars they are saying bad things about me. But I
am shooting films in the mountains with Indians
while they are talking […]” (Schlockoff 1982, 54)

Fulci labored on his own terms to create a forbidding world of unreal reality – a world that may be the truest “reality” of all.

His is a legacy that any director would be proud of, no matter how much she or he had to sacrifice to create it; in the end, to quote Gustave Flaubert, another extravagant personality, if

“the man is nothing, the work – all” (“l’homme n’est rien,
l’oeuvre – tout”) (Flaubert 1875). Through his work, Fulci
brilliantly discharged his debt to the cinema and to the world of the Gothic.

Footnote

*

A version of this chapter was first published in 2012 by

Film International (online) as “Surrealism and Sudden Death
in the Films of Lucio Fulci” (24 December): http://filmint.nu/

?p=6616.

53

Chapter 3

FLASH GORDON AND THE

1930s AND ’40s SCIENCE

FICTION SERIAL*

Motion picture serials, the forerunner of today’s serialized
television dramas, have been around since the earliest days of the narrative cinema. Exhibitors rapidly realized that, in order to assure continued audience attendance, open-ended “cliff
hangers” were needed, as they keep viewers returning week
after week to find out the latest plot twists, character
developments and, of course, how the hero or heroine escaped
from the previous week’s peril. The first real serial – with
multiple episodes and a running weekly continuity – was

Charles Brabin’s What Happened to Mary? (1912), starring

Mary Fuller as an innocent young woman who inherits a
fortune while the villain of the piece tries to separate her from her newfound wealth.

The sequel to the serial, Who Will Mary Marry? (1913),
serves as proof of the new format’s success. But the real
breakthrough came in 1914 with Louis Gasnier’s The Perils
of Pauline, starring Pearl White. Pauline established the
hectic, action-packed formula that would persist until the
production of the very last serial – Spencer Gordon Bennet’s

Blazing the Overland Trail – in 1956. Fistfights, nonstop
action, minimal character exposition and a sense of constant, frenetic danger permeated The Perils of Pauline and this
recipe generated a host of imitators.

54

Soon the “damsel in distress” format used in The Perils of

Pauline was being employed by a number of other serials,
including Francis J. Grandon’s The Adventures of Kathlyn

(1913), starring an equally athletic Kathlyn Williams, and

Louis Feuillade’s epic mystery Fantômas (1913). Early serials were shown in weekly installments, a practice that continued
throughout the lifetime of the genre, but early serial chapters could run as long as an hour – particularly in the case of

Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915), one of the most popular of
the silent serials. These weekly screenings usually took place as a major part of the cinema program and early serials were
aimed at both adults and children. Occasionally, an
enterprising entrepreneur would run a serial chapter
throughout the week to maximize attendance.

Figure 3. Flash Gordon.

Source: Author’s collection.

55

By the late teens and early ’20s, a fairly rigid structure had been defined through trial and error. Serials ran 12 to 15
episodes, with the first episode usually running a half-hour to set up the situation and introduce the protagonists (and their adversaries) to viewers. Subsequent episodes clocked in at
roughly 20 minutes. Each episode ended with what the
industry termed a “take-out” – a scene of violent peril from
which the hero or heroine could not possibly escape. The next chapter would pick up the action at the same point, but offer a

“way out” for the lead character: a trap door offering a
convenient escape, jumping from a moving car, or breaking
free from some sort of fiendish device created by the serial’s chief villain.

The central characters in serials were more often types, rather than fully fleshed-out characters. In the early silent days,
women were the protagonists of many of the action serials,
thrown into situations of continual danger until the final reel unspooled. With the advent of women’s voting rights in 1920,
the lead character became, more often than not, a heroic male

– blindingly handsome and often endowed with above
average mental acuity (as an investigator, adventurer or
soldier of fortune). A female companion was then introduced
to support the hero’s efforts, with the possible addition of a young boy or girl “sidekick” to encourage adolescent
identification with the serial’s characters. The hero was aided by a number of associates who usually worked as a team to
support the lead’s efforts. Lastly and most importantly (for
the leads in serials were usually rather bland), there was the chief villain, often masked, whose identity was not disclosed until the final moments of the last chapter. Known in the trade as “brains” heavy, the villain would, in turn, be aided by a
variety of henchmen, or “action” heavies, who would

56
unquestioningly carry out the orders of their leader in a campaign of mayhem and violence that kept the serial’s
narrative in constant motion. Indeed, though the serial format would serve as the template for weekly television series
starting in the early 1950s, serials were far more violent than early television fare; they were noted for their extreme,
nonstop action, their propulsive music scores and seemingly
impossible stunt work. Unlike contemporary television series, which are open-ended and conclude only when audience
interest has evaporated, serials were designed as a “closed
set” – fifteen episodes and out, shot on breakneck schedules
of 30 days or fewer for completed films that could run as long as four hours in their final, chapter-by-chapter format.

Serials embraced nearly every genre – jungle serials (Jungle

Menace [1937], with Frank Buck); crime serials (Alan James’

Dick Tracy [1937], with Ralph Byrd); the supernatural

(Normal Deming and Sam Nelson’s Mandrake the Magician

[1939], with Warren Hull); Westerns (William Witney and

John English’s The Lone Ranger Rides Again [1939], with

Robert Livingston); and, of course, science fiction. Some of
the earliest serials made were sci-fi efforts, including Robert Broadwell and Robert F. Hill’s The Great Radium Mystery

(1919), Otto Rippert’s Homunculus (1916) and Harry A.

Pollard’s The Invisible Ray (1920); all were successful with
the public, who clamored for more.

Note that, in almost all of these cases, two directors were
assigned to a serial. This was because of the sheer bulk of
material involved. Sometimes, directors worked on alternate
days to keep from becoming burnt out; in other instances, one director would handle all the action scenes while another
would shoot all the narrative exposition sequences. Serial

57
scripts were immense, often running to 400 pages or more (or four times the length of an average feature), yet shooting
schedules and budgets were often minuscule and directors
were expected to shoot as many as 70 “setups” (complete
changes of camera angle and lighting) a day to stay on
schedule. Nat Levine – head of Mascot Studios, prime
purveyor of serial fare until his company merged with

Republic Pictures and arguably the most accomplished of the
sound era serial makers – used ruthless cost-cutting to bring in such films as The Phantom Empire (1935), a 12 chapter
science fiction/Western hybrid serial directed by Otto Brower and B. Reeves “Breezy” Eason and starring a young Gene

Autry.

Pushing his directors and crews to the limit, Levine also cut corners on actors’ salaries and other production costs so that every dime he spent showed up on the screen. Actors,
directors and stunt men were left to fend for themselves; all that Levine cared about was finishing on time and on
schedule. Levine also had an improvised dormitory set up on
the Mascot lot in some vacant studio space; there, exhausted
stuntmen, actors and technicians could catch a few minutes of sleep in between setups, then grab a cup of coffee and some
doughnuts to wake up before being dragged back to the set.

This arrangement allowed Levine to keep an eye on his
employees at all times – something like the production system used by the Shaw Brothers studios in Hong Kong in the

1970s. If you stayed on the lot all the time, Levine always
knew where to find you.

As veteran serial director Harry Fraser recalled in his
memoirs (Fraser would go on to co-script the first Batman
serial in 1943, which was directed by Lambert Hillyer), Nat

58

Levine was “the real Simon Legree without a whip” (Fraser 1990, 102). Wrote Fraser:

I recall doing a Rin-Tin-Tin for him, released under
the title The Wolf Dog (1933, co-directed with

Colbert Clark), as I recall. I had an eighty scene
schedule one day, with the dog as the star and
involved in most of the scenes. In addition to

[former D. W. Griffith stock company member]

Henry B. Walthall playing the human lead, there
was a long list of supporting actors and actresses.

Well, I came out with seventy scenes at the end of
the day, but pushing everyone to the limit. But when
the Serial King heard I was behind schedule by ten
scenes, he practically accused me of causing the
company to go bankrupt. My Scottish ire aroused, I
listened to Nat rave on, then finally threw the script
on the table and walked out of his office. (Fraser

1990, 102)

Conditions at the other studios were little better. By now
firmly consigned to the “kiddie trade” where before they had
also attracted adult audiences, serials were seen as
bottom-of-the-barrel product and the major studios that
churned them out (Columbia, Republic and Universal) saw
them as strictly bottom line propositions. However, in many
cases, viewers went to the theater each week not to see the
feature attraction, but rather the serial, which kept them
coming back for the next thrilling installment. Always
cost-conscious, serial makers would usually spend most of
their production budget on the first three or four chapters to entice exhibitors to book the serial and capture audience

59
attention; subsequent episodes were then ground out as cheaply as possible.

To top it off, the seventh or eighth chapter of many serials
would be a “recap” chapter, in which expensive action
sequences from earlier episodes were recycled for maximum
cost benefit. Then, too, stock footage from earlier serials, as well as newsreel sequences, were often employed to keep
costs down. Thus, most serials were compromised from the
start. Occasionally, a serial hero would emerge who would
rate slightly better treatment than usual – often a comic book hero transferred to the screen. Dick Tracy was one of the first of these; Flash Gordon was another, the star of three

Universal serials produced between 1936 and 1940. Flash

Gordon began its life as a comic strip with a lavish, full color Sunday episode on 7 January 1934, as created by Alex

Raymond. The strip proved popular almost immediately and,
in 1936, Universal decided to gamble a significant amount of
time and money on bringing Flash to the screen.

While estimates range widely, the serial was roughly
budgeted at $350,000 – far more than the average serial at the time, which was usually brought in for $100,000 or less.

Despite the generous budget, Flash Gordon was an ambitious
project, requiring spectacular sets (many of them borrowed
from other Universal productions), a plethora of special
effects and a fairly large cast of principal actors. Director Frederick Stephani – who also co-wrote the film’s script –
was given a six-week schedule, but the circumstances
surrounding the production were by no means luxurious.

Even with an uncredited assist from co-director Ray Taylor,

Stephani faced a daunting challenge. As Buster Crabbe – the

60
star of the serial and, for many, the archetypal, iconic Flash Gordon – remembered years later:

[They] started shooting Flash Gordon in October of

1935, and to bring it in on the six-week schedule, we
had to average 85 setups a day. That means moving
and rearranging the heavy equipment we had, the arc
lights and everything, 85 times a day. We had to be
in makeup every morning at seven, and on the set at
eight ready to go. They’d always knock off for
lunch, and then we always worked after dinner.

They’d give us a break of a half-hour or 45 minutes
and then we’d go back on the set and work until
ten-thirty every night. It wasn’t fun, it was a lot of
work! (Kinnard 1998, 39)

In addition to Crabbe in the leading role, Jean Rogers was
cast as Dale Arden, Flash’s nominal love interest. Charles

Middleton, then in his sixties, made an indelible impression
as Ming the Merciless – perhaps the most memorable of all
serial villains for his pure cruelty and sadism. Frank Shannon portrayed Dr. Zarkov, Flash’s scientific advisor and mentor,
and Priscilla Lawson appeared as Princess Aura, Ming’s
daughter, who vacillates between loyalty to her father and a
more than passing interest in Flash. Buster Crabbe – who, as

Clarence Linden Crabbe, won a gold medal for swimming in
the 1932 Olympics – was only 26 when he took on the role of

Flash. While others – including future Ramar of the Jungle
star Jon Hall – tried out for the part, Crabbe was seemingly
destined for the role.

As he told Karl Whitezel in 2000, Crabbe went to the audition for the role purely as a lark, with no real interest in the part.

61

As he was watching Hall and others try out for the role from the sidelines, however, Crabbe was noticed by the serial’s
producer, Henry MacRae. After a brief conversation and with
no audition at all, MacRae surprised Crabbe by offering him
the part. Under contract to Paramount at the time and not
happy about it, Crabbe expressed polite disinterest: “I
honestly thought Flash Gordon was too far-out, and that it
would flop at the box office. God knows I’d been in enough
turkeys during my four years as an actor; I didn’t need
another one.” But MacRae persisted and, finally, Crabbe told
him that it was up to Paramount: “if they say you can borrow
me, then I’d be willing to play the part” (Whitezel 2000, 52).

The two men shook hands on it and, a month later, Crabbe
found himself on a Universal sound stage, tackling the role
that would become his lifetime calling card. His dark hair
bleached blonde for the role, Crabbe dove into the hectic
production schedule with a sense of cheerful fatalism; fate
had given him the role, so he tried to make the best of it. As filming progressed, Crabbe grew more confident and the cast
and crew realized that they were working on something that
was – to say the least – a notch above the usual serial fare.

When production wrapped a few days before Christmas 1936,
there was no wrap party; that would have cost money. A few
actors went across the street to a local bar for drinks, director Stephani patted Crabbe on the back, thanking him for a “nice
job,” and that was all.

At the time, Flash Gordon seemed like just another
assignment for the young actor, who had made six other
features in 1936 alone as part of his Paramount contract. But, to Crabbe’s surprise, Flash Gordon made him a star overnight

62
when it was released in March of that year. As the pseudonymous “Wear” in Variety enthused:

Universal’s serialization of the Flash Gordon
cartoon character in screen form is an unusually
ambitious effort. In some respects, it smacks of old
serial days when story and action, as well as
authentic background, were depended upon to
sustain their vigorous popularity. Here, instead,
feature production standard has been maintained as
to cast, direction, writing and background […]

Buster Crabbe is well fitted for the title role, a
robust, heroic youth who dares almost any danger.

Character calls for plenty of action, which places
him in a favorable light. Charles Middleton, best
known of late for his Western character portrayals,
is a happy choice as the cruel Ming, [and] brings a
wealth of histrionic ability to the part. Jean Rogers
and Priscilla Lawson, besides being easy on the
eyes, are entirely adequate, former as Dale Arden
and Miss Lawson as Emperor Ming’s daughter.

Frank Shannon indicates promise from his portrayal
of the wild-eyed inventive genius […] Flash Gordon
should be a top grosser in the serial field. (Willis

1985, 49)

Thus, as Flash, Crabbe achieved a certain sort of cinematic
immortality – although, to the end of his days, he maintained a love/hate relationship with the role, convinced (perhaps
correctly) that it had typecast him permanently as an action
hero when he longed for more serious parts. When the
original film proved a box-office bonanza, Crabbe was called
back for two sequels, the first of which was Ford Beebe and

63

Robert Hill’s Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars (1938). For his second outing, however, the production was no longer a
first-class affair. As Crabbe remembered:

We started the routine of long days and short nights
again, to grind out what would become a lesser
product than the first had been, quality-wise. The
producer took short-cuts, such as reusing some of
the rocket ship footage filmed earlier, and replaying
some of the landscape shots, assuming that
audiences wouldn’t know the difference […] I never
attempted to learn how well it did for Universal.

Judging from the fact that, two years later, I would
be called back for a third Flash Gordon serial [Ford

Beebe and Ray Taylor’s Flash Gordon Conquers the

Universe, 1940], I assume it was almost as
successful as the first had been. (Whitezel 2000, 56)

In between these three iconic serials, in an attempt to break away from the Flash Gordon character, Crabbe also portrayed

Buck Rogers in a 1939 Universal serial (Buck Rogers) that
was cranked out quickly on a modest budget and directed by

Ford Beebe and Saul A. Goodkind. All the while, Crabbe kept
appearing in “B” feature fare at Paramount – much to his
chagrin, as he kept hoping for more substantial roles. But

Paramount apparently saw little potential in the actor and, to Crabbe’s shock, dropped him as a contract player in late 1939
despite his success with Flash Gordon. Screen tests at other
studios, including Twentieth Century Fox, yielded nothing.

Twentieth Century Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, after
seeing Crabbe’s test, dismissed him with the words, “he’s a
character actor. We can hire all of them we need” (Whitezel

2000, 57).

64

Crabbe’s next film would seal his fate in Hollywood; he agreed to appear in a string of no-budget Westerns for PRC

(Producers’ Releasing Corporation, arguably the cheapest
studio in Hollywood). As astonishing as it seems today, of all the studios, only PRC would agree to put Crabbe in a starring role. His salary was roughly $1,000 a week for each six-day
picture with star billing, such as it was, thrown in as an added inducement. From there, it was all downhill. Crabbe had
achieved lasting fame as Flash Gordon, but he would be
forever identified with the role; now, the future seemed to
promise only bottom-of-the-barrel action pictures.

The die had already been cast even with the cost-conscious
production of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe (1940).

Most of the cast had been replaced by lesser-known actors for reasons of economy, with only Charles Middleton and Frank

Shannon reprising their roles as Ming and Zarkov. As Crabbe
remembered, with evident sadness:

I didn’t like the final Flash Gordon serial. We used a
lot of scenes that we’d done before, the uniforms
were the same, [and] the scenery was the same.

Universal had a library full of old clips: Flash
running from here to there, Ming going from one
palace to another, exterior shots of flying rocket
ships and milling crowds. It saved a lot of
production time, but I thought it was a poor product
that was nothing more than a doctored-up script
from earlier days. (Whitezel 2000, 59)

Yet, for all the compromises and production shortcuts, the

Flash Gordon trilogy stands as a major achievement in
science fiction cinema history; indeed, the first Flash Gordon 65
serial was selected in 1996 by the Library of Congress National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” (Wikipedia 2013). No matter that it used recycled sets and costumes, nor that its score comprised almost entirely of stock music from other Universal films –
such as James Whale’s The Invisible Man (1935), Whale’s

Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Lambert Hillyer’s Dracula’s

Daughter (1936), Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934) or

Rowland V. Lee’s Son of Frankenstein (1939) – interspersed
with snippets of new music by house composer Clifford

Vaughan and “lifts” from Liszt, Brahms, Tchaikovsky and

Wagner (this last music cue from Parsifal fitting in quite
nicely). The trio of serials had made in indelible impact on
popular culture.

The rocket ships were generally ineffective miniatures, the
plots were predictably preposterous and the special effects
were often primitive, but somehow, none of this mattered. For the first two serials, at least – as Variety noted in their review

– the cast performed with a sense of conviction and cohesion
that lifted the project out of the ordinary and into the realm of myth and wonder. There is a genuine chemistry between

Crabbe and Jean Rogers and, although the first serial in
particular is clearly geared towards a juvenile audience, it
nevertheless has an adult feel to it – perhaps because all the principals took their roles seriously and didn’t condescend to the audience.

Charles Middleton, for example, had been a song and dance
man earlier in his career and had worked in films with
everyone from Laurel and Hardy to director Cecil B. DeMille

(in The Sign of the Cross, 1932). He also provided a
memorable foil for the Marx Brothers in Leo McCarey’s

66

Duck Soup (1933) and appeared in a typically villainous role in John Ford’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of

Wrath (1940). In all, Middleton appeared in more than 190
films and worked in every imaginable role right up to his
death in 1948. Like the other actors in the Flash Gordon
films, Middleton played his role with conviction and sincerity and, as Ming, lent a certain gravitas to the entire enterprise.

The world of Flash Gordon is at once fantastic and real; one
feels for the characters, which are drawn with greater depth
than traditional serial protagonists so that they seem to be
actual personages in an actual world, albeit one far removed
from our own.

In the wake of the Flash Gordon trilogy, other science fiction serials would follow – most from Republic Pictures. Many of
the Republic efforts were quite effective, with high
production values and superb special effects by Howard and

Theodore Lydecker. These included Spencer Gordon Bennet
and Fred C. Brannon’s dystopic The Purple Monster Strikes

(1945), which dealt with an alien invasion from Mars;

William Witney and Brannon’s memorably sinister The

Crimson Ghost, in which the titular villain attempts to steal a counteratomic weapon known as a Cyclotrode in order to
achieve the (somewhat predictable) aim of world domination;

Spencer Gordon Bennet, Wallace A. Grissell and stuntman
extraordinaire Yakima Canutt’s Manhunt of Mystery Island

(1945) with its plot device of a “transformation chair” to
bring to life the serial’s villain, one Captain Mephisto (Roy Barcroft, Republic’s go-to heavy in residence), and a plot
centering on the theft of a “radioatomic power transmitter”;
and Harry Keller, Franklin Adreon and Fred C. Brannon’s

Commando Cody: Sky Marshall of the Universe (1953), the
only serial directly designed as a syndicated television series, 67
thus providing a link between the nonstop frenzy of the serial format and the more intimate domain of domestic TV fare.

Using recycled footage from Brannon’s King of the Rocket

Men (1949), Radar Men From the Moon (1952) and Zombies
of the Stratosphere (1952), Commando Cody’s format was a
definite departure from the usual serial template; each

30-minute episode was self-contained, yet the series
maintained continuity so that each episode could be run as a

“stand alone” or as part of a group. Released theatrically in 1953, the series of 12 episodes was picked up by NBC as a
network series and ran from 16 July 1955 to 8 October 1955

(Hayes 2000, 124). However, despite this attempt to move
into television, Republic’s operation was winding down; the
company’s last serial was Franklin Adreon’s nondescript

King of the Carnival (1955). Republic officially closed its
doors as a production entity on 31 July 1959, although it still exists today as a holding company and a distributor of past
products (Flynn and McCarthy 1975b, 324).

Though the later Republic, Columbia and Universal sci-fi
serials provided predictably pulse-pounding entertainment,
there seemed at length to be a perfunctory air about many of
the serials in the mid-to-late 1940s. They were predictable,
their plots unfolded like clockwork, they did the job and got out. All nuances and much of the human element were gone.

The serials had become a well-oiled machine, delivering
predicable thrills on an assembly line basis with characters
that lacked depth, personality or individuality. Serial leads were utterly replaceable, as were serial heroines – they did
their job and went home – and dialogue was confined to
exposition, with more and more repetition and recapitulation
creeping in as the years passed by. The Flash Gordon serials

68
created a world in which its characters lived and took on definite human shape; subsequent serials, no matter how
well-crafted, lacked this three-dimensional quality.

Universal had been producing serials since 1914 and had 137
productions in all to their credit and more chapter plays than any other company when the ignominious end finally came
with 1946’s Lost City of the Jungle (directed by Ray Taylor
and Lewis D. Collins and shot almost simultaneously with

The Mysterious Mr. M, directed by Collins and Vernon

Keays). Lost City of the Jungle has achieved a certain
notoriety as famed character actor Lionel Atwill’s last film; the actor was fighting what would ultimately prove to be fatal bronchial cancer and pneumonia and was forced to leave the
film in the midst of production. Ironically, Atwill agreed to film his “death scene” for Lost City of the Jungle as his last work in front of the camera, leaving much of his role in the
serial incomplete. Atwill then departed the Universal lot,
never to return, and died on 22 April 1946. To finish Lost

City of the Jungle, Universal used a double, created a new
subplot to make Atwill’s character an underling instead of the

“brains” heavy and used outtakes for Atwill’s reaction shots.

It didn’t work. Lost City of the Jungle was released on 23

April 1946 – the day after Atwill’s death – to generally
dismal results. When The Mysterious Mr. M, a nondescript
science fiction serial, was released to a similarly lukewarm
reception, Universal called it quits.

Columbia fared a little better. Lambert Hillyer’s incredibly
racist Batman (1943), for example – the first appearance of
the caped crusader on the screen – had a strong sci-fi element in the “mad lab” of Dr. Daka (J. Carrol Naish), a Japanese spy working to sabotage the Allied war effort. While it was a

69
solid enough effort, it relied on characters that were sketched in broad, charcoal strokes with little shading or detail. The Superman serials from producer Sam Katzman’s Columbia
unit – 1948’s Superman, directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet
and Thomas Carr, and 1950’s Atom Man vs. Superman,
directed by Bennet alone – also have strong sci-fi elements,
including disintegrator rays, teleportation machines and, of
course, the person of Superman himself. Superman was
played in both serials by Kirk Alyn and took the form of “a
strange being from another planet who came to Earth with
powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men,” as the
narrative introduction for the subsequent Superman TV series

– in which George Reeves took over the title role – would
have it. But, in the two Columbia serials, whenever Superman
was called upon to fly to the rescue, the legendarily
cost-conscious Katzman would switch to two-dimensional
animation rather than using the more expensive live action
footage, seriously compromising the production as a whole.

The television incarnation of Superman ultimately served the
franchise much more effectively, with vastly improved live
action special effects.

Thomas Carr, for example – whose career as an actor
stretched back to the silent era and who actually played the
role of Captain Rama of the Forest People in Flash Gordon’s

Trip to Mars – switched to directing program Westerns in the

1940s and would go on to direct a number of the early
episodes of the Superman TV series, bringing much of the
serial sensibility with him. But many viewers criticized the
first season of the TV Superman series for its “excessive,”

serial-like violence; it took a regime change at the producer level to create a more “user-friendly” Superman for home
consumption. What had worked in the theaters – usually out

70
of the view of parents and guardians on a Saturday morning –
raised eyebrows when Mom or Dad watched along with their
children in the family den.

Thus, a “softer” Commando Cody and Superman paved the
way for 1950s Saturday morning children’s sci-fi, including a filmed West German, half-hour version of Flash Gordon,

Captain Video and His Video Rangers, Tom Corbett, Space

Cadet, Captain Midnight and Rocky Jones, Space Ranger –
which had, arguably, the best production values of the lot

(Dixon 2008). These Saturday morning teleseries would soon
lead to more adult sci-fi, with The Twilight Zone, The Outer

Limits, Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica all in prime time
and the children’s serial, as it had flourished in the past,
fading into the mists of our collective memory.

Yet, of all these serials, it is the Flash Gordon trilogy that still commands our attention today. Its scrolling titles and
futuristic gadgetry clearly inspired George Lucas’s Star Wars series – particularly the initial episode, released in 1977. It has also inspired a host of remakes; after the 1954–55 West

German series, there was an animated series entitled The New

Adventures of Flash Gordon (1979–80), Mike Hodges’ 1980
feature film featuring Max von Sydow as Ming the Merciless

– which failed to live up to expectations – as well as Michael Benveniste and Howard Ziehm’s X-rated parody Flesh

Gordon (1974) and a sequel, Ziehm’s Flesh Gordon Meets the

Cosmic Cheerleaders (1989). As of this writing, director

Breck Eisner has announced that plans are in the works for a
new 3D version of Flash Gordon, which will bypass the 1980
film and the Universal serials and go straight back to Alex

Raymond’s comic strip for inspiration. So, it seems that Flash will always be with us and that the original serials – tacky and 71
art deco in design though they may be – will remain talismans of our cinematic past.

As for the sci-fi serial format itself, the serial truly paved the way for the television series of the 1950s and beyond; it
offered compact thrills and a continuing storyline within the confines of a twenty to thirty minute template and, just like contemporary television serials, kept audiences coming back
for more week after week. Today’s teleseries are considerably more sophisticated – both in their technology and in their
narrative structure – and the characters that inhabit them are, for the most part, fully dimensional human beings and not
cardboard archetypes. Yet, they owe a considerable debt to
the serials, which inhabited a world of constant action, peril and imagination, but were ultimately too simplistic for
contemporary audiences. The half-hour television series
format simply erased the serial from public consciousness; the theatrical serial had become obsolete.

People didn’t have to go out anymore to see the latest
adventures of their favorite sci-fi heroes and heroines; they could watch them on TV. And so, just as Flash Gordon and its
sci-fi serial brethren predicted much of our future technology (rockets, telescreens, the possibility of interplanetary travel), it also paved the way for the medium of television, with its
chaptered
format,
rigorous
schematic
structure
and
cliffhanging plot lines. The future of sci-fi television, as well as theatrical series (the Star Wars and Star Trek feature films are two obvious examples), played out in the ’60s, ’70s and

’80s and continues up to the present day; many of the plots
are as fantastic as the early science fiction serials, even if the special effects have markedly improved. But the Flash

Gordon serials played in important part in the creation of

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contemporary televisual formats – as well as in the serial-like sequel formats of many contemporary theatrical science
fiction franchises – and offered to audiences a sense of
wonder and amazement that still both resonates today and
continues to gesture towards the future.

Footnote

*

A version of this chapter was first published in 2011 by

Screening the Past (online) as “Flash Gordon and the 1930s
and

40s

Science

Fiction

Serial”

(number

32):

http://www.screeningthepast.com/2011/11/
flash-gordon-and-the-1930s-and-40s-science-fiction-serial/.

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Chapter 4

JUST THE FACTS, MAN: THE

COMPLICATED GENESIS OF

TELEVISION’S DRAGNET*

All I want to do is make a million dollars.

—Jack Webb, 1953 (Hayde 2001, 59)

Jack Webb had a lot of help when he created the hit series

Dragnet. The series marked a significant departure from
existing models of “crime and punishment” police and
detective shows – which had, in the past, existed only in
exaggerated versions. With Dragnet, the quotidian, everyday
aspects of police work came to the fore, portrayed in minute
detail. But the origins of Dragnet are shrouded in a good deal of contentious disputation and it’s clear that series creator, Jack Webb, was not the only person involved in establishing
the format for the show. Born in Santa Monica, CA, on 2

April 1920, Webb never knew his father, Samuel Webb, who
deserted Jack’s mother and filed for divorce shortly before

Jack’s birth (Hayde 2001, 9). Samuel Webb then vanished
completely from Jack’s life – swallowed up by the

Depression – leaving Jack, his mother, Margaret, and her
mother, Emma, to get by as best they could (Hayde 2001,

9–10).

As a child, Jack Webb was plagued by a variety of
debilitating illnesses and thus forced to spend many hours in bed. There, he compensated for his incapacity by becoming
an omnivorous reader of books borrowed from the public

74

library or magazines scavenged from trash cans outside the
family’s cramped apartment (Hayde 2001, 10). Indeed, Webb
was so ill during his childhood that he was unable to walk up a flight of stairs and had to be carried up by his mother; he didn’t start attending school until he was nine years old,
simply because his health was so precarious (Hayde 2001,

10). After graduating from Belmont High School – where he
put on variety shows and got his first exposure to the
technical aspects of radio production – Webb tried his hand at standup comedy, amazingly enough. Later, he worked as a
disc jockey on The Coffee Club, assembling a voluminous
record collection in the process, as well as creating and
starring in a now-forgotten series entitled One Out of Seven, which was written by future Dragnet co-creator Jim Moser,
whom Webb met while working as a staff announcer at radio
station KGO, San Francisco (Hayde 2001, 11–12).

Figure 4. Jack Webb and Ben Alexander in Dragnet.

Source: Author’s collection.

75

Indeed, in his early years, Webb’s career focus seemed scattered, yet his drive and determination were never in
doubt. Growing up during the Depression, like many others,

Webb found escape at the movies; at one point, he became so
enamored with Walt Disney’s production of Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs (1937) that he parlayed his nascent skill as an amateur cartoonist into a scholarship at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles and even applied to the Disney

Studios for work as an animator. Webb dropped off his
portfolio at Disney’s personally, convinced that his future lay in animation – yet, amazingly, forgot to include his return
address. Predictably, Disney never got back to him (Hayde

2001, 11).

After that, Webb attended Los Angeles City College and
created the radio series A Half-Hour to Kill – an early attempt at a murder mystery – for the college’s radio station. He also began spending his nights at jazz joints – where he met his
future wife, singer Julie London – then worked in a steel mill before impulsively joining the Army Air Force. There, he was
assigned to a desk job as a clerk typist while directing USO
variety shows on the side, eventually earning a dependency
discharge in 1945 so he could work to support his ailing
mother (Hayde 2001, 11). Desperate for cash, Webb worked
as a bit actor in a variety of film roles in the late 1940s and early 1950s in addition to playing the wisecracking lead in Pat Novak, for Hire, a private eye radio series that ran for one
season in 1946–47.

Most notably during this period, Webb appeared in the role of an assistant director in Billy Wilder’s classic drama Sunset

Boulevard (1950). When he got the chance to play a bit role
as a forensic crime lab technician in Alfred L. Werker and

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Anthony Mann’s noir classic He Walked by Night (1948), however, he saw that the gritty style the film embraced
offered a new approach to the detective genre – a new angle
that he had been looking for. Webb promptly appropriated the
no-nonsense documentary style of He Walked by Night to
create the hit radio series Dragnet, right down to the “this is the city, Los Angeles, California” opening narration; he also used the same deadpan, procedural approach for Dragnet that
had worked so well in He Walked by Night. Dragnet was an
immediate hit on radio, but Webb – who had been angling for
a shot at the big time for decades – saw that radio was a dying medium.

With television rapidly draining away radio audiences, Webb
saw that he had to make the jump to TV and, with the aid of
director/editor Herbert L. Strock, Webb did just that. During his long career, Strock helmed the prescient science fiction
feature Gog (1954), as well as numerous episodes of the early television series Highway Patrol, starring Academy Award
winner Broderick Crawford. Strock was also a pioneer in the

TV medium, directing the early teleseries The Cases of Eddie

Drake, produced for CBS in 1949. Strock also directed
episodes of Bonanza, Maverick, Colt .45, 77 Sunset Strip,

Cheyenne, The Alaskans, Sky King, Sea Hunt, The Veil,

Science Fiction Theater, I Led Three Lives and other series;
another significant credit Strock notched up was as the editor of Herk Harvey’s remarkable fantasy film Carnival of Souls
in 1962, as well as Curt Siodmak’s The Magnetic Monster

(1953), Richard Carlson’s Riders to the Stars (1954) and, as
late as 1992, post-production supervisor on Wade Williams’

remake of Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1945 noir classic Detour (1992).

So, Strock certainly knew his way around a sound stage. Yet,
if Strock had one personal failing, it was his inability to stand 77
up for himself in the face of opposition and so his credits as both director and editor fall into two distinct groups: projects on which he had a sympathetic and/or supportive producer,
who left him alone to get the job done, and other projects,
where he received little or no credit at all despite significant contributions because of his self-effacing nature.

Webb, on the other hand, had never directed film or television before; so, though he knew what he wanted, Webb needed

Strock’s technical expertise to help bring his vision to life and hired Strock to direct the pilot for the TV version of Dragnet.

Shooting on sets that matched the interior of the Los Angeles Police Department down to the last detail, Webb and Strock’s

Dragnet had a distinctive visual look (tight close-ups on the faces of the actors as they delivered their lines; mechanical, repetitive editing which cut on each line, waiting for the
response from the other actor; the use of drab locations and
equally utilitarian sets; flat, harsh lighting to give the series a documentary feel) that set it apart from other television series of the era. Webb also insisted that all the actors in the series read their lines off teleprompters, thus eliminating rehearsals and forcing the actors to read their lines with the robotic air that Webb wanted. Yet, the collaboration between Strock and

Webb was an uneasy one. When Webb felt confident enough
to take over after watching Strock direct the pilot for the
series – for which Strock received only an editorial credit –

Webb summarily fired Strock in 1952 and began directing the
series himself, although the visual and editorial style the two men had co-created remained intact.

While Dragnet’s social and cultural vision is largely
attributable to Jack Webb, Strock’s influence on the visual
stylization of the series cannot be discounted. And, indeed,

78

Strock was there at the very beginning of the series, working alongside the demanding and deeply insecure Webb, who saw

Dragnet as his one “make it or break it” shot at the big time.

As Strock recounted in his autobiography, Picture Perfect,

I was introduced to Jack Webb and Homer Canfield,
the Dragnet radio producer at NBC, and was
eventually employed as director and editor on the
pilot of the original Dragnet television series.

Because I had plunged into television with a
smattering of knowledge of TV production, actors’

deals, photography, and techniques of the day, and
because I had helped to form the Television

Producers Association and aided in getting the

Television Academy off to a start, I was hired by

Jack Webb […] I hired some of my crew from the

Eddie Drake series and from feature productions,
and we were off and running with Dragnet, which
was a tremendous success. (Strock 2000, 16)

However, the two men soon clashed. Webb was, in Strock’s
view, “a lonely man, in constant search of someone to
intimidate […] he would call me at all hours of the night, and demand that I meet him at the studio to discuss a problem that often did not really exist” (Strock 2000, 18). Webb’s shooting schedule was draconian; as Strock notes, “we were virtually
shooting around the clock and over […] holiday weekend[s]”

(17). It was Strock who showed Webb how to give Dragnet
the individual visual look that set it apart from other
television series of the era. Surprisingly, despite the fact that the actors were simply reading their lines from teleprompters on the set during shooting rather than memorizing them –

79
which should have saved time – the production pressure was relentless:

For dramatic reasons, lines would sometimes be
rewritten and have to be changed on all the various
prompter sheets with large, permanent brush pens,
which made reading more difficult. It was time
consuming, but radio actors read lines, they don’t
learn them, and most of the cast, in the earlier
shows, came from radio. The tension on these shows
was unbearable, and not just because of tight
schedules and prompters. Webb was tough on
everyone. […] I recognized his innate acting ability
and quick mind. He was in his element when he was
giving orders. In spite of his posturing, he was an
extremely energetic and brilliant man and a fast
learner. It didn’t take him long to decide to be star,
producer, and director of the show, and he did it
very well. In fact, when I finally decided I’d reached
the end of my rope with him, he told me I was a
damn good teacher who taught him too fast how to
direct, and he would now direct his own shows.

(Strock 2000, 18)

The situation was ultimately untenable for Strock, who was
essentially a gentle man and no match for Webb’s
authoritarian abrasiveness. But the Dragnet saga had an ironic coda for Strock. As he recalls, “years later, when we
accidentally met on a plane, [Webb] surprised me by saying
he owed his success to me – praise that came a little late!”

(Strock 2000, 18). Bleak, unrelenting and highly stylized for all of its embrace of skid row realism, Dragnet mirrored the

80
dark side of the Eisenhower era and became an iconic milestone in television history.

Before the series went off-the-air in its first incarnation (it would be revamped by Webb in a desperate attempt to
salvage his flagging career in 1966 with a TV movie that
spawned a short-lived, tone deaf revival of Dragnet from

1967 to 1970), the original television series of Dragnet racked up no fewer than 276 half-hour episodes, effectively spanning the entire decade of the 1950s from 16 December 1951 to 23

August 1959. At the same time, to wring every last possible
dollar out of the franchise, Dragnet continued as a radio show from its original airdate of 3 June 1949 to 26 February 1957, even as the television series took firm hold of the nation’s
consciousness.

The 1950s version of Dragnet was, in many ways, an

“outlier” in the contemporary televisual landscape; easily
burlesqued and imitated, there was still nothing else like it in terms of hard-nosed stylization, grimly procedural story lines and, for the period, grimy authenticity. A look at some of the plot lines demonstrates just how out of sync Dragnet was in a world populated by the likes of The Adventures of Ozzie and

Harriet, The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver and other
enormously popular, family-oriented series of the era.

Dragnet, by contrast, concentrated almost entirely on the
downsides of 1950s American existence; misfits, psychos,
drifters, con men and ne’er-do-wells collectively comprised
the series’ world. Dragnet’s world was the netherworld of

American society and every episode made it clear that only
the LAPD was holding back the tide of scum that threatened
to engulf Los Angeles and, by extension, the entire nation.

81

In “The Big Death” (17 January 1952), an unsuspecting husband hires Joe Friday, LAPD detective and protagonist of
the show, as a hit man to kill his wife; in “The Big Mother”

(31 January 1952), a newborn infant is abducted from a
hospital by an unstable young woman who is unable to have
children herself; in “The Big Speech” (28 February 1952),

Friday delivers a lecture warning on the evils of drug
addiction at his former high school, even as he tracks down a teenage hoodlum who, in seeking his next fix, beats up and
robs a friendly druggist; in “The Big Blast” (10 April 1952), which Webb both wrote and directed, a young mother is
killed in her bed by a shotgun blast as her infant son slumbers next to her; in “The Big September Man” (8 May 1952), an
unbalanced sociopath feels divinely inspired to kill “a sinner”

and his former fiancée is his most recent victim; in the justly infamous “.22 Rifle for Christmas” (18 December 1952,

Dragnet’s first “Christmas episode”), co-written by Moser
and Webb, a young boy prematurely opens a Christmas gift –
a .22 rifle – and accidentally kills one of his friends while playing with it, subsequently hiding the young victim’s body
in the brush on Christmas Eve.

In “The Big Lay Out” (16 April 1953), a high school honors
student becomes strung out on heroin; in “The Big Hands”

(21 May 1953), a young woman is found strangled to death in
a cheap hotel room; in “The Big Nazi” (25 November 1958),

Friday uncovers a high school neo-Nazi ring; and on and on it goes, a parade of beatings, stabbings, murders, rapes,
robberies and wanton brutality that seems to have no end in
sight, an unstoppable tidal wave of human greed, violence
and corruption (Hayde 2001, 264–87). Compared to the 1960s
version of the series, which kicked off with an unintentionally risible episode on the dangers of LSD – the “Blue Boy”

82
episode, actually titled “The LSD Story,” first broadcasted on 12 January 1967 – the 1950s version of Dragnet bristles with
menace, energy and simmering social disruption; no one even
thinks of “Mirandizing” suspects because, of course, no such
law existed. Instead, Joe Friday and his partner, Frank Smith (Ben Alexander), sweat out an assortment of lowlifes,
stoolies, drug addicts and convicted felons, quickly resorting to physical violence when even the slightest excuse to do so
presents itself. Of course, in this, the original TV version of Dragnet effectively mirrors the racist, homophobic and
right-wing Los Angeles Police Department of the period –
then under the direction of Chief W. H. Parker, who was
similarly adrift in the 1960s, oblivious to the demands and
concerns of a new generation that was better educated, more
independent, not afraid to challenge authority and, as the
decade progressed, almost universally opposed to the war in

Vietnam.

For all intents and purposes, however, Strock’s work on the
series seems to have been conscientiously erased in one
manner or another. But an assiduous search of the archives at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion

Picture Arts and Sciences reveals two tantalizing pieces of
information. The Daily Variety for 7 January 1952 lists

Strock as the film editor for the series – as he is credited in

“The Human Bomb” pilot episode – yet, by 11 February 1952

(just one month later), Daily Variety records that Strock had been dropped from the series and replaced by Robert Leeds.

In addition, in their review of “The Human Bomb” printed on

19 December 1951, Weekly Variety failed – in a departure
from their usually scrupulously complete credits for all the
films and television shots they covered – to assign any

83
editorial credit at all to the series, while writer Jim Moser and Webb are both prominently credited (“Jose” 1951, 27).

What makes all of this even more suspect – at least in my
eyes – is that only two days earlier in Daily Variety (17

December 1951), in another unsigned review, Strock is given
credit as “Associate Producer” for the pilot, which is certainly a few notches up from merely being the editor. Thus, having
spoken personally with Strock at great length in a detailed
telephone interview before his death on 30 November 2005
and having also reviewed not only the materials in the

Margaret Herrick Library, but also in the Jack Webb Papers at UCLA, and taking into account Strock’s career path as a
whole, I, for one, am inclined to believe his version of events.

Strock was far from the only person whom Webb used and
then summarily disposed of during his march to the top of the Nielsen ratings.

Webb’s politics – though he always insisted that Dragnet was
entertainment and not social engineering – leaned resolutely
to the far right and impatience and intolerance with any
differing points of view were shared equally by the actor in
real life and the character he played. On the set, Webb was a classic bully, threatening actors and technicians and – once
the yoke of Joe Friday had been indelibly placed upon him –
increasingly consumed by a desire to get the day’s shooting
over as fast as possible; episodes of the second iteration of Dragnet, such as “The Big Prophet” (11 January 1968) –
essentially, a half-hour tirade on the evils of drugs – were
knocked off in less than one day of shooting as Friday and Joe Gannon, his new partner (Harry Morgan), interrogate a

Timothy Leary-esque messiah figure who espouses the

“mind-expanding” use of LSD.

84

Where the black-and-white Dragnet episodes of the 1950s would often take three to four days to film and involve
numerous camera setups and carefully designed lighting,
camera movement and narrative structures, “The Big

Prophet” was in fact shot using only five camera setups for
the entire half-hour; the camera gazes in somnolent
stupefaction as Friday delivers yet another of his patented

“Jesus Speeches,” intended to set miscreants firmly on the
path to law-abiding righteousness.

Sure enough, the 1967–70 incarnation of Dragnet lasted only

3 years and 98 episodes. Shot in garish, cheap color on garish, cheap sets with “hotspots” abounding on the walls and doors,
the series lacks both care and conviction; any attempt at
authenticity has vanished. In the 1960s Dragnet, we’re left
with a threadbare scold who doesn’t understand what’s going
on in the world, doesn’t want to know and, much like Mitt

Romney, the failed Republican candidate in the 2012
presidential election, would love to return to the 1950s
forever – to when gays were “sexual deviants” and women
were fit only to be fashion accessories or baby machines.

Perhaps this is why the 1960s shows – which only marginally
scraped by in their original network turn – found their largest and most enthusiastic audience when they were run as camp
artifacts in the late 1980s on Nick at Nite. While the 1960s
version of Dragnet was the product of a tired, irascible,
out-of-touch reactionary, the 1950s version brought home the
reality of American life in the 1950s like no other show
before or since.

But Webb’s interaction with Herbert L. Strock in the early
days of Dragnet is far from an isolated instance. Having come up the hard way and having appropriated so many ideas from

85
others on his way to small screen stardom, Webb was well known to use people in the most brutal fashion as long as they could help him and then discard them without a backward
glance. Not only was he tough on his crews and actors
throughout Dragnet; he was equally rough on his business
partners. From the start, Webb was ruthless in his desire to
get whatever he wanted. To get Dragnet off the ground as a
radio series, for instance, Webb required the assistance of
agent Robert Rosenberg – who, in fact, owned the series
outright, while Webb was merely a salaried employee.

Needless to say, Webb wasn’t happy about this and he
refused to sign any contracts to bring Dragnet to television
with NBC until he gained full ownership of the series.

Rosenberg, erroneously reasoning that Webb needed Dragnet
more than Dragnet needed Webb – in short, that Webb could
be replaced with another actor/director – refused to sell out.

Thus began an intricate game of brinksmanship – the details
of which are still somewhat obscure to this day – in which the series producer, Michael Meshekoff, somehow talked

Rosenberg into signing over ownership to Webb. Webb then
promptly fired Rosenberg, who immediately sued him for

$300,000 in damages (Hayde 2001, 40–41).

With NBC and sponsor Liggett & Myers on his side, Webb
now had the upper hand and Rosenberg settled out of court
while Mike Meshekoff, who had worked for the agency
headed by Rosenberg, resigned to become Dragnet’s new
producer (Hayde 2001, 41). As payback for Meshekoff ’s
help in pulling off this coup, Webb offered the erstwhile
agent 25 percent of the show – which Meshekoff accepted –
while Rosenberg was reduced to a mere $625 per week of the
series’ net profits; now he, not Webb, was the salaried
employee (Hayde 2001, 41). But manifestations of Webb’s

86
inherent insecurity continued to pop up. When Webb was in the final negotiations with NBC for the Dragnet television
pilot, he suddenly insisted that he was wrong for the leading role of Joe Friday and suggested that veteran actor Lloyd

Nolan play the role. NBC wouldn’t hear of it; Webb was Joe

Friday whether he liked it or not and, if he wanted to direct the series, they’d give him a shot, but only if he also took on the leading role. Reluctantly, Webb, who was afraid he was
spreading himself too thin, acquiesced to the network’s
demands (Hayde 2001, 41).

This was not the end of the off-screen turmoil. In 1954, as

Lucanio and Coville, co-authors of “Behind Badge 714: The

Story of Jack Webb and Dragnet,” recount, Webb moved
against Meshekoff, whom he now regarded as a “moneyman”

and not a creative person, as Webb thought himself to be; he
replaced him with Stanley Meyer, who immediately began
negotiations for a big screen feature version of Dragnet,
which came out in 1954 (Lucanio and Coville 1993b, 80).

Nor was this the only legal or personal battle Webb faced in

1954; on 25 November, his divorce from Julie London
became final, with Webb being required to pay alimony and
child support for the couple’s two daughters, as well as

$500,000 in a property settlement. Significantly, not only did Webb not contest the ruling, but he wasn’t even present in
court as he was busy wrapping up shooting on the Dragnet
episode “The Big Gangster” at the time – and, obviously,
work came first (Hayde 2001, 75). During the same period,

Webb gave an uncharacteristically unvarnished interview on
the split with both Rosenberg and Meshekoff, in which he
griped, “what the hell have [Rosenberg and Meshekoff] done
since they left me? You just show me their track records […]

some of these money men even tell me they create, too. They

87
don’t create as much as the worst bit actor in the show”

(Lucanio and Coville 1993b, 80).

