It was during my tenure at Maysles Films that I met Bruce Sinofsky He had been working there for eight years as an editor of TV commercials. In 1989, I decided to make my first short film, “Outrageous Taxi Stories,” a humorous look at New York City cab drivers. I called in a lot of favors to get the film made with virtually no budget. I talked Bruce into editing the film for free. Bruce and I really bonded in the editing room—not just as friends but also as zealots of classic cinema verité films. In the editing room, we lamented the fact that Albert and David were so busy doing paying gigs that they were no longer making the kind of nonfiction feature films, like Gimme Shelter, that had made them famous (perhaps I was doing the world of cinema a disservice by doing too good a job at getting the Maysleses commercial work). We were also inspired by Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, which had just been released theatrically Although Morris’s film was not a verité film (because it relied heavily on dramatic re-creations), we were excited that people were starting to go to the theater to see documentaries, a rare occurrence in those days. (Michael Moore’s Roger & Me wouldn’t appear for another year.) Bruce and I made a pact to find a human drama to film in the spirit of the classic ’60s verité films like Salesman and Gimme Shelter, and vowed to get it released in movie theaters.
It took us almost a year to find the right story. One morning in June 1990, I noticed an article in The New York Times about Delbert Ward, a barely literate elderly man in upstate New York who was accused of murdering his ailing brother, Bill. The Wards seemed like they were from another era. Bill and Delbert lived with their two other brothers Roscoe and Lyman, in a dilapidated shack with no running water or heat, except for a portable kerosene stove, and they never changed their clothes. Delbert, who had an IQ of 72, had allegedly smothered Bill with a pillow in the bed that they shared. The town was rallying to Delbert’s defense, even raising the money for him to fight the charges, which grew to include a bizarre theory of incest gone bad. The townspeople believed Delbert, with his low IQ, had been coerced into signing a false confession. As soon as I read the article, I knew this was the story we had been waiting for.
When Bruce got to work that morning, he burst into my office, excitedly waving the same article in my face. He had read the piece that morning and had come to the same conclusion. Before we had a time to change our minds (and encouraged by the positive reception that “Outrageous Taxi Stories” had received from film festivals during the past year), we threw ourselves into making what would eventually be Brother’s Keeper. A few days later, with no budget and little filmmaking experience, we drove four hours to the tiny town of Munnsville to see if there was a film there waiting to be made. We spent a year shooting Brother’s Keeper, holding down our full-time jobs at Maysles Films while spending weekends in Munnsville, often crashing on the floor of people’s homes (or, sometimes, their incredibly frigid cabins). We maxed out a dozen credit cards between us and took out second mortgages on our homes to get the film in the can. Just as the case was going to trial and we had run out of money, the now defunct PBS series American Playhouse came to our rescue, giving us $400,000 in funding to complete the film. We quit our jobs at Maysles Films and set up our own production company Creative Thinking International. With real money from a real broadcaster, we were able to film the trial, giving us the story arc and climax we needed.
Bruce and I took turns operating the second camera. Our constant use of two cameras allowed us to get true reaction shots. (Courtesy of Annamaria DiSanto)
Making Brother’s Keeper turned out to be quite a Cinderella story for us. The film won the Audience Award at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. It also garnered Best Documentary honors from the Directors Guild of America, the National Board of Review, and the New York Film Critics Circle. Comparing the film to “fine fiction,” the late Vincent Canby of The New York Times called Brother’s Keeper “a remarkably rich portrait of a man in the context of his family, his community, the law, and even the seasons.” As budding documentary filmmakers who considered ourselves storytellers as much as journalists, there was no higher compliment.
Bruce and I were now officially documentarians by profession. As much as we loved the acclaim for Brother’s Keeper, I think what really hooked us was the adventure of capturing the unknown. Verité filmmaking requires a huge leap of faith: following a story as it unfolds means not knowing how—or even if—the story will end. The payoff isn’t just a compelling story; a great verité film reveals larger emotional truths about the human condition that are rarely the domain of straightforward news reports or historical documentaries.
