WEBVTT 1 00:00:12.780 --> 00:00:17.060 We haven't talked about labs too much except for that there were a lot of labs. 2 00:00:20.180 --> 00:00:21.220 Well infrastructure. 3 00:00:21.480 --> 00:00:21.940 Are you ready? 4 00:00:22.120 --> 00:00:22.780 Yeah, we're rolling. 5 00:00:23.960 --> 00:00:23.960 6 00:00:26.580 --> 00:00:32.000 I remember at one time, I wish I could nail a date for you, but it would have been mid-60s 7 00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:32.700 let's say. 8 00:00:34.500 --> 00:00:41.920 There were over 50 film labs in Chicago processing movie film, 16 millimeter and 35. 9 00:00:42.860 --> 00:00:47.160 The labs were not necessarily both 16 and 35. 10 00:00:49.580 --> 00:00:54.900 Some of the producers and I think of both Sarah and Wilding had their own labs. 11 00:00:55.400 --> 00:00:57.940 Oh, and Atlas and Oak Park had their own lab. 12 00:01:02.500 --> 00:01:05.400 And there could have been others as well. 13 00:01:05.600 --> 00:01:08.940 But those three producers had their own labs, black and white. 14 00:01:09.780 --> 00:01:17.500 And of course, that did the fact that early on they hadn't switched to color yet and 15 00:01:17.500 --> 00:01:19.940 made it much easier to set up a lab. 16 00:01:22.440 --> 00:01:29.120 Color was a whole different story, but there was a company called Houston Fearless in Los 17 00:01:29.120 --> 00:01:34.440 Angeles that made almost portable processing machines. 18 00:01:34.440 --> 00:01:40.600 By portable, I mean it was about the size of an oversized desk. 19 00:01:42.960 --> 00:01:48.460 And it was basically made for television stations processing news footage. 20 00:01:50.540 --> 00:01:56.240 But there were other machines being made. 21 00:01:56.240 --> 00:02:05.580 Later on, a guy named Howard, I want to say Howard, is that right? 22 00:02:06.080 --> 00:02:09.200 Treese, I can't remember his first name. 23 00:02:09.860 --> 00:02:15.500 His last name was Treese and he built custom processing machines for labs. 24 00:02:17.440 --> 00:02:18.280 And they were huge. 25 00:02:18.660 --> 00:02:24.900 You know, a machine could be 50 feet long and they were made for high rates of production. 26 00:02:25.460 --> 00:02:29.620 And there was a lab just north of the river. 27 00:02:31.620 --> 00:02:33.460 I can't remember his last name. 28 00:02:33.740 --> 00:02:34.600 Larry something. 29 00:02:35.260 --> 00:02:41.960 And it was a rack and tank processing where film would get dumped in a tank for development. 30 00:02:42.640 --> 00:02:49.640 And at the end, it would get wrapped on a rack very similar to a clothes drying rack. 31 00:02:50.200 --> 00:02:56.860 And the film would air dry on this rack, which meant that I could only process maybe 100 32 00:02:56.860 --> 00:02:57.860 feet at a time. 33 00:02:58.020 --> 00:03:00.720 And that's what the TV stations were using. 34 00:03:01.560 --> 00:03:07.700 And so they would send film into the lab and it could be an hour or two before it would 35 00:03:07.700 --> 00:03:08.620 come out of the lab. 36 00:03:10.300 --> 00:03:16.900 And so whether the news footage would make the 6 o'clock news or not depended on exactly 37 00:03:16.900 --> 00:03:18.280 what time it got into the lab. 38 00:03:18.420 --> 00:03:19.360 Very touchy. 39 00:03:19.800 --> 00:03:22.080 And that's how cinema processors got started. 40 00:03:24.160 --> 00:03:29.720 It was two partners, Ike Barnimotia was in touch with the racetracks. 41 00:03:29.980 --> 00:03:37.780 He had set up the film labs out at Arlington Park and Hawthorne to do photo finishes. 42 00:03:38.780 --> 00:03:45.760 And then he ran across Maury Blackman, who was a cameraman at CBS. 43 00:03:46.580 --> 00:03:52.780 And they thought that what they were drinking together and like all great decisions that 44 00:03:52.780 --> 00:03:59.580 get made, when they drunk enough, they figured, well, what we got to do is set up a lab to 45 00:03:59.580 --> 00:04:01.640 do the news footage. 46 00:04:02.360 --> 00:04:03.440 And so they did. 47 00:04:03.440 --> 00:04:12.660 And within minutes, they were doing all the processing for ABC, NBC, CBS, and WGN. 48 00:04:12.980 --> 00:04:19.440 And they had motorcycles parked outside the lab to run processed film back to the station 49 00:04:19.960 --> 00:04:24.720 and to bring in film to be processed from the stations. 50 00:04:25.860 --> 00:04:28.400 And it was big operation. 51 00:04:31.340 --> 00:04:38.300 And as I say, there were just lots of labs that specialized in various things. 52 00:04:38.480 --> 00:04:44.440 Colburn Lab was one that went into producer services. 53 00:04:44.900 --> 00:04:48.720 In addition to processing film, they had writers on staff. 54 00:04:49.160 --> 00:04:56.000 And so if you work for a company and the company wants to make a film but they don't want 55 00:04:56.000 --> 00:05:01.680 to hire an outside producer because of the cost, they could go to Colburn. 56 00:05:01.880 --> 00:05:04.720 They would help them write a film script. 57 00:05:06.040 --> 00:05:16.400 They would have a, in the early days, they had a cameraman in a studio on staff ready 58 00:05:16.400 --> 00:05:17.400 to do it. 59 00:05:19.140 --> 00:05:22.520 They had editing rooms, sound recording facility. 60 00:05:23.920 --> 00:05:30.200 So they could provide all of the services that a company would need that wanted to do 61 00:05:30.200 --> 00:05:33.220 a film and wanted to do it in-house. 62 00:05:35.360 --> 00:05:37.400 That was pretty unusual. 63 00:05:37.860 --> 00:05:42.080 I think Colburn is the only one that comes to mind that did that. 64 00:05:43.480 --> 00:05:46.260 But there were just a lot, Sarah did their own. 65 00:05:46.260 --> 00:05:57.020 And then when Color came in, they set up a lab across the street from their studio to 66 00:05:57.020 --> 00:05:57.760 do Color. 67 00:05:58.560 --> 00:05:59.460 That was Astra. 68 00:06:00.240 --> 00:06:00.960 It was Astra? 69 00:06:01.180 --> 00:06:01.840 Yeah. 70 00:06:05.080 --> 00:06:11.460 So there were just lots of labs and a lot of competition between them. 71 00:06:12.180 --> 00:06:12.780 Wilding. 72 00:06:12.900 --> 00:06:15.380 It means that there was a lot, a lot, a lot of production. 73 00:06:15.460 --> 00:06:16.640 Oh, it was huge. 74 00:06:17.520 --> 00:06:18.380 Yeah, yeah. 75 00:06:18.840 --> 00:06:22.080 Most of it's 16 millimeter, but some 35. 76 00:06:27.860 --> 00:06:32.120 There were two or three people in the equipment business. 77 00:06:32.200 --> 00:06:33.280 It was our shop. 78 00:06:34.120 --> 00:06:41.220 Mark Armstead, who rented cameras in Los Angeles, had a shop here where they rented Mitchell 79 00:06:41.220 --> 00:06:44.480 cameras to mostly 35. 