We haven't talked about labs too much except for that there were a lot of labs.
Well infrastructure.
Are you ready? Yeah, we're rolling.
I remember at one time, I wish I could nail a date for you, but it would have been mid -60s let's say.
There were over 50 film labs in Chicago processing movie film, 16 millimeter and 35.
The labs were not necessarily both 16 and 35.
Some of the producers and I think of both Sarah and Wilding had their own labs.
Oh, and Atlas and Oak Park had their own lab.
And there could have been others as well.
But those three producers had their own labs, black and white.
And of course, that did the fact that early on they hadn't switched to color yet and made it much easier to set up a lab.
Color was a whole different story, but there was a company called Houston Fearless in Los Angeles that made almost portable processing machines.
By portable, I mean it was about the size of an oversized desk.
And it was basically made for television stations processing news footage.
But there were other machines being made.
Later on, a guy named Howard, I want to say Howard, is that right? Treese, I can't remember his first name.
His last name was Treese and he built custom processing machines for labs.
And they were huge.
You know, a machine could be 50 feet long and they were made for high rates of production.
And there was a lab just north of the river.
I can't remember his last name.
Larry something.
And it was a rack and tank processing where film would get dumped in a tank for development.
And at the end, it would get wrapped on a rack very similar to a clothes drying rack.
And the film would air dry on this rack, which meant that I could only process maybe 100 feet at a time.
And that's what the TV stations were using.
And so they would send film into the lab and it could be an hour or two before it would come out of the lab.
And so whether the news footage would make the 6 o 'clock news or not depended on exactly what time it got into the lab.
Very touchy.
And that's how cinema processors got started.
It was two partners, Ike Barnimotia was in touch with the racetracks.
He had set up the film labs out at Arlington Park and Hawthorne to do photo finishes.
And then he ran across Maury Blackman, who was a cameraman at CBS.
And they thought that what they were drinking together and like all great decisions that get made, when they drunk enough, they figured, well, what we got to do is set up a lab to do the news footage.
And so they did.
And within minutes, they were doing all the processing for ABC, NBC, CBS, and WGN.
And they had motorcycles parked outside the lab to run processed film back to the station and to bring in film to be processed from the stations.
And it was big operation.
And as I say, there were just lots of labs that specialized in various things.
Colburn Lab was one that went into producer services.
In addition to processing film, they had writers on staff.
And so if you work for a company and the company wants to make a film but they don't want to hire an outside producer because of the cost, they could go to Colburn.
They would help them write a film script.
They would have a, in the early days, they had a cameraman in a studio on staff ready to do it.
They had editing rooms, sound recording facility.
So they could provide all of the services that a company would need that wanted to do a film and wanted to do it in -house.
That was pretty unusual.
I think Colburn is the only one that comes to mind that did that.
But there were just a lot, Sarah did their own.
And then when Color came in, they set up a lab across the street from their studio to do Color.
That was Astra.
It was Astra? Yeah.
So there were just lots of labs and a lot of competition between them.
Wilding.
It means that there was a lot, a lot, a lot of production.
Oh, it was huge.
Yeah, yeah.
Most of it's 16 millimeter, but some 35.
There were two or three people in the equipment business.
It was our shop.
Mark Armstead, who rented cameras in Los Angeles, had a shop here where they rented Mitchell cameras to mostly 35.
I didn't do that at all.
Then there was Victor Duncan.
Victor Duncan, that was much later.
Well, Allied Film Lab, that was Northside.
They were on Belmont.
Right.
And Bill Smith ran Allied.
He started working for Paul.
Terrible to have such a bad memory in trying to do this.
Oh, no.
That happens to everybody when they are providing all the information.
It'll come around.
Anyway, he had a lab called Lakeside Lab in Gary.
The guy that ran that lab had a cousin named Bill Smith.
Bill and I became friends way early on.
My first week in the business, I met Bill Smith.
We're still the best of friends.
Bill is retired now and living in Carmel, which isn't a bad place.
Bill's son, Scott Smith, you probably know.
When Scott set up his shop in Chicago, I gave him an office to set it up in.
Scott and I go, when I first met Scott, he was one year old.
We've known each other a long time.
Anyway, Bill worked for his cousin at Lakeside Lab.