Gimme Shelter, for instance, is so much more than just a brilliant concert film that captured the Stones in peak form. The Maysles Brothers followed the Stones on their 1969 American tour as it led up to the Altamont concert. On the advice of the Grateful Dead, the Stones hired the Hells Angels motorcycle gang to provide security This was a tragic mistake. The bikers had no idea how to handle the job. During the opening sets by the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Jefferson Airplane, the Angels—strung out on acid, speed, and who knows what else—began beating up people in the crowd. By the time the Stones went on, things were out of control. “People, people,” Mick Jagger implored the crowd, “who’s fighting, and what for?” But it was too late. By the time the show was over, four people were dead. One of them was stabbed by an Angel, caught on film by the Maysleses’ cameras. In part due to the film, Altamont became legendary as a symbol of the flameout of the ’60s utopian dream. Through a keen eye and a groundbreaking editing technique, the film gives a sense of the context this all occurred in—the tumultuous period that led up to the band’s ill-fated attempt at a hippie utopia. The point was not merely to “let the music speak for itself,” which seems to be the point of a typical rock concert film, but to show what this music—how it was performed and how it was received—revealed about the environment in which it was created and consumed.
Some Kind of Monster allowed us to pay subtle tribute to the people who got us started in the business. Our film really is an homage to Gimme Shelter. Just as Gimme Shelter was originally intended to be just a document of the Stones’ 1969 American tour, Monster began as a simple making-of-an-album promo film. Like Gimme Shelter, Monster transcends its putative subject by providing a window into our times. As the critic Rob Nelson put it, Monster tackles “the incestuous relationship between psychology and creativity.” If Gimme Shelter is about the death of a mass movement’s communal dream, Monster is about struggling to maintain a similar dream within the microcosmic context of our families and loved ones. Put it this way: Can you imagine a film about a metal band undergoing group therapy appearing thirty years ago? Or even ten years ago?
The structure of our film also pays tribute to Gimme Shelter. Monster telegraphs its ending and uses a flashback structure to take the viewer on an epic journey Gimme Shelter also begins where it ends, with Jagger and the Stones reviewing the Altamont footage in the Maysleses’ editing room. We know from the start that someone has been stabbed to death; the events leading up to the killing are shown in flashbacks. The late Charlotte Zwerin, the codirector and editor of the film (and Bruce’s mentor), brilliantly turned the voyeuristic gaze back on the subjects of the film themselves. At various points, the film returns to Jagger watching the Altamont footage on a Steenbeck editing table. Confronted with tragic images for which he is partially responsible, he struggles to formulate a response. With the camera on him, he can’t turn away. As Lars Ulrich would discover twenty years later, the camera makes you feel like you have to say something.
I’m not saying that Some Kind of Monster is as important and groundbreaking as Gimme Shelter (though it’s been rewarding to hear some critics make the comparison without knowing of our connection to the Maysleses or our conscious attempt to emulate their film’s structure). Nor do I want to trivialize the Altamont tragedy by giving Metallica’s struggles the same symbolic weight as the murder that occurred right in front of the Stones’
stage and what that death said about the souring of the Woodstock generation. The point is, you don’t have to be a Stones fan to be moved by the Maysleses-Zwerin film, and I’d like to think you don’t have to like Metallica or metal to respond to the themes in Monster. You just have to be someone who’s ever tried to connect to those around you in a fractious world that does so much to tear us apart.
CHAPTER 3
WEST MEMPHIS AND BEYOND
Publicity still from Paradise Lost, the film that first introduced us to Metallica. For more information on the case, go to www.wm3.org. (Courtesy of HBO)
If three kids hadn’t been railroaded by the American justice system, I probably never would have met Metallica.
Once the whirlwind surrounding Brother’s Keeper died down, Bruce and I weren’t sure what to do next. In 1993, Shelia Nevins, the doyenne of documentaries at HBO and a fan of Brother’s Keeper, sent us a small wire-service story buried deep inside The New York Times. Three teenage boys had just been accused of murdering three eight-year-old boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, a small town near the Tennessee border. The teens had reportedly committed the murders as some sort of horrific ritual sacrifice to Satan. Shelia suggested there could be a documentary here. If so, HBO might be interested.
