WEBVTT 1 00:00:08.220 --> 00:00:10.580 I like the stories a lot. 2 00:00:10.900 --> 00:00:15.780 The stories are just really wonderful and there's so much information in them. 3 00:00:17.180 --> 00:00:17.880 All of that. 4 00:00:18.120 --> 00:00:29.060 I just, I'm suspecting that there's a lot more material and I'm nervous that you're 5 00:00:29.060 --> 00:00:29.360 moving. 6 00:00:30.460 --> 00:00:33.800 I have a structural memory problem. 7 00:00:34.420 --> 00:00:36.580 I get off on one thing and I... 8 00:00:37.140 --> 00:00:39.700 Well, I think a lot of people do. 9 00:00:41.320 --> 00:00:44.800 I don't think that's a bad thing at all. 10 00:00:45.020 --> 00:00:52.240 But I don't mind going back to, you know, if I do that, I'd like to do more on documentary 11 00:00:52.240 --> 00:00:53.780 and bring Kartein Kuhn into it. 12 00:00:53.780 --> 00:00:55.340 I'm definitely taking you back there. 13 00:00:59.620 --> 00:01:01.080 Oh, that's right. 14 00:01:01.160 --> 00:01:01.960 In New York. 15 00:01:02.820 --> 00:01:03.820 Thank you very much. 16 00:01:03.920 --> 00:01:05.900 I know exactly where I want to go now. 17 00:01:06.760 --> 00:01:09.640 Which is, I'd like to talk a little bit more about Helen Morrison. 18 00:01:09.880 --> 00:01:11.000 If there is anything more to say. 19 00:01:11.000 --> 00:01:12.740 I don't have... 20 00:01:12.740 --> 00:01:14.780 Okay, let me ask you one more question about her. 21 00:01:15.580 --> 00:01:15.580 22 00:01:17.360 --> 00:01:17.360 23 00:01:19.300 --> 00:01:20.640 Back to Helen Morrison. 24 00:01:21.340 --> 00:01:25.320 You said she was a still photographer and then she was a film director. 25 00:01:25.320 --> 00:01:27.680 And then it became a motion. 26 00:01:30.880 --> 00:01:34.300 Anne Cybilshire, how did you get to know them? 27 00:01:34.360 --> 00:01:37.160 Were they well known in the city then? 28 00:01:37.360 --> 00:01:38.800 No, not at all. 29 00:01:39.560 --> 00:01:45.640 Well, tell me a little bit how you got together with them and what your impressions of them 30 00:01:45.640 --> 00:01:48.120 were or of just Helen. 31 00:01:48.800 --> 00:01:52.300 Well, my impressions of them were that they came right off of a wall. 32 00:01:54.500 --> 00:02:01.040 They didn't fit any pattern that I knew in terms of film. 33 00:02:02.360 --> 00:02:05.040 I had not known professional dancers. 34 00:02:06.920 --> 00:02:08.320 I went to engineering school. 35 00:02:08.500 --> 00:02:09.640 We didn't do dancing. 36 00:02:12.420 --> 00:02:20.300 So I didn't know Cybilshire at all until I went out to their studio, which was in Northbrook. 37 00:02:23.480 --> 00:02:28.300 And when Helen asked me to help her figure out lighting to be able to... 38 00:02:30.320 --> 00:02:37.560 She was used to portrait kind of photography where you set up a light and you perch somebody. 39 00:02:39.780 --> 00:02:40.280 Yeah. 40 00:02:40.980 --> 00:02:43.460 So there's a camera there and a light there. 41 00:02:44.940 --> 00:02:47.320 You almost always have a triangle like that, you know. 42 00:02:47.320 --> 00:02:52.180 Helen and here's Cybils all over the studio dancing. 43 00:02:53.360 --> 00:03:03.040 And Helen wanted help in figuring a lighting plan so that the lighting could get an exposure 44 00:03:03.040 --> 00:03:06.480 anywhere in the studio and still be somewhat dramatic. 45 00:03:11.320 --> 00:03:13.580 It's not as easy as it probably sounds. 46 00:03:13.580 --> 00:03:16.820 And so I did a lot of that kind of thing. 47 00:03:17.240 --> 00:03:23.040 She went on site there and helped Helen figure out lighting strategies. 48 00:03:23.240 --> 00:03:23.580 Yes. 49 00:03:25.280 --> 00:03:27.240 And that's what it was, is a strategy. 50 00:03:31.000 --> 00:03:31.900 Go ahead. 51 00:03:33.020 --> 00:03:35.380 So you met Cybils too. 52 00:03:35.540 --> 00:03:35.580 Yeah. 53 00:03:36.640 --> 00:03:37.840 Yeah, and I liked them a lot. 54 00:03:37.980 --> 00:03:39.960 I mean, they had good cookies. 55 00:03:39.960 --> 00:03:41.680 Can I tell you? 56 00:03:45.900 --> 00:03:46.460 All right. 57 00:03:46.980 --> 00:03:49.360 But they were fairly unknown, right? 58 00:03:49.860 --> 00:03:55.600 I'm sure that, well, certainly Cybil was very well known in the dance community. 59 00:03:56.540 --> 00:04:01.260 She did a one-person show in New York on Broadway. 60 00:04:03.180 --> 00:04:07.900 And so, or maybe it was off-Broadway, but it was close by Broadway. 61 00:04:09.060 --> 00:04:12.520 Helen was a well-known still photographer. 62 00:04:13.440 --> 00:04:16.320 Neither were known at all in the film world. 63 00:04:17.320 --> 00:04:18.000 All right. 64 00:04:19.160 --> 00:04:21.500 Do you recall why they came to Chicago? 65 00:04:23.420 --> 00:04:25.720 Well, they lived here. 66 00:04:26.840 --> 00:04:30.100 Was Cybil born in New York though and started her career? 67 00:04:30.100 --> 00:04:31.060 I really don't know. 68 00:04:32.100 --> 00:04:32.100 69 00:04:32.540 --> 00:04:34.700 I do a little bit, so I was just trying to... 70 00:04:34.700 --> 00:04:35.800 Yeah, okay. 71 00:04:36.640 --> 00:04:38.140 All right. 72 00:04:41.960 --> 00:04:44.820 Back to documentary filmmaking. 73 00:04:45.260 --> 00:04:49.820 We talked about educational films that were made in this area, 74 00:04:50.920 --> 00:04:57.020 corporate films, TV content and news. 75 00:04:59.220 --> 00:05:04.660 How did, can you kind of talk a little bit about the documentary and how it kind of emerged? 76 00:05:04.660 --> 00:05:08.640 And when it emerged, I mean, in Chicago. 77 00:05:09.460 --> 00:05:11.500 And I want to go back again. 78 00:05:11.840 --> 00:05:18.720 I'm not trying to connect Alc or Andy together, but both of them you talked kind of, 79 00:05:18.740 --> 00:05:26.620 they had a certain point of view, philosophy type thing that kind of overrode, you know, 80 00:05:26.620 --> 00:05:28.320 how they made their money through film. 81 00:05:29.000 --> 00:05:35.740 Yeah, the, I guess people that have grown up with television 82 00:05:37.300 --> 00:05:42.180 think of what I call a TV doc as a documentary, 83 00:05:43.080 --> 00:05:49.620 where you're getting talking faces that explain what it is that you're looking at 84 00:05:49.620 --> 00:05:53.300 in case you're so incredibly stupid that you can't figure it out 85 00:05:53.300 --> 00:05:57.220 or if it's so badly shot that it isn't put in context. 86 00:05:57.220 --> 00:06:06.440 But the old documentaries were made when it was very difficult to interlock sound and picture. 87 00:06:08.740 --> 00:06:15.980 And there were no, for instance, there were no portable tape recorders for audio tape. 88 00:06:18.640 --> 00:06:19.920 And so what do you do? 89 00:06:20.140 --> 00:06:26.840 You're out there and in fact what you do is you go out with a camera 90 00:06:26.840 --> 00:06:33.460 and it's a noisy camera and you don't have any intent of shooting sync sound. 91 00:06:34.140 --> 00:06:40.160 And so you are sort of forced to learn to shoot a picture that tells the story. 92 00:06:41.020 --> 00:06:43.300 And you don't rely on a talking face. 93 00:06:44.040 --> 00:06:46.800 In fact, you don't have a talking face at all. 94 00:06:46.900 --> 00:06:53.400 You may have a narration that you slug in later on to help with explanatory material, 95 00:06:53.400 --> 00:06:56.280 but basically you're shooting a picture that tells the story. 96 00:06:56.920 --> 00:07:02.660 You've got to be much more visually oriented than TV people are 97 00:07:04.920 --> 00:07:08.860 because that's all you've got to work with is the picture. 98 00:07:09.440 --> 00:07:12.740 And so you have to learn how to do that. 99 00:07:12.960 --> 00:07:17.660 And it's a skill that I think is largely lost today. 100 00:07:17.660 --> 00:07:22.440 If you send people now to do a documentary, 101 00:07:24.580 --> 00:07:32.340 they just naturally think in terms of somebody talking to tell you what it is they're trying to get across. 