When Charlotte Zwerin was five years old, in 1936, she had been taken to a show called “Big Band and a Movie.” The musical act was nice, but the film itself had caught her attention and sparked her sense of wonder: just how was this magical artifact made? Zwerin, who was born in Detroit, attended Wayne State University, where she founded the school’s film society. After graduating, she made her way to New York, where she found work at CBS as a librarian for the documentary series The 20th Century, in pursuit of her goal of becoming a director herself. Documentary film, with its more engaged, political bent, was more hospitable to female filmmakers than Hollywood, and Zwerin eventually was hired by Robert Drew’s company Drew Associates. While there, she ran in the same circles as Drew’s cinematographer Albert Maysles. Zwerin rapidly developed a reputation as a gifted editor, able to burrow deeply into complex or gnarled material and emerge with a fleet, sleek story.
When Albert and David Maysles began making their own films together in the mid-1960s, they brought Zwerin along with them as an editor. She edited Meet Marlon Brando and With Love from Truman for them in 1966, but 1969’s Salesman established her bona fides. She found that her physical and psychological removal from the material—she had not accompanied Albert and David on their shoots, or ever met the film’s subjects—allowed her to pare away the inessential. “I think this removal from the scene,” she argued, “helped my judgment and helped me to understand more clearly what the viewer would feel.” Given Salesman’s runaway success (at least by the hothouse standards of the documentary film world), it was only natural that Zwerin would rejoin Albert and David for their Rolling Stones film. Zwerin was traveling in Europe when the Maysles brothers were shooting at Altamont, and staying at a hotel in Paris when she received a letter from David, expressing his enthusiasm for the footage they had shot and asking her to join them in New York.
As the unusually frigid winter of 1970 left icicles and streaky trails of condensation on the windows of the Ed Sullivan Theater building at 1697 Broadway in Manhattan, the editors of the Altamont documentary huddled inside, consumed by a series of technical difficulties all orbiting a central challenge.
All involved parties understood that the death of Meredith Hunter changed the equation of how to transform the raw footage from Altamont into a film. “We only want beautiful things,” David Maysles had told his crew on the day of Altamont, a pronouncement that was itself a kind of expression of hope. But the unremitting violence, and the tragedy that had marked its nadir, prodded the Maysles brothers to consider the prospect that they had accidentally made another kind of film entirely. And luckily for them, their crews had not listened to David; one cinematographer whom he had castigated went right on filming the drug-fueled panic attack of a disoriented young woman that had initially prompted David’s concern.
Hunter’s death had upended the entire intended function of the film, which was to have served as a privileged glimpse inside the rarefied world of the Rolling Stones, and a tantalizing opportunity for music fans to bear witness to one of the most hyped concerts of the decade. The Altamont film could no longer just be about the music, or about the Stones. It was a concert film ultimately not about music, but a murder mystery whose key piece of footage lasted less than ten seconds, a story of celebrities whose celebrity might very well be permanently tarnished by the film in which they starred. The death of a fan would have to take precedence, but how could it avoid making the entirety of the film feel misleading, or in poor taste?
The filmmakers worried over a technical matter that was itself an aesthetic and moral quandary: how could the footage be slowed down enough for audiences to see it, without being too jarring an editorial intrusion? It was the film’s blessing and its curse that it had captured the moment of Meredith Hunter’s killing. Hunter’s death made the Maysleses’ film so much more than another concert film, but it also forced the entire film to hinge on a single blurry and confusing sequence. Seeing it once, at regular speed, an audience would only be confused by what it had been shown. The lack of a voiceover providing guidance—a direct-cinema no-no—would only make it all the more disorienting. Who were we looking at? Who was the attacker, and who the victim? Hunter’s killing cried out for a kind of contextualization that direct cinema was philosophically disinclined to offer.
