I returned to Los Angeles to edit the film with Bud Smith, one of Wolper’s best editors. We were excited to be working with this visceral footage. Shaping it into a coherent story in a style that drew from contemporary foreign films—subliminal cuts, jump cuts, unexpected transitions—we worked twelve-hour days for six weeks, six days a week, stopping only for lunch.
We presented our first cut to Wolper and his top executive, Mel Stuart, a fine documentary filmmaker in his own right. Wolper and Mel arrived in the screening room, smiling, one late afternoon. Other Wolper directors and executives had been invited, and the room was packed. “The hour of truth,” Mel said sardonically. I was proud of what we were about to show, and it came in at the required forty-seven minutes and thirty seconds.
Wolper told the projectionist to roll it. Afterward, the lights came on to an uncomfortable silence that lasted almost a minute. Dave and Mel were no longer smiling. Suddenly Dave stood up, took off his shoe, and threw it at the screen with full force, leaving a hole at the point of impact. He was furious. “There comes a time when the white-hot light goes on and”—he was sputtering—“and the bullshit falls away . . . like bricks on the ground!” Those were his exact words; I’ve never forgotten them, nor has Bud.
Then Wolper turned to us, fuming. “This is the worst piece of shit I’ve ever seen!”
Mel Stuart joined in. “Fucking awful! A simple idea, and you assholes made it incomprehensible!”
“I hate this fucking thing!” Wolper added. He turned to Mel. “What can we do? Is it salvageable?”
Mel was pacing the room. “I don’t know, but we’re going back into the cutting room, and we’re going to look at every fucking frame that’s been shot and see if it makes any sense at all.”
I was crushed. I looked at Bud and Julian Ludwig. Both seemed calm; they had seen this before. I never had a critique so brutal before or since; I was sure to be fired.
“You fucking idiots!” Wolper shouted, staring at me with hatred in his eyes. He turned to Julian. “It’s obvious he”—pointing to me—“knows nothing. Why didn’t you straighten him out?”
Julian extended his arms as if to say, What could I do? I kept my anger in check. I had no idea what was wrong. We went back to the cutting room, and in a week of sixteen-hour days, Mel slashed the film to pieces as I watched. The finished film was a slick, impersonal montage of stunts, with little opportunity to know or care about the people performing them. I don’t claim that my version was a masterpiece; it didn’t work for Wolper or Mel, and it was their company. But the ABC network showing of The Bold Men in prime time turned out to be a critical and commercial success. It was my first shot at the big time: a network documentary. The success was qualified, but a giant step nonetheless. I wasn’t fired.
For a long time I felt this trial by fire shaped me as a filmmaker. It broke me down, and was an invaluable lesson: go straight for the story, don’t clutter it with gimmicks, “technique,” or “director’s touches.” These documentaries weren’t meant as a showcase for my talents, slim as they were, nor were they meant to impress film buffs. They were aimed at the largest possible audience, people of all ages across all boundaries. Wolper and Stuart knew how to cast a wide net. I didn’t. They broke me down, only to remake me in their image. Much was gained, but much lost. My Wolper documentaries led to future work, but they stripped me of the ambition to make films that reflected my own sensibilities. The filmmakers I most admire are all “visible” in their work. Their approach to life, their compassion, their sense of humor or irony, show in all their films. Because I was a neophyte at Wolper, my only aim was to please, but a film that’s only meant to please, that embodies no deeper personal truths, will not resonate. It’s impossible for me to watch most of my films today, especially the early documentaries. What I gained was experience and knowledge. I had been to Spain, Mexico, Houston, Utah, and San Diego all for the first time. Filmmaking had become an adventure as well as an education, and an invaluable insight into various cultures.