Then later broke loose from him, set up a lab in Detroit.
Then later on set up Allied in Chicago.
How would you rate 16 -millimeter production mid -20th century? The last second half of the century? There was a lot of it.
In terms of other cities such as New York? There was a lot of 16 -millimeter production in New York.
I would guess there was more 16 -millimeter production in Chicago than in Los Angeles.
Except for the universities out there.
They churned out a lot of stuff.
There was a university producers' association that I mentioned before.
Almost every big university had a production unit.
Starting at what you think.
I kind of remember.
There wasn't film studies, did not exist.
No, there wasn't any.
Sometimes it was an offshoot of the English department where they're talking about stories.
Film has one advantage.
You can show a film in the class and everybody in the class has actually seen that film.
Then you can talk about it.
You can assign the class to read a story or a book.
Having taught a little bit, there's nothing to guarantee that everybody in the class has read the book.
You get six people involved in the discussion.
Whereas film, everybody is starting from the same point.
It's a big advantage in a classroom.
Are there any filmmakers or people that we haven't talked about that come to mind to you? There are hundreds.
I know there exist a lot of them.
Let's go back and talk about industrial films a little bit.
When International Harvester decided to...
They had a classic problem.
They built a machine that, let's say, it's involved in planting cotton.
But it's November.
Nobody plants cotton in November.
Even if you're in a part of the country where you do plant cotton.
And so they have two holdups.
One is time and one is distance.
How do you be where the cotton is? Well, what they did was they bought a huge farm out near Starved Rock.
I think it was near Ottawa, Illinois.
And they set up a film production unit out there.
It was a huge building.
They built a studio, soundproof.
And it also taught dealers how to service harvester equipment.
So they had a shop where they could do that.
And then they had their film.
So they had a lake on the farm.
One side of the lake was deciduous trees.
The other side is assiduous trees.
So they could get a background from the lake of whatever they wanted with a field in front of it.
And if they needed a shot of planting cotton, they could do it.
And they didn't care what month it was because they had no intention of raising that cotton.
They were just planting it.
And so they could tailor the farm for what they were going to want within six months or a year.
And they could schedule it all themselves.
They had all their production equipment there.
They didn't have to travel around the country.
It made all kinds of sense to them.
I remember one film they made where they got Garroway to be their narrator.
And the corporate dude that worked for Harvester that was in charge, he wanted to be there when they shot Garroway.
And he shows up, he thought he was C .B.
DeMille, and he showed up one morning wearing riding breeches and playing Mr.
Hollywood.
Garroway had been up all night.
He was an amateur astronomer, and he'd been up all night watching stars.
And he came out, he was so blurry -eyed, he didn't see this guy in his riding breeches anyway.
It was a big, they had, Ace Moore was one of their editors.
They had probably four or five editors working at any place that's making enough, shooting enough film to keep four editors busy is a working studio.
Yeah, finishing houses too, in the time of film.
Sure.
Well, that's an outgrowth of the advertising agencies that were in Chicago.
You show a commercial to an agency client, and there's one thing I can absolutely guarantee, and that's the agency is going to want a change made.
They're never going to take it the way it comes.
That's the old hairy arm theory.
You've got to show them something they don't want to see so they can suggest something.
Well, Mike Birch that used to work for Burnett did a commercial that they shot in London for parliament cigarettes and came back and wanted to show it to parliament, and he was very nervous about it.
They'd spent a lot of money, and they had cobbled together three commercials in a strip, and it was interlocked, which means that picture was on one roll and sound is on another roll.
He called me and asked me if I would rent them an interlocked projector with me to run it.
So I went over, and it was interesting.
He said, you run the commercials and immediately rewind it and get ready to run them again, and don't wait for instructions.
Just automatically do that.
So I ran it, and there's a table, a long table with maybe 20 people sitting around the table, half of them from Burnett and half of them from whoever it is that makes parliament.
And ran the commercial, ran the things, I'm rewinding, and nobody in the room says a word.
Finally somebody says, run them again, so I run them again.
Nobody says a word.
I ran it six, seven, eight times, and then finally somebody said, I noticed that when she came around the corner in the second spot, there was a reflection from a car that was coming the other way.
