When The Shooting Stops Read online

  Another film I remember was Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand’s Native Land, a 1942 attack on antiunion oppression in the United States. One scene in particular left an impression on me, the burial of a man who had been killed in a strike. The enormous grief of the widow is communicated with almost unbearable intensity by showing her bending over her husband’s newly dug grave again and again and again from different angles and distances. The impact of this simple repetition is heartrending. Of course the viewer knows he is being manipulated, that he is being made to see the same action over and over, but the effect is no less powerful.

  Because I was an apprentice editor, my mind preyed on transitional effects. Irving might discuss the eloquent, timeless images in Dov-shenko’s Earth, but my eye was on the cut: the terrified face of the child, the mother’s arm coming through the air to strike it, sudden cut to the peasant’s whip following the arc of action begun by the arm and landing with a smack on the ox’s back. Today most of these editing techniques have become commonplace, and some have become cliche. But they were fresh then. And what made them truly exciting was going to work the next day and watching Sidney perform these tricks as if he had been raised on them. How could anyone make that mass of prosaic detail Willard was shipping back from Seattle into a cohesive film? And yet in a series of quick cuts from cattle to fishing to grain to timber to mining to farmland—with the action of each cut moving in the same direction across the screen—Sidney could weld together a theme in a way that was so natural the viewer never consciously appreciated the technique behind it.

  Willard’s Northwest, U.S.A. was an attempt at a portrait of the people and industry of Washington and Oregon. It had no more compelling element to link its themes than the fact that a Soviet plane had recently flown over the North Pole from Moscow to Seattle—an achievement that promised to make the Northwest an important international crossroads. Like so many other OWI films, the combination of Willard’s powerful images, Ben Maddow’s commentary, Walter Huston’s narration, Norman Lloyd’s score, Sidney Meyers’ cutting, and Riskin’s and Dunne’s shrewd critiques somehow man-aged to fill the vacuum, an incredible triumph of form, style, and technique over lack of content.

  To say that Sidney played a major role in this is an understatement, for the challenges he faced were mammoth. “The material was as good as we could make it,” says Van Dyke, “but it was thin, and I thought that Sidney did a hell of a job with it. In my case, I was constantly feeling, Jesus, I wish I could have gotten this, we only had this amount of time, we got stymied on this—and I was grateful that the editor brought as much as he did to it and pulled the thing together.”

  “Sidney would get a film,” remembers Irving Jacoby, “and he would look at it and say, ‘Oh my God, this terrible shit, I have to make a film out of it!’ And then he would work on it for some months and, by God, it got better and better and better all the time. Not another inch of film was added, mind you. But as it became his, it became better, and toward the end it was very fine. Then the director had to fight for his credit!” (Actually Jacoby himself had to fight for his director’s credit once—over his OWI compilation film, The Pale Horseman, a powerful account of the epidemics that might follow the war. The editor who challenged Jacoby for the director’s credit—and almost got it—was an unusually confident young cutter named Peter Elgar.)

  Not everyone was satisfied with Sidney’s work, however, as Willard reveals in comparing him to producer and editor Irving Lerner: “Irving and I worked together hand in glove. Irving was always looking for the clear narrative line, so that you wouldn’t lose the message. Then within that he would look for the connectives—and he was always coming up with brilliant connectives. Sidney more often tried for a kind of ambiguity that would show off his contribution. Rather than what the film needed to say, it was what Sidney needed to say.”

  Willard cites San Francisco, 1945, his film about the founding of the United Nations, as an example of Sidney’s occasional gracelessness as a collaborator. “What happened in San Francisco happened behind closed doors. They were not going to let us in. We didn’t have the material; there was no way to get the material. So what we all had to do was to kind of fake it. There were minor disagreements on emphases and where the fakery ought to be and so forth, and my feeling was that Sidney was often less interested in the straight statement than in showing how clever he was.”

  The problem with Sidney was that he was an editor who really should have been a director. He had a lively, inventive mind and he could not bear to have it constantly subordinated to the needs of another man’s picture. He proved his capacity as a director after the war when he made his celebrated movie The Quiet One, a feature-length film about the private world of a young Harlem boy and his experiences at the Wiltwyck School. But partly because funds for documentary film took a dive after the war and partly because of the limits of his own personality, Sidney spent most of the remaining years of his career in the cutting room.

  Sidney’s office was on the eighth floor, which had been set aside entirely for editing cubicles. The standard cubicle, never more than twelve feet square, contained two four-foot tables, a wall lined with metal racks to hold reels of film, a couple of high stools, a Moviola, and a big, free-rolling film barrel with numerous pieces of film hanging into it.

  The Moviola was invented in 1919 and came into use around 1925. At the time, editors were still jerking film through their fingers before an overhead light to get a sense of the motion and to estimate the best place to break. Although many editors resisted the alteration of their physical routine that the Moviola required, its peep-show viewer offered a much better sense of how the edited film would look on the screen.

