Wisconsin, 1960. An unlikely setting perhaps for one of the most crucial showdowns in the wide-open race for the presidency. The Democrats had to decide who to nominate to run against Richard Nixon. John F. Kennedy realized that if he beat Hubert Humphrey in the Wisconsin primary, if he could prove that a Catholic senator from New England could triumph over a Protestant senator from a neighboring state, he could also prove his national appeal. It's quite a story and Primary tells it like no documentary ever had before.
But Robert Drew has made many remarkable documentaries since and, while the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is currently working with Drew Associates to gather the original negatives of his other films in a sweeping effort to restore his legacy, Docurama is making these vital works available on DVD. Jonathan Marlow recently spoke with Drew about the ideas that have shaped his films.
Primary
Marlow: I first saw Primary and Crisis many years ago but watched them again last week with your commentary with photographer Richard Leacock. I suspect that it was a little awkward for you to record them.
Drew: I hate to talk over my own films. I understand that I am a little old-fashioned and I have to get used to it. I did like joking around with Ricky.
Marlow: It seemed as if it were easier for you both to add comments to Primary. There were long passages in Crisis where it seemed as if you were caught up in the moment of the film.
Drew: That's right. It was easier with Primary. Crisis is harder to talk over because some real things are going on.
Marlow: Life Magazine of the Year. How did that project get started originally?
Drew: My greatest interest was the still picture essay, shot with a 35mm camera. I spent six weeks at the University of Michigan just shooting candidly. That's the way we got feeling and emotion into pictures. Spend time with people. I felt if we could put sound and motion against these candid pictures that we were shooting, we could develop a lot more power. At the same time, television was coming along and the documentaries on television were all posed, lit and sort of manipulated. Directed. So I thought that we could do something that would have a lasting impact on the medium and advance the medium.
I managed to get some money from NBC (I was at Life but NBC put up the money) to make a Magazine of the Year. I made four or five pieces and put them together into a magazine. In the process, I found out first-hand how primitive "reality" motion picture photography is. For instance, the first project I shot was on a house in Illinois. It was built by a great German architect and the lady that lived in it hated it. It made a funny story. For that purpose, I was interviewing Philip Johnson in his glass house in Connecticut and I wanted to shoot candidly. I wanted to get him being himself. After I got my eight-man crew in there, we set up our two-hundred pound camera and got the cables out of the way so that people wouldn't trip. I put Allen Grant behind the camera; he was a Life photographer. My whole theory rested on getting talent behind the camera.
We started shooting and the soundman jumped in front of the camera and clapped some clap sticks right in the face of Philip Johnson. It was alarming and quite upsetting to the atmosphere and so forth. I told him not to do that anymore. We started rolling again and I heard someone yell, "Cut." I looked around and wondered, "Who's running this show?" It was the soundman again. I said, "Why did you holler 'Cut'?" He said, "I think I hear an airplane in the distance!"
The whole apparatus was absolutely unmanageable. When I put the film together, I didn't like it very much. It wasn't very candid and there was something basically wrong and I couldn't figure it out. So I went off on a Nieman Fellowship to Harvard and studied storytelling for a year. During that year, I found out what was wrong with my film.
Marlow: In a sense, you were trying to capture what you believed was possible in photo-journalism and communicate that in motion pictures?
Drew: That's exactly right.
Marlow: That is where the working process came from? The idea of no interviews, no repeats, no direction whatsoever and the idea of finding talent to put behind the camera. Quite critically, in the case of Primary, you have Albert Maysles, DA Pennebaker, Terrence McCartney Filgate, Richard Leacock, of course. You have folks who went on to do rather incredible work outside of this film as well.
Drew: Yes, I did, and the fact is, most of these people - all but Leacock - were completely unknown at the time. They took the ideas that were behind Primary and ran with them. They've all done a wonderful job.
Marlow: They all essentially took that aesthetic to their own work. Would you say that is also the case with other filmmakers that work in the Direct Cinema vein?