I moved on to research and create The Thin Blue Line, which Wolper sold as a documentary about law enforcement. Thinking about this subject and how I would portray it opened a door to my past:
An uncle on my mother’s side, Harry Lang, was a notorious Chicago cop in the 1930s. A detective-sergeant, he was given the assignment by Chicago mayor Anton Cermak to “clean up” the Italian mob before the 1932 Democratic National Convention and the 1933 World’s Fair. The leader of the mob, after the imprisonment of Al Capone, was Frank “The Enforcer” Nitti, and an often-whispered rumor in my family was that Uncle Harry had ties to Nitti. Corruption in Chicago was so rampant that Mayor Cermak himself had become a millionaire as a result of his own racketeering connections. The North Side crime boss, Teddy Newberry, in concert with Mayor Cermak, paid Uncle Harry $15,000 to kill Frank Nitti. According to legend, later bolstered by facts, Harry took two patrolmen to Nitti’s office on LaSalle Street, where he had easy access, shot Nitti in the back and neck, then shot himself in the arm to make it appear that Nitti had shot him first.
Miraculously, Nitti survived, and he ordered hits on Cermak and Newberry. Newberry was killed, and attempts were made on Cermak’s life, but he left Chicago for an extended vacation in Miami. He took Uncle Harry along as a bodyguard, and Harry was with him the night he appeared on the dais at a public event honoring newly elected president Franklin Roosevelt. A lone assassin, Gus Zangara, stood up in the large crowd at Bay Front Park and shot Mayor Cermak, who died three weeks later. Zangara was reported to be a madman. His target was said to be Roosevelt, but it was later revealed that he had been a sharpshooter for the Italian army during World War I and a hired killer from the Sicilian Mafia, and that his target was in fact Cermak.
Uncle Harry was fired from the Chicago Police Department and put on trial for the attempted murder of Frank Nitti. A jury found him guilty, and it was reported that he said, “I will blow the lid off Chicago politics and wreck the Democratic Party if I have to serve one day in jail.” He was granted a new trial which was later dismissed. I became aware of him when I was five. He was married to my mother’s beloved sister, Sarah (“Aunt Sunny”). They had a handsomely furnished apartment, about twelve rooms on the West Side, with an enormous free-standing radio that stood four feet high and three feet wide. They also had a large black Cadillac in which they used to take my mother, father, and me for long drives to Chicago’s northern suburbs for dinner at an elegant restaurant. Some of the happiest times in my young life were on those drives, when I sat by a window in the back seat and gazed at the unfamiliar neighborhoods floating by, as if in a slide show.
On summer vacations from high school I used to work at Uncle Harry’s tavern/liquor store, the Sip and Bottle on Irving Park Road, where I would overhear conversations between him and his cronies from the police force and the underworld. This was my first exposure to the ambiguous nature of a policeman’s life. It prepared me for The Thin Blue Line, my second documentary for Wolper.
Its first image was a policeman’s badge. An officer’s voice is heard on the sound track: “This piece of tin is a target. Out on the street, we don’t know what we’re gonna be up against; any second could be our last.”
In the 1960s the city of Rochester, New York, had experienced race riots similar to those in Watts. I contacted the mayor and the chief of police, who allowed me to film a day in the life of a Rochester street cop in a troubled neighborhood. Previously respected in his precinct, he had become “The Fuzz,” and I tried to capture his feelings and the challenges these changes produced.
In another sequence, I went out with an undercover Los Angeles narc on a surveillance of a gas station attendant suspected of dealing heroin. The cop, “Paul,” makes a “buy” from “Eddie,” the dealer. We then see the heroin being tested in the police lab in graphic detail. It tests positive, and “Eddie” is arrested and given a sentence of five years, later reduced. The point of the sequence was that the war on drugs was being lost
. Detectives were risking their lives to take dealers off the streets, only to see them come out of jail after doing very little time
Unlike the documentaries made by committed independent filmmakers today, the Wolper shows aimed only to fill forty-seven minutes of air time and lead the audience by the hand with wall-to-wall narration. Wolper’s philosophy, often stated, was, “You’ve gotta hit ’em over the head, and after you hit ’em over the head, you’ve gotta hit ’em again and again.” And so our films relied heavily on narration, telling the audience what to think and feel, rather than insightful interviews and simple observations of human nature.
