Spectrum Hawaii; Terrence Knapp Interview with John Unterecker and Marjorie Sinclair; Nino J. Martin Interview with Haskell Wexler and Frederick Wiseman

The following program is a production of KHET in Honolulu, Hawaii Public Television. The following program has been funded, in part, by grants from the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and the People of Chevron in Hawaii. [gentle folk music] [Host] Today on Spectrum, poetry is the subject. Poet and translator Marjorie Sinclair is accompanied by John Unterecker, distinguished recipient of the 1984 Hawaii Award for Literature, presented to him by Governor Ariyoshi. A discussion of poetry and outstanding writers will be included in an interview conducted by guest host Terence Knapp, Professor of Dramatic Arts at the University of

Hawaii. Here's Terence Knapp. [Knapp] Hello and welcome again to Spectrum. I'm here today to talk with Dr. John Unterecker and Marjorie Sinclair, both distinguished recipients of the Hawaii Prize of Literature, which you have already heard about. But, I think, what's particularly fascinating about these two delightful people is that they are old friends. You have an ongoing acquaintance, which goes on for many years. Is that correct? [Unterecker] Well, since 1969. [Sinclair] That's right. [Unterecker] In fact, Marjorie was the first person I saw in Hawaii, I think. [Sinclair] I think so. [Unterecker] Picked me up and took me on a grand tour of the Diamondhead area... [Knapp] Oh, really? [Unterecker] ...which was absolutely wonderful. It was the best introduction to Hawaii that anyone could ever have had. [Knapp] Very privileged, huh? [Unterecker] Yes. [Knapp] Jack, you came to us to Hawaii from where? [Unterecker] I'd been teaching at Columbia. I was directing the graduate program in English at Columbia at the time. [Knapp] And you had been there a long time?

[Unterecker] I'd been at Columbia for about 12 years, and, before that, at College of City of New York. [Knapp] Yes. Your acquaintance with life previously had been very much on the East Coast, is that right? [Unterecker] Entirely. I hadn't been west of Buffalo, where I was born, and suddenly I was in Hawaii. [Knapp] Buffalo? That's near the Canadian border, is that right? [Unterecker] It's at the Canadian border, 25 miles south of Niagara Falls. [Knapp] Yeah, yeah. A small town? [Unterecker] About a million people now. Niagara Falls is about 20,000, but no one knows where Buffalo is. [Knapp] Well, we're beginning to find out. When you were born, there, was Buffalo a different kind of place to what it is now? [Unterecker] I suspect rather nicer, but then, I suspect, most places were rather nicer when I was born than they are now. That is, the big population boom hadn't come on and the urban blight hadn't come on. It was rather a pretty town. It had been set up in terms of the Pan-American Exposition of, I

think, 1898, maybe it was 1903, something like that. But, in any event, the whole city was planted in elm trees, and spectacularly, of course, the Dutch elm disease arrived in the thirties and forties and decimated the town. So the town, from being a totally green town, became a totally bare town. [Knapp] Sounds very sad. Where were you educated? [Unterecker] Middlebury College, first. Well, after high school in Buffalo. Middlebury College up in Vermont. [Knapp] But, in Buffalo, when you were a little boy. [Unterecker] Oh, when I was a little, little boy. [Knapp] When you were a little boy. Tell me... I'm fascinated by the way people begin, you know, those very early years. I think that tells us a lot about the man or the woman to come. Don't you? [Unterecker] All right, well, the very earliest, I started in school 30. I lasted all of six months when I came down with whooping cough and was sent off to a private school to catch up because I had a lot of whooping cough. And I caught up for five years at Miss

