I like the stories a lot.
The stories are just really wonderful and there's so much information in them.
All of that.
I just, I'm suspecting that there's a lot more material and I'm nervous that you're moving.
I have a structural memory problem.
I get off on one thing and I...
Well, I think a lot of people do.
I don't think that's a bad thing at all.
But I don't mind going back to, you know, if I do that, I'd like to do more on documentary and bring Kartein Kuhn into it.
I'm definitely taking you back there.
Oh, that's right.
In New York.
Thank you very much.
I know exactly where I want to go now.
Which is, I'd like to talk a little bit more about Helen Morrison.
If there is anything more to say.
I don't have...
Okay, let me ask you one more question about her.
Back to Helen Morrison.
You said she was a still photographer and then she was a film director.
And then it became a motion.
Anne Cybilshire, how did you get to know them? Were they well known in the city then? No, not at all.
Well, tell me a little bit how you got together with them and what your impressions of them were or of just Helen.
Well, my impressions of them were that they came right off of a wall.
They didn't fit any pattern that I knew in terms of film.
I had not known professional dancers.
I went to engineering school.
We didn't do dancing.
So I didn't know Cybilshire at all until I went out to their studio, which was in Northbrook.
And when Helen asked me to help her figure out lighting to be able to...
She was used to portrait kind of photography where you set up a light and you perch somebody.
Yeah.
So there's a camera there and a light there.
You almost always have a triangle like that, you know.
Helen and here's Cybils all over the studio dancing.
And Helen wanted help in figuring a lighting plan so that the lighting could get an exposure anywhere in the studio and still be somewhat dramatic.
It's not as easy as it probably sounds.
And so I did a lot of that kind of thing.
She went on site there and helped Helen figure out lighting strategies.
Yes.
And that's what it was, is a strategy.
Go ahead.
So you met Cybils too.
Yeah.
Yeah, and I liked them a lot.
I mean, they had good cookies.
Can I tell you? All right.
But they were fairly unknown, right? I'm sure that, well, certainly Cybil was very well known in the dance community.
She did a one -person show in New York on Broadway.
And so, or maybe it was off -Broadway, but it was close by Broadway.
Helen was a well -known still photographer.
Neither were known at all in the film world.
All right.
Do you recall why they came to Chicago? Well, they lived here.
Was Cybil born in New York though and started her career? I really don't know.
I do a little bit, so I was just trying to...
Yeah, okay.
All right.
Back to documentary filmmaking.
We talked about educational films that were made in this area, corporate films, TV content and news.
How did, can you kind of talk a little bit about the documentary and how it kind of emerged? And when it emerged, I mean, in Chicago.
And I want to go back again.
I'm not trying to connect Alc or Andy together, but both of them you talked kind of, they had a certain point of view, philosophy type thing that kind of overrode, you know, how they made their money through film.
Yeah, the, I guess people that have grown up with television think of what I call a TV doc as a documentary, where you're getting talking faces that explain what it is that you're looking at in case you're so incredibly stupid that you can't figure it out or if it's so badly shot that it isn't put in context.
But the old documentaries were made when it was very difficult to interlock sound and picture.
And there were no, for instance, there were no portable tape recorders for audio tape.
And so what do you do? You're out there and in fact what you do is you go out with a camera and it's a noisy camera and you don't have any intent of shooting sync sound.
And so you are sort of forced to learn to shoot a picture that tells the story.
And you don't rely on a talking face.
In fact, you don't have a talking face at all.
You may have a narration that you slug in later on to help with explanatory material, but basically you're shooting a picture that tells the story.
You've got to be much more visually oriented than TV people are because that's all you've got to work with is the picture.
And so you have to learn how to do that.
And it's a skill that I think is largely lost today.
If you send people now to do a documentary, they just naturally think in terms of somebody talking to tell you what it is they're trying to get across.
And my guess is that when Kartemkorn, for instance, did their first documentaries, I would guess that they were not sync sound.
They were shooting visuals and then putting the sound in later.
I don't know that that's true, but that would be my guess.
It would be kind of fun to go back and look at them.
Do you remember when the film group started? Tell me about the film group.
I guess that was Mike Gray and Hedman—I can't remember his first name.
Hedman, Gray, and Shea.