Somebody said, run it again, so I ran it again.
And then somebody said, well, somebody else was starting through that door just when she was going to come in, and that didn't look quite right.
So run it again.
And after I'd run it 20 or 30 times, Leo Burnett, who was sitting there, said, I liked it.
And now suddenly everybody on the Burnett side of the table liked it.
And so somebody said, run it again, and I ran it again.
And now the number one guy from parliament said, I liked it.
And now everybody over there liked it.
And that's the way it was.
And so you just had to—that's just the nature of commercials, and that's why so many people wanted to not do it.
That is such a defining story about commercial production.
I worked commercials too, you know, at some point in my career.
And that is so defining of what it's all about.
Thoughtful people didn't want to do it.
Pardon? No, yeah.
You check your brains at the door when you do that stuff.
Except that shooting them— A lot of money wasted too.
But shooting them was very demanding, very demanding.
Good quality stuff.
There was one that Gordy Weisenborn did, worked on for Miller Brewing in Milwaukee.
And he asked me to go up with him again to do an interlock.
And we—they had—it was just another beer commercial.
You've seen one, you've seen them all.
And at the end of showing these films, one of the Miller people said, I am very concerned about the middle syllable of the key word of our slogan.
Now, they've been using this slogan for 30 years, right? The beer of distinction.
And he's very concerned about the middle syllable of distinction.
Do we want to really say that stink is in some way associated with Miller beer? Well, they got into discussing this.
And after an hour and a half, Gordy said, Jack, are you ready to go? And I said, I could leave.
He said, let's get the hell out of here, and when you guys are ready to talk about it, we'll come back.
And we did.
We left.
And left them talking about the stink and distinction.
Now, yeah, you check your brains at the door when you get into that line of work.
On the other hand, I did a film for Cannes Salmon Institute.
Not a household word, but there is such a thing, or there was then.
An institute of folks that do canned salmon.
And there was a cannery in Alaska that had a three -year inventory on hand of canned salmon that they couldn't sell.
And the reason they couldn't sell it, it was white.
And people think salmon is pink.
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.
And the three -year inventory sold in two weeks.
So you never can underestimate the stupidity of the consumer.
Oh, yeah.
Well, Bill, whose father was in the business long before him, shot the footage of the Hindenburg blowing up, which is probably some of the most famous footage that's ever been shot.
Bill went into the Army during the war and shot the troops landing on Utah Beach.
And then when the war was over, he—and by the way, he was just an excellent cameraman.
I've seen a lot of his footage, and I've seen films that he made.
I've never seen a scene in any of his films that you could quarrel with.
I mean, he knew his work.
And he got it the hard way.
I guess if you're shooting the troops landing on Utah Beach, you're kind of busy.
And it's best not to be easily distracted.
He did a film of the building of Gateway Arch in St.
Louis.
It's just a wonderful film, I think.
I mean, it's a construction site that is very unusual, and he was able to really catch the unusual nature of it.
He did a—I think he shot a lot of films for the city as well.
Oh, yeah.
He did.
Another cameraman, Henry Ushajima, did a film for Mayor Daley after the 1968 convention when there were so many—so much criticism of the city and the way the police handled it, the riots and everything.
Yeah, what trees did they plant? Birch shot that too? I know, Henry.
Henry—I think Henry shot it.
Yeah, okay.
They think Bill was— I don't think Bill— Oh, I'm sorry.
I thought you were saying— I don't think Bill did that.
No, he didn't.
Yeah, that was my understanding too.
Yeah.
Bill did a lot of work for the city.
See, the city—again, this is union versus nonunion.
The city felt that they could only hire union crews, union producers.
In fact, a lot of old Mayor Daley's—this chair squeaks, I can't— Right.
Yeah, okay.
It's not picking it up.
Okay, yeah, that's all.
The city felt that they couldn't contract with people that were not union.
And so McCormick Place was all union, and the film producers that they hired were union.
Bill Birch was a union cameraman, and so he was a union producer, and so was Henry Yoshijima.
I'll tell you a story about Henry.
Go ahead.
He was Japanese American, and his wife was also—his wife Ruth was also Japanese American.
And after Pearl Harbor, they bought a house in Park Ridge.
