Side 1: Beverly Baynes / Side 2: Guy on Facets
Beverly, the first question is how were films made? Your directors and the line on the floor and so on.
The directors came where? From out of the theater? You know, that type of thing.
Well, of course, in the early days, everything was very primitive.
It was an untried medium and new techniques had to be sought out.
And directors usually came from the legitimate theater or stock companies or some sort of training school for actors.
But for instance, you put the camera tripod on the floor and from that floor, the cameraman would stretch a white line on either side of the camera and it usually, 18 feet was the extent it could be widened back of us.
And we had to perform within that area and always be sure that we never stepped over the line because Mr.
Spoor was very careful that his actors were always available, always being able to be seen.
And another thing that was very curious about that time, you were not the director and the showed on an actor's face or his body or on the floor, the scene had to be redone.
They would not allow a shadow to be shown anywhere.
And every day after the shooting, they would go to the projection room downstairs and see whether there were retakes to be taken the next day.
And of course, there were some very good directors.
The head director was Henry McRae Webster.
I couldn't think for the moment.
Of course, Harry McRae Webster was one of our head directors.
It was Joseph Towton and several others that all contributed something to the eventual technique of movies.
As I said earlier, we were fumbling in the dark in one sense.
The camera stayed mostly in one position.
Of course, we had to have a close -up.
He would move the camera in and take that in a certain area, but always within the confines of these two white lines.
And it at moments was a little difficult to do.
Well, Wally Beery was quite a character.
He was big and bumptious and well, jolly.
And he played in a comedy series called Swede.
He played a Norwegian cook with a gingham dress, an apron and blonde wig.
Excuse me, let's go to Wallace Beery.
Well, Wally Beery was quite a character.
He came there to do a series called Swede.
He dressed as a woman, played this part of a maid, and he wore great floppy shoes like they did in Carnivals as a clown.
After all, that's where Wally came from, Carnivals and circuses and one thing another.
And he got this very comic technique to bring to our series at S &A.
And he was exceptionally good in it.
And he used to have a yellow Mercer car.
Couldn't think of it for a minute.
He would, oh, tear up and down Sheridan Road in Chicago with a cutout.
And all the people in the neighborhood would say, there goes that film actor.
And Gloria Swanson, which usually be with him, she took a great liking to him.
And that was Wally in his jolly way.
He made friends with everyone.
And finally he left S &A, had a big contract, to go to California and play for Max Sennett in a series of the Keystone Cops.
Bushman, as I have said earlier, I believe, he was very exact in calculating all about his work.
And when he would play with me, he always saw to it that some way I was maneuvered with the side of my head or the back of my head so that he could be in full view.
And particularly, he always wanted the profile.
And he sort of upstaged me on everything.
And I guess he did on the other actors too, because they used to talk about it.
But he was very precise, very meticulous, and well, oh, spoke very elegantly and precisely.
Beverly, tell us about that wonderful new lighting system.
The lighting system they had is one of the great studios.
And how you felt when those hot lights, what were they? Carbon arcs and cliques and so on? Well, our studio was very modern.
It had to be equipped to take care of a great many plays that would be taken indoors, because the weather, as you know, in Chicago is cold and vicious.
So a lot of plays had to be geared around interiors.
So they had very powerful lights, clique lights, they called them.
And then they had something called a broad arc light, which was very, very hot.
And in those days, they wouldn't allow a shadow to fall on the floor from your body as you walked or a shadow on your face.
I presume that was due to the fact that some of the movie theaters might not have such excellent lighting or whatever.
They were afraid that they would dim out.
And the consequence was that they had this powerful light all around you, and particularly this arc light broadside.
When you do a scene down by a fireplace and you had to work very closely to the light, you would go home at night and you would have a sunburn on your eyes.
And all night long you would be weeping and it was very painful.
And sometimes the next day you'd have to cancel out because you couldn't take the picture.
Your eyes were so sunburned or red.
And of course, there were after a while, they brought in lighting and tried to be more artful about shadows and use the effects of light and shadow.
But in the beginning, it was very stark.
It just had to be bright light and nothing else.
Spoor, my old boss, and Edwin Hill Amit developed the Magnoscope.