Gibbons School, which was a school for what I later learned were children who had one kind of defect or another. My defect was having had whooping cough, but there were somewhere between seven and a dozen of us at any one time. And she handled us all from first grade through eighth grade. [Knapp] Was it a private school? [Unterecker] Very private. [Knapp] Miss Gibbons' School, yeah? [Unterecker] Miss Gibbons School. It was on a second floor, one room, and we each had a desk, and we read most of the time. So I did nothing but read. She liked poetry and I read poetry. [Knapp] She, actually, kind of, maybe, gave you a start, right? In terms of where you would eventually... [Unterecker] Oh, yeah. [Knapp] ...eventually to end up. Like sitting in that chair now. [Unterecker] I can remember, in third grade, memorizing "The Chambered Nautilus" of Oliver Wendell Holmes. "This is the ship of Pearl that, poets feign, sails the unshadowed main, and so on." [Knapp] Did it come easily? [Unterecker] Yes. [Knapp] The reading and the learning? [crosstalk] The memorizing is what I mean. [Unterecker] I memorized by accident. I read it so many times. And I think that was generally

true. [Knapp] Do you think that's an important part of the poet's psyche? The ability to retain images as well as verbal line? [Unterecker] I think what you retain are images, don't you, Marjorie? [Sinclair] Yes, yes. [Unterecker] Because images hold, for me, pretty well. Lines don't. I rewrite everyone's lines. Shakespeare's. I rewrite Keats. I rewrite my own. I can't possibly read my own, memorize my own lines and read them, because what happens when I when I do is that I'll get an earlier version of the poem. [Knapp] That reassures me a great deal because as a man of the theater, I find that I, too, feed on images and retain images and actually don't remember, at all, the articulation, the specific articulation of something. Is that true for you, Marjorie? [Sinclair] Oh, yes. Always the images is what remains with me. And I was very fortunate as a little girl,

young girl, I had what they call eidetic imagery. So you know I could, you know, look at a book, just look at the page and I had it there in my eyes. I think that may have influenced me a little bit, but my mother was a painter, and she made sure -- Jack knows very well -- she made sure that my brother and I look at everything very carefully, things in nature, not only that, but things in people's houses, beautiful paintings, and so forth. So I'm very strongly visual-minded. I think Jack and I both... [Unterecker] We share that because I grew up with painters. My sister was a painter. My closest friends were all painters. [Knapp] Is that right, yes. [Unterecker] In fact, my house is covered with her paintings. [Knapp] Haven't you both been lucky? I mean, you were expose then to, not only similar kinds of stimulus, but obviously very healthy and productive ones in terms of writing. Where does music come into this if it does at all? Is it allied?

Is it related? [Unterecker] For me, it really wasn't. I hated learning piano. I learned piano from a woman named Madame Skates, who was a Welshwoman. [Knapp] What a lovely name! [Unterecker] She was a Welshwoman who... [Knapp] Nobody is called Madame anymore! [Unterecker] She was Madame Skates. She is a Welshwoman who played piano, for uh, or she played organ, rather, for spiritual seances, and, in her spare time and to make a living, taught little pipsqueaks like I was. And she would teach these...Well, we had one book, and, for three years, we played the same exercises in the same book, so that I knew all the scales but I couldn't play a tune. I think "The Harmonious Blacksmith" was the only tune that I can remember playing. [Sinclair] I rather liked piano lessons. [Knapp] Did you? [Sinclair] I enjoyed it, and I was in two or three recitals, and, of course, that made me very proud. But my first

real introduction to music was in college, at Mills College, where every Wednesday, I guess, maybe, it was only one Wednesday a month, they had chamber music concerts, the Coolidge String Quartet would come and play. And, from that time on, you know, I've been a chamber music buff. I just adore it. Almost as much as poetry, not quite. [Unterecker] I had a very similar experience with chamber music. I, just after college, came down to New York and started, well, I started acting actually and then was teaching. I took out a subscription to a chamber music series, and it was overwhelming to me the amount of sound that could come out of a string quartet. And I heard the Juilliard Quartet perform the first series of Bartok quartets that they played and later recorded, and it was just thrilling. I don't know any music that's moved me more. It was a marvelous occasion.