And about a week after they'd moved in, a delegation of the neighbors came to call on them and wanted to know who they were, what—you know, welcome to the neighborhood.
And after they'd been there a while, they sort of said, well, where are you from? What is Yoshijima? What kind of a name is that? And they said, well, we're Japanese American.
And I said, oh, they were so relieved, they thought they might be Jewish.
This was right after Pearl Harbor.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, that's— Which brings up an interesting facet of film world.
When I got into the business, there were no blacks in the business, period.
There was a black guy that came here from Canada who had gotten a lot of awards in Canada as a cameraman.
And he wanted to get into the Union in Chicago, and they didn't want any part of him.
And Gordy Weissenborn, who was in the Union—he was in the Directors Guild—said he would— there was a fairly major film coming up for him, and I can't remember which one it was, but he said he wanted to use Jim Strickland as his cameraman.
And so the Union—if the Union didn't want him to do that, they had to take him in as a Union member.
And several of us wrote letters praising Jim and the films that he'd shot, and so the Union did take him in.
He was the first black cameraman taken into the Union, and that was because of a lot of pressure put on him.
It did set something of a precedent, but not much.
There's still quite a lot of racism, I would say, in the film unions.
What year was that? Oh, God, I don't know.
It almost had to be in the early 70s.
Yeah, still don't know.
So—and when I hired a couple of guys, one of them was Ron Pitts, who I think is still teaching at Columbia.
They weren't hired—blacks were not being hired to do anything in the film world at that time.
And— How about women? 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.
Certainly not working crew, not shooting, not recording sound.
Editing sometimes.
Sitting—sit -down jobs.
I guess that's the big dividing line, whether you're standing up or— That was across pretty much the entire industry, not just Chicago.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't think of stand -up jobs for women.
Did you and Gordon have—were there any other filmmakers that were in your corner in regards to trying to force certain— Not many.
Not many.
Most people in the film world saw everybody else as a competitor or as a threat.
And so there was very little—it wasn't as cooperative as the names of the— 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.
University Film Producers Association.
Within these organizations, there'd be all kinds of openness and sharing and information swapping, networking, but not generally.
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.
Just—I don't know why.
Well, that's— But it doesn't—that doesn't really relate to filmmaking so much.
It's just— Well, I think it does relate in some ways, because filmmaking a film is such a collaborative effort.
Yeah.
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.
Yeah.
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— 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.
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, 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.
You've got a right to do that, except I'm never going to call you again.
And so you have to make the decision which way do you want to go.
And I've seen all kinds of people do it both ways.
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.
And he left and told Bob the night before he left.
So we had to shoot around him, get all the shots that we didn't need him for while he was gone.
And Bob said, well, I'll never call that son of a bitch again.
Could you talk a little bit more about Bob Link? 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.
He taught me sailing.
I taught him shooting.
And so we were together a lot.
I worked with him on all the films that he made.
How did he start getting? Was that his profession? No, he worked for CBS.
He was lighting director for CBS.
He went to school.
He took architecture in school.
He learned how to draw, learned how to deal with perspective, and went to work somehow for CBS designing sets and then lighting.
He lit the set for the first Nixon -Kennedy debate, which was in Chicago.
And that's an interesting story, by the way.
Nixon had been—there was a cartoonist named Herb Block that did cartoons of Nixon.
He did a lot of political cartoons.
And the standard cartoon of Nixon was Five O 'Clock Shadow, that he always needed a shave.
And Nixon was very conscious of that.
And his press secretary, whose name was Herb Klein, came to Bob before the shoot and said, 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.
And Bob said to him, Did you ever play Halloween? Herb Klein said, What are you talking about? He says, You know, where you hold a flashlight under your face to make you look spooky.
And Herb Klein says, If I want your opinion, I'll ask for it.
Put a light down on the floor.
And so Bob said, Yes, sir.
And a little later, Pierre Salinger, who was Kennedy's press secretary, came over to him and he said, You know that light you put on the floor for Nixon? He said, Yeah.
He says, I want one for my man, too.
So Bob went over to Dick Ortner, who was the floor manager, and he said, The whole world has gone mad.
What are we going to do? And Dick says, You do what you're told.
Don't argue with these guys.