It was an early projector for movie houses.
developed film as Chasers in Vaudeville.
And then he founded the Peerless Film Company in 1907.
And Bronco Billy Anderson or G .M.
And they used the initials of their last names as a trade name.
And they called it S &A, Film Manufacturing Company.
And did I do Peerless? And one of the earliest actors was Ben Turpin.
And the picture was called An Awful Skate.
From then on, Spoor and Anderson were in business.
Spoor was an excellent executive.
And as a thriving businessman, Bronco Billy Anderson was a great promoter and very intelligent.
And ultimately, he became an actor.
Went to Colorado, started a company there, and then to Niles, California.
And he did a great many Westerns and was a great success.
Spoor coming in the studio long around 11 in the morning, very elegantly dressed.
He was a dignified, wonderful -looking man.
And he would go to his office.
None of us would see him until suddenly he would simply sail through the studio, the various departments.
And of course, everyone was very submissive, feeling that they wanted to be seen in the best part of their work in the studio.
And he would stand with his great Havana cigar.
I can see him now puffing away at it as we would work on our scenes.
My recollections of George Spoor.
Spoor was a very dignified and handsome man.
Very well turned out, beautiful clothing.
And he would come into the studio, go to his office.
We'd all know when he went there.
It was usually at the hour of 11.
And then after looking over his effects and whatnot, business of the day, he would make a circuitous trip through the studios and all the departments and wherever a company was working.
And he would stand there with a great Havana cigar in his mouth and watch the action, whatever was going on.
We never really talked to him much.
But he was always very kind and friendly.
And I think he actually at one time, I believe it was in the 50s, was given an Oscar for having one of the finest movie establishments in the business.
Well, I believe in the 50s, Mr.
Spoor was given an Oscar because he was one of the early pioneers in the business and one of the top men in films from the very beginning.
Charles Chaplin comes to SNA in 1915.
Charles Chaplin came to us in, I guess it was 1915, he was very meticulous in all his direction.
He demanded a great deal of time for every scene.
And of course, the rest of us who had in our early stages had made one movie a day.
We were suddenly confronted with a man who took hours and hours to just rehearse one scene.
It might go all day long and into the next day.
This one scene of him going out a door and another actor coming in and getting in his way as he turned around with a ladder or an old dirty mop or something and hit the other actor in the face and the reactions, which were usually very funny.
He would take a day and a half to do that one scene.
The legitimate, traumatic actors that had to work so fast, we couldn't believe this was possible.
Now, another thing that he did, he would put screens up around.
No one was allowed to see him.
He kept to himself and was not antisocial, but none of us really had any conversation with him at all, other than, good morning and how do you do? But there was a great deal of mystery about it.
But the outcome was that the other directors eventually caught on to the time element that Chaplin had established.
And they began to take a little more leisure with their work and found that the results were so good that the front office accepted this change to the great delight of the cast and the directors.
Chaplin only did one film in Chicago with us at S &A.
And the weather being so frightfully cold and frigid, he joined the S &A company in Niles, California, where he did 13 shows, I believe, plays, whatever you want to call them, for S &A.
What did you think of the comedies, the slapstick at the time? Did you look down on Chaplin and the other comics, you know, who did this kind of thing? All right.
What was your feeling though about comedy and the comics and so on? Were you a...
Well, actually, being a dramatic actress, all my attention and thought and inclination was toward drama and romantic drama and that sort of thing.
That comedy didn't interest me so much.
I had a great regard for it because it is a distinct gift to be a good comic.
But I'm more of a serious person and therefore dramas pleased me more than comedies, although I had great regard for some of the Chaplin and other comic movies.
Curiously enough, I'm a very serious minded person.
I'm greatly concerned about causes and things that are going on in our...
Most of my friends know that I'm sort of a crusader.
I'm always sponsoring causes and I'm very interested in patriotic things.
And I'm constantly writing to our senators and congressmen and where I feel that we should all be concerned so that we can give them something of our thought and of our concern for matters that are going on in our country.
And as I laughingly say to my friends, I wake up sometimes two o 'clock in the morning and I write the most magnificent letters.
Everything comes to me brilliantly.
