I expected to see bolts of lightning appear. But nothing happened. Nothing you could see. Vincent Ciucci sat perfectly still, as did we on the other side of the plate glass. The murmuring behind the glass had ceased. His body was shot through with forty-five hundred volts of electricity; then, at a second signal from the warden, thirty-five hundred volts; and finally, another forty-five hundred volts. The muscles of Vincent’s neck ballooned out slowly and expansively, as though they would explode. His neck looked like Dizzy Gillespie’s cheeks when he was blowing trumpet; surely it would burst. Then, Vincent’s thighs began to glow red, and smoke arose from them. At this point, Brennan, sitting next to me on one of the benches, rolled off the bench and threw up—Brennan, the veteran reporter who’d covered other executions. He went to a corner of the room and continued to vomit. Two guards rolled down the metallic screen, behind which Vincent’s body continued to smoke. Smoke rose from his thighs to the ceiling, covering his upper body and face. I thought of the photos of his children on his now vacant cell wall . . . a cell awaiting the next victim.
Moments later the metallic screen was rolled up once again, revealing a tableau of Ciucci free of restraints, draped across the electric chair in a crucified position. The prison doctor hovered over him, checking vital signs. Next to the doctor stood the warden, and on the other side a Catholic priest. Two guards stood at the rear. I saw the doctor nod to the warden, and the metal curtain came down for the last time, as Ray Brennan struggled to his feet. Warden Johnson appeared in the witness room. He seemed a beaten man. He looked at his wristwatch, then spoke in a quiet, almost catatonic voice: “It’s 12:07 a.m.; the orders of the court were carried out at 12:01. Vincent Ciucci, convicted of four counts of first-degree murder, was executed as determined by the court. Those of you on deadline can leave now; the others, please wait until I dismiss you.”
The beat reporters, about twenty of the thirty witnesses, filed out. I leaned back on the bench behind me. I couldn’t speak—no one spoke. This scene has played back in my mind’s eye for fifty years. This was the fate that awaited Paul Crump unless I could find a way to get his story to a sympathetic public, and to the governor. I walked slowly from the Criminal Courts Building to a side street where my car was parked. It was freezing cold. A fog had settled in, but I could see a small woman, shabbily dressed, standing alone in the doorway of the courts building: Vincent Ciucci’s mother, waiting to claim his body. I had an image of a young Vincent playing on a sidewalk under his mother’s watchful gaze. The streets around the county jail were still crowded with cars and people waiting to see the lights dim. It was almost 1:00 a.m., and they were still waiting, and they might have waited forever; the dimming of the lights was a myth. There were thousands of people out there, seeking the vicarious thrill of a man’s execution.
When I got to my apartment, my mother was asleep. I tried to wash SAIN off my wrist, but it wouldn’t come off. It faded slowly on its own after several weeks, as Ciucci’s life had dissolved from flesh to dust.
While working on the documentary, I wrote articles about the case for Lois Solomon’s counterculture four-sheet newspaper, the Paper. The articles were reprinted in a prominent liberal magazine, Paul Krassner’s Realist. Lois was also helpful in convincing a young civil liberties lawyer, Donald Page Moore, to take Crump’s case pro bono. Paul had one final appeal left to the U.S. Supreme Court, to grant a stay. Moore gave us a blistering interview that brought chills as I stood next to the camera. He said, “There was an overwhelming probability that Paul was beaten to within an inch of his life. . . . This is what the Chicago police have been doing, the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. The police have a disgraceful history of beating and torturing people in police stations.” Moore wrapped up his powerful oration with the argument that “if the State kills Crump, it will be worse than the killing he is accused of, because this killing will be in cold blood.”
The guard who identified Paul by his voice was supposed to be knowledgeable about weapons, but was unable to identify the gun with which he was hit. When asked by William Gerber, Crump’s court-appointed attorney, how he could identify Paul’s voice but not the weapon, the guard answered, “When you’re working with a hundred or so of these niggers every day, you get to know one voice from another pretty easy.”
Warden Johnson gave us access to Death Row, where we filmed Paul in his cell. Paul described the beating he received from the police until he broke down and confessed. He said that the beatings were so severe, he started to pray out loud. He begged God to take his life, at which point Lieutenant Pape shouted, “What would the white Mother of God want to do with a black son of a bitch like you?”
When Paul first described to me what he had endured at the hands of the police, he was angry. His tears were nonstop; he was hysterical. But now, in front of a film camera, he was unable to describe these events with the same emotion. At one point I stopped the camera, and for the first of three times in my career, I resorted to a technique I read was used by the French director H.-G. Clouzot to evoke emotion from an actor. I said, “Paul, do you love me?”
“You know I love you, Bill,” he answered.
“Do you trust me?” I asked him.
“I trust you with my life!”
I took him by the shoulders and repeated, “You love me and you trust me . . .”
“Yes!” he responded emphatically, at which point I hit him as hard as I could across the face.