  The basic Moviola has hardly changed in forty years. It is a chunky machine full of switches and swivels and interlocking parts almost all of burnished steel and aluminum, first black, now green. Its legs support a waist-high base upon which rests the four-inch viewer that points up toward the hunched-over editor at something like a 45-degree angle. Stretching up above the viewer from the back end of the base are two metal arms that are fitted with sprockets for reels. One sprocket holds the silent footage, which runs past the viewing head. The other sprocket holds the sound track, which runs over a standard magnetic tape head. Two foot pedals control the motors that keep everything moving. The editor can run sound and visual reels separately or in synch, and make separate splicing marks on each. Sidney sometimes ran through whole ten-minute sound and picture reels this way, marking them with a grease pencil, before handling them over to his first assistant for cutting.

  As Sidney’s second assistant, my job was also strictly mechanical. I kept in contact with the laboratory, helped the negative cutter match the negatives for the final negative print, helped prepare the negative title role, attended the recording sessions where the translated narrations were being made—just a few of the scores of tedious tasks that go into making a movie. One of the great features of the OWI films was their sound tracks, many of which were original scores by Aaron Copland, Morton Gould, Norman Lloyd, or Virgil Thomson. I would prepare for these composers a cut-by-cut “shot list” of the film with a description of each shot and the number of seconds it lasted. After viewing the unscored film and getting an emotional sense of it, the composers would use these shot lists to write their precisely timed scores.

  Morton Gould recorded his score for San Francisco, 1945 in a completely empty Carnegie Hall. An extreme perfectionist, he wanted the acoustics and timing to be immaculate. As he conducted, he seemed to be everywhere at once, with one eye on the orchestra, one eye on the score, and one eye on the stopwatch that was held just beneath his nose by Sidney’s second assistant. I was then twenty years old and so pleased with myself that had Gould indeed had three eyes, I would not have noticed.

  Not all the OWI films had original scores, and when stock music was needed, Max Goberman was the maestro of the sound track. Max was a New York conductor and musicologist who worked for the O
WI as an independent contractor. He was a slight, spunky, outspoken man who achieved a somewhat Mephistophelian appearance by dint of a very pointy Van Dyke beard. Once when I brought him a script, I asked Max how he managed to find just the right piece of music for all the propaganda films he was scoring. Max pointed to five records and said, “This is my whole music library.” The library consisted of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth (Pathétique) Symphony, Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, and Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. Somewhere in the wings were two or three other Russian recordings, but these were the five he depended on over and over again, and in the thirty-five years since then, I have come to depend on them too. If you think of film action in battle terms, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite are great for the battle scenes—tanks, infantry, bombing—all the conflict and frenzy. They are followed magnificently by cuts to Tchaikovsky’s Sixth or Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, portions of which are always perfect to lay down behind refugees, wounded soldiers, or devastation or pain of any kind. The Moussorgsky is an all-purpose record, flexible enough to use for both a climax and a dénouement.

  Max’s little room at the OWI had a Moviola, records, and a turntable. As he watched the edited picture, he would record portions of his five records onto optical sound track, which he would then cut into perfect synchronization with the film. Because he always recorded much more than he needed, he had a whole library of leftovers—a can of Moussorgsky segments here, a can of Rachmaninoff segments there—that he could dip into for each new picture. One of my thrills as an assistant editor was to be sent into Max’s empty room one day with instructions to use his outtakes to score a five-minute sequence from one of Sidney’s films. I no longer remember the film, although the afternoon is still vivid—it was the day that President Roosevelt died.

  In the end some forty films were made during the three years of the OWI’s operation. Technically brilliant but terribly restricted in content, most seem bland and uninteresting today. The films that got the best reception abroad were those that had some real (if re-created) drama, like the struggle of the French immigrants to a New England town in Helen Grayson’s and Larry Madison’s Cummington Story; a single person to focus on, like The Window Cleaner, who takes us on his odyssey across the face of the Empire State Building, talking the voice-over narration as he goes; or some offbeat humor like Joseph Krumgold’s commentary in The Autobiography of a Jeep. Film writer and educator Richard Dyer MacCann (who got the story from OWI overseas chief Robert Sherwood) recounts the reception the jeep film received in Normandy shortly after the Allied invasion: “At Cherbourg, when the ruins were still smoking and the peninsula was still not secure, the OWI showed a feature, a newsreel, and The Autobiography of a Jeep. The jubilant, liberated Frenchmen, touched by the warm humanity of this little film about a quarter ton of metal and motor, burst into shouts of ‘’Vive le jip! Vive le jip!’ ”

  Reportedly the most popular of all the OWI films shown overseas was Hammid’s 1945 portrait of the renowned conductor Arturo Toscanini. Prepared for release to coincide with the liberation of Italy, Toscanini: The Hymn of Nations shows the seventy-eight-year-old expatriate celebrity conducting the NBC Symphony performing the Verdi composition from which the picture takes its title. Produced and edited by Irving Lerner, with Burgess Meredith narrating, the film portrays the dignity, nobility, and, by implication, the antifascist resolve of Toscanini in heroic proportions. One of the longest of the OWI pictures (thirty-one minutes), it was also its finest piece of propaganda.