And then I think, oh, I must put that in a letter tomorrow.
And I usually do, but I don't know as I approximate the great triumph that I do in this two to four in the morning.
Well, all my friends out here know that I'm a crusader.
I'm a serious minded person and I'm very interested in lots of causes, particularly anything that has to do with my country.
I have wakeful moments at times at night and along about two o 'clock in the morning, I can contrive and write the most magnificent letters, at least in my thought, to my congressmen and senators, etc.
And I get up in the morning and then my friends tell me, well, that's pretty good.
I like it or some words to that effect.
And that gives me the courage to send these things off.
I don't know whether it is like by my congressman or not that they have to open them and read them.
But for most part, I get wonderful replies from all of them.
My son and I came to Arizona about 13 years ago.
We were going to visit a friend in Beverly Hills in California and on our way back home to Westchester in New York, we almost bought a house.
But motherly caution, I said, let's go back and sell our home and then we'll return to Arizona.
Well, we sold our beautiful house on acreage and wonderful dog root, a dog, but I guess.
Oh, we sold our home in Westchester, a beautiful house with ancient dog root trees that everybody loved.
And of course, it was the house was sold in one day.
Oh, I guess 15 days after we were back.
We were on our way with the moving van in just ahead of us on our way to Arizona, having no house in mind at that particular point.
But we found a very lovely place, two and a half acres out in Paradise Valley.
And by the way, oh, it is so beautiful.
Any view, my view from my living room window, simply gorgeous.
Looked at the superstitions and the Bradshaw's and all the wonderful mountains and the all the homes had to be on two or two and a half acres.
And you had such a sense of spaciousness.
You were allowed to have horses and dogs and real country living.
And everybody that would visit in the fall would ride up to Carefree, which is a marvelous community about 20 miles north of us.
With the gorgeous mansions and beautifully planned village, which is just, as I said, 20 miles away, makes a marvelous drive for everybody who visits here.
And you see them riding along in their cars leisurely all the way up Scottsdale Road to Carefree and the lovely relaxed look on their faces.
Nothing like in California or back east in New York, the aggressive traffic and all the rest of it.
Well, of course, to me, this is the most beautiful place and it's where I hope to live the rest of my life.
Scottsdale, in its village -like atmosphere, offers so much to everybody who lives here.
And all of Arizona is so exquisite.
The gorgeous swallows, all the cacti, the little animals, the road runners that are hardly anyplace else in the world, I guess.
And it is just where I feel that God has directed me to spend my remaining days.
All right, dolls, about Beverly Bain doll.
There was a wonderful publisher in New York, Daniel Bloom.
We all affectionately called him Danny.
And he started as a very young boy collecting autographs of the great motion picture actors and also the greats of the legitimate state.
And finally, he met a little woman that made dolls.
And she designed them after the exact characters and costumes.
They're about 14 inches high, I would say.
And Danny had his whole apartment lined with glass shelves with electric lights in them with these dolls as a beautiful ornament.
How did you come to the possession of these marvelous dolls, Beverly? Well, about three years ago, Mr.
Daniel Bloom, who was a great Broadway publisher of the pictures of the silent movie actors and also the greats of the legitimate stage, he published several books, one of the silent screens and one of the stars of Broadway in a certain number of years, etc.
And he, I knew him very well, used to go to parties at his home down on West 9th Street.
And his entire living room was filled with glass cases in which, as you go in, you would see these exquisite dolls, replicas of Alfred Lunt and Lillian Fontaine, Lillian Gish, Geraldine Farrar, Alfred Lunt or any number of magnificent stars, Helen Hayes, all of them, Catherine Cornell, in the costumes that they played in their certain play that they were playing at that time.
And when I came to Arizona, he said, Beverly, I'm going to have a doll of you as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet.
And very shortly, I'll send it to you.
Well, I came out here and I got a lovely card from him at Valentine's.
And he said, I have your doll and when you come to New York next time, we're going to have a bash.
He said, I'm going to give you a beautiful party and you will have your doll.
Well, as a matter of fact, about two weeks later, the dear man passed away.
He told me about the big party he was going to give me.
And so a fan told me that the auctioning of the doll collection after Mr.