102 00:07:35.580 --> 00:07:42.600 And my guess is that when Kartemkorn, for instance, did their first documentaries, 103 00:07:42.600 --> 00:07:48.920 I would guess that they were not sync sound. 104 00:07:49.780 --> 00:07:53.700 They were shooting visuals and then putting the sound in later. 105 00:07:54.520 --> 00:07:57.260 I don't know that that's true, but that would be my guess. 106 00:07:58.060 --> 00:08:00.680 It would be kind of fun to go back and look at them. 107 00:08:00.680 --> 00:08:11.900 Do you remember when the film group started? 108 00:08:13.000 --> 00:08:14.280 Tell me about the film group. 109 00:08:14.280 --> 00:08:20.760 I guess that was Mike Gray and Hedman—I can't remember his first name. 110 00:08:21.780 --> 00:08:25.720 Hedman, Gray, and Shea. Is that right? 111 00:08:26.080 --> 00:08:28.020 Mike Shea, yeah. 112 00:08:29.060 --> 00:08:33.240 And there was a partner, Hedman, that I think is still— 113 00:08:33.240 --> 00:08:34.440 He was a cameraman. 114 00:08:35.260 --> 00:08:38.220 Yeah, but I think he might have come out of still. I'm not sure. 115 00:08:38.380 --> 00:08:39.240 Oh, I know he did. 116 00:08:39.240 --> 00:08:39.840 Yeah, okay. 117 00:08:42.040 --> 00:08:47.780 Yeah. Yeah, they did documentaries. 118 00:08:47.780 --> 00:08:56.120 And I think probably—I'm guessing, no. 119 00:08:56.120 --> 00:09:05.460 But I would guess that the first real documentary they shot was during the 68 Democratic Convention outside of the Conrad Hilton Hotel. 120 00:09:06.060 --> 00:09:14.580 And it was because they were shooting a commercial there, or near there, and they happened to have film and camera. 121 00:09:14.580 --> 00:09:19.520 And here's this riot going on out on the street, and they just started shooting. 122 00:09:21.100 --> 00:09:24.500 And I think that was a life changer for Mike Gray. 123 00:09:25.080 --> 00:09:29.620 In fact, we've talked about it, and I'm sure it was. 124 00:09:31.580 --> 00:09:37.620 And he just said to himself, there's something important going on here. 125 00:09:38.200 --> 00:09:42.980 There's something vastly unimportant going on over there, and that's how I'm making my money. 126 00:09:42.980 --> 00:09:57.680 And so he sort of changed his life and went into documentary shooting, which probably meant learning to live on less and enjoying what you do quite a bit more. 127 00:10:00.340 --> 00:10:05.500 There were other people in, too, that weren't doing what they were doing. 128 00:10:05.500 --> 00:10:10.280 They really carved out a niche that expanded later on. 129 00:10:10.860 --> 00:10:11.520 The film group? 130 00:10:11.520 --> 00:10:11.940 Yeah. 131 00:10:14.120 --> 00:10:23.520 So to your recall there, before them, Ed Bland's work, Cry of Jazz, that was in 59, I think. 132 00:10:24.080 --> 00:10:25.540 And Howard Alt cut that. 133 00:10:28.240 --> 00:10:30.960 And that was, you know, Ed Bland was actually a composer. 134 00:10:31.020 --> 00:10:33.460 Yeah, his background was music. 135 00:10:33.460 --> 00:10:34.160 Yeah. 136 00:10:38.180 --> 00:10:52.800 So possibly you're saying in terms of social or political documentary filmmaking, it might have, in Chicago, it may have started with the film group. 137 00:10:53.260 --> 00:10:54.640 It may have, yeah. 138 00:10:54.640 --> 00:11:07.380 It may have also started with, which was not a documentary, but Haskell Wexler happened to be here shooting a film called Medium Cool. 139 00:11:07.380 --> 00:11:22.940 And it was, there was a storyline in the film dealing with a journalist, a photojournalist, I guess. 140 00:11:24.600 --> 00:11:32.580 And then the Democratic Convention happened, and they incorporated a lot of that footage into Medium Cool. 141 00:11:34.000 --> 00:11:46.860 When old Mayor Daley, not Richard M. Daley, saw the film, he said that film must not be shown much in Chicago. 142 00:11:47.640 --> 00:11:51.540 And so he told the distributor that he wanted it killed. 143 00:11:52.400 --> 00:11:58.020 And so what they did was they opened the theater, the Medium Cool, in a huge theater. 144 00:11:58.020 --> 00:12:01.680 And I can't remember which one, but it was like a 4,000-seat theater. 145 00:12:03.320 --> 00:12:12.220 And they think they got 150 people coming to it because it was not the kind of a film that, it wasn't a blockbuster kind of film. 146 00:12:12.800 --> 00:12:20.480 It was a niche film for more thoughtful people. I don't know what else to say about it. 147 00:12:21.180 --> 00:12:22.560 And so the film died. 148 00:12:23.140 --> 00:12:31.400 It's opening reviews were that it killed the theater that it opened with, closed that film in four days, something like that. 149 00:12:31.980 --> 00:12:36.220 And so it wasn't shown in Chicago. It did very well over the rest of the country. 150 00:12:38.300 --> 00:12:45.600 And I think Haskell, I think he was born in Chicago. I think he started in industrial films. 151 00:12:45.600 --> 00:12:46.720 Yes, yeah. 152 00:12:46.720 --> 00:12:52.300 Oh, he did, I think, I think he did a documentary on cotton or something. 153 00:12:52.440 --> 00:12:57.080 Well, he worked for EB. He was on staff at Encyclopedia Britannica. 154 00:12:57.960 --> 00:13:01.760 And he worked with Andy and he worked with Gordy. 155 00:13:08.400 --> 00:13:15.380 All right. And then Cartemplin Films, I think was shortly after film group in. 156 00:13:15.380 --> 00:13:18.300 And also Chekhov. 157 00:13:18.860 --> 00:13:21.100 Right, right, right. 158 00:13:22.380 --> 00:13:32.320 And these people all at various times worked together and at various times they went their separate ways. 159 00:13:32.940 --> 00:13:35.300 But they all stimulated each other. 160 00:13:35.300 --> 00:13:46.820 And toward the end of the, I'd say in the middle 70s or maybe even the young 70s, 161 00:13:48.760 --> 00:13:58.600 I worked with the Directors Guild to set up a small committee of people to look at films that were being made in Chicago. 162 00:13:58.600 --> 00:14:07.340 And we had monthly screenings every month of a half a dozen films that had been made here. 163 00:14:07.720 --> 00:14:10.840 And they were all wonderful films. 164 00:14:11.660 --> 00:14:15.340 And this was at your, where did this meeting take place? 165 00:14:15.440 --> 00:14:21.440 Well, we started in the Sheraton Hotel on Michigan Avenue and it got kind of expensive. 166 00:14:21.440 --> 00:14:36.980 So my favorite wine store was a guy named Leonard Solomon who had a shop on LaSalle Street, later became Burr Hopps Fish House. 167 00:14:37.720 --> 00:14:44.000 And he had an empty floor upstairs and he let us use that floor and we had monthly screenings there. 168 00:14:44.000 --> 00:14:51.660 I worked with Ruth Ratney who did a local newsletter for the film industry. 169 00:14:52.880 --> 00:14:56.060 And so Ruth would publicize it and we'd work it together. 170 00:14:57.540 --> 00:15:02.220 And then I worked with the committee from the DGA to select the films. 171 00:15:02.840 --> 00:15:13.000 And we would look at, every month we would look at maybe 20 films and select the top half dozen of them that we would screen. 172 00:15:13.000 --> 00:15:23.800 And I knew all the editors in town and they would tell me interesting films that they were working on. 173 00:15:24.140 --> 00:15:29.100 Ron Klasky was probably my best source and Dave Sabo. 174 00:15:30.960 --> 00:15:34.840 So they would let me know what they were doing that was interesting. 175 00:15:35.740 --> 00:15:41.180 Wow. And so you would supply the projectors and the equipment needed to... 176 00:15:41.180 --> 00:15:48.180 Yeah, yeah. We'd go wherever it was, set up a screen, set up projectors and just run it. 177 00:15:48.420 --> 00:15:49.480 What year was this? 178 00:15:50.860 --> 00:15:56.080 Oh, it was maybe ten years between the early 70s and early 80s. 179 00:15:58.160 --> 00:16:00.100 Or it may have been the late 60s. 180 00:16:03.860 --> 00:16:07.200 But it was ten to twelve years that we did that every month. 