“Passer’s sense of America is very sharp,” wrote Kael, “and the rhythm of the picture, edited by Ralph Rosenblum, who was once a jazz musician, is active, volatile.”
But if jazz and my friendship with Buddy and my trips to midtown, to Harlem, and occasionally to the Polo Grounds in the Bronx were the secret celebrations that kept my teenage years alive, their decline as I turned sixteen left me with little to fall back on. The year still registers as an emotional calamity. Buddy and most of my lesser friends, guys who were two years older than I because I had been skipped twice in school, were drafted or enlisted to fight in the war. And my father became paralyzed.
My father is a dim shadow. Silent. Worried. Unexpressive. Impatient. All his life he did piecework in the garment center and fretted during the months of no work. He was a sewing-machine operator and always aspired to become, oddly enough, a “cutter,” the one who scissored the pattern. I knew very little about him except that as a boy he had made his way on foot from Russia to Belgium, where he boarded a boat to New York. Aside from this one heroic act, his life was full of negatives. He lamented that he had never studied dentistry or accounting, professions that had been open to him and more suited to his intellect. Throughout my boyhood I was always told that my father could not take me to a ball game, to a circus, to a vaudeville show because he had tried to do all these things with my brother and had been disappointed or distressed by the results. Took Jack to the ball game—he ate too many hot dogs and vomited. Never again! Schlepped Jack all the way to Madison Square Garden to see Ringling Brothers and he was bored. Never again! My father did take me skating once, when I was about six, but I landed on my ass, and he got fed up, and that was probably the last time we did anything together. As it turned out, I was twenty-five when I first saw the circus—with my wife, Davida.
Although the actual cause of my father’s paralysis was a cerebral hemorrhage, it seemed to represent an organic decision on his part to bring the grinding routine of his life to a halt. With that stroke I graduated from an oddball kid to the sole breadwinner in my family.
By this time I had had adequate warning that I could never go to a pay college, but I had fantasized all the same about attending one of the Midwestern universities, particularly one of the Big Ten because I loved football. True to my nature, one that had caused me to memorize the names of grade-B actors and revel over a file on jazz bands, during my senior year at high school I had sent away to these schools for their catalogues. Despite all this fantasizing, I assumed that I would go to Brooklyn College in the end. Now, suddenly, because of my father’s illness, this fallback was snatched away. I found myself at sixteen with a paralyzed father at home, complete responsibility for my family’s support (Jack, too, had been drafted), and not an inkling about what I wanted to do with my life. The things that turned me on all seemed as impractical as the saxophone. If I didn’t fail for lack of talent I would surely fail for fear of failure. I wasn’t yet aware that all the things that meant something to me, like becoming a writer or a composer or a musician, had one quality that was laden with taboo—standing on a hilltop and proclaiming myself.
For the next year I worked in the shipping department of the garment factory where my father was last employed. The shipping department consisted mostly of older black men and a few Italian kids, no one that I felt I could relate to. What’s more, having been denied Brooklyn College and brought up to believe that knowledge and self-worth were intimate partners, I was becoming gripped by a new obsession: self-education.
The factory was located at 500 Seventh Avenue right off Thirty-eighth Street. I would spend my lunch hours at Herald Square, sitting on a park bench across the street from Macy’s, under the clock whose mechanized figures would bang out the hours. There I read some of the most exciting literature of my life. The sensation of imbibing Dreiser, Tolstoy, Henry James, Ignazio Silone—every molecule in my body told me I was being enriched.
Meanwhile, at home I was listening to Prokofieff, Tchaikovsky, and Beethoven. I spent hours and days learning about classical music, to the point that by the time I was eighteen or nineteen I could listen to a Beethoven symphony and identify both the number of the symphony and the movement being played. I could identify all the piano concertos. This was proof of the success of my noncollege education.
Unfortunately, I knew no one with whom I could share this burgeoning knowledge. I was too shy to hang out on the Brooklyn College campus, and the girls I was introduced to at the time could barely carry a conversation across the street. Afflicted with my stammer and a nagging insecurity, I was nonetheless filled with a secret belief in my own superiority. “The superiority of the afflicted” is what Woody and I would later call it.
In keeping with the rigidity of a family life from which I desperately wanted to be free, at the age of sixteen I still saw intellectual growth as a process of memorization. You can’t read this important stuff and file it away—you’ve got to be able to quote it. You should read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and then, in the best of all possible worlds, be able to recite it—because it’s so damned important. Years later Malcolm X’s autobiography would stir me more than any book I’d ever read, because, similarly consumed with the need to educate himself, he had spent most of his first term in prison reading and memorizing the dictionary.
After I had worked in the garment factory for about a year, someone told me about a civil-service exam, and without much thought except of escaping the pushcart and the rack, I took the test. I passed easily and soon received a notice telling me to report to the Office of War Information on Fifty-seventh Street to take a job as a clerk-messenger. I was so pleased I never returned to the factory to pick up my last check. They’d liked me there and called my home to see what had happened to me, and even left a message assuring me that the job was still mine, but I was so filled with shame and anger over having been subjected to that existence, of having followed so dreadfully close in my father’s footsteps, that I never returned their calls.
