Ted Bonnitt's background is radio. CNN, NBC, NPR and New York's Pacifica radio station, WBAI. Here, he tells the story of how he ended up making one of the first features shot on DV and the very first to be distributed coast-to-coast on DVD.
Ted Bonnitt
Saying, "I like elders," as you have, is almost a culturally subversive thing to say.
Well, in a culture that worships youth like ours, it is a little unusual. But most cultures do at least honor the elderly. One of Dan's great gifts is he had this great life and got to a point where he could look back on it. The charm of this was, it was two old guys recalling their careers and we could illustrate it with footage to back it up. One of the reasons this country is as twisted as it is right now is that it's upside down. It's letting inexperienced children rule the media. Where's the balance and grounding right now?
According to the New York Times, Dave Friedman said - with a "hint of disappointment" - that the film is more of a character study and less about the business. What do you think about Friedman being disappointed that it was a character study?
These guys aren't terribly comfortable being examined. Dave is a showman. He likes to examine people. He doesn't like to be examined. Through the process of making the movie, they never understood what the hell we were doing. When I was shooting footage of Dan around the house, he kept saying, "What the hell are you doing this for? Who the hell wants to see a goddamn old man?" I'd say, "Dan, it's the ultimate home movie. Don't worry about it." The reason we did that footage of him doing the laundry and the dishes was to show how one guy was the ultimate family man, and the other guy was the ultimate dog.
What would you have done if Dan and Dave hadn't been likable characters?
I would have moved on to another project. I met those guys before I saw any of their films. They did a tribute down at the New Art Theater here in LA for Dave in honor of Eddie's book, Grindhouse. And they screened She Freak. Like most of the movies, it was really a chore to get through.
I like elders and Dave was very amusing. Then I read his book, A Youth in Babylon, which is out of print, and it was hilarious. I come from a radio background. I've been doing producing and hosting a comedy show in New York for ten years. The comedy show I did in New York was on a Pacifica station. It was a character improv show, and I was the host and played an unscrupulous talent agent, "Bernie Fleshkin, agent to the stars." It was sort of a situational, surrealist, political comedy show. Bernie basically handled anybody whose phone number he could get a hold of. I did the character for about 15 years, and he was a scam artist.
I put Bernie behind me when I moved to LA. I'd been out here a few months when I met Dave, read his book, and I realized Dave's book was written by Bernie. Not only did Bernie exist in reality, but he was far more funny and more imaginative than anything I could have thought of. Because I did Bernie for something like 500 shows, I knew Dave's beats.
I went down to Alabama where Dave lived, met his wife, to you know, present myself. Dave liked my journalism credentials and we got along, so he agreed to do the movie, even though they'd done a million of them, but he was into it.
I knew I had to meet Dan, but from Dave's book, his business partner, Dan, seemed like a really nasty son of a bitch. I was really scared to meet him. I knew he was in LA somewhere, I just didn't know where.
A few months after I went to Alabama, a very dear friend of mine from radio back east [who] had moved out west and lived three blocks down from me called me up and said, "Hey, you know that guy you went to meet in Alabama, in the exploitation business? Well, my landlord was in that business. His name's Dan Sonney." I said, "Dan Sonney's your landlord?" She said, "Yes, and I told him about you. He lives down the street and he wants to meet you." He found me. I walked down my street, knocked on the door, and Dan was waiting for me.
I immediately fell in love with him. He was just like the grandfather I don't have anymore. He was so cool. Where you going to meet an 86-year-old guy who's funny and cool? And he was a rascal. I just loved him.
We became very dear friends in the last couple of years. We played cards every week. He went out owing me about $25. About two weeks before he died, I said, "Well, damn, what If I get ahead here?" He said, "Give it to my wife." He was the luckiest guy. He always got what he wanted.
Once I had the two guys, it was like, "Oh, man, I gotta do this." They were, quintessentially, the odd couple. Then I was really on the spot. I had it, and then, I had to figure out how to shoot it. It was another year before I figured out how to shoot it with DV cams finally emerging. [So I took] a chance against everybody's advice to shoot with it. Nobody was doing it yet. And that's how I did it in 1998.
I went ahead and took a shot and did it before I negotiated the rights to the films. I thought if I got held up on the movies, I could get them on camera and become friends with them, and then, say, "Look, guys, I need a deal. There's no money in this business. I'm not NBC." It was all serendipity. It was all, "Just believe, just go for it, give it a shot," and it all worked out.
People have opinions about how documentaries should be, especially in contrast to fictional films. Is there an expectation that documentaries be struggle-oriented?