181 00:16:15.320 --> 00:16:23.660 So, could you talk a little bit about... 182 00:16:23.660 --> 00:16:31.040 And then I want to go back to some of the other characters in the film business, historical people. 183 00:16:31.100 --> 00:16:35.360 But could you talk a little bit about Kodak and kind of their... 184 00:16:35.360 --> 00:16:43.500 Sure. You can't think of the film business without Kodak. You just can't. 185 00:16:45.300 --> 00:16:52.020 Perhaps you could in Europe, but in the United States, Kodak made the film and processed it. 186 00:16:52.880 --> 00:16:56.300 So Kodak had an office in the Prudential Building. 187 00:16:57.060 --> 00:17:00.620 And then they had a warehouse in Oakbrook. 188 00:17:00.860 --> 00:17:04.880 And they had a big processing lab out on Prairie Avenue. 189 00:17:06.360 --> 00:17:13.700 Most of that lab was processing Kodachrome for still cameras, but also Kodachrome for movies. 190 00:17:16.760 --> 00:17:26.360 Kodachrome, which as far as I'm sure they've discontinued it now, is a color positive film. 191 00:17:26.960 --> 00:17:32.200 It's not made for duplication, so it's made with the idea that you project the original. 192 00:17:33.420 --> 00:17:39.940 And it holds up very well. It's wonderful archive material, as you know. 193 00:17:41.400 --> 00:17:42.940 The whole movies are... 194 00:17:42.940 --> 00:17:43.820 All Kodachrome. 195 00:17:44.000 --> 00:17:45.660 And are all beautiful shaped. 196 00:17:46.160 --> 00:17:46.700 Yeah. There's no... 197 00:17:46.700 --> 00:17:47.680 The whole movies are beautiful. 198 00:17:47.680 --> 00:17:59.780 There's no... And just to explain what that means, films that are printed from a color negative have what is called cyan fading. 199 00:18:00.380 --> 00:18:04.700 Cyan is the blue-green color within the film base, and that fades. 200 00:18:05.140 --> 00:18:11.000 And as that fades, then the film has a red... it has the opposite color. 201 00:18:12.000 --> 00:18:15.020 And Kodachrome does not have cyan fading. 202 00:18:17.200 --> 00:18:23.340 And if you said, well, why did Kodak make a film that had cyan fading? 203 00:18:24.000 --> 00:18:27.420 They didn't... I suspect they didn't know it when they made it. 204 00:18:27.660 --> 00:18:30.400 It takes years for that to show up. 205 00:18:31.240 --> 00:18:33.600 And years of poor storage. 206 00:18:34.260 --> 00:18:37.900 And one of the things Kodak didn't do was store film in a poor way. 207 00:18:38.180 --> 00:18:39.320 They knew how to do it. 208 00:18:39.320 --> 00:18:44.840 So they would keep it cool, and they'd keep it as humid as it needed to be, but not too much. 209 00:18:46.380 --> 00:18:50.820 And so it took years for that problem to make itself known. 210 00:18:50.880 --> 00:18:55.520 And then they put a research team and corrected it. 211 00:18:55.680 --> 00:18:57.400 But by then, videotape was with us. 212 00:18:57.880 --> 00:19:03.660 And I think that's when Scorsese also came into the picture in terms of speaking up about film preservation. 213 00:19:04.560 --> 00:19:06.180 Right. He wasn't the first one. 214 00:19:06.740 --> 00:19:07.500 Who was? 215 00:19:08.040 --> 00:19:08.920 People at Kodak. 216 00:19:08.920 --> 00:19:11.280 You think the people at Kodak were... 217 00:19:11.280 --> 00:19:12.920 Oh, sure. Kodak, you cannot... 218 00:19:13.680 --> 00:19:16.940 Today, it's hard to imagine what a powerhouse it was. 219 00:19:17.960 --> 00:19:23.280 When the atomic bomb was developed during World War II, 220 00:19:24.580 --> 00:19:33.400 a high percentage of the people that worked at Oak Ridge and at Los Alamos were from Kodak's lab. 221 00:19:33.400 --> 00:19:41.020 Kodak and Western Electric Bell Labs were the two industrial organizations in the country 222 00:19:41.020 --> 00:19:50.020 that had just world-class, Ph.D.-based research labs. 223 00:19:51.180 --> 00:19:52.300 Good people. 224 00:19:53.600 --> 00:19:59.260 And so it was Kodak's support, really, that made the film business what it is. 225 00:20:02.520 --> 00:20:06.560 The first color films were... 226 00:20:06.560 --> 00:20:09.420 And I don't really mean the historical first. 227 00:20:09.580 --> 00:20:13.220 I mean the first commercial color films were Technicolor, 228 00:20:14.000 --> 00:20:17.260 which required a camera that weighed 700 pounds. 229 00:20:20.100 --> 00:20:25.880 It was a three-strip camera, three-strip black-and-white camera. 230 00:20:25.880 --> 00:20:30.920 And each black-and-white strip had a filter on it. 231 00:20:31.220 --> 00:20:36.000 And so one camera would filter out everything but red. 232 00:20:36.560 --> 00:20:38.120 Another camera would filter out... 233 00:20:38.120 --> 00:20:41.260 And I'm making up... I'm not doing this on paper. 234 00:20:41.340 --> 00:20:42.820 I'm just making it up as I go along. 235 00:20:43.280 --> 00:20:46.340 But another camera would filter out everything but green. 236 00:20:46.460 --> 00:20:51.620 Another one would fill out everything but blue, let's say. 237 00:20:51.620 --> 00:20:56.000 And so you put these three colors together and then you have a full spectrum, 238 00:20:56.520 --> 00:21:00.540 or a fairly full spectrum, and that's the way Technicolor worked. 239 00:21:02.080 --> 00:21:07.040 It needed a very special kind of film, a very special kind of processing, 240 00:21:07.760 --> 00:21:15.220 and a very special kind of camera that only lent itself because it weighed 700 pounds. 241 00:21:16.600 --> 00:21:18.000 You didn't hand hold. 242 00:21:19.820 --> 00:21:23.600 You didn't go out of the studio unless you absolutely had to. 243 00:21:24.380 --> 00:21:25.680 It was just too hard. 244 00:21:26.440 --> 00:21:30.060 And so it built in and it was noisy. 245 00:21:31.140 --> 00:21:36.760 If you can imagine, three cameras interlocked that are all running together. 246 00:21:37.220 --> 00:21:43.200 So it was a very noisy, a very cumbersome tool to use. 247 00:21:43.900 --> 00:21:46.860 Not used in Chicago essentially at all. 248 00:21:46.860 --> 00:21:51.600 It was just made to order for the Hollywood studio thing. 249 00:21:52.220 --> 00:22:02.760 So then when Kodak developed color film, first Kodachrome and then Color Negative, 250 00:22:03.520 --> 00:22:05.780 with the idea of being able to print from it, 251 00:22:06.860 --> 00:22:12.480 that opened up color filmmaking to industrials, documentaries. 252 00:22:13.040 --> 00:22:13.300 Amateur. 253 00:22:13.400 --> 00:22:14.740 Amateur, right. 254 00:22:15.640 --> 00:22:21.940 Amateurs used Kodachrome, which was better than the professionals were using, 255 00:22:22.720 --> 00:22:29.640 because professionals were shooting material to be printed so they could make multiple prints. 256 00:22:32.780 --> 00:22:36.140 So Kodak was a very important force in the industry. 257 00:22:37.240 --> 00:22:40.800 When did they open up in Chicago and why? 258 00:22:42.120 --> 00:22:49.140 There was a lawsuit that I can't, I don't know any of the details of it, 259 00:22:49.500 --> 00:23:03.180 but at some point Kodak was forced to divest themselves of the distribution of film, of professional film. 260 00:23:03.680 --> 00:23:08.000 It's a monopoly thing I guess, but I'm not certain of that. 261 00:23:08.000 --> 00:23:09.880 I don't know the details at all. 262 00:23:09.880 --> 00:23:13.440 But a company was set up called W.J. German, 263 00:23:14.020 --> 00:23:21.540 and German was the distributor for professional film. 264 00:23:22.280 --> 00:23:25.780 And you had to go to them for it, and there was only one, 265 00:23:26.300 --> 00:23:30.440 there may have been more than one price, but as a small filmmaker you didn't, 266 00:23:30.720 --> 00:23:32.900 I didn't know if there was another price or not. 267 00:23:34.660 --> 00:23:39.860 They had no or very little technical backup. 