A cursory glance might have suggested that the issue of structure was irrelevant, too obvious to consider. This was a film, after all, mostly about a single concert, on a single day. The bulk of the film would have to take place in chronological order, culminating in the Rolling Stones’ set and the death of Meredith Hunter. But what kind of film would introduce its most important moment at the very end, with no warning, and little in the way of resolution?
Zwerin was the glue that held the Maysleses’ work together, with an uncanny knack for taking all the brilliant moments their crews had captured in the field and assembling them into a narrative with a beginning and an ending. But this film proved an immense challenge, with an explosive climax that threatened to undercut everything that preceded it, and that was nearly impossible to foreshadow. The editors working under Zwerin took note of her calm—a calm only further underscored by the air of near panic trickling through the hallways of 1697 Broadway.
The filmmakers were sitting on a snippet of film unlike any they had ever filmed in their careers, and yet the prospect of making a functional feature film out of it grew ever more remote. Only Zwerin’s quiet focus soothed the jangled nerves of her colleagues. Albert and David trusted her completely, sure that she would find the resolution they all needed. The Maysles brothers had embraced collaboration as a working style in keeping with the tenets of direct cinema, but it also allowed them to bring in a partner whose strengths made up for their weaknesses.
In the eyes of many of her colleagues, Zwerin was the true director now. Albert and David had done yeoman work in finding the material, but they were now secondary figures in the process of assembly. Neither Albert nor David could shepherd a film as complex as this one through the editing process by themselves. It would require the editing skill, and infinite patience, of Charlotte Zwerin to transform the Altamont footage into a workable film.
Zwerin was known for her incredible stamina, with weeks and months of late nights and unceasing toil marked only by the growing pile of crushed cigarette packs accumulating in the editing room’s wastebasket. Zwerin was capable of superlative feats of editorial wizardry when necessary, able to trim together a montage as smoothly as any editor working in documentary—or Hollywood, for that matter—in order to shift a mood, or silently convey a message that might otherwise not make it onto the screen. She understood composition and form, and was a faithful servant of the material, allowing it, and not her own work, to speak loudest. But to edit a work of direct cinema was less about editorial pyrotechnics than about expressing a fundamental respect for the forms and patterns that reality took.
Zwerin would regularly interrupt her work during that long winter, leave her desk in her editing room, located down a corridor from David and Albert’s conjoined desks, and lie down on a mattress on the floor. She was resting her bad back, getting off her feet to ward off another flare-up of lower-back pain, but there was likely something else happening, also. The puzzle of Altamont pulled at her, demanding resolution. The film was a line, plodding diligently down the path from one event to the next, and it needed to become a circle. How could Meredith Hunter’s death be resolved? Zwerin never spoke much, did not do much explaining of her train of thought, but the younger editors could see the wheels silently spinning, calculating the angles and searching for a solution.
The crew of Gimme Shelter, taken the morning after the festival. (Courtesy of Eric Saarinen)
* * *
Immediately after the concert, Albert and David asked two of the cinematographers they had employed at the show, Joan Churchill and Baird Bryant, to pick up the raw footage from the lab in Los Angeles where it had been processed and do a rapid search for the mome
nt of Meredith Hunter’s death. Churchill had been renting a cantilevered house in Laurel Canyon from Bryant and his wife, Johanna Demetrakas, and the two filmmakers brought the footage back to the house to search through it. Passing through the potted plants dramatically strung from the exterior walls and into the house’s cool interior, Bryant set up camp in the editing room, and Churchill worked on a Moviola editing machine she had borrowed from her father.
Churchill and Bryant were understandably unsettled by the morbid task, their jitters only further underscored by the steady stream of anxious phone calls originating from New York. The Maysleses were rattled by the Hells Angels’ pressure campaign, demanding to see the footage shot at Altamont. Their panic had Churchill convinced, every time she looked through the house’s large windows onto Willow Glen Road, that Sonny Barger himself was prowling the canyons in search of rogue documentary editors. Churchill would sit at the editing desk, scrolling through footage, and picture packs of leather-clad Angels combing the hillsides for her and Bryant. Paranoia was in the air, borne on the wind by the murderous spree of Charles Manson and his acolytes through these same canyons the preceding year. Death, they felt, just might be stalking them, too.