Plight and suffering are a plus in docs. I ran into the same thing at the Pacifica station in New York. We were happy, straight and we laughed. It was like three strikes against us. We finally won them over, and they became really good friends. Even though the market is indicating this trend of entertaining documentaries, it wasn't regarded as a serious work as first, whatever that means.
But I didn't do it for them, so I didn't care. We did a lot of things that were never done before - and still are, in the marketing and distribution. A good percentage of the independent community asks me to speak about what we did and how we did it and I've been in three books.
It's good to be the first, isn't it?
If we look at ourselves like - I wouldn't say as Lewis and Clark, but like pioneers in the covered wagon stage, there are still no IHOPS out there. So when you get there, it's cold, lonely and you're hungry and you have to start everything on your own. That worked against us in many respects, but at the same time, we benefited. There are always perks associated with being first. On balance, I'm very happy with how things are going. The GreenCine VOD is another example of trying something new.
Part of the idea of this project was, it's a first movie. We're not doing it for the money. We're not going to take on anything we can't afford to lose, and it's all about experimentation and having fun with it. And we're not getting uptight over money. That design has held up well, and it's still a pleasure.
Dan Sonney, in particular, struck me as living with a huge contradiction. He was a good Catholic with four daughters in a business where women were used as meat. I'm sure the irony was not lost on him.
Dan was a street-smart guy. He was brilliant with numbers. And very wise and always had great judgment. He was not educated. He had the best sense of humor, but not a sophisticated sense of irony. He wasn't introspective. He did what he did, and he didn't look back. And he did really well. He died with millions in the bank.
Have you heard anything from feminists about this documentary?
The fact is, what we really strived for, Eddie and I, in the editorial process, was to be completely non-judgmental. The fact is, we were both affected by the "roughies." ["Roughies" depicted women having their tongues pulled out, strangled or getting whipped - JR] But the rest of it was pretty benign. And yet we agreed that we couldn't whitewash their careers. We have to reflect what they did. So we used it to the best of our ability by manipulating the audience a little bit. You have the benign first act of the silly movies, then the heartwarming, reflective, lovable grandfathers in the second act, and then, boom! They're whipping women. The whole point was to use it to show the contradiction. For the audience to think, "Wait a minute. Maybe we don't like these guys." Then, come back around by the end and maybe like them again. That was the point of using that segment. I was more afraid, grimacing at the end of the second act, that people might walk out before they see Dan finish doing the dishes, to understand why we're doing this. By the time we got to the whipping, I was like, "Phew!"
Half the people would say, "I love those film clips." The other half would say, "The clips were ok, but I loved seeing those guys at home. Now I know what my grandfather does."
As far as the misogynistic aspect of their work goes, I can count maybe on one hand a few women I know who were offended and didn't like it as a result. I said, "That's what it's about. I'm not selling these guys. I'm portraying them. Definitely, this went on, and it's weird." I think people are fascinated by it, and again, documentaries are supposed to make you think, not make you feel good.
Although I was trying to make people feel good by laughing and having some good music. The whole point of their career was to laugh all the way to the bank. Who was going to take their stuff seriously if they didn't? The whole point of the movie was to be breezy, funny and happy. They succeeded in doing that. They're old men, they got what they wanted and they're happy. That's something we should all strive for.
But what if Dave Freidman and Dan Sonny had, in fact, wanted to be taken seriously as filmmakers?
I did the movie because they were funny. They were refreshingly unpretentious filmmakers. Since my forte is comedy and I did a documentary because of the limited technology and funding I had. I thought the early DV technology was much better suited for nonfiction programming - still do. But I really wanted to make a comedy, so what the piece is really, is a radio piece, an audio piece. It's really tightly edited to their comedy. Because I now that character from Bernie. I knew how to cut to time their beats. Instead of having a voice-over or a serious UCLA professor telling us what we should know, the approach was to use music to drive it without a narrator, and then, have Frank Henenlotter [director of cult classics Basket Case and Frankenhooker], who knows more about these movies than anyone else, but still keeps it safe for the audience and has fun with them - that was perfect.
The guys aren't going to talk about their movies. That's the whole point. They're not going to reflect on disappointment, or reflect on their movies, either. They're not going to go there. Dave talked a little bit about it. He said, "I'm not ashamed of anything I did. I wouldn't apologize to anybody." That was defensive. He was talking about the totality of his career. He was the one who called me on the phone about The Pickup. He said, "Get a copy. I'm in it, and he's getting a blow job in this movie." And I was thinking, "Wow. I guess it's ok to use this." As he says, he was one of the founding fathers of the sexual revolution. He likes to brag that he used to call Hefner at Esquire when Hefner worked as a writer over there.