268 00:23:39.960 --> 00:23:45.000 It was a distribution organization, and they wanted money up front. 269 00:23:45.580 --> 00:23:48.840 So if you went to German you went out with a check, 270 00:23:50.160 --> 00:23:54.280 and the check had already been approved or you didn't bother to go. 271 00:23:55.520 --> 00:23:58.880 And so you went out there and picked up the film. 272 00:24:00.020 --> 00:24:06.080 Kodak had an office in the Prudential Building to solve problems for people. 273 00:24:06.460 --> 00:24:09.860 It was a customer service organization. 274 00:24:10.020 --> 00:24:17.300 So if you had a problem with the color in a print or with the print quality, 275 00:24:18.180 --> 00:24:20.380 you could call Kodak and get an answer, 276 00:24:20.560 --> 00:24:25.960 or if you needed a special stock for whatever you were shooting. 277 00:24:25.960 --> 00:24:31.580 For instance, I did quite a lot of work with infrared film, 278 00:24:32.420 --> 00:24:39.000 and I needed help from Kodak in figuring out how to do that. 279 00:24:46.560 --> 00:24:51.260 They were, I did that, well somehow along the line, 280 00:24:51.580 --> 00:24:54.700 I had been in the equipment business for 30 years, 281 00:24:54.700 --> 00:25:01.280 and I had shown so many people how to use film and how to use cameras 282 00:25:02.440 --> 00:25:08.180 and how to light and how to record sound that somebody asked me to do it myself. 283 00:25:08.580 --> 00:25:11.700 I had a good friend that worked for Continental Can Company, 284 00:25:12.860 --> 00:25:16.640 and they had to make a bunch of films. 285 00:25:16.680 --> 00:25:20.100 They had to make seven films in Russian. 286 00:25:20.780 --> 00:25:26.380 They were sending a team of executives to Russia to sell. 287 00:25:27.940 --> 00:25:29.480 How do I tell this story? 288 00:25:31.440 --> 00:25:34.840 What Continental Can Company did was they did not make cans. 289 00:25:35.260 --> 00:25:37.120 They made factories that made cans. 290 00:25:37.920 --> 00:25:43.280 And so if your name is Charlie Anhauser-Busch, 291 00:25:43.940 --> 00:25:46.260 and you're going to can a bunch of beer, 292 00:25:47.060 --> 00:25:51.020 you would get Continental Can Company to build you a factory to make cans, 293 00:25:51.780 --> 00:25:55.520 and then you would throw your beer in those cans. 294 00:25:56.440 --> 00:26:01.880 Well, the problem with that was that if Anhauser-Busch had an old factory 295 00:26:01.880 --> 00:26:05.580 and they wanted a new factory, they had to get rid of their old factory. 296 00:26:06.360 --> 00:26:08.920 And so Continental Can Company would take back their own, 297 00:26:09.020 --> 00:26:10.420 it was like the used car business. 298 00:26:10.500 --> 00:26:15.340 They would take back the old factory and put it in a warehouse 299 00:26:15.340 --> 00:26:17.180 and put in the new factory. 300 00:26:17.920 --> 00:26:22.660 So they were getting too many warehouses full of old factories to make cans. 301 00:26:22.680 --> 00:26:27.640 So they sent a team to Russia that had no can-making equipment at all. 302 00:26:28.860 --> 00:26:30.560 And I remember the statistics. 303 00:26:31.460 --> 00:26:37.240 They figured in the United States at that time there were 40 breweries making beer. 304 00:26:38.560 --> 00:26:41.960 Beer is the most important product, of course, that goes into cans. 305 00:26:41.960 --> 00:26:48.900 And in Russia there was something like 8,000 breweries because there were no cans. 306 00:26:49.020 --> 00:26:51.640 And so you had a brewery in every town. 307 00:26:53.080 --> 00:26:57.620 And so Continental Can sent a team of executives to Russia to sell them 308 00:26:57.620 --> 00:27:00.420 some of these old can-making factories. 309 00:27:01.240 --> 00:27:06.260 And they wanted to take films that they had to tell how weird and wonderful 310 00:27:06.260 --> 00:27:10.100 their cans were that they could show in Russia. 311 00:27:10.100 --> 00:27:13.960 But they had English narrations. 312 00:27:14.380 --> 00:27:17.360 And so they had to remake these films and make some new films 313 00:27:17.360 --> 00:27:22.840 to show their research and how weird and wonderful Continental Can was. 314 00:27:23.400 --> 00:27:28.580 And so they asked me if I could just make these films for them. 315 00:27:28.600 --> 00:27:31.980 And by the way, I had six weeks and they had to be in Russian. 316 00:27:32.620 --> 00:27:38.540 And that included doing translations and finding Russian-speaking narrators and all of that. 317 00:27:38.540 --> 00:27:42.180 And editors who could understand the language so they could cut the films. 318 00:27:43.360 --> 00:27:50.840 So I did. And after I did that, I just produced it. 319 00:27:51.580 --> 00:27:54.180 So I became aware that I could do that. 320 00:27:54.740 --> 00:27:56.720 And I didn't know I could do that. 321 00:27:58.280 --> 00:27:58.860 And I suspect that... 322 00:27:58.860 --> 00:27:59.960 Like many other producers. 323 00:28:00.640 --> 00:28:02.720 Yeah, I think that's how producers get into the business. 324 00:28:02.720 --> 00:28:06.780 They somehow get this idea thrown at them. 325 00:28:07.300 --> 00:28:08.160 And so you do it. 326 00:28:09.000 --> 00:28:11.640 And then you find out it isn't all that hard. 327 00:28:12.280 --> 00:28:14.000 You have to give it some thought. 328 00:28:15.620 --> 00:28:18.540 So that's how I really got in the production business. 329 00:28:19.740 --> 00:28:21.160 I didn't want to... 330 00:28:21.160 --> 00:28:23.180 What was that about? Do you recall? 331 00:28:23.560 --> 00:28:27.460 Oh, I'm going to say late 70s. 332 00:28:27.760 --> 00:28:29.940 Okay, that's the first time you started making films. 333 00:28:30.000 --> 00:28:31.120 Yeah, yeah. 334 00:28:31.120 --> 00:28:33.820 But I didn't want to compete with my customers. 335 00:28:34.120 --> 00:28:41.360 Because I had literally hundreds of customers that bought equipment from me and rented equipment from me. 336 00:28:41.840 --> 00:28:44.200 And I didn't want them to see me as a threat. 337 00:28:45.580 --> 00:28:47.860 And I'm sure they didn't. 338 00:28:49.460 --> 00:28:53.780 Nobody could drool as much as I do and be very threatening. 339 00:28:53.780 --> 00:29:03.080 So I developed little niche things that other people didn't do. 340 00:29:03.520 --> 00:29:05.520 And I did a lot of high-speed photography. 341 00:29:07.040 --> 00:29:10.920 We were shooting all up to 10,000 frames a second. 342 00:29:11.540 --> 00:29:14.140 And that operates like a microscope. 343 00:29:15.540 --> 00:29:19.040 What a microscope does for size, high speed does for time. 344 00:29:19.040 --> 00:29:26.360 And so you can slow down if you shoot at 10,000 frames a second and play back at 24 frames a second, 345 00:29:27.440 --> 00:29:31.960 you're making a very fast action appear to be slow. 346 00:29:31.960 --> 00:29:40.500 Can you tell me a little bit about that one shoot that you did for, I forget what company it was, but it was a test explosion? 347 00:29:41.340 --> 00:29:44.960 Oh yeah, that was for... 348 00:29:45.560 --> 00:29:47.680 I can't remember the name of the company either. 349 00:29:47.680 --> 00:29:49.120 Oh, Republic. 350 00:29:49.760 --> 00:30:02.140 It was a company set up in the iron mining range up in upper Minnesota, northern Minnesota, in the Musabee Range. 351 00:30:03.340 --> 00:30:08.900 The company was owned by something like 40 different mining companies. 352 00:30:09.980 --> 00:30:12.900 And they were sort of like a pool. 353 00:30:12.900 --> 00:30:23.620 And when they mine iron, they dig holes in the ground with a giant post hole digger, if you want to think of it that way. 354 00:30:23.640 --> 00:30:27.020 And the holes may be 50 feet deep and three feet in diameter. 