Is that right? Mike Shea, yeah.
And there was a partner, Hedman, that I think is still— He was a cameraman.
Yeah, but I think he might have come out of still.
I'm not sure.
Oh, I know he did.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah.
Yeah, they did documentaries.
And I think probably—I'm guessing, no.
But I would guess that the first real documentary they shot was during the 68 Democratic Convention outside of the Conrad Hilton Hotel.
And it was because they were shooting a commercial there, or near there, and they happened to have film and camera.
And here's this riot going on out on the street, and they just started shooting.
And I think that was a life changer for Mike Gray.
In fact, we've talked about it, and I'm sure it was.
And he just said to himself, there's something important going on here.
There's something vastly unimportant going on over there, and that's how I'm making my money.
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.
There were other people in, too, that weren't doing what they were doing.
They really carved out a niche that expanded later on.
The film group? Yeah.
So to your recall there, before them, Ed Bland's work, Cry of Jazz, that was in 59, I think.
And Howard Alt cut that.
And that was, you know, Ed Bland was actually a composer.
Yeah, his background was music.
Yeah.
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.
It may have, yeah.
It may have also started with, which was not a documentary, but Haskell Wexler happened to be here shooting a film called Medium Cool.
And it was, there was a storyline in the film dealing with a journalist, a photojournalist, I guess.
And then the Democratic Convention happened, and they incorporated a lot of that footage into Medium Cool.
When old Mayor Daley, not Richard M.
Daley, saw the film, he said that film must not be shown much in Chicago.
And so he told the distributor that he wanted it killed.
And so what they did was they opened the theater, the Medium Cool, in a huge theater.
And I can't remember which one, but it was like a 4 ,000 -seat theater.
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.
It was a niche film for more thoughtful people.
I don't know what else to say about it.
And so the film died.
It's opening reviews were that it killed the theater that it opened with, closed that film in four days, something like that.
And so it wasn't shown in Chicago.
It did very well over the rest of the country.
And I think Haskell, I think he was born in Chicago.
I think he started in industrial films.
Yes, yeah.
Oh, he did, I think, I think he did a documentary on cotton or something.
Well, he worked for EB.
He was on staff at Encyclopedia Britannica.
And he worked with Andy and he worked with Gordy.
All right.
And then Cartemplin Films, I think was shortly after film group in.
And also Chekhov.
Right, right, right.
And these people all at various times worked together and at various times they went their separate ways.
But they all stimulated each other.
And toward the end of the, I'd say in the middle 70s or maybe even the young 70s, I worked with the Directors Guild to set up a small committee of people to look at films that were being made in Chicago.
And we had monthly screenings every month of a half a dozen films that had been made here.
And they were all wonderful films.
And this was at your, where did this meeting take place? Well, we started in the Sheraton Hotel on Michigan Avenue and it got kind of expensive.
So my favorite wine store was a guy named Leonard Solomon who had a shop on LaSalle Street, later became Burr Hopps Fish House.
And he had an empty floor upstairs and he let us use that floor and we had monthly screenings there.
I worked with Ruth Ratney who did a local newsletter for the film industry.
And so Ruth would publicize it and we'd work it together.
And then I worked with the committee from the DGA to select the films.
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.
And I knew all the editors in town and they would tell me interesting films that they were working on.
Ron Klasky was probably my best source and Dave Sabo.
So they would let me know what they were doing that was interesting.
Wow.
And so you would supply the projectors and the equipment needed to...
Yeah, yeah.
We'd go wherever it was, set up a screen, set up projectors and just run it.
What year was this? Oh, it was maybe ten years between the early 70s and early 80s.
Or it may have been the late 60s.
But it was ten to twelve years that we did that every month.
So, could you talk a little bit about...
And then I want to go back to some of the other characters in the film business, historical people.
But could you talk a little bit about Kodak and kind of their...
Sure.
You can't think of the film business without Kodak.
You just can't.
Perhaps you could in Europe, but in the United States, Kodak made the film and processed it.
So Kodak had an office in the Prudential Building.
And then they had a warehouse in Oakbrook.
And they had a big processing lab out on Prairie Avenue.
Most of that lab was processing Kodachrome for still cameras, but also Kodachrome for movies.