Yes, there is some other historical significance here. The dealings they had with the Legion of Decency, for instance.
There is a serious side to some of the repercussions of what they did. They pushed the First Amendment and laid the groundwork for mass media like no one else. The studios those days kowtowed to the Hayes Code. And the day the Hayes Code was enacted was the day exploitation was born, and these guys blazed the trail. So they fought the good fight, in their minds. With every publicity kit and release, they had lawyers prepare packages to send to theaters to prepare for any legal intervention, like police busts. They don't talk about that stuff, and we could have gone there, but it's not funny.
And this was never intended to be a comprehensive look at the exploitation genre. I was cloaking a profile of two old men with some sex and comedy. If I had not put those movies in it, do you think anybody would have watched this one?
What are the signifiers of the exploitation genre?
These guys broke the nudity barrier with the nudist camp films, also called "volleyball epics," for obvious reasons. When they got tired of that, they went to more exposition in the "nudie cuties." These were basically adult pictures for children: "I'll turn into a frog so I can see the girl undress." Then they shifted really weirdly from nudie cuties to the roughies. Then things went explicit and hardcore, which they dabbled in briefly and then they gave up on.
Did they talk about why they gave it up?
As Dave explained it in the movie, his wrap on it was, "We're carnie guys. We promise and don't deliver. We give you the sizzle not the steak. The minute you raise the curtain, you give away the third act, and what's the fun in that?" Plus, they were getting old. And video production was coming around. It was too much for them. They were used to shooting grinders and shipping prints to theaters. They didn't know anything about this home video. They were tired. They were done. They had the money they needed. Hardcore was an entirely different revolution, with different, younger players. It's like me at my age trying to hang out with rappers.
Dave said their work brought down barriers. Do you think he meant this in earnest, or was it just a good marketing angle?
Dave is the ultimate carnie. He'll come up with a line of bullshit before he comes up with the idea itself. That's why he said he'd write the trailers and posters before he wrote the scripts. Dan would say, "Boy, if Dave doesn't know the answer, he'll make one up and it'll be better." But Dave is proud of what he's done, and he ought to be. He was a pioneer. He is regarded by many people as a Great. I'm glad he's happy about his life.
You've said this is a wonderful time for anyone to be making movies. Do you really want to see more people making films?
To me, it raises the bar. It doesn't lower the bar. If more people can make them, they're going to have to be better. Everybody should be able to exercise freedom of expression if they want to. Think of all the people who weren't able to get near any kind of equipment to tell a story. I think it's wonderful that technology is being democratized through shrinking costs. When the iMac came out with a DV cam and Final Cut Pro, I was thinking I wished I was sixteen again. I was shooting and trying to do sound on Super 8. If there's a will, there's a way. And that was one of the things we heard: "You can make it on your own, but you're not going to get into the theater system." Well, we stayed out of the theater system because we couldn't get a fair deal. We had distribution offers. I turned them all down because they were going to rip me off because they thought I had no leverage. I used to work in a theater so I wasn't intimidated by what it took to get into a theater. I knew half of the distributors who were interested in me weren't big enough to do anything with it anyway. They would've taken a quick hit and sold off the video, and I never would have seen a dime, and probably, it would never have seen the light of day.
But then, each successive year over the four year period that I was shooting, editing, then posting it, distributing it, there were major technological leaps. Not the least of which was the advent of these low cost LCD video projectors, which were totally portable. So I self-distributed it in the same style that Dan and Dave did with new toys. I'd mail this fifteen-pound projector to the theater that filled up the big screen, and told the theater to bring in their DVD player from home. That's how we played all the major theaters, got all the major reviews. It was a road show slight of hand. If others can do it, I can do it. That was the spirit of experimentation that really paid off for us. All I really wanted to do was to play the fifteen to twenty top American cities to get my reviews for the box art for the video.
This film was shot in five to seven partial days?
Over three months, yes, in five to seven partial days. It was a very efficient process. And we had to do that because Dan and Dave's batteries would run out. Dan needed to go back and take a nap. But they're showmen, so they were ready to go and they were a lot of fun to work with. There's one shoot in the car where we drove for three hours. It was early on in the project, so the camera didn't have any accessories. I had to jerry-rig a wide-angle lens. That scene came out great. We were just lucky.
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