Churchill and Bryant were unable to locate the footage in question, perhaps misled by the faulty information then circulating about when during the Stones’ set Hunter had been killed, and the larger team of editors in New York took over the job. The film came in to the Maysleses’ editing room in midtown Manhattan in magazines, each containing approximately eleven minutes of footage. Glimpsed from a certain angle, the movie had been a straightforward production—a three-day shoot, practically, with almost the entirety of it shot over the course of a single day, in a single location. And yet, the challenge of turning the mass of raw material into a polished film had only just begun for the three filmmakers.
The rush was on to find the footage of the encounter between Hunter and the Hells Angels. Editors dug through boxes and hastily cued up footage on their Steenbeck editing machines in the hopes of being the one who found the moment that transformed a concert film into a criminal investigation.
David Maysles told editor Janet Swanson that he was sure Hunter had been killed during the Stones’ performance of “Sympathy for the Devil.” Swanson spent five full days painstakingly syncing picture with track, only to find nothing related to Hunter during the song.
The idea of seeing the moment of a man’s death was so fraught with drama that even experienced film editors expected to find something monumental, an image invested with the weight of its significance. Instead, once the editing team realized that Hunter had been killed during “Under My Thumb,” not “Sympathy for the Devil,” they rapidly located the stabbing. It unfolded so quickly that even a trained eye might not notice what had just taken place. From the back of the stage, Baird Bryant had shot the footage over the shoulders of the Stones and out into the crowd, where a brief scuffle could be glimpsed in the front rows. In it, a young African-American man appeared to lurch away from a passel of bikers, reaching into his suit jacket and pulling out a gun. One of the Angels then leapt onto him and proceeded to stab him twice before both men disappeared from sight.
It was, on close inspection, unquestionably Hunter, although the camera seemed to arrive after the encounter between him and the Hells Angels had already begun, the footage too herky-jerky and brief to provide any definitive conclusions. Nonetheless, it was, as the directors instantly knew, the most important footage that anyone had shot on that day.
Now that the filmmakers had confirmed the existence of a filmed record of Meredith Hunter’s killing, their paranoia about the Hells Angels’ threats rapidly amplified. The Angels were naggingly aware that the material shot by the Maysles brothers and their crews might not only reflect poorly on their character, but also serve as incontrovertible proof of criminal activity. With no way of knowing just what the film had captured, the Angels—or some of their colleagues—were concerned about being blindsided by the Maysleses’ work. A New York branch of the Angels reached out to Albert and David through mutual acquaintances with a threat: there was a contract out on the two directors’ lives. If they were so foolhardy as to release their film, they would both be killed.
David had already been assaulted by an Angel at a meeting in California some days after the concert. He and Albert had brought some footage to show the Hells Angels, hoping to film them watching it. They refused, telling the Maysles brothers that the film had to be destroyed. Alternatively, they could pay the Angels $1 million as a release fee to cover the costs of their performance. David had been summoned to a back bathroom to talk further and encountered one of the Angels. He hoped to speak sensibly with them about cooperating with his film, but had instead been on the receiving end of a beating.
One day not long after the discovery of the footage of Hunter’s death, none other than Sonny Barger showed up at 1697 Broadway. He had heard the rumors that Albert and David might be in possession of potentially incriminating footage of one of his members, and he came to do what the Angels did: intimidate their enemies into silence. “You people better not do us dirt,” he threatened as he stalked the editing rooms, which suddenly felt airless, and coated with menace. Barger hardly had to make his threats any more explicit. He knew he was speaking to people who spent their days watching what happened to people who crossed the Hells Angels.
Albert and David were understandably terrified, and immediately made efforts to protect their film. They made duplicates of all the footage shot at Altamont, and placed it into safekeeping to keep it out of the hands of any marauding Angels.