It must have been my first or second day at the OWI that I caught a glimpse of the cutting rooms. Row after row of dim cubicles in which film that had been shot all over the country was being assembled into propaganda documentaries. In solitude and concentration, each editor worked his creations unencumbered by human relations, audience reactions, or even, for that matter, the judgment of the world. For who knew what an editor did? And who was to say if it was bad?
Sidney Meyers.
Willard Van Dyke and Larry Madison (at camera), filming STEELTOWN, USA.
(Courtesy Museum of Modern Art)
7 ■ The Office of War Information
Apprenticeship with the Documentary Guys
A great many of us learned our craft very well, because we had almost unlimited money and an atmosphere in which we could learn freely. No, we didn’t make the films we wanted to make. Rarely did we. But we worked together carefully and closely, so it affected all of us, and perhaps it affected the field.
—WILLARD VAN DYKE
I arrived at the Office of War Information in the spring of 1943, armed with a hardship draft deferment (because of my father’s illness), troubled by a secret inner mixture of arrogance and self-rejection, and filled with the hope of discovery. The offices were spread across several floors of the Argonaut Building at 224 West Fifty-seventh Street, right off Broadway. They were bustling with educated people from all over the country. For a boy who had never been outside New York City, who had never known a “free” woman, who had never witnessed an animated conversation that didn’t concern the price of chopped meat or the ingratitude of a feuding relative, who had never known anyone who was excited by culture or the arts, who had thought all his life that the world was almost equally divided between Jews and Italians, this was a debut of cosmic proportions. To my great pleasure I was assigned to the Overseas Motion Picture Bureau down at 35 West Forty-fifth Street in the jewelry district.
The OWI at this time was already the su
bject of considerable political controversy. The propaganda that was being churned out to stimulate the war spirit at home was often found unnecessary, paternalistic, or otherwise insulting, while the OWI as a whole had to contend with the traditional American suspicion of propaganda and the fear that it would somehow be used to support New Deal policies and to help President Roosevelt win a fourth term. Little of this affected us at the overseas bureau, however, where our products were strictly for foreign consumption. In fact, during my entire three years at the OWI I was ignorant of any controversy, ill will, or competitiveness. It was an enthralling new world, and I was deep beneath the storms.
The idea of the OWI overseas bureau was to counter the vast sums that the Germans and Japanese were spending on propaganda of all kinds—radio broadcasts, pamphlets, magazines, and films. While some of our own “psychological warfare” was geared to frighten and break the resistance of enemy populations, the special job of the Motion Picture Bureau was to make friends for America. Films featuring various aspects of the American way of life—small-town democracy, the European heritage, the functioning of government agencies, the industrial process—all with an emphasis on ordinary people and their labors, were chosen with the idea of correcting a set of prejudices that had sprung up about America—largely as a result of the success of Hollywood pictures abroad. They were each produced in twenty-six languages for distribution to allies, neutrals, and liberated nations. The voice-over commentaries were translated and renarrated at the Foreign Language Section, the department where I began work as a messenger.
One of the administrative people at the Foreign Language Section was a woman named Helen Gwynne, who must have been close to forty at that time. Helen struck me immediately as the most extraordinary woman I had ever encountered. She had been married twice, had worked in California for the Hollywood Reporter, had flacked for one of the big New York nightclubs, and had rubbed up against and walked away from a lot of wealth. Now she was writing, publicizing, administrating—a tough, independent woman and the first person I latched onto at my new job.
Rosemarie Hickson, who was only about three or four years older than I but far more experienced, also became a friend, and as a member of this triumvirate I was first delivered from the Benson-hurst shtetl and introduced to the world I came to think of as the Twentieth Century.
With Helen and Rosemarie I first ate Chinese food. I was astounded to discover that these women could go into a Chinese restaurant and, without asking, know the difference between moo goo gai pan and egg foo yung. I had never graduated from coffee-shop food, and here I was eating Chinese, Japanese, Mexican—going straight to a Ph.D. What these two women thought of me, I can only wonder. But they must have been surprised at my encyclopedic knowledge of jazz. And in return for all the sophistication they showered on me, I took them to jazz concerts. One day—much to my embarrassment—they even took the subway all the way to Benson-hurst to see my family and the house I’d lived in almost since the day I was born—whereupon my mother became overwrought with the alarming idea that I was about to form an unhealthy attachment to an overaged, non-Jewish woman. The three of us were inseparable until late in the war, when Helen got restless and took an assignment with our bureau in India.
The Overseas Motion Picture Bureau occupied four entire floors, the halls of which were lined with cubicles where films were in various stages of production. In one room the bureau chiefs, Robert Riskin and Philip Dunne, might be viewing the rushes sent back from Youngstown, Ohio, by Willard Van Dyke, who was shooting Steeltown. In another room John Houseman might be preparing the script for A Tuesday in November, a film about the electoral process. Down the hall Gene Fowler, Jr., might be editing The Autobiography of a Jeep (narrated with great anthropomorphic wit by the jeep itself), while just within earshot Fredric March finished recording his voice-over for The Valley of the Tennessee. Elsewhere a sound editor might be editing the score for Henwar Rodakievicz’s Capital Story, a film about the U.S. Public Health Service’s efforts to track down a dangerous pollutant, while next door a staff group lingered for a final glimpse of the bureau’s first production, Swedes in America, starring Ingrid Bergman.