80 00:06:45.240 --> 00:06:46.820 I didn't do that at all. 81 00:06:46.880 --> 00:06:47.960 Then there was Victor Duncan. 82 00:06:48.060 --> 00:06:49.960 Victor Duncan, that was much later. 83 00:07:09.600 --> 00:07:14.580 Well, Allied Film Lab, that was Northside. 84 00:07:14.720 --> 00:07:15.740 They were on Belmont. 85 00:07:15.740 --> 00:07:16.680 Right. 86 00:07:18.840 --> 00:07:21.160 And Bill Smith ran Allied. 87 00:07:21.400 --> 00:07:25.160 He started working for Paul. 88 00:07:29.620 --> 00:07:33.160 Terrible to have such a bad memory in trying to do this. 89 00:07:33.620 --> 00:07:34.220 Oh, no. 90 00:07:35.460 --> 00:07:40.600 That happens to everybody when they are providing all the information. 91 00:07:40.840 --> 00:07:42.080 It'll come around. 92 00:07:42.760 --> 00:07:46.860 Anyway, he had a lab called Lakeside Lab in Gary. 93 00:07:49.260 --> 00:07:54.520 The guy that ran that lab had a cousin named Bill Smith. 94 00:07:57.840 --> 00:08:02.580 Bill and I became friends way early on. 95 00:08:02.860 --> 00:08:05.800 My first week in the business, I met Bill Smith. 96 00:08:06.660 --> 00:08:08.380 We're still the best of friends. 97 00:08:09.660 --> 00:08:14.840 Bill is retired now and living in Carmel, which isn't a bad place. 98 00:08:16.600 --> 00:08:19.980 Bill's son, Scott Smith, you probably know. 99 00:08:22.960 --> 00:08:27.620 When Scott set up his shop in Chicago, I gave him an office to set it up in. 100 00:08:28.280 --> 00:08:32.800 Scott and I go, when I first met Scott, he was one year old. 101 00:08:33.400 --> 00:08:35.120 We've known each other a long time. 102 00:08:38.960 --> 00:08:44.580 Anyway, Bill worked for his cousin at Lakeside Lab. 103 00:08:45.380 --> 00:08:49.200 Then later broke loose from him, set up a lab in Detroit. 104 00:08:51.380 --> 00:08:54.660 Then later on set up Allied in Chicago. 105 00:09:03.100 --> 00:09:10.520 How would you rate 16-millimeter production mid-20th century? 106 00:09:11.260 --> 00:09:13.260 The last second half of the century? 107 00:09:13.260 --> 00:09:14.340 There was a lot of it. 108 00:09:14.980 --> 00:09:18.620 In terms of other cities such as New York? 109 00:09:19.620 --> 00:09:22.940 There was a lot of 16-millimeter production in New York. 110 00:09:24.960 --> 00:09:33.400 I would guess there was more 16-millimeter production in Chicago than in Los Angeles. 111 00:09:34.240 --> 00:09:38.020 Except for the universities out there. They churned out a lot of stuff. 112 00:09:39.180 --> 00:09:44.000 There was a university producers' association that I mentioned before. 113 00:09:44.000 --> 00:09:48.500 Almost every big university had a production unit. 114 00:09:49.720 --> 00:09:51.520 Starting at what you think. 115 00:09:51.960 --> 00:09:57.340 I kind of remember. There wasn't film studies, did not exist. 116 00:09:57.340 --> 00:09:58.680 No, there wasn't any. 117 00:10:00.700 --> 00:10:06.460 Sometimes it was an offshoot of the English department where they're talking about stories. 118 00:10:10.740 --> 00:10:12.780 Film has one advantage. 119 00:10:12.780 --> 00:10:18.440 You can show a film in the class and everybody in the class has actually seen that film. 120 00:10:19.240 --> 00:10:21.060 Then you can talk about it. 121 00:10:21.220 --> 00:10:25.480 You can assign the class to read a story or a book. 122 00:10:27.660 --> 00:10:32.640 Having taught a little bit, there's nothing to guarantee that everybody in the class has read the book. 123 00:10:33.360 --> 00:10:36.440 You get six people involved in the discussion. 124 00:10:38.620 --> 00:10:42.520 Whereas film, everybody is starting from the same point. 125 00:10:43.660 --> 00:10:45.940 It's a big advantage in a classroom. 126 00:10:48.560 --> 00:10:58.060 Are there any filmmakers or people that we haven't talked about that come to mind to you? 127 00:10:58.120 --> 00:10:59.120 There are hundreds. 128 00:10:59.760 --> 00:11:02.600 I know there exist a lot of them. 129 00:11:02.600 --> 00:11:06.460 Let's go back and talk about industrial films a little bit. 130 00:11:07.140 --> 00:11:11.600 When International Harvester decided to... 131 00:11:12.440 --> 00:11:13.740 They had a classic problem. 132 00:11:14.020 --> 00:11:21.040 They built a machine that, let's say, it's involved in planting cotton. 133 00:11:25.620 --> 00:11:27.020 But it's November. 134 00:11:27.960 --> 00:11:29.800 Nobody plants cotton in November. 135 00:11:29.800 --> 00:11:37.120 Even if you're in a part of the country where you do plant cotton. 136 00:11:38.600 --> 00:11:41.340 And so they have two holdups. 137 00:11:41.400 --> 00:11:43.100 One is time and one is distance. 138 00:11:43.900 --> 00:11:45.140 How do you be where the cotton is? 139 00:11:45.240 --> 00:11:50.300 Well, what they did was they bought a huge farm out near Starved Rock. 140 00:11:51.940 --> 00:11:54.340 I think it was near Ottawa, Illinois. 141 00:11:55.040 --> 00:11:59.400 And they set up a film production unit out there. 142 00:11:59.400 --> 00:12:00.780 It was a huge building. 143 00:12:01.460 --> 00:12:03.440 They built a studio, soundproof. 144 00:12:04.800 --> 00:12:10.020 And it also taught dealers how to service harvester equipment. 145 00:12:10.480 --> 00:12:13.260 So they had a shop where they could do that. 146 00:12:13.400 --> 00:12:14.400 And then they had their film. 147 00:12:15.020 --> 00:12:18.160 So they had a lake on the farm. 148 00:12:19.560 --> 00:12:22.600 One side of the lake was deciduous trees. 149 00:12:22.640 --> 00:12:24.520 The other side is assiduous trees. 150 00:12:24.520 --> 00:12:28.960 So they could get a background from the lake of whatever they wanted 151 00:12:28.960 --> 00:12:30.900 with a field in front of it. 152 00:12:31.680 --> 00:12:34.820 And if they needed a shot of planting cotton, they could do it. 153 00:12:34.880 --> 00:12:39.160 And they didn't care what month it was because they had no intention of raising that cotton. 154 00:12:39.260 --> 00:12:40.500 They were just planting it. 155 00:12:40.800 --> 00:12:47.060 And so they could tailor the farm for what they were going to want within six months or a year. 156 00:12:47.780 --> 00:12:50.100 And they could schedule it all themselves. 157 00:12:50.180 --> 00:12:51.820 They had all their production equipment there. 158 00:12:51.840 --> 00:12:53.580 They didn't have to travel around the country. 159 00:12:53.580 --> 00:12:55.580 It made all kinds of sense to them. 160 00:12:55.660 --> 00:13:02.080 I remember one film they made where they got Garroway to be their narrator. 