And I wrote to friends who live in Bedford Village, the Donald A.
McElroys, and they were darlings.
They said, don't you worry, we'll go to the auction and get your doll.
Well, in the meantime, a little chap, a picture fan of some 20 odd years, wrote me about this auction.
And he said, I want to get your doll.
And I said, no, don't do that because other friends are going to.
And you know that very shortly thereafter, the moment the auction was over, three wonderful dolls, perfectly precious, but they're about 14 inches high, came from this little picture fan.
And one is Enrico Caruso in Pagliacci.
And the other is exquisite of Lillian Gish.
The portraiture is divine of the Lillian Gish in Camille.
And then a lovely one of Geraldine Farrar as Tosca.
Very shortly after I received these lovely presents from the little man, I received this large box sent from my friends in Bedford Village of me as Juliet.
And if I could show you the picture of this, which I have here, this is an exact replica, even to the bench that I was sitting on, to play the first scene that I did with Romeo in the film.
And even to the beads, long beads around the neck and the rings on the fingers, the exquisite design of the dress with the featured jewels just where I had mine, and a beautiful cap made out of antique velvet, and my curls and the portraiture of the face is ever so good.
And I wish you could see the feet and the darling little shoes that she made.
And these dear miniatures were made by a Miss Mary Green, a great friend of Daniel Bloom's.
And oh, I wish I could find her and knew where she was.
I would love to have her know that everyone has adored her creations.
Okay, let's drape this so that, and then I will ask, we can ask them to do this.
Okay, this is my level, this is my level, this is my level, this is my level, this is my level, this is my level, this is my level, this is my level, this is my level, Okay.
Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello? Yeah, it should be okay.
Hello? Hello, how are you? Today is Thursday the 12th.
Okay, what I want to do is, I want to ask you, what is your level? I'd like to start out asking you, tell me first what you want to, what kinds of things you want to get out of it.
I'll tell you what, I have not seen a thorough article on facets multi -meaning.
And what I'd like to get out of this is, because there is a feeling over here that is nowhere else in Chicago, and that is a complete generosity among the people here.
And commitment and love of the films and of the activities that are here.
So it's a credit to you and Nicole.
And what I wanted to do is trace where you were, just simply really fast, tell me where you started out, how long you were there, what kind of a place it was, what you were confronted with.
Why don't we start there? Where did you first, you know, go? Okay, in...
First of all, you came over here from Czechoslovakia.
And how old were you then? You were a young kid.
And you had lived in Prague? I had lived close to Prague.
In a suburb or in a what? No, in a small town, very small town.
You knew Kadav? No, I didn't know him.
You did not know Kadav? No, no, no.
I knew, you know, I knew nothing about film.
I mean, as a child, I had very little exposure to film because I lived in a small town that didn't have a theater.
So if I saw, besides TV, which at the time in the late 50s in Eastern Europe was very limited anyway, if I, there's probably three movies that I remember from my childhood, and that's about it.
So it was pretty devoid of film.
In other words, you had not seen even, they were not playing American films in your youth anyway, were they? You know, honestly, now and since then, I've thought about it obviously, you know, but since then I remember one film that I remember, that I remember ever seeing in Czechoslovakia as a Czech film.
I mean, I know what the film is now, but that's the only film that's in my memory really is from my childhood to 13.
And you had not seen any French films or anything else? No, not at all.
Then I went to Australia and I went to, I think, two drive -ins there that I was taken to as a child.
When I came to Chicago when I was 13, you know, I did probably whatever a kid does, which is, you know, you're OD on junk on Saturday afternoon, junk matinees, you know, seeing a combination of Hammer films and BXB movies.
Oh, you saw the Hammer films? Yeah, of course.
Which did you like? I remember Marshall Square, at Marshall Square Theatre on 22nd and Marshall Square Boulevard, which is where I went to movies as a kid.
But you know, again, that's far from any kind of formative film experience.
I was much more interested in literature and spent some time owning a used bookstore, which is where I did my very first film program.
Did you, you went to school obviously in Czechoslovakia, then in Australia where you went? Where you came from, the United States.