Shortly after this, Jim Moser – who had been the principal
writer and, in many respects, not only the narrative, but also the ideological architect of the series’ bleak worldview (only the police are competent; average citizens are either
incompetent or obstructions to police work; criminals
permeate every level of society and are at constant war with
the common good – in short, rampant Cold War era paranoia)

– got into a heated argument with Webb over Moser’s
freelancing work. In particular, they contended over Moser’s
scripts for the new hospital drama Medic, starring Richard

Boone, which Webb viewed as direct competition to Dragnet;
further, Webb accused Moser of appropriating Dragnet’s flat,
matter-of-fact style in his scripts for Medic to bring a new
degree of realism to the series, which was indeed a healthy
departure from the Dr. Kildare vision of the medical
profession (Lucanio and Coville 1993b, 80).

What made the situation more peculiar was that Moser had
pitched Medic to Webb’s Mark VII Productions as a possible
series, but Webb, surprisingly, was convinced that a hospital drama would be too grim to attract a mass audience (Hayde

2001, 102). Webb was wrong; Medic, despite being slotted by

NBC directly opposite I Love Lucy, lasted for two full
seasons (1954–56) and was lauded by critics. When it
eventually folded, however, Moser found himself drawn back
into Dragnet’s monolithic production machine along with

Medic’s producer, Frank La Tourette (Hayde 2001, 201).

Nevertheless, at the time, the feud between Webb and Moser
was hot copy for the trade journals (Lucanio and Coville

88

1993b, 80) and relations between Webb and Moser were indeed strained – so much so that, on Friday, 18 December

1954, Moser filed suit against Mark VII Productions for back
pay on no fewer than 47 radio scripts that Moser had written
for the radio version of Dragnet, which then had been
recycled for scripts for the TV series. Moser had only been
paid for the use of 19 of the 47 screenplays and sued for

$9,100. The matter was almost immediately settled out of
court, but the acrimonious atmosphere between the two men
persisted; Webb was simply driving Moser too hard and was
jealous of any “outside” projects he might pursue (Hayde

2001, 78).

Privately, Webb hoped that he would be able to take a hiatus
from Dragnet to launch a television series based on his 1951
radio series Pete Kelly’s Blues, starring a trumpet player in 1920s Kansas City. In what little downtime he had available
to him, Webb was an inveterate fan of New Orleans jazz – a
holdover from his turbulent youth – and he saw this new
show as a way to expand his horizons. There had been 13
radio episodes of Pete Kelly in 1951; now, Webb wanted to
translate Pete Kelly to the small screen, but the unceasing
demands of Dragnet proved overwhelming. Webb directed
and starred in a 1955 feature film based on the old radio
scripts – also entitled Pete Kelly’s Blues, in which Lee

Marvin’s performance completely overshadowed Webb’s
work in the film – and, in 1959, finally brought Pete Kelly to television for a 13 episode run, starring William Reynolds in the lead role. Critical and audience response for the show,
however, was tepid.

But with Dragnet firmly established, Webb was able to make
his biggest deal yet: cashing in on Dragnet’s popularity to

89
make a fortune overnight. As the 89th episode – “The Big Crime,” about the abduction and sexual molestation of twin
girls, age four, by an “alcoholic delivery man” who later
admits he would have killed them both had not Friday and his
partner apprehended him – wrapped production on 23

December 1954 and Webb, under doctor’s orders, decamped
to Hawaii for a month’s vacation to recuperate from his
round-the-clock work on the series, the actor/director was
preparing for his biggest coup of all: selling out all rights to the television version of Dragnet to MCA (the Music

Corporation of America) for a cool $5 million in cash (Hayde

2001, 78–9).

Dragnet was now very hot property indeed. The big screen
movie version from Warner Bros. (in color) was in the offing
and NBC further affirmed their faith in the continuing pull of the series on 28 December 1954 with an order for an
unprecedented 95 additional episodes (Hayde 2001, 79).

Whether he liked it or not – and there is ample evidence that Webb was growing weary of the Joe Friday straitjacket –

Dragnet had become an unstoppable, seemingly endless
franchise. Whether he wanted to accept it or not, Jack Webb
was hopelessly typecast; the public wanted him as Joe Friday
or they didn’t want him at all. Ever the realist, Webb decided to give the public what they wanted.

With Webb still in Hawaii, attorneys for Mark VII

Productions and MCA in Los Angeles hammered out a final
deal for the TV rights to Dragnet on the last day of the year, 31 December 1954. The MCA deal was both straightforward
and complex. For $5 million, MCA got all rights to Dragnet
as a television show – both all episodes so far produced, as
well as all episodes to come – with Webb receiving an

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additional $100,000 a year in salary and royalties, as well as retaining complete creative control over the series through

Mark VII Productions, extending into perpetuity (which is
why when the series was relaunched in 1967, it remained
firmly in the hands of MCA/Universal, as the company later
became known) (Hayde 2001, 79). Additionally, MCA set up
an entirely separate arm of their television production unit, Sherry TV, exclusively to manage both Dragnet and Badge

714, as the series was known in syndication; with more than
enough episodes in the can, it was time to cash in on the
nationwide “network” of independent television stations with
reruns as Badge 714 while the network version, Dragnet,
continued on its course until 1959 (Hayde 2001, 79).

With the paperwork finalized, Meshekoff – long departed
from the show, yet still the owner of 25 percent of Mark VII

Productions – sold out to MCA, who immediately sold the 25
percent back to Webb as part of the overall deal. In the end, Meshekoff got roughly $2 million for his interest in Mark VII by holding out until the MCA deal was finalized; Stanley

Meyer, who had set up a deal with Warner Bros. for the

Dragnet feature, got out with $1.25 million; Webb walked
away with $2.5 million (Hayde 2001, 79). Webb no longer
owned Dragnet outright, but he had fulfilled his initial
ambition: he was now a millionaire – more than a millionaire.

That was all he had ever wanted and now he had achieved his
goal. The rest of his life would be a postscript.

Footnote

*

A version of this chapter was first published in 2012 by

Film International (online) as “Just the Facts, Man: The

91

Complicated

Genesis
of

Television’s

Dragnet”

(25

November): http://filmint.nu/?p=6348.

92

Chapter 5

THE DISQUIETING AURA

OF FABIÁN BIELINSKY*

I said no to Hollywood. There you have no freedom
to create.

—Bielinsky to Federico Fahsbender (Fashbender

2005)

Film audiences won’t find in [The Aura] an
accessible or agreeable story. Also, the film doesn’t
show a bit of sympathy or good intentions for any of
the characters. I’m talking not only about the near
total lack of humor, but also that dramatic
concessions were avoided in the screenplay – even
though this is not a very good attitude when you
think of a film as a product to be sold.

—Bielinsky to Amadeo Lukas (Lukas 2009)

Fabián Bielinsky’s career was brief, but incandescent, yet his moment in the public eye came after years of hard work and
apprenticeship. Born on the 3 February 1959 in Buenos Aires,

Bielinsky became obsessed with cinema during childhood
and, by the age of 13, began making films while studying at
the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires – one of which was the
short film Continuidad de los Parques (1971), based on a
short story by Julio Cortázar. After graduating from high
school, Bielinsky suddenly decided to pursue studies in
psychology, but soon abandoned this to enter the Centro de

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Experimentación y Realización Cinematografia (also known as Escuela Nacional de Experimentación y Realización

Cinematográfica or ENERC) where he directed another short
film – La Espera (The Wait, 1983), from a story by Jorge Luis Borges – which also attracted favorable attention, winning
first prize at the International Festival of Huesco in Spain

(Moviefone 2013). This led to a plethora of work as an
assistant director and, before his debut as a feature director with Nine Queens in 1998, Bielinsky drove himself into the
ground working on roughly 400 television commercials along
with, in the words of one biographer, several high-profile
feature films including Marco Bechis’ Alambrado, Mario

Levin’s Sotto Voce, and Carlos Sorin’s Eterna Sonrise de

New Jersey. Bielinsky then worked his way up the ladder,
climbing up to the tier of co-screenwriter and second director on two projects for filmmaker Fernando Spiner: Bajamar, la

Costa del Silencio and La Sonámbula. Bielinsky’s graduation
to director happened somewhat capriciously; he won first
prize in a filmmaking contest sponsored by Patagonik Film

Group, Kodak, Cinecolor, JZ y Associados and FX Sound – a
cash prize that gave him the funds to shoot his debut feature.

This effort, 1998’s Nine Queens, [won] awards around the
globe, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay,
and seven other accolades at the 2001 Argentinean Film

Critics’ Association Awards; Best Argentinean Film of the

Year by FIPRESCI 2001; and the Audience Award and Best

Director prizes at the 2001 Lleida Latin-American Film

Festival. The picture, a labyrinthine crime thriller sans the comic overtones of Pulp Fiction and True Romance that had
become en vogue at the time, deals with two smalltime con
artists, Juan (Gastón Pauls) and Marcos (Ricardo Darín), who
partner up for a hotel-centered scam that involves a philatelic forgery. (Moviefone 2013)

94

Figure 5. Fabián Bielinsky on the set of The Aura.

Source: Image courtesy of Photofest.

Indeed, the film was a worldwide hit and even spawned a
tepid American remake – Criminal (Gregory Jacobs, 2004),
with John C. Reilly, Diego Luna and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Diplomatically, Bielinsky refused to discuss Criminal, telling Jorge Letelier that, “I promised not to talk about it. Let
everyone draw their own conclusions. What do I know? It has
very good actors” (Letelier 2006). In the meantime, Nine

Queens unexpectedly “typed” Bielinsky as an expert in “caper
comedies,” something that he hadn’t fully appreciated when
the film was first released. But, even with Nine Queens –
which is nothing more or less than a blinding series of double and triple crosses coupled with “slamming door” farce
dealing with inopportune and/or staged exits and entrances –

Bielinsky was trying mightily to break out beyond the barriers of convention. Fluent in both Spanish and English, Bielinsky
was courted by the World Press and gave a series of

95
valedictory press junket interviews on the film, telling the BBC’s Tom Dawson that
people told me that they wanted to make something
more commercial. Before Nine Queens, in

Argentina if you wanted to make money with your
film, you had to do a stupid comedy with television
actors. Nine Queens proved that you could make a
personal film, without big stars, which wasn’t a
comedy, and that it could still make a load of money
and get good reviews. (Dawson 2002)

But, of course, this really isn’t the case; Nine Queens is
resolutely commercial from start to finish and is seemingly
designed to both dazzle and confuse audiences in the most
nonthreatening fashion possible. One can hardly blame

Bielinsky, though, for trying so ferociously to work his way
out of the world of 60-second television spots and assistant
director jobs with his first feature, for which he also wrote the screenplay. As Andrew L. Urban noted while conducting an
interview with Bielinsky shortly after the film’s release,

Bielinsky has the odd phone call from those
producers who had been offered the script but

[rejected it]. “Some never called me again, but a few
called and said, ‘What can I say, I was wrong, I’m
an [asshole] […] everybody’s telling me I’m an

[asshole] and they’re right’ […] but believe me, it’s
nothing like revenge for me because I did end up
with the right producers and I’m glad I didn’t make
the film with those that knocked me back. Fate led
me to the right place […] I’ve had a lot of phone
calls – something like 15 different production

96
companies from all over the world, but mainly Americans – have approached the production
company to buy the script and do an English
language remake. But not only American […] there
were also people from England and France
interested. When there was vague talk of me
directing a remake, I said absolutely not. I’m not
going to make my first and second film the same.

That’s a crazy idea. [Instead, I’m working on] a
psychological thriller – or something like that […]

about a decent man who is tempted by crime. I’d
like to […] you know, make it a small, warm film
and keep full control. But the most amazing thing
that happened to me with Nine Queens is that
everybody from all over the world is calling me and
they want to work with me and they offer me
production and everything. All these doors are wide
open waiting for me. But I’m trying not to think
about all that […] just thinking of the script and to
finish that first.” (Urban 2002)

Of course, in refusing to try to repeat himself, Bielinsky
almost guaranteed diminishing returns – not to mention
limited his future creative options for the rest of his career.

But Bielinsky was already moving on, even disavowing the
film that had put him on the map to a degree by refusing to
categorize it as a comedy; rather, he called it a “personal
film.” Yes, it was a film over which Bielinsky had total
creative control, but if he had followed in the ill-advised
footsteps of such directors as Géla Babluani, whose slavishly uninspired 2010 American remake of his brilliant 13 Tzameti

(2005, titled simply 13) pretty much finished his career, or

George

Sluizer,
whose
watered-down
and
fatally

97
compromised 1993 American remake of his 1988 hit Spoorloos (The Vanishing) also caused a major career
setback, he probably would have suffered much the same fate.

As he told Urban of the proposed American remake, even at
that early stage, the entire idea was inherently ridiculous:

“You as director and the crew and the producers who made
the film with you, we all agree that the film was perfect.

Everybody loved the film, and it went great at the box office and we won all these accolades and awards and everybody
liked the film […] so, let’s do it again” (Urban 2002).

No – that would not happen to Fabián Bielinsky. Even
though, as Stuart Klawans would point out after Bielinsky’s
death, Bielinsky received “no [financial] windfall from Nine

Queens, having signed away the film’s rights to the

[organizers of the competition that provided the financing]”

(Klawans 2006, 348), making Nine Queens as his debut
feature was still an exceptionally shrewd move. As Klawans
notes, Nine Queens outgrossed Ridley Scott’s Gladiator in

Argentinian cinemas, but such outsize success comes with a
definite price. As the press junket for Nine Queens wore on
and on – even into 2002 – Bielinsky

[began] to sound apologetic. Because of Nine

Queens, “I’m in a privileged situation,” he [said] in

March 2002 to Anthony Kaufman, an American
reporter for IndieWire. “I have international
connections and European and American production
companies contacting me to see what I want to do
next. But filmmaking here is still very hard. I may
be okay, but some of my friends are not, and the rest
of the country is not, so it’s not exactly a happy
feeling” […] To the world at large, [Bielinsky]

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embodie[d] the New Argentine Cinema; but to […]

critics and festival programmers who support them,

Bielinsky is more like a Hollywood director with a

Porteño accent. They see that the intricate,
money-driven plot and quick pace of Nine Queens
might easily be translated into an American re-make

[…] [m]eanwhile, the upsurge of New Argentine

Cinema is producing films that can’t be categorized,
translated or easily financed: Lucrecia Martel’s
brooding, atmospheric examination of middle class
rot, La Ciénaga; Adrián Caetano’s neo-realist
portrait of an immigrant laborer, Bolivia; Diego

Lerman’s lesbian punk road movie, Tan de repente;

Carlos Sorin’s rueful and funny portrayal of small
lives in large Patagonian spaces, Historias minimas.

(Klawans 2006, 347)

And money, as it always is, remains the real stumbling block
to creating anything of lasting value and worth in the cinema: give the public what they want and you’ll probably make a
least a modest profit, even if you don’t hit the jackpot; try something riskier and you’re in unchartered territory. As

Klawans put it,

Bielinsky was not an impractical man. He chose to
put forward Nine Queens, rather than another
screenplay on hand, because it was playful in spirit,
full of trickery and imposture. So ingeniously
constructed was this mechanical toy that it might
have belonged to a fairytale Emperor of China. So
smoothly did the device amuse its actual owners –
the ticket-buying masses – that audiences could
accept it as if it were a conventional product.

99

Bielinsky started out by giving the people something he knew they’d want: a yarn about an inexperienced
young con artist, a swaggering older one, a primly
beautiful woman, and an allegedly valuable sheet of
postage stamps. […] Stylistically self-contradictory
and precedent-defying yet instantly accessible, Nine

Queens belonged to no category except the biggest
of them all: the movies. The generic thrill that

Bielinsky offered his audience, and shared with
them, was that of a Saturday matinée. “I felt the
pleasure as a spectator all my life,” he told an

American interviewer, Pam Grady, around the time

Nine Queens was released in the United States. “A
teenage feeling. Oh, two hours of movies! To see the

Metro lion and the Twentieth Century Fox
searchlight and the Warner Bros. WB […] It’s like
somebody telling you that you’re going to have a
good time.” (Klawans 2000, 348–9)

Except that something terrible happened in the interim:

Argentina’s financial structure, always somewhat perilous,
spiraled into near total collapse. As Anthony Kaufman
reported,

On December 19 [2001], mass protests erupted in

Argentina over an economic crisis that was only
getting worse. After riots in Buenos Aires resulted in
a reported seven deaths, the economic minister and
the president resigned, and what was South

America’s second largest economy (after Brazil) lay
in ruin. Subsequently, the country has had several
interim presidents and seems to be on the road to
recovery, but as Campanella says, “No one knows

100
exactly what’s going to happen. It’s even more complicated than Enron.” At the 2002 Rotterdam

Film

Festival,
several
attending

Argentine
filmmakers issued a statement expressing their
collective concerns. “Due to the lack of honesty and
talent of the governing class,” it said, “a richly
endowed country was brought down at the very
same moment that the Argentine cinema started to
bear the fruits of the changes in the industry.”

(Kaufman 2002)

In this atmosphere of free fall, Bielinsky stood out as a
commercial director in both senses of the word – he not only
directed feature films that were resolutely commercial, as
evidenced by Nine Queens, but also directed actual
commercials for television, relying upon his skill in the
medium to support his family while driving himself harder
and harder. He was, in short, successful in the midst of
catastrophe. Chain smoking, eating heavy foods, living on
coffee and nerves, Bielinsky was soon diagnosed with
hypertension brought on by both overwork and overweight,
but he could see no way out of his situation. To repeat himself would be both artistic and career suicide; he could see that
clearly. What, then, to do other than to continue on with his hectic lifestyle, living hand to mouth directing commercials, desperately trying to patch together funding for the project
that would emerge as his last feature film, The Aura (2005)?

The roots of The Aura go way back in Bielinsky’s childhood
to a screening of John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972), which
so mesmerized the young cineaste that he refused to leave his seat until the management gave him a poster of the film as a
souvenir (Harley 2006). Over the years, Deliverance occupied

101
almost the entire space of the young director’s mind; it’s worth noting that, even as he suggested that after the success of Nine Queens he might next like to try his hand at “a
psychological thriller,” the first draft of the script for The Aura was written in 1983, the year he directed the short film La Espera and graduated from the national film school

(Harley 2006). The film was in every way darker and more
fatalistic than Nine Queens; as he declared from the outset of the film’s production, The Aura was designed to please no
one but its maker.

As Bielinsky told Jorge Letelier in the film journal Mabuse,

“the [film’s] theme is crime, but its structure allows for more discussions because […] I decided to accept a series of brutal and dangerous breaks in the structure, because in a genre film audiences expect a certain type of structure and rhythm
according to the rules of the genre in question. I opted to go on breaking those rules, so that things wouldn’t happen when
they were supposed to happen” (Letelier 2006). And this,
indeed, is precisely what sets The Aura apart from more
traditional crime “thrillers”: it is, at its heart, a study in psychological penetration, gesturing back to the director’s
early studies in psychology and his examination of the ethos
of machismo in Latin American society.

And it’s clear that, as an omnivorous moviegoer, Bielinsky
knew much better than most of the people who interviewed
him that Nine Queens had been a work of precise calculation

– every bit the same sleight-of-hand trick that the film itself celebrated. Make The Aura first? Not likely. Make a crowd
pleaser first, designed to appeal to the widest possible
audience, and then, if you were lucky and worked hard, you
just might get a shot at a script that had been kicking around 102
in your file drawers since your 24th birthday – a work so dark, so uncompromising, so willfully designed not to please
that it might as well have been Godard’s Le Petit Soldat or

Les Carabiniers (both 1963), films which represented an
outright assault on their respective audiences. And, when an
unsuspecting critic suggested that someone like David Mamet
might have been an influence on Bielinsky’s work, the
director was quick to disabuse them of that mistaken notion.

When David Edwards ventured that Mamet might perhaps
have been “a particular influence,” Bielinsky good naturedly, but firmly, put Edwards in his place, saying:

[Well], you know I was writing ideas like this before

I even knew David Mamet existed! Of course, it’s
flattering to be compared to him because he’s such a
great scriptwriter and playwright. But, you know,

Mamet didn’t invent this. There’s a whole history of
con man movies before he came on the scene. I
mean, I think about films like The Sting, Paper

Moon, The Flim Flam Man, House of Games, the
films of Fellini and other Italian films I saw when I
was a teenager. (Edwards 2002)

So, the roots of both Nine Queens and The Aura run deep –
not only into Bielinsky’s past, but into the past of cinema as a whole. And now, with the immense success of his first film
and the American remake racking up acceptable grosses,
producers who were formerly unwilling to take a chance on

Bielinsky’s pet project agreed to participate. True, he had to cobble together financing from a variety of sources – and,
especially in the wake of Argentina’s financial collapse,
everything, not just filmmaking, was a daily struggle – but, at length, all was in place and Bielinsky was allowed to embark

103
upon the dark journey of The Aura – which, though he did not know it at the time, would be his last testament as a
filmmaker. If Nine Queens presents the picture of a world
becoming undone – a film that, in the words of Michael

Chanan, “presents the picture of a corrupt society, where
everyone is conning everyone else, a metaphor for a
dangerous political situation on the verge of coming to a
head, with a closing scene – as a bank puts up its shutters and depositors clamor for their money – that is nothing short of
prophetic” (Chanan 2006) – then The Aura shows the
aftermath of that society’s collapse – now no longer a joking matter, but rather a deadly serious fight for survival.

The Aura’s central plot – in contrast to that of Nine Queens, though equally complex – takes on a much more sinister hue
from the film’s first moments. When we first meet The

Aura’s protagonist, an epileptic loner named Esteban

Espinoza (Ricardo Darín again, in a superb performance), it is in a vertiginous overhead crane shot as he regains
consciousness after passing out at an ATM in the deserted
lobby of a Buenos Aires bank with no one around to help
him. From the opening of The Aura, Esteban’s isolation from
society is complete; afflicted with blackouts he can’t control, alienated from the world and utterly alone, Esteban is the
epitome of the modern man – solitary, hopeless, friendless.

Pulling himself together, Esteban marches his way back to his house where he works on some stuffed animals for a museum
display while listening to Vivaldi’s Sinfonia alla rustica on his radio.

From the next room, his wife pounds on the translucent glass
door to Esteban’s workroom, but Esteban ignores her and
turns up the radio to drown out her voice, continuing with his 104
work in a calm, unconcerned manner. It’s clear that whatever relationship they might have had is over. And, indeed, we
never really see his wife – just her shadow as she tries to get his attention with shouts and threats, none of which touch

Esteban in the slightest; he’s in his own world, bringing the dead “back to life” with artificial eyes, fur and other totemic aspects of existence, even if this imitation of life is utterly superficial and phantasmal.

At the museum, Esteban meets a fellow taxidermist who is
also bringing along some dead animals for display, but,
though the two men “know” each other, one could hardly call
them friends. Sontag (Alejandro Awada) is a gruff, brutal
man, utterly lacking in compassion or humanity and both men
readily admit that they’re trying to palm off some inferior
goods on the museum – recycled trophies that they’ve
previously used in other dioramas. Wandering through the
museum while they wait for the display director to decide
what he’ll buy from them, Esteban and Sontag walk through
the halls of the decaying building, commenting on how
rundown the place has become.

When Esteban gently touches one of the stuffed animals on
display, its antlers immediately fall off; everything is
appearance and fragile appearance at that. A few minutes later in the payroll office of the museum, however, as Esteban and

Sontag line up for their checks, the film’s central narrative kicks in: Esteban’s fantasy life as a master criminal. In a
superbly executed “fantasy projection” sequence, Esteban
describes to Sontag just how he would rob the payroll office
with a group of imaginary accomplices. As Bielinsky shows
us the entire robbery in detail in a blur of activity, Esteban and Sontag remain in the center of the commotion, unaffected

105
by the events around them. None of this is “really”

happening, of course. It’s all in Esteban’s mind and his calm detachment as he narrates the details of the crime to Sontag –
a crime we are “witnessing” – is in stark contrast to the sleek efficiency of the phantom criminals, who pull off the

“robbery” without a hitch and vanish down a secret catwalk to make good their escape.

This is the most visceral scene in the film up to this point in the narrative; it’s clear that Esteban lives more fully in his imagination than he does in real life. Sontag has heard all this before, in various other scenarios – how Esteban would pull
off the “perfect” robbery in any number of locations – but he is still amazed by Esteban’s photographic memory. Without
looking twice, Esteban is able to instantly memorize the serial numbers on the bags of money carried by the payroll guards;
perhaps this is a side effect of his epilepsy – of the “aura” that envelopes him with inexorable inevitability just before each
attack. But with the fantasy robbery “complete” in Esteban’s
imagination, Bielinsky returns us to the quotidian drabness of the payroll office and the dull certainty of everyday life. It’s just a dream, after all – though we sense that Esteban, if given the chance, might just follow through on such a scenario.

Returning home, Esteban discovers that his wife has left him, leaving just a cursory note that we never see. When Sontag
suggests that the two men take a vacation to do some hunting, they eventually arrive at the forest lodge of Carlos Dietrich (Manual Rodal), a mysterious figure who keeps a secret
hunting lodge deep in the woods and, as eventually becomes
clear, is involved in preparations for an elaborate payroll
robbery. However, we don’t meet Dietrich at this point in the narrative; he is out on a hunting trip, leaving his abused wife, 106

Diana (Dolores Fonzi), in charge of the lodge. In the meantime, Sontag becomes disgusted with Esteban’s inability
to effectively stalk and kill the very same animals that he
stuffs for a living and, after a quarrel, the two men separate, with Sontag essentially abandoning Esteban at Dietrich’s
remote hunting lodge. Alone, unsure of what to do next,

Esteban ventures deep into the forest, determined at last to
hunt and kill a deer to prove, in some fashion, that he has the cojones to take a life.

But, just as he is about to pull the trigger and bring down a magnificent stag that seems unaware of his presence, Esteban
suffers another epileptic seizure – which Bielinsky signals
with a series of sweeping tracking shots as the world seems to collapse around Esteban, obliterating his conscious existence.

When, at length, Esteban wakes up, not knowing how long
he’s been unconscious, he instinctively grabs his rifle and
aims at the first thing that moves. Unfortunately, this turns out to be Dietrich; Esteban, in the first genuinely violent act of the film, kills him with a single shot to the head. This is the first time we’ve seen Dietrich and it’s also the last; a figure viewed in distance, his living presence in the film is confined to a matter of seconds. The corpse of Dietrich is a different matter altogether, however. It reveals, upon examination, a
host of information about Dietrich’s planned payroll job and a key to the cabin in the woods where Dietrich secretly made
his plans. With Dietrich’s death, Esteban is also “adopted” by Dietrich’s dog – a massive animal with one blue eye and one
brown eye who seemingly transfers his loyalty from his dead
master to Esteban and serves as Esteban’s erstwhile guide
into Dietrich’s dark domain. Entering Dietrich’s cabin,

Esteban discovers the complete plan for the robbery and, with his photographic memory, absorbs every detail of the plan.

107

Returning to the lodge, Esteban is confronted by two of Dietrich’s criminal associates – Sosa (Pablo Cedron) and

Montero (Walter Reyno) – and passes himself off as

Dietrich’s partner in the proposed payroll robbery, explaining that Dietrich had to leave suddenly on business. Dietrich’s
wife, Diana, is completely unaware of her late husband’s
plans, although she knows that something is in the works.

But, at the same time, the much younger Diana – who bears
the scars of Dietrich’s savage beatings on her back – is really more a prisoner of Dietrich’s lodge than anything else; it’s
clear that she long ago ceased to care for her husband.

As Esteban, Sosa and Montero proceed with their plans for
the robbery, Diana keeps her distance even as she befriends

Esteban, recognizing that there’s some good in him. The
robbery, for Esteban, is more of an adventure than a criminal enterprise – for once in his life, Esteban would like to see one of his schemes played out for real, but he doesn’t really
understand the potential consequences of what he’s doing.

Esteban is a dreamer, not a hardened criminal; by contrast,

Sosa and Montero are utterly ruthless, willing to kill at a
moment’s notice. As the plan picks up speed and starts to
unfold, Esteban finds himself utterly alone in a hostile world of greed, violence and brutality far more vicious than
anything he could ever have imagined. “Perfect” crimes
happen only in daydreams; in the real world, with everyone
out for themselves, things unfold in a decidedly different
manner.

I will leave the rest of the narrative to the viewer to discover; indeed, all I have sketched is the first thirty or so minutes of the film, which then embarks on a series of spectacular
double crosses and deceptions reminiscent of Nine Queens,

108
but far more sinister in both their implications and their consequences. Through it all, Esteban sleepwalks through the
steps of Dietrich’s plan as if lost in a dream in which reality and fantasy are impossible to separate. The music for the film

– a stunningly hypnotic drone score composed by Lucio

Godoy – suitably amplifies this “disconnect” from society.

Even though he is “part” of Dietrich’s scheme, Esteban is still in the dark about many of the twists and turns in the plan and is left to discover, often to his detriment, numerous aspects of the scheme that aren’t readily apparent.

Indeed, Esteban seems almost more like a spectator than a
participant in the film’s action – he’s along for the ride, but he has no real idea of how things will eventually turn out. During one memorable sequence midway through the film, as

Esteban is tracking the various ancillary characters in

Dietrich’s scheme, he witnesses a payroll robbery at a
manufacturing plant from his car across the street, not more
than 100 feet away from a scene of violence and mayhem. As
the robbery unfolds – viewed exclusively from Esteban’s
point of view in a series of long shots – Esteban leaves his car and wanders across the street right into the thick of a vicious gun battle between the thieves and the police, seemingly
oblivious to the risk he’s taking. And, indeed, he is oblivious; none of this is real to him. His entire life is a dream. Indeed, all of the events in The Aura may well be entirely imaginary –
is any of this really happening at all?

As Bielinsky’s friend, Diego Lerer, noted after the director’s death,

In the world of Fabián Bielinsky, behind every
corner there was darkness. The unexpected, the

109
impossible, the surreal could come up at every turn.

In El aura, his second and, sadly, last film, the main
character walks in the woods, surrounded by
shadows and fog, with only flashes of light
illuminating the tall trees. The light is out there – the
world, the possibility of happiness – but he can’t see
it. His mind is somewhere else: planning the next
step of an elaborate robbery, stealing the identity of
the man he just killed. Obsessive to the point of
memorizing every number, every face, every step he
had to walk to get out of the woods, the protagonist
cannot, finally, control everything that’s around him.

Because real life, real things, can’t be controlled,
processed, written down on a piece of paper and
handled as if it were a map, where space and time
are fixed and easy to follow. His mind controls him,
but can’t control the world […]

[Like Esteban, Bielinsky’s] mind was always
somewhere else, maybe a few steps ahead of yours,
like a great chess player that has the entire game in
his mind before even moving the first piece […] He
would shoot and reshoot every scene until it looked
exactly the way he had conceived it in his mind. He
fought to maintain a very long cut of El aura (at the
expense of a tighter editing that would have given
the film a better and longer commercial run) because
he believed that was the only way the audience
could get into the mind of the protagonist. He also
made the entire film from the main character’s
point-of-view, forcing the audience to be outside the
main action during long sequences. But he had a
vision of what he wanted. And he stuck to that, with

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great results. El aura was also a great step to show his qualities as a filmmaker […]

[Bielinsky] was able to show a strong command of
storytelling in Nine Queens. But that film was – still
is – basically a great script, shot in a very classical,
unobtrusive way, helped by a career-making
performance by Darín. No wonder it was compared
to the films of David Mamet, another great
storyteller not particularly famous for his visual
skills. El aura was a different thing altogether.

Standing apart from the precise logic of Nine

Queens, Bielinsky dared to abandon the big city and
go to the woods in Patagonia, when time, space and
events are harder to predict. The wildlife, the guns,
the mysterious animals, the traps were not as easy to
handle as they had been when the main character

[…] was in Buenos Aires working as a taxidermist.

These animals, these people, these guns were real,
and they could turn things around at any given time.

Even the shooting of the film ended up being more
difficult than the production company had predicted:

they couldn’t control the weather, the light, the
hundreds of things that can go wrong when you are
out in the wilderness. With El aura came a different
approach in terms of screenwriting, a decision to let
things more open to interpretation, to avoid closing
all the doors to the audience for a satisfying and
conclusive ending. With that, also came a more
lyrical approach to filmmaking. Longer takes,
moody atmosphere, a visual palette that’s closer to a
painting created by a disturbed mind (the mind of

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the protagonist), and a filmic style you can compare to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks or Sam Raimi’s A

Simple Plan. (Lerer 2006)

Bielinsky’s achievement in The Aura, then, is one of
transcendence – of escape from the real into the zone of
imagination, which then doubles back up on itself to
encompass actuality. It’s also worth noting in passing that this idea of a “sleepwalking” protagonist was not new to

Bielinsky, who scripted the equally dreamlike The Sleep

Walker (La Sonámbula) for director Fernando Spiner in 1998
and, when working in commercials, assisted none other than

Wim Wenders in the shooting of a Renault Mégane
commercial (the Mégane is a small family car manufactured
by Renault) in Argentina, which had a similarly surrealistic
bent (Chanan 2006). As Esteban tells Diana Dietrich in The

Aura, he lives his life in a state of perpetual uncertainty –
never knowing when an attack will come on, simultaneously
dreading each episode and yet anticipating it, as if his hold on reality remains very slight indeed; as he describes it, “there’s a moment, a shift […] things suddenly change […] The fit is
coming, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it. Nothing.

It’s horrible […] and it’s perfect. Because during those few
seconds, you’re free. There’s no choice. No alternative.

Nothing for you to decide.”

And yet, for all of its sophistication – or rather, precisely because of it – The Aura failed to duplicate the commercial
success of Nine Queens; then again, Bielinsky made it
manifestly clear going into the project that he more or less
expected a lukewarm public reception. Never mind; he would
keep directing commercials until a new project presented
itself. Though not a box-office smash, The Aura had been an

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overwhelming critical success and that was all that mattered.

But it was not to be. As Vince Keenan notes,

El aura did not achieve Neuve Reinas’s level of
exposure in the United States. It was distributed via
the Independent Film Channel’s First Take series,
released on demand and in theaters simultaneously.

This approach makes films available to a wider
audience […] but at the expense of publicity. Even
being named one of 2006’s best films by the New

York Times’s A. O. Scott didn’t garner El aura
additional attention. On June 26, 2006, El aura
swept Argentina’s film awards, taking home prizes
for best picture, Bielinsky’s script and direction, and

Darín’s performance among others. Two days later,
in a hotel room in São Paulo, Brazil where he was
casting a TV commercial, Fabián Bielinsky died of a
heart attack at age 47, leaving behind a wife and a
young son. (Keenan 2009)

In one of his last interviews, conducted on 21 April 2006 by

Mariano Colalongo and Alvaro Fuentes at Bielinsky’s home
in La Plata, Buenos Aires – “a comfortable and bright house
with a home theater, with DVD shelves of some 400 classic

American films” (Colalongo and Fuentes 2006) – Bielinsky
told his two listeners that, with regard to The Aura,

I am glad to have done what I did in terms of the
whole work. I was convinced I wanted to open the
picture to other completely different spaces, to
precisely my own decisions […] The Aura is a more
personal film, from a different place, linked to
certain obsessions or fantasies or thoughts that are

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mine […] [at the premiere of the film] I remember

[Ricardo] Darín [saying], “It’s you that you see on
the screen – it’s you.” […] Yes, the truth is that
there is a personal component in terms of
atmosphere, climate, a level of obsession […]

(Colalongo and Fuentes 2006)

But who is it that Darín saw on the screen? As Megan Ratner
noted,

Despite their tight narratives, Bielinsky’s films pose
questions about the suppositions and assumptions
most film viewers make, even about the very act of
viewing itself. The taxidermist especially is remote,
unable to be in life except as a kind of fill-in. Even
in the midst of a shoot-out, he seems invisible to
those taking part, protected by his semi-existence.

Later in the film, deep into a heist, one of his
unwilling associates accosts him: “Who are you?

Where do you come from?” as if unable to imagine
this man is flesh and blood. What he responds to is
the taxidermist’s lack of affect, the profound
uninvolvement that allows him to watch even a
gunfight as if at a screening. Though his plotting and
techniques drew largely on traditions of Wilder and
other established masters, Bielinsky set challenges
as far-reaching as Michael Haneke’s in Code

Unknown and Caché about our roles as actors and
witnesses and about the soothing passivity so easily
abetted by standing by and watching, watching,
watching. (Ratner 2007)

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Thus, Bielinsky – the obsessive moviegoer, the perpetual spectator, the creator of hundreds of television commercials
that sold a lifestyle that never existed – seems in the end to have had a similarly disassociated view of life itself. Nine

Queens was a commercial entertainment that put him on the
map, but in The Aura, he reveals what’s behind all the
duplicity, greed and violence: emptiness. Esteban’s greatest
moments of clarity – by his own admission – come right
before the seizures that render him unconscious; in the real
world, he observes, but doesn’t really interact. It’s only when he accidentally stumbles into someone else’s fantasy
projection that he actually embraces his existence – and then, only because he’s caught up in the excitement and intricacy of Dietrich’s scheme.

It’s telling that the only time we see Dietrich is for the split second before Esteban accidentally shoots him. Although
there’s no actual communication between the two men,

Dietrich does leave behind his master plan – his own dream
of a life beyond the insulation of a remote hunting lodge,
located at the outmost margins of society, catering to a
clientele of losers, misfits and violent outcasts. It is very much like the world of Deliverance – Dietrich’s hunting camp
can only exist beyond the boundaries of conventional society, in an outlaw zone where the only law is the rule of brutality and greed. In this phantom zone, people cease to exist as we
know them; they become only the manifestations of their
primal designs – to hunt, to kill, to steal, to break all the rules and somehow get away with it. The question is really apt:

“Who are you? Where do you come from?” No one knows
and there really is no answer.

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In the end, the genre trappings of The Aura fade into insignificance; the film is more concerned with the human
condition than any quotidian criminal enterprise. That and the uncertainty and ephemerality of existence – the unknowable
interior of each person’s individual being. “Who are you?

Where do you come from?” – there will never be an answer to
these questions, not for Esteban or Bielinsky or for any of us.

The triumph of The Aura, then, is to make the mystery of our
being a question that perpetually hovers over every other
aspect of the film. We can’t know ourselves or each other or
even the motives that drive us towards certain specific actions and away from others.

For me, at least, the career of Fabián Bielinsky had just begun and his death has robbed us of one of cinema’s most original
and deeply penetrating talents. What he might have
accomplished had he lived is, of course, a matter of utter
conjecture, but there can be no doubt that, in his brief time on earth, Bielinsky was moving toward a meditational cinema
that extended beyond the boundaries of the known – both in
life and in art – and far beyond the vicissitudes of daily life, toward larger questions of metaphysical existence and
philosophical contemplation – a journey he had only just
begun.

Footnote

*

I
thank

Arso

Risteski
for
his
translation
of

Spanish-language sources. A version of this chapter was first published in 2013 by Film International (online) as “The

Disquieting Aura of Fabián Bielinsky” (29 April):

http://filmint.nu/?p=7610.

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Part II

HISTORY

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Chapter 6

FAST WORKER: THE FILMS

OF SAM NEWFIELD*

Newfield is hard, that’s a hard one, you can’t do too
much of that.

—Martin Scorsese (22 March 1991)

Sam Newfield is, in all probability, the most prolific director in American sound-film history, but very little archival
material survives on his career. The director of more than 250
feature films, as well as numerous shorts and television
series’ episodes, in a career that spanned four decades (from 1923 to 1958) Newfield leaves behind him only his work on
the set; next to nothing is known of his personal life.

However, using conversations with Sigmund Neufeld, Jr. and

Stanley Neufeld – the sons of Sam Newfield’s (born Neufeld)

brother Sigmund Neufeld (all quotes from them in this essay
are from these interviews) – as well as materials from the

Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture

Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, I was able to piece together a rough sketch of the man behind such a torrential output of
work.

Comedies, musicals, Westerns, horror films, jungle pictures,
crime dramas, espionage thrillers – Sam Newfield did them
all, often on budgets of fewer than $20,000 per feature and
shooting schedules of as little as three days. But, as Martin Scorsese notes, watching Newfield’s work is hard because he
often seems absolutely detached from the images that appear

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on the screen, as if he is an observer rather than a participant.

Then, too, the conditions of extreme economy that Newfield
labored under created a pressure-cooker environment in
which the ultimate goal of all his films was simply to get
them done on time and under budget. Nevertheless, as
arguably the most prolific auteur in American motion picture
history, Newfield deserves mention and brief examination as
one of the key “second rung” directors of 1940s Hollywood,

Newfield’s most productive era.

Figure 6. Bert Sternbach, Sam Newfield, Sigmund Neufeld,

Jack Greenhalgh.

Source: Author’s collection.

Born on 6 December 1899 in a cold water flat in the Bronx to
immigrant parents from Budapest, Sam Neufeld was one of
four children. His older brother, Sigmund Neufeld, Sr., was
born in 1896 and, with the premature death of his father,

Simon Neufeld, Sigmund rapidly became the family’s sole

119
source of income. Sam and Sigmund’s other brother, Murray, became an electrician, while their sister, Sadie, eventually
married a “grip” in the 1920s and settled down to life as a
housewife and mother. But all of this was well in the future
when Sigmund was forced to drop out of school in the sixth
grade after his father’s sudden death. At the age of 11, he got a job delivering beer to New York saloons with a horse and
wagon. Other jobs rapidly followed in succession and

Sigmund learned to hustle to support his indigent family.

Sigmund’s father, Simon, had been a “picker” in the fur
business, taking scraps of fur left over from bigger jobs and preparing them to be sewn together in cheaper fur coats.

However, endlessly toiling in poorly ventilated workshops
left Simon susceptible to a variety of ailments and his early death from pneumonia made Sigmund wary of following in
his father’s footsteps. Instead, while Sigmund’s mother eked
out a meager living washing floors of the cold water
tenements in the building where they lived, young Sigmund
developed a reputation as an aggressive entrepreneur, who
saw early on that he would have to take chances in order to
survive and advance.

Fired from his beer delivery route, Sigmund delivered
newspapers, sold fruit on street corners and finally got a job as a delivery boy for a local tailor and dry cleaner. One day, Sigmund was sent to drop off some clothes for the head of

Universal Pictures’ New York office and was immediately
entranced by the hum of creative activity. Sigmund refused to deliver the clothing to anyone other than the head of the
company and, as a reward for his persistence, was hired in

1914 as a go-fer, runner and general assistant; from there, he rapidly advanced to the cutting room. The job for the tailor

120
was immediately forgotten; Sigmund Neufeld had found his life’s work.

Sigmund’s driving ambition inspired his brother, Sam, to try
his luck in the film business as well – although, for the
moment, Sigmund remained the family’s chief breadwinner.

By the late teens, Sigmund was asked to go out to California
to Universal’s studios there and supervise the editing of
two-reel comedies made by the Stern Brothers’ production
company, but released through Universal. By now an
experienced editor, Sigmund saw that there was considerable
wastage in the shooting of the comedies and impressed his
bosses when he managed to put together a “new” two-reel
film from outtakes and unused scenes of two or three
comedies, creating more product and profit for his employers.

For each “extra” comedy Sigmund manufactured for the Stern

Brothers, he would get a modest bonus; on one occasion, he
got a diamond ring for his efforts, now worn by his son

Sigmund Neufeld, Jr. But the young Sigmund Neufeld
noticed that, while he might get a little something extra for his efforts, his bosses pocketed a cool $10,000 for each “instant”

comedy Sigmund stitched together. Thus it was that, after a
few desultory stabs at directing, Sigmund decided to make a
move to production so that he could reap the full benefits of his labor.

Sigmund was still the main source of support for his mother,
two brothers and sister, sending money back home to New

York at regular intervals to keep his family solvent. One by
one, his family members joined him in Los Angeles. The first
to follow his brother west was Sam, who changed his name to

“Newfeld” and later “Newfield” as he climbed up through the

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studio hierarchy on his way to the director’s chair. Starting off in the industry in 1919 as a runner, set assistant and
occasional actor – as his brother had – Sam soon found that
he had a knack with actors and enjoyed working on the studio
floor – much more so than Sigmund, who was increasingly
drawn to the business and production end of the industry.

Rapidly moving up through the ranks at the Stern Brothers

Company thanks to his brother’s influence with the front
office, Sam Newfield directed his first silent film in 1923.

Later silent films included Which is Which? (1926) as part of the Excuse Makers series and comedy entries in the popular

Let George Do It, What Happened to Jane and Buster Brown
series. For the Jane series, Newfield directed Jane’s

Predicament (1926), Jane’s Engagement Party (1926), Jane’s

Sleuth (1927) and other titles; his Let George Do It entries
included Sailor George (1928), George’s School Daze (1928),

George’s False Alarm (1928) and many others; and, for the

Buster Brown series, Newfield’s films included Buster Trims

Up (1928), Buster Minds the Baby (1928), Busting Buster

(1928) and numerous other comedies.

In all, between 1926 and 1930, Newfield directed more than

50 two-reel comedies, learning the ropes as he went along.

This in itself would be enough for mention in any
comprehensive film history, but, as it turned out, Sam

Newfield was just getting warmed up. Making these films on
very rapid schedules and tight budgets, Newfield consolidated his reputation as a fast and conscientious craftsman – he was so busy, in fact, that he began freelancing for the bottom rung outfit, Educational Pictures, on additional two-reel shorts
while still working full-time for the Stern Brothers at

Universal. However, the landscape of the industry was

122
changing. By 1930, sound had definitively arrived in Hollywood and, while Sam made the switch to talkies with
relative ease, the market for shorts was beginning to stagnate.

The Stern Brothers Company was absorbed by Universal, but

Universal saw no reason to promote either Sam or Sigmund
out of its two-reel comedy unit, which was arguably the
lowest rung of the studio production ladder.

With no opportunities for advancement, Sigmund struck out
on his own as an independent producer. At first, the going
was tough and Sigmund had to scrimp and economize to
produce his early programmers, such as The Red Haired Alibi

(1932, directed by Christy Cabanne) and Red Blood of

Courage (1935, directed by John “Jack” English, who would
later become a prolific co-director of action serials for

Republic Pictures, working with the gifted William Witney
for most of his career). Sam Newfield, oddly enough, didn’t
work for his brother in his new producer capacity during this period and he struggled to get his first feature assignment,

Reform Girl, followed by The Important Witness and Under

Secret Orders, all shot in 1933. But the films were successful and Sam pressed on. In 1934, he directed four independent
features: Big Time or Bust, Marrying Widows, Beggar’s

Holiday and African Incident, all modest but successful
program pictures. By 1935, Sam had established himself as a
reliable second rung director and brother Sigmund had
partnered with Maurice Conn to create Ambassador Pictures,
a small production company specializing in Westerns and
outdoor action fare. For Ambassador, Newfield directed

Northern Frontier, Code of the Mounted and Trail of the

Wild, all in 1935, and it seemed as if the partnership between the two brothers might extend profitably in the future.

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But, for the next few years, while Sigmund produced a slate of routine Westerns, Sam went over to Republic to grind out

Johnny Mack Brown and Bob Steele Westerns on an
assembly line basis; he then switched to Sam Katzman’s tiny

Victory Studios in 1939 to create a similar series of Tim

McCoy Westerns, all made on modest budgets. Sam clearly
liked Westerns more than almost any other genre and, while
the production values of many of these programmers were
obviously threadbare, all of the films returned a tidy profit.

However, events would soon conspire to bring the two
brothers together under the roof of the same studio, Producers Releasing Corporation, where, for better or worse, they
embarked on the most productive – some might say notorious

– period of their long careers.

PRC itself came about through the collapse of Producers

Distribution Corporation, or PDC, which was originally set up by Poverty Row producer Ben Judell. Working with Sigmund

Neufeld as his co-producer and Sam Newfield as the director,

PDC produced a relatively ambitious anti-Nazi film: Hitler:

Beast of Berlin (1939), featuring, in a bit part, a very young Alan Ladd. The film was topical, reasonably budgeted in the

$100,000 range, but it ran afoul of the German American

Bund, then quite active in isolationist pre–World War II

America. The Bund members broke into the PDC lot and
destroyed the film’s sets almost entirely. They were rebuilt, but then local censorship boards refused to pass the film for exhibition because of its “anti-German” slant. With many
distribution possibilities blocked, production bills began to pile up. With six additional features in production, Judell was seriously overextended and PDC collapsed in a hail of debts.

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Sigmund Neufeld, however, sensed an opportunity and, working with Robert S. Benjamin – an attorney for Pathé

Film Laboratory, one of PDC’s chief creditors – he forestalled payment of a $90,000 debt to Pathé in return for a stake in the reorganized PRC (Backstreet 2007). Judell was out, Sigmund

Neufeld was in, and he lost no time in signing up his brother, Sam,
as

PRC’s
house
director.