161 00:13:05.000 --> 00:13:11.340 And the corporate dude that worked for Harvester that was in charge, 162 00:13:11.660 --> 00:13:13.620 he wanted to be there when they shot Garroway. 163 00:13:13.800 --> 00:13:19.100 And he shows up, he thought he was C.B. DeMille, and he showed up one morning wearing riding breeches 164 00:13:22.380 --> 00:13:24.180 and playing Mr. Hollywood. 165 00:13:26.140 --> 00:13:27.400 Garroway had been up all night. 166 00:13:27.640 --> 00:13:31.720 He was an amateur astronomer, and he'd been up all night watching stars. 167 00:13:32.380 --> 00:13:37.840 And he came out, he was so blurry-eyed, he didn't see this guy in his riding breeches anyway. 168 00:13:40.380 --> 00:13:44.700 It was a big, they had, Ace Moore was one of their editors. 169 00:13:48.120 --> 00:13:55.380 They had probably four or five editors working at any place that's making enough, 170 00:13:55.880 --> 00:14:02.780 shooting enough film to keep four editors busy is a working studio. 171 00:14:04.360 --> 00:14:04.360 172 00:14:04.360 --> 00:14:08.620 Yeah, finishing houses too, in the time of film. 173 00:14:08.620 --> 00:14:08.980 Sure. 174 00:14:09.700 --> 00:14:13.280 Well, that's an outgrowth of the advertising agencies that were in Chicago. 175 00:14:16.200 --> 00:14:24.420 You show a commercial to an agency client, and there's one thing I can absolutely guarantee, 176 00:14:24.500 --> 00:14:26.700 and that's the agency is going to want a change made. 177 00:14:27.540 --> 00:14:29.400 They're never going to take it the way it comes. 178 00:14:30.020 --> 00:14:31.560 That's the old hairy arm theory. 179 00:14:31.560 --> 00:14:35.920 You've got to show them something they don't want to see so they can suggest something. 180 00:14:36.840 --> 00:14:50.560 Well, Mike Birch that used to work for Burnett did a commercial that they shot in London for parliament cigarettes 181 00:14:52.260 --> 00:14:59.080 and came back and wanted to show it to parliament, and he was very nervous about it. 182 00:14:59.080 --> 00:15:06.300 They'd spent a lot of money, and they had cobbled together three commercials in a strip, 183 00:15:07.920 --> 00:15:14.780 and it was interlocked, which means that picture was on one roll and sound is on another roll. 184 00:15:17.460 --> 00:15:26.960 He called me and asked me if I would rent them an interlocked projector with me to run it. 185 00:15:27.940 --> 00:15:31.360 So I went over, and it was interesting. 186 00:15:31.400 --> 00:15:37.740 He said, you run the commercials and immediately rewind it and get ready to run them again, 187 00:15:38.200 --> 00:15:39.860 and don't wait for instructions. 188 00:15:39.960 --> 00:15:41.560 Just automatically do that. 189 00:15:42.100 --> 00:15:48.060 So I ran it, and there's a table, a long table with maybe 20 people sitting around the table, 190 00:15:48.400 --> 00:15:54.220 half of them from Burnett and half of them from whoever it is that makes parliament. 191 00:15:56.000 --> 00:16:03.280 And ran the commercial, ran the things, I'm rewinding, and nobody in the room says a word. 192 00:16:04.140 --> 00:16:06.860 Finally somebody says, run them again, so I run them again. 193 00:16:08.020 --> 00:16:13.300 Nobody says a word. I ran it six, seven, eight times, and then finally somebody said, 194 00:16:13.920 --> 00:16:18.920 I noticed that when she came around the corner in the second spot, 195 00:16:19.040 --> 00:16:22.740 there was a reflection from a car that was coming the other way. 196 00:16:23.300 --> 00:16:25.820 Somebody said, run it again, so I ran it again. 197 00:16:26.200 --> 00:16:31.340 And then somebody said, well, somebody else was starting through that door 198 00:16:31.340 --> 00:16:34.640 just when she was going to come in, and that didn't look quite right. 199 00:16:34.840 --> 00:16:36.820 So run it again. 200 00:16:37.400 --> 00:16:45.780 And after I'd run it 20 or 30 times, Leo Burnett, who was sitting there, said, I liked it. 201 00:16:47.380 --> 00:16:52.180 And now suddenly everybody on the Burnett side of the table liked it. 202 00:16:52.180 --> 00:16:56.240 And so somebody said, run it again, and I ran it again. 203 00:16:56.240 --> 00:17:00.180 And now the number one guy from parliament said, I liked it. 204 00:17:00.180 --> 00:17:03.140 And now everybody over there liked it. And that's the way it was. 205 00:17:04.000 --> 00:17:10.980 And so you just had to—that's just the nature of commercials, 206 00:17:11.000 --> 00:17:15.140 and that's why so many people wanted to not do it. 207 00:17:16.380 --> 00:17:21.340 That is such a defining story about commercial production. 208 00:17:21.620 --> 00:17:25.240 I worked commercials too, you know, at some point in my career. 209 00:17:25.360 --> 00:17:30.680 And that is so defining of what it's all about. 210 00:17:31.580 --> 00:17:33.440 Thoughtful people didn't want to do it. 211 00:17:33.540 --> 00:17:35.160 Pardon? No, yeah. 212 00:17:36.080 --> 00:17:39.160 You check your brains at the door when you do that stuff. 213 00:17:39.820 --> 00:17:40.480 Except that shooting them— 214 00:17:40.480 --> 00:17:42.120 A lot of money wasted too. 215 00:17:42.120 --> 00:17:47.120 But shooting them was very demanding, very demanding. Good quality stuff. 216 00:17:48.180 --> 00:17:55.820 There was one that Gordy Weisenborn did, worked on for Miller Brewing in Milwaukee. 217 00:17:57.480 --> 00:18:01.980 And he asked me to go up with him again to do an interlock. 218 00:18:02.980 --> 00:18:09.100 And we—they had—it was just another beer commercial. 219 00:18:09.320 --> 00:18:10.960 You've seen one, you've seen them all. 220 00:18:13.980 --> 00:18:19.400 And at the end of showing these films, one of the Miller people said, 221 00:18:20.260 --> 00:18:28.040 I am very concerned about the middle syllable of the key word of our slogan. 222 00:18:28.940 --> 00:18:32.860 Now, they've been using this slogan for 30 years, right? 223 00:18:33.980 --> 00:18:35.140 The beer of distinction. 224 00:18:36.720 --> 00:18:41.200 And he's very concerned about the middle syllable of distinction. 225 00:18:42.280 --> 00:18:48.060 Do we want to really say that stink is in some way associated with Miller beer? 226 00:18:49.140 --> 00:18:51.480 Well, they got into discussing this. 227 00:18:51.660 --> 00:18:56.240 And after an hour and a half, Gordy said, Jack, are you ready to go? 228 00:18:56.240 --> 00:18:57.600 And I said, I could leave. 229 00:18:58.000 --> 00:19:02.800 He said, let's get the hell out of here, and when you guys are ready to talk about it, we'll come back. 230 00:19:03.580 --> 00:19:04.680 And we did. We left. 231 00:19:05.220 --> 00:19:07.740 And left them talking about the stink and distinction. 