  If it did nothing else, the OWI documentary unit filled the enormous gap in historical and educational material on the America of its time. Few of those who went to public school in the fifties realize that their basic film diet as students was the OWI movies that had been made available by the U.S. Office of Education at print cost to teach American youngsters about their country. Wrote film historian and critic Arthur Knight in 1958 of the OWI work, “It was a priceless collection.”

  Both the Cold War, which made the examination of domestic problems taboo, and the arrival of television killed off most possibilities for government and private sponsorship of documentary filmmaking after the war. By the early seventies, when the documentary began to flower again, the work and the reputations of men like Willard Van Dyke, Sasha Hammid, and Sidney Meyers had sunk anonymously into the general pool of film knowledge. In 1977, when Irving Jacoby, who founded film studies at City College, returned to apply for a job, no one there knew who he was.

  The OWI collection has similarly been lost to memory. Not even a simple list of the three or four dozen films produced by the Overseas Motion Picture Bureau has been preserved. “The Battle of Stalingrad was the important thing,” says Willard, “not the fact that we made a film about the Pacific Northwest and had a hell of a time doing it. The idea that future generations would be interested really never crossed our minds.”

  Hollywood was, of course, irrevocably changed by the war experience. Location shooting for documentary flavor became the standard new form—if you wanted New York streets, you went to New York and shot them. But the full-length nonfiction feature became a rarity. It would remain for the old master Robert Flaherty, who had nearly invented the genre with Nanook, to make its postwar swan song with the final film of his life—and my first feature job—Louisiana Story.

  Robert Flaherty and Helen van Dongen in their makeshift Louisiana cutting room.

  (Courtesy Museum of Modern Art)

  8 ■ Robert Flaherty and Helen van Dongen

  The Collaboration That Sustained a Legend

  Do this again and you will be immortal, and excommunicated from Hollywood, which is a good fate.

  —CHARLIE CHAPLIN, JEAN RENOIR, and

  DUDLEY NICHOLS in a telegram to Robert Flaherty after the West Coast premiere of Louisiana Story.

  In the summer of 1948, when I was twenty-two years old and star-struck by the people who glistened at the heights of the motion-picture industry, I was riding in a cab with Robert Flaherty, on whose film, Louisiana Story, I had just finished working as the assistant editor. Flaherty was a great rumpled man with a wide fringe of white hair and the sort of broad, fleshy face that made his Irish nose look like a beak. He was sixty-four then but appeared to be over seventy, as perhaps befits someone who had achieved almost Biblical stature to people all over the world. His voice was deep and slightly graveled, with that rich, confident cadence that, when applied slowly and purposefully to the narrations of his films, lent them a tone of mystery and timelessness, as if the fables he told were not about specific people but about the struggles of the whole human race.

  For several months after Louisiana Story was completed, I assisted Flaherty in the tedious business of seeking a distributor for his independently produced film. It was not a happy time for Flaherty, for once again he was returning to do business with the commercial studios that had made him an outcast and that he detested. But he was a warm and irrepressible raconteur, and whether we were breakfasting on his awful, over-brewed and blackened tea in his room at the Chelsea Hotel or performing our desultory rounds, he charmed me with stories of the Cajuns of the swamp country, of Irish writers, of famous people and faraway places.

  Our errand on this particular day was to screen his picture for one of the big Hollywood companies—MGM, Columbia, or Paramount. As I held the door of the cab for the man who had climbed in and out of igloos, who had been carried on a litter by Samoan chiefs when he was illt who had been borne by elephants in India and cabin cruisers in the bayou, I could not help but notice how awkward Flaherty looked in this midtown business setting. He didn’t seem to belong in the cab, and he didn’t seem to belong in New York. He could fit in almost anywhere, except in the one arena where the power lay to bolster his forever frustrated career, and it was easy to see that Flaherty understood this all too well. As we rolled through the stunning cavern of upper Park Avenu
e, Flaherty stuck a chubby thumb toward the towering symbols of modern civilization and with a wonderful disdain that momentarily righted all balances, he said, “This has all the warmth of a well-marbled lavatory.”

  Flaherty’s reputation was based largely on three films: Nanook of the North (1922), his famous picture about the Eskimos with whom he had lived for two years; Man of Aran (1934), a film created during a two-year sojourn with the Aran Islanders off the coast of Ireland; and Elephant Boy (1936), a big studio-sponsored production in which Flaherty’s stirring scenes of India were adulterated by studio additions and editing. Scattered between were numerous failures including three Hollywood-backed pictures in the South Seas.

  He was known in the profession as an uncompromising innocent, a difficult collaborator, a man with no sense whatever of the commercial realities of filmmaking. Yet he had the knack of capturing moments that stirred people very deeply, and this capacity, this love and gentleness and extraordinary tenacity, made him a legend of a kind we no longer have today—as well as a constant, if resistible, temptation to producers. In 1931, after Flaherty’s negotiations with Soviet motion-picture authorities to film the dying cultures of Central Russia fell through, John Grierson invited him to join the British Film Unit, hoping to point Flaherty’s loving lens at Britain’s industrial craftsmen. But Flaherty’s love was a love that needed to linger, and the prohibitive costs of his production routines forced Grierson to take the picture—Industrial Britain—from him and edit it without him.