Newfield
would
single-handedly helm the majority of the company’s feature
output from 1940 up until the demise of PRC in 1947. Indeed,
he was so prolific that he became something of an
embarrassment to the fledgling studio and, on the advice of
his brother, Newfield adopted two aliases (Sherman Scott and

Peter Stewart) to cover his tracks.

Sigmund Neufeld, Jr. told me that, while these pseudonyms
are now fairly common knowledge, at the time of their
implementation, they were a closely guarded secret. PRC’s

New York office, in fact, called Sigmund in for a meeting,
telling him that, while Sam’s work was good and Sherman

Scott’s work was also acceptable, Peter Stewart was the real

“find” for the studio and that Sigmund should use him more
often in the future. Sigmund cheerfully complied with this
directive and Sherman Scott’s output declined, while Peter

Stewart’s escalated (Neufeld 2007).

It has been written that Newfield used these aliases on a

“genre” basis – using “Newfield” for Westerns, “Scott” for
crime films and “Stewart” for more serious dramas – but there seems to be little foundation for this. “Scott,” for example, directed Billy the Kid’s Fighting Pals (1941), while “Stewart”

directed Billy the Kid in Texas (1940) and Newfield directed

The Lone Rider Fights Back (1941) under his own name.

Further, Newfield abandoned this “triple threat” strategy early 125
in 1943 with only one exception (1946’s The Flying Serpent, which he directed as Sherman Scott) until PRC itself
collapsed and Newfield began the final phase of his career
freelancing for William Pine and William Thomas (known as

“The Dollar Bills” for their unflagging production economy)

at Paramount and producer Maurice Conn at Twentieth

Century Fox, one of Newfield’s few brushes with a major
studio. In these films, Newfield alternated between his alter egos with seeming impunity until, in 1950, working for

Robert

Lippert’s
cost-conscious
production
company,

Newfield abandoned the practice altogether and was billed
solely as Sam Newfield from 1950 to 1958, when he directed
his final films.

All this was in the distant future when Newfield assumed the
key directorial reins at the newly minted PRC and began
turning out product at a torrid pace. Obviously, Newfield
wasn’t the only director on the PRC lot. Edgar G. Ulmer,
whose films have since been recognized as some of the most
interesting and influential genre films of the 1940s, was

PRC’s “prestige” director. Ulmer himself referred to his
position with the company as being “the Capra of PRC”

(Bogdanovich, 397), and such films as Detour (1946),

Bluebeard (1944), Strange Illusion (1946) and Her Sister’s

Secret (1946) have long since developed a cult status among
aficionados of 1940s Hollywood cinema. Even so, Ulmer had
minimal resources to work with: a strict schedule of five or
six days per feature, a 2 to 1 shooting ratio and an average of 60 or more camera setups a day.

Indeed, Ulmer adopted a style of shooting the close-ups in his films for PRC against a neutral grey background to disguise
the fact that they were shot back-to-back for all the day’s

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scenes, with one setup in the final hour of shooting every day.

Ulmer would direct the actors to look “camera right” or

“camera left” as they read off dialogue from all the day’s
sequences and put his hand over the lens to separate the takes.

(Bogdanovich, 397). Such draconian economy did not come
naturally to Ulmer, who had been used to the relative
production luxury of such films as Universal’s The Black Cat

(1934) earlier in his career. For Sam Newfield, such tactics
were an everyday occurrence.

This, of course, is the most problematic factor of Newfield’s films for PRC; with so little time and money at his disposal
and the bottom line always strictly enforced, Newfield had no time for delicate touches in his work. Newfield’s many

Westerns are straightforward and violent, with a minimum of
character development; his big city dramas, such as Queen of

Broadway (1943) and his horror films – in particular. Dead

Men Walk (1943) and The Flying Serpent (1946) – are grimly
procedural, moving with inexorable assurance towards their
generically predestined ends. The Black Raven (1943), a
crime drama set in a rundown inn, is unrelentingly bleak and
fatalistic; I Accuse My Parents (1944), an early juvenile
delinquency film foreshadowing Nicholas Ray’s later Rebel

Without a Cause (1955), offers a similarly grim view of
wartime absentee parenthood and its social consequences.

Swing Hostess (1944) is a typically cheerless PRC musical,
simultaneously tacky and tawdry, while Murder Is My

Business (1946) is a grimy crime thriller that embraces its
shoddy world with world-weary certainty.

The pace of production was unrelenting. In 1943 alone,

Newfield directed no fewer than 18 feature films; in 1945, 12
films; and, in 1946, 15 full-length features. On the set,

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Newfield preferred to shoot long master takes with few close-ups, making his master shots the key coverage of his
scenes. Close-ups were reserved for detailed action – a door
opening, a gun firing, a safe being cracked – and thus

Newfield’s films have an air of hermetic finality in their
execution which is, for better or worse, his alone. One gets
the feeling that Newfield’s actors do not so much appear in
his films as they are trapped in them, entombed in their
frames for cinematic eternity, consigned to low-budget limbo, inhabiting a shadow zone of hastily constructed sets and
borrowed narratives. Indeed, one of Newfield’s most
controversial projects is his “riff” on Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), which he directed as Apology for Murder

(1945); the original title of the project, amazingly enough,
was Single Indemnity. Paramount, Wilder’s home studio,
wasn’t fooled by the title change and slapped an injunction on the finished film that remains in force to this day. Although it is an interesting and often effective thriller, Apology for

Murder survives only in private collections and on bootleg

DVDs and is seldom, if ever, screened in public.

For all the pressures put on Newfield and his cast and crew,
however, those who witnessed him at work on the set recall a
director who was patient with actors, genuinely enjoyed
working with them and who kept the mood light no matter
how somber the subject matter. Sigmund Neufeld’s son, a
teenager in the 1940s, often went to the PRC sound stages on

Saturdays to watch Sam at work and later went into the
business as a director himself. Despite the rapid pace of
shooting, Sigmund Neufeld, Jr. recalled that Sam would take
his time to get the right effect from an actor and do his best to bring out the desired emotion in a scene. As he told me during an interview,

128

I watched him work with some kids a few times when he needed them to cry, and he was very good
in talking to them and getting out of them what he
wanted. He would just have a conversation with
them until he got them right in the right mood and
then he’d wave his hand, say “Let’s roll” and the
kid’d be there crying throughout the dialogue. And I
thought, “That’s pretty darn good.” (Neufeld 2007)

At the same time, Newfield was an inveterate gambler whose
gaming habit eventually got the better of him. Even in his
early PRC days, he would get a crap game going during
breaks or in the studio bus on the way to Iverson’s Ranch to
shoot one of his Westerns or at the end of the day as
production wound down. Newfield loved any sort of
wagering and, in one case, matter-offactly informed the cast
and crew on one of his films that, whatever happened, he had
to finish the day’s shooting by 3 o’clock so he could get to the Santa Anita racetrack in time to see a heavily favored horse –
whom he had backed to the hilt – run in the day’s final race.

Sadly, it was this affliction more than anything else that
marked Newfield’s personal decline in his last years.

Estranged from his wife – the former Violet McComas, whom
he had met as a script supervisor on one of his films –

Newfield lost custody of his children, Joel and Jacqueline, in a bitter divorce case and never really recovered from the
aftermath of the affair. These events, mercifully, would be
confined to his final days; for the moment, in the early 1940s, Newfield was at the top of his game, the purveyor of the
cinematic Blue Plate Special in genre-driven Hollywood.

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For someone who made so many films, it’s both interesting and intriguing that Newfield kept no scrapbooks, photo
albums or other mementos of his career and that today there
are only two known photos of Newfield in existence – an
astounding fact for the most prolific director in the history of the American sound cinema. While gregarious, Newfield
never sought out publicity and was happiest on the set,
working on one project after another, taking each new script
as a fresh challenge. As he consolidated his hold on PRC’s
top directorial spot, Newfield gathered around him a crew of
skilled technicians whom he could rely upon to knock out the
day’s work with speed and efficiency.

In one of two known photographs of Newfield, he appears
with his brother and the two key members of his crew at a
formal studio dinner at PRC in the early 1940s. From left to
right: Bert Sternbach, the studio’s ace production manager,
staring at the camera, is flanked by Newfield himself, his eyes confronting the viewer with an inscrutable and impassive
gaze, next to his brother, Sigmund, every bit the hard-edged
businessman and Jack Greenhalgh, a rough-and-tumble
cameraman of legendary speed and efficiency.

My first reaction upon seeing this photograph (which was
also my first view of Newfield himself) was a sense of shock; here, unmistakably, was Hollywood’s working class,
completely aware that they were creating genre entertainment
for mass audiences at a price and utterly unapologetic about
their films or their production methods. Unlike many
directors, Sam Newfield felt most comfortable making
straightforward films for audiences eager for 60 to 70 minutes of cheerfully brutal entertainment. Newfield and his crew
were, as the photo attests, tough customers, uninterested in

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theorizing or pushing back the limits of genre filmmaking. At the same time, because of the inherent hardscrabble
desperation implicit in all PRC films, Newfield and his
colleagues ultimately presented a truer picture of 1940s

America than many of his slicker compatriots at the major
studios.

At PRC, it was a constant fight to find story material, hire
actors at cut rates, recycle sets from existing flats and then push through 40 to 50 setups a day to get the finished film in the can. PRC was involved in a continual struggle for mere
survival on an everyday basis, much like the rest of the
country during World War II. Sam Newfield and his crew
were populist filmmakers, who never condescended to their
audiences and yet never stretched the limits of genre
filmmaking either. Life in the 1940s was hard; life at PRC
was hard. Unlike studio life at the majors – from MGM on
down, where luxury and privilege were a way of life for many
of the studio’s most valuable players – at PRC, everyone from the top down worked for their living. As Sigmund Neufeld,

Jr. told me, “I think they were happy where they were. My
dad and Sam both realized that they were doing what they
were really good at” (Neufeld 2007). In short, at PRC, the
quotidian struggle for survival was real, both on and off the screen.

PRC was, in the truest sense of the word, a “mom and pop”

operation; between them, Sigmund and Sam pretty much ran
the studio, although Leon Fromkess, a former accountant
from New York with a degree from Columbia University, was
the titular head of the organization. Before Fromkess, until

1944, O. Henry Briggs served as PRC’s financial head, but he
ultimately clashed with Sigmund Neufeld and resigned. The

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division of labor was fairly straightforward: Sigmund, always more of a “roll up your shirtsleeves” type, kept an eye on
daily production, supervising the activity on PRC’s eight
sound stages throughout the day. Fromkess supervised
finance and kept the distributors and film exchanges from
interfering too much in production. Indeed, shortly before

PRC dissolved, Fromkess left the company to join Samuel

Goldwyn’s much more prestigious organization, working
with Goldwyn on William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our

Lives (1946) and Henry Koster’s The Bishop’s Wife (1947).

But, as we’ll see, Fromkess was soon restless at the Goldwyn
studios and left to set up his own production company, where
his path would again cross with Sam Newfield on a number
of projects.

Another aspect of PRC’s studio identity was the fact that,
during the run up to World War II, both Sigmund and Sam
felt strongly that Hollywood had to oppose the Nazi regime in Germany, as evidenced by their first project, Hitler: Beast of Berlin (Goose Step in re-releases). In their rejection of

Nazism, PRC was ahead of the curve in Hollywood, as the
major studios still sought to appease Hitler and thus avoid the loss of film rentals in the lucrative German market. Only

Warner Bros. – arguably the most socially conscious studio in the 1930s and early 1940s – followed PRC’s lead with the
production of Anatole Litvak’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy

(1939) when the rest of the majors advised Warner’s to avoid
the subject.

But PRC served another function in the battle against Hitler.

Though neither Sam nor Sigmund were particularly religious,
the studio soon became an informal haven for many gifted

Jewish artists escaping from the Nazis, such as Edgar G.

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Ulmer, Franz Wysbar (who “anglicized” his name to “Frank Wisbar”) and the brilliant cameraman Eugen Schüfftan. And
yet, like most of the minor studios, what most defined PRC
was a strong work ethic, shooting from dawn to dusk six days
a week to get the film in the can on time.

Salaries were very tight. Newfield received only $500 to
direct Secrets of a Model in 1940, but rose to $1,250 for

Prairie Rustlers in 1945, while cameraman Jack Greenhalgh
was paid a mere $200 for shooting Secrets of a Model and
only broke through to the $1,000 range in the late 1940s. And yet, despite the frantic pace, PRC was a close-knit “family
operation,” according to Sigmund Neufeld, Jr.: “We were all
friends, and we used to have weekend parties, dances, stuff
like that. They worked so much together that they all knew
each other really well, and almost everyone got along”

(Neufeld 2007).

There was another factor to consider: unlike the major
studios, PRC never sold its films on a percentage basis to
theaters, but rather as straight rentals. Most PRC films played the bottom half of double bills. If a PRC film was an
unexpected box-office hit, the theater owners, not PRC,
reaped the benefits. All PRC ever got for their films was a flat rental rate, no matter how well or poorly the film performed
with audiences. (PRC owned a few theaters where they got a
better break on their product, but the number of screens –
about 10 at most – was so small, this had little impact on the company’s bottom line.) Thus, the margin of profit was very
slim. PRC films cost so much and they made so little; on
some of the Westerns, PRC’s actual profit after all the
production, exploitation and distribution expenses was as low as $1,000. Because of this, PRC was never really able to

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expand or move on to more ambitious pictures. Budgets and profits were both strictly limited.

For all the penury of PRC’s financial situation, Sam Newfield lived well during the 1940s with his two children in a house
on the beach in Malibu. But warning signs were evident. Sam
never exercised and smoked cigarettes incessantly. While he
never drank, gambling became an overwhelming addiction for
him and, by 1950, his wife, children and PRC had all
vanished from his life. In 1947, PRC was completely
absorbed by the newly formed Eagle Lion Pictures, which

Sigmund and Sam both viewed as a serious mistake. Eagle

Lion, which was eventually folded into United Artists in

February of 1951 (Flynn and McCarthy 1975a, 41), started
out with an ambitious slate of productions – such as Ulmer’s

Ruthless (1949) and a series of atmospheric noirs directed by a young Anthony Mann – but soon became overextended. As

Sigmund Neufeld, Jr. remembers:

My dad [Sigmund], Sam and all their friends left the
studio, because Eagle Lion had goals of making
bigger and better movies. And my dad said, “You’re
making a mistake to change the formula – what
we’re doing is very successful.” But the new people
who came in wanted to change to “prestige films,”

and they did. But they didn’t last very long.

(Neufeld 2007)

With PRC’s demise, Sam Newfield and Sigmund Neufeld felt
as if the ground had been cut out from under them. By 1950,

Newfield’s home life was just a memory and yet the director
soldiered on through a slate of films for a variety of smaller American companies, such as Lippert, Film Classics and even

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two films for Eagle Lion (Lady at Midnight and The Strange Mrs. Crane, both made in 1948) before accepting an
assignment with Britain’s Hammer Films under producer

Anthony Hinds to direct two films for the young company,

Scotland Yard Inspector (aka Lady in the Fog) with Cesar

Romero and The Gambler and the Lady, starring Dane Clark,
both completed in 1952. Robert Lippert was just the right sort of producer for Sam Newfield: cost-conscious and aggressive.

As Sigmund Neufeld, Jr. told me:

Bob Lippert owned three or four hundred theaters up
in the Bay area. The reason he got into producing
was because he was having trouble buying the
pictures from the major studios. He had fights with
them and he couldn’t get the shows he wanted. So
he got really mad and said, “Okay, I’m coming to

Hollywood and produce my own movies,” which he
had never done. So he came to Los Angeles and my
dad [Sigmund] ended up working with him to do a
lot of his movies. But Sam’s attitude towards his
work never changed over time. I think he would
have probably kept on working ‘til he dropped, if he
could have. But the old way of doing business was
definitely coming to an end; Lippert was the last of
the low, low budget independent producers.

It was also during this period that Newfield tackled one of his most ambitious projects: Lippert’s science fiction themed

Lost Continent (1951), which featured stop-motion dinosaurs
reminiscent of Willis O’Brien’s work in King Kong (1933)

and an unusually luxurious shooting schedule and budget.

Sigmund Neufeld, Jr. was on the set of Lost Continent and
remembers that the film

135
was shot at the Sam Goldwyn Studios on the biggest stage that they had there, because they actually built
that mountain on the stage. When they designed it,

Sam was a part of the process, because he had to
shoot it all. They designed it so that they could work
their way around the mountain, going higher and
higher as they shot the film. The damn thing went
almost to the top of the stage. They designed it so
they could just work their way around it without
having to change the lighting throughout the shoot,
and it worked very well. (Neufeld 2007)

Jack Greenhalgh shot the film for Newfield, one of his last
assignments in a career that began in 1935, ended in 1953,
and spanned more than 200 films as director of
cinematography. Stanley Neufeld worked on the film as an
assistant director and remembers that much of the second part of the film was shot at the Santa Anita Botanical Gardens,
where, much later, exteriors for the American teleseries

Fantasy Island were also photographed (Neufeld 2007).

Despite the challenge of making Lost Continent with a larger
than average budget, a solid cast and an unheard of 18 days to complete principal photography, Sam Newfield was growing
bored with his profession. With hundreds of films to his
credit, Newfield was in the odd and uncomfortable position of having to work harder than ever just to keep up; for a lifetime of work, he had put nothing aside for his retirement. In
addition, surprisingly for someone who had been in the
business for so long, he simply didn’t know how to market his talent. Notes Stanley Neufeld,

136

Sam was good making films but didn’t know how to present himself, in today’s market or even back in
the ’50s, of being proud of what he was doing, or
publicizing it.

He just did his work, and didn’t care about publicity
or anything like that. And it hurt him, because he
never had an agent, never held out for a better deal.

He just liked to work more than anything else. He
just accepted doing all these program pictures and
he never got a real break to do anything better. In
the film industry, you get typed. And so working at

PRC insulated him from many of the realities of the
business, because Sig always handled the business
end. On the films he made, if you didn’t do 50
setups a day, you were fired, no matter if you were
the assistant director or the director. So, Sam really
didn’t have the time to be worried. He had to keep
working simply to survive. (Neufeld 2007)

In his final years, Newfield predictably moved over to
television, working with his brother, Sigmund, and Leon

Fromkess to create the violently colonialist and racist
television series Ramar of the Jungle, starring Jon Hall as a white doctor bringing “civilization” to African tribal culture.

Comprised for the most part of stock footage, with hastily
staged sequences on a few sparse sets, Ramar was a surprise
hit of the 1953–54 American television season and remained
in reruns for many years after; some 44 episodes of the series are now available on DVD.

Working at a rapid clip, Newfield directed roughly a third of the series’ episodes, completing each half-hour segment in an 137
astonishing one and 2/3 days before moving on to direct episodes of Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion, another

1950s American children’s television show, starring Buster

Crabbe, at a similarly rapid pace. By the mid-1950s, however, both Sam and Sigmund were out of step with the industry,
clinging to past generic conventions to complete four routine Westerns in 1956 for Sigmund’s newly formed Associated

Film Releasing Corporation, which folded in 1957.

Newfield accepted a final assignment in Canada, becoming
one of the first American directors to produce films there
because of the cost incentives. In 1956, he directed 37
episodes of the syndicated television series Hawkeye and The

Last of the Mohicans. His last theatrical feature productions were Wolf Dog and Flaming Frontier (both 1958), which he
shot back-to-back for Regal Films Canada, a subsidiary of

Robert L. Lippert’s United States and UK production entities.

Both films, shot in RegalScope – a CinemaScope-like
widescreen process – were given routine distribution on the
bottom half of double bills by Twentieth Century Fox. With
them, Newfield’s directorial career came to a close.

Newfield still wanted to work. He needed to work. But, as

Stanley Neufeld told me:

I think that the type of films he was doing sort of
died out at that point. And so it was hard, very hard
getting a job. And he never took care of himself or
anything. He never stopped gambling either, which
didn’t help the situation. So he ran up like big
gambling debts, and my dad [Sigmund] would have
to bail him out. He gambled on anything at all. He
loved Las Vegas. He loved gambling on sports. It

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became an addiction. It ruined him. He just couldn’t get work. So he lost a lot of connections. His health
was okay until probably the last six months of his
life. But he couldn’t get work. And then he got
diagnosed with liver cancer. So that was the end of
that. (Neufeld 2007)

Sam Newfield died on 10 November 1964, at the relatively
young age of 64. In his last years, he lived in a small
apartment two blocks away from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre,
supported in large part by his brother Sigmund. Though
retired from the business, Sigmund had managed to save
enough and invest wisely so that his last years were
comfortable; he died on 21 March 1979. Sam Newfield’s
daughter, Jackie, married the owner of a large swimming pool
company, Blue Haven Pools, while his son, Joel, became a
graphic artist for the Los Angeles Times. Sigmund Neufeld’s
sons both entered the business. Stanley worked his way up
through the ranks and became an executive producer on such
films as Come Back, Charleston Blue (1972) and Popi (1978),
before retiring in 2006. Sigmund, Jr. had a long career
directing episodic television, including episodes of Simon and Simon, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and Scarecrow and

Mrs. King; he retired in 1989 and now lives in Las Vegas.

In the end, Sam Newfield’s accomplishments as a director are
both ephemeral and yet somehow quite solid. When PRC
went out of business, the negatives for the entire PRC
catalogue were sold to a television syndicator for a flat $1,750
each and, in the early days of the medium, when the majors
shunned television as a threat to their hegemony, Newfield’s
films were ubiquitous. In time, the copyrights on all the PRC
films lapsed when no one bothered to renew them and the

139
films entered the public domain, available for anyone to screen, copy or sell to the public. With the advent of DVDs,

Alpha Video, a small American video distributor specializing
in copyright-free material, began releasing nearly all of

Newfield’s work in cheap, five dollar editions.

So, for better or worse, Newfield’s work is everywhere. With
the coming of the worldwide web, downloads of Newfield’s
more popular films are now readily available for free – for
use on cell phones and video iPods – from a number of
archival websites. Perhaps surprisingly, many viewers have a
great affection for Newfield’s films precisely because of their compromised origins. Films such as Dead Men Walk (1943)

retain a certain sinister appeal in the grim certainty of their visual execution, while Newfield’s many slapdash Westerns
are favored by aficionados of the genre for their utter
disregard of narrative or character motivation; with Newfield, action always comes first. And yet, at the center of all this activity, Newfield himself remains a remote personality –
jocular with his crew, eager to please his employers, yet
essentially indecipherable as both a man and the most prolific director in the history of the American sound film. Despite all the films he left behind, Newfield himself is something of an enigma.

What drove him to create so much work so quickly? Money,
certainly, but there’s more to it than that. Perhaps Sam

Newfield was comfortable with himself only on the set and
would rather keep working on anything rather than endure
enforced idleness. One could argue that Newfield existed only in his films and that his addiction to gambling was an outlet for his uneasiness with life outside the sound stage. On the
set, Sam Newfield knew exactly what he wanted and got it.

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Off-screen, it seems Newfield searched restlessly for personal satisfaction – which in the end, sadly, remained elusive. What little now survives of his personal life is little more than a few newspaper clippings and two photographs; for the rest, he
leaves behind more than 250 feature films. In this, Newfield, one might argue, is the true phantom of the cinema.

Footnote

*

A version of this chapter was first published in 2007 by

Senses of Cinema (online) as “Fast Worker: The Films of

Sam Newfield” (issue 45): http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/
feature-articles/sam-newfield/.

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Chapter 7

THE POWER OF RESISTANCE: LES

DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE*

Destiny is tragic. But I prefer one of our own
making to one that is forced upon us.

—Agnès (Elina Labourdette in Les Dames du Bois
de Boulogne)

As I wrote of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne in a review of
the film,

One of Robert Bresson’s most incandescent works,
this early film also marks the teaming of two of

France’s most personal and idiosyncratic artists:

Robert Bresson and Jean Cocteau. Cocteau, whose

1949
film

Orpheus

(Orphée)

mesmerized
post-World War II audiences in addition to his
numerous
other
accomplishments,
wrote
the
dialogue for Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne,
loosely based on Denis Diderot’s short story Jacques
le Fataliste et Son Maître. Elina Labourdette plays

Agnès, a young woman who has been forced into a
life of prostitution in wartime Vichy, France, in
order to support herself and her ailing mother

(Lucienne Bogaert). At the same time, Hélène (the
serpentine Maria Casarès) is breaking up with her
longtime lover, Jean (Paul Bernard), and, feeling
jilted by him, concocts an elaborate plot for revenge.

Contacting Agnès and her mother, Hélène offers to

142

take over their debts, move them out of the brothel
they call home, and set them up in a sleek, modern
apartment, with no strings attached. We discover too
late Hélène’s true motives; she is doing all of this so
that Jean will “accidentally” meet Agnès, fall in love
with her, marry her, and then become the subject of
public ridicule because of Agnès’ past. All of this
goes off with clockwork precision, but Jean, when
confronted with the monstrousness of Hélène’s
treachery, shakes off his bourgeois prudishness,
embraces Agnès despite her fall from grace, and the
film ends on a note of hope and Bressonian
redemption. (Dixon 1999)

Figure 7. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne.

Source: Author’s collection.

This unique collaboration between Cocteau and Bresson
would be a oneoff in every sense of the term. Bresson’s later

“stripped down” style, so brilliantly presented in such films as 143

Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé ou le vent souffle où il veut (A Man Escaped or: The Wind Bloweth Where it

Listeth, 1956), Pickpocket (1959), Mouchette (1967) and his
other mature films was directly at odds with the studied
artificiality of Cocteau’s brittle, yet transcendent vision. As Daniel Millar points out in his perceptive essay on Les

Dames, Bresson’s signature late films are marked by, among
other notable characteristics,
drab clothes and stark, bare settings, filmed strictly
on location, with little or no studio work; a low-key,
muted, realistic photographic style […] a sense of
ritual, either overtly religious or apparently secular,
emphasized sparingly by music; a reticently indirect
treatment of sex and of emotion generally; [and] a
predominance of non-professional actors. (Millar

1970, 33)

In Les Dames, we can see many of these later stylistic
tendencies beginning to blossom – albeit under the auspices
of professional actors, whom Bresson would henceforth do
away with entirely. This rigorously sparse mise en scène is
diametrically opposed to the dark-hued celestial paradise
presented by Cocteau in his second film, Le Sang d’un Poète

(1930) – a world of camera trickery, overt homoerotic
symbolism, ornate sets and autobiographical self-promotion.

Where Bresson sought to efface himself in his films,

Cocteau’s public personality is the centerpiece of not only Le Sang but also Orphée and his 1946 fairy tale for adults, La

Belle et la bête. Yet, one could certainly conversely argue
that, in his later stark, sparse visual style, Bresson is equally

“present” in his films; the empty spaces, downcast glances,
monotonal dialogue delivery and deliberate absence of

144
spectacle make Bresson’s style at once unique and also offer a direct link to his persona as a filmmaker. And yet, as Richard Roud commented in a 1959 essay in Film Culture, it is
precisely this clash of methodologies that gives Les Dames
much of its richness as a text. For Roud, it is the contestation between

Cocteau’s
distanced
representationalism
and

Bresson’s severe moralism that forms the stylistic and
thematic core of the film. As Roud wrote,

[the] most extraordinary thing about Les Dames is
the way the different levels of abstraction are
constantly brought into play […] The dialogue
written by Cocteau is itself a stylization or an
abstraction of the speech of today. Furthermore, the
dialogue never describes the actions of the
characters but always counterpoints them. For
example, in the scene where Hélène tells Jean that
he has married a whore, she is standing at the
window of his car. Over her highly stylized words –

“Vous avez epouse une grue […] On dirait que vous
ne savez pas ce que c’est qu’une femme qui se
venge” (“You’ve married a tramp […] You don’t
seem to realize what a vengeful woman is capable
of”) – we hear the sound of the windshield wipers
moving back and forth. [sic] Dialogue and sound,
action and character are all; […] there is an
interaction of one mode of reality and another […].

(Roud 1968, 36)

Bresson found working with professional actors both trying
and ultimately unnecessary as his career progressed, but even in this most theatrical of his films – with the possible
exception of his early farce, Les Affaires Publiques (1934),

145
and the dark moral fable, Les Anges du péché (1943) –

Bresson still effectively managed to bend his performers to
the demands of his austere vision. Maria Casarès, a favorite of Cocteau’s as an actor for her “fire and ice” emotionalism,
originally tackled the role of Hélène in Les Dames with the
same sense of theatrical bravado, which soon led to a clash of will between Casarès and Bresson. But, as Bresson told
interviewer Charles Thomas Samuels during an interview
conducted in English in Paris on 2 September 1970 – many
years after the completion of the film – the director soon
devised a method to counteract her somewhat theatrical
approach. As Bresson recalled:

A friend told me that in Julien Green’s South she
had to appear on the stage saying, “it’s raining”; in

French, il pleut. Despite the simplicity of these
words, her tragedian’s temperament made her shout
emphatically: “Il … Il … pleut!” […] To get
courage, she used to drink a little glass of cognac
before acting. When I chanced to discover this, I
asked her to take a sedative instead, which she
willingly did. Then things started to go better.

(Samuels 1970)

In doing this, Bresson prefigured his late style of direction, in which his protagonists would be subjected to intensive
rehearsal periods during which they would be obliged to
repeat their dialogue over and over until nearly all emotion
was stripped from its on-camera delivery. By drugging

Casarès, Bresson tamped down the actor’s inherent
emotionalism and forced her to become an instrument to
recite, as dispassionately as possible, Cocteau’s dialogue. It is one of the great performances of the screen, as Casarès

146
dispassionately arranges for the destruction of all who oppose her. As Doug Cummings documented, “Years later, Casarès
described Bresson as ‘a sweet tyrant’ who forced his actors to abandon their personal wills in order to offer ‘a body, hands, and a voice that he had chosen.’” (Cummings 2004). Perhaps
no better description of Bresson’s attitude towards
professional actors exists; in these few words, Casarès
perfectly distills both the strength of Bresson’s will and his studied detachment.

When one recalls that Cocteau often described, as in the
prefatory titles of Le Sang d’un Poète, his ideal cinema as
consisting of “a realistic document of unreal events,” the
direct contrast to Bresson’s own cinematic approach becomes
immediately apparent. Again speaking to Charles Thomas

Samuels, Bresson emphasized that, for him,
filmmaking is combining images and sounds of real
things in an order that makes them effective. What I
disapprove
of
is
photographing
with
that
extraordinary instrument – the camera – things that
are not real. Sets and actors are not real […] My first
film was made with professional actors, and when
we had our first rehearsal I said, “If you go on acting
and speaking like this, I am leaving.” […] I think
that, in other films, actors speak as if they were
onstage. As a result, the audience is used to
theatrical inflections […] I want the essence of my
films to be not the words my people say or even the
gestures they perform, but what these words and
gestures provoke in them […] We are too clever,
and our cleverness plays us false. We should trust
mainly our feelings and those senses that never lie to

147
us. Our intelligence disturbs our proper vision of things. (Samuels 1970)

Yet, it is this “cleverness” – this flirtation with the “false” or theatrical – that remains the hallmark of Cocteau’s work as a novelist,
scenarist
and
playwright

–
a
complicit
acknowledgment of the inherent artificiality of all fictive
presentation. Conversely, what Bresson was seeking –
seemingly from his first films – was a minimalist approach to his, for, in his words, “cinema is the art of showing nothing”

(Samuels 1970). For Cocteau, the realm of the cinema
belonged to the magical, the inherently unreal. As always,

Cocteau wanted to “astonish” his viewers; Bresson wanted to
force them to concentrate on an inner struggle that lies
beneath the surface of his carefully composed images.

So what, then, brought these two disparate artists together?

The answer is simple: the Occupation of France during World

War II by the Nazis and their puppet Vichy government. In
his moving appreciation of Resistance cinema, André Bazin,
the Occupation, and I, François Truffaut argues persuasively
that, for all of the restrictions placed on artists during this grim period in France’s history, the cinema flowered under
the yoke of the Occupation precisely because of the moral
imperative to make films that defied the ruling order – films that criticized the dominant regime in the time-honored
disguise of genre and thus managed to slip under the radar of the Occupation’s censors. While agreeing that
there was no place for subversion or protest in the
films of this period; the sanctions imposed would
have gone beyond those of the Commission de

Censure [… and thus] it is therefore understandable

148
that cinema took refuge in historical films and films of fantasy and enchantment […]. (Truffaut 1981, 18)

Truffaut noted that, in comparison to the years directly
following the war:

Whereas twenty-five new directors had […] the
opportunity to make their debuts during the four
years of the Occupation – among them [Jacques]

Becker, Bresson, and [Henri-Georges] Clouzot – in
the fourteen years between 1945 and 1959 (the
beginning of the New Wave) the only new names
were René Clément, Jacques Tati, Jean-Pierre

Melville, Roger Leenhardt, Yves Ciampi, Alexandre

Astruc, and Marcel Camus. The numerical
disproportion is obvious. (Truffaut 1981, 20)

Thus, adversity created an atmosphere – a hothouse,
pressurized zone of creation – in which divergent artists
gathered together to create works in defiance of a common
enemy whose tyranny they were dedicated to abolish.

In my essay “‘How Will I Get My Opium?’: Jean Cocteau
and the Treachery of Friendship,” I noted that, while many

French cinéastes and other artists fled Paris during the

Occupation, Cocteau elected to stay behind and play a
dangerous double game, retaining his place in the spotlight

(always an important consideration for Cocteau, to whom
publicity was as essential as oxygen) while clandestinely
fighting for the concerns of his countrymen and still
managing to stay in the good graces of the Vichy authorities

(Dixon 2004, 127–41). Cocteau was, during the Occupation,
certainly a much more recognized artist than Bresson – who,

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at this point in his career, had only one short film (Les Affaires Publiques, which the director never really cared for) to his credit before his 1943 drama Les Anges du péché, with
dialogue by Jean Giraudoux, brought him to initial public
attention. (See Erik Ulman’s insightful essay on Les Anges du péché for more details; in many respects, the film is an
equally dark companion piece to Les Dames.) But Cocteau
during this period was overcoming a crippling addiction to
opium and had essentially been idle as a filmmaker since Le

Sang d’un Poète.

It was only through the intervention of his lover, Jean Marais, that Cocteau reentered the cinema with a script for Serge de

Poligny’s Le Baron Fantôme in 1942 (Cocteau also served as
narrator for the film and made a brief cameo appearance) and
then the scenario for Jean Dellanoy’s updated version of

Tristan and Isolde, L’Eternel retour (1943). This set the stage for Cocteau’s participation in Les Dames, which began
shooting on the 24th of April 1944 – during the last days of
the Occupation – under the working title “L’Opinion

Publique,” (Roud, 35), an ironic title in view of the film’s
initial reception. Due to a variety of production difficulties, the film was begun, stopped and then begun again under
circumstances of direst financial concern, eventually
bankrupting the film’s producer, Raoul Ploquin, and opening
to initial public indifference after the liberation of France in 1945.

Indeed, during the film’s production – which lasted until

February 1945 – the production of the film was halted for
nearly six months due to electrical shortages and a severely
limited supply of raw film stock. The film was almost
scrapped until Cocteau’s connections prevailed and shooting

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resumed (Reader 2000, 20). In short, the film almost vanished before it even had a chance to exist and, although it is readily available on DVD today, for many years before the advent of
video, it was a “phantom text,” intermittently available in

16mm film from a variety of small distributors before
dropping out of sight almost entirely in the mid-1970s. The
ephemerality of the project is thus apparent from the outset; here is a film made in spite of, rather than because of,
circumstance.

In addition to the differing temperaments of the film’s two
key auteurs, one must factor in the knowledge that, while

Cocteau treated Paris during the war as an extended salon for his creative efforts, managing to remain on good terms with
both the members of the Resistance and the occupying
authorities, Bresson himself had direct contact with the war; he was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1939 and held for 18
months in a prison camp. These events in part influenced

Bresson’s postwar film, Un Condamné à mort s’est échappé

(1956), a historical drama set during this period of the

Resistance. This imprisonment, in many senses, marked

Bresson for life and made him simultaneously suspicious and
fearful of capricious external authority. Taught by
circumstance to internalize his emotions during this period by his captors, Bresson’s own approach to the war became that
of a direct combatant while, for Cocteau, the Occupation
merely served as the backdrop for his work as an artist.

The narrative of Les Dames, described in brief thumbnail
form in the opening paragraphs of this essay, is thus a
jumping-off point for two competing, yet incontestably real
visions of the French wartime milieu. Cocteau, the
boulevardier, never strayed far from the public’s attention no 151
matter what else he did while Bresson, a much more interior personage, sought to express himself only through a series of screens – or baffles – deflecting attention from himself. And yet, for all the luxury of its surroundings, Les Dames exists in a world of privation and emotional starvation. In the film’s
opening moments, Hélène is returning from an evening at the
theater with a gentleman friend who knows of her tortured
relationship with Jean and warns Hélène that, “There’s no
love there, only tokens of love.” For all this, Hélène remains infatuated with Jean – despite the fact that, in the next scene, it is apparent that he has forgotten the anniversary of their initial meeting. Hélène presents Jean with a gold cigarette
case – which Jean describes as “warm, cold, light, dark,
incorruptible” – but Jean himself has nothing to offer but
regrets and, subsequently, the “shocking” revelation that he is no longer in love with her.

But even this moment of honesty must be extracted from

Jean; he gives nothing, but in his weakness wants everything
immediately and without discussion. Hélène speaks first of
the gradual breakdown of their relationship and only then
does Jean admit that he too feels a diminution of passion
between them and wants to terminate their affair. Although
she struggles to retain her composure, it is clear that Hélène is stunned by Jean’s rejection. It is one thing for Hélène to break off their relationship, but quite another for Jean to admit that his own ardor has cooled. Hiding her outrage and surprise,

Hélène shows Jean to the door in wordless silence and then
collapses on her bed, idly playing with her pet dog. As the
camera tracks in on her face slowly and impassively, Hélène
utters the words that will set the film’s entire plot in motion:

“I’ll be revenged.” Thus, Jean’s fate is sealed and the rest of the film documents Hélène’s campaign against him.

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In nearly every – if not every – critical account of Les Dames, Paul Bernard’s performance as Jean comes in for rather harsh
criticism, often mentioned as the one “weak spot” (Roud

1968, 37), as being “lackluster” (Reader 2000, 23) or even as being “a […] unanimously accepted […] failure” (Millar

1970, 33). It seems to me that this is far from the case; Jean is a fool, as Agnès bluntly says in the film. He is interested only in the surfaces of people, not in their interior selves.

Bernard’s weak, pliant, falsely earnest performance is in
many ways the perfect contrast to Casarès’ barely controlled
ferocity; he is the ultimate dupe, absolutely unaware of the
web that Hélène spins for him. He is unconscious of having
gravely offended Hélène during their breakup and supposes
her to be his “friend” in some curious regard; in this, he could not be more mistaken. By contrast, Agnès is almost
immediately suspicious of Hélène when she comes into her
life, sensing sinister motives behind Hélène’s seemingly
reassuring smiles.

The film is composed of a series of visually dazzling, almost sensual set pieces despite the somewhat desperate
circumstances of its construction. Hélène’s apartment is like a museum, lit from above with a series of coldly efficient “pin spots,” and Jean-Jacques Grünenwald’s relentlessly romantic
score suffuses the film with a sense of both grandeur and
tragedy. When Hélène decides upon revenge in the opening
scene, Bresson uses a sound bridge of music and percussive
accompaniment to transport us with a dissolve to the precincts of a shabby café where Agnès dances for a group of bored,
indifferent sophisticates, many of whom will try to force their attentions on her later that evening. Alone at a table, Hélène –
appearing as if by magic – watches her with cool
circumspection.

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Only 22 at the time of the film’s production, Casarès makes Hélène a creature of menace and destruction as she coolly
observes Agnès’ dance routine in a series of even tighter
close-ups, her cloak covering her head like the hood of a
coiled cobra, her face wreathed in cigarette smoke. As Agnès

(who has, in the film, a serious heart condition) dances for the crowd, Hélène regards her simply as a means to an end
without any regard for Agnès’ free will or even her life. It
isn’t hard to make the connection between Hélène and the
occupying Nazi forces here; it is absolutely explicit. Hélène’s rapacious pursuit of her plans against Jean will threaten to
destroy all who oppose her and Hélène’s wealth and social
position (particularly in wartime, for Les Dames is firmly, I would argue, situated in the world of occupied Paris) will
always protect her from reprisals.

Agnès completes her pathetic cabaret performance with a
falsely confident smile and leaves the stage pursued by a
horde of young men all seeking her sexual favors. It is clear that economic circumstances caused by the war have brought
ruin to Agnès and her mother and that even cabaret dancing is not enough to support their increasingly tenuous lifestyle.

Agnès, it is clearly implied, has drifted into prostitution, with her mother as her apparently willing enabler. The young men
pursue Agnès back to her apartment where her mother – a
simple, yet morally ambiguous figure – seems quite content to almost literally pimp her daughter to the admirers in exchange for endless bouquets of flowers, money, chocolate and other
false tokens of affection. Even at the start of the film, Agnès is disgusted with her situation and reproaches her mother for accepting the vases of flowers; as she puts it, “Behind every flower, there’s the face of a man.”

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In return, the young men treat Agnès as little more than a tramp, blowing smoke in her face while she is dancing and
tormenting her with their unwanted advances. At length,
while dancing with a particularly insolent suitor, Agnès reacts to his “smoke in the face” gesture of contempt by grabbing
his lit cigarette and stubbing it out on his cheek. He
immediately slaps Agnès in response and she pushes him
back into an end table, knocking both him and the table over
and spilling champagne and an ice bucket on the floor of the
room. As always, Agnès’ mother reacts by trying to restore a
sense of order to this utterly amoral social universe,
obediently rushing to pick up the champagne while Agnès
regards her with ill-disguised disgust. Hélène, who has
followed Agnès and her mother to their apartment, watches
this degrading scene with a smile of satisfaction and then
moves in for the kill.

Confronting Agnès’ mother in a side room, Hélène feigns
sympathy for the mother and daughter’s desperate situation
and offers to set them up in a luxury apartment, settle their debts and restore them to society, seemingly with no strings
attached. Agnès is immediately suspicious, but goes along to
keep her mother happy. And yet, the airy, spacious apartment
seems strangely barren and claustrophobic. Whenever Agnès
dances around the rooms and opens the windows in an
attempt to take “possession” of the space, her mother closes
the windows that let in light and air with protests that Agnès should not exert herself in view of her weak heart, trapping

Agnès further within the décor of the apartment and Hélène’s
machinations. Indeed, Agnès collapses after one brief attempt at pirouetting through the apartment and it becomes clear to
her that Hélène’s entire scheme is simply a trap for Agnès and her mother.

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But it is also a trap for Jean after Hélène arranges an

“accidental” meeting between Jean and Agnès at the park near
the Bois de Boulogne. Immediately smitten with Agnès – in a
sequence staged in a series of sensuously interlocking
reciprocal dissolves – Jean demands to know Agnès’ address
and begins pursuing her with manic, childish intensity. He
knows nothing of Agnès’ interior torments or her past life, but is attracted by her physical presence alone. Hélène, shrewdly judging this infatuation as a dream state from which Jean
refuses to awaken, devises various means to keep Jean and

Agnès apart while gradually divulging more and more
information about their supposedly “secret” apartment. At
length, Jean’s pursuit results in a proposal of marriage, which Agnès eventually acquiesces to and immediately regrets. She
composes a letter to Jean telling him of her past, but he
refuses to read it and, in a detailed and resonantly Catholic ceremony, the couple is wed.

Her triumph complete, Hélène doesn’t even wait for the
wedding to conclude; as she works her way down the
receiving line, Hélène whispers in Jean’s ear that she has
made a “terrible mistake” about Agnès’ pedigree. “Make
inquiries,” she urges and, when Jean demands clarification,

Hélène coolly tells him that he’s married “a tramp” and that
this is the revenge she has exacted for his “betrayal” of their love. Jean, speechless, flees the scene of the wedding as

Agnès collapses on her bed, the victim of another heart attack.

At length, ashen, Jean returns and, in the film’s final
moments, begs Agnès to “stay” with him and not to die.

Agnès’ last words in the film – “I’ll stay” – signal that,
despite all of Hélène’s elaborate plans and despite Jean’s
essential human weakness and the general condemnation of
society, the couple will make a go of it. More importantly,

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Jean has finally begun to look behind the surface of both people and things, and values Agnès as a wife and partner in
his life. Hélène, ultimately, has failed. It is not so much love, but rather faith, that has triumphed.

Cocteau, ever the expert manipulator of both people and
things, saw to it that the film opened at the Rex Theatre in

Paris, the largest cinema in the city. Despite the subsequent cool reception, director Jacques Becker – who was present at
the premiere – later wrote that, “the public has understood

Bresson, I know, and I had the proof of this in a large

Boulevard cinema in which some three thousand spectators
followed the film in attentive silence” (Reader 2000, 22).

Thus, the well-known story of the film’s immediate failure
should be qualified by Becker’s account of this initial success, even though Cocteau himself noted that the film ultimately

“won its case in the appeals court” of subsequent critical
opinion, particularly with the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd

(Euker 2007).

But most contemporary critics and audiences misunderstood
or disliked the film, perhaps because it reminded them of the recent Vichy past and, for many, their collaborationist share in it. Bresson’s future as a director hung in the balance for a time, while Cocteau immediately skipped along to his next
project. Another factor that militated against the film’s
reception was Bresson’s relative disinterest in dealing
effectively with the critics. As he himself later noted,

I hate publicity. One should be known for what he
does, not for what he is. Nowadays a painter paints a
bad painting, but he talks about it until it becomes

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famous. He paints for five minutes and talks about it on television for five years. (Samuels 1970)

This is a sentiment that Cocteau, who always cultivated
public opinion in his favor, would never have understood. As
a result of these and other factors, Bresson never worked with Cocteau again. The two dissimilar artists were moving in
decisively different directions in their respective careers –

Bresson gravitating towards asceticism, while Cocteau was
drawn to a world of fantasy and ornate spectacle. Thus, the
intensely romantic vision afforded by Bresson’s meticulous
direction, Max Douy’s sumptuous decors (Douy would later
work for Jean Renoir on his equally transcendent romance,

French Cancan, 1954, as well as Jules Dassin’s Topkapi, 1964
and, amazingly enough, on Lewis Gilbert’s Moonraker, 1979,
along with numerous other films), Grünenwald’s passionate
musical core and Philippe Agostini’s sharp-as-a-knife
cinematography became a curiosity in both Bresson and

Cocteau’s respective careers.

Bresson would not make a film again until 1950, when his

Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest),
emerged as the first of a series of austere, sculptural films that completely rejected the theatricality of conventional screen
performance, editing, camera movement and musical cues to
create nothing less than an utterly unique and distinctive
language that Bresson made entirely his own for the rest of
his long, but not prolific, career. For Cocteau, Les Dames
remains a triumph of polished, cynical upper-crust dialogue
on par with his masterful 1929 play of love betrayed, La Voix humaine, which was eventually filmed by Roberto Rossellini
in 1948 (titled “Una voce umana” and part of L’Amore). But

Cocteau had his own vision as a director to pursue on-screen

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and made a triumphant return as an auteur with his La Belle et la bête (shot in 1945, shortly after the liberation of Paris) – a film as far removed from Bresson’s spare, sculptural style as one could possibly imagine.

Yet, their collaboration in Les Dames – one might even call it a clash of wills, both intent on the same object, but
approaching it through different means – remains a key text in understanding the work of both artists. In the precise
choreographing of movements, gestures and screen space, one
can already see the beginnings of Bresson’s later style.

Composed of a series of precise, individuated movements and
edited with an air of inexorable inevitability rather than
kinetic excitement, Bresson’s deconstruction of time and
motion is both mathematically precise and laden with
meaning (the champagne and table fall, the mother mops up –
momentary violence is followed by order restored). Cocteau’s
script is almost a catalogue of aphorisms; at one point, when Agnès has gone missing in an attempt to evade Jean’s ever
more intensive advances, Hélène professes ignorance of

Agnès’ whereabouts, saying, “Wherever she is, she’s doing
something sublime; in short, ruining herself.” And so, Les

Dames can correctly be seen as a romance – a drama of
revenge and its consequences, a window into France under
the Nazi Occupation and even, in a bizarre way, as a
seriocomic melodrama on the vicissitudes of friendship and
maternal attachments.