232 00:19:09.920 --> 00:19:14.080 Now, yeah, you check your brains at the door when you get into that line of work. 233 00:19:14.600 --> 00:19:19.060 On the other hand, I did a film for Cannes Salmon Institute. 234 00:19:20.760 --> 00:19:25.220 Not a household word, but there is such a thing, or there was then. 235 00:19:25.940 --> 00:19:30.020 An institute of folks that do canned salmon. 236 00:19:30.960 --> 00:19:40.380 And there was a cannery in Alaska that had a three-year inventory on hand of canned salmon that they couldn't sell. 237 00:19:40.840 --> 00:19:42.920 And the reason they couldn't sell it, it was white. 238 00:19:43.660 --> 00:19:45.400 And people think salmon is pink. 239 00:19:45.400 --> 00:19:54.800 And so they got a new agency that created a new label for them, and it said, guaranteed not to turn pink in the can. 240 00:19:56.060 --> 00:19:59.320 And the three-year inventory sold in two weeks. 241 00:20:02.720 --> 00:20:07.180 So you never can underestimate the stupidity of the consumer. 242 00:20:16.400 --> 00:20:18.140 Oh, yeah. 243 00:20:18.740 --> 00:20:29.320 Well, Bill, whose father was in the business long before him, shot the footage of the Hindenburg blowing up, 244 00:20:30.660 --> 00:20:36.640 which is probably some of the most famous footage that's ever been shot. 245 00:20:39.280 --> 00:20:47.140 Bill went into the Army during the war and shot the troops landing on Utah Beach. 246 00:20:48.660 --> 00:20:56.900 And then when the war was over, he—and by the way, he was just an excellent cameraman. 247 00:20:57.480 --> 00:21:03.120 I've seen a lot of his footage, and I've seen films that he made. 248 00:21:04.440 --> 00:21:09.000 I've never seen a scene in any of his films that you could quarrel with. 249 00:21:09.180 --> 00:21:11.640 I mean, he knew his work. 250 00:21:12.980 --> 00:21:14.760 And he got it the hard way. 251 00:21:14.880 --> 00:21:22.060 I guess if you're shooting the troops landing on Utah Beach, you're kind of busy. 252 00:21:23.100 --> 00:21:26.360 And it's best not to be easily distracted. 253 00:21:29.120 --> 00:21:35.440 He did a film of the building of Gateway Arch in St. Louis. 254 00:21:35.980 --> 00:21:39.920 It's just a wonderful film, I think. 255 00:21:40.140 --> 00:21:44.360 I mean, it's a construction site that is very unusual, 256 00:21:45.360 --> 00:21:52.900 and he was able to really catch the unusual nature of it. 257 00:21:57.000 --> 00:22:02.300 He did a—I think he shot a lot of films for the city as well. 258 00:22:02.540 --> 00:22:04.040 Oh, yeah. He did. 259 00:22:04.160 --> 00:22:12.400 Another cameraman, Henry Ushajima, did a film for Mayor Daley after the 1968 convention 260 00:22:12.400 --> 00:22:21.300 when there were so many—so much criticism of the city and the way the police handled it, the riots and everything. 261 00:22:21.560 --> 00:22:23.100 Yeah, what trees did they plant? 262 00:22:23.680 --> 00:22:25.160 Birch shot that too? 263 00:22:25.160 --> 00:22:26.240 I know, Henry. 264 00:22:27.100 --> 00:22:28.600 Henry—I think Henry shot it. 265 00:22:28.680 --> 00:22:29.680 Yeah, okay. 266 00:22:30.340 --> 00:22:31.640 They think Bill was— 267 00:22:31.640 --> 00:22:32.660 I don't think Bill— 268 00:22:32.660 --> 00:22:34.000 Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were saying— 269 00:22:34.000 --> 00:22:35.060 I don't think Bill did that. 270 00:22:35.120 --> 00:22:37.760 No, he didn't. Yeah, that was my understanding too. 271 00:22:38.000 --> 00:22:39.640 Yeah. Bill did a lot of work for the city. 272 00:22:40.760 --> 00:22:43.900 See, the city—again, this is union versus nonunion. 273 00:22:44.000 --> 00:22:51.980 The city felt that they could only hire union crews, union producers. 274 00:22:51.980 --> 00:23:01.000 In fact, a lot of old Mayor Daley's—this chair squeaks, I can't— 275 00:23:01.000 --> 00:23:01.480 Right. Yeah, okay. 276 00:23:02.620 --> 00:23:03.920 It's not picking it up. 277 00:23:04.000 --> 00:23:05.140 Okay, yeah, that's all. 278 00:23:06.760 --> 00:23:11.680 The city felt that they couldn't contract with people that were not union. 279 00:23:12.700 --> 00:23:21.180 And so McCormick Place was all union, and the film producers that they hired were union. 280 00:23:21.180 --> 00:23:29.080 Bill Birch was a union cameraman, and so he was a union producer, and so was Henry Yoshijima. 281 00:23:31.140 --> 00:23:32.380 I'll tell you a story about Henry. 282 00:23:32.580 --> 00:23:33.060 Go ahead. 283 00:23:34.400 --> 00:23:44.320 He was Japanese American, and his wife was also—his wife Ruth was also Japanese American. 284 00:23:44.320 --> 00:23:50.120 And after Pearl Harbor, they bought a house in Park Ridge. 285 00:23:52.000 --> 00:23:57.320 And about a week after they'd moved in, a delegation of the neighbors came to call on them 286 00:23:59.020 --> 00:24:04.860 and wanted to know who they were, what—you know, welcome to the neighborhood. 287 00:24:06.620 --> 00:24:12.220 And after they'd been there a while, they sort of said, well, where are you from? 288 00:24:12.220 --> 00:24:15.420 What is Yoshijima? What kind of a name is that? 289 00:24:15.500 --> 00:24:17.320 And they said, well, we're Japanese American. 290 00:24:18.600 --> 00:24:22.620 And I said, oh, they were so relieved, they thought they might be Jewish. 291 00:24:29.060 --> 00:24:31.580 This was right after Pearl Harbor. 292 00:24:32.500 --> 00:24:38.640 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's— 293 00:24:38.640 --> 00:24:43.680 Which brings up an interesting facet of film world. 294 00:24:45.040 --> 00:24:49.340 When I got into the business, there were no blacks in the business, period. 295 00:24:52.400 --> 00:25:01.060 There was a black guy that came here from Canada who had gotten a lot of awards in Canada as a cameraman. 296 00:25:02.360 --> 00:25:08.900 And he wanted to get into the Union in Chicago, and they didn't want any part of him. 297 00:25:09.840 --> 00:25:18.900 And Gordy Weissenborn, who was in the Union—he was in the Directors Guild—said he would— 298 00:25:18.900 --> 00:25:24.580 there was a fairly major film coming up for him, and I can't remember which one it was, 299 00:25:24.580 --> 00:25:27.880 but he said he wanted to use Jim Strickland as his cameraman. 300 00:25:30.620 --> 00:25:37.040 And so the Union—if the Union didn't want him to do that, they had to take him in as a Union member. 