John Grierson, who headed the British government Film Unit and whose name has become almost synonymous with documentary film, believed in the power of film to educate. His celebrated cluster of filmmakers not only perfected the imaginative educational use of film, they made pictures that captured the special qualities in what otherwise passed for humdrum existence. With pictures that ranged from the story of the men who sorted mail on the Postal Special from London to Glasgow, to an exploration of housing ills and cures, to a dramatic statement on the importance of savings accounts, the British Film Unit served in both spirit and tone as the model on which the OWI propaganda was built.
If the British films made me dream of faraway places, egalitarian principles, and the dignity of simple lives, Triumph of the Will, my first glimpse of Nazi documentary, sucked me into my seat as if I were being electrocuted. Technically a record of the 1934 Nazi party congress at Nuremberg, Leni Riefenstahl’s mythic chiller was hardcore propaganda with a melodramatic, antihumanist bent. Edited to produce a pace of irrestible forward energy, and photographed to create a sense of omnipotence and unbreakable mass unity—with endless ranks of soldiers, torchlight parades, haranguing speakers, and cheering crowds—the film terrified me, much as it had terrified audiences all over Europe.
The Nazis had been the first to recognize the power of film as an instrument of war, and when Hitler’s panzers drove into Poland, his camera crews were right alongside them. Baptism of Fire was the picture that resulted. A year later Victory in the West recorded the capitulation of France. In Russia, England, and the United States a similar mobilization of documentary talent was underway, and filmmakers who had lived through years of sparse employment suddenly had jobs with overtime. Out of the British Film Unit came titles like London Can Take It and Target for Tonight, while in the Soviet Union top directors like Pudovkin and Alexander Dovshenko busily edited footage from a thousand miles of front. Seen today on television retrospectives, these wartime compilations are still as breathtaking as they were for me in the early forties because of the superlative Soviet editing.
When the United States entered the war in 1941, it started spending upward of fifty million dollars a year on propaganda films. The various military services had their own film units, of which the Army Signal Corps was the most important, accounting for Frank Capra’s celebrated Why We Fight series. The directors John Huston, John Ford, and William Wyler left their studios to learn the art of documentary, and with the collaboration of studio editors like Bill Hornbeck created films that ranged from training material for soldiers, to edited compilations on various war themes, to on-the-spot reportage of great battles. Naturally this material also came through the OWL Although various Signal Corps productions have achieved lasting recognition, I was most profoundly affected by the uncut reels of Corps film that were shipped almost daily into our offices toward the end of the war, most of which have never been shown publicly and may even have been destroyed. This was the film that the Signal Corps cameramen shot as they poured into liberated concentration camps all over Europe, film that we screened in silence and agony and disbelief.
The OWI was set up in 1942 to consolidate all the information services of the government’s far-flung and burgeoning propaganda machinery. And, as it turned out, it was at the OWI that the bulk of the country’s documentary film talent, people who had developed as artists and craftsmen during the last years of the Depression, found their battle stations. It was the first and last time that American documentarists were brought together in a mass collective effort, and it was an historic moment in filmmaking.
When Robert Riskin took command of the OWI Overseas Motion Picture Bureau, he was well established as a playwright and scriptwriter, known especially for his work with Frank Capra. His screenplays included It Happened One Night, for which he won an Oscar, Lost Horizon, and You Can’t Take It with You. He was married to the blond screen heroine Fay Wray, who was, of course, better known for her liaison with an enormous ape.
Because the United States was far behind in documentary filmmaking, Riskin had a large job on his hands. Dramatist Robert Sherwood, who headed the OWI’s massive overseas propaganda effort, groaned that he had only frivolous Hollywood pictures to show in the liberated zones of North Africa. Wallace Carroll, who headed the OWI London office, reported that in 1943 London’s central film registry listed five thousand documentary films of which “only three were American and they were out of date. At that time, the American film companies in London had two hundred gangster films in their vaults, but not one film about the Tennessee Valley Authority. The crowds that stormed a London theater to see the stirring Soviet documentary film One Day at War were also treated to a Hollywood film called Orchestra Wives, which told the story of a touring jazz band and the petty rivalries among the wives of its members.”