But, in the final analysis, Les Dames remains – as François

Truffaut and André Bazin both suggested – a film of
resistance, in which a group of talented men and women
joined forces to create a parable of one’s need for personal
responsibility and the consequences of evading it. Reductive

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though it might be, on at least one level, Les Dames is an attack on the “caretakers” of the Vichy regime, who implicitly promised Parisians – and, by extension, all of France – that
nothing would change under their rule except perhaps the loss of a few personal liberties and the disappearance of much of

France’s Jewish population. As Truffaut pointed out in 1975,

Marcel Ophüls’ epic examination of French culpability during
the Occupation, Le Chagrin et la Pitié (The Sorrow and the

Pity, 1970), placed the era of the Vichy regime into much
sharper focus; he is quick to acknowledge that more than a
few French cinéastes – especially Lucien Rebatet (who often
wrote under the pseudonym François Vinneuil) – willingly
cooperated with the Nazis in creating an atmosphere of
anti-Semitism in French cultural life with, as he put it, a very

“heavy hand” (Truffaut 1981, 13).

To place the production of Les Dames in its proper context,

Truffaut quotes from a text written in April 1941 by Rebatet/

Vinneuil under the title “Les Tribus du Cinéma et du Théâtre”

(the tribes of the cinema and the theatre), in which the author categorically lays out the future of French cinema in a world ruled by the Nazis:

Sooner or later, our soil will have to be cleared of
several hundred thousand Jews, beginning with Jews
without regular papers, those who are not
naturalized, those who have most recently arrived,
those whose political and financial malfeasance is
most obvious – in other words, all the Jews working
in cinema. Before this is done, we will pick out
those for whom exile would be too benign a
punishment and who will have to pay their debt with
prison terms at least. In the meantime, the entire

160

French film industry, from the production to the printing of films to the management of the smallest
theater, will have to be inexorably and definitively
closed to Jews without distinction of either class or
origin. (Truffaut 1981, 13)

What does one do in such an untenable situation? One either
fights or flees. Now, from the perspective of more than fifty years, the struggle for the mind and souls of France during

World War II seems simultaneously remote and difficult to
quantify; we look back from the standpoint of those who have
vanquished evil (at least in this case), as if victory was always assured. But it was not. Life in France during the Occupation was a constant battle – a series of opportunities for resistance and obligations to one’s conscience that were either heeded or ignored. In Les Dames, Cocteau and Bresson created a
parable that still resonates today – in a time when
governments fail to heed the will of their citizens and engage in violence to extract both information and the subjugation of all opposing voices.

If you give up your freedom, you give up your ability to alter your situation. To fight against such tyranny is not only the right thing to do, Bresson and Cocteau argue – in the final
resolve, it is the only thing to do. What will be the

“resistance” films of today, in a time of war that seems to
stretch endlessly before us? No doubt, they masquerade as
genre entertainments – romances, action films, other escapist fare – in order to stay off the radar screen of the ruling
culture. But they exist, as Les Dames exists, and offer
examples of strength and courage in a time of extreme
adversity. Ultimately, Les Dames’ lasting power derives from
the brilliance of its execution, the sophistication of its

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dialogue and the message of faith, hope and struggle contained within its narrative. Such was the work of the

Resistance cinema – and all “resistance” cinema – and such is the achievement of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne.

Footnote

*

A version of this chapter was first published in 2008 by

Senses of Cinema (online) as “The Power of Resistance: Les

Dames
du

Bois
de

Boulogne”

(issue

46):

http://sensesofcinema.com/2008/feature-articles/
dames-du-bois-de-boulogne/.

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Chapter 8

BEYOND CHARACTERIZATION:

PERFORMANCE IN 1960s

EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA*

The New American Cinema of the 1960s differed from
conventional models of filmmaking in many ways: embracing
chance, roughness of physical execution, an impoverishment
of technical and financial facilities, but also freeing the
filmmakers to create personal films that reflected their lives, their sexuality and their social beliefs. The “actors” in these films were really performing themselves, even if they were
following a script; “performance” in experimental films of the 1960s was really an extension of each actor’s personality and, often, actors were left to their own devices without traditional direction during the production of a film. This essay discusses some of the key films of the era, along with the directors and performers who created them.

Acting and performance styles in experimental films are
many and varied, but all rely to some degree on the force of
individual personality to relate to the film’s intended
audience. The nomad bikers in Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio

Rising (USA, 1963), for example, are essentially performing
themselves for the camera as part of the normal daily
catalogue of ritualized behavior. Gerard Malanga as Victor,
however – the Victor in Andy Warhol’s Vinyl (USA, 1965) –
working from Ron Tavel’s script, delivers an exaggerated,
over-the-top “declamatory” performance that was partly the
result of Warhol’s refusal to let the actors rehearse; Malanga was forced to read much of the script from enormous cue

163

cards during the filming, essentially reading the scenario for the first time. Since all acting contains a certain element of theatricality, the strategy in experimental cinema depends
either on complete improvisation (as in the case of Taylor

Mead in Ron Rice’s free form feature film The Flower Thief

(USA, 1960)), or else upon a stylized sensibility that seems to bring to the forefront the essential artificiality, or
performative nature, of acting.

Figure 8. Flaming Creatures.

Source: Author’s collection.

Often, actors in experimental films are friends of the director, or else stage actors working on the fringe of performance arts and so there is a strong sense of exploration and uncertainty in experimental filmic acting styles; in many cases, the film is a combined voyage of discovery for both the performer and
the director alike. Using examples from the works of such
artists as Andy Warhol, Ron Rice, Jack Smith, Gunvor

Nelson, Gerard Malanga and others, I’ll attempt to examine

164
the question of what defines “performance” in the world of experimental cinema and the many ways in which it manifests
itself in some signature works of this multifaceted genre.

In the early 1960s, before the specter of AIDS consciousness
closed off the body into a site of dis/ease, American
experimental filmmakers were more intent on exploring the
limits of their physical/mental existence than on more
formalist questions of filmic structure and syntax, which
would dominate the American avant-garde in the 1970s and

’80s. All of these filmmakers shared one thing in common: a
highly personal and deeply-felt vision of a new and anarchic
way of looking at film and video, fueled by the inexhaustible romanticism of the era and the fact that film and video were
both very “cheap” mediums with which to work during the

1960s.

The Flower Thief is a good example of the essence of
performativity as content and as the informing structure for
creating a finished cinematic work. Produced to final, optical sound print for considerably less than $1,000 on outdated
black-and-white film stock – specifically, leftover aerial
gunnery film in 50-foot cartridges from World War II,
donated at the last minute, curiously, by the notoriously
cost-conscious Hollywood producer Sam Katzman – the film
follows Taylor Mead, the Chaplin of the 1960s underground,
on a series of picaresque adventures in and around San

Francisco. The film has little plot and needs none; the title derives from a random incident in which Mead steals a flower
from a street vendor, then fantasizes that the police are about to arrest him for his crime. Escaping down the steep San

Francisco streets in a Radio Flyer child’s wagon, desperately clutching his much-abused teddy bear, Mead is at once

165
pathetic and endearing, projecting an image of holy foolishness on the screen.

As the film progresses through its 75-minute running time,

Taylor Mead interacts with groups of roving beatniks, school
children, jazz musicians and North Beach hustlers to create a portrait of a man unfettered by the constraints of society. The film’s construction is equally anarchic, incorporating as it
does light flares, punch holes, mere fragments of film edited together to form a semi-coherent whole and, at times, entire

50-foot reels of film unedited, straight from the camera. The soundtrack for The Flower Thief is, appropriately enough, a
mixture of scratchy old records and Beat poetry; no attempt at image/sound synchronization is made. The soundtrack is
every bit as rough in its execution as are the images; it is
simply the gathering of Mead’s acts of performance that
interests Rice above all other formalist concerns. Considered perhaps the most uncompromising and genuinely avant-garde
feature film of the very early 1960s, The Flower Thief is a
paean to the plight of the common man in a world that is both unresponsive and unyielding.

This motivated extravagance extended to Rice’s other films –
most notably Chumlum (USA, 1964), which starred Mario

Montez, Gerard Malanga and Jack Smith (more on these
widely variant personalities later) in what René Micha in Les Temps Modernes described as “an infinite spectacle,
superimposing bodies swinging in hammocks, back and forth
through gossamer draperies that slow the movements, and
suspend them on the edge of the abyss” (Filmmakers’

Cooperative 1967, 125). Shot in ravishing color, the film is an indolent spectacle of pleasure run rampant, existing in a world in which the only pursuits are desire and temptation. In sharp 166
contrast to the “rough-and-ready” look of The Flower Thief, Chumlum is quietly seductive for its brief 26-minute running
time, aided considerably by Angus MacLise’s trance-like
musical accompaniment. In this film, performance consists
almost exclusively of a series of poses; inaction becomes
action and passivity, enticement. It is enough to drift through the world of Chumlum with its protagonists; Rice has created
a pansexual dream world in Chumlum that is both
intoxicating and mesmerizing.

Ron Rice himself died of bronchial pneumonia in Acapulco,

Mexico in 1964, not long after making Chumlum; his
excessive lifestyle and his insistence on putting the cost of film production before all other considerations (food, rent and other more mundane expenses) seemingly ensured his early
death from spectacular, performative self-neglect. In the late 1990s, looking back on the career of what he described as

“the greatest director I ever worked with,” Mead described
the genesis of The Flower Thief and how the film represented
for him – and for Ron Rice – a departure from the
conventional cinema as it was then being practiced, even at
the margins of production:

The philosophies of the ’50s “Beat” writers came to
cinematic fruition […] in the film Pull My Daisy

(USA, 1959) by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. I
attended this film with Ron Rice, and we both
picked up on how interesting and easy it was to
respond to our surroundings in real life and even
transfer to cinema. Though the “professionalism”

and cost of Pull My Daisy was even beyond our
financial and mentally competent or inclined
disposition. We thought we could make a “worse”

167
film, and it would cost a fraction of the well-lit and correlated Pull My Daisy. What I think we bought
especially was the philosophy within the film of

Allen, Gregory, and Peter, and their friends – that
this was the new way to do things, including live.

And, in film, Ron Rice’s basic advice to filmmakers
was “Push the button.” Unfortunately he carried

“living” to its ultimate at the early age of 28 […].

(Mead 1998, 2)

In Taylor Mead’s other performative films of the 1960s –

Passion in a Seaside Slum and The Hobo and the Circus (both
directed by Bob Chatterton; USA, 1961) and Lemon Hearts

(directed by Vernon Zimmerman; USA, 1960) – Mead retains
his childlike innocence in a world that continually seeks,
without success, to corrupt him with the desire for
conventional material rewards. Lemon Hearts, a 16mm

30-minute black-and-white film with an optical soundtrack,
was financed by the actor Richard Kiley and produced in its
entirety on an amazingly low budget of $50 (Sargeant 1997,

88). Mead plays eleven different roles in the film as he drifts aimlessly
through
the
ruins
of
a
series
of
soon-tobe-demolished Victorian houses, sometimes appearing
in drag, sometimes in blue jeans and a sweatshirt.

The soundtrack is once again pirated from jazz records,
interspersed with Mead’s own Beat poetry (“Oh God, oh God,
oh God, my feet smell […] I pissed on Jane Wyman’s
picture”). In his lackadaisical avoidance of conventional plot and characterization in those films he appeared in, Taylor

Mead – in concert with the filmmakers he worked with –
created a cinema in which his performing body was the
central focus of the camera’s gaze. Whenever he is off the

168
screen in The Flower Thief or Lemon Hearts, the audience grows restless. Taylor Mead creates – with his gracefully
languid nymph-like body and his blissfully blank expression –
the perfect picture of absolute innocence in a hopelessly
corrupt universe.

I knew Mead during the Warhol era in the late 1960s and
found him to be a fascinating, deeply innocent and vastly
talented performer. Once, at Warhol’s 33 Union Square West

Factory, I spontaneously began filming Mead with my Bolex
absolutely without warning and was stunned when he
immediately improvised what he later termed “The Dance of
the Ruptured Swan,” making up the choreography for the
piece entirely on the spot. From a series of graceful
pirouettes, Mead suddenly fell to the floor in mock agony,
clutching his genitals, screaming, “I’ve been castrated!” while still attempting to carry on with his dance performance with a flurry of vigorous leg thrusts and extravagant arm gestures as he did so.

What amazed me even more was that, as my spring-wound

Bolex ended each 15 foot burst and needed rewinding, Mead
would pause and wait for me to quickly rewind the camera.

When we continued, Mead resumed the sequence without a
gap. I shot two 100-foot reels of Mead in this fashion, without a word spoken between us, and when I had exhausted my
supply of film, I simply gestured towards him and remarked,

“That was brilliant. Thank you.” With characteristic modesty, Mead, now in his nonperformance persona, brushed off my
praise with a wave of his hand and I left the Factory with the very real sense that I’d just been in the presence of an
authentic performing genius.

169

The other aspect that struck me as remarkable was that Mead had instinctively responded to the whir of my camera,
reflexively kicking into performance mode without missing a
beat. Further, I could make no claim for “directing” the
footage I had just shot; Mead had created the whole thing
from the start of filming. Nor did he inquire what I wanted,
what I intended to do with the footage or even who I was (we
were relative strangers at the time). Simply put, Mead was the auteur of the sequence much more than I was; I was simply
recording his performance on film.

In short, Taylor Mead was an ideal actor for a “hands off”

director like Andy Warhol or Ron Rice; given literally no
direction, he transfixed the gaze of the camera with his
consummate skill as a performer. But, then again, this skill
served Mead best in experimental cinema; although he has
made a few forays into semi-commercial cinema, such as Jim

Jarmusch’s portmanteau film Coffee and Cigarettes (USA,

2004), when bound to a script, Mead seems tied down. A
perennial free spirit, Mead is best left to his own devices.

In a similar vein, Mario Montez (born René Rivera in 1935 in

Puerto Rico) was another distinctive performer, although his
work was in a somewhat narrower vein – adopting the drag
persona of a 1940s movie siren, patterned after the iconic

Maria Montez, the “Queen of Technicolor,” in such films as

Robert Siodmak’s Cobra Woman (USA, 1944). With her
premature death at age 33 of a heart attack, Montez became
the patron saint of gay “underground” actors and directors
and René Rivera, a New York City postal worker, adopted

Montez’s name and extravagant attitude, bursting forth from
the screen in a series of experimental epics beginning with

Jack Smith’s notorious Flaming Creatures (USA, 1963), in

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which he was billed as Dolores Flores (“Zagria”). Flaming Creatures, a parody of the Arabian Nights costume pictures
both Smith and Montez were so fond of, climaxed in a
transvestite orgy coupled with an earthquake. The film was an instant succès de scandale and the object of numerous
obscenity busts, but it became Smith’s signature work and
launched Montez into a sort of twilight stardom.

Subsequently, in Mario Banana No. 1 (USA, 1964), Montez
solidified his screen persona by seductively fellating a banana for four minutes in lavish, explosive color – just the sort of mise en scène that Maria Montez herself would have
appreciated in form, if not content. Shot in the style of

Warhol’s “screen test” series – 100-foot rolls of film run
through a Bolex camera with an electric motor to capture all
the action in one take – Mario Banana is at once an homage to

’40s camp and effectively queers the entire costume drama
genre with its shimmeringly aggressive shot composition.

Framed in a tight, glamorous close-up, Montez regards the
camera as a potential suitor, an object to be seduced, even as she/he eagerly consumes the banana for the spectator’s
implied pleasure.

Montez then appeared in Warhol’s Screen Test Number 2

(USA, 1965), as well as Warhol’s Harlot (USA, 1965),
loosely based on the cult of Jean Harlow, and Hedy (The

Shoplifter; USA, 1965), a spoof of Hedy Lamarr’s Hollywood
career. Her final appearance in a Warhol film was a brief
cameo in Chelsea Girls (USA, 1966), in which Warhol
pushed her in front of the camera to sing “They Say Falling In Love is Wonderful,” while two men engage in a sexual
liaison on a sloppily made bed. Montez’s performance has a
double-edged verisimilitude; one is conscious of the drag

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aspect of his onscreen persona, but at the same time, Montez embraces his alter ego with such fervent devotion that the
masquerade becomes almost transparent. He is what he
presents himself to be: a transgendered figure of androgynous desire, upon whom the audience can project either a male or
female gender identity.

As Montez says forthrightly, “I learned my acting basically
from watching old movies,” and so his performances form a
link not only between masculine and feminine performance
styles, but also classical Hollywood and the New American
cinema of the 1960s, which discarded many of the “rules of
the game” by which the cinema had previously operated. Not
that he made much money at it; “With Warhol, everyone was
forced to sign releases before you did anything. We were all
naïve and we signed away […] I was working [in] the
daytime as a clerical worker and I had to squeeze in time to
do things for Warhol, [as well as theatrical performance artist]

Charles Ludlam. I don’t know how I did it” (Martorell 2010).

Eventually, Montez decided that New York was too
inhospitable a climate and, in the late 1970s, moved to

Florida, more or less abandoning his performing career –
although he is, from time to time, lured out of retirement at benefit screenings for Warhol’s films or those of Jack Smith.

Gerard Malanga, once Andy Warhol’s right-hand man and
now a full-time photographer and archivist, created a series of deeply romantic films in which his own persona of “the
young poet” was foregrounded in each frame. In contrast to
the gaze of Warhol’s detached, somnolent Auricon camera –
loaded with 35 minutes (1200 feet) of 16mm film at a clip to
record the happenings staged by Warhol’s Factory regulars –

Malanga’s films, shot almost entirely with a handheld Bolex,

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present a world in which all is celebration, beauty and sacrifice of the self for art. While such early Warhol films as Camp (USA, 1965) – a shoddily improvised “variety show”

featuring Paul Swan, Baby Jane Holzer, Jack Smith, Mario

Montez and Tosh Carillo – also present the human body as
the sole point of interest to the gaze of the camera, Warhol’s informing strategy in such films as Horse (USA, 1965), The

Life of Juanita Castro (USA, 1965), Vinyl (USA, 1965), Poor

Little Rich Girl (USA, 1965) and his magnum opus The

Chelsea Girls (USA, 1966) is to confront the performer (and
spectator) with the documented image of the performing
body.

Malanga’s handheld, restlessly moving camera interprets the
actions he records; with In Search of the Miraculous (USA/

Italy, 1967), Malanga creates an emotional, vivid poem of
adoration for his then-fiancée, Benedetta Barzini. Other early Malanga films also put the performer center stage within the
filmmaker’s lens – which once again extends rather than
contains the performances it records. Mary for Mary (USA,

1966) is a portrait of the actor Mary Woronov; Donovan

Meets Gerard (USA, 1966) documents a performative
meeting between Malanga and the folk singer, Donovan, at

Warhol’s studio, which is obviously staged for the recording
camera. One of Malanga’s most ambitious works, the

60-minute,
split
screen,
two-projector,
stereo
sound

Pre-Raphaelite

Dream

(USA,

1968),
documents
the
filmmaker’s friends and extended family in Cambridge,

Massachusetts, as they perform their lives for the camera. In The Recording Zone Operator (Italy, 1968), shot on location
in Rome in 35mm Techniscope/ Technicolor, Malanga
worked with Tony Kinna, Anita Pallenberg and members of
the Living Theatre to improvise a 40-minute performance

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piece in which a group of gay “angels” accost passersby in a local park, leading to an orgy in a nearby apartment.

The almost forgotten Kip Coburn created a series of sensuous
personal films, working entirely in standard 8mm reversal
color with sound-on-tape accompaniment. Such films as

Cocain [sic], Flesh, Hitchhiker, Johns Doll [sic], Trips,

Stoned and Colors (all USA, all undated) document an
internal odyssey in which the filmmaker is at one with the
world he creates, presenting himself as the ritualized
performer in a drama of the artist’s quest for life beyond the boundaries of normative experience. Similarly, Storm de

Hirsch’s Divinations (USA, 1964), Peyote Queen (USA,

1965) and Shaman: A Tapestry for Sorcerers (USA, 1966)

extend the filmmaker’s body into the performance space of
the film frame, as de Hirsch photographs herself, nude,
through a variety of prismatic lenses and diffusion filters,
presenting her body as the site of ritualistic display to her audience. Stan Brakhage was another filmmaker who
celebrated the human body in many of his films, especially
such early works as Window Water Baby Moving (1962), his
epic feature film Dog Star Man (1964) and perhaps his most
direct and controversial film, Lovemaking (1968), a
forty-minute film that depicted numerous couples – both
straight and gay – photographed with unflinching honesty,
locked in ecstatic embrace.

Ed Emshwiller’s Dance Chromatic (USA, 1959), Lifelines

(USA, 1960) and Thanatopsis (USA, 1962) center on the
body in motion – particularly on dance as a location of
celebration of the human instinct for physical pleasure and
self-expression. Arnold Gassan’s Marsyas (USA, 1963)

follows the plight of an African-American who seeks to

174
escape, metaphorically, the suffocating domination of the White world around him. Fleeing from the city into the
woods, he is symbolically castrated and then, in the final
images of the film, confronts himself as a negative-imaged
ghost in his bathroom mirror. Disturbing and powerful,

Marsyas offers us a performative vision of the loss of human
identity through the twin exigencies of social alienation and racial marginalization and focuses on only one character, Don Crawford (as Marsyas), throughout its 12-minute running
time.

Gunvor Nelson, working with Dorothy Wiley, created the
groundbreaking film Schmeerguntz (USA, 1966), which deals
almost exclusively with the traditionally non-documented
physical aspects of childbirth and child rearing: nausea and
vomiting, cleaning dirty diapers, morning sickness and the
general chores that one must accomplish when one gives birth
to a child. Intercut with clips from 1930s beauty pageant films and other images of the “idealized” feminine corpus, as well
as clips from the Jack LaLanne exercise program (“Merrily
we exercise!” Jack sings, as Nelson and Wiley, in their ninth month of pregnancy, struggle simply to navigate the length of their cramped apartment), Schmeerguntz is a 15-minute
expression of anger, disgust and protest against a society
which artificially sanitizes and erases images of the
reproductive body from the mainstream media.

In a much more celebratory vein, the late Barbara Rubin’s

Christmas on Earth (USA, 1963) – astonishingly created
when the filmmaker was only 18 – is a 30-minute 16mm
double-projection film in which two separate reels of images
of the human body engaged in sexual intercourse, straight and gay, are superimposed to create a landscape of desire and

175
corporeal performance which remains one of the most audacious cultural statements of the 1960s. Rubin
photographed the images for the film in a freeform,
documentary manner, then cut the developed reels of film into short strips, threw them into a basket and drew the individual shots out one by one, splicing them together in random order.

As Daniel Belasco notes of the making of the film,

In June 1963, [Rubin] corralled five friends into the

Ludlow Street crash pad rented by musicians John

Cale and Tony Conrad and instigated a night of
playful debauchery. “Barbara held us hostage for 24
hours, from early evening to the next day. It was
very Cocteau-ish. We were locked in and
hermeticized in this apartment, it was a very
freewheeling situation,” recalled Gerard Malanga,
one of the performers in the film [in a telephone
interview with Belasco]. (Belasco 2007)

This free-associational approach to the shooting and editing
of Christmas On Earth extended to the film’s presentation, as well. After extended consideration, Rubin cut the finished
film into two separate reels, screening the images on two
projectors simultaneously to create another layering of
imagery within the work. While requesting that one
projector’s image fill the entire screen and the second
projector’s image be “approximately 1/3 smaller, [filling]

only the middle of the screen,” Rubin was very much
interested in enlisting the projectionist of her film as a
co-creator of the work, as evidenced by these remarks to the
projectionist, found on a sheet of paper enclosed in the film can:

176

It doesn’t matter which reel is on which projector.

During the screening, the projectionist is asked to
play with color changes by holding colored filters in
front of the lens of one or the other projector, or
both. Moreover, the film has neither head nor tail –
it can be projected either way. (Filmmakers’

Cooperative 1967, 129)

Rubin’s vision of the human body as a performative site of
pleasure, desire, mystery and ritual role play is certainly one of the most direct to come out of the 1960s American
experimental cinema and one of the most unashamed. By
holding up the human body (male and female) to the careful
scrutiny of the camera lens, Barbara Rubin, in a single film, managed to reclaim the sexualized body from the zone of
pornographic representation it inhabits in the Dominant

Cinema – as a location of fear and prurient desire. Instead, the Edenic images Rubin offers the viewer in Christmas On Earth
remind us of our own genesis – our life and breath – and our
concomitant mortality.

Ben Van Meter, a West Coast filmmaker most active in the

1960s, created a gorgeous series of films that celebrate the
human body in such works as The Poon-Tang Trilogy (USA,

1964), Colorfilm (USA, 1964–65), Olds-Mo-Bile (USA,

1965) and his epic Acid Mantra: Re-Birth of a Nation (USA,

1966–68), a 47-minute color and black-and-white work of
such propulsive energy and intensity that viewing it is almost an exhausting experience. Starting with footage of various
rock bands in concert – including the Velvet Underground
and the Grateful Dead – the film superimposes as many as ten
different layers of images simultaneously to engulf the viewer in a cornucopia of sight and sound, all leading up to a

177
climactic orgy during a summer picnic at a party in the Bay Area countryside.

Men, women and children are seen frolicking about nude,
unashamed before Van Meter’s camera: swimming, playing

Frisbee, lounging on the grass in the late afternoon sunlight.

As the film enters its final third, the men and women
participate in a celebratory group sex experience, which we
barely glimpse through a haze of filters, quasi fabrics and
competing imagistic material. As the couples engage in
ecstatic sexual performative role play, Van Meter drips blobs of colored paint directly on the film, as if to suggest the
intensity of the energy that is being released by this
performance. As the film ends, we see family units once again engaged in relaxed outdoor activities still in the nude, playing various sports, relaxing or walking in the tall grass with their children.

Carolee Schneemann created the beautiful film Fuses (USA,

1964–68), a 22-minute meditation on the act of lovemaking,
which Schneemann photographed with her partner during the
act of intercourse. Unlike the stratified images of sexual
activity removed from any human context, Carolee

Schneemann, throughout the film, allows her camera to film
the family cat disinterestedly watching them or window
curtains blowing in the afternoon breeze. Schneemann also
created a number of performance pieces during the 1960s and

’70s that involved the use of her body as a site of
performative ritualistic display; sometimes these events were documented, but often they remained merely as memories in
the minds of those in the audience. José Rodriguez-Soltero’s

Jerovi (USA, 1965) and Naomi Levine’s Jaremelu (USA,

1964) celebrated the act of masturbation as a rite of sexual

178
performance and self-actualization in a way in which even censors of the period found unsettling. Jerovi and Jaremelu
were both denied admission to the 1965 Ann Arbor Film

Festival on the grounds that they were “pornographic,” as the late Gregory Markopoulos reported in an essay on the
festival:

[…] I learned that certain films had not been
admitted to the festival because Mr. Manupelli’s
selection committee thought them unworthy of
inclusion. Among these were Naomi Levine’s lovely

Jaremelu and José Soltero’s Jerovi, another film on
masturbation like [Nathanael Dorsky’s] Ingreen

(USA, 1964) but more direct. A part of the selection
committee ran Jerovi and they were visibly shaken.

One young woman immediately proclaimed it

“pornographic.” “What’s pornographic about it?” I
asked. No reply […] (Filmmakers’ Cooperative

1967, 128)

Warren Sonbert began his filmmaking career with

Amphetamine (USA, 1966), a student film Sonbert shot in

February of that year featuring his friends and roommates
shooting up amphetamine on camera, then engaging in
passionate gay sexual displays of performative lovemaking.

The film was stunning both in its apparent artlessness as well as its unashamed embrace of both the drug culture and the
performative act of homosexual lovemaking, performed
directly in front of Sonbert’s camera. Shot in 16mm
black-and-white and scored to the beat of ’60s rock and roll, Amphetamine was hailed as one of the clearest and most
direct films of the 1960s, receiving an ecstatic review from
critic James Stoller.

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[…] Amphetamine is especially symptomatic as in its intimation that the filmmaker has not performed
enough work for this to be art. But I would suggest
that the work has indeed been done, although
principally in an unaccustomed direction: the
direction of freeing the imagination first so that a
statement could be made for which, in its
transparency and unpretentiousness, there was no
comfortably precedent. The result is beautiful and
pure: behind the bald surface we feel, first, that
many inessentials have been cleared away, and then,
that the need for them has been cleared away.

(Filmmakers’ Cooperative 1967, 141)

One of the most compelling images in the film, indeed, is the result of an accident. As Sonbert told me in 1969, he was
shooting another film about the denizens of 42nd Street in

Manhattan – then, a notorious zone of drugs and debauchery

– when the film in his camera lost its loop, resulting in a

(supposedly) completely unusable image. When the footage
came back from the lab, he was advised to simply throw the
material away. But Sonbert saw the value in embracing this
mistake, much as Marcel Duchamp would have done, and cut
sections of the light, fluttering material into Amphetamine to create what Stoller referred to an “exquisite blur,” right before a “shock cut” to two young men locked in a passionate
embrace while Sonbert’s camera swoops around them in an
ecstatic dance of communal abandon.

Sonbert went on to a long and riveting career as a filmmaker; while his later works are much more formalist, starting with
the structuralist film Carriage Trade (USA, 1971), his early
films, such as Where Did Our Love Go? (USA, 1966), Hall of

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Mirrors (USA, 1966) and The Bad and the Beautiful (USA, 1967) belong to the classical period of American
experimental cinema, and document the lives and loves of his
large circle of friends and colleagues – often scored to rock and roll soundtracks to create an indelible, ineffably romantic portrait of life in New York City during what was arguably its greatest period as an artistic breeding ground for all the arts, not just film.

In similar fashion, Jud Yalkut’s Kusama’s Self Obliteration

(USA, 1967) offers us a vision of the Japanese performance
artist, Yayoi Kusama, engaged in a “self-obliteration” ritual in which she paints dots of color on leaves, animals, various
other objects and finally on a group of people ecstatically
copulating in one of Kusama’s endlessly mirrored “Infinity

Chambers” who carry on making love, seemingly oblivious to

Kusama’s painterly brushstrokes being applied to their naked
skin. By linking nature in the form of trees, flowers, grass and animal to the human experience of performative re/
production, Kusama demonstrates that the physical fact of

“individuality” is mediated by the performative act of

“self-obliteration,” in which individuality is subsumed into
the larger fabric of shared existence. Kusama – whose work
as a performance artist, painter and sculptor is now
undergoing a major renaissance – was one of the first artists in the 1960s to incorporate performativity into her work,
which was presented with or without the apparatus of
documentation. It is only because Jud Yalkut was present
with his camera that we have the record of Kusama’s
performance work in her Self Obliteration piece; many of her
performance works were documented only with stills or not at
all.

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Sara Kathryn Arledge, a pioneering feminist filmmaker who began making 16mm color films in 1941, produced a series of
meditations on human sexuality and ritual body display in
such films as Introspection (USA, 1941–46), What Is A Man?

(USA, 1958), Tender Images (USA, 1978) and others, which
celebrated the union between masculine and feminine with a
directness of address that still strikes the viewer as being fresh and original. Arledge was a pioneer in this area, making films that were uncompromising in their graphic specificity for the era, depicting sexuality as a performative human act rather
than inhabiting the pornographic zone of the forbidden. As

Judith Butler notes, with filmic pornography, “‘construction’

is not simply the doing of the act […] but the depiction of that doing” (Butler 1995, 221), depicting the act of sexual
intercourse in a manner which can be construed as degrading
and/or dehumanizing. Arledge’s work directly tackles the
issues of filmic sexual performativity and transcends the mere documentation of human sexuality through the mediation of
her humanist gaze. In similar fashion, wife and husband

Marie Menken and Willard Maas collaborated on the
precedent shattering film Geography of the Body (USA,

1943), which reviewed the human body in extreme close-up
with the aid of magnifying lenses and specially designed
filters.

All of these films retain their power to impress audiences
today, if only because of their inherent innocence and lack of shame – a visual and sexual freedom that arose out of an era
of pre-viral consciousness. We will never see the likes of the performative “body work” films of the 1960s again. It would
be impossible and inauthentic to attempt to recreate them.

These performative films of human sexuality and ritualized
body display were a response to the repressive atmosphere of

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the 1950s and a breaking down of then-established rules of gender, sex roles and social taboos. In the films discussed in this essay, the viewer can see the human body as the site of
ritualized displays within a social context of imagistic and
sexual self-actualization, a revolutionary act that altered the course of the cinema both in its explicitness and honesty. The legacy that these films bequeath to us today is a terrible vision of the beauty of the human body as a performative locus of
both fear and desire, the domain of the spirit made visible and tangible.

In all experimental cinema, “performance” is a value that is
very much in flux – both during the production and viewing
of the film. Straight viewers get one set of responses; gay
viewers another; lesbian and transgendered spectators yet
another series of insights; and bisexual viewers receive still another series of takeaway impressions. Gender performance
is one of the central concerns of classic experimental cinema, but added to that, such artists as Warhol (and his scenarist, the late Ronald Tavel) purposefully set out to investigate the
limits of filmic narrative and question what passes for a

“performance” in a film. In conventional, mainstream cinema,
foreign or domestic, the role of the actor is clearly defined as a person who can learn lines, hit marks and seemingly

“become” the character they are playing, shedding their own
personality as part of the performative process. Experimental films largely rely on their protagonists to bring themselves, rather than a set of inherently artificial and mimetic skills, to the set; thus, in a very real sense, the individuality and
intensely personal approach one sees in the films discussed in this article represents arguably a more genuine connection to the “real” than any scripted performance. There is a genuine
element of risk and spontaneity in these films that is often

183
absent from mainstream cinema, with its all-too-often predictable story arcs, twist endings and recycled plot lines.

Experimental cinema, by contrast, puts the heart on trial, as it exposes the fears and ambitions of its protagonists,
performing for the love of the art rather than any conventional critical acclaim. In the end, then, experimental films almost by definition interrogate the very process of traditional screen acting and find it innately superficial and often lacking in real human resonance. Not everyone is willing to open himself or
herself up to the scrutiny of such a naked gaze; those who are gesture towards a re-evaluation of theatrical and cinematic
standards of performance and, in the process, bring us closer to ourselves.

Footnote

*

A version of this chapter was first published in 2010 by

Screening the Past (online) as “Beyond Characterization:

Performance in 1960s Experimental Cinema” (number 29):

http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/29/
performance-in-1960s-experimental-cinema.html.

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Chapter 9

VANISHING POINT: THE

LAST DAYS OF FILM*

There can be no doubt that the digitization of the moving
image has radically and irrevocably altered the phenomenon
which we call the cinema and that the characteristics of this transformation leave open an entirely new field of visual
figuration. For those who live and work in the post-filmic era

– that is, those who have come to consciousness in the past
twenty years – the digital world is not only an accomplished
fact, but also the dominant medium of visual discourse. Many
of my students remark that the liberation of the moving image from the tyranny of the “imperfect” medium of film is a
technical shift that is not only inevitable, but also desirable.

For younger viewers, the scratch-free, grain-free, glossily
perfect contours of the digital image hold a pristine allure that the relative roughness of the filmic image lacks. Indeed, by
doing away with film, many of my students persuasively
argue that we are witnessing the next step in what will be a
continual evolution of moving image recording – which, in
turn, will be followed by newer mediums of image capture
now unknown to us. For others, those of my age, the filmic
medium is a separate and sacrosanct domain and the

“coldness” of the digital image – stripped of any of the
inherent qualities of light, plastics and colored dyes – betrays a lack of emotion, a disconnect from the real in the classical Bazinian sense. DVDs are easy to use and cheap to produce,
but can’t afford the visual depth and resonance of a projected 185

35mm filmic image. It seems to me that both arguments have valid points and are equally worthy of serious consideration.

Yet the problem, ultimately, with such considerations is that, in the end, there is no “right” answer – no clearly superior
medium, no set of values that emerges as the clear winner in
any disputation that must, of necessity, be based on personal aesthetics, as well as practical and financial consideration.

16mm, we might as well face it, is dead and I mourn its
passing as much as anyone. Indeed, I run 16mm prints in my
classes as much as I possibly can and revel in the pictorial
values and warmth of the film image during my analytical
student screenings of classic films. But, in my home, I no
longer have a 16mm projection setup, which I had for many
years in the 1960s through to the early 1980s; DVDs have
replaced the hundreds of 16mm prints I used to own and have
since sold or donated to various archives. When screened on a 50-inch plasma monitor in the proper aspect ratio, DVDs
offer a very satisfactory viewing experience – even if what
emerges is, at least in my view, a copy of a copy.

186

Figure 9. Film suffering neglect.

Source: Author’s collection.

It is important to note that the majority of viewers – and I
include many of the new generation of academics here –
make no such distinction. Watching Alfred Hitchcock’s The

Birds (1963) on DVD, for example, twenty-first century
viewers realize that they are watching (optimally) a 35mm
negative transferred to digital memory and then downloaded
to a DVD for home use and that the final image they watch

“copies” the filmic nature of the original image, but, at the same time, gives only the “impression” of its original source material. But, given this a priori assumption, twenty-first
century viewers quickly move past this empirical certainty to embrace this newly digitized image as the simulacrum of a
twentieth-century medium. There is no sadness in this and no
betrayal of the maker’s original intent; it is merely a
translation from one image capture medium to another.

187

Certainly it can be argued that this is an oversimplification of a rather knotty problem; film comes with one set of values
inherently present in the stock itself (a tendency towards
warmth in color for some film stocks, or towards cooler hues
in others, as well as characteristics of grain, depth and
definition which are unique to each individual film matrix),
while the digital video image offers another entirely different set of characteristics, verging on a hyperreal glossiness that seems to shimmer on the screen. To achieve a reconsideration
of the basic states of representationalism inherent in any
comparison of these two mediums is a difficult task, calling
into question more than a century of cinematic practice and a host of assumptions shared by practitioners and viewers alike.

Insofar as the moving image is concerned, it might well be
termed what Friedrich Nietzsche cited in Ecce Homo as the
re-evaluation of all values – or “the old truth coming to an
end” (Nietzsche 1992, 86) – opening up a series of questions, claims and counterclaims that instantaneously obliterate
almost all of our preconceptions of the nature of the moving
image.

This is hard work and, yet, it is work that must be attempted critically and theoretically because, paradoxically, it has
already been accomplished as a physical fact – the film image is about to become the sarcophagus of memory while a new
medium of moving image recording takes center stage for the
moment, its moment, bringing with it a whole new host of
aesthetic and practical issues, such as archiving, distribution and audience reception; how different is it to view these
images primarily in the privacy or isolation of one’s own
home, as opposed to the communal nature of traditional filmic projection in an auditorium of strangers?

188

As Paolo Cherchi Usai notes:

I won’t shed tears over the death of cinema. This
might be its first real chance to be taken seriously. It
is estimated that about one and a half billion viewing
hours of moving images were produced in the year

1999, twice the number made just a decade before.

If that rate of growth continues, three billion
viewing hours of moving images will be made in

2006, and six billion in 2011. By the year 2025 there
will be some one hundred billion hours of these
images to be seen. In 1895, the ratio was just above
forty minutes, and most of it is now preserved. The
meaning is clear. One and a half billion hours is
already well beyond the capacity of any single
human: it translates into more than 171,000 viewing
years of moving pictures in a calendar year. (Usai

2001, 111)

In short, cinema history is so vast that it can never be
encompassed – no matter how assiduously one might try –
and images are disintegrating or being erased faster than we
can possibly archive them. Jean Cocteau was right when he
observed in 1943 that “a cinema studio is a factory for
making ghosts. The cinema is a ghost language that has to be
learned” (Cocteau 2001, 131). But such a language, despite
having widespread currency, is also a language that is
inherently ephemeral, leaving a series of impressions that
have more tangible currency than the fragile film stock on
which they are fixed. The twenty-first century has given us a new “ghost language” with its own rules, ciphers and
grammar.

189

Such twentieth-century fetish films as Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate (1991) and The Forbidden Quest (1993) document the
evanescent ebbing and fading of the filmic image in its last
stages of existence – as its hold on physical existence
threatens to expire from moment to moment, finding a tragic
beauty in the ineluctable decay of the film image. But the
digital image is also given to similar displays of spectacular mortality, dissolving at a moment’s notice in a whorl of
pixels, image rips, rolling sync bars and video grain. For
contemporary moving image production, the line between
film and digital has crossed this boundary, as well; in each
instance, the image is only temporarily fixed, as mortal as we are ourselves. Geoffrey O’Brien once posited that the act of
viewing a film plunges the spectator into a world of endless
self-references and permutations, in which one inhabits a
world populated by, among other things,

[The Battleship] Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925),

Charlie Chaplin in drag, Filipino horror movies
about mad surgeons, animated maps tracking the
pincer movements of [Field Marshal] Rommel’s

Panzer divisions, Egyptian soap operas in which
insanely jealous husbands weep for what seems like
hours at a stretch, made-for-TV stories about
hitchhikers and serial killers, a long row of
seventy-minute cavalry Westerns, Russian science
fiction intercut with nude scenes shot on Long

Island, the best of the Bowery Boys, an amateur
bondage cassette filmed on location in a dentist’s
office in Ronkonkoma, They Drive by Night [Raoul

Walsh, 1940], All This, and Heaven Too [Anatole

Litvak, 1940], The Barkleys of Broadway [Charles

Waters, 1949], Hindi religious musicals, Japanese

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gangster movies, countless adaptations of the works of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, and the

Brontë
sisters,

L’Avventura

[Michelangelo

Antonioni, 1960], The Gene Krupa Story [Don

Weis, 1959], La Noche del terror ciego [Tombs of
the Blind Dead, Amando de Ossorio, 1972], Betty

Boop
cartoons
with
color
added,
touristic
documentation of Calcutta and Isfahan, a Bulgarian
punk band captured live, and the complete
photoplays of Louise Brooks, Greta Garbo, and

Veronica Lake. (O’Brien 1995, 24)

For O’Brien, viewing these images accomplishes one thing
above all others: it provides “minimal proof that you were not dead” (O’Brien 1995, 27). But these images – now accessible
to you primarily through the scan lines of a flatscreen
television, on DVD or Blu-Ray DVD – exist at a distance,
separated from the faces and places that created their phantom existence. A digital copy is a copy of a copy, transformed into another medium and yet more concrete than the presence of
the original negative of the film itself, stored in a different vault miles below the surface of the Earth, indifferently
awaiting revival, retrieval, transfer or oblivion. Gerard

Malanga, Andy Warhol’s right-hand man during his most
prolific period in the early-to-mid 1960s, noted of his own
cinematographic work in 1989 – long after Warhol’s Factory
had vanished – that the most mundane images often held
unexpected resonance for him; he noted that, in the archival
process, “I discovered images I would not have seriously
considered at the time of having made them. But I truly
believe photographs have [an] innate and unique ability to
take on new significance with age” (Maddow 2000, 123).

191

And yet, as Usai argues, even as he venerates the images that informed the interior landscape of his youth, “nostalgia in any form gives me the creeps. Brooding over the past bores me to
death” (Usai 2001, 113), a paradoxical stance to take when he simultaneously admits that “an archive for moving images
will end as a kind of museum – in the sense we currently give that term of an asylum for cultural artifacts” (Usai 2001,

115–16). As a medium, the cinema – whether digital or filmic

– has always thrived on and actively sought out agencies of
dramatic and transformative change. Paper film gave way to
cellulose nitrate and then to “safety film”; black-and-white
has fallen to color film, silence has given way to
multidimensional stereophonic sound, digitally recorded for

Dolby playback. Yet, it seems at each juncture in this
evolutionary parade that it is the critics and theoreticians of the medium that are most resistant to change – as when

Rouben Mamoulian’s Becky Sharp premiered in three-step

Technicolor in 1935 to one critic’s comment that
the total impression is one of a brass band in color
rather than a well-modulated symphony […] As
long as color in film has the quality of a gaudy
calendar lithograph, there is no future for it,
artistically, except in the embellishment of […] the
animated cartoon.

while producer Walter Wanger enthused, “color is just as
inevitable as speech. I don’t believe that one black-and-white picture will be produced four years hence,” while Samuel

Goldwyn announced that all his new pictures would be made
in Technicolor, predicting that “black-and-whites soon would
be as rare as silent films” (Jonas and Nissenson 1994, 20).

192

VCRs, along with a host of other factors, eventually killed drive-ins by making it possible to view a film at home with
ease and convenience; DVDs wiped the VHS format out of
existence a few years after their introduction. In the same
fashion, second-run theaters were also killed off by the
burgeoning DVD market, as the window between VHS and
the theatrical release of a film and its appearance on DVD
dwindled into nonexistence. And yet, as the public audience
for twentieth-century cinema film becomes increasingly
specialized and narrowly segmented to the point that

American Blockbuster stores no longer even bother with a
token “classics” section – even such reliable standbys as

Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) are ignored in most of
the chain’s stores – for those who embrace the past, a wider
range of films has become available. Often these DVDs go
out of print in a matter of months, so one must purchase them immediately upon their release as fetish objects that also have a temporal existence of their own and a thriving bootleg

“industry” exists as well, making copies of all but the most
fugitive films available to the private collector.

In 2001, I wrote an essay entitled “Twenty-Five Reasons Why

It’s All Over,” which argued that the cinema as we had grown
up with it had been altered so drastically so as to be a
different medium altogether – as the combined result of the
collapse of theatrical distribution as an across-the-board

“given” for all 35mm films, the ever-rising bottom line, the
tyranny of teen audiences and hyperconglomerates driven to
satisfy the greatest number of viewers with the least amount
of risk, the “lock out” of foreign films from US audiences
except in a few major cities and numerous other factors.

While all of this is demonstrably true, it now strikes me as
profoundly beside the point. The digital reinvention of the

193
cinema is every bit as revolutionary as the dawn of cinema itself and it comes with an entirely new set of rules and
expectations. While James Cameron and George Lucas may
embrace these new tools for more superficial ends and the
medium will never be any more democratic than it has been
historically, newer works continue to pop up on the margins
of moving image discourse, created by filmmakers who
simply do not care if their images are captured on film, digital tape or a hard drive, so long as their phantom vision reaches the screen – the screen of your plasma television, the screen of your local multiplex, the screen of your cell phone.

Just as a generation in the 1960s celebrated the inherent

“funkiness” of the 16mm image – especially when blown up
to 35mm – as being somehow more “raw” and “real” than its
slicker cinematographic counterpart, the digital generation is comfortable with the roughness of low-end digital video and
hails the “water marks” of cell phone footage and YouTube
downloads as artistic cultural artifacts. In addition, a South Korean company has developed a miniature laser video
projector that can fit into mobile phones and digital cameras.

In April 2006, the Iljin Display Company publicly
demonstrated various prototypes of a number of mini-size
video projectors built directly into mobile phones. Using this technology, consumers can screen photos and video images
on the wall from the built-in projector, making movies truly
portable, downloaded through one’s phone and projected at a
moment’s notice. Who needs to go to the movies anymore
when you can simply carry them with you? This is yet
another example of cross-platforming, which demonstrates
that the theatrical film experience is being faced with
numerous alternative delivery systems (Jin-seo 2006).

194

As A. O. Scott and David Denby noted in two separate articles that appeared almost simultaneously in, respectively, the New York Times and the New Yorker, young viewers
today are, in Scott’s words, “platform agnostic, perfectly
happy to consume moving pictures wherever they pop up – in
the living room, on the laptop, in the car, on the cell phone –
without assigning priority among the various forms” (Scott

2007). While Scott is, in his own words, an “unapologetic
adherent” (Scott 2007) to standard theatrical presentation as the preferred medium of choice for movie-going, his children
have opened up for him an entirely new way of seeing films,
whether mainstream contemporary films or canonical
classics. With a house full of DVDs, Scott’s son and daughter (then aged 10 and 7) mix the past and the present with
impunity, cross-platforming between Turner Classic Movies,
iPod downloads, DVDs and trips to revival houses to see
older films on the big screen. As Scott noted of the experience of taking his children to see an older film,

“Why is he purple?” my daughter asked in the
middle of West Side Story [Robert Wise, 1961],
noticing the effects of an aging Technicolor print on

Tony’s face. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

[John Ford, 1961] the tint would periodically switch
from sepia to silver and back again. My son, noting
each shift, wanted to know why it was happening: a
question about aesthetics that I could only answer
with a whispered lecture about chemistry. Most of
the old movies he had seen were delivered by means
of new technology; this one was old in the physical
as well as the cultural sense.

195

What he made of it I don’t know. (He was amused that Lee Marvin, as the titular villain, calls Jimmy

Stewart’s character “dude.”) But he watched with an
unusual intentness, the same quality of attention he
brought to Monty Python and the Holy Grail [Terry

Gilliam and Terry Jones, 1975], Oliver! [Carol

Reed, 1968] and Samurai Rebellion (Jôi-uchi:

Hairyô tsuma shimatsu) [Masaki Kobayashi, 1967],
some of the other stops on our haphazard tour of
movie history. I’m convinced that these films’

beguiling strangeness was magnified by the
experience of seeing them away from home and its
distractions, with the whir of the projector faintly
audible in the background and motes of dust
suspended in the path from projector to screen.