301 00:25:40.040 --> 00:25:49.640 And several of us wrote letters praising Jim and the films that he'd shot, and so the Union did take him in. 302 00:25:50.200 --> 00:25:57.060 He was the first black cameraman taken into the Union, and that was because of a lot of pressure put on him. 303 00:25:59.020 --> 00:26:02.500 It did set something of a precedent, but not much. 304 00:26:07.500 --> 00:26:12.160 There's still quite a lot of racism, I would say, in the film unions. 305 00:26:13.640 --> 00:26:14.480 What year was that? 306 00:26:15.080 --> 00:26:20.060 Oh, God, I don't know. It almost had to be in the early 70s. 307 00:26:22.440 --> 00:26:24.060 Yeah, still don't know. 308 00:26:27.040 --> 00:26:34.600 So—and when I hired a couple of guys, one of them was Ron Pitts, who I think is still teaching at Columbia. 309 00:26:39.800 --> 00:26:45.260 They weren't hired—blacks were not being hired to do anything in the film world at that time. 310 00:26:47.020 --> 00:26:47.540 And— 311 00:26:47.540 --> 00:26:48.280 How about women? 312 00:26:50.780 --> 00:27:10.280 Specific jobs. Script girl, secretary, receptionist, girls—titles that with the ist or girl at the name of the title sort of defines what kind of jobs they did. 313 00:27:10.280 --> 00:27:17.360 Certainly not working crew, not shooting, not recording sound. 314 00:27:18.700 --> 00:27:22.040 Editing sometimes. Sitting—sit-down jobs. 315 00:27:23.480 --> 00:27:28.300 I guess that's the big dividing line, whether you're standing up or— 316 00:27:28.300 --> 00:27:32.960 That was across pretty much the entire industry, not just Chicago. 317 00:27:33.120 --> 00:27:35.440 Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. 318 00:27:36.440 --> 00:27:42.320 Yeah, I don't think of stand-up jobs for women. 319 00:27:47.180 --> 00:27:59.440 Did you and Gordon have—were there any other filmmakers that were in your corner in regards to trying to force certain— 320 00:28:00.420 --> 00:28:03.220 Not many. Not many. 321 00:28:03.220 --> 00:28:12.140 Most people in the film world saw everybody else as a competitor or as a threat. 322 00:28:12.940 --> 00:28:19.780 And so there was very little—it wasn't as cooperative as the names of the— 323 00:28:19.780 --> 00:28:31.160 There was a lot of cooperation within organizations, like the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, which preceded the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. 324 00:28:33.220 --> 00:28:36.640 University Film Producers Association. 325 00:28:37.600 --> 00:28:51.780 Within these organizations, there'd be all kinds of openness and sharing and information swapping, networking, but not generally. 326 00:28:52.820 --> 00:29:11.740 Part of it was legal. We tried to set up a credit system where labs and equipment people could cooperate on who doesn't pay their bills, information about that, and it didn't get anywhere. 327 00:29:15.140 --> 00:29:16.740 Just—I don't know why. 328 00:29:17.740 --> 00:29:18.780 Well, that's— 329 00:29:18.780 --> 00:29:26.100 But it doesn't—that doesn't really relate to filmmaking so much. It's just— 330 00:29:26.100 --> 00:29:34.880 Well, I think it does relate in some ways, because filmmaking a film is such a collaborative effort. 331 00:29:34.900 --> 00:29:35.120 Yeah. 332 00:29:35.240 --> 00:29:47.260 I mean, a film can fall, or there can be stress points in a film that are due to somebody that is—in other words, you depend on a lot of people to make it successful. 333 00:29:47.260 --> 00:29:47.740 Yeah. 334 00:29:52.100 --> 00:30:01.740 So it is kind of—it might be in every industry, but it is kind of strange when there's a lack of cooperation kind of— 335 00:30:01.740 --> 00:30:20.840 But there's also—there are all these rules that are unwritten. Inevitably, it's a freelance—there's a lot of freelance work, and so there's a lot of competition between workers to get jobs. 336 00:30:20.840 --> 00:30:39.020 And if you hire on as a camera operator for next week, Tuesday and Wednesday, and then you get a job that needs you as a camera operator for the next three weeks starting tomorrow, 337 00:30:39.740 --> 00:30:47.800 and you tell me that, no, you can't take the job that you've already agreed to take because you've got this other gig, well, that's fine. 338 00:30:47.800 --> 00:30:51.540 You've got a right to do that, except I'm never going to call you again. 339 00:30:52.280 --> 00:30:58.000 And so you have to make the decision which way do you want to go. 340 00:30:59.400 --> 00:31:02.780 And I've seen all kinds of people do it both ways. 341 00:31:02.780 --> 00:31:18.460 I worked on a job for Bob Link one time where the lead actor left after three days to do a commercial gig that was paying him more for two or three days than he was getting for the whole job. 342 00:31:19.360 --> 00:31:22.860 And he left and told Bob the night before he left. 343 00:31:22.900 --> 00:31:29.940 So we had to shoot around him, get all the shots that we didn't need him for while he was gone. 344 00:31:31.080 --> 00:31:33.920 And Bob said, well, I'll never call that son of a bitch again. 345 00:31:37.780 --> 00:31:40.360 Could you talk a little bit more about Bob Link? 346 00:31:43.280 --> 00:31:52.840 Well, for about 25 years he was my best friend, so you've got to understand I'm a little prejudiced when I talk about him. 347 00:31:54.140 --> 00:31:55.540 He taught me sailing. 348 00:31:56.220 --> 00:31:58.780 I taught him shooting. 349 00:32:00.060 --> 00:32:05.560 And so we were together a lot. 350 00:32:06.240 --> 00:32:09.100 I worked with him on all the films that he made. 351 00:32:09.760 --> 00:32:13.180 How did he start getting? Was that his profession? 352 00:32:13.360 --> 00:32:16.620 No, he worked for CBS. He was lighting director for CBS. 353 00:32:17.580 --> 00:32:18.240 He went to school. 354 00:32:19.340 --> 00:32:21.740 He took architecture in school. 355 00:32:21.740 --> 00:32:38.460 He learned how to draw, learned how to deal with perspective, and went to work somehow for CBS designing sets and then lighting. 356 00:32:39.200 --> 00:32:44.580 He lit the set for the first Nixon-Kennedy debate, which was in Chicago. 357 00:32:47.360 --> 00:32:51.240 And that's an interesting story, by the way. 358 00:32:54.860 --> 00:33:02.880 Nixon had been—there was a cartoonist named Herb Block that did cartoons of Nixon. 359 00:33:03.000 --> 00:33:04.740 He did a lot of political cartoons. 360 00:33:05.400 --> 00:33:10.860 And the standard cartoon of Nixon was Five O'Clock Shadow, that he always needed a shave. 