UNEASY Cinema Verité: D.A. Pennebaker

This is the fifth and final interview that I’m posting today from the Cinema Verité filmmakers. All of these interviews were done in 1997/1998 for Index and ran as a special pull-out section in the magazine.

I’d become a fan of this style of documentary since seeing D.A. Pennebaker’s Bob Dylan film Dont Look Back, so it was amazing to go deep with these legends. It really was a crash course in Cinema Verité, and I loved every minute of it.

Have you thought about making another film with Bob Dylan?

It's hard to go back. I did do a second film of him, which has never been released. He likes the idea of everything being one time new. I don't know...he's an interesting person.

We were supposed to do something with him a few years ago. He did a performance in a nightclub, I think they recorded it. Jeff, who sort of manages Bob, was trying to get us to film it but we didn't do it. These things happen or they don't, that's the way I feel about them. I very seldom try to make anything like that happen because I think you have to have the momentum, it has to be with you. The thing has to come from the other side.

By the other side, you mean the subject.

Yeah. They have to want to do it enough.

When you did Dont Look Back, how did that come together?

Well, I knew Dylan's girlfriend, his wife, Sara, she worked with us at Life. She took some films of mine to show him. They had been approached by Warner Brothers to do a Dylan film, though he wasn't that big then. Albert Grossman was hoping to set up with WB and the idea was they would concoct a film like they had with Elvis. 

I had no idea it would be a theatrical film. These things, if you're kind of patient, they just happen. I suspect I will probably shoot something with him again one day, but I want him to bring the idea to me, because I have no idea what to do. It's what he would want to sit for. And that's how it is with everybody.

So why isn't there a proper release of Eat The Document [also known as You Know Something is Happening] anywhere? (Shot in the UK again, one year after Don’t Look Back.)

Oh, it was never my film, it was his film. He said, “Now I've helped you make your film, you help me make mine. You be the cameraman and I'll be the director.”

Wouldn't you be interested in releasing something of it?

I don't want to get into a film competition with Dylan. His feelings about that film are very complicated. It's his movie, I'm not trying to show him that I know how to make movies better than he does, or anything else. 

For me, it's very simple, it was always his movie, I helped him when I could. In the end he aired it once because a person that worked with him that I knew, Howard Alt, they edited a version that was peculiar.

People tend to think about it as your film.

It's my film in some ways because I shot it. That doesn't make a film your film, the person who controls how it looks finally, the editing of it, the way it's released, all have a lot to do with how a film exists and who it belongs to. There's some fantastic things in that film. In a way I'm sad a little bit because stuff that I think is fantastic will never be seen. But I always have the feeling that ultimately it will. Sooner or later everybody finds out everything.

Isn't that like Allen Ginsberg's philosophy: say everything that's on your mind, and have it open, and that way no one can ever publicly surprise you by telling your secrets. He was very open about his desires for young men.

It drove the Beatles crazy. I was in a hotel room once where he was, and John was laughing so hard I thought he was going to fall out of his chair.

What was he doing that was so funny?

He was sitting on John's lap, and he was telling him about getting kicked out of Hong Kong, which of course he wasn't, telling stories about little boys or whatever else his appetites were into. John was saying, "I could see why they kicked you out of Hong Kong.” 

It was just a funny scene because of all the Beatles, John was the only one that could really take on Allen - the rest of them were terrified of him. They were all kids from Liverpool who believed in a certain type of social behavior, and Allen loved to upset people with his vile talk. He was such a weird person, from their point of view. And he was sure a vile piece of business when he decided to be.

When I talked with Robert Drew, he said the critics' reaction to Crisis was pretty bad.

Yeah. You can't say critics, though. TV critics didn't mean anything. I think that our critical reaction in the theater was terrific. 

The problem he had was that CBS and ABC didn't want him meddling in their public affairs stuff, and that he was getting access to the White House bothered them. They were putting pressure on the New York Times to say the administration has no business inviting in all this light. 

They didn't know how it was made, but they assumed it was all a big setup and that President Kennedy performed. They made an assumption that was wrong and they put it in the editorial page. Basically, the networks looked on us as being careless with the facts. We weren't obeying these structures that they felt they had set up but of course what they were doing was. Their whole thing was to keep their franchise.

How did Drew get access to the White House? Because of Primary?

We went to Bobby and said we want to do this. He said, "Well, I would say yes if I thought you could really get on a network. Then it might be of some help." Their problem was the perception of civil rights, they wanted it to look like they were doing something about civil rights. So we said, we'll get back to you. We came back: "It looks like they're going to do it." Of course, he had to laugh because he knew that we were just bullshitting. He kind of went along with it, so he let us start shooting.

At Bobby's house?

Well, in Bobby's house, the Justice Center. And then we couldn't get into the White House, but Bobby took us in the back way in a limo.

What do you mean?

It was more complicated than we would ever know. Burke Marshall and Bobby were pushing the President and the President was pushing his advisors to be able to do something. We got in the back way and we started shooting so when everybody came in the office for the meeting I'd been sitting with the President for half an hour. They couldn't believe it that we were with our cameras, filming. They went ahead with the meeting anyway.