(Scott 2007)

And yet, Scott’s son would never have had this experience if
his father hadn’t bothered to take him to the cinema; even as an older teen, he probably would be more likely to seek out
the latest Indiana Jones sequel over a 1962 black-and-white
film by John Ford. For the generation of students who now
are involved in cinema as both a critical and/or active pursuit, the digitization of the cinema is an accomplished fact. Some
younger artists seemingly side with Scott in his preference for conventional filmic projection, a “museum format” if ever
there was one. As Melissa Gronlund comments of some of
these new image-makers:

Hollywood pictures, newsreels and documentaries,
film stock, cameras and projectors and the
auditorium space itself have become the focal point
for several artists’ works – particularly since

196
celluloid has come under threat from digital technology. The collaborative Al and Al are using
their residency at FACT in Liverpool to transform a
defunct train station into a blue screen studio. In

Kodak (2006) Tacita Dean filmed the last standard

16-millimeter film factory in France on the final five
rolls of stock the factory produced. At Cerith Wyn

Evans’ show at London’s ICA in 2005 a bulky

35-[mm] film projector screened a blank film,
tracking the deterioration of the celluloid to create a
changing abstraction of scratches and tears.

(Gronlund 2007, 29)

Such an act memorializes the past of cinema, even as the
industry itself rushes to become a part of the new digital
domain. Barry Meyer, the chairman and CEO of Warner

Brothers, sums the current situation up in two sentences:

“Digital distribution is easy, ubiquitous, and inexpensive. We have to adapt, or we’ll become dinosaurs” (Denby 2007, 56).

John Fithian, president of NATO (the National Association of

Theater Owners), is even more direct, noting,
we’re competing with the high-tech entertainment
crowd, and we’re using technology in theaters that’s
a hundred years old. We need to modernize existing
theaters, and tear down old ones at the same rate

[…] In ten years, I doubt there will be any more
film. (Denby 2007, 62)

Critics Nathan Lee, Kent Jones and Paul Arthur concur,
noting that Superman Returns (Bryan Singer), Apocalypto

(Mel Gibson), A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman),

197

Flyboys (Tony Bill), Miami Vice (Michael Mann) and Click (Frank Coraci), all released in 2006,
have one thing in common: they were all shot in
high-def [digital video]. And no one blinked. All the
huffing and puffing about the purity of 35mm now
feels very 2003 […] all things considered, [2006]

may have been the year when film and video
became indistinguishable. (Lee, Jones and Arthur

2007, 39)

It’s true that all these films were transferred from digital
high-definition video to 35mm for conventional theatrical
release, but that’s simply a holdover from the past. Soon
high-definition movies will be projected in theaters
worldwide in their original production format and
conventional film production will become, for better or
worse, a thing of the past – a museum format.

There is another new development in the area of theatrical
moving image exhibition related to our discussion here,
which shoots off in new and interesting directions. In Madrid, Spain, theater owners are discovering that conventional films, no matter what their format (digital or film) or genre, are
failing to attract all-important younger viewers. Thus, a new theater, Cinegames, has opened in Madrid, offering
theater-screen-size video gaming for a predominantly male
audience. “Forget the pathetic speakers of a PC or television!”

exhorts one advertisement for the new facility. “Come feel the sound that puts you at the center of the action!” For a mere 3
euros – or about $4, much cheaper than a conventional movie
admission – audience participants engage in spirited group
contests of World of Warcraft and other popular video games

198
projected on a giant cinema screen (Carvajal 2007). As described by one observer, the resulting environment is “a
hybrid movie theater with all the digital fire and fury of a
video game: fog, black light, flashing green lasers,
high-definition digital projectors, vibrating seats, game pads, and dozens of 17-inch screens attached to individual chairs”

(Carvajal 2007) to monitor each person’s game play while the
combined contest plays out on a huge screen in the front of
the auditorium. “We’re trying this concept because there are
so many theaters in Spain, and admissions are down. We have
to offer new products,” notes Enrique Martinez, proprietor of Cinegames. “We see the future with multiplexes with five
screens, one for the traditional Hollywood spectaculars and
the others for screens for video halls and 3D. That’s the next step” (Carvajal 2007). Similar facilities throughout Europe
and North America are scheduled to open in the future and
the model seems to be working quite well, although it skews
the audience almost entirely to “young men in their late teens and 20s,” while “a few […] female supporters […] paid 1

Euro each to watch the action,” but not to participate

(Carvajal 2007).

Whether or not this will become a major new audience model
remains to be seen. Big screen video gaming may go the way
of 3D movies and Cinerama, or it may become a solid niche
market appealing to a younger audience. But while the

“platform” of film may vanish, I would argue that, for most
audiences, the “films” themselves will remain and audiences,
now adjusted to viewing moving images in a variety of
different ways, will still want to see their dreams and desires projected on a large screen for the visceral thrill of the
spectacle as well as the communal aspect inherent in any
public performance. Film is indeed disappearing, but movies

199
are not. If anything, they are more robust than ever and are shot in a multiplicity of formats that boggle the mind;
analogue
video,
digital
video,
conventional
film,
high-definition video, on cell phones and pocket-size,
hard-drive, fixed-focus, auto-exposure cameras, in 16mm,

35mm, 70mm and a host of other platforms now just
emerging from the workshop of image making.

For those of us who see the cinema as a vast tapestry of films and filmmakers covering more than 100 years of cinema from
all over the world, the use of digital technology is a plus
because it allows us to access the images of the past with ease and efficiency. For those who know only the cinema of the
present – pure Hollywood product for the most part – it
nevertheless puts the tools of production into the hands of the rawest enthusiast – anyone capable of shooting a video and
downloading it on YouTube or Current TV. The literally
hundreds of thousands of clips now on the web at Google,

Yahoo and other sites (many of them lifted from existing
films and television programs) present an inchoate glut of
imagery that resembles a new forest of the imagination. This
thicket of conflicting images, both home brew and borrowed,
reminds me of the British filmmaker Anthony Scott’s
conceptual feature film, The Longest Most Meaningless

Movie in the Whole Wide World (1969), which represented a
similar cacophony of images to its viewers nearly forty years ago, entirely prefiguring our current image overload. As
described by David Curtis, the film
consist[ed] […] of adverts, complete and incomplete
sequences from feature films, out-takes, sound-only
film, home-movie material and so on. Often a shot
or a whole sequence will repeat ad nauseam,

200
sometimes whole lengths of film appear upside down and running backwards […] By rearranging
familiar material into new and often absurd
relationships, the viewer’s traditional dependence on
continuity is rudely interrupted, and in that disturbed
state, some kind of re-evaluation of the material
shown (either to its advantage or to its detriment) is
inevitable. (Curtis 1971, 145)

This same sort of “re-evaluation of the material shown” is
now taking place on a much larger scale, larger than nearly
anyone could have conceived of even five years ago. Film is
disappearing, but in its place a new platform has emerged
which can comfortably support all previously existing
formats. As with all such previous technological shifts in
moving image study and production, a host of new aesthetic
and practical considerations thus sweep to the fore. Is a digital copy of a film still a film? It is and it isn’t. Is the digital image preferable to the filmic image or the other way around? It’s
clearly a matter of personal opinion.

The archival concerns raised by the digital shift are many and varied, but as Val Lewton observed in the 1940s of his own
work in film, making movies “is like writing on water”

(Dixon and Foster 2011, 20). Some images will survive,
others will not. I would argue that the digitization of our
visual culture will lead to the further preservation of its filmic source materials rather than the other way around. With a
whole new market opening up for these films of the past, the
master negatives are being taken out of the vault and digitally transferred for popular conservation with one especially
desirable side effect: newer audiences now know of the film’s existence. Entombed in 16mm and 35mm frames for

201
projection equipment that is becoming less and less prevalent (especially in the case of 16mm), these films might otherwise never reach a twenty-first-century audience. Perhaps film
isn’t disappearing after all. Perhaps it is coming back to life.

Footnote

*

A version of this chapter was first published in 2007 by

Senses of Cinema (online) as “Vanishing Point: The Last

Days of Film” (issue 43): http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/
feature-articles/last-days-film/.

202

Part III

INTERVIEWS

203

Chapter 10

“LET THE SLEEPERS SLEEP

AND THE HATERS HATE”: AN

INTERVIEW WITH DALE

“RAGE” RESTEGHINI*

On a plane coming back from a research trip in Los Angeles,

I fell into a conversation with one of my seatmates, who
turned out to be Dale Resteghini, one of the most prolific
music video directors of the contemporary music scene. As it
happened, he was on his way to Omaha to shoot a music
video the next day. We swapped contact information and this
interview is the result. Rage, as he is professionally known, directs two to three videos a month and, by his own
estimation, has created at least 400 music videos in the course of his career. At one time, these videos were a staple of
programming on MTV, VH1 and BET, but as these outlets
turned to longer-form programming, the music video has
become something of a luxury for many performers. Yet the
market for Rage’s services remains unabated. There are many
interesting aspects to Rage’s work, but one of his chief
attributes is his versatility. Rather than favoring one musical genre, his videos swing all the way from heavy metal to hip
hop with numerous stops in between, on budgets that range
from several thousand dollars to large, complex productions
with significant price tags. Nothing seems to faze him; as he told me when we first met, “I function best in absolute chaos, when everything seems to be falling apart. Everybody else is
losing it, but I see the opportunities that arise. That’s the time I come up with some of my best ideas.” His production

204
company, Raging Nation Films, is a joint effort between Rage and his wife Kim, who handles the business end of things.

Some of the artists he’s worked with since he broke into
directing in 2003 include Anthrax, Busta Rhymes, Cypress

Hill, P. Diddy, Fall Out Boy, Guns N’ Roses, Ice Cube, Lil

Wayne, Method Man, Redman, Cam’ron and numerous
others across the musical spectrum, usually wrapping up a
video in a day or two of hectic shooting. Rage is something of a paradox: a tough customer who, by his own admission, was
involved in more than a few brushes with the law during his
youth, he is nevertheless an artist with a definite visual
signature to his work which keeps him in constant demand as
the “go to” guy for sharp, compelling concepts and
cost-conscious execution. While he’s completely at home in
the digital era, Rage still prefers to shoot 35mm film rather than high-definition video and, at this point in his career, is poised to make the jump to features. Forthright, direct and
honest, Rage is a self-taught director whose street smart
attitude allows him to create work that is commercially
viable, while at the same time retains an edge that sets him
apart from the rest of his peers. He’s an “up from the streets”

auteur, which is what makes his work that much more real.

This conversation took place by phone on 29–30 March 2011,
with some additional questions answered by e-mail. I also
want to thank Kristen Glaze for the photos of Rage on the set that accompany this interview.

205

Figure 10. Dale Resteghini on the set.

Source: Image courtesy of Kristen Glaze.

WHEELER

Dale,
you
were
born
in

Boston,

WINSTON

Massachusetts, on 28 August 1968. What can

DIXON:

you tell me about your childhood, your early
upbringing and your mother and your father?

How would you describe your life when you
were growing up?

DALE

I was born and raised in a blue collar section

RESTEGHINI: of Massachusetts. My dad was a fireman and
construction
worker.

We
lived
in

Framingham, which has a largely Italian
population. That was my home community. I
grew up there and learned all about life,
work, blood, sweat and tears, an honest day’s
pay for an honest day’s work, playing soccer,
hockey and baseball, going to see the Boston

Red Sox, the Boston Bruins and the Boston

Celtics.

206

DIXON:

Was your mother a housewife or did she
have a job outside the house?

RESTEGHINI: My mom was a housewife, but she also
worked in the school library and was
constantly turning me on to books, making
sure I read a lot, from elementary school to
middle school to high school.

DIXON:

How did you get interested in film and
when? Was there anyone in your family who
pushed you to be creative?

RESTEGHINI: Actually, nobody pushed me to be creative at
all. I wasn’t actually encouraged to do
anything in the arts and I was never – unlike
my brother and my sisters – gifted in
academics. I was sometimes a C, sometimes

B student, but I always excelled in arts. I
could paint, draw and sketch. I was inspired
by cartoons and things like that and so I
pursued that in high school with courses in
commercial
art.

It
was
my
parents’

perception if you weren’t an A student, then
you might as well give up any thoughts of
college and become a blue collar worker or
join the military, which I did for a little bit as
well. I found my way back to Massachusetts
after pursuing two years in the Navy when I
was 18, 19. I heard an audition at a local
dance troupe called The Male Encounter,
which
is
somewhat
similar
to
the

Chippendales. I went on that audition and it
kind of opened up my eyes to the possibility
of performing, being a model, how to present

207
yourself for the camera – all these aspects of performance.

DIXON:

At this point, had you had any exposure to
film whatsoever?

RESTEGHINI: Well, I used to go to the movies when I was

6, 7, 8 years old to see films like [Don

Siegel’s] Escape from Alcatraz [1979] or
even [Hal Needham’s] Hooper [1978] or

Smokey and the Bandit [1977] and then
guess – believe it or not – what the opening
weekend would be. How much money it
would make. And, as I look at it now, it’s
such an odd way to start. At that age, I had
no concept of what directing was, much less
of directing anything myself. I just would
want to see if I knew what the opening
weekend would be for one film against the
other. So here we are, all these years later,

I’m a film director and it’s truer now than
ever. Today, everyone puts the emphasis on
what the opening weekend for a film will be,
just as a lot of weight is also put on the
opening first week for bands, for music, for
how many units you sell, how many
downloads, how many people buy tickets to
your concerts. When I was growing up, it
was much more primitive, but there was a
section in the Sunday paper, in the middle,
that always had the top ten. And I was
usually right on the money with my
predictions.

208

DIXON:

Yet you must have been paying some
attention to the visuals, to story construction
and directorial styles. You told me on the
plane that directors as varied as Robert

Aldrich, Ridley Scott, Orson Welles, Steven

Spielberg, Anthony Mann and John Huston
have an influence on your work.

RESTEGHINI: Yes, that’s true.

DIXON:

Because you’re talking here, so far, only
about the commercial aspect of film. So
where do Tony Mann, John Huston and
people like that come in?

RESTEGHINI: Well, growing up, I watched a lot of old
movies on TV with my father and he pointed
things out to me and I began to look at the
credits. I suddenly realized that a film made
by one person looked very different from a
film, even in the same genre, made by
somebody else. And that was when I began
to think, “Hey, there’s somebody back there
behind the camera figuring this stuff out.” So
that’s when the director consciousness began
to kick in. After I got involved in dancing
and modeling that opened me up to wanting
to do more in the creative end of the
business. And then things started to click for
me.

In Boston, at that point in time, one of the
biggest pop groups was New Kids on the

Block. Their producer was Maurice Starr, a
fantastic producer and songwriter with a real

209
knack for business. He put the group together in 1984 after he split up with New Edition, a
band he’d been working with before that. At
that point in time, I was doing extra work on
films like [Carroll Ballard’s] Wind [1992],
which Francis Ford Coppola produced, and

[Frank Oz’s] Housesitter [1992], with Steve

Martin and Goldie Hawn. At first I was just
doing background stuff, but then I got my

Screen Actors Guild card and started to do a
lot of extra work. I ended up working on a lot
of films shot in Boston, like Gus Van Sant’s

Good Will Hunting [1997]. But another
interesting aspect of my life during all of this
is that I was arrested about fifty times –

DIXON:

Fifty times?

RESTEGHINI: Fifty times.

DIXON:

For what?

RESTEGHINI: Oh, everything from stealing or hustling or
credit card fraud. I got arrested one time for
possession of marijuana because it was in my
car. Even though I never drank or did any
kind of drugs in my entire life, I just was
always catching all these different bad
breaks. This was from 1985 to 1993 or so –
just about the time I was getting into the
business. Mind you, all that stuff happened
inside of a short period, but during that time I
did a lot of dumb things, like driving without
a license or with a suspended license and I’d
get arrested and go to jail. That happened a

210
couple of times. But the last time it
happened, I was tossed in jail for eight
months and that was a real wakeup call. And
then, in the jailhouse library, I found this
book called The Kid Stays in the Picture by

Robert Evans, the guy who produced

[Roman Polanski’s] Chinatown [1974], and it
opened up my eyes to what could happen if
you just kept working at it and didn’t give
up. It’s a great book, almost a game plan for
how to get into the business.

In The Kid Stays in the Picture, Evans
talks about a lot of different people he dealt
with in business – certain films and
filmmakers – and how he’d work with them.

It was inspirational. I’m not an advocate for a
lot of the self-help stuff out there, but
because I was in a situation where all I could
do was read a book or two, I read Napoleon

Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, which is a
classic in the genre. It was written in 1937,
right in the middle of the Depression, but
they keep updating it and I read one of the
later editions. And it had some really good
tools to put in one’s hands, to help them get
through a situation or achieve a goal. And
that was it, achieving a goal. So I decided
that I was through with all of this stuff and,
when I got out, I was going to move on with
my life. And get back into film with a
vengeance.

DIXON:

What genre appeals to you the most?

211

RESTEGHINI: Action/adventure, without question.

DIXON:

What about noir?

RESTEGHINI: I love noir. But the kind of films I hope to
direct are the ones that can gross 100 million
dollars or more and open big on their first
weekend. Obviously, it’s action/adventure
that does that and not so much noir. But that
genre does appeal to me. Orson Welles’s

Touch of Evil [1958] is a fantastic film; the
long shadows, the costumes, the framing, the
lighting and Orson Welles’s performance in
the film – incredible stuff. But if you’re
going to try that today and you don’t have
the right kind of cast, crew and visual style
right across the board, it simply doesn’t
work. Noir is more ’40s and ’50s; this is

2011. It’s the age of escapism, action and
keeping people entertained.

DIXON:

So you’re coming up, you’ve had all these
life experiences, you’ve worked as a model
and a dancer, now you’re working as an extra
and you’re watching these directors work,
right?

RESTEGHINI: Right.

DIXON:

Is this when you begin to get the idea that
you want to move behind the camera and
direct?

RESTEGHINI: The last time I was incarcerated, I had a lot
of time on my hands and, in addition to
reading, I wrote my first screenplay based on
a relationship I was having, which became

212
my first film, Colorz of Rage [1999], which I shot for $26,000 in 16mm.

DIXON:

How did you raise the $26,000?

RESTEGHINI: I put it together piece by piece by piece.

Little bits of money, one chunk at a time.

$1,000, $2,000, $3,000. It was a long haul. I
shot it in 1997, it came out in 1999 and it’s a
full feature. There were some people in the
industry that encouraged me to do it, but
there was one particular person who said,

“No, make it into a short.” At that point, I’m

32, in a relationship with a professional
woman –

DIXON:

Kim?

RESTEGHINI: Yes, Kim. Colorz of Rage is about an
interracial couple who moves to New York
and how reality hits them in the face in ways
they didn’t expect. It’s based on my
relationship with Kim – although, of course,
it’s part fiction, part fact. I believed that I
was talented enough to make a film that
would make its money back. So I refused to
make it into a short. I couldn’t let Kim down.

There’s just no money in short films; you
know that.

DIXON:

Right.

RESTEGHINI: When I got out of jail, I had that screenplay
in my hand and I was motivated to bang on
every door I could to get it made. At that
point, I had never directed anything. So I
wanted to get someone else to do it and I

213
never thought about directing it myself. But I had every Tom, Dick and Harry telling me,

“No, no, no.” So out of frustration, I said,

“Okay, I’m going to do it myself.” So I
started hustling up funds and equipment to
do it and I was able to get some film gear
from Camera Service Center in New York
for free, donated for two months.

DIXON:

That’s
amazing.

Who
was
your
cinematographer?

RESTEGHINI: It started off being one guy who was working
for free, but I had to fire him because, even
though he came with his own camera and
sound gear, he showed up late twice and he
called in sick on another day when I had cast
and crew and everybody waiting to film. So I
ended up shutting down for two or three
weeks. And, usually, when independent
productions with zero dollars shut down,
that’s the end of it. But I was able to find a
superb
cinematographer
from

Sweden,

Martin Ahlgren. He shoots commercials,
music videos and now he’s moving into
features. His work is fantastic. So he finished
the film for me as DP. Sabine Hoffman, who
is an incredible editor, cut the film. Sabine
was, at that point in time, known for cutting

Morgan J. Freeman’s Hurricane [1997] and
now she cuts all of Rebecca Miller’s films

[the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller
and photographer Inge Morath].

214

Colorz of Rage came out and looked
good – much better than anything you could
make for $26,000 – and made its money
back. Sabine was trying to get me to stay in

New York City and be a part of what I call a

“blue
blooded,”

elitist
sort
of
film
community run by Gary Winick, who is now
a feature film director, and John Sloss, who’s
a producer. But that was absolutely not my
scene. I couldn’t even – I wouldn’t even
want to fake that being my scene. I told her,

“[Listen], this isn’t me and I can’t do it. I’m
going to follow in the footsteps of people like

Brett Ratner and Steve Carr, who both went
on from being video directors to getting their
shot at features.”

I should point out, though, that the path
from videos to features is now dead. One of
my music video brethren, a producer in the
business, said, “Dale, I think you are the last
one of us to actually go from music videos to
feature films.” And right then, the bridge
collapsed. Because, now, nobody watches

MTV or BET and there are so many outlets
for so many videos that the only people who
watch videos are fans of that particular artist.

It used to be when you had your name
credited on the end titles of a music video as
the director, everybody saw it. This would
give you a shot, but we’re talking 15, 20
years ago. Now it’s dead.

215

DIXON:

Then you did a micro-budgeted film called

Da Hip Hop Witch [2000], which is a spoof
of [Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez’s]

The Blair Witch Project [1999]. But what a
cast: Eminem, Ja Rule, Pras, Vanilla Ice,

Mobb Deep and lots of other A-list talent in
it. How did you fall in with these people?

What drew you to hip hop and rap?

RESTEGHINI: Well, I moved to New York City from

Boston in ’94 or ’95. And at that point in
time, New York City, the music industry,
was all about hip hop. Rock was nonexistent.

New York had the biggest rappers. The scene
was exploding; Puff Daddy, Biggie Smalls,

Busta Rhymes, the Fugees, the Wu-Tang

Clan; everyone was there. So, if you were
looking to get into music videos, that was the
scene to be in and I was right there. A lot of
the extra work I was doing at the time was
for TV shows like New York Undercover, a
cop show that aired on the Fox network from

1994 to 1998 which had all those rappers in
it. I knew one of the biggest recording studio
engineers in New York City, John Kiehl,
who earlier had a place called Soundtrack

Studios in Boston. John moved to New York

City and so I had a connection in the studio
at a time when hip hop was reigning. I was
trying like hell to get something off the
ground.

Finally, in 2000, I heard that there was a
tour starting called “Tattoo the Earth” that

216
was taking on the world’s heaviest bands like Slipknot and Metallica and everyone else on
the scene, so I took a job with the tour
because it was interesting and I met a lot of
people who I ended up working with three
years later. So, there it was: the world of rock
and metal videos. And once I finally crashed
through the door of rock and metal videos, I
just took off like crazy and ended up doing

10 videos in my first year as a director, 100
in my second year and then I did 100 more
and then I did 100 more and I just kept
going.

DIXON:

You’ve worked with so many musical
groups, it’s ridiculous.

RESTEGHINI: Yes. I’m actually quite proud of the fact that
there has been no other director in the history
of the medium to direct over 100 rock videos
and over 100 hip hop videos.

DIXON:

Do you have a regular crew that your work
with? Like your favorite DP [director of
cinematography], your favorite AD [assistant
director], people like that?

RESTEGHINI: Absolutely. If I needed to shoot in Virginia
tomorrow, I could put my hands on a crew
like that. I have four or five guys I use as

DPs on a regular basis and four or five ADs.

Depending upon the market – whether it’s

Atlanta, Miami, Texas, LA, New York or the

Midwest – I have people I work with all the
time.

217

DIXON:

Your directing style is really visceral. It
seems that a lot of music video directors
more or less stand back and observe the band
and their videos are kind of knocked out on
an assembly line basis. But you’re part of the
action, always right behind the camera,
exhorting the artists to seemingly break
through the screen and confront the viewer.

So I’m wondering: do you storyboard? Do
you brainstorm with the bands you work with
for ideas? How do you keep each video fresh
when you’ve done so many?

RESTEGHINI: Well, I only feel the need to storyboard when
there are a lot of elements going on at the
same point in time and there’s a high dollar
amount that has been given to the production
that I’m accountable for. If a scene involves
potential bodily harm or danger of any sort to
the talent, then I storyboard, just to make
sure everything comes out okay. But other
than that, it never works for me. I didn’t
come up in a storyboard world. The other
day, I was meeting with Bob McMinn and

Gary

Lucchesi
over
at

Lake

Shore

Entertainment. They got to me through my
agent at ICM after seeing my reel and Bob
said, “Quite frankly, we don’t like too many
music video directors, but something about
your rock stuff more than your hip hop stuff
grabs us,” and made them want to meet me.

Bob was asking me the same sort of
questions you are right now – “how do you

218
set it up, how do you visualize it, do you
storyboard?” – stuff like that. I said, “Listen,

I could go scout today and it could be an
exterior shot or interior shot and then I show
up two days later and we could be right at the
same location, but there could be something
completely different with the sun, the clouds,
the lighting or the talent could show up in a
different mood. And, suddenly, something
would just at that moment reveal itself to me
and I act on that.” And Bob started smiling
and he said, “You’re an artist, you’re a
painter,” which is always nice to hear. I’m
happy that somebody can appreciate my
work because, honestly, I do feel what I do is
extremely difficult, but some people just
don’t get it. They say, “All you’re doing is
saying ‘action-cut, action-cut’” – we both
know it’s much more than that. I have to get
the essence of the artist into the video;
otherwise, it doesn’t work.

I always have to adapt to changing
circumstances; I had to embrace what
happened the other day in Omaha, for
example. The song was called “Balance” by
the band Emphatic and we wanted to use a
few hydraulic cars and some sexy girls and it
was meant to be an outdoor shoot, sort of like

Aerosmith meets Linkin Park. But it snowed
outside, so the label guys are saying, “What
do we do, what do we do, it’s snowing, it’s
snowing,” and the hydraulic car guys refused

219
to show up. So I said, “Okay, we’ll just make it a makeshift VIP room with the lead singer
and two girls, one on each arm, with the
windows all steamed up. We’ll use just one
light source – a ring light coming in through
the window – and we’ll film it inside.”

And sure enough, looking at it, I felt,

“This is great, this is great.” So something as
simple as thinking on my feet like that makes
me more valuable than someone else who
would be just hanging around and saying,

“I’m waiting for conditions to change, I’m
waiting for this, I’m waiting for that.” I’m
responding to the moment, asking, “What
does this moment have to offer?” That’s the
key. I’m able to survive in chaos. I literally
can thrive when the whole world is falling
down. So, rather than thinking like a
producer –“Let me stop this, that’s not what
we planned, this isn’t going to work” – I say,

“Take what the moment offers you, finish the
day and move on.” I think the experience of
being locked up, of going to jail, puts all of
that into perspective. Once you have gone
through that, there is nothing to be afraid of;
you can face anything. It’s all just dealing
with music video politics.

DIXON:

So what are your favorite bands? What kind
of music do you like?

RESTEGHINI: I get that question a lot.

DIXON:

I’m sure.

220

RESTEGHINI: When I listen to music, it’s either New Age music, or it’s ’80s music – my high school
years, the music I grew up with. I love Phil

Collins. I like music that lets me think. There
are moments when I want something
aggressive; when I’m working out or
something. If I’m writing a script, I’m
writing a scene or if I’m directing a scene,
there’s music I love for those moments. But
when asked about the kind of music I love
listening to, it’s really ’80s stuff that moves
me; one of my favorite bands of all time is

Asia.

DIXON:

Which do you prefer to shoot: film or HD

[high-definition video]?

RESTEGHINI: Well, I prefer film. But for the last year or
two years, it’s all HD. I would say of my last

100 videos, 90 were shot in HD formats. I
love film because it’s a simple process. Film
just looks better; you can do so much more
with it. There’s more warmth to it, more
depth, more detail. There’s so much
information on one frame of negative film
and you can go in so many different
directions with color and temperature, but
with HD, it’s kind of cold, it’s limited and
you have less to work with – it’s not
something immediately tangible, yet it’s
there. But right now, HD rules.

DIXON:

How are you going to make the jump to
features? Are you working on a script?

221

RESTEGHINI: Well, I have two scripts. One is over at Sony Studios and I’m working on that with two
producers over there on the lot, as well as a
new writer. I wrote it back in 1998, so that’s
one project. There is another project I’m
attached
to
direct.

It’s
a
science
fiction–themed film that Mark Morgan, who
produced [Catherine Hardwick’s] Twilight

[2008], is working on; it’s his next franchise.

It’s called “Unearth”. I’m also attached to
direct a film called “Last Gasp”, based on a
book by a British writer named Trevor

Hoyle. It’s about the last days of Earth. John

Fitzgerald, who is one of the founders of the

Slamdance Film Festival, is producing it.

DIXON:

On a more personal note, how did you meet
your wife and business partner, Kim, and
what part does she have in your company,

Raging Nation?

RESTEGHINI: Well, I was living in Baltimore and on my
way out of one relationship. I was
rollerblading from where I lived uptown, on

157th Street, all the way down to 38th Street
to catch a bus and go to work as an extra on

Sydney Pollack’s remake of Sabrina (1995).

On the way, I made eye contact with Kim as
she was walking back from her lunch break
at work. We exchanged numbers, stayed in
touch over the course of a few months and
eventually got together as a couple. We’ve
been together ever since, something like 16
years. She runs the business end of Raging

222

Nation. When I met her, she was working at

David Burton Associates, which is an
entertainment marketing research firm; she’s

100 percent business. She’s the business side
and I’m the creative side.

DIXON:

One of your personal mantras in the business
is, “Let the sleepers sleep and the haters
hate.” Could you expand on that?

RESTEGHINI: I actually came up with it while working on
my first film, and Redman is really the one
who coined it. A “sleeper” is someone who
won’t give you credit for your work;
someone who won’t acknowledge the
validity of what you do. So then that person
would be “sleeping” on you, not paying
attention to you. The “haters” are obvious.

They’re the people who are jealous of what
you’re doing and try to tear you down. You
have to ignore people like that and find
people who support your work. “Sleepers”

and “haters” don’t want to see your growth,
they don’t want to acknowledge your
success. In this business, you learn that there
are some people who want to see you win
and some people who don’t.

I want to get back to talking about
working on the set. Naturally, we use a video
tap on the camera – even if I don’t have to –
and I always have my eye on the monitor to
see how things are going. But you should
really
concentrate
on
the
performers
themselves and not spend all your time

223
staring at the screen. If I’m looking at a
singer or a rapper on the set and there’s
something going on dramatically, if I don’t
feel it personally, if my eyes don’t believe it
or if my “director gauge” doesn’t believe that
this is really happening, then it’s not going to
work in the final product. You should be on
the set, working with the actors directly. It
really comes down to my personal approach
to directing. I didn’t go to film school, I went
to the school of hard knocks. I work the way

I do because that’s what works for me. I need
to be listening to the actors, making sure that
dialogue scenes are as they should be. In
music videos, I lean a little bit more towards
performance. In features, it’s more intimate;
you’re working with human emotions more.

I still remember directing some of the
scenes of Colorz of Rage like it was
yesterday and they really hit home. And
being able to get those performances out of
all those people is the key to the whole thing.

A music video is usually done in one or two
days and you have all kinds of people
hanging around the set, but it’s still about
getting that personal connection with the
actor, the singer, the rapper or the rocker – to
make sure I get the absolute most out of
them. It gets tiring after three, four, five takes
for them because they still think they are
giving their all, but it’s starting to slow down
so you have to amp up even more. I will

224
know literally in two or three takes if it’s going to get any better or not. But I’m not
going to do that many takes on any one
scene; you just can’t. You have a budget and
a timeline and you have to stick to it.

DIXON:

Do you follow through in post-production or
editing, or pretty much exit the project after
the shoot?

RESTEGHINI: I always follow through, be it via the Internet
or if I’m able to sit down with the editor
throughout the process. That’s essential.

DIXON:

Music videos use a lot of flashy cutting and
special effects. Features have a very different
editorial rhythm. How do you expect to adapt
your style for theatrical films?

RESTEGHINI: I never force any style on a project. Style
comes from within the material itself – the
performers and the circumstances of the
shoot. I take each project, no matter how
different or similar than others before it, and
then let the material, the artist and the day do
the rest. I strongly feel that I make the best
creative decisions “in the moment,” rather
than two or three weeks out. You can plan,
but in the end, you have to respond to what’s
happening in front of you and so forcing your
vision on the material never works; you work
with
the
performers
and
you
create
something together. As far as cutting goes,
certain projects call for visual effects and a
more energetic style of editing while others

225
work better with traditional editorial patterns and camerawork. You have to ask yourself,

“What does this material need to get across
to the viewer?” That’s the key. It has to be
real, it has to connect.

At this point, having done so many
videos, I enjoy it when an artist has an idea
or a concept to start with. If it needs to be
scaled up or down, I make this happen.

Sometimes, when I don’t get awarded a
particular video assignment and see what
they went with, I’m often less than
impressed; not because I didn’t get the gig,
but because I feel that what makes me a tad
more valuable than a lot of others is my
ability to know that, in the end, it’s about
selling stuff and making money for the ones
who hire me. So, a lot of times, I’ll forgo
something more artistic for something far
more commercial and visceral because you
can never miss with that.

DIXON:

What about 3D? Do you think it’s a gimmick
or do you think that it actually has
possibilities and is going to stick around?

RESTEGHINI: I think it’s both a gimmick and something
that can be useful. It’s hard for me to fathom
every film being shot in 3D, just because for
most of my life it’s been a 2D world –
making that as amazing and sonically
wonderful as you possibly can for a
moviegoer. 3D opens up some doors, but it
also changes the game of making films and

226
sometimes it gets in your way. But sure, I’d work with 3D in a second. It all depends on
what the project is.

DIXON:

There are now so many delivery systems for
feature films. You have theatrical, streaming,

DVDs. What do you see as the future of
movies? Do you think theatrical screenings
are going to continue? When you’re
designing a film now, you have to visualize it
not only for theaters but also for TV,
computers, cell phones, streaming video and
other formats. What do you have to say about
that?

RESTEGHINI: I believe that the movie-going experience is
always going to be around. Even though the
studios are beginning to toy with having
some films released as “On Demand” titles
for home viewers on the same day they come
out in theaters, I believe that people still want
to go get popcorn, a Coke and have the
experience of going to a movie. Ultimately,
theatrical is still going to be where the
studios get the big, big dollars because every
studio needs that big opening weekend to
push the film over the top, which is what
they build their marketing plan around. You
need fan buzz buildup before the opening or
otherwise you lose out on kids texting each
other, “I just saw this movie and here’s what

I thought” right while they’re watching the
film! These are instant, peer-based reviews
and they’re more important than what any

227
critic has to say. You open, you get one shot and that’s it. You want to make sure nothing
leaks out before the theatrical release –
which is getting harder and harder to do – but
other than teasers and trailers, the more you
can control the flow of information on a film,
the better off you are. Even if the buzz on a
film goes viral, you can still ride that wave
and make money if you know what you’re
doing.

I keep hammering home to the studio
executives and producers I meet with that,

“Guys, this is a new world.” I hold up my
cell phone and say, “Kids text and, for the
most part, they don’t want to see procedural,
long-winded dialogue scenes between several
actors. It’s all about what’s happening right
now. They want to see something up on the
screen they can’t see in real life.” They want
the movie going experience, sitting in the
dark, escaping the real world for a couple of
hours. I believe the “real estate” of theatrical
presentations, in both the physical and
theoretical sense – of being able to show a
film with a big buildup over a weekend,
opening on Friday – is the only way to make
sure you get as much money out of the film
as possible. The studios need to hold on to
that because, otherwise, it’s going to become
like music, where there are so many studios
releasing films that new films are going to
get lost. They’re going to get lost because

228
there’s nothing to make it special. Right now, there’s an avalanche of music online
available for digital downloads, but if you
don’t know what you’re looking for, you’re
never going to find it. So, as much as these
other new technologies are good for ancillary
distribution, for mainstream, big budget film,
theatrical is the only way to go.

Footnote

*

A version of this chapter was first published in 2012 by

Taylor & Francis as “‘Let the Sleepers Sleep, and the Haters Hate’: An Interview with Dale Resteghini,” Quarterly Review
of Film and Video 29 (1): 1–11.

229

Chapter 11

MARGIN CALL: AN INTERVIEW

WITH J. C. CHANDOR*

When I first saw J. C. Chandor’s debut feature Margin Call

(2010), I was deeply impressed by the film’s script, direction and restraint, and also struck by the fact that the film seemed almost classical in its construction, as if it harkened back to the analogue era of The Birds (1963) in the precision of its
shot setups and editorial construction. Along with Lars von

Trier’s Melancholia (2011), it’s the finest work I’ve seen
from anyone in quite some time – all the more impressive
because, aside from a long apprenticeship as an actor, still
photographer and director of short films and documentaries,

Margin Call is Chandor’s first fully-realized feature film,
despite the fact that he tried to get an earlier project off the ground (see below), only to have financing evaporate at the
last minute.

Margin Call documents the frenetic activity at a never-named
brokerage firm on the night that the 2008 stock market
collapse really took hold. The film is triggered by the firing of a longtime stock analyst, Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci, in a
typically immaculate, world-weary performance), who, in his
last hours at the firm, discovers that the company is deeply
over-leveraged in the derivatives market. As he is being
ushered out of the building, Dale passes a flash drive with his findings on to the young Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto) with a solemn warning. Sullivan quickly realizes the dimensions of the impending disaster and begins alerting a chain of
superiors, who hatch a desperate plan to dump all the

230
questionable assets in one day – the next morning – to save the firm, but at a terrible price.

Despite the dire nature of the crisis, Chandor’s direction –
from his own script, which he pounded out in a four-day (yes, four-day) frenzy of inspired typing and then pitched to
co-producer Zachary Quinto, typos and all, to get the film off the ground – is calm, contemplative and brings the various
characters in the film to the screen in three dimensions.

Neither heroes nor villains for the most part, they’re just
working stiffs who have overextended themselves and now
find that they’re being called to account in the most terrible fashion possible. There are no flashing screens with
meaningless numbers in the film, no rapid-fire MTV cutting,
no overheated boardroom fights – just the beginning of the
systematic unraveling of the United States’ economy: quiet,
deadly and inexorable. All in all, the film is a remarkable
achievement and I decided to speak to Chandor in detail to
get his take on the runaway success of the film. We spoke by
phone; Chandor was in New York working on a new project
on 15 November 2011.

231

Figure 11. J. C. Chandor and Zachary Quinto.

Source: Author’s collection.

J.

C. I don’t know if “fan” is the right word, but I’ve

CHANDOR: read a lot of your work, so I’m expecting this to
be a little more off the beaten track than the
usual interview, which I’m looking forward to.

WHEELER Well, I’ll try not to disappoint you. So, first off,

WINSTON tell me something about your childhood. When

DIXON:

and where were you born and what were your
earliest memories like?

CHANDOR: I was born in suburban New Jersey, outside of

New York City. I grew up there and in London,

England – I’ll get to that later. My dad was a
banker.

DIXON:

Who worked for Merrill Lynch for 35 years,
right?

CHANDOR: Yes, exactly, so it was a very stable existence;
he was a successful guy – not overly so – but I

232
had a very nice, upper middle class childhood and adolescence. I spent most of my early
childhood in the New Jersey/New York area,
but I lived in London for the 7th, 8th, 9th and

10th grades – prime years in one’s upbringing.

We were over there for three-and-a-half to four
years, so it was pretty key in my early
education. I had a great time. But I was always
vaguely aware of the stress my father was
under, even though he tried to make everything
seem very stable. Working in the financial
profession is very, very tough.

DIXON:

At this point, did you have any inkling that you
were going to become involved in film at all?

CHANDOR: Yes. I came at it from both still photography
and then acting. So those two things kind of
merged into moving images, but I was a fairly
involved actor. For a very long time, I was
extremely interested in still photography –
through most of my middle school and high
school years and into college as well. I started
getting into film, sort of, in late high school and
into college, but I had always taken still
photographs and did a lot of acting. Mainly
high school drama stuff, but then I did apply to
acting conservatories. It was kind of my mom’s
idea. I was a very “mixed” student and so her
theory was to get me into a better school than I
could have otherwise gotten into by getting me
into a first-rate acting program.

DIXON:

That’s interesting. This is something that really
hasn’t come out in your previous interviews on

233
the film; you’re really coming to Margin Call from a very strong acting background. That
explains part of the success of the film to me; I
think you got remarkable performances from all
the people that are involved. So, when was the
first time you picked up a camera?

CHANDOR: I had a VHS video camera that my sister,

Heather, and I used to make some short films –
which my mom has just transferred from VHS
to DVD, by the way, because the originals were
kind of disintegrating. So, Heather and I made a
film
called

George

Washington

Meets

Abraham Lincoln, which is the first project I
really remember, when I was about 10 years
old.

DIXON:

Sounds ambitious. So what happened when

Washington met Lincoln?

CHANDOR: [Laughs] I think they went for, like, a carriage
ride; it isn’t exactly a masterpiece. Not
earthshaking or anything. We were playing
with very rudimentary editing – some
in-camera editing when we made that. Then I
moved into a whole Christmas extravaganza for
my next project, which was more of a musical
revue.

But
they
were
fairly
elaborate
productions, in their way; we got the neighbors
involved and everything. We made three or
four films altogether. Then we tried to do a
horror movie, but that one didn’t actually turn
out very well. Then I gave up making film for
awhile, but then I really dove back into it in
basically my sophomore year of high school. I

234
acted all throughout my high school years and I was lucky because the American School in

London has a very, very strong drama program.

I was there for the 7th, 8th and 9th and half
of 10th grades and then I was at Ridge High

School, which is in Basking Ridge, New Jersey,
which also had a great drama program at the
time. There was a teacher there named Jaye

Barre who was really sort of an inspiring
woman. During that time in New Jersey, the
arts were being slashed – sort of like today –
and she basically kept the entire drama program
going. Actually, we’ve kept in touch and she
just came to a screening that I had of Margin

Call in my hometown. I saw her and now
they’re building a theater with that drama
program outside of the high school, so there’s
actually going to be an independent theater
there, which is all her work. She’s incredible
and she taught me a lot.

DIXON:

As you were growing up, were there any
particular film directors whom you admired?

CHANDOR: Well, I’m 37 years old right now, so I was a
total ’80s kid who loved Steven Spielberg’s
films – Raiders of the Lost Ark [1981], all that
sort of stuff. These are sort of the movies of my
childhood; I think I was literally the target
audience for E. T. [1982]. I would have been in

3rd or 4th grade when that film came out. I
really rode Spielberg up through his early
prime, shall we call it.

235

DIXON:

But your films are nothing like his work.

CHANDOR: No, they’re absolutely not. This was just the
stuff I grew up on. But then I got interested in a
little deeper stuff – all in still photography, like

Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, though I probably
wasn’t smart enough to actually have gotten
into her until later on in college. But what
turned me on the most was landscape
photography, so for starters, it was definitely

Ansel Adams. Then, when I got to college, in
my freshman year at the College of Wooster, I
created my own major in cultural film studies
trying to merge all my interests into one
discipline.

DIXON:

Was your aim in doing this to combine film and
video production with theory and aesthetics?

CHANDOR: Yes, that’s absolutely right. With the straight
communication major, you had to do a lot of
advertising classes and stuff, but they had an
independent study program which I basically
figured was a really neat opportunity to expand
my horizons. I had already done two production
internships between my senior year of high
school and freshman year of college. But,
during my freshman and sophomore years of
college, I really got into internships – one of
which was an internship on the production side
of MTV in the summer of 1993. I actually
worked for a division of Viacom that did
specials for MTV and it was a fun job actually.

Then, the next summer, I started to take
additional film classes at NYU because I knew

236

I needed to add something on top of what I was doing at Wooster.

DIXON:

Now, for your senior project in college, you
shot a film which you have described, and I
quote, as “a total overreach, too vast in scope
and scale, but I got jobs right away after
graduation based on it.” Can you tell me about
that film?

CHANDOR: It was a road trip film that was my attempt to
really add something new to the genre that
should have been David Lynch’s The Straight

Story [1999]. I saw that years later and that was
what I was trying to do, but it was beyond me
then. That’s the film I should have made. But,
though it didn’t really work, I actually learned
so much from that experience. We drove across
the country, made this film, but frankly, it just
didn’t cut together. I tried, but it was a student
film and it showed. The writing was the best
part of it, but, in the end, it was just a bunch of
scenes that were all very good acting exercises,
for lack of a better word, but they didn’t build
to anything that really worked. But it was
fascinating to do and there were so many
lessons learned. It kind of scared me into
realizing that I thought I knew so much more
than I actually did – which is, of course, when
you are 21 years old, how you feel: you know it
all, even when you don’t.

DIXON:

But it must have had some level of success
because, as you say, it almost immediately got
you work. You graduated in 1996 and, almost

237
immediately, you’re directing music videos,
documentaries, commercials, fashion videos.

Can you tell me something about this time?

CHANDOR: Well, I was an intern on a sitcom for a little
while – a very short while. That scared me out
of the “writing room” world, where a bunch of
people sit around and slam a script together. I’d
rather write on my own, not bounce ideas
around with a bunch of other people.

DIXON:

Right.

CHANDOR: I did a bunch of fashion videos for different
brands like Valentino and 23 KU, which is a

Japanese brand, and some ads for Subaru cars; I
did a whole series of ads for Sambazon energy
drinks, Carhartt outdoor clothing – the crazy
sort of fun things that you do when you’re
trying to make a living in the business. And, in
the middle of that whole world, I did a short
film that was my first success called Despacito,
which I wrote and directed. It’s 12 minutes
long, starring Will Arnett in his pre-Arrested

Development days; he was just about to shoot
the pilot of Arrested Development when we
made the film. It’s about two brothers who are
roofers and an immigrant worker they’ve hired
to help them who are roofing a huge, huge barn
in the winter while the rich people that own the
place are away. But, they underestimate the
logistics of the project and they get stuck on the
scaffolding 60, 70 feet off the ground. So, the
three of them are stuck on the roof on a
freezing, freezing cold night and their father is

238
showing up the next morning to check in on the job. The last thing that they want to have
happen is their dad see his two idiot sons
having been stuck on a roof. I leave it
unresolved; you’re just sort of up on a roof with
these guys. It was very concise, very tight. I
was quite proud of that film and so I used it as a
calling card to shoot a feature, which I worked
on for six or seven years to try and get made
and then it fell apart at the last minute, which
absolutely killed me. Everything was ready to
go and then the financing collapsed. I was
shattered.

DIXON:

That was in 2005. What was the feature going
to be about?

CHANDOR: It was about a family living in one of those
huge “McMansions” in a gated community,
with all the houses all right next to each other –
about a guy on his second marriage, but the
script really followed his daughter and what
was happening to her. It wasn’t a commercial
story at all; somewhat American Beauty-esque,
but basically a family drama – very quiet.

People reacted very, very strongly to the script

– which I wrote – but didn’t feel it was very
commercial, so it took us a long time to try and
raise the money for it.

DIXON:

And then financing collapsed a week before
filming?

CHANDOR: Yes, literally. Sam Shepard was going to play
the lead, Marisa Tomei was asked and Michelle

239

Yeoh was also involved and then the whole
thing fell apart. And that blew my mind, so I
walked away from the business for a while. My
wife and I had just had a baby at the time and I
kept a couple of documentary projects that I
was doing going; I actually still have those in
the works all these years later. I didn’t fully
walk away, but emotionally, I needed to see if I
could make a living doing something else.

You’re at the mercy of too many people in that
situation and it’s just kind of a tenuous
existence. I wanted some security for my wife
and child. Frankly, it was a very, very difficult
time in my life. I was trying any way possible
to come up with being able to make a living
while also keeping the dream of a feature film
alive.

DIXON:

So then you decided to get involved in real
estate
and
renovate
a
building
into
condominiums with some partners, but right in
the middle of construction the godfather of one
of your partners says, “You’ve got to sell out
right away because everything is going to go to
hell in the stock market?” This is in 2007.