355 00:30:27.580 --> 00:30:29.880 And they may be eight or 10 feet apart. 356 00:30:30.400 --> 00:30:32.900 And they fill these holes with liquid explosive. 357 00:30:35.720 --> 00:30:48.420 And because the taconite, which is the rock that is used when they mine iron, is a very hard rock, just incredibly hard. 358 00:30:48.920 --> 00:30:57.980 And so when they blast to break up a bunch of rock, you may end up with chunks that are the size of a house. 359 00:30:58.500 --> 00:31:01.260 And you can't throw those chunks into a rock crusher. 360 00:31:01.260 --> 00:31:09.700 And so it's important when they fill these holes with explosive that the explosive actually goes off. 361 00:31:10.400 --> 00:31:14.300 And it happens so they may have 50 of these holes in a row. 362 00:31:14.720 --> 00:31:16.380 And they go off in a sequence. 363 00:31:16.940 --> 00:31:27.680 And so we shot high-speed photography to show that each one was going off in the proper order and that they weren't missing any. 364 00:31:27.680 --> 00:31:37.040 And if the film showed that they were missing some, then they had an argument going with the supplier of the explosive. 365 00:31:37.480 --> 00:31:39.020 I see, okay. 366 00:31:39.600 --> 00:31:41.220 So it's a research. 367 00:31:42.460 --> 00:31:46.860 You'll never see this on television or in your local theater. 368 00:31:47.660 --> 00:31:48.960 Well, we did see that at the Cisco, though. 369 00:31:49.660 --> 00:31:49.680 Yeah. 370 00:31:49.980 --> 00:31:50.700 Yeah. 371 00:31:50.900 --> 00:32:00.140 We did the same thing for a company that makes railroad wheels, where we had a static shot of a wheel going around for something like a half an hour. 372 00:32:00.320 --> 00:32:05.600 And a brake shoe was pressing against the wheel and heating it up. 373 00:32:05.960 --> 00:32:11.640 And then we shot infrared high-speed to show what the heating effect was on the wheel. 374 00:32:11.640 --> 00:32:19.440 And it's something you either have to be in the railroad world to get any meaning out of it. 375 00:32:20.160 --> 00:32:28.140 But it was very important because what happened was that they put the wrong kind of brake shoe on the train and the brake shoe would overheat the wheel. 376 00:32:28.500 --> 00:32:29.480 The wheel would break. 377 00:32:30.100 --> 00:32:32.220 And you'd get a train wreck. 378 00:32:33.120 --> 00:32:37.060 I think that's a technical term, when a bunch of cars end up in the ditch. 379 00:32:38.080 --> 00:32:43.580 So this showed why some trains were falling off the tracks. 380 00:32:44.620 --> 00:32:51.700 So were most of the York film—I think you did something also, like the 50th anniversary of the Equitable Building? 381 00:32:52.340 --> 00:32:53.780 Oh, that was done for fun. 382 00:32:54.260 --> 00:32:56.100 Yeah, okay. Yeah. 383 00:32:56.500 --> 00:32:58.140 There was the Equitable Building going on. 384 00:32:58.140 --> 00:32:58.640 Yeah. 385 00:32:58.640 --> 00:33:01.440 There was an editor named Hans Graf. 386 00:33:02.140 --> 00:33:08.380 And Hans had his little editing studio in a penthouse overlooking that construction site. 387 00:33:09.080 --> 00:33:19.760 So one day we drank lunch together and decided that it would be a fun thing to set up a time-lapse camera shooting out of his window at this construction thing going on. 388 00:33:20.300 --> 00:33:22.700 And it ran for three years. 389 00:33:23.500 --> 00:33:24.460 What was the name of the building? 390 00:33:24.900 --> 00:33:26.400 Equitable Building, yeah. 391 00:33:27.940 --> 00:33:32.200 You did also something with Leo Burnett, right? Their 50th anniversary? 392 00:33:32.220 --> 00:33:38.880 Yeah. For their 50th anniversary they set up a huge tent in Grant Park. 393 00:33:39.700 --> 00:33:51.000 And so we, again, shot out of a window of Bob Link's apartment, putting this tent up and taking it down. 394 00:33:51.000 --> 00:33:56.620 So where something took three days, we compressed it into five minutes or something like that. 395 00:33:58.280 --> 00:34:01.620 So you really liked the technology. 396 00:34:01.900 --> 00:34:07.740 I loved the technology, yes. And this didn't step on anybody's toes. 397 00:34:08.760 --> 00:34:24.360 One of the high-speed shoots I did was for a speech therapist at Northwestern Hospital that taught people to talk after they had had a polyp removed from their larynx or something like that. 398 00:34:25.760 --> 00:34:35.880 And he had been teaching speech for years and suddenly realized that he didn't know really how the larynx makes sound. 399 00:34:36.360 --> 00:34:37.800 Where does that come from? 400 00:34:38.380 --> 00:34:48.160 And so he got me to do a high-speed, make a high-speed shot of the larynx when somebody is coughing. 401 00:34:51.320 --> 00:34:54.160 And lighting it was interesting. 402 00:34:55.280 --> 00:34:55.960 How did you do that? 403 00:34:56.100 --> 00:35:00.520 Well, when you shoot at 10,000 frames a second, you don't have a very long exposure time. 404 00:35:01.540 --> 00:35:03.360 Right. How do you get? 405 00:35:04.280 --> 00:35:15.040 Well, I used a xenon arc light and I focused it. And then we were testing it in his office. 406 00:35:15.040 --> 00:35:19.620 And he said, well, it's bright enough, that's for sure. 407 00:35:20.040 --> 00:35:25.780 And we smelled smoke and it had started a calendar on fire that was hanging on the wall on the other side of the room. 408 00:35:26.400 --> 00:35:32.380 So he said that could be kind of hard on vocal cords that when somebody has just had surgery on them. 409 00:35:33.180 --> 00:35:37.060 So we had to figure out a way to get the heat out of the light. 410 00:35:38.420 --> 00:35:39.440 Good for cancer. 411 00:35:39.540 --> 00:35:42.880 Yeah, right. Right. The ultimate radiation. 412 00:35:44.300 --> 00:35:45.740 Just fry the sucker. 413 00:35:49.120 --> 00:35:51.840 So, yeah, I love that kind of thing. 414 00:35:51.960 --> 00:36:02.820 We did a job for Quaker Oats where they wanted to know how could they crack oats in a, in a cycle, in a, in a rig that spins them around. 415 00:36:02.820 --> 00:36:13.220 And it, it whirls these, these oats at, at 25,000 RPM into little barriers that crack the shell. 416 00:36:13.620 --> 00:36:17.780 And, and so we shot that in, in high speed to. 417 00:36:18.000 --> 00:36:18.800 Do we have that? 418 00:36:19.040 --> 00:36:28.220 No, no, no. They, a lot of the work that I did, the client wanted the footage and they, they wanted to keep it close by. 419 00:36:28.220 --> 00:36:33.220 There was a competitive world out there and they wanted the results of their research. 420 00:36:35.880 --> 00:36:45.460 Which is fair enough. I, I, the, the only, if I did a commercial film, which is like the kind that you'd show to an audience, 421 00:36:47.100 --> 00:36:52.580 usually the deal would be that it was my film that they had all the rights to. 422 00:36:52.580 --> 00:36:57.720 But I could use any shot from them and from that in any other film that I. 423 00:36:57.720 --> 00:36:59.000 Right, you could use the footage. 424 00:36:59.520 --> 00:37:00.060 Yeah. Right. 425 00:37:00.060 --> 00:37:00.500 For any purpose. 426 00:37:00.660 --> 00:37:02.520 Right. But it was their film. 427 00:37:02.960 --> 00:37:04.920 What, what, what are some of those films? 428 00:37:06.260 --> 00:37:12.420 Oh, I made a, I made a fundraising film for Swedish Covenant Hospital. 429 00:37:12.420 --> 00:37:21.720 And we're talking about that medical care goes back a long way in history. 430 00:37:23.280 --> 00:37:27.040 And so we're talking about coming out of the mists of time. 431 00:37:27.900 --> 00:37:31.040 Well, how do you, how do you shoot the mists of time? 432 00:37:31.380 --> 00:37:34.220 You know, what is a metaphor? 433 00:37:34.220 --> 00:37:35.260 What is a metaphor? 