If filling the holes in two decades of American filmmaking neglect was a stout challenge, Riskin was faced with an equally arduous job in forging his unlikely unit into a cooperative alliance. Here, after all, was a Hollywood man heading an organization composed mostly of documentarists, people who had always been viewed in Hollywood as poor relations—filmmakers who ran around making pictures no one wanted to see, using hand-held cameras, in crews of two and three. Riskin could lavish on his documentary cousins unlimited industry resources including the best Hollywood scriptwriters (whose scripts the documentary men invariably found absurd and unusable), but could he respect them and win their trust?
The group that hashed out ideas and assignments typically included Riskin, his production chief Philip Dunne (a Hollywood screenwriter whose credits included The Last of the Mohicans and How Green Was My Valley), and documentary men Irving Lerner, Irving Jacoby, and Willard Van Dyke. “There was a feeling on our part,” recalls Van Dyke, “that Riskin didn’t know his ass from his elbow because he was a Hollywood guy.”
As the meetings became sticky, Riskin’s celebrated nervous habits would surface. “He had a wedding ring that was composed of three interlocking rings,” says Van Dyke, “and he would take that off and would play with it. Then he would reach into his pocket and get change, and if he had four quarters, two nickels, and a penny, he’d shift them around until the penny was in the middle, and then the two nickels and the four quarters—and he’d sit there and play with them, and the thing was to get symmetry. He was a great gambler, a professional. People would give him a thousand bucks and send him to Las Vegas. He was really a terrific guy, a nice guy, but not our kind of guy.”
I’ll always remember the impression Van Dyke made on me—a dazzling dresser, the nattiest man I’d ever seen; an aristocrat with an egalitarian self-confidence that seemed to include rather than belittle those around him. His first affinity among the “Hollywood guys” was for Dunne, because, as he puts it, “Dunne wore button-down collars and so did I.” When we visited him in his Upper West Side apartment to interview him for this book, Willard was seventy-one years old and retired after a fruitful decade as a top TV documentarist and as the director of the Museum of Modern Art’s film department. Though he no longer wielded a camera, his facility for nailing the essential detail was still acute.
“Riskin couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable with all of us,” says Willard. And when it was decided to do a documentary story of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Riskin reached into the Signal Corps for Shepard Traube, who had directed Angel Street on Broadway. “Traube came over to the OWI and he listened tolerantly to what was being said to him. Finally Riskin turned to me and said, ‘Willard, you’ve worked among those mountain people—tell Shep the kind of thing that he might run into.’ Well before I could open my mouth, this guy who had new bars on his shoulder as a captain in the Signal Corps said, ‘Dd you see these bars? They’ll do what I tell them.’ ”
Alexander (Sasha) Hammid, who was languishing in Hollywood at this time, unable even to get into the cameraman’s union, was asked to join the OWI and to go right to work as Traube’s cameraman. A quiet, unassumin
g man who could walk through a room like a whisper, Hammid was immediately put off by Traube’s grand style: “One day we happened to come to a location that I liked very much, and so I grabbed a camera and started shooting. That got him terribly mad—that I dared to shoot without consulting him.”
Traube incited a minor rebellion among the crew, and after two weeks Riskin reluctantly turned the project over to Hammid. “Sasha went down and made a beautiful film,” says Van Dyke with pleasure. “He was a documentary guy.”
The chauvinism of the documentary guys was the chauvinism of the foot soldiers. They were proud of their ability to go onto a location and patiently get the feel of a real situation; to work with nonprofessional actors and gently guide them away from their self-consciousness; to operate out in the field with limited personnel and none of the fancy equipment available on a studio set. At times their contempt for their rich relations in The Industry was ill concealed: “Every picture made in Hollywood was confined to a studio set,” snorts Willard. “The idea of sending a camera crew to New York if you wanted New York streets just wasn’t done. If you wanted a New York street, you built it on a Hollywood set.”