CHANDOR: Essentially, but there were other reasons. We
had run into lots of problems; frankly, we were
in over our heads – that’s the real reason. But
yes, the godfather of this guy who was an
investor in the project could see that the big
crash was coming and he told us we had to get
out now and make a small profit and be happy
with that. At the time, I was annoyed, but of

240
course, in hindsight, he was right. So, a year later when the market literally starts imploding,

I started thinking back on what it must have
been like for that guy to be walking around
with that knowledge. Knowing all that stuff and
knowing that it was about to happen.

DIXON:

Then you wrote the 81 page draft of Margin

Call in four days flat, right? Did you feel like
you were almost taking dictation when you
were writing it; in a sense, that it just came out
of all the experiences of your life?

CHANDOR: Yes; it was interesting. I was desperate. When I
write, I have a real problem at times focusing.

The strength of my writing lies in the fact that I
feel that, by wandering along as you write,
eventually you get to where you are supposed
to be. So, normally it doesn’t happen as fast as
this did and I’m not a person who can just write
every day. I have periods of very intense work
and then I have to kind of go away from it,
thinking about it and figuring it out and then,
all of a sudden, it reaches kind of a download
point. I knew the voice of each of these
characters individually and I could actually
hear them talking and each had a distinctive
voice, so I was pretty much writing it at
white-hot speed.

It was knowing each of these characters
through different avenues and then locking
these people into one space, which came from
the production limitations placed on myself. I
wasn’t writing this script to sell it. I was writing

241
it to direct it myself and so the whole concept for the movie came from what was the best way
to have a performance-driven movie – a movie
about actors. So it was, “How do you write a
compelling movie about a topic that essentially
spans the world, but do it in one location?” My
original thought was, “How do you keep this
moving?” It came from my concept of: “How
do you make a movie for under a million
dollars about the stock market crash?” and my
idea was to trap them on one floor and then you
let the performances lead you through the story.

DIXON:

This is the same strategy that producer Val

Lewton used in his classic low-budget horror
films of the 1940s: keep most of the action on
one set so you don’t lose time moving people
around and you don’t blow a lot of money on
sets; you can concentrate on the story and the
performances.

CHANDOR: Yes, I call them “submarine movies” – put
them in a submarine and then you can shoot it
really cheap. So, Margin Call is a ticking time
bomb submarine movie. They’re totally
isolated from the outside. It sounds kind of
ridiculous, because it is such a topical film, but

I didn’t want it to be a current events movie.

This was supposed to be essentially a
character-driven drama, like Sidney Lumet’s 12

Angry Men [1957]. Put them in a room, lock
the door and see what happens. It’s timeless.

DIXON:

One thing I thought was really effective was the
lack of chattering computer screens rattling off

242
meaningless statistics. I don’t think you ever really see a close-up of a monitor in the film;
you just see close-ups of the actors’ faces
reacting to the impending disaster, starting with

Zachary Quinto’s look of complete disbelief
and shock when he initially realizes just how
bad the whole thing is.

CHANDOR: I agree with you totally, but again, this was
partly economics; we couldn’t really afford to
do that sort of stuff. This is so much more
effective. But again, it’s letting the budget
limitations work for you, rather than against
you. What I’m constantly trying to do in

Margin Call is to give the audience only the
information that they have to have and then the
rest of it becomes about the performance.

DIXON:

So, who helped you get this film off the ground
financially?

CHANDOR: Well, Zachary was in from the ground floor,
along with his producing partner Neal Dodson

– so, Neal and Zachary and I, along with
producer Corey Moosa, always felt like the
money would follow the cast, so to speak, and
so our approach was to see who we could get to
read the script. Ben Kingsley and Carla Gugino
were the first two people involved, but sadly,
neither of them is in the finished film. Ben was
going to play John Tuld, the head of the firm,
and Carla was going to play Sarah Robertson,
who gets the firm involved in derivatives and
then gets axed as a result, but both had to bow
out due to scheduling conflicts, which is sad

243
because they came on and supported me and
really got the film moving. But they had to
back out because of other commitments by the
time we got the money. It took a long time.

DIXON:

So, was the negative budget really $3.5
million?

CHANDOR: The negative budget minus tax incentives was
actually $2.8 million.

DIXON:

And the whole thing was shot in 17 days, am I
right?

CHANDOR: Yes, with one “B” day to do the helicopter stuff
and then, during the trading sequence at the end
of the film, that second unit stuff was done on
one other “B” unit day.

DIXON:

Are there any particular directors whose work
really impresses you, either classical or
contemporary?

CHANDOR: Well, I always feel a little sort of touchy diving
into that subject because you always feel like
you’re marginalizing some people and you
don’t mean to, but David Fincher is fantastic
and Walter Salles, who did Central Station

[1998], and, of course, David Lean. If I could
be any director and have their career, it would
be David Lean. I think he got to live in a pretty
interesting era and his films really evolve and
move into various different genres and do a lot
of different things; some are small scale, some
are epic. He could do it all. I’m a huge, huge
fan of pretty much anything he touches.

244

DIXON:

You shot Margin Call on a mixture of film and
video, but it’s mostly film, right?

CHANDOR: I’ve got to be honest – it’s mostly shot on the

RED digital camera. We were shooting so
much and we were shooting with incredible
speed throughout the entire shoot. A lot of the
film was shot with two cameras – certainly all
the boardroom scenes and everything.

DIXON:

Really? I would have thought it was a
single-camera film.

CHANDOR: Yes it is, in its primary structure, and the
editing makes it look like a single-camera
movie. It’s the way I like to set things up. But
we had to use two cameras because we were
working so fast. We had no choice. Time was
the important thing and to let nothing get in the
way of the performances. In fact, one of the
boardroom sequences was three cameras,
actually. It was insane to orchestrate. This
movie lives and dies with the performances, so
that was the most important thing to capture.

Frankly, between you and me, I’m a
one-camera guy – that’s the style I like to shoot
a movie in. Still, in the end, I would say
probably 65 to 70 percent of the movie was
shot single-camera. But there were five or six
really key scenes where it was actually
wonderful to have two cameras because it
allowed these performances to really live and
work off of each other. But the neat thing also
with having two RED cameras and shooting in
that environment was that we were able to have

245
one camera aiming out the windows when we
didn’t need it, doing all that wonderful time
lapse stuff literally as we were shooting. If we
weren’t using the camera, we would set up a six
hour time lapse and it was kind of neat to have
that be part of the shooting environment, sitting
in the corner doing its own thing while we were
working.

DIXON:

How closely did you work with [director of
cinematography] Frank DeMarco? He got a
really cold, slick look for the film, devoid of
warmth or humanity, I thought.

CHANDOR: Very closely. To shoot a movie that quickly, he
had to be the right person for the job and

Frankie just killed it. He was the best.

DIXON:

Nathan Larson’s music was almost subliminal.

How much input did you have on that?

CHANDOR: He and I worked very, very closely together.

There was also a woman named Suzana Peric
who helped with that, who is a wonderful
music editor and consultant. Her specialty is,
for lack of a better word, placement. We had a
rough cut of the film, but the music wasn’t
working and none of us could figure out what
was going on. Suzana came in and just moved
it around and shuffled it and made the whole
thing work. I never wanted the music to feel
like it was taking over the movie, but it
certainly was necessary to keep the movie
moving forward.

246

DIXON:

You shot the film in 17 days, but you finished

Stanley Tucci in three days and Jeremy Irons in
three days. How the hell did you do that? How
many setups did you do a day? Really, that’s
incredible.

CHANDOR: Yes, the Jeremy Irons section was unbelievable
because he was supposed to work on the film
for five days, but because of the visa thing he
could only work three. So we did the entire
boardroom scene with Jeremy Irons in one
night on the shortest night of the year, or close
to it. So that was one day and so we were doing
twelve pages a day on some days.

DIXON:

One of the things that really impressed me,
though, is the restraint of all the performances.

Left to their own devices, some of the actors
involved might have taken it over the top, in
my opinion; but, since you’re coming from an
actor’s standpoint on the film, it seems to me
that you really got everyone involved to play it
very
close
to
the
vest,
without
any
melodramatic histrionics.

CHANDOR: Well, every one of these actors is obviously
unbelievably experienced and accomplished in
their own right and the amazing thing about
them is, once they get confidence that the
director – in this case, the writer/director –
actually knows what they want, they will be
willing to let you guide them towards that goal.

DIXON:

Would you say it would be fair to say you were
saying, “Take it down?”

247

CHANDOR: In some cases, yes, and in others it was “take it up.” Different people need different things. I
had to have the confidence to let these guys
know what I was looking for and that’s hard to
do, but it’s essential. If you don’t have the
respect of the cast, if you don’t have the vision
and you don’t communicate it, you’re not going
to get what you want. The great thing I got
from this film – and it’s a great lesson for me
moving forward with new films – is that you
have to know exactly what you want when you
go on the floor and you should never shoot
something if you don’t.

DIXON:

Margin Call is shot and edited in a very
classical style, almost like John Ford, believe it
or not. The camerawork is never flashy; it’s just
there where it needs to be, in the right place at
the right time. You don’t do a lot of flashy
jump cuts or change speeds in mid-shot; in my
book, cheap tricks all. So, it looks like a very
classical film. Totally intentional, right?

CHANDOR: Absolutely.

DIXON:

Okay. How do you feel about that MTV-ized
direction?

CHANDOR: It’s a little more experimental. But with this
setup, I felt that the material and the way that it
was handled, I didn’t need to get in the way of
the story of the actors, which is what stuff like
that does – it calls attention to itself. I wanted
the audience to forget the camera was there. I
sort of needed to get out of the way.

248

DIXON:

Absolutely. Strip it down and make it clean.

Would you say that, in your view, there are no
villains here, no heroes, just human beings who
screw up?

CHANDOR: Yes and I think, even more interestingly, that
everyone in the film is both a hero and a villain.

Hopefully this is a window into an authentic
vision of how people would act under these
circumstances.

DIXON:

Now you have a two-picture deal writing at

Warner Brothers, working on the script for a
film called Portofino for Leonardo DiCaprio. It
seems to me that you are exactly where

Christopher Nolan was in 1999 when he
released his small, black-and-white, no-budget
film, Following. I don’t know if you’ve ever
seen it. You’re about to break through to the
big time.

CHANDOR: Indeed, I have; it’s a great little film. And
obviously, I think that, since then, Christopher

Nolan has managed to make commercial and
also intelligent films. I would take Mr. Nolan’s
career in about 32 seconds! Right now, I’m
closing the actor deal on a film that would be
very different from Margin Call – with a bigger
budget, a sort of experimental action movie. So,
that is what I’ll be shooting in January if that
goes. And then I would like to do a bigger
movie for a much wider audience. I should
point out that the Warner Brothers gig, though,
is strictly a writing gig; this is a completely
different project. They’re two different things.

249

DIXON:

As the budgets get bigger, it seems to me that
the essential thing is to maintain your artistic
integrity. As André Gide famously noted, “art
is born of constraint and dies of freedom.” Do
you agree?

CHANDOR: Absolutely. I love the business side of this
business and I think wonderful things can come
out of the constraints, the limitations. The
driving force of Margin Call did not come out
of thin air; it came out of how to tell this
particular story well and quickly and on a tight
budget. The Warner Brothers gig is a
wonderful, wonderful opportunity to learn the
larger studio system. I don’t know if any of
these scripts will ever get made into a movie,
but it’s a great learning experience.

DIXON:

Well, thanks for your time and I guess the very
last question is this – what does J. C. stand for?

CHANDOR: Jeffrey Chandor is what I have been called
since birth, so J. C. doesn’t make sense because
my middle name is McDonald. So it should be

J. M., but my parents, for some reason, called
me J. C. So it’s Jeffrey McDonald Chandor.

Footnote

*

A version of this chapter was first published in 2012 as

“Margin Call: An Interview with J.C. Chandor,” Film

International 10(3): 6–15.

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Chapter 12

“ALL MY FILMS ARE PERSONAL”:

AN INTERVIEW WITH PAT

JACKSON*

I first became aware of Pat Jackson’s work through one of his later and lesser-known films: the suspense thriller Don’t Talk to Strange Men (1962), a sharply observed little film shot on a shoestring budget, centering on a serial killer in a small

British country village who selects his victims by ringing an isolated phone booth near a bus stop and waiting to see who
answers. When Jean Painter (Christina Gregg) picks up the
phone late one afternoon, the anonymous caller on the other
end of the line begins to chat her up in soothing, seductive
tones. Lulled into a false sense of security, Jean agrees to
meet him later at an isolated rendezvous. Only the timely
intervention of Jean’s much younger, but far more perceptive, sister, Ann (Janina Faye), saves Jean from a violent death.

Interestingly, we never see the killer, who is photographed
only from the back, blocking out much of the frame in each
scene in which he appears; all that identifies him is his voice, which seems unnervingly calm and composed.

Originally released on the bottom half of a double bill with

Tony Richardson’s classic The Loneliness of the Long

Distance Runner (1962), Don’t Talk to Strange Men is a deft
example of low-budget filmmaking at its most effective and
typical of much of the work that Pat Jackson did in the 1960s

– which also included a number of episodes of the visionary
television series The Prisoner (Jackson was the person who

“discovered” Prisoner star Patrick McGoohan and directed

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the actor’s first screen test), as well as episodes of The Saint, Danger Man (aka Secret Agent in the United States), Man in a

Suitcase and other hour-long television dramas. But Jackson’s career goes back to the mid-1930s. Born on 26 March 1916,

Jackson was just turning twenty when he started off as an
assistant on Harry Watt and Basil Wright’s classic
documentary Night Mail (1936) and later Humphrey Jennings
and Harry Watt’s London Can Take It (1940), a stirring piece
of agitprop shot during the Nazi blitz. Even at this early stage, Jackson was leaving a personal imprint on the films he
worked on; it is his voice, for example, doing the main
narration on Night Mail – or, as he put it, “[E]verything but

[W. H.] Auden’s poetry” on the soundtrack. On London Can

Take It, Jackson was one of many cameramen on the project;
as he told me, “We all shot stuff for that film.”

Figure 12. Pat Jackson (extreme right, white shirt) on set.

Source: Author’s collection.

252

From there, Jackson moved on to what has become his signature film: the feature-length docudrama Western

Approaches (1945), which he also scripted, directed and acted in. A tribute to merchant seamen in the British Navy during

World War II, Western Approaches has the distinction of
being the first film shot in sync sound three-strip Technicolor in near-documentary conditions. Shot in 1943–44, when the
outcome of the war was far from certain, the film
unforgettably conveys the sense of sacrifice and urgency that dominated England at the height of the conflict with Hitler’s Germany. This earlier part of his career has been amply
documented in a number of essays and Jackson’s
autobiography, A Retake Please! (1999), but little attention
has been paid to his later work.

To remedy this, I wrote to Jackson and we agreed to an
interview by telephone on 25 and 26 March 2011 to discuss
his later films. Even in his mid-nineties, Jackson was a
formidable figure who sometimes would open up on certain
subjects and then shut down on others. Irascible, blunt and
very much his own man, Jackson remained an indisputably
individual talent until the end of his life; sadly, this was his last interview. Pat Jackson died on 3 June 2011.

WHEELER Hello, Pat. How are you?

WINSTON

DIXON:

PAT

Oh, ticking away at my ripe old age. I’m

JACKSON: ninety-five now, you know!

DIXON:

Well, a great deal of writing on your films –
including your own book A Retake Please! – has
dealt with your earlier work, such as Western

253

Approaches and films you worked on as an
assistant or apprentice. It’s fascinating stuff, but

I did want to talk to you about your other films,
which haven’t been discussed that much.

JACKSON: Yes, sure.

DIXON:

Okay, so let’s pick it up from White Corridors

[1951], after your unhappy experience at MGM.

You had been working quite successfully in

England, but then you succumbed to the lure of

Hollywood and found that it was a creative
straitjacket, as you make clear in your memoirs.

It seems that they thought you were just another
director for hire – when, of course, you’d been
working on personal films of one sort or another
and doing most of your own scriptwriting since
the mid-1930s and started out with a very
experimental film unit, the GPO [General Post

Office film unit], under John Grierson.

JACKSON: Well, I left Hollywood when I received the
script of White Corridors and I never looked
back. I knew I could make White Corridors
work and I knew it was a quality project; that
and Western Approaches are my two favorite
films. I was thankful to get back to England
because MGM had not picked up my option
because it was too expensive. Alexander Korda
had put me under contract and they would have
had to pay me a lot of money at MGM to keep
me. So they dropped me.

254

DIXON:

Is it true that MGM wanted to put you on a

Lassie picture [Challenge to Lassie, 1949] that

Richard Thorpe wound up directing?

JACKSON: Yes, but I wouldn’t do it. I never made a film I
didn’t believe in. When Dore Schary took over

MGM from Louis B. Mayer, he called me into
his office and said, “We’re giving you an
assignment and we want you to do it. But I hear
that you don’t want to do it. Am I right?” I said,

“Do you expect directors to go on the floor not
believing a word of what they are going to do? If
that’s the way you work, I’m not interested. You
better sack me right away.”

DIXON:

You wrote one resignation letter after another.

JACKSON: Oh, yeah. I was constantly trying to leave MGM;
it just wasn’t working.

DIXON:

In your letters, you would more or less say,

“Since you are not using my services and you
are giving me projects I don’t believe in, maybe
it’s best if we just pack it all in right now,” am I
correct?

JACKSON: That’s right.

DIXON:

But every time this would result in a meeting
with Schary and his assistants and they would
say, “We will have something for you in three
weeks,” but nothing ever came of it.

JACKSON: That’s about it. But then I met [the MGM
contract writer and producer] Robert Sisk, who
knew I was interested in a story that he was
working on with Bill Ludwig, which became

Shadow on the Wall [1950]. Originally, it was

255
called Death in a Doll’s House, which they had to change because somebody finally realized

[here, a distinct note of sarcasm creeps into his
voice] that someone named Ibsen had written a
play with roughly the same title! Robert helped a
lot with the script; it was a fairly good suspense
thriller and I agreed to do it. So they gave it to
me to do and then we went over schedule by
nearly two days after three weeks of shooting.

Nancy Davis promptly came down with the
mumps or some damn thing. So that made it
very difficult. But we finally finished under
schedule and on time. That had a pretty good
cast: Zachary Scott and Ann Sothern were the
leads and they were quite competent. It was a
five week schedule, which is fairly luxurious.

But, after that, nothing worked out at MGM and

I was glad to get back to Britain.

DIXON:

Your first film after that was the hospital drama

White Corridors, which is one of your favorite
films. You cover that in your book. But let’s talk
about your segment of Encore [1951], a
multipart film based on three stories by

Somerset Maugham; your segment was “The

Ant and the Grasshopper.”

JACKSON: That was lovely. That starred Nigel Patrick and

Roland Culver; it was a very pleasant
assignment, very literate – a great script. But the
schedule was short; I had only a week to shoot
it. The title sums the whole thing up; one brother
is a worthless layabout while the other is
constantly striving to get ahead in business. But

256
the layabout, Tom [Nigel Patrick], gets the girl!

A nice twist ending, typical for Maugham. It was
an easy piece to shoot.

DIXON:

Your next feature was Something Money Can’t

Buy [1952], which you co-wrote with James L.

Hodson; it’s about a returning World War II
veteran who can’t adjust to civilian life and is
threatened by his wife’s job as head of an
employment agency. Unwilling to sit at home,
he goes into the catering business with some of
his former comrades. What can you tell me
about that?

JACKSON: Well, that was the famous novelist James L.

Hodson. He was a survivor of the first World

War, who wrote a wonderful book called Return
to the Wood. We had a long history together. I
first met him in 1943. We had gone to Rome
together because, when Rome fell, Prime

Minister Churchill thought it would be a very
good idea to make a film on the theme of the

“Return of the Four Freedoms” in the first
captured enemy capital. Churchill had his own

35mm copy of Western Approaches and he
loved the film, so he thought I was the man for
the job. So, I was summoned to the Ministry of

Information and they said, “The Prime Minister
wants this film made on the Four Freedoms.”

I said, “Freedom in any form is pretty
abstract for a film, but I suppose if you let me
use a sync sound setup, we should be able to
understand what Rome is thinking about being
liberated by the Allies and it will be interesting.”

257

But they didn’t want to give me a sound unit; they wanted me to shoot the whole thing silent
and dub it in later. I said, “Without sound, it will
be a travelogue with British soldiers looking at
the Coliseum and the Vatican and that’s going to
be a fat lot of good, isn’t it?” So they said,

“Well, that’s up to you to provide the right
visuals.” I said, “I’m not your man. I think it’s a
crazy idea without sync sound and it’s going to
be a waste of time.” So we argued about the
assignment and so on.

Finally they said, “Well, if James Hodson is
prepared to go, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.”

That piqued my interest. So we met over lunch
and I told Jim that, “Without sync sound, this is
an absolute waste of time.” He said, “I agree
with you. But we’re in a difficult position
because the Prime Minister wants this film
made. I agree with you that without sync sound
it’s going to be a waste of time, but the least we
can do is to go there, have a look at Rome and
report.” Then, with a twinkle in his eye, he said,

“Anyway, it would be an interesting experience,
wouldn’t it?” And so we got a trip to Rome out
of it, at least, and the film never did get made.

But, it led to a long friendship between Jim and
myself. So, when we got to Something Money

Can’t Buy, we were old friends and could draw
on a lot of shared experiences.

DIXON:

There’s a credit for you in most sources as a
co-director on an early Hammer film, Scotland

258

Yard Inspector [1952], which was directed to Sam Newfield.

JACKSON: No, I never worked for Hammer, never would.

DIXON:

What about The Gentle Touch [1956]?

JACKSON: Oh yes, that was a nursing film. I wrote the
script to that and directed it; a lot of other people
were originally involved, but I pretty much
swept them out of the way and took over the
whole thing. It was about student nurses in a

National Health Service system in the 1950s.

After that I made The Birthday Present [1957]

about a salesman who brings home an expensive
watch to his wife and gets caught with it at
customs and winds up in jail! Tony Britton and

Sylvia Syms were the stars; it was Jack

Whittingham’s script. We made it on a five
week schedule. Sylvia Syms was delightful to
work with and so was Tony Britton. Actually,
there were a lot of good people in that film:

Geoffrey Keen, Thorley Walters, Howard

Marion-Crawford and even Ian Bannen, in a
small bit as a junior customs officer. Then I did
an interesting little film, Our Virgin Island [aka

Virgin Island, 1959], which I co-scripted with

Ring Lardner, Jr. [from a novel by Robb White,
who later went on to write a series of horror
films for director William Castle]. That one had
a really good cast: John Cassavetes, Ruby Dee,

Sidney Poitier and it was shot by Freddie

Francis, who went on to win two Academy

Awards and also directed a number of films. It’s
about two people who go to live on a tropical

259
island and become entangled in a smuggling
ring.

DIXON:

Yes, I knew Freddie very well; a fabulous
cinematographer.

JACKSON: After that I directed Snowball [1960], a very
interesting little crime thriller, very short – just
over an hour – with Gordon Jackson, Kenneth

Griffith, Zena Walker and a little boy who
became a famous actor and is still going strong:

Dennis Waterman. Then came Seven Keys

[1961], another crime thriller, and then a horror
comedy, No Place Like Homicide [aka, What a

Carve Up!, 1961], which was sort of an
unofficial Carry On [comedy series] film, with

Sidney James and Kenneth Connor and a great
supporting cast: Shirley Eaton, Dennis Price,

Michael Gough. I loved doing it because I
thought, “I’ll take the Mickey out [i.e., mock the
seriousness] of horror films,” but it was so well
done that everybody thought I was playing it
straight.

DIXON:

Now I want to get into your TV work. How did
you get into television?

JACKSON: Well, I brought Patrick McGoohan to the screen.

I’ll tell you how that happened. When Orson

Welles came to London, he produced a theatrical
version of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick,
entitled Moby Dick Rehearsed, in 1955. A
wonderful thing to have done. The whole thing
was done in modern dress with practically no
props. Welles even shot a film of the production

260
in one weekend, but it’s now apparently lost.

Can you believe it; to shoot the whole thing and
then lose it? Anyway, I went to see it in the
theater and it was fantastic! What a cast: Gordon

Jackson, Christopher Lee, Patrick McGoohan,

Joan Plowright, Kenneth Williams – Kenneth

Williams, mind you, from the Carry On films, in
a serious production, playing multiple roles –
just amazing! Welles had a real eye for talent
because, at that point, none of these people were
really known. Anyway, Patrick played the first
officer, Starbuck, and as soon as he came on the
stage, he had the audience in the palm of his
hand. He had a wonderful voice. I had never
heard of him, never seen him. It was one of his
very first parts; he was a completely unknown
actor.

So, I got in touch with him and said, “I want
you to come down, if you would, and do a
screen test.” So he said, “Yes, all right, fine. But

I’ve never done any film work, you know.” I
said, “Well, it doesn’t matter because you’re a
wonderful actor. That’s all that matters.” So I
met him a few days later at Pinewood [Studios]

about 8:00 in the morning, outside the canteen.

He drove up in his little car and got out, as white
as a sheet. He came up to me and said, “Pat, I’m
sorry. I don’t think I can go through with this.” I
told him, “Relax. One thousand feet of film is no
more important than a roll of toilet paper.

You’ve got nothing to lose. Don’t be a fool, of
course you’re ready to do it.” So I shot 1,000

261
feet of his face, close-ups, long shots, different lighting – a real run through of what he looked
like on screen. Well, he did a wonderful test and
immediately was put under contract by J. Arthur

Rank – and then, of course, he became a TV star
with Danger Man. So, I directed his first test and
pretty much discovered him, which is why we
worked together so well on The Prisoner, much,
much later.

DIXON:

Now what can you tell me about the TV series

Rendezvous [1957– 61]? You directed twelve
episodes of that.

JACKSON: More than that. I did half of them. You must see
it because Peter O’Toole is in it and Patrick is in
one of the episodes, “The Executioner,” which I
directed in 1961. It was one of Peter O’Toole’s
first appearances on film or television; we shot it
all on film.

DIXON:

Was this a big hit in Britain?

JACKSON: No. It died the death. It was ahead of its time.

Rendezvous was a whole series of short stories –
half-hour short stories. There was no continuity;
it was an entirely new cast and plot line every
week. But the British audience, by that time,
insisted on soap operas or serials. They couldn’t
take a new short story every week. Getting used
to characters they had never seen before was
simply too much work for British TV viewers,
even then, and so the series lingered for a while
and then died. It was too bad because it was very

262
good. Peter O’Toole was delightful to work
with.

DIXON:

Now we come to Don’t Talk to Strange Men.

JACKSON: Well, that was a great little suspense thriller
produced by Derick Williams. It was shot very
quickly, on a very modest budget. But it holds
up very well. It had a great script by Gwen

Cherrell and a solid cast: Christina Gregg, Janina

Faye and Cyril Raymond were all very good.

The voice of the killer, incidentally, is done by

Tony Britton, who gets no credit anywhere in
the film; he did it as a favor to me. But, as you
know, you never see his face; he’s always got
his back to the camera. We never find out who
the killer is, even at the end. It doesn’t really
matter who he is. He could be anyone. That’s the
point of the whole film. You think you know
people, but you don’t. The fact that you don’t
know who it is makes the whole film that much
more sinister.

DIXON:

What I thought was interesting – among many
other things in the film – was how much you did
with atmosphere. Simple things. When Jean is in
the phone booth and you’re listening to the killer
talk to her, you cut outside to the woods around
the phone booth, but there’s really nothing
obvious there. You get the sense that there’s
something back there, but you can’t see what it
is. It gives a sense of unease to the whole thing. I
thought it was just a brilliant piece of work –
memorably sinister. And now, of course, it’s on

263

DVD, so a whole new generation of viewers can see it.

JACKSON: Yes, I was quite surprised by that. I like the film, but I’d prefer it if White Corridors came out on

DVD; it’s really a better film, I think. And after

Don’t Talk to Strange Men, I directed a sort of
kid’s film, Seventy Deadly Pills [1964], about a
group of young kids – a gang called “The

Rockets” – who find a bunch of pills that could
kill them; the film becomes a race against time
to recover the pills before one of the kids takes
them. That was also for Derick Williams, who
produced Don’t Talk to Strange Men.

DIXON:

Right after that, you directed one episode of The

Saint, entitled “The Revolution Racket” [1964].

Roger Moore has gone on record as saying, “I’m
not an actor and I’ve got 50 films to prove it.”

Would you more or less agree?

JACKSON: He was all right, in a limited way. That was just
more or less an assignment. It was shot in five
days; assembly line work. And, around the same
time, I also did some episodes of Man in a

Suitcase, an hour long drama about an American
spy [McGill, nicknamed Mac, played by

American actor Richard Bradford] who has been
kicked out of the service unjustly and winds up
in London. From there, he takes whatever work
he can while at the same time trying to restore
his reputation. It’s a good premise, but the show
was just routine. I did three episodes: “The

Bridge,” “Man from the Dead,” and “Variation

264
on a Million Bucks: Part 1,” all in 1967. It paid the rent.

But, around the same time, I got the chance
to do an episode of Danger Man – “The Hunting

Party” in 1966. That was a whole different story.

Patrick was such a good actor and, even though
it was a TV show, with a tight schedule, he just
had so much more range that the whole thing
just clicked right from the start. I just did one
episode of Danger Man, but then, of course, that
led to The Prisoner, which was very much a
personal project for Patrick. I directed four
episodes of The Prisoner, which was way ahead
of its time: “Hammer into Anvil,” “The Schizoid

Man,” and “A. B. and C.,” all in 1967, and “Do

Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling” in 1968.

As you know, there were only seventeen
episodes shot in the entire series and then it was
done. Today, of course, it’s a classic. Patrick had
almost complete total control over it. We had
five days to shoot each episode and because the
whole thing was so well planned out, it went off
just like clockwork. Television moves very
quickly and you have to get things done bang on
schedule; when you have a good crew and a
good cast, the whole thing moves right along.

But The Prisoner was a one-of-a-kind series;
they tried to remake it a year or so ago for
television and it simply didn’t work. Without

Patrick’s vision, The Prisoner would never have
existed.

265

DIXON:

Do you storyboard your films and television
shows?

JACKSON: It’s much more than that. I plan everything – and

I mean everything – out in advance. Every
camera movement is worked out, every
movement of the artist is worked out, because
otherwise you don’t know what your camera is
going to do. I don’t arrive on the floor and see
what the actors have blocked out; I work all that
out beforehand. It has to be precise. I plan the
whole thing out in advance. It’s the only way to
do it, particularly when you have to get it done
on time and on schedule. And, of course, I
moved into directing a lot of television; my last
work was on the TV series Arthur of the Britons
in 1973 – I did six episodes of that – and, after
that, a kid’s show, which was very popular –

The Famous Five, in 1978 and 1979. I shot
eleven episodes of that; both were half-hour
series. Again, without preplanning everything,
you’re never going to get it done on time, so I
always plan every last detail before I go on the
set.

DIXON:

You worked with people like Harry Watt and

John Grierson in the glory days of the GPO with

Night Mail and London Can Take It. But who
were the people in the 1960s you worked with?

How did you feel about how the cinema had
changed over the years?

JACKSON: Well, I didn’t have any real connection to other
directors in the 1960s. I was freelance. Every
time I made a film, it would be a different lot of

266
people. I was a floating object, floating on the sea. Anybody who was interested got in touch.

Because I hadn’t got an agent. So, on my later
films, we shot them and we didn’t think they
would have any great future, but we did films
like Don’t Talk to Strange Men because it was
an interesting story.

When you make a film and it goes down
well in the press, you feel you’ve done
something, that it’s all been worthwhile. Some
films I’ve made, like Western Approaches, are
obviously personal films I have control over
from start to finish. And then working on The

Prisoner, that was Patrick’s personal vision – he
even directed some of the episodes himself – and
so that was very satisfying. Some work I’ve
done simply to pay the bills. But, in everything

I’ve done, I’ve tried to give it an edge,
something that’s mine alone. Of course, I’ve
written a lot of the scripts for my films and I
wish I had a chance to do more of that – and I
have several scripts that I would like to have
done, but never got the chance to do, for various
reasons. But, when I look back on my work, I’m
pleased with it; I got a chance to do a lot of
interesting projects and my best work, like

White Corridors, still holds up today. I was
never an organization man; as you know from
my abortive sojourn at MGM, Hollywood holds
no allure for me. All of my films are personal, to
one degree or another. That’s the only way to do
it.

267

Footnote

*

A version of this chapter was first published in 2011 by

Taylor & Francis as “‘All My Films Are Personal’: An

Interview with Pat Jackson,” Journal of Popular Film and

Television 39 (4): 150–61.

268

Chapter 13

WORKING WITHIN THE

SYSTEM: AN INTERVIEW

WITH GERRY O’HARA*

Gerry O’Hara is a true original and, if he never really got the chance to definitively climb out of the ranks of assistant
directors into the realm of full-fledged feature directors, he nevertheless managed to carve out a solid career in the
cinema working with such luminaries as Sir Laurence Olivier,

Ronald Neame, Michael Powell, Sir Carol Reed, Anatole

Litvak, Ken Annakin, Terence Fisher, Sidney Box, Otto

Preminger and many more in his early years, before striking
out on his own with several low-budget sixties British films –
the most memorable of which is The Pleasure Girls (UK,

1963), recently rereleased as part of the BFI’s “Flipside”

series of lesser-known films that nevertheless deserve
attention. Despite its unfortunate title, The Pleasure Girls is, in reality, a deeply moving feminist document of ’60s

London, shot in a real apartment building as four young
women come to London to make their way in the world.

Throughout his career, O’Hara has had to do a number of
projects he didn’t really want to do, but he also got a chance to work with some of the greatest talents in the history of the cinema and is frank about his past, including the biggest
mistake of his career: walking off Lawrence of Arabia (dir.

David Lean, UK, 1962) as first assistant director during early preproduction, after which he alleges that Columbia Pictures
effectively blacklisted O’Hara within the industry as

“unreliable.” I couldn’t possibly cover all of his credits even 269

in this lengthy interview, but suffice it to say that Gerry

O’Hara was extremely active from the early 1940s on,
working with all the major talents in the field; he certainly left his mark on the cinema industry. But let him tell it in this
interview conducted on 3 December 2010.

Figure 13. Gerry O’Hara on set of The Pleasure Girls.

Source: Author’s collection.

WHEELER You were born in 1924.

WINSTON

DIXON:

GERRY

Correct.

O’HARA:

DIXON:

And your father was a bookmaker?

O’HARA: That’s right. He was just small time. He was the
equivalent of what was called a street bookie. In
those days, it was illegal to take cash for

270
wagering. He was just a very smalltime bookie in a little country town – Boston Lincolnshire –
where I was born.

DIXON:

What about your early schooling?

O’HARA: Very primitive. St. Mary’s Catholic School – it
was what was called then an elementary school.

They just taught you the three R’s for three
hours a day and, being a Catholic school, a lot of
religion. Plus a little geography, a little history.

But I never finished; I left school at 14. I was
really more interested in getting out into the
world and finding my own way. So, I became a
cub reporter on a failing Labour newspaper in a
conservative town, the Boston Guardian. It was
on its last legs and it lasted for about 18 months
at the outside, but when it folded, we were all
picked up by the conservative paper – which still
exists – the Lincolnshire Standard.

DIXON:

And what was your beat?

O’HARA: Deaths and weddings, christenings, charity
dinners – that sort of stuff. I was 14 when I got
the job on the Guardian. It’s odd, really, because
of course at 14 now you wouldn’t have a chance
at something like that. They might allow you to
sell newspapers on the street, but they wouldn’t
make you write them. But anyway, I kept at this
for some time, until one day in 1941, the

Lincolnshire Standard sent me out to interview

[director] Michael Powell, who was shooting

One of Our Aircraft is Missing [co-directed with

Emeric Pressburger, UK, 1942] on location. We

271
were told in the newspaper office that there was a film unit down at the swing bridge – which
was a railway bridge across the river – and I
went down there on my bicycle and saw what
was happening. Ronnie Neame was the
cameraman – who, of course, later became a
very famous director – and I watched the crew
working all day. I got an interview in the
evening with Michael Powell, who was very
open and forthcoming. I went home thinking
about what I’d seen and it looked very
intriguing. After a few weeks, the penny
dropped and I thought, “Hey, that looks like a
pretty good job.”

It was during the war, of course, but I was
young and full of ambition, so I wrote to

Michael asking for a job, which took some
nerve, I guess. Surprisingly, Michael wrote back
and said, “Yes, come and see me if you come
down to London.” So I went off to meet him, but

I went to the wrong place. I went to his office in
the city, which was an accountant’s office, when
of course I should have gone to Pinewood

Studios or Denham, where he was shooting. But
they took pity on me. I was 17 and pretty green –
with straw in my hair, as it were. So the
accountants said, “Look, we represent Michael

Powell, but since you have come all this way,
there is a film company around the corner, a
documentary company run by Sidney Box and
we also look after them. Why don’t you try your
luck there?”

272

DIXON:

That was Verity Films, wasn’t it?

O’HARA: That’s right. I got a job there at 3 pounds 7/6 a
week. I started as a trainee in the script
department because, theoretically, I was a
journalist. But I was just running errands for the
script department, carrying film cans and stuff
like that. Then Ken Annakin, who became quite
famous later on, was a young assistant director
there; he sort of took me under his wing and I
switched to being a runner and errand boy in the
assistant director’s department.

DIXON:

So,
basically,
you
were
working
on
documentaries as an assistant director?

O’HARA: Yes. How to put out a firebomb and stuff like
that. It was a lot of wartime work, of course, and
most of it was civil defense stuff, films for hire.

DIXON:

Did you work on any films for the GPO – for the

General Post Office?

O’HARA: Yes, the Ministry of Information. We did a sort
of copy of Carol Reed’s The Next of Kin [UK,

1942] called Jigsaw [UK, 1942], which was a
naval version of how to keep secrets and so
forth. I did a film called Old Mother Riley at

Home [dir. Oswald Mitchell, UK, 1945] with

Arthur Lucan, which was drag comedy, very
simple stuff; oddly, Lucan came from my
hometown and his whole drag act as Old Mother

Riley was very, very popular with working class
audiences. I was a second assistant on that and
so I kept working and gradually moved up to
first assistant. I think the first one was a film

273
called The Loyal Heart [dir. Oswald Mitchell, UK, 1946]; it was about a faithful sheepdog,
shot very quickly at British National. The
cinematographer on that was Arthur Grant, who
later went on to do a lot of work for Hammer in
the ’60s; he was very, very fast on the set. We
shared a bedroom in Cumberland for about three
or four months during that period. Percy

Marmont and his daughter, Patricia, were in it,
but it wasn’t very good. I think it ran for about
three days in two cinemas and they took it off.

I think, at that time, I seemed to waver
between first and second assistant, which
happened a lot. I was still very young then –
only about 18 or 19. But it was a great
apprenticeship; it was incredible. So I kept
working on small-budget films and then I got a
shot at working on Boys in Brown [dir.

Montgomery Tully, UK, 1949], a very famous

British film about a prison for boys – what we
call a Borstal. That had a really top-flight cast,
all of them at the beginning of their careers: Sir

Richard Attenborough (who wasn’t a “Sir”

then), Dirk Bogarde and Jack Warner, who was
a fixture in British crime dramas and also in the

Huggett films, which were family comedies.

Later, he had a big success playing one character
over and over again: Sgt. George Dixon, Dixon
of Dick Green.

DIXON:

Did you have any particular feelings that these
people were going to go on to be major names?

274

O’HARA: Well, I think people had their eye on Dirk because he had begun to get quite a good
reputation in the theater. He was known to be a
talent, but he was a little reserved – a very nice
guy but very private. One never got to know
him. Dickie Attenborough knew him very well.

Dickie used to give me a ride up and down to the
studios every day and Dickie came from

Leicestershire, which is quite near where I came
from. And so we had a very, very slight affinity.

Boys in Brown was shot using what they
called “the independent frame system,” which
nobody remembers, but which was just crazy. It
was the third and last film made with the
independent frame process, which was devised
by a production designer. The idea was that you
could prefabricate the set off the stage and wheel
them in on rostrums so you didn’t occupy the
stage for too long. And you’d shoot most of it
with front screen projection or rear projection.

You’d go out and do all the exteriors when the
weather was good and then you’d come in and
shoot the rest of the film against a bunch of
projection plates. They shot one more film with
the process after that – The Astonished Heart

[dirs. Antony Darnborough and Terence Fisher,

UK, 1950], a Noel Coward vehicle, which he
wrote and starred in – but then they only used
elements of it. The process was just too
constricting.

DIXON:

You can clear something up for me here:

Terence Fisher and Antony Darnborough are

275
credited as co-directors on The Astonished

Heart, a somewhat unusual arrangement. But did
they really co-direct it?

O’HARA: Yes. Terry Fisher was really an editor; he was
graduating from the cutting room and moving
into the director’s chair. And, of course, like

Arthur Grant, Terry also wound up at Hammer,
making lots of horror films, which made his
reputation. Terry had made some smaller films
before that, but this was a Noel Coward film, so
it was a big deal.

DIXON:

So how did they collaborate on that film?

O’HARA: Well, Antony Darnborough was a very nice guy,
but he was a sort of high-flyer – kind of a toff

[aristocrat]. Antony did most of the direction of
the actors and Terry worked on the camera
setups because he knew what would cut
together, being an editor. Antony was a very
decent guy, but he was actually better off as a
producer. He did one more with Terry, So Long
at the Fair [UK, 1950], which I was also first AD
on. That had a pretty stellar cast, too: Jean

Simmons, Dirk Bogarde, David Tomlinson,

Felix Aylmer, André Morrell and a young Honor

Blackman. Again, Antony directed the actors
while Terry tended to the camera setups, but
after that, Antony vanishes from cinema history
while Terry’s career took off. Terry was a very
quiet, very determined director; chain smoked
all the time; always kept on time and on
schedule.

276

DIXON:

Yes. So, do you have any memories of So Long
at the Fair? That was an “A” picture, of course.

O’HARA: Yes, it was a big movie. We went to Paris for
about four weeks to do the location stuff.

DIXON:

Really? I thought the whole thing was shot in the
studio.

O’HARA: No, we did a lot of location work at the Tuileries

Gardens in Paris. Of course, we then went back
and shot a lot of the film in the UK; we had a
mock up of the base of the Eiffel Tower in the
studio and used that for a lot of the dialogue
work. I don’t remember exactly how much we
shot in Paris, but you know, in those days, things
were more relaxed.

DIXON:

How many setups would you do in a day on
something like So Long at the Fair?

O’HARA: Well, on an “A” movie, probably about 8 to 10
setups. If it was a quickie, more like 15 to 18
setups.

DIXON:

Next comes Trio [dirs. Ken Annakin and Harold

French, UK, 1950], which is a portmanteau film,
with three stories all written originally by

Somerset Maugham, who also appeared in the
film. You were really going from one film to the
next very rapidly.

O’HARA: Yes, I certainly was. I worked on only one
episode of that, “The Verger,” which was
directed by my old friend Ken Annakin, who by
now was moving up very rapidly. James Hayter
and Michael Hordern starred in that; it was a
nice short piece of work. Geoffrey Unsworth

277
shot that; he was a fine cameraman. It was
produced,
oddly
enough,
by

Antony

Darnborough, who by this time had decided to
step back from direction and work strictly as a
producer.

DIXON:

There was really quite a vogue for these

Somerset Maugham “anthology” movies at the
time; there was Trio, Quartet [dirs. Ken

Annakin, Arthur Crabtree, Harold French and

Ralph Smart, UK, 1948] and Encore [dirs.

Harold French and Pat Jackson, UK, 1951].

O’HARA: I worked on Trio and Quartet; both times with

Ken. We did one episode of Quartet, “The

Colonel’s

Lady.”

Cecil

Parker,

Wilfrid

Hyde-White and Nora Swinburne were in that;

Reginald Wyer shot it – a very fast and efficient
cameraman. It was a beautiful segment about a
very tough-nosed colonel who couldn’t live with
the fact that his wife had written a book of erotic
poetry. That was shot at Gainsborough Studios
in Islington. It was a very small studio, one stage
built on top of the other. In fact, it was a
converted factory.

DIXON:

Next up is the crime thriller The Clouded

Yellow [UK, 1950]. That was directed by Ralph

Thomas. What was he like as a director? Jean

Simmons and Trevor Howard were in that.

O’HARA: Ralph Thomas was okay. He was an awful snob.

His brother, Gerry Thomas, was much more
amusing, much more fun – he was much more
approachable.

Ralph
took
himself
quite

278
seriously. You had to call him “Rafe,” not

“Ralph.” I remember that he was very proud of
the fact that he was a member of the Cavalry

Club, which was a very exclusive London men’s
club. Supposedly, he had a long affair with Betty

Box.

DIXON:

Gerry directed all the Carry On films, right?

O’HARA: Absolutely. I didn’t work on any of those, but I
knew him slightly. Both Ralph and Gerry were
editors who became directors. They were what
we call “working directors”; they got the film in
on time and on schedule, but they certainly
weren’t mainstream talents.

DIXON:

Next, I have a film called Meet Mr. Callahan

[UK, 1954], directed by Charles Saunders, based
on Peter Cheney’s character of the slightly
down-at-the-heels
private
detective

Slim

Callaghan. The Slim Callaghan novels were
wildly popular in the ’50s, but now nobody
seems to read him except for Jean-Luc Godard,
surprisingly. What was that like?

O’HARA: That was fine; a small picture, but easy to make.

Charlie Saunders again was an ex-editor. Those
kinds of guys like Charlie, Ralph Smart and

Ralph and Gerry Thomas were what I used to
call “meat and potatoes” directors. They knew
how to cut up the script and how to choose the
right setups to get it in the can as rapidly as
possible. Charlie’s brother produced the long
running Agatha Christie play The Mouse Trap,

279
which opened in 1952, is still running to this day; some 24,000 performances!

DIXON:

The next picture that I have for you, though, is a
distinct step up: Sir Laurence Olivier’s Richard

III [ UK, 1955]. You’ve been essentially
working in “B” films and on smaller “A” films,
but this is quite a promotion. How did you get
the job on that?

O’HARA: Well, I was working on The Divided Heart [dir.

Charles Crichton, UK, 1954] at Ealing Studios,
which was based on a true story published in

Life magazine. It was a really good picture, very
solidly told. It was about a little boy whose
entire family, including his mother, was
presumed killed by the Nazis during World War

II. After the war, the boy is adopted by a

German couple in the Bavarian Alps, where he
grows up and considers the adoptive couple his
real parents. But then, out of nowhere, his birth
mother suddenly reappears and fights tooth and
nail through the courts to get the child back.

Really well done; Theodore Bikel, Yvonne

Mitchell, Geoffrey Keen, Alexander Knox and

Liam Redmond were all in it and they were first
rate.

But here’s the thing: Ealing Studios was
grooming me to be a staff member there, which I
didn’t really want to be. I didn’t realize that at
the time, but I didn’t care for Ealing Studios.

They were a bit snobbish, you know? They were
quite nice, but there were all university guys and
they were a bit kinky. So I didn’t really fit in.

280

But I made one good friend; the cameraman on that was a lovely guy named Otto Heller. He was
a Czech refugee and his English was appalling.

He was a very funny, very sweet guy but he
couldn’t read the scripts, so that was a real
problem! The Ealing people didn’t really care
for him, but they hired him for the very good
reason that he was fast. Really, really fast on the
set. But Otto couldn’t read the script, so I used to
tell him what the scene was every day. Each
scene. Charlie Crichton was a bit standoffish; he

“couldn’t be bothered” to tell Otto what was
going on, you know. So that’s why we became
quite good pals, Otto and I.

And then Otto came to me one day and said,

“Gerry, what is this Richard III?” And I said,

“Well, it’s Shakespeare; it’s a play about a very
cruel British monarch.” That’s as best as I knew,
you know, since we hadn’t studied Shakespeare
at school. “Why do you ask?” I wondered.

“Well,” Otto said, “I’m going to speak to Mr.

Olivier tonight” – he called him “Mr. Olivier” –

“because he wants me to shoot a film for him.”

Larry was playing at the Phoenix Theatre in

Terence Rattigan’s The Sleeping Prince with

Vivien Leigh and he wanted Otto to drop by
after the performance for a job interview. Otto
was beside himself; he really wanted the job, but
he had no idea what Richard III was about! So
he asked me, “Could you find out for me what
it’s about, what the plot is, so I don’t look like
an idiot?” “Sure,” I said, so I sent for one of

281

Michael Balcon’s trainees, Michael Birkett, who later became Lord Birkett – a very nice guy.