361 00:33:10.860 --> 00:33:16.140 And Nixon was very conscious of that. 362 00:33:16.520 --> 00:33:27.580 And his press secretary, whose name was Herb Klein, came to Bob before the shoot and said, 363 00:33:27.580 --> 00:33:39.540 After you get the set lit, I want you to put an inky, which is a little 150-watt spotlight, down on the floor and light my man from below. 364 00:33:40.940 --> 00:33:43.080 And Bob said to him, Did you ever play Halloween? 365 00:33:44.680 --> 00:33:46.380 Herb Klein said, What are you talking about? 366 00:33:46.440 --> 00:33:50.060 He says, You know, where you hold a flashlight under your face to make you look spooky. 367 00:33:51.600 --> 00:33:55.100 And Herb Klein says, If I want your opinion, I'll ask for it. 368 00:33:55.400 --> 00:33:57.020 Put a light down on the floor. 369 00:33:59.960 --> 00:34:02.100 And so Bob said, Yes, sir. 370 00:34:04.580 --> 00:34:12.280 And a little later, Pierre Salinger, who was Kennedy's press secretary, came over to him and he said, 371 00:34:12.300 --> 00:34:14.540 You know that light you put on the floor for Nixon? 372 00:34:14.700 --> 00:34:15.680 He said, Yeah. 373 00:34:16.100 --> 00:34:18.040 He says, I want one for my man, too. 374 00:34:20.440 --> 00:34:25.520 So Bob went over to Dick Ortner, who was the floor manager, and he said, The whole world has gone mad. 375 00:34:26.220 --> 00:34:27.400 What are we going to do? 376 00:34:27.640 --> 00:34:29.220 And Dick says, You do what you're told. 377 00:34:30.460 --> 00:34:31.920 Don't argue with these guys. 378 00:34:32.760 --> 00:34:34.840 So he put the light down for Kennedy. 379 00:34:35.860 --> 00:34:38.080 And then they were having a coffee break. 380 00:34:40.700 --> 00:34:46.000 And Salinger came over and he said to Bob very quietly, he said, Thank you for putting that light there. 381 00:34:46.000 --> 00:34:50.340 Now when nobody is looking, could you have somebody unplug it? 382 00:34:51.840 --> 00:34:59.860 And so in the debate itself, Nixon has this ghastly look from the light being down there. 383 00:35:00.400 --> 00:35:05.280 The other thing that happened, and I'm not a Nixon fan, don't misunderstand what I'm saying, 384 00:35:05.880 --> 00:35:13.520 but Nixon had had an infection in his knee, an abscess, and they drove his limo into the studio. 385 00:35:13.520 --> 00:35:21.060 And when he got there, he swung around to get out of the car and he banged his knee into the door post of the car. 386 00:35:21.260 --> 00:35:22.920 And he almost passed out. 387 00:35:23.480 --> 00:35:30.480 And Bob Link caught him and just held him for a minute until he could stand. 388 00:35:35.240 --> 00:35:39.040 And that was 20 minutes before the debate started. 389 00:35:39.040 --> 00:35:52.200 So when I heard these stories, it just made me aware of how stupid the debate format is for electing a president. 390 00:35:54.900 --> 00:35:57.220 You're bound to catch somebody at their worst. 391 00:35:58.380 --> 00:36:05.020 And that has nothing to do with what kind of an administrator they'll be or how creative their thinking will be. 392 00:36:05.020 --> 00:36:09.780 Right. And how powerful anyway the media is in... 393 00:36:09.780 --> 00:36:11.040 At the wrong thing. 394 00:36:11.220 --> 00:36:14.420 At the wrong...right. At anything. 395 00:36:15.540 --> 00:36:15.540 396 00:36:17.760 --> 00:36:17.760 397 00:36:19.160 --> 00:36:23.020 Speaking though of other...I think there was a guy named Mantell. 398 00:36:23.900 --> 00:36:24.640 Harry Mantell. 399 00:36:24.880 --> 00:36:26.780 Yes. Can you talk about him a little bit? 400 00:36:27.220 --> 00:36:33.040 I can't. I remember his name, and I think if he walked in the room I'd know him. 401 00:36:33.040 --> 00:36:37.760 But I can't talk about the films that he made. 402 00:36:38.600 --> 00:36:49.120 Okay. Yeah, because we have a collection of his films and some of them are very strange and interesting and all, but we can't find anything about him. 403 00:36:50.760 --> 00:36:53.340 I think he came out of the TV studios. 404 00:36:54.220 --> 00:36:56.800 I would guess so, but I don't know. 405 00:36:56.800 --> 00:37:02.740 Oh, two people I would like to mention. Bill Friedman...or Bill Friedkin? 406 00:37:03.100 --> 00:37:03.820 Yeah. 407 00:37:05.480 --> 00:37:07.820 Who worked for GN and Bill Butler. 408 00:37:08.360 --> 00:37:08.980 Yeah. 409 00:37:09.320 --> 00:37:12.720 And Bill Butler was Friedkin's cameraman at GN. 410 00:37:13.980 --> 00:37:24.480 And then they left GN and went...Red Quinlan was my general manager of Channel 7, I believe. 411 00:37:24.480 --> 00:37:29.780 Yeah. I may be wrong about that, but I think it was Red Quinlan. 412 00:37:30.420 --> 00:37:33.140 Later on he became general manager of Channel 32. 413 00:37:35.520 --> 00:37:48.880 I don't know where any of those channels are today, but when Red was at Channel 7, he...Friedkin was directing and Butler was shooting. 414 00:37:48.880 --> 00:37:55.820 And they did a series of documentaries for Channel 7 that were just wonderful. 415 00:37:57.120 --> 00:38:00.980 They were...one was The People versus Paul Crump. 416 00:38:01.860 --> 00:38:06.640 Paul Crump was a black guy that was headed for the electric chair. 417 00:38:09.020 --> 00:38:16.540 He had...there had been a murder, as I remember it, of a guard at the Swift Meatpacking Plant. 418 00:38:16.540 --> 00:38:29.920 And they nailed Paul Crump, who I don't believe was even in the neighborhood at the time. 419 00:38:30.180 --> 00:38:45.580 I can't remember any of the details of it, but they made that film, which was really a documentary-style theatrical film made for television. 420 00:38:45.580 --> 00:38:49.900 Mayor Daley squashed it, so it was never shown. 421 00:38:50.440 --> 00:38:55.600 He called Red Quinlan and said, I never want to see that on TV. 422 00:38:56.500 --> 00:39:00.420 And so they pulled it without it being shown. 423 00:39:02.000 --> 00:39:04.220 But they made a lot of other films that were shown. 424 00:39:05.860 --> 00:39:12.380 And I remember one was A Tale of Two Cities, which compared Chicago and I think Liverpool. 425 00:39:14.480 --> 00:39:19.540 I may be wrong about that, but it was something like that. 426 00:39:19.820 --> 00:39:28.700 They made a lot of documentaries together that were just very good and fascinating films. 427 00:39:28.980 --> 00:39:31.380 And then they both went to Hollywood. 428 00:39:33.400 --> 00:39:40.160 Bill Butler shot Jaws, and he shot a lot of other films that were pretty good. 429 00:39:40.780 --> 00:39:49.860 And of course, Friedkin did The Night They Rated Minsky's, and he did The French Connection and The Exorcist. 