The simmering conflict between the two camps began to froth and foam when Josef von Sternberg (The Blue Angel, Shanghai Express) volunteered his patriotic services and was assigned by Riskin to do a film called The Town. Von Sternberg was known as a master of lighting and camera work, for having created through his careful photographing of Marlene Dietrich the current romantic screen “look,” and for his great arrogance. He was anything but a documentary guy. And the OWI documentarists felt both snubbed and secretly elated at the thought of what might happen.
The idea behind The Town was to present the life of a small town in the Midwest. What the people looked like, what happened on Saturday afternoons when the farmers came to sell their produce—to capture the feeling of living in a very American place. A little town in Indiana was chosen, and one day in 1943 von Sternberg arrived there with an OWI crew that included unit manager Ben Gradus and cameramen Larry Madison and Benji Doniger.
“When the initial rushes started coming in, we didn’t know what he was trying to do,” says Willard. “It was embarrassing. He was approaching it as if he were photographing Dietrich. He couldn’t stay away from the camera and when they went inside he usually pushed Larry aside and began to do his own lighting. He had the trees painted with silver paint so they would reflect the light just right. He had a contempt for the exposure meter. At one point he was on top of a station wagon and a big crowd was there. Doniger, who was an absolutely wonderful, wild, crazy New York fella, was going around taking readings, and through the bull horn von Sternberg said, ‘Mr. Doniger, would you please come to the truck.’ So Benji comes over, a wide-eyed, full-of-citrus-fruit nice guy, and von Sternberg said, ‘Mr. Doniger, I wish you would put that annoying instrument away. We do not measure the intensity of people’s dandruff.’ Well the whole town heard it, and Benji was humiliated.”
Riskin smoked Dunhill cigarettes with their paper cigarette holders, and, according to Willard, “The point at which Riskin began to tear those things up and bite ‘em and chew ‘em and spit ‘em out, you knew something was up.” Night after night Riskin, Dunne, and Van Dyke watched the rushes coming back from Indiana with Riskin breaking and chewing his Dunhill cigarette holders into thousands of pieces. “Finally Riskin turned to me and said, ‘Willard, go out there and save this picture.’ And I said, ‘Not on your life.’ Nobody was going to go and either save von Sternberg or step on his toes. It wasn’t professional to do that.”
In the end von Sternberg surprised everyone by producing a pleasing portrait of the town and the way people lived there, an effort much like many of the other OWI movies. The documentary guys were a little reluctant to admit this, however, and for a long time afterward The Town led their list of “East Toilet, Ohio” pictures— compulsory stories of the folks from nowheresville, heavy on the schmaltz and light on the content.
Ultimately the prejudices faded. The documentary guys gradually realized that no one had a better critical eye than Riskin or a sharper ear for dialogue than Dunne. While the Hollywood brass, for their part, were soon impressed with the documentarists’ fieldwork and cutting-room dexterity. “In documentary practice,” wrote Dunne in a postwar appreciation of the documentary skills he observed at the OWI, “a film editor is also in effect a writer, using a Moviola instead of a typewriter. Give a good documentary editor an idea and he will express it for you in film: pictorial image, mood, and tempo. His function is more often creative than editorial.”
Each morning, although I’d already eaten breakfast, I arrived at the eighth-floor office with coffee and a danish, which to me were symbols of entry into the adult world. Helen Gwynne would be compulsively finishing off The New York Times crossword in ink, and I got a certain thrill just being alongside her as this virtuoso performance neared completion. My first run of the day might be to pick up some piece of equipment, deliver a script to the home of one of the composers, like Aaron Copland, who were scoring our films, or make a run to the film lab. Much of my time was spent in transit between our office and the main offices up at the Argonaut Building.
I was drawn to editing by almost every aspect of my childhood experience. The darkness, the isolation, the power of the process over the emotions of millions of people who never knew it existed, the alchemical secrecy. When my promotion came through in 1944, my first job as an assistant was in the cutting room of the foreign-language department, where the films were remixed with translated narrations. I bided my time there until I was moved over to assist the chief editor, Sidney Meyers.