Anyway, I called Michael on the set – he
was only about 18 or 19 years old at the time –
and said, “Look, I want a ‘once upon a time’

version of Richard III, only a couple of pages
long, and I want it by 5:00 tonight.” And

Michael did it. Otto and I went to a coffee bar
after day’s shooting. I told him the story and he
went to see Larry. Larry wanted Otto because he
was fast; he had a much-deserved reputation for
doing great work really, really quickly. Larry
had worked with some of the great cameramen
of the British cinema in his earlier films, but
they’d taken up the lion’s share of production
time getting the set lit, with the actors waiting
around and he didn’t want to do that again.

So, somebody had told him that Otto was
quality and quick and, after a very brief
interview with Larry, he got the job. But, as Otto
was leaving the dressing room, he said, “There’s
just one thing: I need an assistant on the film. I
have difficulty reading and this boy, Gerry

O’Hara, really helps me with the script.” So

Larry said, “Send him in tomorrow night.” So I
went backstage the next night, spoke to Larry
and got the job. Otto really did me a favor there;
he made my participation in the film essential. I
was first assistant on that film and it was a hell
of a break for me.

DIXON:

Richard III was shot in a very kind of “book of
hours” manner – very stylized. The sets look like

282
they came from a medieval illuminated
manuscript – very theatrical – and I also noticed
that Olivier and Heller used banks of colored
lights on the set – lots of colored gels during
shooting. Am I right?

O’HARA: Yes. Ninety percent of the film was shot inside,
on the studio floor, and for the scenes of the
castle ramparts, we would have a hell of a lot of
light pouring down on the set. We shot the battle
sequences in Spain, which was a nightmare, but
most of the film was shot very quickly in the
studio in long takes, which Larry loved because
they got so much done so quickly. He had quite
a good editor on the film – Helga Cranston. We
had a very good camera operator – Denys Coop,
who, of course, went on to being a very good

DP. He had all these guys from the theater –
very good production designers and a wonderful
art director called Carmen Dillon. Sir William

Walton did the music, which is one of my
favorite scores for any film. So, it was top notch
all the way around.

DIXON:

How long a schedule did this film have?

O’HARA: Well, as I said, it all went well until we went to

Spain to do the climactic battle sequence. It took
forever and didn’t really come off. It seemed to
me that he was trying to redo the battle scenes
from his own film, Henry V [UK, 1944], but it
didn’t work. The battle scenes for Richard III
were shot in the same kind of stylized way as the
rest of the film. We went over the battleground
some days ahead and tried to plan everything

283
out, but the weather was terrible and, in the end, we didn’t really get what we wanted.

DIXON:

A very young Stanley Baker played Henry, the

Earl of Richmond in the film, who finally brings
about Richard’s downfall. What was Baker like
on the set? Would you tab him as somebody
who was an up-and-comer?

O’HARA: Yes, you would. Unfortunately, he was very
arrogant
because
he knew he was
an
up-and-comer, too! And there was a terrible
moment on location when Larry got shot by an
arrow during the battle sequence. It accidentally
hit him in the chin. So it was a tough shoot
during the Spanish location work.

DIXON:

What was Olivier like as a person?

O’HARA: Oh, he was great. Everybody called him Sir

Larry. We got on tremendously well. He was a
very solid, professional person; working on that
film was a real eye-opener. You could make
topflight stuff and still be a rather down-to-earth
personality.

DIXON:

How long was the whole schedule on the
picture?

O’HARA: Quite a long one – about 18 weeks.

DIXON:

So, all in all, this was a huge jump forward for
you.

O’HARA: Yes, it was, and after that, offers of work came
in droves. Anatole Litvak wanted me for

Anastasia [UK, 1956], Ronnie Neame wanted
me for The Man Who Never Was [UK, 1956],

Robert Rossen for Island in the Sun [UK, 1957],

284

Muriel Box’s The Truth About Women [UK,

1957], Carol Reed’s The Key [UK, 1958], which
nobody seems to remember now, and I did them
all. It was a really great time to be working in
the industry. Anastasia I remember because I
loved working with Anatole, but the star of the
film was Yul Brynner and he was a bastard – he
was a pain in the ass. Ingrid Bergman was
another matter altogether; lovely to work with,
but very, very private. But she used to tease

Anatole because he would shoot take after take;
that was just his style. He would say, “Cut, go
again,” and one day she finally said, “Why, why
should we go again?” and he just said, “Again,

Ingrid.” But she was a real professional. Island
in the Sun was a rather daring film for the time
because of its interracial love aspect, with

Dorothy Dandridge, James Mason, Joan Collins
and Harry Belafonte. I remember we were
specifically told not to try and get fresh with

Dorothy Dandridge because her boyfriend was
in the mafia. And it all came from working on

Richard III.

DIXON:

And then, in something of a switch, you worked
on Third Man on the Mountain [USA, 1959], a

Disney adventure film about mountain climbing.

This one is also somewhat forgotten, but it’s a
rather rousing adventure film and much of it was
shot on location in Switzerland, scaling the

Matterhorn. Ken Annakin directed it, with a cast
that
included

Michael

Rennie,

James

MacArthur, Janet Munro and Herbert Lom. That

285
must have been a difficult film to shoot because a lot of the footage was shot on the mountain
itself and not in the studio, if I remember
correctly. Was there a lot of location work on
that project?

O’HARA: Yes, there was, but we also shot a lot of it on a
small mountain halfway up among other
mountains. There was also a great big clump of
rocks that stood just outside the railway station
where we were shooting and we had it
scaffolded so we could do all the close-ups. Ken
did send me off one day with the French

Mountain Unit to do some second-unit shots
with doubles and I did actually get hauled up on
a rope a fair way up the Matterhorn, so yes, it
was a bit challenging.

DIXON:

What about Our Man in Havana [dir. Carol

Reed, UK, 1959]?

O’HARA: Oh, that was a lot of fun to work on, but it didn’t
really turn out all that well in the end. We shot a
lot of it in Cuba right around the time of Castro’s
revolution. Of course, that was based on Graham

Greene’s novel and it had a lot of star power
going into the project.

DIXON:

The main character, James Wormold, a vacuum
cleaner salesman who’s recruited as a spy for the

British government, was played by Alec

Guinness. What was he like to work with?

O’HARA: Well, unfortunately that didn’t work too well
between Carol and Alec; not that I was aware of
anything being said, but Alec was a cold fish.

286

Again, he was a very private man. He took us all out to dinner one at a time. I had dinner with him
one night in Havana. But he didn’t open up at
all; it was like, “So, tell me about you.” So he
was more or less inspecting you in a way.

DIXON:

What about Ernie Kovacs?

O’HARA: Oh, he was wonderful – we all loved him, he
was great. It was really, really sad when he died
so young in that car accident [on 13 January

1962]. Who knows what he could have done.

DIXON:

And what about Noel Coward, who plays

Hawthorne, the British secret service agent who
taps Alec Guinness’s character for spy duty?

O’HARA: Noel Coward was talent personified. When he
turned up, you knew he was there; he sort of
dominated the whole thing effortlessly. He
didn’t work on the picture that long, but he was
a delight on the set – a very dry sense of humor.

He was very fond of Carol, but, as I say, it didn’t
quite work as a film.

DIXON:

Next, I have you as AD on The L-Shaped Room

[dir. Bryan Forbes, UK, 1962], which is
something of a change of pace for you, with

Leslie Caron, Tom Bell and Brock Peters. It’s a
kitchen sink drama about some lonely misfits in
a London boarding house. That’s a different kind
of film compared to the other work that you
were doing – all interiors, a small cast.

O’HARA: Well, yes. I got into a muddle there. Before that,

I was in Rome on Cleopatra [dir. Joseph L.

Mankiewicz, USA, 1963]. But, before I went up

287
to do Cleopatra, the producer Jimmy Woolf had picked me to do L-Shaped Room. I didn’t want
to do it; it was the wrong kind of film for
someone like me because it was really just a
small affair and I think anybody could have done
it, you know. But I signed up for it.

DIXON:

And you liked working on big pictures?

O’HARA: That was it, because I was having a wonderful
time in Rome on Cleopatra, where I was first

AD on the second unit. But then my time was
running out. I was going to have to go back to

London and shoot L-Shaped Room, which, as I
say, anyone could have done. Walter Wanger,
who was producing Cleopatra, wanted very
much to keep me. Cleopatra was a huge picture
and he wanted me to keep a firm hand on things.

He pleaded with Jimmy Woolf to release me, but

Jimmy wouldn’t, which was annoying. And so I
had to come back for it. But you know, on

Cleopatra, I was originally supposed to be Joe

Mankiewicz’s assistant, but it turned out that, in
fact, I was actually first assistant on the second
unit, which was directed by Ray Kellogg …

DIXON:

I didn’t know that!

O’HARA: Yes, he was an ex-Marine – a bull of a man.

DIXON:

Yes, he was really a special effects guy, but later
he directed stuff like The Giant Gila Monster

[USA, 1959], The Killer Shrews [USA, 1959]

and The Green Berets [USA, 1968], which he
co-directed with John Wayne, who starred in the

288
film, and also Mervyn LeRoy, who came in and directed some scenes.

O’HARA: I never met John Wayne, but Ray was of that ilk.

A really tough customer.

DIXON:

So, how long did you work on Cleopatra?

O’HARA: I was on it for about three months. But then I got
a break and got out of the second unit and sort of
promoted, in a rather odd way. One of the extras
in the cast was embarrassed because they wanted
her to appear nude in a scene and she was an

Italian actress who didn’t want to do that kind of
stuff. I sort of interceded with Joe, who I only
knew really because we used to have dinners
from time to time. I got it resolved to everyone’s
satisfaction, so they pulled me off the second
unit and made me kind of a special assistant,
sorting out problems, what they call a “trouble
shooter” for Joe. And that’s why Walter Wanger
asked Jimmy Woolf to let me stay with them.

DIXON:

But he wouldn’t let you, so then you wound up
going back to do first AD chores on The

L-Shaped Room.

O’HARA: That’s it. It wasn’t fun. I wish I could have
stayed. But I was under contract and I had to do
it.

DIXON:

Now what about Tom Jones [dir. Tony

Richardson, UK, 1963]? You were first AD on
that and it was both a huge film and a period
piece and, of course, it won many, many awards

– both in the States and the UK.

289

O’HARA: Oh, that was wonderful. It was a big picture, but it was the happiest film I was ever on. I couldn’t
wait to go to work in the morning. Tony was a
delight. It had a great script by John Osborne
and Albert Finney was superb in it, as was

Susannah York. And you’re right; it did
amazingly well. It won all kinds of awards.

Oddly enough, Albert Finney was a friend of
mine, you know; his father was a street bookie,
just like my father. So was Peter O’Toole’s, but

I never worked with him.

DIXON:

Jumping back a bit – during your career, you
also drew an assignment with the notoriously,
how should I put this, volcanic …

O’HARA: Otto Preminger.

DIXON:

Yes, Otto Preminger first on Exodus [USA,

1960] and then on The Cardinal [USA, 1963].

Now, The Cardinal was a big picture, but not a
particularly good one. I don’t know if you would
agree with that.

O’HARA: Well, give me Exodus any day. That was a really
huge production. Probably the biggest picture I
did, physically. I was the first AD on it; I
worked on that with a bunch of people, one of
whom was the Israeli AD, Yoel Silberg. He and

I are still friends. He is now the senior director at
the Habima Theater in Tel Aviv. Another guy
who worked on that, in an uncredited capacity,
was George Cosmatos, who wound up directing

Rambo: First Blood Part II [USA] in 1985 and

Tombstone [USA] in 1993. The production of

290

Exodus went on forever and forever; it was an enormously complex project in every respect –
locations, cast, crew, everything. Just look at the
cast: Paul Newman, Eva Marie Saint, Peter

Lawford, Ralph Richardson, Lee J. Cobb, Sal

Mineo, John Derek, Hugh Griffith … the list
goes on and on and on. We were in Israel and
then we went to Cyprus.

DIXON:

What was Paul Newman like to work with?

O’HARA: He was, again, very private. All he would ever
say was, “Hi, Gerry,” and that was the end of the
conversation. Lee J. Cobb, though, I thought was
wonderful. I loved him.

DIXON:

But, after Exodus, I have a gap. And, during this
time, it seems that you turned down the job of
first AD on Lawrence of Arabia, amazingly
enough. What happened?

O’HARA: Well, I’ll tell you, but it’s complex. Two or three
years or so after Exodus, I was in Paris working
on The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse [USA,

1962] with Vincente Minnelli. But, after about
six weeks, the picture was in trouble and we
were miles behind schedule. Vincente was a
lovely guy, but he was very difficult at times; he
took forever to set things up and then he would
change his mind. He was adorable, but
nevertheless he was taking forever. Anyway, he
came to me one day and said, “Look, they’re
pulling the picture, we have got to go back to

Hollywood. But they won’t let me take you with
me because the Hollywood union won’t allow it,

291
so you’re off the picture.” But then he said,

“Look, I saw Sam Spiegel [the producer of

Lawrence of Arabia] last night in the hotel and
he wants to see you.” Now, I had already turned
down Lawrence of Arabia because I had a
feeling it wasn’t going to work out for me, but I
was suddenly out of work as it were and it would
have been silly not to go, so I went to the hotel
and saw Sam. And Sam said, “Look, you know,
whatever your problems, if it’s about money,
call our guy in London and tell him what you
want. I’ll see you in Jordan.” And foolishly I
went along with it.

I left before Lawrence started, during
preproduction, because I had been told that it
was going to be just a few weeks in Jordan and
the rest shot in the UK, but then they said, “No,
it’ll be three months in Jordan and then the rest
of it in England.” Well, I had a Jewish girlfriend
and she couldn’t come to Jordan. So, when I met
up with David Lean in Jordan, I mentioned the
schedule to him – shooting some of it in Jordan
and the rest back in the UK – and he said, “Oh
no, we’re going to do it all here, the whole thing
right here in the desert.” And I thought, “Oh,
fuck. That lets me out.” And I’m afraid I left the
picture. I just didn’t like the way things were
going on the project, but it was still my biggest
mistake. I should have taken the job. It put me in
big trouble. Columbia put the word out that I
was unreliable. When I went back to London, I
couldn’t get work. I did get a short job as first

292

AD on a really small British comedy, Maid for Murder [dir. Robert Asher, UK, 1962; originally
titled She’ll Have to Go], starring, believe it or
not, Bob Monkhouse, Alfred Marks, Hattie

Jacques from the Carry Ons and, of all people,

Anna Karina, Jean-Luc Godard’s wife! Then
somebody offered me a little picture, a three
week shoot as a director.

DIXON:

That Kind of Girl [UK, 1963].

O’HARA: That Kind of Girl. And I think the guy who
offered it to me, Robert Hartford-Davis, thought
he was going to direct me! It was an exploitation
picture, pure and simple, about venereal disease.

I shot That Kind of Girl and it was a three week
shoot, 17 days. The night that we finished, I
went back to my flat and I was absolutely
exhausted. We had no money, so we just had a
few beers in a pub and that was the end of the
picture party. They didn’t even want me to edit it
or do any of the finishing stages. I think I got

750 pounds for a three week shoot. That was
probably about two years after Exodus. So, the
night I finished it, I was at home having a drink
when Otto Preminger phoned me from New

York – typical Otto, right to the point. He said,

“Gerry, what are you doing?” And I said, “Well,

I just finished directing a film.” Otto said,

“Okay, I’ll drink to the film’s success. But let
me ask you, are you going to go on directing?” I
said, “No, no, they don’t even want me to edit it.

I’m through.” Immediately, he jumped on this.

“Good,” he said, “I want you here in New York.

293

Go to Columbia tomorrow, get your ticket.” And that’s how I got on The Cardinal; he put me on
as a second unit director. No one else would give
me a job, but Otto came through, in his own
unusual way.

DIXON:

And then you wrote and directed The Pleasure

Girls [UK, 1965], which has now come out on

DVD and Blu-Ray, as you know, as part of the

BFI’s Flipside series.

O’HARA: Yes. It was shot for something like 30,000
pounds; it’s about a group of young women
making their way in 1960s London. I wrote the
script and we shot it on location. Probably our
biggest star was Klaus Kinski, who got 900
pounds for 10 days’ work in the film, just before
he went off to appear in Dr. Zhivago [dir. David

Lean, UK, 1965]; the entire shoot was only 20
days. But then we also had Tony Tanner, Ian

McShane and, of course, Francesca Annis, so it
was an excellent cast. It was shot in a house in

Kensington; we didn’t have the money for a
studio. Plus, it made the whole thing that much
more realistic. Michael Reed shot it; he was very
fast, very good and also wound up working as a

DP for Hammer! The original title of the film
was A Time and a Place, but that didn’t last
long; the producer, Michael Klinger, saw to that.

Michael had a great deal of movie sense; he’s
the one who gave Roman Polanski a shot at
directing his first English language feature with

Repulsion [UK, 1965], which certainly launched
his career in the UK. I hated the title and I hated

294
the title music. It had nothing to do with the film! But they didn’t consult me about it, so
that’s what happened. Still, I think the movie is
rather good.

DIXON:

The title music is ghastly – yes, it’s true. But you
can’t be held responsible. But the thing that
strikes me about the film is that it’s a very
feminist movie. It’s really about a group of
young women, told from their point of view, and
it really gives you a sense of what the ’60s were
really like in London. You also have a very
sympathetic gay couple in it.

O’HARA: Yes, which was quite intentional. That was the
first gay kiss in the movies. They did a program
on the BBC – a whole bit on it – when it came
out. It was the first time anyone had seen two
boys kissing in a film.

DIXON:

This was your script; how long did it take you to
write?

O’HARA: Well, I’ll tell you how that happened. I started
writing scripts on “spec,” or speculation, hoping
to get one of them financed. Looking for work,
in other words. I had written four or five scripts
and gotten absolutely nowhere. I would send
them out to everyone I knew and they all wound
up in the slush pile and no one was paying any
attention to them. But luckily for me, Raymond

Stross, the producer, was in the hospital having
an operation and, to take his mind off his
problems, he had his secretary send over a stack
of scripts to read. I had no knowledge of any of

295
this, but one morning around 7:30 the phone
rang and it was Raymond. He said, “Listen, I
read your script” – which wasn’t The Pleasure

Girls, it was another spec script I’d written –

“and I don’t want to buy it, but I like the
dialogue. Do you have anything else?” I said,

“Yes, sure.” So he said, “Well, bring it around to
the hospital, which is just around the corner, and

I’ll read it.”

So, two or three days later I got another
phone call from him, with the same verdict: “I
like the dialogue, but I don’t want to buy it. You
had better come and have tea with me when I get
out of the hospital and see if we can’t fix
something up.” So I went to have tea with him
and he said, “Look, why aren’t you writing
about Chelsea? You live in Chelsea, you
obviously hang around all the Chelsea clubs and
things, the discos and all that sort of stuff. Why
don’t you write about that? That sounds more
interesting to me than the rest of this stuff
you’ve sent me.” I went back to my flat. Now, at
that time, I shared my flat with a young guy who
wasn’t in the film business at all, but he had a lot
of common sense. He said, “Are you stupid or
what? A producer takes the time to talk to you
and tells you what he wants to see and you don’t
want to do it? Write the damned thing!” And I
was so annoyed, I sat right down there with the
typewriter and banged the script out. And then
they bankrolled it and it turned out very well.

Apart from the title and that damned theme

296
song, I pretty much had a free hand. And the notices were very good – then and now, with the

DVD release, which was a pleasant surprise.

DIXON:

Now let me touch on some other work you did.

You directed a couple of episodes of The

Avengers: “The Hour That Never Was” [UK,

1965] and “Small Game for Big Hunters” [UK,

1966], with Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg.

These were two of the black-and-white filmed
episodes, which I think were the best of the
series.

O’HARA: I agree.

DIXON:

What was Diana Rigg like to work with?

O’HARA: She was a very shrewd, very amusing girl. She
had Patrick in her pocket. Patrick was just an
amiable sort of David Niven kind of character.

They knew exactly what they were doing; they
used to rehearse in their dressing rooms and they
would come down with a scene already worked
out. And, if you had any sense, you went along
with it. We took about 10 or 11 days to do an
episode; it was quality television. But then Diana
found out that the cameraman was making more
money than she was and she quit. And I was
hired to shoot a day’s test with six women for a
possible new partner for Patrick’s character,

John Steed.

DIXON:

You were the one who was stuck with that?

O’HARA: Yes. I directed Linda Thorson’s test and she got
the part.

297

DIXON:

Now, your next film as director was Maroc 7

[UK, 1967]. What can you tell me about that?

O’HARA: Not a happy experience. Sidney Box had put me
under contract after The Pleasure Girls. He saw

The Pleasure Girls and he also saw The

Avengers episodes I did and liked my work. He
rang me that night that The Avengers went out,

“The Hour That Never Was,” and said, “Gerry,
you know a few years ago, we would have made
a movie out of that and made money with it.

Come and see me.” So he put me under contract.

I was under contract to him for a couple of
years. But nothing ever happened! Whatever we
tried to set up didn’t come off. And then Leslie

Phillips, who was quite a good comedy actor,
had seen Pleasure Girls and was about to
produce his first feature, Maroc 7. So he went to

Sidney and Sidney loaned me out to direct

Maroc 7. I had nothing to say about it; I was
under contract and I had to do it. Gene Barry
was the star after another German actor, whose
name I forget, pulled out, along with Elsa

Martinelli, Cyd Charisse and Leslie Phillips, of
course, acting in his own film. Not only that, but

I went over budget. There were lots of problems.

DIXON:

What about Amsterdam Affair [UK/Netherlands,

1968]?

O’HARA: That was part of my Sidney Box contract with a
company called London Independent Producers.

While I was with them, somebody brought along
the book by Nicholas Freeling called Love in

Amsterdam. Freeling was a British crime

298
novelist and it was a solid piece of work. So they asked me if I would do the script. But, although I
was under contract to them to direct, I wasn’t
under contract to them to write. I played this
very close to the chest. I went to Amsterdam and
met with Nicholas Freeling; he agreed to work
with me for ten days. He wouldn’t put a word on
paper. He would only talk. And so we talked for
ten days.

I went to Amsterdam twice. I laid out the
locations, got ready to direct the film and then
they called me in one day. Sidney by now had
gone from the company and the guy who took
over said, “Gerry, I’ve got some bad news for
you. The completion guarantors won’t accept
you as the director because you went over
budget on Maroc 7.” I had been waiting for it to
happen. I’ve always had a kind of slightly
book-makerish cynicism. I knew somebody was
going to pull the rug out from under me because
of that, so I said, “Look, what are you going to
do for a script?” And the guy said, “What are
you talking about?” I said, “Well, you don’t own
the script.” He said, “We own it, we own the
book.” I said, “Sure you own the book, but you
don’t own the script. I own the script. I did it on
spec. I’m not under contract to write, just to
direct. So if you want my script, you’ll have to
let me direct.” I had them over a barrel and they
knew it.

So, I went to a meeting with the completion
guarantors. They were very heavy characters,

299
accountants with attitude. So, this was my one chance and I took it. Essentially I said, “Look,

I’m the best possible person to shoot this movie
because I have got to get off the hook with you. I
guarantee to shoot this film bang on time,
possibly under time. Give me a shot at it.” So
they sent me to Amsterdam with their own man,
a very heavy production manager and he revised
the schedule. He broke the script down into A, B
and C scenes; scenes that were absolutely
essential to the film, subplots that could be
excised and then insert shots for added
production value. The plan was that I would be
allowed to shoot A scenes and I could shoot B
scenes if I had time at the end of the day. C
scenes would be shot by the second unit. Well, I
shot the whole thing – A, B and C – and came in
on time and under budget. By the end of the last
week, I could have finished it a few days early,
but I used up the time just to make this movie as
pretty as I could. I’m very fond of it. It’s a film I
like enormously, but I can’t find a copy of it.

DIXON:

What about All the Right Noises [UK, 1971]?

O’HARA: Well, I love that film. That was Tom Bell, who
was in The L-Shaped Room. Olivia Hussey was
in that, as well. Tom had become a friend of
mine and I wrote the script with him in mind. I
gave it to [director and cinematographer]

Nicolas Roeg – whom I’ve known forever – and
said, “Do me a favor, Nic, and tell me what you
think of this. It’s been going the rounds and
everybody’s turned it down.” Nic read it and

300
said, “It’s great, I like it very much, let me see what I can do.” A few months later, Nic rang me
up at half past 7 in the morning; he said, “Now,
listen Gerry and listen carefully. A guy is going
to call you, a guy named Si Litvinoff. I had
dinner with him last night; he’s the guy who
produced my film Walkabout [UK, 1971]. Si
told me that he’s looking for something to do in

England. I told him you had a great script, All
the Right Noises, ready to go. He wants to buy
it.” And so it got made. Now, that’s only
because Nic told him the story. How lucky can
you get?

DIXON:

What about Jackie Collins’ film The Bitch [UK,

1979]?

O’HARA: Well, that was a kind of cynical affair. I was
hired to do The Bitch – to write it and direct it –
on the condition that I did it for the same budget
as The Stud [dir. Quentin Masters, UK, 1978],
which was made a year earlier.

DIXON:

And these were Joan Collins’ “comeback”

pictures, weren’t they?

O’HARA: Yes, they were. As a result of The Bitch, she got
the role on Dynasty and it ramped up her career
all over again.

DIXON:

Now, how did you become involved with the
notoriously cost-conscious producer, Harry Alan

Towers?

O’HARA: Well, when things were bad, my agent would
scour around and try to get me work. And, one
day, she got me to meet Harry in the late ’60s

301
and he and I established a kind of working
friendship, which lasted until he died last year.

But he was a real pirate, make no mistake.

DIXON:

Was your version of Fanny Hill [UK, 1983] one
of his productions?

O’HARA: That’s right. He produced it; he wrote a kind of
half-hour script for it. I didn’t even use the
script. I had a pretty good cast, though: Oliver

Reed, Wilfrid Hyde-White (who died about a
year later) and Shelley Winters, who was
wonderful. She talked the whole time and then
when you said “action” she went right into
character.

DIXON:

And what about The Mummy Lives [UK/Israel,

1993]?

O’HARA: The less said the better. That was produced by

Yoram Globus, with Tony Curtis in the lead. It
was supposed to be Chris Lee, but he wisely
bowed out of the project before it went forward.

We shot it in Tel Aviv.

DIXON:

Looking back at your long and involved career,
you worked with so many people. You made
such a great beginning with Pleasure Girls, but
then, after that, luck seemed to run against you.

Why didn’t you make the jump to a full-fledged
directorial career, in your opinion? What
prevented you?

O’HARA: Well, in the ’60s, people like Richard Lester and
those guys were all the rage. I didn’t fit in with
that set. My real problem was that, when Sidney

Box retired, I didn’t have a producer. I didn’t

302
have an advocate. I had Harry Alan Towers, who used me, but that wasn’t the same. You know, he
was a very tough guy and he used to phone me
up and say, “Gerry, come and see me; I’m going
to cross your palm with silver.” But that’s all it
was – silver.

DIXON:

He was a real operator. That was basically it.

But I’m so glad for you that Pleasure Girls has
come out and has found a new twenty-first
century audience.

O’HARA: That and All the Right Noises. It’s certainly a
better picture, at least in my opinion. More
money was spent. It was a nine week shoot.

And, of course, it’s my own script and I had
pretty much total creative control, which is very
rare. As I told you, Nicolas Roeg helped set that
up for me and I think it’s probably my best film.

Some things I did simply for the pension fund.

But I’ve done a lot of things I’m proud of, that
really still hold up for me and, for that, I’m
grateful.

Footnote

*

A version of this chapter was first published in 2011 by

Screening the Past (online) as “Working Within the System:

An Interview with Gerry O’ Hara” (number 30):

http://www.screeningthepast.com/2011/04/
working-within-the-system-an-interview-with-gerry-o%E2%80%99hara/.

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Chapter 14

ANDREW V. MCLAGLEN:

LAST OF THE HOLLYWOOD

PROFESSIONALS*

Andrew V. McLaglen (he is quite insistent on retaining the

“V” in his name, as part of his authorial signature) is without a doubt one of the last of the classical Hollywood filmmakers who worked during the Golden Age of the studio system.

Coming of age when his father – the gifted actor Victor

McLaglen – won an Oscar for Best Actor for his performance
in John Ford’s The Informer (1935; Ford himself also won as

Best Director that year, as did Max Steiner for his music score and Dudley Nichols for the screenplay), young Andrew
worked and lived with the cream of Hollywood’s most
original and idiosyncratic artists. In addition to John Ford, he knew and/or worked with John “Duke” Wayne, William

Wellman, Budd Boetticher and Cary Grant and later carved
out a career for himself as a director in the Western genre that few can equal. Even now, he is still going strong, directing
stage productions of such classics as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman and keeping an interested eye on the business.

In all his work, Andrew V. McLaglen was a genuine artist,
but one who also kept an eye on the bottom line and kept his
projects moving. And, as you will see, although he is best
known for his work as a director of Westerns, he feels that he did some of his best work in other genres. At 89, McLaglen is still as sharp as a tack – his memory is clear and strong and his personal history is pretty much a history of the medium
itself. Most telling, he is generous to others in telling his story 304
and eager to acknowledge the talents of the many actors and directors whom he worked with. But let him tell his story to
you directly, as he did to me in February 2009.

WHEELER

You were born on 28 July 1920 in London

WINSTON
and your father was the actor Victor

DIXON:

McLaglen, which makes you roughly 15 years
old when he won the Academy Award for The

Informer. What can you tell me about your
early childhood, your early growing-up years
and your education?

ANDREW V. As
a
young
child,

I
was
schooled

MCLAGLEN: conventionally, then I went to Black Fox

Military in the fifth grade. From the fifth
grade through the eighth grade, I went to a
school on Beverly Boulevard called The Carl

Curtis School [now called simply The Curtis

School]. It was an academic school, along
with a strong emphasis on physical education.

All the kids at the school were doing gym
exercises every single day – special exercises
to, you know, to keep you in good shape,
everything you could think of. It was a very
thorough education. And, through my life,

I’ve known what the names of all the bones in
the human body are and everything just
through my basic grade school education
there.

DIXON:

When was the first time that you realized that
your father was doing something other than
ordinary work, so to speak?

305

MCLAGLEN: Well, I think it was when he starred in Josef von Sternberg’s Dishonored [1931] with

Marlene Dietrich, which made quite a splash.

But he had been in the business a long time
before, of course, going back to his first film,

A. E. Coleby’s The Call of the Road [1920],
which was made the year I was born. Then, of
course, he moved over to the States. He and

Edmund Lowe were giant stars in the late

’20s, starting with Raoul Walsh’s What Price

Glory [1926], which was their first movie
together. They worked together doing six or
seven movies – way up into the ’30s
somewhere – and became a very well known
team. His pictures did a lot of business. I
remember receiving a watch my dad gave me
years ago – a platinum watch that they gave
him at the Roxy Theater in New York as the
biggest box-office star of that time. It was
when he made a personal appearance and it
was about that time I realized he was working
in a different sort of profession, something the
public noticed.

DIXON:

Did you hang around on the set when he
worked? What was your relationship like with
your father?

MCLAGLEN: I can remember going as a sub-teenager to the
set, but not that often. I went to boarding
school, so I didn’t do much of it then, except
when I graduated from high school in 1938
and I spent two weeks on the set of George

Stevens’ Gunga Din [1939]. Then I got to see

306

George Stevens, Cary Grant, my father and

Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in action, which was
quite an experience! I just kept out of the way
because they were working hard; they had a
picture to make! I had another school buddy
with me at the time – we were 18 and 19
years old – and we had a terrific time. We got
to know Cary and Doug, Jr. and Joan Fontaine

– what a great group of people they were!

And George Stevens; in years to come,
whenever I bumped into him, we would
always talk about those Gunga Din days
because I think that was one of his favorite
projects.

DIXON:

It’s a fantastic film. Now, at this point, did
you get the idea that maybe you were
interested in making movies?

MCLAGLEN: Yeah, I got the idea when I was in high school
at Cates School in Santa Barbara [now the

Cate School]. I got a 16mm camera and I got
together with my friends and I made little
movies there. This was in the late 1930s.

That’s when I first really got really interested
in it – from the ninth grade onwards.

DIXON:

Did you ever try to convince your father to be
in any of your films at that point?

MCLAGLEN: I never did, no. These were school things that
we did as a bunch of friends and we didn’t get
any adults involved. Well, this is very early
on, you know, for people to be making
movies. Then, right after I graduated, I went

307
to the University of Virginia. I was on the
freshman boxing team. I only stayed there one
year because, if you really wanna know the
truth, I fell in love with a gal from Stanford.

One interesting thing: when I was a freshman
there, [future director] Robert Aldrich was a
senior.

DIXON:

Did you meet him?

MCLAGLEN: Oh, yeah – he knew me and he even tried to
get me into his fraternity. He was on the

Virginia football team. Then I went home and

World War II was just about getting started.

My parents were very close friends of Robert

E. Gross, who was the Chairman of the Board
of Lockheed Aircraft. And he said, “Do you
think Andrew would like to come and work
here?” Which was funny because I was
drafted right away, so it looked like that
wouldn’t happen, but everything turned out
fine. I was as good as in the Army, you know,
except when it came to my height. I stood on
a scale during the induction physical and the
little guy who was taking my height had a
stool he had to stand on because the ruler
came out of his hands. I was six feet seven.

That’s where I got my nickname, Big A,
which stuck from that point on. Anyway, the
little guy didn’t know what to do. I’ll always
remember that he didn’t say a word. He just
got down and took a little yellow pad and he
wrote “4F” [unfit for military service because

308

of a physical handicap] on it and gave it to
me.

Figure 14. McClintock!

Source: Author’s collection.

DIXON:

4F! Just because of your height!

MCLAGLEN: Yeah, 4F. So, I wasn’t in the Army. But,
instead of being in the Army, I spent four
years chasing ring corrugations for the P38 all
over the factory at Lockheed. I didn’t wanna
do that for my whole life! So, by the time the
war was over, the question was “What am I
gonna do?” When I got out of Lockheed, my
father said, “The one thing I’m gonna advise
you is don’t go in the picture business. It’s
disappointing, it’s hard work, it’s full of ups
and downs and I just suggest that you skip

309
that.” Well, I didn’t take his suggestion.

Instead, I wrote a letter to Herbert J. Yates,
the head of Republic Pictures. I told him who

I was and I said, “I really wanna get into the
motion picture business” and so on. He wrote
me a letter back and said, “Come to work.”

DIXON:

Why did you pick Republic and not one of the
major studios?

MCLAGLEN: Well, the only reason I picked Republic is

’cause, at that particular moment, my father
was about to make a movie there.

DIXON:

The first credit I have on you – and maybe
this is wrong – is as an assistant director on

Albert Rogell’s 1945 film, Love, Honor and

Goodbye.

MCLAGLEN: You’re exactly right.

DIXON:

So, what was your baptism of fire like as an
assistant director?

MCLAGLEN: Well, I didn’t start as an AD on Love, Honor
and Goodbye. I was what we call a company
clerk.

DIXON:

A go-fer.

MCLAGLEN: I had to make the call sheet and check up on
the weather to see if it was okay to go on
location. So, yeah, you’re right: a go-fer.

DIXON:

Then I have a gap from you between ’45 and

’51 when you worked with Budd Boetticher
on Bullfighter and the Lady [1951]. What
happened?

310

MCLAGLEN: After two years at Republic or so, I decided I wanted to be a second assistant director. I
remember I said, “Now, how in the hell am I
gonna do it?” Every morning, Herbert Yates
would drive in in his big limousine, get out
and walk along this long path to go into his
office. I hid in the bushes one morning and
met him halfway. I kind of jumped out of the
bushes at him. I said, “Mr. Yates, I really feel
like I’m ready to become a second assistant.”

And he said, “Oh, I remember you, son. I’ll
look into it.” And that was it, believe it or not.

I became a second assistant, but it was when
the war was just over and all the guys are
coming back. So, I didn’t have much job
security. Then the studio said, “Sorry,

Andrew, we’re gonna have to lay you off now
because the fellas are coming back from the
war.” That’s when they took away my permit
from the Directors Guild because, until I’d
done a sixth picture, I was riding on a permit
and not a full Guild membership. So, they
took my permit away, but I happened to read
the bylaws of The Guild and it said, “After six
pictures, you’re automatically a member.” So,

I wrote to Yates again. I said, “If you read
your bylaws, I’m automatically a member of
the Guild because [I had done six pictures
and] I’ll have to sue you.” He didn’t want
that, so in ’46 or ’47, I became a member of
the Directors Guild.

311

DIXON:

I don’t have any credits for you between ’45
and ’51.

MCLAGLEN: Oh, I did a whole bunch of movies. But, in
those days, it wasn’t a Guild rule that second
assistant be given credit. I know I worked on
some
films
with

Budd

Boetticher
at

Monogram with Roddy McDowall, who was
just a kid then.

DIXON:

Yes, that was called Killer Shark [1950].

MCLAGLEN: That’s it! You got it. My God Almighty, yeah.

DIXON:

When I interviewed Boetticher shortly before
his death, he called Monogram “really second
rate.”

MCLAGLEN: Absolutely. But it was a good thing being on
that picture with Budd. I was only a second
assistant, but we became friends. And Budd
said, “You know, I’ve written this script” and

I said, “Listen, let me see it. Maybe I can do
something with it.” So I took the script and,
because I’d worked with Duke [John Wayne],
you know, in my very first picture as a second
assistant, Dakota [1945] …

DIXON:

Joseph Kane, who directed literally hundreds
of Westerns, directed that. You were the
second assistant on that?

MCLAGLEN: Uh-huh. With John Wayne and Vera Hruba

Ralston. And Wayne took a liking to me.

He’d already known my father for a long time

– all the way up through my years at

Republic. So, when I took Budd’s script to
him in 1950, I was still a second. I said, “Take

312
a look at this, Duke, and see what you think.”

I told Budd, “If by some miracle Duke can get

Mr. Yates to make this movie, I want you to
make me the associate producer.” He says,

“You got it.” So, Yates liked it and we went
down to Mexico and did Bullfighter and the

Lady. That was when I became a first
assistant.

DIXON:

And you actually got credit on it as “Andy

McLaglen.”

MCLAGLEN: Yeah. Whether Budd tried or didn’t try, I
didn’t get my associate producer credit, but at
least I became a first assistant. I was a first
from then on. But then Mr. Yates had decided
to make [John Ford’s] The Quiet Man [1952].

They knew that I knew Duke well and that I
had known John Ford since I was about 13
years old.

DIXON:

But you were the second assistant on that
film.

MCLAGLEN: You’re right and here’s why. Yates said,

“Look, we can’t make you the first on that
because Wingate Smith is John Ford’s
brother-inlaw and he’s his first.”

DIXON:

Makes sense.

MCLAGLEN: “Would you go over as the second?” “On that
picture?” I said. “You bet I will.”

DIXON:

A wise decision… and a free trip to Ireland, to
boot.

MCLAGLEN: Absolutely. Except, when I got over there,

Wingate was my roommate and we got along

313
fine. But he was an old guy by that time, so I actually was the first assistant on The Quiet

Man for the entire movie and old Wingate
stood aside and let me do it. I really stepped
up to the plate and I’ll never forget it. I
worked my ass off for John Ford.

DIXON:

What was your impression of Ford? I’ve
heard so many different stories about him –
and about John Wayne – with lots of different
opinions. Give me your take.

MCLAGLEN: My take on Ford was that he was kind of a
mysterious character – a very unusual
personality. You’d have to almost meet him to
understand
something
about
him.

Unpredictable.

DIXON:

Practically blind, right?

MCLAGLEN: Blind in one eye and he sometimes wore an
eye patch.

DIXON:

And used to chew on a handkerchief while he
was shooting.

MCLAGLEN: You’re absolutely right. It was a nervous
habit. He used to chew on his handkerchief all
the time.

DIXON:

And he shot to the cut, didn’t he?

MCLAGLEN: He would shoot to the cut. In other words, he
would pretty much shoot only what he
needed. Totally economical. I mean pictures
like She Wore a Yellow Ribbon [1949] and

Fort Apache [1948] – he made those in like
six weeks!

314

DIXON:

I know. It’s just amazing.

MCLAGLEN: And when he made The Informer with my
dad, he shot that in 27 days.

DIXON:

I know. That was supposed to be a “B”

picture and it broke through to an “A” status,
won a bunch of Oscars and everybody was
very surprised.

MCLAGLEN: Oh, yeah, yeah. It was a real victory for my
father, ’cause to win the Best Actor Oscar he
had to knock off Clark Gable, Charles

Laughton and Franchot Tone for [Frank

Lloyd’s] Mutiny on the Bounty [1935].

DIXON:

Tough competition.

MCLAGLEN: Tough competition. And, as we’re talking,

I’m looking at my father’s Academy Award
that he won that night.

DIXON:

What happened after you did The Quiet Man?

MCLAGLEN: I became almost a contract first assistant for

Batjac with John Wayne.

DIXON:

John Wayne’s company.

MCLAGLEN: And that was another great experience
because, though I didn’t get to work with

Ford anymore, I did four or five movies with

William A. Wellman.

DIXON:

“Wild Bill” Wellman.

MCLAGLEN: That’s right. We went through The High and
the Mighty [1954], Island in the Sky [1953],

Track of the Cat [1954] and Blood Alley

[1955]. That was one of my best experiences

I’ve ever had because Bill Wellman was

315
fantastic. And, boy, when you’re his assistant, you’re not just a production assistant. You
were his assistant. He would call me up at

5:30 in the morning and say, “Hey, Andrew,
good morning, what are you doing?” I’d say,

“Sleeping.” And he’d say, “Well, how about
breakfast?” I’d say, “Okay, what time?”

“How’s 6:30?” So, I’d run over to his house.

It was his seven kids and his wife and we’d all
sit around the table and have breakfast with
him. I really loved working with Bill

Wellman. He just loved making movies and
knew exactly what he was doing. But Blood

Alley was my last movie as a first assistant
because Bob Morrison and I found a little
script and Duke knew that I wanted to be a
director. So, one day, he said, “I’ll tell you
what. If you guys can put it together, I’ll
guarantee the budget at the bank.”

DIXON:

Wow, that’s a real vote of confidence.

MCLAGLEN: Not many people knew that.

DIXON:

That’s a hell of a kind gesture.

MCLAGLEN: That’s how I became a director, with a little
film called Man in the Vault [1956]. The
funny thing was, it wasn’t a Western. It was a
crime picture – almost a noir film – with

William Campbell, Anita Ekberg and Mike

Mazurki. But the thing is, when you move up
to being a director and you just do a little
picture, how are you gonna keep on being a
director? So, Bob Morrison and I found

316
another script, which became my next picture, Gun the Man Down [1956]. When I was
working as first on this, the picture we made
in Hawaii in the early ’50s…

DIXON:

Edward Ludwig’s Big Jim McLain [1952].

MCLAGLEN: …yeah, Big Jim McLain… I’d gotten to know

Jim Arness very well. And Jim Arness
happened to be under contract to Duke. And,
all of a sudden, Jim became a big star with the

TV series Gunsmoke.

DIXON:

Which made him totally bankable.

MCLAGLEN: Yeah. So, I went and saw the vice president of

United Artists and said, “What if I give you

Jim Arness and Angie Dickinson in this script
and shoot it in ten days?”

DIXON:

Ten days? That’s a very tight schedule.

MCLAGLEN: I put Harry Carey, Jr. into that also and Bill

Clothier was the cameraman. That was my
second one.

DIXON:

What was the budget on that, if I may ask?

MCLAGLEN: Oh, my gosh. You know, the budgets were so
small then…

DIXON:

A hundred grand, something like that?

MCLAGLEN: Yeah, a little more than that. I know I was
making $2,500 a week back then, which today
is like nothing. But, in 1956 dollars, it was
quite a lot. So, after I finished Gun the Man

Down, my next thought was, “What am I
gonna do next?” You can’t stop; you’ve gotta
keep looking for that next project. We found

317
another script and what do you think that
was? Budd Boetticher’s Seven Men from

Now [1956].

DIXON:

But you didn’t wind up directing that film.

MCLAGLEN: No, I didn’t. I just took it for granted that, if
we made the picture, I would direct it. But

Bob Fellows, who was Duke’s partner, for
some reason told Warners that he’d much
rather have Budd Boetticher direct it. So,

Budd directed it and that was that. I did get a
producer credit out of it, but that wasn’t what

I wanted. I wanted to keep on directing.

In the meantime, Arness had done a year
of Gunsmoke. And he said to CBS, “Why
don’t you try McLaglen on a couple of

Gunsmoke episodes? I just did a movie, Gun
the Man Down, with him and that worked out
well.” So, I signed up for a couple of

Gunsmokes. And, to cut it real short, I hold
the record for the number of episodes of

Gunsmoke directed: 96 between 1956 and

1965. Each of those episodes was done in six
days; that’s it. You couldn’t go over. Anyway,
during that period, they made a pilot for Have

Gun – Will Travel. They took me off

Gunsmoke for a little bit and put me on Have

Gun – Will Travel and, the next thing you
know, I had directed 116 episodes on that!

DIXON:

Tell me about Richard Boone [star of Have

Gun – Will Travel].

318

MCLAGLEN: He became a very close friend of mine. We worked together for six solid years. But,
during that time, I also did five movies. I went
to CBS and said, “Look, will you let me off
for three or four weeks, I wanna do a little
movie.” And they said, “Okay.” That’s when I
did The Abductors [1957] and The Little

Shepherd of Kingdom Come [1961].

DIXON:

What was it like directing your father in The

Abductors? This was an odd little period
crime drama about two men trying to hold

Abraham Lincoln’s body for ransom. Your
father was joined by George Macready, Fay

Spain and some other talented actors in this
little film.

MCLAGLEN: Yeah, I loved it. I made the picture in ten
days. He just did it as a favor for me.

DIXON:

Then, back on television, you directed a
bunch of Perry Masons and seven episodes of

Rawhide with Clint Eastwood. What was

Eastwood like at that point in his career,
which is very early on?

MCLAGLEN: He was great; he was just starting out. You
know, it’s funny – on that show, Eric Fleming

[an actor who appeared in the series] was sort
of the boss. He was kind of a grumpy guy. I
remember Clint as being a good guy, easy to
work with, always on time, always knew his
lines. It’s a kick when I think back. If then
you were gonna tell me that Clint was gonna
become one of the biggest icons that’s ever hit

319
the screen, I wouldn’t have believed you. But he’s done some incredible work in his career.

DIXON:

Well, the next picture I have you directing is a
big budget Western, McLintock! [1963].

MCLAGLEN: Oh, McLintock! was my big break – with

Duke and Maureen O’Hara. Big box-office
hit, big picture. And that put me in the big
time.

DIXON:

That film was tied up in some rights problems
for years and years and you couldn’t see it
anywhere. Now it’s come out on DVD in the
past couple of years. You know anything
about that or not?

MCLAGLEN: Well, it might have been because Duke’s
family owned it. When Michael Wayne –

Duke’s oldest son – died, his widow took over
all the pictures. And she went over to

Paramount and struck a DVD deal. That was
on all the pictures that I did with Duke. I think
he owned Chisum [1970], too.

DIXON:

But after McLintock!, you actually went over
and did an episode of The Virginian, which
was the first 90-minute television series.

MCLAGLEN: One episode. That’s it. No more. It was okay,
but I didn’t wanna slip back to TV when I was
doing so well as a feature director. I got
another
feature
off
the
ground
fast,

Shenandoah [1965] and then The Rare Breed

[1966]. That came right after Shenandoah.

DIXON:

What was it like working with Jimmy

Stewart?

320

MCLAGLEN: I loved it. He was a great actor, always professional, knew what he wanted – a real
solid actor. I did four pictures with him.

DIXON:

You worked a lot with Maureen O’Hara too.

MCLAGLEN: I did two with Maureen and with Jimmy,
including Bandolero! [1968] and my favorite
of all, Fools’ Parade [1971].

DIXON:

How would you describe the way that you
approached directing actors? When you have
somebody like Jimmy Stewart, who knows
what he’s doing, or John Wayne, would you
just run through it and then just shoot it?

What’s your approach to working with actors?

MCLAGLEN: Well, by the time I was directing Duke and

Jimmy, I had done 200-plus TV pictures.

And, you know, there’s one thing about doing
television:

you’re
taught
to,
without
sacrificing anything in the way of production
values, keep things on time and move
forward. You find yourself doing things on
budget, on schedule, no problems. And Duke
and I got along fine. That’s the only reason,
after McLintock!, I did five more movies with

Duke. He knew what he was doing and so did

I. He had a lot of faith in me.

DIXON:

I understand what you’re saying because
directing television is great practice for
getting things done on time and under budget.