[Knapp] Can you remember the first time you actually picked up a pen or pencil and articulated on a piece of paper the poetic urge in yourself? [Unterecker] Mmm-hmm. I can remember, precisely. [Knapp] Do tell. I was in eighth grade, and I'd gone back to regular public school, and I had an idea...Well, I learned there were such things as forms, and I learned what the structure of a sonnet was, and so on, and a ballad meter, and so on. And I thought, well, if they can do that, I can invent a form, so I arbitrarily set up a structure, so many beats to a line and the rhyme scheme. And then I'd started a poem about a dove on a lawn, and I took it to my science teacher, who was a lady named Miss Mackenzie, and I took it to Miss Mackenzie and said,

"I've written this poem? What do you think of it?" And she said, Doggerel! [all laugh] [Knapp] How crushing! [Unterecker] I'd been desperately in love with her, and the love vanished instantly. [Knapp] Instantaneously, right? [Unterecker] And it was wasn't that terrible poem, you know. It wasn't very good, but it wasn't bad. [Knapp] Was that impulse easily recognized again and again and again? [Unterecker] Oh, yeah. By then, I'd read a lot of poetry. [Knapp] You see, I find the act of creation very fascinating and very mystifying because I am, myself, not a creator. I'm an interpreter, right? Or a re-creative artist. I think it must be the most satisfying thing in this world to be able to create as you do with words. How do you feel about that? [Sinclair] Well, I said a few minutes ago that Jack and I are strongly visual-minded, and we are. At the same time, I love words.

I love the sound of them. I love the rhythm of them. And sometimes I don't even mind stringing them together when they make very little or no meaning. [Knapp] Almost like a string of beads, as it were. [Sinclair] That's right, and just sort of putting them together. But I started out, in a way, quite different from Jack. [Knapp] Do tell. [Sinclair] My grandmother gave me two volumes of poetry when I was a little-little. One was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, naturally, and the other was Robert Burns. The amusing thing about the book of Burns's poetry was that she cut out all of the things that she thought might be naughty for a little girl to read [Knapp] Bowdlerization, right! [Sinclair] Yes! But it was the Longfellow that enchanted me because I happened to be fascinated with the Indians when I was a little girl. So I wrote reams and reams... [Unterecker] Of Hiawathas! [Sinclair] Of Hiawathas in the heroic couplet. And, I just, I would sit... [Knapp] Hiawatha in the United States. [Sinclair] He-uh-watha, yes. [Knapp] We call it Hi-uh-watha in Britain, always, yeah, but never mind.

[Sinclair] "By the shores of Gitch Gumee..." [Knapp] Can I just cut in? I wanted to say something. Here you two lovely people are, talking to me about, you know, the early influences of poetry and how you came to write poetry yourself. Have you any comment to make at all about why, for so many people, poetry is a remote and distant turnoff? In the light of what you have been saying about, you know, how exciting and how illuminating and stimulating it is. And I remember as a child how wonderful it was. I share some of your thoughts and feelings. Why is poetry such a desiccated art for the man in the street? [Unterecker] I think lack of exposure, largely. Largely lack of exposure. When you consider poetry of a kind, jingles on television and radio that we hear 300 times, we learn those, whereas, if we read a poem at all, we read it once, and it's taught in such a deadly way, in so many

places. You know, it's taught for all the wrong things. You're taught the syntax. You're taught the rhythmical structure, as if that's the poem but the poem is... [Knapp] Why is it taught so badly, Jack, if, I mean, presumably... [Sinclair] Because I don't think the teachers really understand poetry themselves... [Knapp] Are they afraid of it? Are they afraid of poetry? [Sinclair] I think they're a little afraid of it. [Knapp] Is it an overwhelming... [Sinclair] At the university, I very often taught the beginning course in poetry for teachers, and they would come back to try to study, to learn how to teach poetry or something about poetry, really not how to teach it. They were scared! I've had them cry! Fifty-year-old women weeping in my office. [Knapp] When you put your foot into the theatrical waters, Jack, I mean, for example, as a Shakespearean actor, I am, in that sense, used to poetry and poetics, right, and the offering the communication of images, which is really the name of the game. Did you find that in your theater experience there was less fear or