Sidney was a balding man with a horseshoe band of orange fringe and miscellaneous stray wisps. He was always a little stooped, even when he wasn’t bending over his Moviola, and he was always gentle. He struck me as someone who was more interested in the deeper issues of life, in philosophy, in political ideas, in questions about music—he had been a violist before becoming a filmmaker—and rather less concerned about who was having lunch with whom and where. I always thought of him as a man who would be more inclined to be paternal and protective toward a pretty girl than seductive. Looking back, I believe he would have been happier if he had been a little tougher.
Sidney was my mentor and my surrogate father. I talked to him about things that I’d never discussed with anyone else—poetry, music, philosophy, and filmmaking—and he told me there was a basement auditorium in the Museum of Modern Art where I could see some of the great films I’d missed. My favorite recollections are of Sidney and me sitting out on the stairwell having a smoke—cigarettes were strictly forbidden in the cutting rooms during the days when nitrate stock was still in use—and spending maybe fifteen minutes, maybe a half hour, talking about all these things that had been important in his life and were becoming important in mine. He told me what books to read, and certain pieces of music to listen to, and he filled me with so much inspiration that there was never a thought of turning toward another career after the war. In the months we spent together, months of moments that had titanic importance to me but were probably little more than pleasant for Sidney, he never castigated me or lost his temper or discouraged me in any way. He never tried to warn me, as I hear myself warning so many would-be filmmakers today, that film is a desperately competitive business and difficult to break into. Although he was at least twenty years older than I was, I have no memory of him talking “sense” to me about anything.
How different Sidney was from a certain West Coast film editor who also wound up at the OWL A contemporary of Sidney’s, he saw cutting as a mechanic’s job with no creative potential. He had to drink his lunch to endure the afternoon, so painful and monotonous was the business to him. Once, when I wanted to discuss a current movie, he looked at me as if I were crazy—“I don’t go to the movies,” he said.
During this time, I was still living with my parents in Bensonhurst, although my daily excursions into
the Twentieth Century had given me a spiritual divorce from my old environment. My mother could hardly be approached on the subject of filmmaking, and my paralyzed father was beyond communication. I remember trying to tell my uncle Morris, the butcher and bootlegger and lover of Stalin, one of the few relatives I really enjoyed, about my new profession. Morris was over seventy then. I had to explain patiently that films are photographs, that they are arranged in a cutting room—and Morris looked at me, and he listened, and he seemed quite interested. When I finished talking, Uncle Morris rearranged his face and said, “So when are you going into business for yourself?”
Only my OWI family stood solidly behind my filmmaking future. Helen Gwynne convinced Irving Jacoby, who had just founded the Institute of Film Techniques at City College, to let me attend his first course by acting as his helper. Two nights a week I carried, threaded, and ran Irving’s 16 mm projecter and saw films I never knew existed.
In Irving’s class I first saw Pudovkin’s Mother and the British Film Unit productions Song of Ceylon and Night Mail. Watching now for the editor’s contribution, I spotted the technique that had made them classics.
The drama of Harry Watt’s and Basil Wright’s Night Mail was clearly the product of editing. The film’s ability to generate excitement over the task of dropping off mail sacks from a speeding train—two men preparing the sack, the rails whirring by, the scenery, the wires overhead, the local dogs transfixed as the train flies by, the approaching sack catcher, the men releasing the sack, outside the train the sack caught in a web—could only have been imparted at the cutting bench. Some pair of hands at a Moviola somewhere (R.Q. MacNaughton’s, as I later learned) had made that excitement communicable.
In Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon I could see how cutting was used to a more lyrical effect. A mingling of human and elephant feet, cut to the elephant’s trunk lifting the rider, cut to the elephant’s impervious face. We are awed by the elephant’s immense servile presence because instead of standing back and observing the whole action at a distance, we are invited to share certain intimate and suggestive details. The young shirtless man scaling the coconut tree, the sound of a ship’s whistle, cut to the ship itself. See! See how the sound had prepared the way for the cut, made it seamless and unquestionable? Again, the work of editing.
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