Right, I went to, in Australia it was quite a shock, you know, because I didn't speak any English when I came to Australia, so the only thing which happened is that I learned English like a first language, really, rather than a second language.
And then I went to, you know, public schools in Chicago.
Were they kind of, was it kind of a traumatic experience or not? Kind of tough school in Chicago.
Where did you go with school? I went to Farragut High School.
It was a very easy experience in comparison, you know, because English schools are much more structured and Australian schools really are, probably at the time, were more structured than English schools were at the time, even though they were public schools.
I mean, there were uniforms that held business.
I know, the uniforms were still held over before they were...
And so this was an interesting experience in Farragut.
I did my, actually the very first movie that I ever showed is in high school.
I belonged to a science club because I was very interested in science.
And I showed Invasion of the Body Snatchers, not as a benefit for the science club, the old version, right? Not knowing anything about the movie at all.
I mean, it was, you know, out of no respect to the love of Don Siegel or, as an American science fiction classic.
And it's very interesting because that movie, the principal received a complaint on that because at the time when the Catholic...
Legion of Decency ratings were still paid very close attention to a parent complained and said that the Legion of Decency at the time had condemned it, you know, because it probably was a disrespectful of God.
So that was really the very first thing like that.
Then when I owned the bookstore, which was a used bookstore, or antiquarian bookstore on 5200 North Clark Street.
It was a 5200 North Clark? Right, it was the first one after which it moved to Halsted.
It was called the Antiquarian? It was called Action Bookstore.
Oh pardon me, Action Bookstore.
And what kind of books? A lot of philosophy, you know, a lot of literature.
Who were your favorite? In other words, you stocked it with the kind of books you wanted also to sell, did you not? Well, that's always the tragic thing because what you like doesn't sell.
What were you selling? What did you...
What we sold a lot of, you know, even at the time, which was in the late 60s or very early 70s, I mean you sold a lot of occult because that was really the beginning of the occult interest before the market really got gluttoned.
And we acquired a very good collection of philosophy from a lawyer who had been shot in Chicago and his wife had sold the collection.
He had been shot by another lawyer on the street.
And killed? Killed, oh yes, killed.
I'm sure he never read the books that he bought, I mean they're very expensive, very esoteric philosophy, you know.
I mean not just Camus and Sartre, I mean this was Wittgenstein and very, very, a lot of his friends.
But the interesting thing about him was that the only thing that he did is stamp his name probably six times inside each cover of the book.
I mean he had this obsession with having his name all over his possessions.
But anyway, we show the first movie there, which was Dostoevsky's 150th Birthday, which was an event...
Now this is on the Clark Street address, right? On the Clark Street address, right.
Which was an event, you know, treated rather substantially in Russia, but very little in America.
We showed the Russian version of The Idiot.
Do you remember the director of...
Very Konchalovsky or something like that.
I mean nobody super big, it was only part one that's available here.
But that was the very first film ever.
After that when we moved to...
The bookstore was moved because the lease was renewed to 2146 North Halstead.
Then we did some more films there.
Then we did films there and really did the first consistent program, which was a Czech film festival.
By the way, who did you contact for the Czech film? Did you contact Konsole? Konsole, the branching people? It all came from distributors, but it was a very stumbling way to really do it.
How would you have done it had you known what you know now? I probably wouldn't have done it.
But it worked relatively well.
How many people now were part of the scene? I had a partner in the bookstore and that was me and him.
And then you had a following of people who wanted to see the film.
Did you know? We ran out of the projector, ran out of the films, ran out of the chairs, ran out of the screen, rented everything.
It was in the bookstore itself? It was in the bookstore.
I don't know whether it made money or lost money, but if it made any, it certainly didn't make much.
But at the time, it was more expanding the cultural attraction to the bookstore, although it really didn't sell any books either.
But anyway, that was it for a while.
Did you have any Czech authors in the bookstore? Were you selling to Czech or Central Europeans? There was very little translated of Czech authors.
What about the Solider Schweik? Solider Schweik is it and that existed in a bad translation until recently.
Very bad translation until recently.
And the only thing that's happened is that Philip Roth has now taken some of the younger Czech authors under his wing for some reason only known to him.