Pete Rozelle sat behind his desk leaning on his elbows in a large office on Park Avenue South, headquarters of the National Football League, his fingers covering his mouth and nose, revealing only piercing blue eyes. If he meant to appear intimidating, he did. Until the 1950s, the NFL had been a money-losing venture. When I met Rozelle in 1965, the empire over which he presided was valued at a mere $50 million. But television was emerging as the league’s benefactor, paying $14 million for broadcast rights, and there was competition from another pro league, the AFL. The NFL had its superstars—Johnny Unitas, Fran Tarkenton, Jim Brown, Jim Taylor—but a team’s average payroll was less than $1 million, several million less than what many of the NFL players earn individually today.
“Why should I help you?” Rozelle asked behind his half-shielded face—cold, noncommittal. I told him our show would be seen on the full ABC network. “I have a contract with CBS,” he said, a razor’s edge to his voice. “CBS has exclusive rights to our games.”
“I understand, but our show will be a special, and it will be on film, and it would feature a history of the game.”
“That’s wonderful,” he said sarcastically. “I also have a film division, NFL Films. They have exclusive rights to our games and our own specials.”
“I’d want to work with them,” I assured him.
He buzzed his secretary to send in Ed Sabol, head of NFL Films. The recently launched division was Sabol’s idea. Ed was tall, thick, with prematurely white hair, red cheeks, and a brash, aggressive attitude. He wore a dark blue suit with a bright red tie. He and Rozelle talked about my proposal as though I wasn’t in the room.
“Why should we, Ed? What do we gain?” And on and on, in the same vein.
Finally Sabol turned to me. “Look, you’ll have to use our cameramen, and we’d want full screen credit.”
“Absolutely,” I agreed.
“I don’t think we have anything to lose,” he told Rozelle. “It could be good promotion.”
“Your call,” Rozelle told him, but I knew it was Rozelle’s call.
“You know we’re in exhibition season,” Sabol informed me. It was mid-July. “When do you need to start shooting?”
“As soon as possible; we have to be on the air in October.”
Because Rozelle knew and liked Wolper, he eventually agreed. “There’s an exhibition game in San Francisco in three weeks, Forty-Niners versus the Cleveland Browns—would that work for you?”
I arranged to film the Browns and Forty-Niners in training camp. Along with two Wolper cameramen, Vilis Lapenieks and John Alonzo, who later became one of the best cinematographers in Hollywood (Chinatown, Blue Thunder), I set off for Hiram, Ohio, the Browns’ training facility. I also had Wolper’s best sound man again, the young Englishman, Nigel Noble.
When we checked into a small motel in Hiram, we were met with curiosity by the locals. There were a lot of young girls in town. Several were waitresses at the motel. They wondered who these four young guys with long hair were, carrying heavy cases of technical equipment. For two days the girls, smiling and giggling, watched us come and go, trying to figure out what we were doing in their little town, until finally on the third night, a few of them approached us. “Who are you guys?” they asked shyly.
We’d known this was coming, and we tried to stay cool, so we had a prepared answer: “Please don’t tell anyone, we’re Herman’s Hermits”—the English rock band, enjoying a huge hit at the time with “I’m Henry the VIII, I Am.” They squealed with pleasure. Nigel had an English accent, and Alonzo and I affected one; we passed Vilis off as our manager. He was older and had a Latvian accent.
Why were we in Hiram? the girls wanted to know.
“We’re rehearsing a concert tour that starts next week in Cleveland,” was our answer.
Occasionally at dinner, we’d sing quietly, as though rehearsing, and the waitresses would stand at our table, hoping for more. The crowds got bigger. Would we consider singing for them in the restaurant? There was a piano in the lounge, but none of us could play or sing.
“They don’t sing for free,” Vilis, our “tour manager,” said.
We had a great time pretending we were rock stars until we quietly stole out of town.
We had total access to the isolated world of the Browns’ training camp, including coaches’ meetings and the practice sessions. We miked the coaches and some of the players. We recorded a voice-over with Jim Brown, then the best running back in the game, who in his ninth year had gained more yards and scored more touchdowns than any other player in NFL history. “I love the game and I’d play even if they didn’t pay me,” Brown said. “We have a phrase: a guy who doesn’t love the game is just up here for a cup o’ coffee. We can spot him easy and we just call him ‘Cup o’ Coffee.’”