Kodachrome, which as far as I'm sure they've discontinued it now, is a color positive film.
It's not made for duplication, so it's made with the idea that you project the original.
And it holds up very well.
It's wonderful archive material, as you know.
The whole movies are...
All Kodachrome.
And are all beautiful shaped.
Yeah.
There's no...
The whole movies are beautiful.
There's no...
And just to explain what that means, films that are printed from a color negative have what is called cyan fading.
Cyan is the blue -green color within the film base, and that fades.
And as that fades, then the film has a red...
it has the opposite color.
And Kodachrome does not have cyan fading.
And if you said, well, why did Kodak make a film that had cyan fading? They didn't...
I suspect they didn't know it when they made it.
It takes years for that to show up.
And years of poor storage.
And one of the things Kodak didn't do was store film in a poor way.
They knew how to do it.
So they would keep it cool, and they'd keep it as humid as it needed to be, but not too much.
And so it took years for that problem to make itself known.
And then they put a research team and corrected it.
But by then, videotape was with us.
And I think that's when Scorsese also came into the picture in terms of speaking up about film preservation.
Right.
He wasn't the first one.
Who was? People at Kodak.
You think the people at Kodak were...
Oh, sure.
Kodak, you cannot...
Today, it's hard to imagine what a powerhouse it was.
When the atomic bomb was developed during World War II, a high percentage of the people that worked at Oak Ridge and at Los Alamos were from Kodak's lab.
Kodak and Western Electric Bell Labs were the two industrial organizations in the country that had just world -class, Ph .D.-based research labs.
Good people.
And so it was Kodak's support, really, that made the film business what it is.
The first color films were...
And I don't really mean the historical first.
I mean the first commercial color films were Technicolor, which required a camera that weighed 700 pounds.
It was a three -strip camera, three -strip black -and -white camera.
And each black -and -white strip had a filter on it.
And so one camera would filter out everything but red.
Another camera would filter out...
And I'm making up...
I'm not doing this on paper.
I'm just making it up as I go along.
But another camera would filter out everything but green.
Another one would fill out everything but blue, let's say.
And so you put these three colors together and then you have a full spectrum, or a fairly full spectrum, and that's the way Technicolor worked.
It needed a very special kind of film, a very special kind of processing, and a very special kind of camera that only lent itself because it weighed 700 pounds.
You didn't hand hold.
You didn't go out of the studio unless you absolutely had to.
It was just too hard.
And so it built in and it was noisy.
If you can imagine, three cameras interlocked that are all running together.
So it was a very noisy, a very cumbersome tool to use.
Not used in Chicago essentially at all.
It was just made to order for the Hollywood studio thing.
So then when Kodak developed color film, first Kodachrome and then Color Negative, with the idea of being able to print from it, that opened up color filmmaking to industrials, documentaries.
Amateur.
Amateur, right.
Amateurs used Kodachrome, which was better than the professionals were using, because professionals were shooting material to be printed so they could make multiple prints.
So Kodak was a very important force in the industry.
When did they open up in Chicago and why? There was a lawsuit that I can't, I don't know any of the details of it, but at some point Kodak was forced to divest themselves of the distribution of film, of professional film.
It's a monopoly thing I guess, but I'm not certain of that.
I don't know the details at all.
But a company was set up called W .J.
German, and German was the distributor for professional film.
And you had to go to them for it, and there was only one, there may have been more than one price, but as a small filmmaker you didn't, I didn't know if there was another price or not.
They had no or very little technical backup.
It was a distribution organization, and they wanted money up front.
So if you went to German you went out with a check, and the check had already been approved or you didn't bother to go.
And so you went out there and picked up the film.
Kodak had an office in the Prudential Building to solve problems for people.
It was a customer service organization.
So if you had a problem with the color in a print or with the print quality, you could call Kodak and get an answer, or if you needed a special stock for whatever you were shooting.
For instance, I did quite a lot of work with infrared film, and I needed help from Kodak in figuring out how to do that.
They were, I did that, well somehow along the line, I had been in the equipment business for 30 years, and I had shown so many people how to use film and how to use cameras and how to light and how to record sound that somebody asked me to do it myself.
I had a good friend that worked for Continental Can Company, and they had to make a bunch of films.