So I think Penguin or Somebody is now publishing a series called The Other Europe or something like that.
So they're publishing like Kundera and some of the younger writers.
But anyway, then in 1973, I ended up at a very small live theater which was down the street from the bookstore.
On Hosted, which is called the Drama Shelter.
And in an attempt to increase their audiences and get them better known, I started a film series there which was called the Rare Cinema Series.
And all it really was was one foreign film a week with some interesting things.
Again, taking chances out of ignorance and things that I would be very scared to take a chance on now.
And it was there that I really met Nicole for the first time.
Yes, I heard that she was at the Drama Shelter.
Now what kind of thing was she doing at the Drama Shelter? In other words, what kind of script or work was she directing? Okay, well they were a very small, struggling, really amateur theater.
I mean although they aspired to the professional as all of them did at the time.
But she had come from Oberlin College where she worked with Herbert Blau under the Oberlin Group.
Blau is a good director, but he's not a dance director.
Blau had directed stuff off of Broadway.
Right, Herbert has a very strange history.
He set up really what was like, it still is remnants of, really the first professional theater training program in this country, which was at CalArts.
And he had a very good approach to it.
He invited the best people from all over the world to come and teach.
I think, who's the person, was one of the students, was, who's in Bonnie and Clyde? The last direction of six characters in Search of an Author, which was fantastic.
Who was in Bonnie and Clyde? The woman.
You're talking about, which, the woman? The woman.
She was one of the students anyway, Herbert's students.
And then, Herbert always, I mean Herbert is very political and very...
Yes, he went to Lincoln Center and he was the first director of Lincoln Center and he got into trouble there for...
He was not from San Francisco.
That was not the Blau from San Francisco.
Okay, Blau from San Francisco, okay, I got it now.
Blau also directed prior to that, off Broadway, six characters in Search of an Author at the Martinique Hotel, which exists no longer.
He was literally the first person to bring people like Genet and Brecht to America.
I mean, there's a lot of credit for that.
He's written a book called The Impossible Theater, which some years ago...
Did he direct Genet in New York or not? In New York, yes.
But he got into a lot of problems.
I mean, there again, politically, in San Francisco during the late 60s for having his actors lay down on the streets in protest of Vietnam.
And then he ended up at Oberlin College where he brought some of his people from CalArts, went with him to Oberlin.
And he had a department set up under, I think, interdisciplinary or intra -arts program, where he started what was, in the end, a professional theater company.
This time, with a lot of the teachers in terms of Grotowski, in physical theater.
Their first piece, which Nicole was in, was Seeds of Atreus, which she toured.
Okay, what is it? Seeds of Atreus? Seeds of Atreus, which was based on the Oristaya...
And subsequently, he did the Donner Party, after which she left Oberlin, was in Maryland, he had a new group.
I don't know what's happened to him recently, I mean, it's like in the last year that I So it's more than Blau, it's other, it's, for instance, her, what she is doing now is a combination.
Could it be called physical? It's like a psychophysical theater.
No, which derives from Grotowski.
Grotowski? Which is not dance, because none of the actors ever had a stitch of dance.
Well, and then it's Germanic, it goes back to the German, because is it not, does it not have some German origin, because I'm thinking about, well that goes back to modern dance, which is Germanic.
It goes, well really, you know, it goes back to Atoll, really, was the first, really, well, if you want to trace it back...
Philosophically, okay, I mean, this was all traced in retrospect, because Grotowski supposedly had his theories ignorant of Atoll, I mean, although...
And let's not go back, if that's the case.
Okay, and then before that was Meyerhold, you know, instead of taking back.
And that is, then that is really basically influenced by expressionism.
Meyerhold certainly influenced expressionism.
To a large extent, although, you know, in terms of...
And futurist, although really in combining it, nobody has ever successfully gone back and combined this and said, this is the development, you know, there is like...
So it was really sort of, Nicholas is more or less a disciple of Grotowski's, then is that it or not? Through the line, I mean, that was their foundation, right.
So it is a kind of theater that is rather, it's unique.
It aims at making the actor the center of the creative process.
The actor then contributes what? Does he contribute lines? The actor contributes everything.