434 00:37:39.240 --> 00:37:48.540 And a few years before that I had made a film for the Chicago Association of Commerce that we called Black, Black Powder. 435 00:37:49.260 --> 00:37:54.420 And they were having a Christmas party and they wanted to show a film about hunting. 436 00:37:55.380 --> 00:38:04.620 They had a group that was part of the Association of Commerce that were into sportsmanship, hunting, fishing. 437 00:38:05.620 --> 00:38:11.700 And so they wanted me to do a film about hunting that they could show at the Christmas party. 438 00:38:11.760 --> 00:38:21.420 So we did a film called Black Powder about using Revolutionary War guns to hunt. 439 00:38:21.420 --> 00:38:25.680 And how did that work, you know? 440 00:38:26.080 --> 00:38:34.100 And so I had a shot that we had made of a guy paddling a canoe on a foggy, misty morning. 441 00:38:34.940 --> 00:38:41.660 And I used that shot for the mists of time in another film. 442 00:38:42.060 --> 00:38:43.480 Right. Right, right. 443 00:38:43.700 --> 00:38:45.540 And so you never, you just never know. 444 00:38:45.540 --> 00:38:53.860 You know, you've got a shot and the only way you, I've often wondered how do you index stuff like that? 445 00:38:53.860 --> 00:39:03.500 And I just don't know how you'd go through a film and be able to index every shot in it to call it to memory. 446 00:39:04.000 --> 00:39:05.940 Well, we try to do that. 447 00:39:06.040 --> 00:39:08.980 But I would guess it would be very difficult. 448 00:39:09.000 --> 00:39:10.300 It's very time consuming. 449 00:39:10.960 --> 00:39:13.460 And yeah, logging, right, all the shots. 450 00:39:14.160 --> 00:39:14.720 Yeah. 451 00:39:21.460 --> 00:39:23.600 I do have more questions. 452 00:39:30.640 --> 00:39:37.640 Just going back to the theaters, I wanted to ask about one in particular, which was the Playboy Theater. 453 00:39:37.700 --> 00:39:38.200 Oh. 454 00:39:38.480 --> 00:39:40.380 Can you tell me a little bit about that? 455 00:39:40.380 --> 00:39:42.360 I think that was on Dearborn. 456 00:39:42.360 --> 00:39:43.720 Was it or? 457 00:39:44.440 --> 00:39:46.440 Let me just think a minute now. 458 00:39:46.780 --> 00:39:48.160 Playboy Theater. 459 00:39:51.640 --> 00:40:02.060 The theater that I believe is now called the Village Theater, and I may be wrong, I think it's on Clark Street. 460 00:40:03.800 --> 00:40:05.440 It used to be called the Surf. 461 00:40:06.780 --> 00:40:11.140 And it was an art house, in the best sense of the word. 462 00:40:12.660 --> 00:40:14.980 Yeah, you get into trouble with that word. 463 00:40:18.180 --> 00:40:26.280 It showed, they had a nice lobby and you could get coffee in the lobby and you could carry the coffee into the theater. 464 00:40:26.420 --> 00:40:29.440 It was a pretty civilized operation. 465 00:40:29.440 --> 00:40:46.940 There was a film made when Bob Flaxman made a film about the making of a film called The Last Affair. 466 00:40:47.440 --> 00:40:53.260 It was a feature length film made by Columbia College's recent graduates. 467 00:40:54.560 --> 00:40:59.160 And it was sort of a, they called it softcore porn. 468 00:40:59.920 --> 00:41:04.940 And it was a goofy storyline. 469 00:41:05.480 --> 00:41:07.180 Let's not bother with that. 470 00:41:08.280 --> 00:41:10.780 There are a lot of goofy storylines out there. 471 00:41:11.260 --> 00:41:22.840 But the film they made crossed the line to the point where no theater in Chicago would show it. 472 00:41:24.740 --> 00:41:29.660 Now, why they wouldn't show it, there could be two reasons. 473 00:41:29.740 --> 00:41:33.720 One is they were afraid of Citi taking action against them. 474 00:41:34.520 --> 00:41:38.300 Citi had a very active censorship board at that time. 475 00:41:38.460 --> 00:41:39.900 I don't know if we could talk about that. 476 00:41:42.020 --> 00:41:44.420 The other reason is it was a terrible film. 477 00:41:44.420 --> 00:41:54.740 And there was, believe it or not, a lot of theater operators can tell the difference. 478 00:41:54.880 --> 00:41:57.260 They know a bad film when they see one. 479 00:41:58.080 --> 00:42:03.160 And they don't necessarily know a good film when they see one, but they certainly do know a bad one. 480 00:42:03.580 --> 00:42:05.960 And they smelled this one from a long way away. 481 00:42:08.480 --> 00:42:15.260 So after spending roughly $800,000 to make the movie, they weren't being able to get it shown. 482 00:42:15.700 --> 00:42:18.180 And so they bought the old Surf Theater. 483 00:42:18.820 --> 00:42:22.840 They called it the Chelex, which was the name of their production company. 484 00:42:23.540 --> 00:42:28.180 And they showed the film in their own theater, and it lasted four days. 485 00:42:31.020 --> 00:42:33.760 So then they had this theater on their hands. 486 00:42:33.760 --> 00:42:34.820 And what are they going to do? 487 00:42:34.820 --> 00:42:40.120 And I think they sold that to Hugh Hefner, and that became the Playboy. 488 00:42:51.020 --> 00:42:52.760 A different kind of art house. 489 00:42:58.080 --> 00:42:59.580 No, no. Oh, no. 490 00:43:00.360 --> 00:43:00.760 It was a... 491 00:43:01.540 --> 00:43:01.980 Sure. 492 00:43:01.980 --> 00:43:04.160 It was a nice theater. 493 00:43:04.560 --> 00:43:05.000 Yeah. 494 00:43:05.800 --> 00:43:06.240 Yeah. 495 00:43:06.280 --> 00:43:06.920 Oh, yeah. 496 00:43:07.760 --> 00:43:11.280 But let's talk a little bit about porn, because... 497 00:43:11.280 --> 00:43:14.200 Do you guys have any objections to talking about porn? 498 00:43:14.500 --> 00:43:18.520 No, but really quick, I think the mic may have slipped down. 499 00:43:18.680 --> 00:43:21.880 I was in your shirt. It seems to be ruffling a little bit more. 500 00:43:22.400 --> 00:43:23.560 Do you want to check it out? 501 00:43:23.800 --> 00:43:24.460 Is it in place? 502 00:43:24.620 --> 00:43:25.320 I don't know. 503 00:43:25.360 --> 00:43:26.100 You're like in pause. 504 00:43:26.180 --> 00:43:26.880 I'm not fine. 505 00:43:26.920 --> 00:43:27.920 Yeah, it's perfect. 506 00:43:28.900 --> 00:43:29.980 Well, not porn, but... 507 00:43:33.000 --> 00:43:38.940 I was hired one time, and I can't remember who hired me. 508 00:43:40.060 --> 00:43:45.200 But it was to stand with a camera and a microphone at the base, 509 00:43:45.340 --> 00:43:48.380 at the bottom of the escalator and water tower place, 510 00:43:49.480 --> 00:43:51.980 and interview people coming down the escalator. 511 00:43:54.880 --> 00:43:58.880 You ask them five questions, and I can't remember what all the questions were, 512 00:43:58.880 --> 00:44:01.640 but one was, do you watch porn movies? 513 00:44:02.980 --> 00:44:12.260 Do you know the name of So-and-so, who was a big star in porn at that time? 514 00:44:12.760 --> 00:44:16.440 What was the last movie this person was in that you've seen? 515 00:44:17.140 --> 00:44:18.160 Questions like that. 516 00:44:18.660 --> 00:44:22.000 And the purpose of it was to find out who watches porn. 517 00:44:23.060 --> 00:44:26.440 And what they found out was that roughly 80% of the people 518 00:44:26.440 --> 00:44:30.320 coming down the escalator at water tower place watched porn. 519 00:44:31.260 --> 00:44:37.440 And this essentially is what paid for the whole consumer electronics industry 520 00:44:37.980 --> 00:44:41.760 at that time, when you think about it. 521 00:44:42.120 --> 00:44:42.780 Porn films? 522 00:44:43.280 --> 00:44:43.740 Sure. 523 00:44:45.720 --> 00:44:46.520 What... 524 00:44:46.520 --> 00:44:48.440 You could get them on videotape. 525 00:44:49.740 --> 00:44:52.660 The FCC had nothing to say about it. 526 00:44:53.080 --> 00:44:54.340 It's not broadcast. 