They had to make seven films in Russian.
They were sending a team of executives to Russia to sell.
How do I tell this story? What Continental Can Company did was they did not make cans.
They made factories that made cans.
And so if your name is Charlie Anhauser -Busch, and you're going to can a bunch of beer, you would get Continental Can Company to build you a factory to make cans, and then you would throw your beer in those cans.
Well, the problem with that was that if Anhauser -Busch had an old factory and they wanted a new factory, they had to get rid of their old factory.
And so Continental Can Company would take back their own, it was like the used car business.
They would take back the old factory and put it in a warehouse and put in the new factory.
So they were getting too many warehouses full of old factories to make cans.
So they sent a team to Russia that had no can -making equipment at all.
And I remember the statistics.
They figured in the United States at that time there were 40 breweries making beer.
Beer is the most important product, of course, that goes into cans.
And in Russia there was something like 8 ,000 breweries because there were no cans.
And so you had a brewery in every town.
And so Continental Can sent a team of executives to Russia to sell them some of these old can -making factories.
And they wanted to take films that they had to tell how weird and wonderful their cans were that they could show in Russia.
But they had English narrations.
And so they had to remake these films and make some new films to show their research and how weird and wonderful Continental Can was.
And so they asked me if I could just make these films for them.
And by the way, I had six weeks and they had to be in Russian.
And that included doing translations and finding Russian -speaking narrators and all of that.
And editors who could understand the language so they could cut the films.
So I did.
And after I did that, I just produced it.
So I became aware that I could do that.
And I didn't know I could do that.
And I suspect that...
Like many other producers.
Yeah, I think that's how producers get into the business.
They somehow get this idea thrown at them.
And so you do it.
And then you find out it isn't all that hard.
You have to give it some thought.
So that's how I really got in the production business.
I didn't want to...
What was that about? Do you recall? Oh, I'm going to say late 70s.
Okay, that's the first time you started making films.
Yeah, yeah.
But I didn't want to compete with my customers.
Because I had literally hundreds of customers that bought equipment from me and rented equipment from me.
And I didn't want them to see me as a threat.
And I'm sure they didn't.
Nobody could drool as much as I do and be very threatening.
So I developed little niche things that other people didn't do.
And I did a lot of high -speed photography.
We were shooting all up to 10 ,000 frames a second.
And that operates like a microscope.
What a microscope does for size, high speed does for time.
And so you can slow down if you shoot at 10 ,000 frames a second and play back at 24 frames a second, you're making a very fast action appear to be slow.
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? Oh yeah, that was for...
I can't remember the name of the company either.
Oh, Republic.
It was a company set up in the iron mining range up in upper Minnesota, northern Minnesota, in the Musabee Range.
The company was owned by something like 40 different mining companies.
And they were sort of like a pool.
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.
And the holes may be 50 feet deep and three feet in diameter.
And they may be eight or 10 feet apart.
And they fill these holes with liquid explosive.
And because the taconite, which is the rock that is used when they mine iron, is a very hard rock, just incredibly hard.
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.
And you can't throw those chunks into a rock crusher.
And so it's important when they fill these holes with explosive that the explosive actually goes off.
And it happens so they may have 50 of these holes in a row.
And they go off in a sequence.
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.
And if the film showed that they were missing some, then they had an argument going with the supplier of the explosive.
I see, okay.
So it's a research.
You'll never see this on television or in your local theater.
Well, we did see that at the Cisco, though.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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.
And a brake shoe was pressing against the wheel and heating it up.
And then we shot infrared high -speed to show what the heating effect was on the wheel.
And it's something you either have to be in the railroad world to get any meaning out of it.
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.
The wheel would break.
And you'd get a train wreck.
I think that's a technical term, when a bunch of cars end up in the ditch.
So this showed why some trains were falling off the tracks.
So were most of the York film—I think you did something also, like the 50th anniversary of the Equitable Building? Oh, that was done for fun.
Yeah, okay.
Yeah.
There was the Equitable Building going on.
Yeah.
There was an editor named Hans Graf.
And Hans had his little editing studio in a penthouse overlooking that construction site.
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.
And it ran for three years.
What was the name of the building? Equitable Building, yeah.
You did also something with Leo Burnett, right? Their 50th anniversary? Yeah.