“Now tell the story!” I shouted, and Butler started the camera. Paul was stunned and hurt, but he gave in to his emotions instead of lashing out at me. The slap brought back the physical and psychological pain he had experienced at the repeated beatings. His tears lasted for several minutes, but Butler’s camera ran out of film after only a few seconds of it. In the documentary, after Paul’s breakdown there is a quiet shot of John Justin Smith walking alone along the lakefront. On the sound track we hear Paul’s crying, as though in Smith’s memory.
On a Monday in March 1962, we were filming on Death Row when Warden Johnson appeared with a telegram. The Warden, in a quiet voice, told Paul that his final appeal for a stay of execution had been denied by the U.S. Supreme Court.
His legal rights had now been exhausted, and in the absence of a commutation from the Governor of Illinois, a date for execution would be set.
A long silence. Paul took the news with no outward sign of emotion. I could only imagine what he felt, though he had been to this place before, many times, and had lived for years with the certain knowledge he was going to die in the electric chair. Finally, he cleared his throat and told the warden that he was more concerned about him, and his opposition to capital punishment. We filmed Paul receiving the last rites from Father Serfling, and then, speaking directly into the camera, he said, “I’ve done things in my life that if I ever got caught for them, I’d be in prison the rest of my life, but not this. Not murder . . . I can’t help but think about the electric chair all the time now, and I don’t feel like a man anymore, just a statistic, only a statistic. It all seems like a macabre dream, a nightmare, but it’s not a nightmare. You wonder if prayer and God mean anything. I try to sleep, but I can’t. I can only get to sleep holding on to the bars. It’s like holding on to reality . . .”
There follows a shot of him in his cell, lights out, holding the bars, until his eyes close, and then—the film plunges into the abyss:
A montage of the electric chair, as it appears in Paul’s nightmare state, waiting like a prehistoric monster for its next victim. We see ankle cuffs and arm braces snapping shut, the electrode pad moving as though on its own to cover the victim’s head. We filmed Paul’s nightmare on the day his appeals ran out. We were able to steal these shots of the chair without the warden’s knowledge. He did not want it filmed, but Butler and I were able to persuade one of the guards to allow us into the chamber and photograph the chair at various angles for a few minutes. In retrospect, I think the warden knew we were doing it, but couldn’t grant off
icial permission.
The final sequence shows John Justin Smith, alone in an inner-city neighborhood, on the South Side, watching a group of black children playing near a construction site. A new tenement is going up—a slum of the future. A loud crash is heard as the construction crane drops a load of earth and debris onto an enormous pile. The children, future Paul Crumps, would be thus deposited on the slag heap at the fringes of an uncaring society. Dissonant music is heard over this shot.
Butler and I were editing the film each night as we got the dailies from the lab. Most of the time we worked at my apartment. My mother would make us lunch and dinner, and we’d work on weekends twelve or fifteen hours a day, with an old pair of rewinds and a 16 mm. viewer and splicer we had “liberated” from the WGN-TV newsroom. Splicing was done with glue, not clear cellophane tape, which came in several years later.
One evening, Ernie Lucas, a veteran TV director, happened to pass by on his way to pick up copy for the ten o’clock news. He was surprised to see us in a film editing bay in the newsroom, since we were involved exclusively with “live” telecasts. He expressed shock that we were editing our negative, and that we were not handling it carefully with white cotton gloves. “What are you guys doing?” he asked. We told him we were working on a short film for our own amusement. “But you’re cutting the negative; you’re not supposed to even touch it.”
“Why not?” We were confused.
Ernie was patient.
“Don’t you know that camera negative is never touched until you have a final edited work print?” he asked.
“What’s a work print?”
Ernie explained that a work print was made immediately after the negative was developed, and that it was this work print that you cut and recut, and only when you were finished was the negative conformed to the work print version. Neither did we know that the work print, negative, and 16 mm. sound track had to be edge-numbered simultaneously, so that picture and sound could be synchronized. Consecutive serial numbers were printed on the edges of these elements at intervals of a foot. Since we didn’t realize this, parts of our negative were scratched and torn, spliced and respliced, until we could belatedly apply edge-numbering. We had to “match” our synch-sound interviews by lip-reading, which took weeks, and we had no idea how to achieve a final print. While we were correcting these errors, Red Quinlan was becoming impatient. Where was the film we promised him, which was now over budget without his having seen a frame?
Meanwhile, the Crump case was heating up. Paul had a new execution date, and once again through the efforts of Lois Solomon, the noted civil rights attorney Elmer Gertz came on board to help Don Moore draft a clemency appeal to Governor Otto Kerner. Gertz was the lawyer who had successfully achieved the release of Nathan Leopold, the surviving member of the Loeb-Leopold case.
Butler and I showed the film, now called The People vs. Paul Crump, to Red in a screening room at WBKB. He was excited beyond my expectations. He said he wanted us to make another print to send to his bosses at the ABC network in New York. He felt that the network would want to air the show, and that it was powerful enough to gain wide public support that might spare Crump’s life. He set up screenings for Warden Johnson, Father Serfling, Elmer Gertz, John Justin Smith, and Don Moore. He also arranged to show the film to members of the Chicago press at screenings he hosted, in which he would explain my involvement with the case.