less distancing? Audiences are obviously ready to respond, aren't they? [Unterecker] Yeah, audiences are. And, I think, that's one reason that poetry is making a kind of a renaissance, in that there are poetry readings. Now, not all poets are good readers. Most of them are terrible readers, as a matter of fact. But some are good, and a good poetry reading can move an audience enormously. Robert Bly, for example, who is a very good poet, is a superb reader, and he has the audience in the palm of his hands. You've heard Gielgud reading poetry... [Knapp] Indeed, I have. [Unterecker] And it's an immensely moving experience. [Knapp] Absolutely. [Unterecker] And, I think, it's because he reads the poetry the way the poet would like to hear the poems read. [Knapp] Obviously a tremendous individual gift Gielgud has for empathizing with a certain kind of poet, right? On the other hand, I remember the vitality and the tremendous gusto of

Dylan Thomas reading his poetry. [Sinclair] Ah, yes. [Unterecker] Exactly, with great power. [Knapp] What a bravura performance, if you like, that man has. Now, you've gone a step further, right, in terms of identifying the word or the lyric word, the poetic word, or whatever, with the motion, other than pure narrative playout. [Unterecker] Sure, I've liked to work with musicians... [Knapp] Tell us about this. [Unterecker] I've liked to work with musicians, with dancers, with other people. I like poetry as a performance art. I've always felt that my own poems tend to be half-dialogues, that is, they're one half of a dialogue, the other half of which is silence. And it's immensely exciting to work with a musician, say, and just poke words into a composition that's in the process of being formed. And the same thing goes with dance. I've worked with Ernest Morgan, over in the Big Island, where we worked with both music and poetry and dance,

and bled them into an amalgam. [Knapp] And I believe you have something in the nature of a little bonne bouche and a surprise for us now along these lines? [Unterecker] Yes. Janet Sturman, choreographer, and John Mario Sevilla, a dancer, and I put together a work. Started out last February with a poem of mine that we didn't use, finally. And Janet said, "Well, I don't know what to do with all the spaces in your poem." I said, "Well, let's do something then with your movements." And she said, "Well, I'm going to do something with jagged movements and circles, and let's see what comes out of it." [Knapp] Okay, well let us see now then. Can I hold that for you? [Unterecker] All right. This is the finished product. Here goes. [Knapp] Well, this will be fun, won't it? [silence]

[Unterecker] These affirmations of light.

Play hero! [Other speaker] No hero! [Unterecker] Play child! Oh, carry me home. Fireworks and summer, summer fireflies.

This earth is what we have.

What hero we have. Not quite son. Not quite moon. Just this touch, just this touch,

toward tomorrow. [Knapp] Absolutely lovely, Jack. [Unterecker] Thank you. [Knapp] Great joy. [Unterecker] Thank you. [Knapp] Did you get a continuous pleasure out of the kind of rapport between yourself and the choreographer and the dancer? [Unterecker] Oh yes, wonderful. It's wonderful because, I think, poetry ought to be communication, and there's a lot of communication going on in there. [Knapp] Yes. How did it come about? How did it begin? [Unterecker] Well it started way back when, as I said, in February, when Janet thought she was going to choreograph a poem of mine, a little one that I brought along, called "Two Islands." One island, Hawaii; one island, Ireland. And I'll show it to you because it's so different from what we ended up with. I'll just read it. Two island, first island. "Night rain.