He contributes, first of all, it aims at developing the actor physically by giving him an instrument to work with in terms of developing his body and voice.
I mean, through very, very consistent...
What exercises does the actor take in order to come into these rehearsals? Well, what they use here, what this theory uses is Grotowski details, which are like asymmetrical, gymnastic derivatives.
Does Grotowski have a book on this subject? A lot of series of interviews and one book which is not like a manual.
It's more like a series, again, a collection of interviews, talks, this kind of thing called Towards a Poor Theater.
He was not a Native American? It's Polish.
And he worked for a long time and had a theater company in Wroclaw.
He was in Oberlin at this time? No, no, no.
Right, a student of, I mean, Blau had teachers come to Oberlin, one of whom...
And plus there's a lot of other training in mime, in stage combat, in Alexander voice, which is a system not very much taught in America.
It's taught much more extensively in England.
What is that again? I don't even know it.
It's basically a physical system for the...
Voice? Spell B -O -I -C? B -O -I -C.
What's different about it is that it's like a physical approach to the voice.
It treats the vocal system as a physical organ.
So Alexander voice is simply a name.
Named after a man named Alexander who actually developed a technique called the Alexander Technique, which is a technique of relaxation, which is used a lot in therapy, including in America.
So it's to help the actors with their vocal production.
It aims at relaxing, as opposed to most voice systems, which tense the actor, it aims at relaxing the actor, relaxing his whole voice and bringing his voice down.
So anyway, at the drama shelter, Nicole had begun teaching a series of workshops in basically in Grotowski Technique, and this is where we met.
At the time, there was some pressure on the films because they felt that the films were interfering with the theater.
For what? That the films were interfering.
The film series was interfering and in some cases was more popular than the live stage productions.
So at that time, Nicole and I had decided to go independently and to start, which was the beginning of facets in 1975.
Now, where did facets then? In other words, you and Nicole broke away from the drama shelter.
You had been up at the drama shelter showing your films.
And she had been there teaching.
You wanted to devote more of your time to that.
Then you and Nicole went to the, was this then to Midtown in the church? Okay, well, the first place that we had to work with, because first of all, we had no money, absolutely no money.
And we had, so the first problem was finding a space, which is obviously a space.
So the first space which we had was Resurrection Lutheran Church, which is a 3300 North Seminary.
And what is a resurrection? It's a Lutheran church.
Where they had a hall that had one time been a basketball gymnasium.
Okay, what year is this? 1975.
And the first, since, we had two directions.
First of all, in theater was to audition and start an ensemble or an acting permanent company.
Their first focus for the first nine months was on training.
In the meantime, the films began with public programs and the direction of those programs, the beginning, was to try to reach ethnic audiences.
So the first three programs which we did, the first one was the Spanish Film Festival, which was in June 75.
Then we did a very Italian, a very extensive Italian film festival, which we did in three locations.
In Chicago, in Stone Park, and River Grove simultaneously.
And then we did a German film festival after that in October.
Among the early things that we stumbled upon was the Chicago premiere and the Italian Festival of Ossessione by Visconti, which we brought here.
Which was based on? On Postman, always known twice.
Postman, always known twice, with King.
Was his name King? Yeah, James King.
And then by the spring of 76, there was always a problem in using the space, because obviously it was also being used by neighborhood groups, PTA groups, the church was a problem in running opposite religious services.
The pastor had the unfortunate knack for always walking in during the one sex scene in the whole movie.
And so by that time we had started a volunteer group which was running the Facets films.
Were you calling yourself Facets then? Because you were going to have many facets, obviously.
Did you have then also an idea for a gallery then? No.
It was strictly film and theater.
And at the time, anyway, in early 76, Doug Grandquist, who was a volunteer who was now living in San Francisco, heard that Grace Lutheran Church was being offered for rent.
And after tracking it down, indeed it was.
So in March 76, we moved to Grace Lutheran Church and opened with Jan Kader coming, whom I had known, going back to Kader, sort of known for the last three, four years before that, just independently.
And personally I met him in New York.
You met Kader in New York? Where there was going to be a film festival where he had...
No, I met him just personally as a person.