The film became a cause célèbre in Chicago. A casual encounter with a stranger at a cocktail party I didn’t want to attend had led to this. I was being celebrated not only as a talented young filmmaker but a crusader for justice. Columnists wrote glowing reviews of the film and the injustices done to Crump before the film had a release date. John Justin Smith wrote several columns in the Daily News about his own participation and how in the course of working on it, he came to believe that Paul should not be executed. I went back to the county jail and told Paul and the warden what was going on, and they allowed themselves new hope. After several weeks of euphoria, I got a call from Red to meet him at his office at 10:00 o’clock the next morning. He was standing behind his desk. He came around and put his hand on my shoulder.
“You made a great picture,” he began. “An important picture.” He led me to a leather couch across the room, and we sat down. His perpetual smile was gone. “I sent the film to New York, and they told me there’s no way it can run on the network,” he said.
A sense of dread started in the pit of my stomach.
“They said if we even run it locally, it could expose the network to all kinds of lawsuits. They haven’t ordered me not to run it, they advised me strongly that it’s inflammatory, but it’s my decision.”
A tinge of hope. Red continued, “So I asked Elmer Gertz and Don Moore to see the film. Both had the same reaction. It would do Paul more harm than good.”
I was confused and angry.
“Moore says he won’t stand by the things he said in the film, and Elmer said the best way is to respect the system and appeal directly to the Governor. Not try to create a firestorm of public opinion, which the film will certainly do; and if the Governor feels pressured, he’ll just ignore the petition.”
“Does Paul know about this?” I asked.
“He has no choice but to go with the advice of his lawyers. He doesn’t want the film to air.”
I felt betrayed, and that they were all wrong. Paul had gone through the system and relied on lawyers for years, and now he was about to be executed. “What are you going to do, Red?”
“I told you, it’s my decision. But here’s the thing; what happens if I run it and we’re wrong? If the public or some capital punishment pressure group jumps all over it? And if the Governor decides to let Paul burn? How would you feel if they blame your film?
“I’m not going to run it, Bill,” Red said, sadly. “I can’t take that chance, and neither can you. But I’m going to send it to the Governor. I think he should see it. I think it will give him a better picture of who Paul Crump is today, and I want the film to be seen. So I asked my guys to find out when the next important film festival takes place, and they tell me it’s in San Francisco in September, and I’m going to enter it in the documentary category in competition.” He was certain the film would be accepted by the festival committee, which it was, and he thought good things would result from that.
Red saw that I was crushed; I had put my energy and passion into making this film, with the intent of saving a man’s life. I did it with his help and support, but now we both knew it would never be aired. He offered an alternative as consolation. He floated the idea of me coming over to WBKB with Butler, where we would have our own documentary unit at the station, making films about local issues.
It was a bitter defeat, but Butler and I were soon off to San Francisco. My emotions were mixed: extreme disappointment and accomplishment. I didn’t know whether to celebrate or mourn.
I had never been out of Chicago, so San Francisco was a revelation. A new American culture was emerging. The Beat poetry and novels of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the bebop and progressive jazz of Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan. The Beat Generation was slow-dissolving into the Haight-Ashbury era of sex, drugs, and psychedelia. The creative energy everywhere was electrifying.
The 1962 San Francisco Film Festival was held at the Metro Theater on Union Street in the Marina. It was one of the last movie palaces, built in the 1920s and remodeled in the early ’40s. It had a neoclassical, deco look, with large, graceful chandeliers in the auditorium.
Butler and I arrived for the closing-night ceremony, expecting absolutely nothing, but happy to be a part of it. The seating was assigned, and there were no seats for us. We stood in the back of the auditorium, me in a trench coat, Butler in a short leather jacket. A long list of awards in various categories was presented to ecstatic recipients. The award for Best Documentary was given, but not to our film. The evening was about to end, and Butler and I looked at each other and shrugged.
There was a pause in the proceedings; then the master of ceremonies took the microphone. I don’t remember him but I’ll never forget his words: “Every once in a while, and not every year, a film comes along that is beyond categorization; that is so outstanding we give it the highest award of the festival, the Golden Gate Award. This year, that film is The People vs. Paul Crump.” A short segment of the film was shown, followed by thunderous applause as I made my way to the stage, bringing Butler with me. I introduced him and spoke about his invaluable contribution to the film. I then thanked Red Quinlan, and the festival jury, and I discovered what it felt like to be honored.
There was a dinner afterward at a fancy hotel that went by in a haze, after which I called my mother, who was crying with joy, and Red Quinlan, who laughed and shouted, “That’s great. That’s so great! Well, my boy, you’re off and running!” After a day of interviews, we were to go back to Chicago. At breakfast, I read a story in the San Francisco Chronicle about our winning the grand prize, but what caught my attention was a review of a play being revived at the Actor’s Workshop. It was the first American production, but it had created a sensation in England a few years earlier and was described with a phrase I found compelling: “a comedy of menace.” The reviewer said it was an evening of theater not to be missed. By a new young British playwright named Harold Pinter, it was called The Birthday Party. I went to see it that night—a revelation as pivotal as Citizen Kane.
The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir Page 5