Footsteps filtered through gauze. Fade. Return. Fade into hesitations. They're measuring distances. Word. Word." Second island. "Under the slant moon, cats eyes shape into a language of the dead." She said, "Well, I can think of lots of movements, but I don't trust myself with those with those. So I said, "Well, why don't you start with some choreography? And she said, "All right, I'm going to use jagged motions in circles." And so she started with jagged motions and circles, and then when that those arms went up, I thought, oh, this is affirmations of light. I mean, it's a poem about light. [Knapp] It pleased you. [Unterecker] And then it was,

it became, this poem that is a poem only in terms of the choreography. I mean, it's an independent poem. It's got so many gaps that it could hardly stand. So it has to have the action in it. [Knapp] Jack, before our time finishes, I would like to read one of your poems. I was given this to look at. And I fell in love with one very short poem, entitled "Morning." [Unterecker] Oh, it's one of my favorites. [Knapp] I have Irish blood in me, and I find that what you have written has disturbed me quite a lot, in the nicest possible way. I mean, I'm thrown off balance. This one I recognize. "Morning." "The bay is a jumble of wind. Wind smashes in among the breakers. A fist smashing them backwards. What jumbled light or that time when we were children. You bent over

the mirror." Isn't that the most gorgeous... [Sinclair] That's so wonderful. [Knapp] summary of images and almost kind of kaleidoscopic chaos of the mind I love that. Thank you very much for ever introducing me to that particular poem. [Unterecker] Well, it it was... It started, of course, with the bay itself, which was jumbled light, with the high wind, the Donegal Bay, and all I could think of was one time when my sister, when she was a child, dropped a mirror and it smashed into fragments, and the light coming up onto her face was just like the light of that day exploding all over the world. [Knapp] And it was like that just last night. No, truly. [Unterecker] Yes. [Knapp] Down at Diamondhead, looking out with mist and fragments of light coming in all kinds of way. I wish we could go on talking for hours and hours and hours, but unfortunately our time is very nearly

over. Thank you very much, Jack, for sharing that beautiful poem and all of your gifts with us today. And, Marjorie, I wish that we had had even more time to talk. Poetry is obviously something very special, isn't it? And thank you for filling me in, in part, with some of the mystery and joy of it. Very grateful. Thank you. And so goodbye from Spectrum for this occasion from myself, from Jack Unterecker, and from Marjorie Sinclair. [music] [gentle folk music]

The following program is a production of KHET in Honolulu, Hawaii

Public Television. The following program has been funded in part by the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts and by grants from the people of Chevron of Hawaii and from the Davies Charitable Trust. [music] Spectrum Hawaii's executive producer Nino J. Martin interviews two award- winning documentary filmmakers. Haskell Wexler joins fellow director Frederick Wiseman to discuss the role of the American filmmaker today. Here's Nino J. Martin. [Martin] Good evening and welcome again to Spectum Hawaii. Nice to have you back with us again. I

hope that you had a very pleasant week. We have, and I think that we're going to have a very exciting half-hour for you right now. We have two gentlemen here, as you've been introduced to already, who are filmmakers, specifically documentary makers, and one gentleman also is a very famous cinematographer. And I would like to welcome both Mr. Wexler and Mr. Wiseman to the program today. Gentlemen. And I presume that the film festival is going well for you. [Wexler] Very well. [Wiseman] Very well. People are extremely nice and cordial. [Martin] And it's a big one this year, too. Lots of films from all over the East. I'm gonna ask you a question that I think that a lot of our friends in the audience probably wonder from time to time when we talk about documentary filmmaking, and that is can you really make a living, making documentary films or do you have to do other things? Do you have to support yourself in other ways? Fred? [Wiseman] Well, it depends what you mean by living, but... [Martin] Not a hundred thousand a year. but a comfortable living. [Wiseman] For me, in order to

make ends meet, as the expression goes, out of documentary filmmaking, I have to make one movie a year. I have to give, maybe, 10 talks in colleges, and I get some income from the 16-millimeter distribution of my films in schools and colleges and libraries. If, in any one year, one of those things is off, I'm in serious trouble. The only source of money for documentary films of the sort that we do is public television. And, usually, when you get money from public television, it barely covers the cost of the film. If it, in fact, does cover that. [Martin] But don't you get paid as a producer, as a writer, as a director, in that? [Wiseman] Well, you get, generally, a lump sum, which is usually much less than you ask for, and you can make more money talking about movies than you can making them, at least documentary movies. And I'm very dependent on the 16-millimeter distribution, but the 16-millimeter distribution for all documentary filmmakers has suffered a lot because people copy the films.