527 00:44:56.440 --> 00:45:00.800 There was no Chicago censorship board that had anything to say about it. 528 00:45:01.820 --> 00:45:07.740 You could buy the films somehow on cassette and show them at home, 529 00:45:07.840 --> 00:45:09.440 and nobody could tell you you couldn't. 530 00:45:11.100 --> 00:45:12.440 And so, yet that... 531 00:45:13.460 --> 00:45:20.200 The consumer electronics show that used to be at McCormick Place and in Las Vegas, 532 00:45:20.800 --> 00:45:24.720 roughly a quarter of the floor space of that show was porn. 533 00:45:27.020 --> 00:45:28.000 Big deal. 534 00:45:28.400 --> 00:45:36.280 I remember living on Armitage just west of Clark a long time ago. 535 00:45:36.540 --> 00:45:41.100 And there was a movie... 536 00:45:41.840 --> 00:45:46.380 A movie store, you know, where you could buy, yeah, cassettes. 537 00:45:47.000 --> 00:45:49.240 And in the back, you know, there was a black curtain. 538 00:45:49.340 --> 00:45:49.860 I'm sorry. 539 00:45:49.960 --> 00:45:51.440 In the back, there was... 540 00:45:52.600 --> 00:45:55.140 Yeah, it was all the X-rated movies. 541 00:45:55.160 --> 00:45:55.440 Sure. 542 00:45:55.440 --> 00:45:56.500 I mean, it was... 543 00:45:56.500 --> 00:45:56.720 Sure. 544 00:45:57.780 --> 00:45:58.080 Sure. 545 00:45:58.300 --> 00:46:01.120 It was kind of such an upfront business. 546 00:46:01.380 --> 00:46:03.960 I mean, that was always part of your video stores. 547 00:46:04.560 --> 00:46:04.560 548 00:46:05.500 --> 00:46:07.700 I used to sell equipment to the... 549 00:46:07.700 --> 00:46:11.540 Back in the theater days, I sold equipment to the Chicago censor board. 550 00:46:12.520 --> 00:46:19.260 The censor board was composed of widows who were all Irish, 551 00:46:19.820 --> 00:46:23.580 and they were all widows of Chicago policemen killed in the line of duty. 552 00:46:23.580 --> 00:46:26.280 So this is a fairly conservative bunch. 553 00:46:27.580 --> 00:46:34.520 And they had absolute control over what could and could not be shown in theaters. 554 00:46:38.060 --> 00:46:39.220 Those 50s, 60s? 555 00:46:39.220 --> 00:46:40.640 50s, 60s, yeah. 556 00:46:41.720 --> 00:46:46.160 I don't know when they stopped, and I don't know why they stopped. 557 00:46:46.200 --> 00:46:48.240 It had to be a legal issue. 558 00:46:50.080 --> 00:46:55.920 Bruce Trins used to work as an expert witness in censorship cases. 559 00:46:55.920 --> 00:46:57.680 Okay. Over at the Clark Theater. 560 00:46:57.960 --> 00:47:04.740 Yeah, and when it got legal, he would talk about censorship. 561 00:47:06.000 --> 00:47:06.560 Right. 562 00:47:18.860 --> 00:47:18.860 563 00:47:22.600 --> 00:47:23.720 So Herschel... 564 00:47:23.720 --> 00:47:25.920 So Dallas Studios was that? 565 00:47:26.060 --> 00:47:26.900 Dallas Jones. 566 00:47:27.100 --> 00:47:27.860 Dallas Jones. 567 00:47:28.680 --> 00:47:30.260 Was that a name of a man? 568 00:47:30.360 --> 00:47:31.700 That was the name of a man. 569 00:47:32.100 --> 00:47:33.760 What kind of films did he make? 570 00:47:33.760 --> 00:47:36.320 Commercial, industrial. 571 00:47:40.360 --> 00:47:41.820 He also did... 572 00:47:41.820 --> 00:47:45.320 Yeah, he did commercial, TV commercials, and industrial films. 573 00:47:48.820 --> 00:47:51.600 How about Madeleine Turtelow? 574 00:47:51.700 --> 00:47:52.580 Madeleine Turtelow. 575 00:47:52.660 --> 00:47:59.560 Well, I would put her in the category with Millie Goldshaw and Helen Morrison, 576 00:47:59.560 --> 00:48:04.920 films that were art-based. 577 00:48:06.200 --> 00:48:09.220 And I don't think I ever saw any of her films. 578 00:48:10.240 --> 00:48:11.080 But we talked to her. 579 00:48:11.080 --> 00:48:16.860 She came into the shop, and we talked about cameras, and I sold her equipment. 580 00:48:17.140 --> 00:48:20.620 But I don't think I ever saw any of her finished films. 581 00:48:22.160 --> 00:48:24.540 Do you remember anything about her? What she was like? 582 00:48:24.780 --> 00:48:26.700 Striking looking, yes. 583 00:48:26.700 --> 00:48:31.820 Very stylish, sort of almost imposing. 584 00:48:32.640 --> 00:48:34.960 When she came in, you knew it. 585 00:48:38.940 --> 00:48:41.660 How about Margaret Keneally? 586 00:48:43.940 --> 00:48:50.920 She would come to screenings from time to time, and there were so many organizations then that... 587 00:48:50.920 --> 00:48:54.700 And I can't remember exactly where she fit, but she would... 588 00:48:54.700 --> 00:49:03.660 There was a Chicago Film Producers Association, University Film Producers Association, 589 00:49:05.200 --> 00:49:08.700 Religious Film Producers Association... 590 00:49:09.420 --> 00:49:11.100 The Photographic Society... 591 00:49:11.100 --> 00:49:12.560 Yeah, industrial film. 592 00:49:13.280 --> 00:49:21.580 So there were all these groups that had their own niches, and you would see Margaret at some of these. 593 00:49:21.580 --> 00:49:26.360 She was interested in production. She did a lot of her own films. 594 00:49:27.500 --> 00:49:38.360 And she and other people that did amateur films tried to emulate what the big kids were doing. 595 00:49:39.580 --> 00:49:42.960 And so they would come out to look. 596 00:49:43.840 --> 00:49:50.900 Western Electric out on 22nd and Pulaski running there... 597 00:49:50.900 --> 00:49:58.500 They had the largest camera club in the country of their employees that started a camera club together. 598 00:49:59.200 --> 00:50:05.280 And as part of that camera club were people that were shooting films, essentially home movies. 599 00:50:05.940 --> 00:50:13.800 Right. Yeah, she kind of swam... I know everybody seems to have remembered she was around on the street. 600 00:50:13.820 --> 00:50:16.780 She was around on the periphery of everything that was... 601 00:50:16.780 --> 00:50:23.780 I think she shot for Loyola University some medical films for them, but I asked her once why she didn't. 602 00:50:23.880 --> 00:50:27.420 Because you were right. They had all these trade magazines. 603 00:50:28.480 --> 00:50:34.460 It was... Although hers, I think, didn't quite emulate professional films. 604 00:50:34.580 --> 00:50:39.900 They did something on her, totally her own, or special, in my opinion. 605 00:50:39.960 --> 00:50:41.680 I agree with you. 606 00:50:41.860 --> 00:50:43.300 Sorry, we've got a truck. 607 00:50:44.400 --> 00:50:45.080 Okay. 608 00:50:45.900 --> 00:50:47.140 I think he's backing up. 609 00:50:47.140 --> 00:50:48.440 That I will talk more. 610 00:50:49.760 --> 00:50:54.300 But she said... I asked her once about why she didn't... 611 00:50:55.100 --> 00:51:03.900 Why she didn't, you know, think about trying to get into more professionals. 612 00:51:04.680 --> 00:51:13.280 She was definitely really mired in a really good way, in a positive way, in the amateur film clubs and filmmaking. 613 00:51:13.280 --> 00:51:17.720 She went around the world judging amateur film contests and stuff. 614 00:51:18.700 --> 00:51:22.280 And she said, you know, they're going to make you do things. 615 00:51:22.920 --> 00:51:23.300 Yep. 616 00:51:23.720 --> 00:51:30.760 Certain ways that I just probably am not interested in being forced to do things like that. 617 00:51:31.260 --> 00:51:37.200 But there was a modesty with that, too, when she said that. 618 00:51:37.200 --> 00:51:43.460 But all in all, her stuff did have a certain Margaret Keneally stamp on it. 619 00:51:43.800 --> 00:51:45.480 Yeah, yeah. She's an auteur. 620 00:51:45.640 --> 00:51:46.660 That was deliberate. 621 00:51:47.220 --> 00:51:49.520 Yeah, yeah. Yeah. 622 00:51:50.400 --> 00:51:56.120 I got to say that I was not that interested in amateur stuff. I really wasn't. 623 00:51:56.800 --> 00:52:00.940 And I guess, in fact, I'm still not. I haven't changed. 624 00:52:04.200 --> 00:52:09.460 It's kind of fun to see, but I can only take so much of it. 625 00:52:10.040 --> 00:52:13.940 Yeah. Okay. Well, let me... 626 00:52:13.940 --> 00:52:25.820 Also, speaking of these different groups and agencies and stuff that were around, you talked also about the... 627 00:52:25.820 --> 00:52:28.940 There was a science... 