No one gave serious thought to the idea of shutting down the film, or soft-pedaling its footage of the Angels’ violence. Direct cinema was about honestly reflecting the world without undue filtering or interference. It did not always live up to this ideal, but here, when it appeared as if their lives would be put at risk to test their allegiance to the form’s demands, Zwerin and the Maysles brothers stayed true. The film would depict Altamont as they had seen it, and as their crew had filmed it. All other considerations were secondary.
Others believed the threats from the Hells Angels were less terrifying than they might have initially appeared. The death threat had come from a New York branch of the Angels, not their more ferocious California colleagues. Coming from so distant an outpost, and one lacking the fearsome reputation of the Bay Area Hells Angels, it seemed easier to believe the death threats were mere bluster. How much easier, though, to dismiss a death threat when it was not being made against your own person.
* * *
Even in its unformed state, the film was an object of fascination, a totem intended to prove a case, make an argument, or take revenge on enemies. One day in the spring of 1970, some of the members of Jefferson Airplane, led by Marty Balin, visited the editing offices. Balin had famously been knocked unconscious by the Hells Angel named Animal at Altamont, in a moment captured by the Maysleses’ cameras. The bikers’ attack had scuttled his band’s focus, ruined his starring turn, and damaged the band’s standing in the counterculture. Balin had been cheered for standing up to the Angels, but had also had to suffer the indignity of publicly losing a fight he hadn’t been entirely aware he was part of.
Balin wanted to see the footage leading up to and following his being knocked out by the Hells Angel called Animal, as if to confirm his own undoubtedly hazy memories of the event. More than that, he wanted to impose his unbending stance onto the filmmakers, concerned that the Angels’ threats of violence might cause them to soften their portrait of the rampaging bikers of Altamont. Jefferson Airplane paid a visit to ensure that the filmmakers followed through on their mission to accurately depict the concert. Their film had to be an unsparing indictment of the Hells Angels’ duplicity, viciousness, and callousness.
Word of the footage of Hunter’s death had made its way to the offices of Life magazine in New York, who called with an offer. The magazine’s editors would pay $50,00
0 for the right to publish one frame of the film—a very substantial offer at the time, and a significant one for a penurious documentary film production. The film’s producer, Porter Bibb, was overjoyed, and began to make plans for the windfall. Fifty thousand dollars could go an incredibly long way in promoting a concert documentary, potentially driving audiences who might otherwise never hear about the film into the theaters. To Bibb, this was a no-brainer. After all, not only would the Maysleses not be giving up any of their material, they would be receiving much-needed cash and invaluable free publicity for their film.
But both of the Maysles brothers adamantly opposed the idea. How could they sell their footage to a national magazine when it would give away the ending of their film? Bibb was flabbergasted. It wasn’t like any of their likely audience would attend a film about Altamont without knowing what had taken place there. All they would have had to do would be to pick up a copy of Rolling Stone to read the entire story.
Albert and David, unmoved, told Bibb that as an equal partnership, the two founding members of Maysles Films would outvote him. Perhaps, though, some of Albert and David’s discomfort with the idea of their work appearing in the pages of Life had to do with their justified fear of the Hells Angels, and a concern that publicizing the Hunter footage might cause the bikers to violently lash out. The Life deal was squelched. Bibb, disgusted, sold his one-third share of the Maysles Films partnership back to Albert and David and dropped out of the project.
All the while, another threat lurked: the other music documentary being edited in Manhattan during the winter of 1970. The Maysles brothers and Zwerin were shadowboxing with a ghost, attempting to guess what the documentary Michael Wadleigh and his team were making about Woodstock might be like, and adjusting accordingly. No one wanted to be the second arrival at the party. But if Woodstock, which had also served as a poaching ground from which young editors like Susan Steinberg and Mirra Bank were brought in to work on the Altamont project, was likely to recalibrate expectations about the critical and commercial potential of music documentaries, how might the Maysleses’ project distinguish itself, and not just emerge as a pale imitation?
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