What other films of Kader that you had seen? Sharp on Main Street, Adrift, Death is Call Anglican, which we showed at the bookstore for the first time.
I've seen Sharp on Main Street only.
And at the time he had been living in New York, sort of at the inter -making, as my father told me, but that's for our first meeting, so then he came for the opening of the church on Belden.
You know, the whole tragic story of Belden, right? Well, yeah, then the neighborhood thought it was going to sink in the mud or something.
Right, exactly, the neighborhood thought it was going to sink.
And what did they do? What kind of nasty things did they do? Well, they basically reacted...
You know, although we always had...
I wouldn't say form, it was really informal public support.
I mean, everybody was always very supportive.
We really had no inkling that the neighborhood would be any kind of a problem, but when we moved to the church, first of all, the church had a tragic history of which we were not a part, I mean, which was as a drop -in center, as a treatment center for runaways, as a very liberal pastor who did guitar services with a guitar.
So the neighborhood was very angry about this whole business.
And the resolution of the Lutheran church at the time was to try to rent the building, so at least the building wouldn't go down any further than it had in the year that it had been closed.
So after some renovation, we opened there and started running movies literally every day.
The neighborhood really reacted never directly, but rather indirectly by calling an onslaught of building inspectors, sanitation inspectors, everything else.
Did any of the inspectors, if you wanted to off the record, did they ask for bribes or anything like that? No, never.
Did they get encountered with it? Never.
Never? I never knew how to offer, you know, that was my problem.
I never knew how, I mean, you always hear it, but I said, how do you do it? Because I always felt it was my luck if I did it, I'd be the one to get an honest building inspector would say, aha, here we go, let's call the cops, right? Of course.
But, you know, ultimately the situation with Belden, with the church was that in the meantime, there had been a power struggle within the Lutheran church, although they had made a verbal agreement all the time, all during the time that they would be supportive, there was no problem in renewing the lease, they were very happy with what was happening with the building.
Under pressure from the neighborhood really, they decided to sell the building to a developer.
That's exactly what happened because now the building is torn down.
That was, we found out about it in 1976 and our lease ran through the end of March 1977, so...
It remained there then that long? For a year.
In the meantime, the theater had opened its first piece, which they had a work which was called Coronet, based on work by Rilke.
That was the United States of Chicago, they opened it.
It's based on Rilke and it's called Coronet.
Coronet, C -O -R -N -E -T, right.
Right, because the central force of the piece is the lay of the love and death of Coronet Christopher Rilke, which is, I don't know if it's a book, although it's a lot about the portrait.
And we had had, at that time, Makaveyev had come, Kadar had come, Tanner had come, Claude Yutra had come, Louis Ma had come to the church on Belden.
Louis Ma? Louis Ma, Claude Yutra, Kadar, Makaveyev, Alan Tanner.
And so anyway, when the Lutheran Church decided not to renew Alice in October of 77, we went into a massive building search.
How does it feel, Nicole, what are your feelings about that? You felt kind of lost after all of this? Well, it was a very traumatic experience from the very beginning, because it's like being unjustly accused of something that you didn't do and never knowing what the complaint was, because the complaints always...
It was something Kafka -esque.
Exactly, because it was a question of empty worries, really, about garbage, about parking, about this, about that.
It was really paranoia from the neighborhood.
It also teaches you one instance in terms of Chicago, the people who complain in the end have much more voice than the people who support you, because there are avenues for complaint, but there are no avenues for support, because you have people come up to you and say, I really think I'll live across the street and I think what's happening to you, the neighborhood is doing is really terrible, but what can you tell them to do, to sign a petition? Unless you have connections.
That's true, but there's very little that you can do.
So we had looked at probably 300 buildings in those five months.
You had developed your organization so that you had support from a number of people at that time, am I correct? In other words, there was a sort of loyalty.
I think the critics were always very supportive, especially Ebert.
What about the people in the neighborhood themselves? There were a lot of people in the neighborhood who were very supportive.
Going through the same agony you were.
Except that of course it didn't affect them directly and personally, but I mean who were supportive and who were in some way being cheated, but out of it was a neighborhood resource in some way, and relatively by very, very few people who had done this whole vendetta business.