Tell me something about the beginnings of The Drew Associates?

At the time of Primary I brought Al Maysles along, as he had been working with me previously. I had a big office down on 43rd St. and that became the production studio for the Drew films for the first year. We did 'em all there, hired people and built a big empire, 50-60 people. In the beginning I went in and I agreed not to do any filmmaking, but only to set up the thing and help work on the equipment problems.

Why weren't you doing any filming?

I thought the equipment was more important. We needed to be able to walk. You have to be able to make a film in a desert or on the Metropolitan Opera stage. You had to have general solutions so anywhere you went you got the best sound you could on tape and it synced up to a silent camera so you could do lip sync. The first thing we did was to put the Bulova Accutron watches on the side of--we got Gedelsky to make one of the early NAGRAs for us, and we put the watch on the side of the NAGRA and the watch in the back of the camera and they didn't power it, but they supplied the sync pulse that ran the camera and you recorded it on the center track of the tape recorder. That's how it started. Otherwise you'd still be doing it with fake setups or doing what the Canadian National Film Board did, which is they'd go into a mix and everyone would do the dialogue over. Like Italian movies. The Canadians saw lip sync like, when you slam a door and you hear it, that's sync.

This is the first time it had been done?

Yeah! There was nothing before this. There were Arriflexes that made a terrible noise and they weren't in sync. In order to get sync you had to have a great big camera and a lot of power, which took batteries, and we went through a whole thing. It was a dumb arrangement. You know how they did the sync sound in Louisiana Story? They had these big recording tables where you have an acetate that's turning and you drop the thing down, that's how they did it. They had a sync motor driving the turntable and it pinned the disk and because of the noise they had it about 100 feet away from where they were doing the sound. This is what they were up against.

Can you explain, as simply as possible, about the development of the technology and how it helped to form the genre?

It was for me, simple. If you had a small portable camera (battery powered) that didn't make a lot of noise with a method of recording synchronized sound and a zoom lens you could make films. When Drew came along we were trying to figure out how to devise a camera system. We'd talked to several people, and it's coming to hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost. You couldn't put enough padding around an Arriflex to use it at the time and there was no tape recording system. I had a camera that I wound by hand. 

Anyhow, when Drew came along Ricky and I said this is the chance to do this, to solve this problem, because he wanted to make a film a month and he had these huge visions. He didn't know anything at all about the equipment. Sync sound is not just the sound a door makes when it closes. Sync sound was when you get out into a shooting situation and there's two images going on. Picture and sound, sometimes they're together, sometimes they're separate. 

There's this great moment in The War Room where he's just banging with a piece of paper on the table saying, "What do we call him, I guess we call him Mr. President." The sound of the banging on the table is an image just like the picture. So we tried striping the film and using a little mag-head inside the camera. That was terrible, so eventually you get to a separate recorder, and that was the first NAGRA. And Kenelsky came over here and actually made the goddamn things for us. Then you have the camera, which had to be synchronous, it also had to be quiet. Every time you turn on those old cameras they make a loud noise and everyone braces themselves. Synchronous motors take a lot of power, so in order to get a little system that gave you a 60-cycle signal with enough power to drive it, you had to have something the size of a VW battery. It was horrible. By the end of the second year, I had a camera that would run on 5 Watts, 1/2 amp I could run 20 magazines. That made the news. It was what made all those films possible. I made 6 cameras, all of Monterey Pop was made with these homemade cameras.

When was all of this happening?

This was in the early 1960s. In 1963, with Crisis, I had my camera and I used it for the first time. It worked really fine.

So when you did the basic development of sync camera, was it before or after Primary?

Well, both. Primary was done with a very crude system. It had one 100 ft. Arkon with a cable to a tape recorder, not even a NAGRA. We had built a machine so you could speed up or slow down the transfers so you could put the thing in sync as you watched it. Primary was not entirely successful, the equipment didn't quite function right, but by Eddie Saks it functioned better, we were starting to use small cameras with magazine loads that would wind up and you could get them synched up for brief period or you could use them as wild sound. We were sort of mixing wild sound with sync sound.

When you were working on this camera, who was working with you primarily?

Bob/Buck Donovitch, who was kind of an engineer who had a big shop down on 64th. I had him for awhile and then I started doing it myself.

I heard that Richard Leacock worked on them as well.

Oh, sure, but Ricky's strength was the theoretical. His thing was to say, "If you could find a source of oscillation, like a tuning fork, then we could go into it." We thought of lots of ideas, one was to put up an antenna and record 60 cycles out of the air, because there are radio waves everywhere--but there are none in the Moby desert. Then when we saw the ad for the Bulova Accutron it said accurate to the part of 16,000. I said, "That's it, Ricky, that's all you need". So we got them to make us the little units and mounted them on the side. Ricky was a physical engineer at Harvard, I was more the technician because I had done more electronic work, I knew how to wire stuff. We had a guy as magnet tech, doing the chargers and batteries. It was a huge effort. We spent over a million dollars, that Life Magazine was supporting.