There was nothing in the article to suggest that the kids might have been wrongly accused. Their possible innocence wasn’t what piqued our interest. We were mainly fascinated by the idea that these three friends could commit such a horrible crime. A few months earlier, two ten-year-olds in Liverpool, England, had abducted and murdered two-year-old Jamie Bulger, a crime that garnered international attention for its pointlessness and the age of the killers. The Arkansas murders seemed to me to be similarly inexplicable. Sensing an international pattern of disaffected youth, we thought we were going down to Arkansas to make a film about guilty teenagers, sort of a real-life River’s Edge.
It didn’t take us long to decide that these kids were innocent. A lethal brew of Bible-thumping fundamentalism combined with shoddy local journalism, bad police work, and a narcissistic defendant who seemed to enjoy being in the spotlight had all coalesced into a modern-day witch trial. There was very little evidence connecting the three teens to the crimes. Besides a confession from a semiretarded defendant, which we and the defense team strongly suspected was coerced, there was another defendant, Damien Echols, who wore pentagrams because of his belief in Wicca, and—the smoking gun—listened to Metallica. Yes, the prosecutors had such a lack of evidence that they actually introduced Metallica lyrics into evidence at trial.1 That’s when we realized that these three teens were doomed.
We spent a year filming in West Memphis. We interviewed the families of the victims and the defendants, as well as both legal teams, and we filmed all the court proceedings. When it came time to edit the footage, we realized that we really needed to use Metallica’s music. Damien was particularly fond of “Welcome Home (Sanitarium),” a melancholy plea to recede from the world entirely and therefore perfect for our movie. We did a little research and discovered that Metallica had never licensed its music for use in films. Even if the band made an exception for us, we reasoned, we surely couldn’t afford it. HBO was being very generous, but the value of Metallica’s music in the open market was probably equivalent to half of our entire film budget. Still, there was no harm in trying, because we really wanted to avoid having to hire someone to write some anonymous Metallica-esque score.
After digging up the name and address of Metallica’s management, an outfit called Q Prime in Midtown Manhattan, I wrote a detailed letter that laid out why we thought Metallica’s music was key to the film. We argued that heavy-metal music was on trial as much as these three innocent teens. We felt this was a relevant issue to dangle in front of Metallica, since metal had such a bad rap with parents. We mentioned Dream Deceivers, David Van Taylor’s recent documentary about a lawsuit that blamed the band Judas Priest for the suicide and attempted suicide of two of its fans. We sang our own praises, explaining that Brother’s Keeper was a film that broke down stereotypes, something we wanted to do with these teenage Metallica fans.
Truthfully, I assumed it would be nearly impossible to get through to these guys, literally and figuratively. With Paradise Lost, I wanted to break down the common stereotypes people had about alienated kids who were into metal, but I had my own stereotypical view of metal bands. I assumed that Metallica couldn’t give two shits about cinema and real-life miscarriages of justice. I figured their nickname was “Alcoholica” for a reason: they were most likely a bunch of lazy, beer-swilling idiots paid too much money to make noise for other lazy, beer-swilling idiots. I sent off the fax, assuming it would be the first of many unacknowledged requests.
I hopped in my car and headed home for the day I was on the highway when I heard a strange ringing. I remembered that I’d just bought my first cell phone. It was one of those bulky “transportables”—a portable phone in a cubelike bag, much like a windup Vietnam-era field radio. I hadn’t yet figured out how to use it, so I punched buttons at random and tried not to run myself off the road. Somehow I managed to answer it. It was Bruce back at our office. He was patching me into Cliff Burnstein, Metallica’s manager.
“I got your fax,” Cliff said. “I loved Brother’s Keeper.”
For a second, I thought Bruce might be pulling a prank. “That’s cool,” I said tentatively “I can’t believe you’re calling back so fast.”