It was like an international documentary headquarters. Helen van Dongen, the Dutch-born editor who had cut the films of Joris Ivens; Boris Kaufman, the brother of Soviet director Dziga Vertov and a renowned documentary cameraman in his own right, who later shot On the Waterfront, Baby Doll, and three of the four pictures I edited for Sidney Lumet; Alexander Hammid, a Czech filmmaker who had photographed and co-directed Crisis, the anti-Nazi picture on the rape of Czechoslavakia; Willard Van Dyke, a former still photographer who was on the way to becoming America’s Mr. Documentary; Waldo Salt, who later won Academy Awards for the Midnight Cowboy and Coming Home screenplays—these were some of the people I found myself mingling with. Because they made movies, they were like gods to me. And because they made fact films about the realities of everyday life, they were even greater gods.
Of them all, an editor named Sidney Meyers who before the war had helped found the left-wing documentary collective called Frontier Films was most important. Having never seem film cut, or even guessed that such a process existed, I was amazed to look over Sidney’s shoulder and observe him chopping and joining and, with quick confident strokes, making relationships with raw footage that I never thought possible. I determined that my first promotion had to get me into one of these rooms with Sidney, and by the end of the war he became my mentor.
It has been said that editing is directing the film for the second time. In documentary work, editing is often directing the film for the first and only time. Until he gets into the cutting room, the documentary filmmaker is mainly involved in information gathering. His reliance on cutting as the chief tool for molding his work has made him an important contributor to the development of editing technique.
If I’ve become known for anything as a feature editor, it is a facility for shifting around the original components of a film, knowing how and when to drop whole sections of dialogue and replace them with musical overlays, and generally feeling comfortable taking liberties with a script—skills that are relatively standard in the documentary field. Working in Hollywood, especially in the old days, gave you little idea of the real potential of film; the emphasis was always on following the script, and only the most daring editors proposed radical diversions. To a documentarist, a script was a plan that helped get you going in the morning—certainly nothing that was ever intended to cramp your creative impulses as you went along. My apprenticeship with documentary filmmakers enabled me to face a picture like The Night They Raided Minsky’s, know that I had to piece it together from scratch in the cutting room, and not crumble in panic.
It was exactly the sort of problem I was trained for. Although, after I left the OWI, my career took a long and unsatisfying turn through advertising and television terrain and then passed through the promised land of some thirty feature films, I never lost my love for the documentary, and in my struggle to become a director, documentary is the form I’ve returned to.
The documentary sprang up like a weed wherever people had passionate statements to put on film. One of the earliest forms was the “compilation” film pioneered by Esther Shub and Dziga Vertov. Because these works on the upheavals of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath were forged entirely in the cutting room—of old newsreel and private footage dug out of musty basements, film archives, and personal collections—the editor/directors had to fight at first for their right of authorship.
Another form of documentary was pioneered by the Russian director Victor Turin in Turksib, a 1929 film about the construction of the Turkestan-Siberian railway. Turin’s subject could easily have been seen as a routine industrial labor, but through the subtle use of editing he brought out the inherent drama of the event. After viewing it at the Scala Theater in 1930, Paul Rotha commented on the film’s propagandistic power, “The spectators in London were just as eager for the railwa
y to be opened as were the peasants in Russia!”
Elsewhere in Europe film aficionados and ideologues joined cinema clubs to screen forbidden revolutionary works like Mother and Potemkin, surreptitiously recut newsreels for left-wing viewing (reassembling them for return the next day), issued manifestos on the true purpose of the film, and saw in documentary an opportunity for political and artistic expression. From this milieu came Joris Ivens, a leftist Dutch director who made celebrated pictures in Holland, Belgium, Spain, China, Russia, and the United States during the turmoil years of the thirties. His editor, Helen van Dongen, would become my second teacher.
The title “Father of the Documentary” is often reserved for the American director Robert Flaherty, on whose final picture I served as assistant editor. Flaherty’s 1922 Eskimo film, Nanook of the North, was a surprise commercial hit, and it seemed, as a result, that exotic travelogues would fit into the Hollywood system. But after spending three years shooting his second picture, Moana, an idyll about the coming of age of a Samoan boy, Flaherty was forced to stand by as his producers at Paramount released it as The Love-Life of a South Seas Siren, a subterfuge that insured a box-office fizzle. Thereafter the documentary remained an outsider’s art form in America.
The OWI held regular screenings of the documentary films that had been made abroad. In this high-spirited, home-front, democratic milieu, the lowliest messenger was welcome to attend these viewings and discover worlds that were still unknown to the Benson and the Marboro theaters. My education was sudden and intoxicating. For the first time I was exposed to the two major documentary trends that were doing battle before the war began, and each in its way packed jolts of awakening.
When The Shooting Stops Page 10