So he put the light down for Kennedy.
And then they were having a coffee break.
And Salinger came over and he said to Bob very quietly, he said, Thank you for putting that light there.
Now when nobody is looking, could you have somebody unplug it? And so in the debate itself, Nixon has this ghastly look from the light being down there.
The other thing that happened, and I'm not a Nixon fan, don't misunderstand what I'm saying, but Nixon had had an infection in his knee, an abscess, and they drove his limo into the studio.
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.
And he almost passed out.
And Bob Link caught him and just held him for a minute until he could stand.
And that was 20 minutes before the debate started.
So when I heard these stories, it just made me aware of how stupid the debate format is for electing a president.
You're bound to catch somebody at their worst.
And that has nothing to do with what kind of an administrator they'll be or how creative their thinking will be.
Right.
And how powerful anyway the media is in...
At the wrong thing.
At the wrong...right.
At anything.
Speaking though of other...I think there was a guy named Mantell.
Harry Mantell.
Yes.
Can you talk about him a little bit? I can't.
I remember his name, and I think if he walked in the room I'd know him.
But I can't talk about the films that he made.
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.
I think he came out of the TV studios.
I would guess so, but I don't know.
Oh, two people I would like to mention.
Bill Friedman...or Bill Friedkin? Yeah.
Who worked for GN and Bill Butler.
Yeah.
And Bill Butler was Friedkin's cameraman at GN.
And then they left GN and went...Red Quinlan was my general manager of Channel 7, I believe.
Yeah.
I may be wrong about that, but I think it was Red Quinlan.
Later on he became general manager of Channel 32.
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.
And they did a series of documentaries for Channel 7 that were just wonderful.
They were...one was The People versus Paul Crump.
Paul Crump was a black guy that was headed for the electric chair.
He had...there had been a murder, as I remember it, of a guard at the Swift Meatpacking Plant.
And they nailed Paul Crump, who I don't believe was even in the neighborhood at the time.
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.
Mayor Daley squashed it, so it was never shown.
He called Red Quinlan and said, I never want to see that on TV.
And so they pulled it without it being shown.
But they made a lot of other films that were shown.
And I remember one was A Tale of Two Cities, which compared Chicago and I think Liverpool.
I may be wrong about that, but it was something like that.
They made a lot of documentaries together that were just very good and fascinating films.
And then they both went to Hollywood.
Bill Butler shot Jaws, and he shot a lot of other films that were pretty good.
And of course, Friedkin did The Night They Rated Minsky's, and he did The French Connection and The Exorcist.
And in their background, Friedkin started in the mailroom at WGN.
And they came in one day, I'll never forget it, and said, how do you do a camera? Show us how a movie camera works.
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.
Well, yeah.
You needed two things.
And they weren't necessarily in the same person.
And so this combination of Friedkin and Butler, one was aesthetic, one was technical.
Actually, I asked Bill Butler one time, he lived in Glenview, and we drove out that way together.
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.
And so I try to get some poetry into my shots.
And Friedkin had done some stuff at Second City, and he knew Bernie Sahlins.
And so he's thinking of it more from an actor's point of view.
Right, performance.
There's another guy, Franklin McMahon.
What do you remember about him? Ron Klasky was his editor.
Oh, okay.
He lived in Lake Forest and liked to make films of various kinds.
Most of them are art -based.
They may have been about art.
He was an artist.
Yes, and he knew art.
He knew a lot about it.
And so his films tended to be—they weren't necessarily teaching.
I'm not sure.
I guess I'd put him in the category of art appreciation.
Yeah, he did some political films.
He followed politics.
Yeah, pretty lefty.
Yeah, and then I think made sketches.
He did one on the Chicago seven trial.
And it was all sketches and then interview material and stuff like that.
Right.
Who have we missed? I'm sure we've missed.
Do you guys have any questions? Not a fan.
Okay, well, then let's wrap this up.
And I definitely will go through this stuff, and then probably there will be some.
You go to school, you go into college -level studies to become a filmmaker, and at that time there were no colleges.
And it was more, how do you work this thing? That's right.
So we're rolling.
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.
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.
And then you could talk about it.
And there were wonderful short films being made at that time.
By short film, I mean less than a half hour.