Drew: The variety of things that have grown out of it is staggering and beyond my imagination. Some of it is good and some of it is terrible.
Marlow: Of course.
Drew: I don't endorse all cinéma vérité activities but I appreciate the good ones.
Marlow: Are you interested in the work of Frederick Wiseman at all?
Drew: I am, indeed. Wiseman takes the tools that I developed and uses them for purposes for which I would never use them. I look at his films with some kind of an edge. The idea of making a film to prove a point is as old as film and I consider that a propagandist's job. That's the farthest thing from what I am trying to do.
Marlow: My understanding with Primary is that you were somewhat neutral on the outcome of the 1960 Wisconsin primary. You were essentially, quite to the intent of your process, trying to remain neutral and trying to simply observe. A lot of what happens in the film, story-wise, comes out of the careful editing of the footage.
Drew: That's all true. I went off on this Nieman Fellowship to study storytelling - the modern novel, the short story and so forth. During that year, I found out that my film had been a lecture with picture illustrations. Everything depended on the narration. I realized that what we had to do was shoot enough real, candid footage that we could edit more or less like a movie and let the story tell itself without a lot of intervention by a narrator.
Marlow: Was it there at Harvard that you went from this idea of "word logic" to an approach of "dramatic logic"?
Drew: That's right. I value very greatly the ability to be with people. My definition of cinéma vérité is simply that we're with people and conveying their experience and what it was like to be there. The French considered cinéma vérité to be "accosting people on the street with a microphone" and the Canadians considered it "getting the camera moving." My view was to get the camera moving with people through stories.
Marlow: What was the kernel of the idea that got you to Wisconsin?
Drew: When I finally got the equipment ready that we could actually walk with, I was looking for a story. This young senator was running for President. He was up against the whole Democratic Party, he was too young, he was a Catholic - he had everything stacked against him. I liked the story.
Marlow: Obviously, at the time, you had no way to know what would come.
Drew: Actually, if you were a betting man, you would have bet that he would lose.
Marlow: I think it's difficult for audiences today to put the film in that perspective. At this point, people look back and say, "Naturally, Kennedy would win." But clearly, when you started the production of Primary, it seemed highly unlikely that he would get the nomination of his party.
Drew: That's right.
Marlow: You mentioned that during the Kennedy photo shoot - a real moment which most films would not include since it seems incidental and outside of the context of any narrative necessity - it was the sort of real moment you were trying to capture; it was then that you and Leacock thought were actually on to something.
Drew: The thing is, we jumped out of our car, ran into a photo studio, shot a sequence, back into the car, and we stopped only once to reload, but it was otherwise continuous. You hadn't ever seen that in a film before. It sounds funny now but that's the way it was. After we had completed that, we knew a lot of things. One, the idea was right. Two, the equipment worked, seemed to work - there was a flaw that we didn't know about but it seemed to work. We both felt that it was the start of a whole new way of seeing.
Marlow: You're absolutely right. What was the flaw in the equipment?
Drew: We had spent a year or two trying to get a camera and a recorder to synchronize together. We wanted it to be wireless but we still needed the wire. We started shooting with the wire running from Leacock's camera to my tape recorder. When we got into the editing room a week later, we found out that the wire had been broken the whole time. There was no sync signal.
Marlow: Oh, no! That footage is all wild-sync?
Drew: We had a very wild program. I had commissioned a machine from Ryder Sound Services in California that would allow us to edit in a hotel room. It was basically a tape recorder with six tracks tied to a projector. In this thing, he stuck a box that we didn't know anything about. He called it a "Resolver." We'd never heard of a "Resolver." It had a crank on it. If you turned the crank one way, you slow the picture down versus the tape. If you crank it the other way, you speed the picture up versus the tape. I must say, Pennebaker spent six weeks turning that crank and that was how we were able to resynchronize the film.
Marlow: A very clever solution.
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