City Cinematheque; Film: "Sweet Love, Bitter"

Welcome to City Cinem attack, where the art and pleasure of the movies are the subject of serious discussion. I'm your host, Jerry Carlson, and I teach film studies at the City College of the City University of New York. Today, we continue our series, African-Americans, and the movies, with the 1967 independent American production, Sweet Love, Bitter, directed by Herbert Danska, and based on a novel by John A. Williams. This film stars Dick Gregory, playing a jazz saxophonist whose trajectory is loosely based upon Charlie Parker's career and life. This is a film that raises all kinds of questions about how African-American musicians have been and can be portrayed in the American cinema. And it's our great pleasure to have with us today, the director of this film, and also

the co-author of its screenplay, Herbert Danska. Now, take this opportunity to look at New York through a lens of 1967 in Sweet Love, Bitter. Welcome back to City Cinema Tech. I hope you've enjoyed this opportunity to see, I think, a very interesting film made 40 years ago that captures certain aspects of the world of New York from that era. We have a very special pleasure today because the director of that film, Herbert Danska, is joining us to talk about the history of the film, and many other aspects, which you have many thoughts you had 40 years to think about this film. But, Herbert, let's begin at the very beginning. That is, how did this film come about? How did you and her Lewis Jacobs was your co-screen writer? How did this novel night song by John A. Williams, upon which the screenplay is based?

How did that come to your attention? How did this project get going? You really have to ask, how did I become interested in jazz? Sounds good to me. It came from that. When I was a kid, about the age of 10 or 12, a friend of mine had some old 78 records that his father had in his collection, and he played something by Chew Berry. Now, Chew Berry is a saxophone player of the 30s. He's very well respected, but very few people know his work today. At any rate, I heard Chew Berry, I must have been 10 or 11. It started there, it really kind of took my interest. From there, it went in with me through my art school education. I was trained as an artist, and it took me to the Greenwich Village Million, of course, in the course of things. At which time I met Laura Jones, and now I'm Mary Baraka. And Laura Jones introduced me too, because he could see my interest, and I was hanging

around all of jazz joints at the time. I was a young 20-ish guy, and he said, somebody come here to town, I think you might be interested. And I said, who would that be? He said, Arnett Coleman. I said, oh no, who's Arnett Coleman? I knew most of the jazz people, I didn't know, Arnett Coleman. He said, go to Sam, I'm going to tell you which apartment he's going to be at. I may not be able to be with you that day. It turns out he couldn't come with me that day, and I went up somewhere on 10th or 11th Street, I forget. And there's a guy unpacking his bags. He had just come into New York from Texas. It must have been 1953 or 4 this year that he, and he said, come on in, he was about a year younger than I was, and he pulled something out of his bag that looked like a toy, like a toy instrument, it was a white alto saxophone, white casing with brass keys, and

he's watching every, he's watching the expression on my face, you know. And I said, I'd give up. And he said, yeah, it is. It's an alto that I had made for me in Texas. And he starts to finger and do some runs, you know, and it was fascinating. At any rate, I have that memory. I have anecdote of being one of the first people to ever hear, or in a call, in New York, you know. So it went from there. My jazz world started to become a real part of my interest. And as an artist and a painter, it took form because I started to do covers for metronome magazine. Okay. And then I was jazz magazine, which folded in the mid-sixties, and that in turn brought upon, oh, and then I did the gift.

Now the gift was an outgrowth of the fact that a cameraman lived next door to us in sunny side Queens, which is where we lived at the time. And the gift is a 40-minute ceremony. Well, it's actually, it was actually 50, and it's original for 49 minutes. And this bastardized length was because we weren't making it to commercial formats. We were just making a film for as long as it had to be. And he would bring home short ends of film, short ends of black and white, and 60 millimeter, and he would give them to me. And I was playing around with the home movie camera at the time with another painter. At any rate, that led us to consider doing a film, and it just was born in my head. I just started to make, I did a storyboard because I was a visual artist. So I actually sketched a storyboard and it was about a painter called the gift. And so we shot it on welfare island now called Roosevelt Island.