Half hour, or rather 27 minutes is the running time for a film made for television.
But there were a lot of films that weren't made for television.
And those were the kind that I mentioned before, that we would screen every month.
And they were films that might be anything from a minute to 20 minutes and sometimes longer.
They could be on any kind of subject you can imagine.
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.
There were a lot of Britannica films as one.
But there was also, there was Pyramid Films and Contemporary Films.
These are names of companies that distributed films.
And they're Films Inc.
Yeah, they were the biggest probably, which was an offshoot of Encyclopedia Britannica, owned by the same people.
So teachers were using these films in their classrooms.
They could show, and it was a filmic analogy to a short story.
So a group of them got together and started what they call the Screen Educators Society.
And there were probably 100 members of this group.
And it was all Chicago teachers using film in the classroom.
And one of them was May Peets, who I met and married.
And May happened to have my oldest daughter in her class.
And she was teaching English.
And she had either heard something or read something about you could take a blank film or a leader even, 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.
And so she gave her class, she said in her class, anybody that wanted to do this could do it.
And one loudmouth girl in the class, who happened to be my daughter, said, I don't want to do that.
I want to use a camera.
And she said, we don't have any cameras.
She says, well, my dad has cameras.
I want to do that.
And she said, I want to meet your dad.
So I went to the next open house and met her and gave him some cameras.
And one thing led to another.
And 20 years later, we got married.
Twenty years later? Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah, I've always lived my life in generational lumps.
Anyway, she made three films, one about her father, one about a strike that the Union had at her school.
And Niles North High School.
And I can't remember what the other one was.
Oh, yes, I do.
Cross -section was the name of it.
And I should remember it because I essentially made it.
I helped her.
But it was about a day in the life of her classroom.
And her job was really to keep kids from dropping out of school.
She provided an interesting enough environment in the class that the hope was that kids would come back the next day.
And not because somebody forced them to come back, but to get them to want to come back.
Was this before she worked at Niles? No, it was at Niles.
It was at Niles? Yeah, as part of the English department.
The kids were dropping out of school because they didn't want to read and they didn't want to write.
And they didn't want to think.
They didn't want to do things that they're forced to do in school.
And so she started showing them movies.
And then they'd talk about the movies.
And then they'd talk more about the movies.
And her idea of a good movie is a movie with an idea in it that you could talk about.
And not just the typical boy -girl stuff.
So, I don't know.
Well, I'm going to ask you now that we've gone rolling again.
We've gone lost again.
What do you remember? How did Gordon and Jerry, Jerry Glymphall, Gordon Quinn, do you remember kind of how? There was another guy.
Teminer.
Yeah.
And that's for Cartemquin.
Teminer is the Tem and Quinn is Gordon Quinn.
And yeah, Jerry Blumenthal came later, I believe.
And Gordon can straighten you out on this.
Yeah, I totally agree.
Overall, how did Cartemquin kind of, how would you nudge them into the greater scheme of things? When they came together, I would guess that they had no notion of what they were going to do.
Or what they would end up doing.
Because what they ended up doing was some of the most interesting political documentaries that have ever been made.
And social documentaries.
Not just political, but films like Taylor Chain.
Well, you could say that everything is political.
But it's more economic and social than it is political.
I bought a union strike in a factory that makes chain.
I don't know that that's what they intended to do when they started.
I think they started from an interest in filmmaking and thought they would do what they could do.
And my guess is that they started out commercial and somehow drifted into where they are.
But I don't know that.
I don't know.
Oh, okay.
So yeah.
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? No, no.
They came in with a, they knew what they were going to do.
Right, right, right.
Okay.
And they knew how to do it.
Yeah, there were all kinds of people that came in.
And very, very few people that came in had a rounded notion of how you make a movie or what you use.
They didn't know what kind of camera to use.
And the technology was evolving.
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.
And that means that people that were doing professional work at that time were not shooting sync sound.
Right.
Yeah, of course.
Right.
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.
And you're shooting a talking face that looks something like this.
Hopefully not this ugly, but.
Okay.
Yeah, I think that's it.
I think this is great.
We've got buckets of stuff.
Well, the buckets probably got a hole in it.
I hope not.
Yeah, I don't think so.