430 00:39:49.860 --> 00:39:57.860 And in their background, Friedkin started in the mailroom at WGN. 431 00:40:03.180 --> 00:40:10.740 And they came in one day, I'll never forget it, and said, how do you do a camera? 432 00:40:11.960 --> 00:40:14.100 Show us how a movie camera works. 433 00:40:14.100 --> 00:40:32.340 So there was a sense then that anyone could do this, and it was actually somebody with technical expertise that could, as opposed to how to construct a film, somebody with technical expertise could get you started. 434 00:40:32.520 --> 00:40:38.720 Well, yeah. You needed two things. And they weren't necessarily in the same person. 435 00:40:38.720 --> 00:40:46.920 And so this combination of Friedkin and Butler, one was aesthetic, one was technical. 436 00:40:48.420 --> 00:40:55.600 Actually, I asked Bill Butler one time, he lived in Glenview, and we drove out that way together. 437 00:40:57.700 --> 00:41:05.180 And I asked him what his point of view was for a film that they were shooting, and he says, I like to think of myself as a poet. 438 00:41:06.280 --> 00:41:10.420 And so I try to get some poetry into my shots. 439 00:41:12.200 --> 00:41:19.360 And Friedkin had done some stuff at Second City, and he knew Bernie Sahlins. 440 00:41:21.860 --> 00:41:26.600 And so he's thinking of it more from an actor's point of view. 441 00:41:26.600 --> 00:41:27.940 Right, performance. 442 00:41:33.100 --> 00:41:35.800 There's another guy, Franklin McMahon. 443 00:41:36.740 --> 00:41:36.740 444 00:41:38.660 --> 00:41:40.660 What do you remember about him? 445 00:41:43.580 --> 00:41:45.460 Ron Klasky was his editor. 446 00:41:45.460 --> 00:41:50.500 Oh, okay. 447 00:41:53.460 --> 00:42:02.180 He lived in Lake Forest and liked to make films of various kinds. 448 00:42:02.320 --> 00:42:07.960 Most of them are art-based. They may have been about art. 449 00:42:07.960 --> 00:42:08.880 He was an artist. 450 00:42:08.880 --> 00:42:13.140 Yes, and he knew art. He knew a lot about it. 451 00:42:13.420 --> 00:42:20.800 And so his films tended to be—they weren't necessarily teaching. 452 00:42:21.160 --> 00:42:26.400 I'm not sure. I guess I'd put him in the category of art appreciation. 453 00:42:28.000 --> 00:42:32.380 Yeah, he did some political films. He followed politics. 454 00:42:33.200 --> 00:42:34.160 Yeah, pretty lefty. 455 00:42:34.160 --> 00:42:43.840 Yeah, and then I think made sketches. He did one on the Chicago seven trial. 456 00:42:45.000 --> 00:42:50.640 And it was all sketches and then interview material and stuff like that. 457 00:42:51.040 --> 00:42:51.560 Right. 458 00:42:58.600 --> 00:43:04.180 Who have we missed? I'm sure we've missed. 459 00:43:09.900 --> 00:43:11.560 Do you guys have any questions? 460 00:43:13.160 --> 00:43:13.920 Not a fan. 461 00:43:13.920 --> 00:43:21.920 Okay, well, then let's wrap this up. 462 00:43:23.780 --> 00:43:23.780 463 00:43:28.620 --> 00:43:34.920 And I definitely will go through this stuff, and then probably there will be some. 464 00:43:36.720 --> 00:43:47.920 You go to school, you go into college-level studies to become a filmmaker, and at that time there were no colleges. 465 00:43:48.740 --> 00:43:51.500 And it was more, how do you work this thing? 466 00:43:51.740 --> 00:43:52.180 That's right. 467 00:43:53.660 --> 00:43:54.460 So we're rolling. 468 00:43:54.460 --> 00:44:06.180 Okay, well, it was in the 60s. There were a number of teachers in the Chicago area that were using film in their classroom, mostly in high school. 469 00:44:08.800 --> 00:44:17.460 And they used film, as I said, because you could show a film in a class and you knew that everybody in the class had seen that film. 470 00:44:17.660 --> 00:44:24.780 And then you could talk about it. And there were wonderful short films being made at that time. 471 00:44:25.260 --> 00:44:27.920 By short film, I mean less than a half hour. 472 00:44:28.260 --> 00:44:34.100 Half hour, or rather 27 minutes is the running time for a film made for television. 473 00:44:34.700 --> 00:44:37.380 But there were a lot of films that weren't made for television. 474 00:44:38.140 --> 00:44:43.020 And those were the kind that I mentioned before, that we would screen every month. 475 00:44:43.020 --> 00:44:50.740 And they were films that might be anything from a minute to 20 minutes and sometimes longer. 476 00:44:51.600 --> 00:44:55.060 They could be on any kind of subject you can imagine. 477 00:44:57.200 --> 00:45:12.120 And so teachers, oh, and there were probably 30 major distributors of those kinds of films around the country, many of them based in Chicago. 478 00:45:12.120 --> 00:45:16.560 There were a lot of Britannica films as one. 479 00:45:17.320 --> 00:45:22.440 But there was also, there was Pyramid Films and Contemporary Films. 480 00:45:23.480 --> 00:45:27.780 These are names of companies that distributed films. 481 00:45:28.000 --> 00:45:39.280 And they're Films Inc. Yeah, they were the biggest probably, which was an offshoot of Encyclopedia Britannica, owned by the same people. 482 00:45:42.180 --> 00:45:45.280 So teachers were using these films in their classrooms. 483 00:45:46.000 --> 00:45:53.280 They could show, and it was a filmic analogy to a short story. 484 00:45:58.300 --> 00:46:04.340 So a group of them got together and started what they call the Screen Educators Society. 485 00:46:04.340 --> 00:46:10.400 And there were probably 100 members of this group. 486 00:46:10.480 --> 00:46:14.100 And it was all Chicago teachers using film in the classroom. 487 00:46:14.740 --> 00:46:19.440 And one of them was May Peets, who I met and married. 488 00:46:20.120 --> 00:46:26.320 And May happened to have my oldest daughter in her class. 489 00:46:30.160 --> 00:46:33.200 And she was teaching English. 490 00:46:34.540 --> 00:46:45.200 And she had either heard something or read something about you could take a blank film or a leader even, 491 00:46:46.020 --> 00:46:55.580 and draw on it with a magic marker and create something that you could run through a projector and make interesting kind of blobs on the screen. 492 00:46:55.580 --> 00:47:01.340 And so she gave her class, she said in her class, anybody that wanted to do this could do it. 493 00:47:03.840 --> 00:47:09.500 And one loudmouth girl in the class, who happened to be my daughter, said, I don't want to do that. 494 00:47:09.500 --> 00:47:10.580 I want to use a camera. 495 00:47:12.100 --> 00:47:14.360 And she said, we don't have any cameras. 496 00:47:14.420 --> 00:47:16.140 She says, well, my dad has cameras. 