MCLAGLEN: You can’t beat it. You either get it done or
they find someone else.

321

DIXON:

How many setups did you have to do a day on

Gunsmoke?

MCLAGLEN: Oh, my – I don’t remember it. But I
remember my first day on the Man in the

Vault vividly. I did 51 setups. Don’t ask me
how. It was crazy, but that’s what you had to
do. That’s what you gotta do. I was well
prepared. That’s one important thing: you
have to know the next setup and exactly what
you’re doing.

DIXON:

Do you storyboard?

MCLAGLEN: I never used a storyboard very much. I didn’t
like those too much. If I did my homework, I
knew what I wanted to do and I didn’t have to
hunt around until noon to get my first shot.

DIXON:

Would you more or less set up the master and
then go in for the close-ups and do it that
way?

MCLAGLEN: Well, yeah. It depends on what the scene is,
but that’s usually how I’d do it.

DIXON:

How did you then get involved with The

Ballad of Josie [1967] with Doris Day?

MCLAGLEN: Oh, that was because I had a multiple picture
contract at Universal. My time came up to do
a movie and they said, “Would you do a
picture with Doris Day?” I said, “You bet.”

She was another complete professional. That
was a lot of fun to shoot.

DIXON:

And then, after that, you went over to Disney
to make Monkeys, Go Home [1967].

322

MCLAGLEN: That’s Maurice Chevalier’s last movie.

DIXON:

I know, with Dean Jones and Yvette

Mimieux.

MCLAGLEN: I gotta tell you, I loved working with Maurice

Chevalier. That’s the main reason I took on
the picture – just to get a chance to work with
him. He was a terrific guy, just a terrific guy.

Total pro, knew his lines. Everything was
good about him, you know. As a matter of
fact, that picture was kind of fun because I
had those damn chimpanzees to work with.

[Laughs]

DIXON:

Your next film was The Way West [1967].

MCLAGLEN: The Way West was, to me, one of the things I
dream about today because I thought it was a
terrific picture. I had Richard Widmark, Kirk

Douglas, Bob Mitchum and Sally Field, in her
first movie. She was incredible; you could
tell, even then, that she’d be a big name in the
business. It was fun to shoot and UA thought
it was great. I was really happy with it. But
then, after the whole thing was shot, they
called me up and said, “We’re releasing the
picture, but we want to cut 22 minutes off the
beginning.” I thought it was just perfect as it
was. But they thought it was too long and we
had to bring it back in, which cost a fortune
because we had to cut it after we released it. I
mean, how dumb can you get? It’s stupid. So

I had to go over to the Goldwyn Studio and sit
with my producer, Harold Hecht, and try and

323
nip and tuck here and there to cut some
footage out. And I think I hurt the picture
because, in that movie, I showed you the
beginning of each character and their whole
story and how the whole thing developed. It
was a great novel [by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.] and it
was a great screenplay. Ben Maddow wrote
the screenplay and Bob Mitchum was very
tickled doing the movie ’cause he loved the
novel.

DIXON:

You shot that on location in Bend, Oregon,
didn’t you?

MCLAGLEN: Bend, Oregon and Eugene.

DIXON:

After this, we go to The Devil’s Brigade

[1968], a war picture with William Holden
and Cliff Robertson.

MCLAGLEN: The Devil’s Brigade took me all over the map
and finally to Italy. Originally, they sent me
up to Salt Lake City to do the picture. And the
art director was hunting all over the side of a
mountain, trying to find the right place to
build a village here. The producer was David

L. Wolper, who did a lot of stuff for TV, and I
said, “Jesus, you’re gonna spend all that
money to build a set? It’s gonna be a lot
cheaper for us to go to Italy and find a little
town.” He said, “Well, maybe you’re right.”

So they went to the studio and guess what?

They agreed with me; it was cheaper. That’s
when we went to Italy. Now, I showed the
finished cut to United Artists and they just

324
loved The Devil’s Brigade. They said, “Well, we never try to tell you what to do artistically,
but I wouldn’t touch anything and especially
the stuff with Bill Holden.” But the producer
had a big projection room in his house and he
showed the movie for a solid week to a
hundred people and I think a hundred people
had ideas of what we should do with the
movie.

DIXON:

Oh, God.

MCLAGLEN: And without me having any input – I didn’t
have the last say – they cut the movie and, in
the end, it was not nearly as good as it could
have been. I had a great ending and a lot of
good stuff in there and he didn’t know what
he was doing. I still worry about that.

DIXON:

Your first directorial credit was a crime film,

Man in the Vault, but you rapidly became the

“go-to” guy for Westerns.

MCLAGLEN: I know it.

DIXON:

Do you have a real love for the Western
genre?

MCLAGLEN: No, that was really by mistake.

DIXON:

You’re kidding.

MCLAGLEN: It was totally by mistake because first I did

Man in the Vault. Then I got a Western, Gun
the Man Down [1956], because I knew Jim

Arness. Then, as I told you, I wound up doing
a whole bunch of Gunsmoke episodes. I then
became the “Western Director” – the star over

325
at CBS. Then everybody thinks, “Jesus, that’s his big specialty.”

DIXON:

How did you feel about being typed as a

Western director?

MCLAGLEN: Not good, not good.

DIXON:

That’s interesting ’cause I always thought that
you had a real affection for it.

MCLAGLEN: No, I didn’t. It was what happened. It’s the
way my course was laid for me.

DIXON:

So, what other kind of films would you have
liked to have done?

MCLAGLEN: Well, that’s a big question. There are
probably a lot of would-haves. But, as it is, I
consider myself very fortunate having had a
career and having worked with so many great
people. I know that that time has gone by
now. I’ve had more calls [for interviews]

lately than I’ve ever had. Maybe ’cause I’m
the only one around.

DIXON:

Did you enjoy making Hellfighters [1968],
which was a “non-Western” project?

MCLAGLEN: Hellfighters was fun because it was a story
about “Red” Adair, the guy who made a
living putting out oil well fires all around the
world. Duke was in it, of course, and Red was
my technical advisor on the film. We shot that
down in Houston, Texas and Casper,

Wyoming and, of course, it had one of my
favorite people to work with, Katharine Ross.

I put her in her first movie. That was

326

Shenandoah. Before that, I had her in
television.

DIXON:

And now we come to Chisum [1970], one of
the last classic Westerns, with John Wayne
and Forrest Tucker.

MCLAGLEN: Duke owned the negative on that baby.

Warner Brothers released it; it was originally
made for Fox and then Fox sold it over to

Warner Brothers. That’s got a really amazing
cast. In addition to Duke and Forrest Tucker,
it had Christopher George, who was a damned
good actor, and his wife, Lynda Day George,
to say nothing of old timers like Bruce Cabot
and Patrick Knowles, who both go way, way
back. Patrick Knowles had a big, big part
because Chisum was a true story about “Billy
the Kid.” The Englishman [J. Henry Tunstall
in the film] was a real character who
befriended “Billy the Kid,” who was played in
the film by a guy named Geoffrey Deuel.

Knowles’ character eventually got killed by
the bad guys for his trouble.

DIXON:

Then you did One More Train to Rob [1971].

MCLAGLEN: One More Train to Rob was one of my

Universal pictures that I did with George

Peppard, which was just an okay movie. It’s
played an awful lot on TV, but it isn’t my
favorite by a long shot. After that, I did Cahill

U.S. Marshal in 1973, which was a good
picture and another chance to work with the

Duke. Then I had a little bit of a lapse. I did a

327
couple of family pictures for Disney on
television and then I got called back to

Twentieth Century Fox to do a picture with

Charlton Heston and James Coburn, The Last

Hard Men, which was shot in 1975 and
released in 1976.

DIXON:

But then you did a big picture, The Wild

Geese [1978], which is emphatically not a

Western.

MCLAGLEN: Oh, man, that was fabulous! That was a whole
new start for my career, man, are you
kidding? That was great. A really solid action
war picture with a superb cast: Richard

Burton, Roger Moore, Richard Harris, Stewart

Granger – just incredible. This producer
called me up. I’d only met him once before –

Euan Lloyd, an English producer. And he
said, “You know, I was talking to John Ford
one day just before he died [in 1973],” and

Ford asked him who was gonna direct The

Wild Geese and he said they hadn’t thought of
a director yet. So Ford said, “Well, you ought
to try that young McLaglen ’cause he really
knows how to make pictures.” Well, I never
knew that, except when he told me that Ford
had really helped me there. But he was like
that – he would sort of help you behind your
back. And so, I did the film. Hell, I loved that
movie. It had a great script by Reginald Rose,
who’s a damn, damn good writer. I thought,

“I’m back in the big time, thank God,”

because I had a little slump there. After that, I

328
did The Sea Wolves [1980], which was
another big war picture and, again, I was
working with a top shelf cast: Gregory Peck,

Roger Moore, Trevor Howard and David

Niven. I was back on top. I then did another
film in Berlin with Richard Burton and Rod

Steiger, which came out here as Breakthrough

[1979], which was a good film. But then, in

’81, I got what I really enjoyed doing – seven
hours of The Blue and the Gray [released in

1982]. It was for television, but it had a
first-class budget and a great script. It was
nominated for four Emmys. Again, an
incredible cast: Stacy Keach, Lloyd Bridges,

Rory Calhoun, Coleen Dewhurst, Geraldine

Page, Rip Torn, Robert Vaughn, Sterling

Hayden, Paul Winfield and Gregory Peck.

How can you go wrong?

DIXON:

You did all seven hours of that?

MCLAGLEN: All seven.

DIXON:

That’s a hell of an accomplishment.

MCLAGLEN: That was a big, big thing on TV. And it’s out
on DVD now too, you know.

DIXON:

And then the last picture I have for you is

Return from the River Kwai [1989].

MCLAGLEN: Return from the River Kwai, yes. A good
picture – a sort of sequel to the David Lean
film. That was shot in ’88; it came out in ’89.

And then I did another picture in Europe.

Took me all over Europe: Eye of the Widow

[1989]. That is one we don’t even wanna go

329
into. It had a Corsican producer. I came home at Christmas, then was going back to finish
cutting it. But he just stole the whole movie
and took it to Paris. That was the last I heard
or saw of it. I know it was released all over

Europe. I’m still getting slight, little returns
on it, but it drives you nuts to have something
like that happen. I figured that was enough.

So I just retired from making movies in ’90.

Then, in ’97, I moved up here on this island
and I’ve got a beautiful spot here. You
wouldn’t even believe it.

DIXON:

This is on San Juan Island in Washington

State. I understand that you’re still directing
plays for the San Juan Island Community

Theater.

MCLAGLEN: Absolutely right. We have a 300 seat,
state-of-the-art legitimate theater here.

DIXON:

So, you’re still directing.

MCLAGLEN: Well, I’ve just finished my seventeenth play
in 17 years.

DIXON:

What kind of stuff do you do?

MCLAGLEN: Death of a Salesman. All of the first-rate stuff,
everything you can think of. Chekhov’s Uncle

Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, things like that.

We do a lot of Neil Simon’s plays.

DIXON:

I understand that your son, Josh, is an
assistant director and works in a lot of big
pictures.

MCLAGLEN: Well, Josh is to, to me… Okay, I’m bragging
now.

330

DIXON:

That’s okay.

MCLAGLEN: I think he’s probably one of the three top first
assistant directors in the whole business. And,
of course, what really got him off is that he
was first assistant on [James Cameron’s]

Titanic [1997]. That was a big production and
he’s been doing nothing but big pictures ever
since.

DIXON:

And your daughter, Mary, is an executive
producer and a unit production manager.

MCLAGLEN: Yes, she’s doing a lot of good stuff. I also
have another daughter, Sharon, who for 20
years was a script analyst at Warner Brothers
and, after that, was a script analyst for ten
years at MGM. And she’s my oldest daughter
and she lives up here now, where I live. Mary
has a house right next door to me here.

DIXON:

What do you think about some of the recent

Westerns,
like

George

P.

Cosmatos’

Tombstone [1993]?

MCLAGLEN: Oh, I love Tombstone.

DIXON:

What do you think of Clint Eastwood’s
movies as a director?

MCLAGLEN: I have nothing but admiration for Clint. I just
think he’s great. I love his Westerns and also
his newer stuff, like Gran Torino [2009],
which is a damn good film. The thing I like
about Gran Torino is that he shot the film in
about 30 days on location, no nonsense – “Get
in and get out,” you know? Do you remember
when Clint got the Oscar for directing Million

331

Dollar Baby [2004]? He thanked everybody
and started to walk away from the
microphone. Suddenly, he jumped back in and
said, “And I shot it in 37 days, too.” I always
got a kick out of Clint for that. I love it when
someone
can
do
something
very
economically. At this point, he can do
anything he wants to do and I also love

Changeling [2008].

DIXON:

I agree. I’m really happy to hear that you’re
keeping up on all this stuff.

MCLAGLEN: I do. You have to. That’s what life’s about.

Footnote

*

A version of this chapter was first published in 2009 by

Senses of Cinema (online) as “Andrew V. McLaglen: Last of
the

Hollywood

Professionals”

(issue

50):

http://sensesofcinema.com/2009/50/
andrew-v-mclaglen-interview/.

332

Chapter 15

POP STAR, DIRECTOR,

ACTOR: AN INTERVIEW

WITH MICHAEL SARNE*

Michael Sarne has had a multifaceted career as a director,
actor and even a pop singer and managed along the way to
direct one of the most notorious films of all time: Myra

Breckinridge (1970). Needless to say, he’s had a fascinating
career and I jumped at the chance to interview him. Born in

1940 in London, Sarne spent most of the early 1960s singing
and had a British pop hit with the novelty tune “Come

Outside,” with assistance from Wendy Richard; during this
period, Sarne also worked intermittently as a TV quiz show
host. Sarne pretty much knew everyone who was part of the
scene that became known as “Swinging London” and soon he
was moving in the inner circles of the entertainment business.

Sarne has also directed a number of television commercials,
done film criticism for various cinema journals – such as

Sight and Sound – and continues to moonlight as a pop singer
in his spare time, in addition to numerous acting gigs.

Through a series of chance encounters, blind luck, coupled
with shrewd calculation, Sarne was soon directing the lavish

Technicolor musical Joanna (1968) and then parlayed that
into a contract with Twentieth Century Fox in Hollywood.

Since then, he’s been involved in a variety of other projects, but let him tell it in this interview from 30 April 2011,
arranged by Jill Reading of the BFI.

333

WHEELER Well, I’ve been looking over all of your credits

WINSTON and it seems as if you did just about everything

DIXON:

at one point or another in your career, so I’m just
going to basically touch on a lot of that. First off,
you were born Michael Scheuer on 6 August

1940 in London?

MICHAEL Yes.

SARNE:

Figure 15. Raquel Welch and Michael Sarne on the set of

Myra Breckinridge.

Source: Author’s collection.

DIXON:

I was intrigued by the 1962 pop record you
made, “Come Outside,” as one of your early
ventures into show business; you were about 21
or 22 at the time.

SARNE:

That was produced by Robert Stigwood. A lot of
my bios say that it was produced by Joe Meek,

334
the guy who did the instrumental hit “Telstar”

with The Tornadoes, but it isn’t so. I did meet

Joe a couple of times and I made a record called

“Just Like Eddie” with him, which didn’t chart.

Joe and Stigwood were going through a little
breakup at that time. During that time, Joe made
a couple of records with a guy called John

Leyton [a pop personality of the era], whom I
actually saw yesterday.

DIXON:

Yes, he was in [the pop musical with Freddie
and the Dreamers] Seaside Swingers [aka Every

Day’s a Holiday, dir. James Hill, 1965], wasn’t
he?

SARNE:

Yes and so was I. As it happens, we just did a
gig last night – John Leyton and I – the first time
we’d done a gig together in 50 years or
something. We went back on the road and sang
our old songs.

DIXON:

What are some of those song titles?

SARNE:

Well, he did “Johnny, Remember Me” and I did

“Come Outside” and “Will I Want” and I did
some Chuck Berry numbers like “Roll Over

Beethoven,” “Johnny B. Goode” and things like
that. Can you imagine, after 50 years?

DIXON:

But you’re already working in film at the time; I
have a credit for you as an extra in Sink the

Bismarck [dir. Lewis Gilbert, 1960].

SARNE:

Yes, well, I had one line I think.

DIXON:

How did you get into the film business?

SARNE:

Well, I was in college at London University. My
mother was in Paris at the time. My parents split

335
up, so I lived with my father in London – he was an archeologist and a traveling salesman in
dental goods. They were both refugees from

Europe, my parents. They managed to get across
the border from Czechoslovakia. So, I was living
at the time in Soho with my father and going to
college. I lived on Compton Street and worked
in a coffee bar. So, I was a waiter there and I was
studying Russian at the university and, at the
same time, I was looking for work as an actor or
singer because I had already done a bit of
singing and guitar playing before. I was in a
skiffle group and met this guy, Robert Stigwood,
who later managed the Bee Gees and became
quite a force in the music industry.

Through him, I met his partner, Stephen

Komlosy, and he asked me if I wanted to do any
modeling. I didn’t meet Stigwood – I met his
partner, Stephen Komlosy. They were partners
and Komlosy ran the modeling end of the agency
while Stigwood ran the musical end of it. So, I
went off for a weekend to do a Kodak modeling
commercial; it was all advertising. That went
very well and I actually got paid! Then Stigwood
asked me, “Can you sing?” and I said, “Yes, I’m
trying to do a bit of singing” because I was
trying to get into theater doing musical comedy
numbers, Howard Keel numbers, Frank Sinatra
numbers, the whole bit. So, Stigwood was
working with Joe Meek and John Leyton had
done a few records with Joe, so they decided to
do one with me. Well, Joe Meek came up with a

336
song called “Fountain of Love,” which was
really stupid – “Jack and Jill let’s climb up the
hill to the fountain of love” – and it finished with
the strangest line, which I never understood,
even to this day – “It’s where you go to share
your load, it’s the finest pub in the old Kent

Road.”

DIXON:

That’s ridiculous.

SARNE:

Totally, absolutely didn’t make any sense. And
then he said, “Well, what are we going to do for
a B side?” So the arranger – a chap called

Charles Blackwell, a very nice man – had a song
called “Little Doll,” kind of an Americanized
dance track. Well, I changed the title to “Come

Outside” and, as I was singing it at the piano
with Charles Blackwell, Stigwood had the
brilliant idea of saying, “I can hear a girl talking
back to you, saying, ‘Why do you want to take
me out, what do you want to do?’” And then we
got Wendy Richard in the studio and the thing
just clicked. Stigwood is brilliant; there’s no
getting around it.

DIXON:

So, what about your film work? How did you
jump from pop music to Sink the Bismarck,
where you get one line?

SARNE:

Well, there was a club near where I lived called
the Old Theater Club and I would hang around
there with Michael Caine, Terence Stamp,
people like that, looking for work. We would go
up for small parts, extra parts, and because I
could speak German and Russian and French, I

337
would go up for parts with different agents, banking on this. Sink the Bismarck needed
somebody who could say a couple of lines in

German and then the same thing for The Guns of

Navarone [dir. J. Lee Thompson, 1961] and then

Beware of Children [dir. Gerald Thomas, 1961],
for which I did a French accent and also a
slightly bigger part. I also worked on The

Avengers – the TV series – in 1961, but that was
all done live then, with live switching and
multiple cameras, so I don’t know if any of that
survives. By then, John Leyton and I had had our
hits and “Come Outside” had already become a
hit. So, I started working pretty regularly and I
wrote a couple of extra songs for Seaside

Swingers. That was a year or so later. Believe it
or not, Nicolas Roeg shot that; you know, of
course, that he went on to much bigger things. I
also did the TV series Man in a Suitcase, another
hour-long action show from that period. I got a
lot of small acting jobs and it kept me alive.

But then I got a chance to direct a film of my
own: Road to St. Tropez [1966]. I had been
kicking around the basic outline of the film in
my mind for quite some time; it was about a guy
who’s a gigolo, with an older woman, and the
whole thing was going to look like a travelogue.

A short film; I figured about 20, 30 minutes
long. By then I had a girlfriend, Gabriella

Licudi, whom I loved very much. She was in the
south of France acting in the James Bond spoof,

Casino Royale [dirs. Val Guest, Ken Hughes,

338

John Huston, et al., 1966]. I got hold of Udo Kier, who’s a great actor, and Melissa Stribling,
who had been in all these Hammer horror
movies and was married to Basil Dearden, the
director.

DIXON:

Really? I didn’t know that.

SARNE:

Well, I met Basil when I was one of the leads,
for a change, in his crime thriller A Place to Go

[1963] – one of the best roles and best directors I
had worked with up to that point. I admired him
a lot and, in fact, he was the one who said, “You
should direct pictures because you’ve got the eye
for it.” Well, we shot the film, Twentieth

Century Fox picked it up and the amazing thing
is that this little picture I made for 10,000
pounds made 100,000 pounds for Fox.

DIXON:

As a short?

SARNE:

As a short. Because there was a plan called the

Eady Levy in those days, where British films
would return 50 percent or 40 percent to the
producer of successful films. Now, this little
picture of mine went out with a film called In

Like Flint [dir. Gordon Douglas, 1966]. And the
films were cross-collateralized because my film
went along with In Like Flint as a package, so if
you played that film, you had to play mine, and
so Road to St. Tropez got a chunk of Flint’s box
office. And this got the attention of Dick

Zanuck, who was running Fox.

By then, I had written a script called Joanna,
which I had and was pitching around town as the

339
female Alfie [dir. Lewis Gilbert, 1966]. Zanuck liked that angle and gave me a million dollars to
shoot the film and, at the same time, gave Bob

Freeman a million to shoot what became The

Touchables [1968]; Bob had shot a lot of album
covers for The Beatles and things like that and
this was his big chance. The thing is, all of this
happened on a street corner, outside Zanuck’s
hotel, in a matter of seconds. Zanuck just looked
at me, looked at Bob, and said, “I’m going to
give each of you a million to do your pictures”

and that was that. Imagine that happening today?

I don’t think so.

But the thing was, Joanna didn’t get all that
good a reception from the public when it came
out, especially in Britain. Actually, the English
hated it because they were into this very bitter,
cynical left-wing black-and-white movie phase –
something like Darling [dir. John Schlesinger,

1965] – so to do something in color, in

Panavision, and be a cross between a musical, a
comedy and a drama was something they didn’t
expect or understand. There was also a

Felliniesque quality to Joanna that didn’t go over
well – especially the ending, where you see the
whole cast and crew in the train station all
dancing and singing. It did open well in

America, though; Time magazine gave it a great
review, titled “Hail, Joanna.” The posters were
better, too; poppier and sunnier, with the slogan

“Your smile is like CinemaScope,” something
that John Springer, the veteran publicist, came

340
up with. But the rest of the press thought it was pretty kitsch, which it is – but I concealed any
serious message well below the surface. You
have to dig for it.

When we were getting ready to release

Joanna, Fox thought it would be a good idea if
the film played at Cannes and got some advance
publicity there. My friend, Roman Polanski, was
head of the jury at the time. I thought I would get
a prize. But then the Festival got shut down by
the events of May 1968 and the whole thing
collapsed. Henri Langlois had been fired as the
head of the Cinematheque Française by Charles
de Gaulle and the whole country went nuts.

Truffaut was the ringleader of the shutdown and
that was it. And the whole country was
collapsing, so Polanski and I escaped to Rome.

So, Joanna didn’t exactly have the smoothest of
launches, if you know what I mean.

DIXON:

Okay, but how did you go from here and make
the jump to Myra Breckinridge, which to me is
sort of an experimental movie that you got

Twentieth Century Fox to pick up the tab for?

SARNE:

Well, it’s nice of you to put it like that. They
couldn’t do anything with that movie. They had
the novel, but they didn’t know how to put it on
the screen. I wrote the final script for the film,
which turned the whole thing into a dream,
working with David Giler, who was also one of
the producers, but it was clear to me from the
outset that the entire project was going to be
almost impossible to do. I had to spend a lot of

341
time thinking about what to do and also I had ideas that the producers didn’t want in the final
cut and so there was endless conflict on the set. I
was given total control of the film, supposedly,
but at the same time I was constantly having to
fight over every little detail. As it was, the film
got an “X” rating, which was the kiss of death [a

1978 recut was given an “R” rating].

DIXON:

I have always heard that the set was totally
contentious. True? Not true?

SARNE:

Totally. Mae West didn’t like Raquel Welch and
it went on and on –

DIXON:

It is true that when John Huston finished his
work on the picture, he turned to you and the rest
of the cast and said, “Goodbye, people. You’re
never going to pull this thing together?”

SARNE:

No, that’s apocryphal. John was actually very
happy to do it and working with him on the set
was one of the best parts of making the movie.

At the end of the shoot, I gave everybody on the
film a present from Gucci and, for John, I bought
the most beautiful humidor for cigars because he
quite famously liked cigars. But shooting was
tense every day and I had a feeling as we were
shooting it that it was going to be a tough sell.

DIXON:

So then Myra Breckinridge comes out and
everybody just piles on.

SARNE:

Everybody.

DIXON:

And what happened?

SARNE:

Nothing. I get assassinated, I keep looking for a
rope that is strong enough to hold me up so I can

342
hang myself some place. No, I hang around in LA with Lou Adler and John Phillips and we
work on something called “The Byron and

Shelley Project,” which doesn’t come off. Then I
went to Brazil, where I was invited to shoot a
film and wound up making a film called

Intimidade [co-dir. Perry Salles, 1975] which is
a slightly surrealistic film in Portuguese.

Intimidade won a few prizes and then I get back
to England and the first thing I hear – we go
down to this nightclub in London and there is
this punk band and I’d never heard anything like
it. I’d been listening to bossa nova music for two
years and this was a real wakeup call. I couldn’t
stand disco. That’s why I acquired this book
called The Punk, which I made that into a movie
in 1993 [also known as The Punk and the

Princess]. Then what happened was the kids who
were working with me on The Punk said, “Hey,
we’re going to take the weekend off and go drop
acid at the music festival in Glastonbury.” Well,

I told them that wasn’t the best plan; instead, I
told them to shoot film of the whole event –

Super 8, 16mm, 35mm, anything at all and then
they could edit the whole thing together and
make what became Glastonbury the Movie

[1995]. I’m the producer/director on the film, but

I didn’t cut the picture together.

DIXON:

It’s basically all their footage. You facilitated it
and produced it, but it’s their footage and they
did the editing and everything?

343

SARNE:

That’s right. The only thing I told them was,

“Here’s the first shot and the last shot and the
rest you can fill in what you want.” So, that was
entirely their project and they did a really good
job of it, too. And, in the meantime, I did a lot of
acting to keep busy, mostly in British television

– in The Minder, Howard’s Way, the remake of
the ’60s series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)

and, of course, in David Cronenberg’s film

Eastern Promises [2007], which was a great
experience, playing a character named Valery. It
was really great working with Cronenberg
because he’s a fantastically professional guy. I
got that part through my friend, Jerzy

Skolimowski, a director whose work I really
admire. They know each other and I think Jerzy
must have said to David, “You know, Mike
speaks Russian.” Jerzy has finished directing a
wonderful picture called Essential Killing

[2010]. There is not one word of dialogue in it.

It’s a new picture, just came out – absolutely
brilliant.

DIXON:

One thing I notice here is that, in an odd twist of
fate, you played a minor role in Nick Moran’s
biopic Telstar: The Joe Meek Story [2008].

SARNE:

Oh, yes – well, why not? It was a nice, small
part. The producers put all the people who were
from those days – like John Leyton and all these
other guys – and they gave them little parts in
this picture. That’s why I was one of them.

344

DIXON:

So, how do you feel now that Joanna is coming
out on DVD and everybody is like raving about
it now?

SARNE:

Well, the thing is that when I shot the film, I
never imagined that such a thing would happen.

When I made the picture, I sent a picture – I sent
one print to the BFI in a taxi and said, “Oh, it’s
for you, just put it in your vault” and that was it.

And many, many years later I said, “Well, how
about showing it at the BFI Southbank theater?”

which is a really excellent facility. So, a lot of
people showed up from the industry, raved about
it and then the BFI said, “Well, can we release it
as a DVD?” and, naturally, I agreed. So, the
other day they took me to lunch and said, “What
do you think? After all, it’s been 40 years – what
do you think now about what’s happening?” I
said, “You boys have made all my dreams come
true.” It’s really nice to see the film finally get
an audience and not just sit in the vault.

DIXON:

So, what’s next for you?

SARNE:

I’m working a couple of other projects. I’m
working on a screenplay of something called

“The Battle of Cable Street.” It’s set before

World War II, when the East End of London
erupted in fury because of the activities of Sir

Oswald Mosley, who was a British Nazi
sympathizer who founded the British Union of

Fascists. Mosley and his black shirts came
marching into the East End [on 4 October 1936]

and the lower classes staged a big riot and
stopped the march from happening. Something

345
like 400,000 people fought Mosley and the
police – who were trying to let the march
proceed – but they stopped it cold. And, in a
way, because of that, you could say that it was
on that date that the English began their
resistance against Hitler. If you like, it’s a
mini-revolution. That’s what I’m working on
now. There are so many real stories – good
stories like that – around and they deserve to be
told.

Footnote

*

A version of this chapter was first published in 2011 as

“Pop Star, Director, Actor: An Interview with Michael

Sarne,” Film International 9(5): 30–6.

346

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the Ryan Professor of Film

Studies, coordinator of the Film Studies Program, professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and
editor-in-chief, with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, of the

Quarterly Review of Film and Video. His newest books are

Streaming: Movies, Media and Instant Access (University

Press of Kentucky, 2013), Death of the Moguls: The End of

Classical Hollywood (Rutgers University Press, 2012), 21st

Century Hollywood: Movies in the Era of Transformation

(co-authored with Gwendolyn Audrey Foster; Rutgers

University Press, 2011), A History of Horror (Rutgers

University Press, 2010), Film Noir and the Cinema of

Paranoia (Edinburgh University Press/ Rutgers University

Press, 2009) and A Short History of Film (co-authored with

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster; Rutgers University Press, 2008;
second revised edition, 2013). Dixon’s textual blog of media
commentary, Frame by Frame, and a series of brief videos by

Dixon on film history, theory and criticism, also entitled

Frame by Frame, are available online.

368

INDEX

3D features 131

The Abductors 187

Acid Mantra: Re-Birth of a Nation 100
acting 91–3, 103–4, 137, 142, 144–5, 198–9, 201
actors 144, 145

Adair, Red 191

Adams, Ansel 138
advertising: see television commercials

Ahlgren, Martin 125

Aldrich, Robert 181

Alexander, Ben 32

All the Right Noises 175

Ambassador Pictures 64

Amphetamine 101

Amsterdam Affair 174–5

369

Anastasia 166

Les Anges du péché 82

Ann Arbor Film Festival 101

Annakin, Ken 159, 162

Apology for Murder 67

Argentina, filmmakers 47–8

Arledge, Sara Kathryn 102–3

Arness, Jim 186

Arthur, Paul 113

Arthur of the Britons [TV series] 156

The Astonished Heart 161

Atwill, Lionel 28

The Aura 48–57

The Avengers [TV series] 173–4, 198
awards 44, 55, 185

BFI Southbank 202

Babluani, Géla 46

370

The Ballad of Josie 189

Balun, Chas 16

Barre, Jaye 138

Batman (1943) 28

Becker, Jacques 86

Becky Sharp 109

Belasco, Daniel 99

Bell, Tom 175

Bergman, Ingrid 166

The Beyond 11, 15–17

Bielinsky, Fabián 43–57, 44

Birkett, Michael 164–5

The Birthday Present 152

The Bitch 175–6

The Blue and the Gray [TV miniseries] 193
body as performative site 95–103

Boetticher, Budd 183–4, 187

371

Bogdanovich, Peter 3–7; Who the Devil Made It 3

Boone, Richard 187

Box, Sidney 174

Boys in Brown 160

Brakhage, Stan 98

Bresson, Robert 77, 78, 79–81, 83, 86–7

Britton, Tony 154
budget limitations 142, 146, 186

Bullfighter and the Lady 184

Butler, Judith 102
buzz, commercial value 132

The Call of the Road 180
camerawork 145

Cannes film festival 200

Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion [TV series] 73

The Cardinal 171

Carr, Thomas 29

372

Casarès, Maria 79–80

Chanan, Michael 50

Chandor, J. C. 135–46, 136

Chevalier, Maurice 189

Chisum 192

Christmas on Earth 99–100

Chumlum 93–4

Cinegames, Madrid 113
cinema, history xvii, 108, 112

City of the Living Dead 11

Cleopatra 168–9

The Clouded Yellow 163

Coburn, Kip 98

Cocteau, Jean xvii, 77, 79, 82, 86–7, 108

Collins, Joan 176

Colorz of Rage 124–5

Columbia Pictures 28–9

373

Commando Cody [TV series] 27–8

Corman, Roger 3

Cosmatos, George 170

Coville, Gary 39

Coward, Noel 168

Crabbe, Buster 23–6

Criminal 45

The Crimson Ghost 27

Cronenberg, David 201–2
cross-platforming 111

Cummings, Doug 80

Curtis, David 114

DCPs xii

DVD technology xiii

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne 77–9, 78, 83–6, 87–9

Danger Man [TV series] 155

Darnborough, Antony 161–2

374

Day, Doris 189
de Hirsch, Storm 98

DeMarco, Frank 144

Dearden, Basil 198–9

Delpeut, Peter 108

Denby, David 111

Despacito 140

The Devil’s Brigade 190
digital: cinematography 143; image, vulnerability 108;
technology, uses of xii, 114–15; video, quality 110–11

Digital Cinema Packages (DCPs) xii
digitization xii–xiv, 105–15
directing 124, 130–31, 135, 186, 188–91; style 126–8;
television 156; theater 193–4; videos 125
directors xvi, 21–2, 91–2, 97–103, 122, 124, 143, 163

Dishonored 180

The Divided Heart 163–4

Don’t Talk to Strange Men 147, 154

375

Douy, Max 87

Dragnet [radio series] 33

Dragnet [TV series] 31, 32, 34–42; cinematography 34–5

Eady Levy rules 199

Eagle Lion Pictures 71

Ealing Studios 163–4

Eastern Promises 201–2

Eastwood, Clint 188, 194
editing 131, 163
editors 163

Emshwiller, Ed 98

Encore [multipart film] 150

Escuela Nacional de Experimentación y Realización

Cinematográfica (ENERC) 43

Essential Killing 202

Evans, Robert, The Kid Stays in the Picture 123

Exodus 169–70
experimental cinema 91–104

376

Eye of the Widow 193

The Famous Five [TV series] 156

Fanny Hill 176
fetish films 108
film: 16mm 106; critics 109, 113; history xvii, 108, 112;
stock 106–7; with video 143
filmic medium xi, 110, 128–9; fate of 105–15
filmmakers xvi, 47, 91–9, 97–103; see also directors
films: on DVD 202; digitized xiii; as entertainment 69; music 144, 165, 172; screening 132; see also fetish films; genre
films; horror films; motion picture serials; portmanteau films; short films; thrillers; war pictures

Fisher, Terence 161–2

Fithian, John 112

Flaming Creatures 92, 96

Flash Gordon [serial] 20, 23–7

Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe 26

Flash Gordon trilogy 29–30

Flores, Dolores [pseud.] 96

377

The Flower Thief 93

Fools’ Parade 188

Ford, John 185, 192

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse 170

France, Vichy regime 88–9

Francis, Freddie 152

Fraser, Harry 22

Freeling, Nicholas 174

Freeman, Bob 199

Fromkess, Leon 69

Fulci, Lucio 11–18

Fuses 100

GPO 160

Gainsborough Studios 163

Gassan, Arnold 98

General Post Office films (GPO) 160
genre films 13, 49, 69

378

The Gentle Touch 152

Geography of the Body 103
gialli 13

Gide, André 146

Glastonbury the Movie 201

Goldwyn, Samuel 110

Gran Torino 194

Greenhalgh, Jack 62, 72

Gronlund, Melissa 112

Guinness, Alec 167

Gun the Man Down 186

Gunga Din 180–81

Gunsmoke [TV series] 187

Hammer Films 71

Have Gun – Will Travel [TV series] 187

Heller, Otto 164–5

Hellfighters 191

379
high-definition video 113, 128–9
hip hop 126

Da Hip Hop Witch 125

Hitler: Beast of Berlin 65

Hodson, James L. 151

Hoffman, Sabine 125

Horak, Jan-Christopher xiv
horror films 152
human body on film 95–103

Huston, John 200–201

Iljin Display Company 111
image overload 114

In Like Flint 199

The Informer 179, 185
internships 139

Intimidade 201

Irons, Jeremy 144

380

Island in the Sun 166

Jackson, Pat 147–56, 148; A Retake Please! 148

Jaremelu 100–101

Jerovi 100–101

Jigsaw 160

Joanna 199–200, 202

Jones, Kent 113

Kaufman, Anthony 48

Keenan, Vince 55

Kehr, Dave xiii

Kellogg, Ray 168

Klawans, Stuart 46–7

Klinger, Michael 172

Knowles, Patrick 192

Komlosy, Stephen 197

Kovacs, Ernie 167

Kusama, Yayoi 102

381

Kusama’s Self Obliteration 102

The L-Shaped Room 168

Larson, Nathan 144

Lawrence of Arabia 170

Lean, David 143

Lee, Nathan 113

Lerer, Diego 53

Levine, Naomi 100

Levine, Nat 22

Leyton, John 196, 197

Lippert, Robert 71

Lloyd, Euan 192

London Can Take It 147–8

The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the Whole Wide

World 114

Lost City of the Jungle 28

Lost Continent 71–2

Lowe, Edmund 180

382

The Loyal Heart 160

Lucan, Arthur 160

Lucanio, Patrick 39

MGM 149–50

Maas, Willard 103

MacCormack, Patricia 13

MacRae, Henry 24

Maid for Murder 171

Malanga, Gerard 97, 99, 109

Mamet, David 49

Man in a Suitcase [TV series] 155, 198

Man in the Vault 186, 189

Manhunt of Mystery Island 27

Margin Call 135–6, 141–5

Mario Banana No. 1 96

Markopoulos, Gregory 101

Maroc 7 174

383

Marsyas 98

Martinez, Enrique 113

McGoohan, Patrick 152–3, 155

McLaglen, Andrew V. 179–94

McLaglen, Josh 194

McLaglen, Mary 194

McLaglen, Sharon 194

McLaglen, Victor 179–80, 185

McLintock! 182, 188

McMinn, Bob 127

Mead, Taylor 93, 94–5

Meek, Joe 197

Menken, Marie 103

Meshekoff, Mike 39

Meyer, Barry 112

Micha, René 93

Middleton, Charles 27

384

Millar, Daniel 78

Minnelli, Vincente 170

Monkeys, Go Home 189

Montez, Maria 96

Montez, Mario 96–7

Moore, Roger 155

Moser, Jim 39–40
motion picture serials 19–30; directors 21–2; silent 19–21; see also science fiction serials
movies, economics xiv; theatrical experience 132; see also
films
moving image, defining 107; recording/display technology

105, 111; see also films; video
music: see films, music; music videos; pop songs
music videos 119, 125–6, 130

Myra Breckinridge 200–201

Nelson, Gunvor 98

Neufeld, Sigmund 62, 62–3, 65, 69, 71, 73, 74

Neufeld, Sigmund Jr. 61, 65, 67, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74

385

Neufeld, Stanley 61, 72, 73, 74

New American Cinema 91–104

New Argentine Cinema 47

The New York Ripper 14

Newfield, Sam 61, 62, 63–75; pseudonyms 65–6; silent films

64; two-reel shorts 64

Night Mail 148

Nine Queens 44–50; awards 55

Nolan, Christopher xi, 146
non-narrative structure 11

Nueve Reinas 44–50

O’Brien, Geoffrey xvi, 108–9

O’Hara, Gerry 157–77, 158, 160

O’Kelly, Tim 4, 4

Old Mother Riley at Home 160

Olivier, Laurence 164, 165, 166

One More Train to Rob 192

O’Toole, Peter 153

386

Our Man in Havana 167

Our Virgin Island 152

PDC 65

PRC 65–6, 69–71, 74
performance, definitions 91–3, 102–4
performativity, in art 102; as content 92–93

Peric, Suzana, 144

The Perils of Pauline [serial] 19

Pete Kelly’s Blues [radio series] 40

The Phantom Empire [serial] 22

Phillips, Leslie 174
photography 138

A Place to Go 199

The Pleasure Girls 157, 171–3
pop culture, destructive 7–9
pop songs 196, 198
portmanteau films 162

387

Powell, Michael 159

Preminger, Otto 169, 171

The Prisoner [TV series] 147, 155

Producers Distribution Corporation (PDC) 65

Producers Releasing Corporation: see PRC
production systems 22
program pictures 64
psychological thrillers 49

The Punk/The Punk and the Princess 201

The Purple Monster Strikes 27

Quartet [multipart film] 162

The Quiet Man 184

Quinto, Zachary 136

Rage 119–33

Raging Nation Films 119

Ramar of the Jungle [TV series] 73
rappers 126

388

Ratner, Megan 56

Rebatet, Lucien (François Vinneuil) 88

Reed, Michael 172

Rendezvous [TV series] 153–4

Republic Pictures xiii, 27–8, 182–3

Resistance cinema 89

Resteghini, Dale “Rage” 119–33, 120

Rice, Ron 93–94

Richard III 163, 165–6

Rigg, Diana 173

Road to St Tropez 198–9
rock videos 126

Rodriguez-Soltero, José 100

Roeg, Nicolas 175, 198

Rose, Reginald 192

Rosenberg, Robert 38–9

Ross, Katharine 191

389

Roud, Richard 79

Rubin, Barbara 99–100

The Saint [TV series] 155

Sarne, Michael 195–202, 196

Schary, Dore 149

Schmeerguntz 98

Schneemann, Carolee 100
science fiction serials 27–30

Scorpio Rising 91

Scorsese, Martin 61

Scott, A. O. 111
screenwriting 139–40, 141–2, 156, 172, 174, 200, 202

The Sea Wolves 193

Seaside Swingers 198
serials: see motion picture serials; television series

Seventy Deadly Pills 154

Shadow on the Wall 150

390
short films 64, 124

Silberg, Yoel 169

Sink the Bismarck 198

Sisk, Robert 150

Skolimowski, Jerzy 202
slasher films, 7

Sluizer, George 46

Smith, Jack 96

Smith, Wingate 184

So Long at the Fair 161–2

Something Money Can’t Buy 150–51

Sonbert, Warren 101–2

Spielberg, Steven xi, 138

Stephani, Frederick 23

Stern Brothers Company 63–4

Sternbach, Bert 62

Stewart, Jimmy 188

391

Stewart, Peter [pseud.] 65

Stigwood, Robert 196, 198

Stoller, James 101, 102

The Straight Story 139

Strock, Herbert L. 33–5, 37; Picture Perfect 34

Stross, Raymond 172
studios, control by xii

Superman [serial] 29

Superman [TV series] 29
synchronized sound technology 151

Targets 3–9, 4

“Tattoo the Earth” rock tour 126

Technicolor 109–10, 148
teleseries: see television series
television 7–8, 73, 74, 152–6; acting 201; commercials 48,

140, 197; directing 173, 187–9; series 29, 30; see also by
name

That Kind of Girl 171

392
theaters 113, 132, 202
theatricality and improvisation 91–2

Third Man on the Mountain 167

Thomas, Gerry (Gerald) 163

Thomas, Ralph 163
thrillers 49

Tom Jones 169

Touch of Evil 123

Towers, Harry Alan 176

Trio [multipart film] 162

Truffaut, François 81, 88

Twentieth Century Fox 199–200
two-reel shorts 64

Ulmer, Edgar G. 66

United Artists 186, 190

United Kingdom, Ministry of Information 160

Universal 28

393

Urban, Andrew L. 45

Usai, Paolo Cherchi 107, 109

Van Meter, Ben 100

Verity Films 159
video: with film 143; gaming, communal 113; projectors, in
mobile phones 111; stores xiv, 110

Vinneuil, François [pseud.] 88
violence, in US culture 6

Virgin Island 152

The Virginian [TV series] 188

Wanger, Walter 109, 168
war pictures 190, 192, 193

Warhol, Andy, experimental films 96–7

Warner Bros. 192

The Way West 190

Wayne, John 184, 186, 188–9

“Wear” [pseud.] 24

Webb, Jack 31–5, 32, 37–42

394
websites, archival 74

Welch, Raquel 196

Welles, Orson 152–3

Wellman, William A. 185–6

Western Approaches 148

Westerns 191

What Price Glory 180

White Corridors 149

Whitman, Charles 5

The Wild Geese 192

Wiley, Dorothy 98

Williams, Derick 154

Winters, Shelley 176

Witney, William xiii Wolper, David L. 190

World War II, Occupation of France 81–3, 88–9

Wyer, Reginald 162

Yalkut, Jud 102

395

Yates, Herbert J. 182–3

Zanuck, Dick (Richard) 199

396

397

Document Outline

- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- CONTENTS
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- INTRODUCTION

- Part I GENRE

- Chapter 1 THE FUTURE CATCHES UP WITH THE PAST: PETER BOGDANOVICH’S TARGETS

- Chapter 2 SURREALISM AND SUDDEN DEATH IN THE FILMS OF LUCIO FULCI

- Chapter 3 FLASH GORDON AND THE 1930s AND ’40s SCIENCE FICTION SERIAL

- Chapter 4 JUST THE FACTS, MAN: THE COMPLICATED GENESIS OF TELEVISION’S DRAGNET

- Chapter 5 THE DISQUIETING AURA OF FABIÁN BIELINSKY

- Part II HISTORY

- Chapter 6 FAST WORKER: THE FILMS OF SAM NEWFIELD

- Chapter 7 THE POWER OF RESISTANCE: LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE

- Chapter 8 BEYOND CHARACTERIZATION: PERFORMANCE IN 1960s EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA

- Chapter 9 VANISHING POINT: THE LAST DAYS OF FILM

- Part III INTERVIEWS

- Chapter 10 “LET THE SLEEPERS SLEEP AND THE HATERS HATE”: AN INTERVIEW WITH DALE “RAGE” RESTEGHINI

- Chapter 11 MARGIN CALL: AN INTERVIEW WITH J. C. CHANDOR

- Chapter 12 “ALL MY FILMS ARE PERSONAL”: AN INTERVIEW WITH PAT JACKSON

- Chapter 13 WORKING WITHIN THE SYSTEM: AN INTERVIEW WITH GERRY O’HARA

- Chapter 14 ANDREW V. MCLAGLEN: LAST OF THE HOLLYWOOD PROFESSIONALS

- Chapter 15 POP STAR, DIRECTOR, ACTOR: AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL SARNE

- WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- INDEX
- Back Cover

Table of Contents

- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- CONTENTS
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
- INTRODUCTION

- Part I GENRE

- Chapter 1 THE FUTURE CATCHES UP WITH THE PAST: PETER BOGDANOVICH’S TARGETS

- Chapter 2 SURREALISM AND SUDDEN DEATH IN THE FILMS OF LUCIO FULCI

- Chapter 3 FLASH GORDON AND THE 1930s AND ’40s SCIENCE FICTION SERIAL

- Chapter 4 JUST THE FACTS, MAN: THE COMPLICATED GENESIS OF TELEVISION’S DRAGNET

- Chapter 5 THE DISQUIETING AURA OF FABIÁN BIELINSKY

- Part II HISTORY

- Chapter 6 FAST WORKER: THE FILMS OF SAM NEWFIELD

- Chapter 7 THE POWER OF RESISTANCE: LES DAMES DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE

- Chapter 8 BEYOND CHARACTERIZATION: PERFORMANCE IN 1960s EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA

- Chapter 9 VANISHING POINT: THE LAST DAYS OF FILM

- Part III INTERVIEWS

- Chapter 10 “LET THE SLEEPERS SLEEP AND THE HATERS HATE”: AN INTERVIEW WITH DALE “RAGE” RESTEGHINI

- Chapter 11 MARGIN CALL: AN INTERVIEW WITH J. C. CHANDOR

- Chapter 12 “ALL MY FILMS ARE PERSONAL”: AN INTERVIEW WITH PAT JACKSON

- Chapter 13 WORKING WITHIN THE SYSTEM: AN INTERVIEW WITH GERRY O’HARA

- Chapter 14 ANDREW V. MCLAGLEN: LAST OF THE HOLLYWOOD PROFESSIONALS

- Chapter 15 POP STAR, DIRECTOR, ACTOR: AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL SARNE

- WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- INDEX
- Back Cover