Our coverage emphasized the violence and brutality of the game. This was Wolper’s mandate: mayhem. A young rookie lineman, Don Thiessen, tells us, “I’ll forget my life. My body. It’s gonna be a destroy type of deal.” We showed linemen slamming into blocking dummies and into each other in tight close-ups with the sound magnified. We also captured the complexity of offensive and defensive patterns and the intelligence necessary to execute them. After five days, “the Hermits” left Hiram, never to return.
Our next stop was St. Mary’s College, a Catholic liberal arts school in a peaceful valley in Moraga, California, home of the Sisters of Mercy and the Sisters of St. Joseph. In July it was also the training camp of the San Francisco Forty-Niners. Again we had total access to practice and strategy sessions. The year before, 1964, the 49ers had finished last in their division, while the Browns won the NFL championship, and the finale of our documentary was to be an exhibition game between them at Kezar Stadium in San Francisco. Nothing was at stake, but it was my job to make the game seem of vital importance. I had Vilis and Alonzo film the game in extreme tight close-ups, while Nigel picked up the sounds of plays being called and bodies crashing. I augmented our tight coverage with wider shots from the NFL cameramen. It was the first time the game had been shot in this impressionistic way, with little concern for continuity. Bud Smith edited the football montages as though we were covering a war. We isolated the rival coaches, Jack Christiansen of the Forty-Niners and Blanton Collier of the Browns, as though they were the generals of two contending armies. “To play football, a man must have the killer instinct,” said Van Heflin on the soundtrack. “Teams win or lose—defeat is a personal thing.”
The Browns won, 37–21. It was never a contest. The documentary was contrived, full of “facts and information,” some of it mildly interesting—“Four miles of hot dogs would be sold that day; forty-five hundred gallons of beer; the crowd would go home fifty-three thousand pounds heavier.” I don’t know if any of this was accurate. It was an exercise in making chicken salad out of chicken shit.
In his novel What Makes Sammy Run?, Budd Schulberg has the newspaperman Al Manheim ask the newly promoted copyboy, Sammy Glick, if he likes his new job. “I like it fine this year,” Sammy answers, “but if I have it next year it’ll stink.” That’s how I felt after three documentaries and over a year at Wolper. I quickly assimilated story-telling skills, but to no purpose. The Crump documentary, inept as it was, was an attempt to save a man’s life and a screed against capital punishment. The Wolper shows were anecdotal and superficial. The 1960s were about to change the wor
ld: films, popular music, hippies, war protesters, they were all part of a cultural revolution, and I was on the sidelines.
I became friendly with some of my contemporaries, in particular Francis Coppola. Francis had taken cinema courses in college and was passionate about film and knowledgeable about all the new equipment. He was laserlike in his drive to express himself on film. He had worked for Roger Corman making B movies, but he had the chutzpah to get a major studio to let him direct a personal film called You’re a Big Boy Now, which was funny and stylistic and signaled to many critics the arrival of an American New Wave. Pauline Kael called the movie “this generation’s Citizen Kane”—heady stuff. Francis loved good food and wine, and we would often meet in restaurants or at various social gatherings and talk movies.
Francis was close to his brother Augie, as well as to his mother and father. He was all about family, which is how he would approach The Godfather a few years later. There was an unstated competition between us, but he was an inspiration to me.
Joe Wizan, an agent at the Morris office, sent a print of The People vs. Paul Crump to several producers, one of whom, Norman Lloyd, was the producer of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. He had been a distinguished character actor, with many important film and theatrical credits; most notably the title role in Hitchcock’s Saboteur. The Hitchcock show had been on television for ten years. Norman ran the shows, commissioned the scripts, hired the actors and directors, and supervised production. In the final season, Hitchcock made a studio appearance only once a week to deliver his introductions to each show. Occasionally he would direct one of the shows, but he was still deeply involved in feature films and entrusted the series to Norman and other associates, who knew precisely what he wanted, having worked with him for so long.
The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir Page 8