And it got attention, because Brad Derek, the reviewer for Time Magazine, was in the audience at our Friday night underground film screenings at the Charles Theatre in Avenue B and Thirteenth Street. And he was in the Any Rights Historical in Time Magazine, which was totally unprecedented. And I went to lunch with him, called me up, and who was at lunch his guest was Olivia de Havilland, someone called Olivia de Havilland. I'm sitting. Robin, let's girlfriend, really. And she was very charming, very nice. And he was telling me that, you know, you've got to do more. He's telling me again, well, I said I had an ongoing career as an illustrator and a poster designer. But I would certainly, I loved the medium, and I used to hang out, by the way, whenever

I played hooky from high school, I went to the high school music and art, and I want to plug that school, because it's a great New York institution, absolutely. But if I ever played hooky, I'd play hooky on Times Square. And a 40-second street on the north side of 42nd mid block was a theater called the Apollo. And the Apollo theater played all the foreign films. Absolutely. French Spanish, you name it. So from about the age of 12 of 13, I was seeing foreign films maybe once a week there. And that's where my film, Appetite, was determined, determined. And at any rate, the gift getting this kind of attention in Time Magazine, of course, it became a theatrical release out of it. It was blown up the 35-millimeter, which is really unheard of, for a 60-millimeter film. In those days, it never was done.

And Joseph Burston was the guy who released it. He did Open City and Open City and the other one by Russell Amy, I forget it immediately. Pison. Thank you. Pison. Right. So that led to Lou Jacobs calling me and said, I saw your film, I saw the gift, I said, yeah. And he said, do you know my work? And I said, not really, he said the book that I did, The Rise of the American Cinema. And I didn't know it. But I had heard the title, and I said, I know the title of it. And he said, well, listen, come by, I'd like to talk to you, and I went there. And he said, you know, young filmmakers like yourself were the kind of, the thrust of your film interests me.

And if there's anything else that you would like to do, I'd be interested in perhaps working with you in some way to help you produce it, et cetera. Now Lou Jacobs, by the way, was one of Orson Well's editors. I don't know whether you're aware of that. But when he was in California, he edited on Orson Well's films. I don't know which titles. Right. I know about his background as a filmmaker, Louis Jacobs, and certainly as a film scholar myself. I mean, his books were still in print when I was at university and are classics of that way. Yes. And I found it really just great to be with him. He's a very supportive guy. And he said, what did he get in mind? Anything else? I said, not immediately. And lo and behold, two days later, Nat Hinto of calls me up, because I had met him in the village via Ornet Coleman, because Ornet Coleman played his first gig at the cafe name, alludes me for the moment.

But I met Nat Hinto of at that gig. And he said, you know, there's a book called Night Song. He knew my interest in jazz. And he knew that I had made a first film. He hadn't seen it. And he said, you might want to consider it. It has a great deal of a great deal of film accessibility. So that led to the Night Song, the book by John A Williams. And that in turn, I passed on to Lou Jacobs and he read it. And he said, you know, I think we might have a movie here. Oh, interesting. Very interesting. So then you two worked on the script together, right? And we developed it. And he would not, and more we both did, we raised the money individually. Right. And at that time, we put together an awesome sum of $260,000, which was a lot of money. That's a lot of money. It was 1964, right? So that was finally the budget. And Philadelphia became the area to shoot it.

And New York was too expensive to hide a shoot it in New York. So we went to Philadelphia. Now, what kinds of ideas did you have about casting the film? Because this is a film in which there are very distinct characters. And they're physical presence. I mean, physical presence of an actor is always important. Right. But I think this is one of those films in which there's a sense of just that immediate first thing they register when they're on the screen or not, is very important. So how did that happen? Well, first, who was going to play Eagle, Eagle is buried, of course. But highly modified film version of Charlie Parker. And Dick Gregory, I had seen Dick Gregory at the Village Vanguard one night, just maybe a month before, for the first time.