For their 50th anniversary they set up a huge tent in Grant Park.
And so we, again, shot out of a window of Bob Link's apartment, putting this tent up and taking it down.
So where something took three days, we compressed it into five minutes or something like that.
So you really liked the technology.
I loved the technology, yes.
And this didn't step on anybody's toes.
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.
And he had been teaching speech for years and suddenly realized that he didn't know really how the larynx makes sound.
Where does that come from? And so he got me to do a high -speed, make a high -speed shot of the larynx when somebody is coughing.
And lighting it was interesting.
How did you do that? Well, when you shoot at 10 ,000 frames a second, you don't have a very long exposure time.
Right.
How do you get? Well, I used a xenon arc light and I focused it.
And then we were testing it in his office.
And he said, well, it's bright enough, that's for sure.
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.
So he said that could be kind of hard on vocal cords that when somebody has just had surgery on them.
So we had to figure out a way to get the heat out of the light.
Good for cancer.
Yeah, right.
Right.
The ultimate radiation.
Just fry the sucker.
So, yeah, I love that kind of thing.
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.
And it, it whirls these, these oats at, at 25 ,000 RPM into little barriers that crack the shell.
And, and so we shot that in, in high speed to.
Do we have that? 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.
There was a competitive world out there and they wanted the results of their research.
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, usually the deal would be that it was my film that they had all the rights to.
But I could use any shot from them and from that in any other film that I.
Right, you could use the footage.
Yeah.
Right.
For any purpose.
Right.
But it was their film.
What, what, what are some of those films? Oh, I made a, I made a fundraising film for Swedish Covenant Hospital.
And we're talking about that medical care goes back a long way in history.
And so we're talking about coming out of the mists of time.
Well, how do you, how do you shoot the mists of time? You know, what is a metaphor? What is a metaphor? And a few years before that I had made a film for the Chicago Association of Commerce that we called Black, Black Powder.
And they were having a Christmas party and they wanted to show a film about hunting.
They had a group that was part of the Association of Commerce that were into sportsmanship, hunting, fishing.
And so they wanted me to do a film about hunting that they could show at the Christmas party.
So we did a film called Black Powder about using Revolutionary War guns to hunt.
And how did that work, you know? And so I had a shot that we had made of a guy paddling a canoe on a foggy, misty morning.
And I used that shot for the mists of time in another film.
Right.
Right, right.
And so you never, you just never know.
You know, you've got a shot and the only way you, I've often wondered how do you index stuff like that? 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.
Well, we try to do that.
But I would guess it would be very difficult.
It's very time consuming.
And yeah, logging, right, all the shots.
Yeah.
I do have more questions.
Just going back to the theaters, I wanted to ask about one in particular, which was the Playboy Theater.
Oh.
Can you tell me a little bit about that? I think that was on Dearborn.
Was it or? Let me just think a minute now.
Playboy Theater.
The theater that I believe is now called the Village Theater, and I may be wrong, I think it's on Clark Street.
It used to be called the Surf.
And it was an art house, in the best sense of the word.
Yeah, you get into trouble with that word.
It showed, they had a nice lobby and you could get coffee in the lobby and you could carry the coffee into the theater.
It was a pretty civilized operation.
There was a film made when Bob Flaxman made a film about the making of a film called The Last Affair.
It was a feature length film made by Columbia College's recent graduates.
And it was sort of a, they called it softcore porn.
And it was a goofy storyline.
Let's not bother with that.
There are a lot of goofy storylines out there.
But the film they made crossed the line to the point where no theater in Chicago would show it.
Now, why they wouldn't show it, there could be two reasons.
One is they were afraid of Citi taking action against them.
Citi had a very active censorship board at that time.
I don't know if we could talk about that.
The other reason is it was a terrible film.
And there was, believe it or not, a lot of theater operators can tell the difference.
They know a bad film when they see one.
And they don't necessarily know a good film when they see one, but they certainly do know a bad one.
And they smelled this one from a long way away.
So after spending roughly $800 ,000 to make the movie, they weren't being able to get it shown.
And so they bought the old Surf Theater.
They called it the Chelex, which was the name of their production company.
And they showed the film in their own theater, and it lasted four days.