497 00:47:16.540 --> 00:47:17.840 I want to do that. 498 00:47:18.320 --> 00:47:20.020 And she said, I want to meet your dad. 499 00:47:20.020 --> 00:47:26.500 So I went to the next open house and met her and gave him some cameras. 500 00:47:27.520 --> 00:47:28.780 And one thing led to another. 501 00:47:29.360 --> 00:47:31.780 And 20 years later, we got married. 502 00:47:33.700 --> 00:47:34.680 Twenty years later? 503 00:47:35.100 --> 00:47:37.520 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 504 00:47:37.680 --> 00:47:38.240 Wow. 505 00:47:40.540 --> 00:47:44.600 Yeah, I've always lived my life in generational lumps. 506 00:47:44.600 --> 00:47:58.280 Anyway, she made three films, one about her father, one about a strike that the Union had at her school. 507 00:48:02.140 --> 00:48:03.740 And Niles North High School. 508 00:48:05.680 --> 00:48:08.020 And I can't remember what the other one was. 509 00:48:10.700 --> 00:48:11.740 Oh, yes, I do. 510 00:48:11.740 --> 00:48:13.460 Cross-section was the name of it. 511 00:48:14.040 --> 00:48:17.260 And I should remember it because I essentially made it. 512 00:48:18.180 --> 00:48:19.820 I helped her. 513 00:48:20.240 --> 00:48:23.360 But it was about a day in the life of her classroom. 514 00:48:27.660 --> 00:48:33.880 And her job was really to keep kids from dropping out of school. 515 00:48:36.580 --> 00:48:45.120 She provided an interesting enough environment in the class that the hope was that kids would come back the next day. 516 00:48:46.360 --> 00:48:51.120 And not because somebody forced them to come back, but to get them to want to come back. 517 00:48:51.560 --> 00:48:54.140 Was this before she worked at Niles? 518 00:48:54.640 --> 00:48:55.700 No, it was at Niles. 519 00:48:55.760 --> 00:48:56.560 It was at Niles? 520 00:48:56.620 --> 00:48:58.280 Yeah, as part of the English department. 521 00:48:59.320 --> 00:49:03.000 The kids were dropping out of school because they didn't want to read and they didn't want to write. 522 00:49:03.000 --> 00:49:04.240 And they didn't want to think. 523 00:49:04.780 --> 00:49:10.760 They didn't want to do things that they're forced to do in school. 524 00:49:11.660 --> 00:49:14.900 And so she started showing them movies. 525 00:49:15.740 --> 00:49:17.400 And then they'd talk about the movies. 526 00:49:17.480 --> 00:49:19.640 And then they'd talk more about the movies. 527 00:49:22.200 --> 00:49:27.880 And her idea of a good movie is a movie with an idea in it that you could talk about. 528 00:49:27.880 --> 00:49:33.940 And not just the typical boy-girl stuff. 529 00:49:36.340 --> 00:49:37.700 So, I don't know. 530 00:49:38.380 --> 00:49:41.580 Well, I'm going to ask you now that we've gone rolling again. 531 00:49:42.620 --> 00:49:43.840 We've gone lost again. 532 00:49:47.300 --> 00:49:48.460 What do you remember? 533 00:49:48.600 --> 00:49:57.380 How did Gordon and Jerry, Jerry Glymphall, Gordon Quinn, do you remember kind of how? 534 00:49:57.380 --> 00:49:59.340 There was another guy. 535 00:50:00.040 --> 00:50:00.520 Teminer. 536 00:50:00.760 --> 00:50:01.420 Yeah. 537 00:50:03.420 --> 00:50:04.380 And that's for Cartemquin. 538 00:50:05.280 --> 00:50:09.320 Teminer is the Tem and Quinn is Gordon Quinn. 539 00:50:13.620 --> 00:50:16.340 And yeah, Jerry Blumenthal came later, I believe. 540 00:50:18.440 --> 00:50:21.380 And Gordon can straighten you out on this. 541 00:50:21.960 --> 00:50:23.540 Yeah, I totally agree. 542 00:50:24.780 --> 00:50:32.720 Overall, how did Cartemquin kind of, how would you nudge them into the greater scheme of things? 543 00:50:34.760 --> 00:50:42.880 When they came together, I would guess that they had no notion of what they were going to do. 544 00:50:43.380 --> 00:50:44.980 Or what they would end up doing. 545 00:50:46.520 --> 00:50:53.240 Because what they ended up doing was some of the most interesting political documentaries that have ever been made. 546 00:50:55.160 --> 00:50:58.180 And social documentaries. 547 00:50:58.780 --> 00:51:01.820 Not just political, but films like Taylor Chain. 548 00:51:03.900 --> 00:51:06.100 Well, you could say that everything is political. 549 00:51:06.460 --> 00:51:10.000 But it's more economic and social than it is political. 550 00:51:10.000 --> 00:51:14.960 I bought a union strike in a factory that makes chain. 551 00:51:18.780 --> 00:51:22.440 I don't know that that's what they intended to do when they started. 552 00:51:22.720 --> 00:51:29.300 I think they started from an interest in filmmaking and thought they would do what they could do. 553 00:51:29.800 --> 00:51:35.440 And my guess is that they started out commercial and somehow drifted into where they are. 554 00:51:35.460 --> 00:51:37.200 But I don't know that. I don't know. 555 00:51:37.300 --> 00:51:38.640 Oh, okay. So yeah. 556 00:51:38.640 --> 00:51:47.480 All right. Did they, so they weren't some of those people that came into Baron's equipment and said, how do you work this thing? 557 00:51:47.920 --> 00:51:52.280 No, no. They came in with a, they knew what they were going to do. 558 00:51:52.400 --> 00:51:54.900 Right, right, right. Okay. 559 00:51:55.000 --> 00:51:56.380 And they knew how to do it. 560 00:51:56.380 --> 00:51:59.160 Yeah, there were all kinds of people that came in. 561 00:52:01.980 --> 00:52:10.860 And very, very few people that came in had a rounded notion of how you make a movie or what you use. 562 00:52:13.080 --> 00:52:14.720 They didn't know what kind of camera to use. 563 00:52:15.420 --> 00:52:17.180 And the technology was evolving. 564 00:52:19.040 --> 00:52:28.460 I'd been in the business for several years before I got the first blimp, which was a soundproof housing that you put around the camera to make it quiet. 565 00:52:29.500 --> 00:52:38.380 And that means that people that were doing professional work at that time were not shooting sync sound. 566 00:52:38.380 --> 00:52:43.940 Right. Yeah, of course. Right. 567 00:52:43.940 --> 00:52:59.180 Which is why, in my opinion, one of the reasons why films were really better then than the videos that are made now, where it's just automatic when you shoot a video to set a camera, to set a microphone in place. 568 00:52:59.940 --> 00:53:06.380 And you're shooting a talking face that looks something like this. 569 00:53:07.240 --> 00:53:09.860 Hopefully not this ugly, but. 570 00:53:13.220 --> 00:53:13.700 Okay. 571 00:53:15.320 --> 00:53:18.500 Yeah, I think that's it. I think this is great. 572 00:53:19.760 --> 00:53:22.220 We've got buckets of stuff. 573 00:53:23.940 --> 00:53:25.860 Well, the buckets probably got a hole in it. 574 00:53:27.340 --> 00:53:29.100 I hope not. Yeah, I don't think so.