And I said, I wonder if this guy, Gregory, might be interested, he had never done a screen roll before, never even considered film. He was a young comic, who had been in New York maybe a few times, just on the heels of Lenny Bruce, who broke the way for new kind of comics, you know, absolutely. And I went out to the Vanguard on my own one night, a second time, and went backstage and introduced myself to him. And I said, here's a script, would you be interested, would you just read it? And he was a little tough about it. But he said, OK, just leave it with me. And about 10 days later, I get a call from his key man, his assistant, who says, come on down, and let's talk about it. And he said, look, I would be scared shitless, he said to act, he said, I just, but you know, the character in here is really pretty fascinating.

And he was not himself personally involved in the jazz world. Oh, is that right? Yeah, that's interesting. Jazz was not something, as a matter of fact, 180 degrees otherwise. He was interested in opera. And still is. Because if I Dick Gregory, that was to be a real fan of opera, would go to the Met when everyone was in New York. And not to say that jazz was not in his life, but it was not part of his world. Yeah, absolutely. No, you can admire an art form, you can like some of it. But he's not the person prowling the clubs, fascinated by it, getting involved and designing covers of magazines having to do with it like you are. Exactly, right. Exactly. Well, it took me about three visits with him and we went out and had a couple of beers and finally he said, look, I'll try it. What do I have to do? And I said, look, there are things we can do to help. And there were some professionals by this time that were gathering around and becoming part of the production team. And we figured out a way to give him cue cards on three by five cards so he could carry

those who got him a wonderful assistant by the name of Woody King, a guy who's the head of the new Federal Theater here in New York today, very important guy in Black Theater. And Woody was a young guy from Detroit who had just come into New York and he became his dialogue coach. And from there, we put together a fairly good cast for a 260 grand movie, you know. We've got Robert Hooks to play the role of Keale. Absolutely. We've got Diane Varsi who in her own right was a very fascinating little legend. Do you know the story of Diane Varsi? Sure. With us. Quickly. Okay. She played on a nighttime East of Eden series and people were looking at it because she was special. There was something about her.

She was not cut out of the usual cookie cutter that makes... Yeah, the central casting click, click, yeah. Right. And so she quit the show suddenly and she was at liberty. So I said, let's strive for her. She would be great for the character of the white girl who was in love with Keale, Keale played by Bobby Rex, the cafe owner. At any rate, one herover. So now we have a cast with some fairly good, you know, acting power and added to that Don Murray, bus stop, Marilyn Monroe, seven years earlier in the mid and late 50s when they made it. When Don Murray came along as the white college professor, we were ready to go. That was it. But now we've gotten to this point in which you've got the script, you've got the cast. And you've got to say, like any filmmaker at this moment, you've got a vision because

you're somebody who's deeply immersed in the jazz world. I mean, this has become one of the passions of your life. So let's talking about from that moment, what was it that you did want to do in the film? And what are some of the things that you'd want to the film not to do? Well, I'd like to start with the not. I knew that I didn't want it. I didn't want it to be part of a romanticized version of what the jazz world means to white eyes. I wanted to be a clear view of what that world is made of and the kind of people that live in it and that determine its character. And so I refused to do anything that was sentimentalized in terms of story. And the book, Night Song, was a very, very honest view of that world.

So it was a great start for us. And other than that, I was just wanting to, I didn't have any particular position about doing a black white film. There was none of that I don't think in my mind, you know, to express black white relationships or to perhaps do something that would contribute to the embedderment of these relations. There was none of that. It was really about jazz and to see whether we could get at an honest picture. And from you at this point, you've got a script that does this. You've got a cast capable of bringing it to the screen. And one of the things that was noted about your earlier film, The Gift, was how cinematically intelligent it was, that is, it used a sense of cinema as a language, it's expressive,

it's expressive capacities. You go into production and you've got this. So you came out with a first cut and how was the cut in relationship to what you wanted to do? Were you on the happier side or? Well, of course, it had some elbows, it had some places that were not smooth, that were rough to add. But in a sense, that kind of contributed to the character of the film. And there was nothing slick about it in terms of its style or its production character. And essentially, since I was a highly visual person, or basically I could see things in a kind of visual sense, it was just built into the way I think. The film emerged as a, as a, I thought, a pretty good rendering of the book, Night Song. And the title Sweet Love Bitter emerged after we shot it.