So then they had this theater on their hands.
And what are they going to do? And I think they sold that to Hugh Hefner, and that became the Playboy.
A different kind of art house.
No, no.
Oh, no.
It was a...
Sure.
It was a nice theater.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
But let's talk a little bit about porn, because...
Do you guys have any objections to talking about porn? No, but really quick, I think the mic may have slipped down.
I was in your shirt.
It seems to be ruffling a little bit more.
Do you want to check it out? Is it in place? I don't know.
You're like in pause.
I'm not fine.
Yeah, it's perfect.
Well, not porn, but...
I was hired one time, and I can't remember who hired me.
But it was to stand with a camera and a microphone at the base, at the bottom of the escalator and water tower place, and interview people coming down the escalator.
You ask them five questions, and I can't remember what all the questions were, but one was, do you watch porn movies? Do you know the name of So -and -so, who was a big star in porn at that time? What was the last movie this person was in that you've seen? Questions like that.
And the purpose of it was to find out who watches porn.
And what they found out was that roughly 80 % of the people coming down the escalator at water tower place watched porn.
And this essentially is what paid for the whole consumer electronics industry at that time, when you think about it.
Porn films? Sure.
What...
You could get them on videotape.
The FCC had nothing to say about it.
It's not broadcast.
There was no Chicago censorship board that had anything to say about it.
You could buy the films somehow on cassette and show them at home, and nobody could tell you you couldn't.
And so, yet that...
The consumer electronics show that used to be at McCormick Place and in Las Vegas, roughly a quarter of the floor space of that show was porn.
Big deal.
I remember living on Armitage just west of Clark a long time ago.
And there was a movie...
A movie store, you know, where you could buy, yeah, cassettes.
And in the back, you know, there was a black curtain.
I'm sorry.
In the back, there was...
Yeah, it was all the X -rated movies.
Sure.
I mean, it was...
Sure.
Sure.
It was kind of such an upfront business.
I mean, that was always part of your video stores.
I used to sell equipment to the...
Back in the theater days, I sold equipment to the Chicago censor board.
The censor board was composed of widows who were all Irish, and they were all widows of Chicago policemen killed in the line of duty.
So this is a fairly conservative bunch.
And they had absolute control over what could and could not be shown in theaters.
Those 50s, 60s? 50s, 60s, yeah.
I don't know when they stopped, and I don't know why they stopped.
It had to be a legal issue.
Bruce Trins used to work as an expert witness in censorship cases.
Okay.
Over at the Clark Theater.
Yeah, and when it got legal, he would talk about censorship.
Right.
So Herschel...
So Dallas Studios was that? Dallas Jones.
Dallas Jones.
Was that a name of a man? That was the name of a man.
What kind of films did he make? Commercial, industrial.
He also did...
Yeah, he did commercial, TV commercials, and industrial films.
How about Madeleine Turtelow? Madeleine Turtelow.
Well, I would put her in the category with Millie Goldshaw and Helen Morrison, films that were art -based.
And I don't think I ever saw any of her films.
But we talked to her.
She came into the shop, and we talked about cameras, and I sold her equipment.
But I don't think I ever saw any of her finished films.
Do you remember anything about her? What she was like? Striking looking, yes.
Very stylish, sort of almost imposing.
When she came in, you knew it.
How about Margaret Keneally? She would come to screenings from time to time, and there were so many organizations then that...
And I can't remember exactly where she fit, but she would...
There was a Chicago Film Producers Association, University Film Producers Association, Religious Film Producers Association...
The Photographic Society...
Yeah, industrial film.
So there were all these groups that had their own niches, and you would see Margaret at some of these.
She was interested in production.
She did a lot of her own films.
And she and other people that did amateur films tried to emulate what the big kids were doing.
And so they would come out to look.
Western Electric out on 22nd and Pulaski running there...
They had the largest camera club in the country of their employees that started a camera club together.
And as part of that camera club were people that were shooting films, essentially home movies.
Right.
Yeah, she kind of swam...
I know everybody seems to have remembered she was around on the street.
She was around on the periphery of everything that was...
I think she shot for Loyola University some medical films for them, but I asked her once why she didn't.
Because you were right.
They had all these trade magazines.
It was...
Although hers, I think, didn't quite emulate professional films.