“I saw you guys do a Q&A opening night at Film Forum. Great film. The band loved it, too.”
We told Cliff why we wanted the music. A few weeks later, Bruce and I had a phone conversation with the band. They ultimately gave us the three tracks we requested—"Welcome Home (Sanitarium),” “Orion,” and “The Call of Ktulu.”2 As we dealt with Metallica and its management and legal representatives, we were amazed at how fair and responsive everyone was. We were even more intrigued by the extreme disconnect between these guys’ public image and what they were really like offstage.
Paradise Lost finally aired on HBO in 1996, after premiering at the Sundance Film Festival a few months earlier. We heard that Metallica were really proud of their connection to our film and the wrongfully accused defendants, now dubbed the “West Memphis 3.”3 Lars in particular was really into the film as a piece of art. We spoke with the band a few times about making a Metallica movie, but the conversations never really got very far. Bruce and I made it clear that to make a film about Metallica, we’d need to explore their personal lives, their offstage personas. We reiterated that we weren’t interested in making a standard on-the-road concert film. Lars’s interest had grown now that he’d seen Paradise Lost, but the idea clearly was not flying with the other guys. (In hindsight, I’m thankful for their reticence. Some Kind of Monster would have been some kind of bore if we’d made it during this period. There just wasn’t enough going on with the band on an emotional and interpersonal level.)
Over the years, we spoke with Lars several times about making a Metallica movie. (Courtesy of Bob Richman)
A few months after Paradise Lost came out, Lars invited us to see Metallica play at Madison Square Garden. He hinted that the band might want to revisit the film idea. Needless to say it was my first Metallica show. In fact, it was the first rock show I’d gone to since a stint following the Grateful Dead around during college fourteen years earlier. Before that, music had been almost completely absent from my life. When I was a kid, my father, who owned a lumberyard, blew his ear out using a ripsaw without ear protection. The injury left him extremely sensitive to even moderately loud sounds, so music played at a volume level audible to most human beings was basically forbidden in the house.
I showed up at the Garden not knowing what to expect. I discovered how great Metallica is live and how hard-core its fans are. The band members were clearly not the moronic metal-heads I’d envisioned—in fact, they were brilliant showmen. Hearing some of the music we used in the film brought a little lump in my throat. I’d grown up
in a house devoid of music, I hadn’t seen live music in more than a decade, and here I was at a Metallica concert—as Metallica’s invited guest! I even had a backstage pass. I was pumped.
Toward the end of the show, a huge light tower came crashing down unexpectedly. Live electrical wires whipped around, throwing off mean-looking sparks. Crew members were frantically trying to get out of the way One of them became engulfed in flames. Others put out the fire, and the burned man, apparently unconscious, was carried away on a stretcher.
I was horrified. I was also a little stoned, so it all seemed real to me. “Do you think that guy’s okay?” I asked Bruce.
Bruce couldn’t believe I was so gullible as to fall for this gag. Apparently Metallica staged this “accident” every night on this tour. In any case, I had never seen anything like this before. I was hooked. (I found out later that the stunt was a nod to a real pyrotechnics accident that happened in 1992, when Metallica was onstage in Montreal, which left James with serious burns. The dark humor behind the gag appealed to my sensibilities, which made me want to explore further who these guys really were.)
After the last encore, we made our way backstage, hoping we could talk more about the Metallica movie idea. Lars, Jason, and Kirk were courteous—for a few seconds. They each had entourages and well-wishers to greet; we were just part of the amorphous backstage landscape. James was in seclusion, his bodyguard preventing anyone from entering his inner sanctum. This did not bode well for him letting us film him offstage—we couldn’t even get to his dressing room to say hello.
When I got home, I took out the cool Metallica shirt I’d bought on the way out, and realized that I’d mistakenly picked up a shirt advertising the opening band, Corrosion of Conformity Taking this as a sign, I threw the shirt in my closet and pretty much put Metallica out of my mind for the next two years.
Metallica: This Monster Lives Page 4