That emerged from the irony of the relationships. And it was a film of relationships, that was very important, and a film of behavior. And so with all of that, there were a couple of other things. I must add that there was a marvelous actor by name of Carl Lee, who played the role of yards, Miles Davis, a brilliant job. He doesn't exist in the film, I must add parenthetically. He was cut out and we'll talk about why that happened. So the film emerged as a kind of a tough look at the way black, white relations developed within the jazz life. Don Murray is a young professor on the skids. He lost his wife in an auto accident. He was driving the car. He holds himself responsible for her death.

He comes into New York in a very strange state of mind. He's looking to hear jazz. He's a guy from somewhere upstate New York, maybe teaching at a place like Buffalo University or Rochester or wherever, you know. And so he just, and he's short on money and he's drinking and that leads to a pawn shop, the pawn shop and Eagle, whose yards are one place that comes together and this encounter leads to, they're getting boozed up that night and having a great old time talking about jazz. And he's never really had a chance as many white jazz aficionados would like to talk to black musicians. He's just never had that opportunity. And he's so naive and open about his feelings and that's great.

I mean, that was truly genuine on his part. And it leads him to getting passing out at the end of that long night together, Winters Night in the snow, winds up in a bed, in a bedroom that he doesn't recognize and this guy, Kiel, who is Eagle's best friend and who is the owner of this coffee shop that I spoke of, gets him through the only, he's got a floor or whatever at the end of this binge that he's on. And when he recovers, he's part of this suddenly, part of the jazz world around this coffee shop where musicians hang out. And he's just all eyes and ears. He's watching and listening and he's like a kid, a candy shop, you know. And so one thing leads to another and finally, you know, the relationship.

We are running out of time really rapidly. So talk to us very quickly about what then the distance between that first cut of the film and the film that got released and which is the film we saw today. Okay. The film itself eventually goes into the jazz world, the musicians in it, the singers, the relationship between miles or yards and Eagle, a beautiful relationship, which is a 20-minute section totally excised, totally excised, why, too intricately part of the jazz life. Where would that leave the good white liberal audience? They wouldn't understand it. It was too intimate. It was too, what's the word I'm looking for, too authentic, you know, the line in terms of language style, everything.

The relationship that Gregory and Carl Lee, the two actors create, is just a beautiful one. And it's excised. Right. Other sections are excised, a black blue singer, someone like based on Dinah Washington, she's removed from the film. This removal truncates the film and eventually, I thought, it became the very kind of film that I was fighting against. It became a film focused on Eagle and on his problem, you know, the black artist, the misunderstood, the abused guy who abuses himself through drugs and eventually ends up on the skids. And you know, it was just painful to see what happens by exercising the meat of the relationships, the jazz relationships, it leaves the film to focus on him solely.

So he becomes the one who is done wrong to, by life, by everything that he's experiencing. And he eventually gets beat up by a cop when he goes out on the road with his group, as you know, and they go to the town where this professor that's played by Don Murray, who goes back to school, by the way, goes back to school, and it's a very, one of the schools that the group is going to play on their trip, go out on a series of gigs. And it's there that he's beaten by a cop, and Don Murray sees it from a distance. He sees his beating take place, eventually he reveals to Eagle that he saw it back in New York again when they return.

And that leads to the day of Numa, and Eagle, you know, he just blows. He completely goes, hey, where are he? We have, I'm sorry to do this to you, we've reached our day of Numa. If you'd like more information about city cinema tech or about city university television, please look at our website. You can find it at www.cuny.tv. You'll find click ons there for city cinema tech, our other programming, and also click ons to correspond with us by email, so please visit www.cuny.tv. Herb, I can't thank you enough for bringing an expertise that only you have on this. To us, it's been a very rich 30 minutes, only which we had more time, but you've given us, I think, an extraordinary portrait of a particular moment in American life and a particular moment in American independent filmmaking. Thanks for coming, everyone. Thank you. Thank you.

And thank you for joining us here on city cinema tech. I hope you'll join us again as we stroll through the archives of film history. In any case, thanks for being here today. Bye bye for now.