They did something on her, totally her own, or special, in my opinion.
I agree with you.
Sorry, we've got a truck.
Okay.
I think he's backing up.
That I will talk more.
But she said...
I asked her once about why she didn't...
Why she didn't, you know, think about trying to get into more professionals.
She was definitely really mired in a really good way, in a positive way, in the amateur film clubs and filmmaking.
She went around the world judging amateur film contests and stuff.
And she said, you know, they're going to make you do things.
Yep.
Certain ways that I just probably am not interested in being forced to do things like that.
But there was a modesty with that, too, when she said that.
But all in all, her stuff did have a certain Margaret Keneally stamp on it.
Yeah, yeah.
She's an auteur.
That was deliberate.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
I got to say that I was not that interested in amateur stuff.
I really wasn't.
And I guess, in fact, I'm still not.
I haven't changed.
It's kind of fun to see, but I can only take so much of it.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, let me...
Also, speaking of these different groups and agencies and stuff that were around, you talked also about the...
There was a science...
John Ott.
Oh, John Ott.
He did a weekly show on NBC called How Does Your Garden Grow? And he had two specialties.
One was photography, and he knew moviemaking.
He didn't really know moviemaking, but he knew how to set up a camera and get shots.
And then he knew how to grow flowers.
And so he did a weekly show showing how flowers grow.
And he developed a system of time -lapse photography where...
Well, let me describe the problem.
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, how are you going to get an exposure that matches, that balances out day and night? You have to have artificial light at night, and in the daytime, you've got sunlight.
So that doesn't work.
You can't mix and match.
So what he finally...
He tried a number of things.
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.
It needs sunlight to ripen the apple.
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.
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, take the house down, and let the sun get to the apple.
So he is shooting...
He's got stuff going on all over the place, and he found out that everything that grows needs sunlight.
Everything.
It makes the chlorophyll thing happen, and it makes flowers won't germinate.
I mean, all kinds of bad things.
And in fact, he also found that people need sunlight, and without sunlight, they get things acting up.
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.
And then he developed reading lights that are full spectrum reading lights.
So he's a very interesting guy.
He understands the usefulness of asking questions and wondering why things work the way they do.
And then he's very good at figuring out, okay, once you've figured out the problem, what do you do about it? And it was that thought process that he went through that...
Allowed him to shoot this ripening apple in artificial light.
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.
But he had something like 40 cameras, and he used Bell and Howell wind -up cameras.
And he had something like 40 of them around his place.
He had a greenhouse that he built.
And the greenhouse was built for photography so that he was getting sunlight in the greenhouse.
But whenever he's going to expose one frame, you build a house around the thing and light it and shoot it.
That's a great story.
All right.
How about another cameraman, Blackford, Burt Van Bork? I don't know that he had a niche.
As far as I can remember, he was a very, very good meticulous guy that could do most anything.
Good mechanic.
He worked for EBE.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And loved science.
And he sort of specialized in scientific stuff.
Yeah.
But that can mean anything.
Do you remember John Kerry by any chance? No.
He was a song guy.
How about Don Klugeman? Oh.
He was a storyteller.
He did films to suit himself.
He didn't have—what he did in real life, I can't remember.
I think he worked for an agency or something.
But the films that he made were for himself and whatever audience he could find for them.
And they were often psychological -based about the human condition, whatever you want to call that.
And I like Don.
I think he was a good filmmaker.
He combined writing, shooting, directing, recording the sound, editing.
Knew how to do that.
How were all of these people in the time of film able to make their own films? 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? Where did Klugeman get his dough to? A little at a time.
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.
He shot people films.
He would shoot a film that had a party sequence in it that had 20 people wandering around in a living room or something.
So he had a lot of—he had to schedule his shoots around when people would be available, and that had to be difficult.
Where the money came from? Well, a lot of it was using equipment that was down a running jump from what they probably should have been using.
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.
So you just shoot, and then you get recordings of people saying what you want them to say, a little like Altman does.
Yeah.
And so you fake it.
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.
Right.
Sorry, take change.
Okay.
How are you feeling? Oh, I'm not ready for surgery yet.
Okay, it's getting around noon right now.
I'm okay.
You're okay? Let me—how are you guys?