And it's a violation of copyright law, but there's still no way of enforcing your rights against it. And it's particularly bad among universities. The centers of moral learning tape films off the air. [Martin] And just use them. [Wiseman] And use them, right. [Martin] Haskell, how about you? You started as a cinematographer, of course, a very famous one, with Virginia Woolf. [Wexler] I didn't start famous, though. [Martin] No. But you became famous, of course, as a talent. But you've also gone into documentaries. One, we all know, is Medium Cool, which was out about, what, 15 years ago. [Wexler] That's not really a documentary, though. [Martin] Well, documentary...What is it, docudrama? [Wexler] Well, no it was a dramatic film, Medium Cool was. It played in the theaters. I have made a lot of documentary films, though, and I've made them all my life, before I even made features. [Martin] And you have another one coming out now, a feature, I guess, and that would be Latino. [Wexler] Yeah, the film Latino is a dramatic feature. [Martin] Do you find that people, filmmakers who are documentarians,

solely, can make a living on making documentaries and selling them? [Wexler] Well, I'd have answer exactly as Fred has answered... Depends on what your definition of a living is. And to make money on documentaries is, really to make a living on documentaries, is impossible. I mean, I make my documentaries, because...out of money that I make on feature films, and money I make on commercials, and my own personal funds that I get from a trust fund. And I just arbitrarily make the documentaries because I want to make them, because I'm interested in them, and not because I ever believe it'll make their money back. [Martin] You say that you make commercials. What kind of commercials do you make? [Wexler] Any kind. I mean, not any kind, but kinds that you have seen. You know, automobile commercials, beer commercials, telephone company commercials. A lot of them. [Martin] And you photograph them and you direct them. [Wexler] Yes. [Martin] Well, it seems to me that

somewhere in your backgrounds something influenced you to become documentarians. Fred, you were a graduate of Yale Law School, got past your bar, and were you actually a lawyer at one point? [Wiseman] I never practiced. I taught law for a couple of years. [Martin] What brought you from your interest in law to filmmaking? [Wiseman] Well, it was really quite easy. I hated law school, and I wanted to do something I liked doing. And I liked, I had fiddled around with movies for a long time. I'd made a lot of eight-millimeter movies, and I reached the witching age of 30 and figured I better do something I liked. But, I mean, I don't know what motivation is beyond that. [Martin] Your first film was, what, Titicut Follies, the one that we all know. [Wiseman] Right. [Martin] How did you make that transition from psychiatry and law and mental health... [Wiseman] Well, when I taught at Boston University Law School, I taught criminal law. And a lot of the students at BU at the time went on to careers as criminal

lawyers or as assistant district attorneys. So I thought they should see the kind of place their client or their victim might end up in. And I used to take them on tours of the state prisons and go to parole board hearings, so that I visited the prison where I ultimately made Titicut Follies. I visited that for the first time when I took students there, and I still remember the first time I went down there. And when I was thinking about a movie, or switching into making documentary movies, that occurred to me as a natural subject, so that, in a sense, that came out of the teaching, but just by chance. [Martin] Both of you make films, at least when you make the films that you want to make, affecting some sort of social change. So there's some sort of controversy involved. Why, Haskell, did you make Medium Cool, for example? [Wexler] Well, I made it because I was interested in it, and I felt that it would make an exciting