628 00:52:28.940 --> 00:52:30.340 John Ott. 629 00:52:30.780 --> 00:52:38.060 Oh, John Ott. He did a weekly show on NBC called How Does Your Garden Grow? 630 00:52:39.160 --> 00:52:45.040 And he had two specialties. One was photography, and he knew moviemaking. 631 00:52:46.060 --> 00:52:49.780 He didn't really know moviemaking, but he knew how to set up a camera and get shots. 632 00:52:49.860 --> 00:52:52.380 And then he knew how to grow flowers. 633 00:52:52.380 --> 00:53:00.300 And so he did a weekly show showing how flowers grow. 634 00:53:00.660 --> 00:53:05.380 And he developed a system of time-lapse photography where... 635 00:53:06.400 --> 00:53:08.260 Well, let me describe the problem. 636 00:53:08.660 --> 00:53:20.680 If you have an apple on an apple tree, and you want to do time-lapse photography of that apple, let's say over a 24-hour period, which would be very short, 637 00:53:21.560 --> 00:53:28.260 how are you going to get an exposure that matches, that balances out day and night? 638 00:53:29.520 --> 00:53:39.320 You have to have artificial light at night, and in the daytime, you've got sunlight. 639 00:53:39.540 --> 00:53:44.200 So that doesn't work. You can't mix and match. 640 00:53:44.960 --> 00:53:49.020 So what he finally... He tried a number of things. 641 00:53:50.580 --> 00:53:59.340 And one of the things that he learned is that if he builds a house around that apple and uses artificial light, that the apple doesn't ripen. 642 00:53:59.660 --> 00:54:02.180 It needs sunlight to ripen the apple. 643 00:54:03.200 --> 00:54:11.860 And so what you've got to have is a house that collapses to let the sunlight in, except when you're going to take a move, a shot. 644 00:54:11.860 --> 00:54:22.480 And when you're going to expose one frame, the house has to automatically get built again around the apple, turn on your lights, get your shot, turn off your lights, 645 00:54:22.920 --> 00:54:26.380 take the house down, and let the sun get to the apple. 646 00:54:26.940 --> 00:54:36.100 So he is shooting... He's got stuff going on all over the place, and he found out that everything that grows needs sunlight. 647 00:54:37.360 --> 00:54:46.800 Everything. It makes the chlorophyll thing happen, and it makes flowers won't germinate. 648 00:54:46.920 --> 00:54:48.760 I mean, all kinds of bad things. 649 00:54:48.920 --> 00:55:01.100 And in fact, he also found that people need sunlight, and without sunlight, they get things acting up. 650 00:55:01.350 --> 00:55:15.890 And he got crippled with arthritis, I believe, and found out that he changed all the windows in his house so that he would get full spectrum of light coming in the windows, and his arthritis went away. 651 00:55:16.810 --> 00:55:22.950 And then he developed reading lights that are full spectrum reading lights. 652 00:55:22.950 --> 00:55:35.970 So he's a very interesting guy. He understands the usefulness of asking questions and wondering why things work the way they do. 653 00:55:36.230 --> 00:55:44.570 And then he's very good at figuring out, okay, once you've figured out the problem, what do you do about it? 654 00:55:44.570 --> 00:55:50.570 And it was that thought process that he went through that... 655 00:55:51.210 --> 00:55:58.370 Allowed him to shoot this ripening apple in artificial light. 656 00:55:58.370 --> 00:56:09.130 Yes. And make it exciting so that you'd watch his show every week. It was one of the best rated local shows around at that time. 657 00:56:13.010 --> 00:56:19.190 But he had something like 40 cameras, and he used Bell and Howell wind-up cameras. 658 00:56:20.950 --> 00:56:26.370 And he had something like 40 of them around his place. He had a greenhouse that he built. 659 00:56:26.370 --> 00:56:33.650 And the greenhouse was built for photography so that he was getting sunlight in the greenhouse. 660 00:56:34.310 --> 00:56:43.490 But whenever he's going to expose one frame, you build a house around the thing and light it and shoot it. 661 00:56:44.590 --> 00:56:46.150 That's a great story. 662 00:56:47.870 --> 00:56:52.490 All right. How about another cameraman, Blackford, Burt Van Bork? 663 00:56:54.490 --> 00:56:59.550 I don't know that he had a niche. 664 00:57:00.590 --> 00:57:11.670 As far as I can remember, he was a very, very good meticulous guy that could do most anything. Good mechanic. 665 00:57:13.650 --> 00:57:14.590 He worked for EBE. 666 00:57:14.710 --> 00:57:16.790 Yeah. Yeah. 667 00:57:17.470 --> 00:57:17.830 And loved science. 668 00:57:18.310 --> 00:57:26.350 And he sort of specialized in scientific stuff. Yeah. But that can mean anything. 669 00:57:29.790 --> 00:57:33.790 Do you remember John Kerry by any chance? 670 00:57:33.790 --> 00:57:34.290 No. 671 00:57:34.290 --> 00:57:35.510 He was a song guy. 672 00:57:40.130 --> 00:57:42.330 How about Don Klugeman? 673 00:57:42.730 --> 00:57:48.130 Oh. He was a storyteller. 674 00:57:48.130 --> 00:57:57.610 He did films to suit himself. 675 00:57:58.970 --> 00:58:05.690 He didn't have—what he did in real life, I can't remember. I think he worked for an agency or something. 676 00:58:06.230 --> 00:58:12.030 But the films that he made were for himself and whatever audience he could find for them. 677 00:58:12.030 --> 00:58:21.670 And they were often psychological-based about the human condition, whatever you want to call that. 678 00:58:22.110 --> 00:58:23.790 And I like Don. 679 00:58:28.590 --> 00:58:30.550 I think he was a good filmmaker. 680 00:58:31.830 --> 00:58:40.750 He combined writing, shooting, directing, recording the sound, editing. Knew how to do that. 681 00:58:42.470 --> 00:58:48.430 How were all of these people in the time of film able to make their own films? 682 00:58:50.410 --> 00:59:00.570 I know that there was a lot of corporate sponsorship, but where did John Ott get the money to do this, to have all these cameras? 683 00:59:00.630 --> 00:59:04.470 Where did Klugeman get his dough to? 684 00:59:04.670 --> 00:59:06.310 A little at a time. 685 00:59:08.250 --> 00:59:21.090 He would—I don't know this, but I would guess that when he'd start making a film, the hard thing, the kind of films that Klugeman made, he relied on talent, on people. 686 00:59:21.370 --> 00:59:22.790 He shot people films. 687 00:59:24.450 --> 00:59:30.670 He would shoot a film that had a party sequence in it that had 20 people wandering around in a living room or something. 688 00:59:30.670 --> 00:59:41.350 So he had a lot of—he had to schedule his shoots around when people would be available, and that had to be difficult. 689 00:59:41.610 --> 00:59:42.810 Where the money came from? 690 00:59:43.630 --> 00:59:57.850 Well, a lot of it was using equipment that was down a running jump from what they probably should have been using. 691 00:59:57.850 --> 01:00:08.690 For instance, if he's shooting a sequence that is a party sequence where people are talking, you don't use the sync sound camera. 692 01:00:08.830 --> 01:00:16.550 So you just shoot, and then you get recordings of people saying what you want them to say, a little like Altman does. 693 01:00:19.410 --> 01:00:19.710 Yeah. 694 01:00:20.310 --> 01:00:21.450 And so you fake it. 695 01:00:21.450 --> 01:00:40.870 You have to be—that's not an easy thing to do, to shoot two people having a conversation where you don't—as an audience, it doesn't bother you that their sound is not matching the mouth movement. 696 01:00:41.650 --> 01:00:42.170 Right. 697 01:00:42.970 --> 01:00:43.970 Sorry, take change. 698 01:00:45.270 --> 01:00:46.470 Okay. How are you feeling? 699 01:00:47.390 --> 01:00:51.370 Oh, I'm not ready for surgery yet. 700 01:00:51.630 --> 01:00:53.870 Okay, it's getting around noon right now. 701 01:00:53.870 --> 01:00:54.370 I'm okay. 702 01:00:54.670 --> 01:00:55.310 You're okay? 703 01:00:56.850 --> 01:00:58.370 Let me—how are you guys?