story. And it had to do with an exciting time in our history. I recognized it, at the time, as being a critical time, 1968, in the history of America. And I wanted to present a character, a TV cameraman, who began to question certain values which he had. [Martin] Was this accidental that you happened to be at the conventions? You just went? Or did you plan it? How did that all come about? [Wexler] Medium Cool was a script that was written, finished about three months before the convention. And it was an acted script, but it was integrated with the actual happenings of the time. But it predicted the riots that ultimately occurred in Chicago. [Martin] So you intercut the actual riot footage that you got at the convention and then recreated much of it, didn't you, in the studio, or was it all studio? [Wexler] No, it was all where the actors were there at the time,

and I directed them within the scenes, within the actual happenings in Chicago. [Martin] Fred, in your films, you deal with institutions. When you selected institutions, basically, as your subject, all the way from meatpacking plants to mental hospitals, "Hospital," "Law and Order," and so forth. What is it about institutions that fascinates you that you selected that as a subject? [Wiseman] Well, essentially, I pick institutions for the same reason you have a net in tennis, in the sense that I try to pick a place that's existed for a while, where people are performing work that they're accustomed to and that has geographical boundaries, usually a building and occasionally a larger area, but most of the time one building. And I deliberately confine the film to that building, and I have an intensive look at what's going on in that building. [Martin] Is it the issue within the building though that you're interested in? Is the structure of the institution or the people involved? [Wiseman] Well,

one of the things, one of the themes, I think, that cuts across all the films that I've done is the relationship of people to authority. And each of these institutions has certain rules or codes or constitutions or whatever you want to call them and are supposed to administer and offer certain kinds of services to other people. And so what I'm doing is having a look at what goes on in the place and the way the people behave in relation to the way they're supposed to behave. [Martin] When you actually photograph the people, would you say that what you're actually photographing is very real? Or does the fact that you as a director and a cameraman, sound people around, how does that affect the action in front of that camera? [Wiseman] Well, I mean, there's no way of answering that question definitively. I don't happen to think the presence of a camera and a tape recorder and the people operating them have much effect on people's behavior, as long as you don't ask them to do anything specially. And there's a funny kind of sizing up that goes on because, on the one hand, you're trying to figure

out what you want, what kind of sequences you want in the film, what to shoot and what not to shoot, when to shoot, and etc. At the same time, all of the participants may not put it exactly the same way...They're sizing you up to figure out, in a sense, whether they can trust you. And the worst thing you can do is tell people not to look at the camera or not pay any attention to you. And you can never con anybody. If there's any sort of technique, and technique is even the wrong word to apply, it's you have to be very straightforward about what you're doing. For reasons I don't really understand, it never seems to bother anybody or so few people as to be negligible. And the other test you have is that most the time you're making a movie like this, you're not shooting. You're hanging around. And when you're hanging around, you know, the camera and the tape recording may be under the chair. But you're watching people, some of whom may be in a sequence at another time, and you're getting some sort of informal test or comparison because you subsequently can

compare what you've seen when the camera is not on with what happens when it is on. And if I think somebody is putting it on for the camera, I don't use a sequence or, you know, we stopped shooting. Or if I don't realize it the editing, I don't use it in the film. But just like any other profession, you can be wrong. But you develop...Anybody who deals with a lot of people, whether you're a filmmaker or in television or insurance salesman or a doctor or a teacher, has to develop a fairly sensitive meter to figure out when you're being conned or when somebody's putting it on for you, and it's no different in filmmaking, and you rely on that. [Martin] Do you have a preconceived notion about what the production is going to be or what the story's going to be or do you just go in and roll film? [Wiseman] Well, I certainly have ideas or cliches that I start with, but I always end up with different cliches because the whole point of... I mean, I've never made a movie yet where I haven't been surprised at the way it's come out, and I think if it were predictable, if the final movie represented what I thought before I started,

I wouldn't have learned anything. And I know very little about these places before I start. Some would say I know very little when I'm finished. But it's an exploration. It's sort of a discovery process. And you... I like the idea of being surprised by the result. [Martin] Do you get emotionally attached to the material when you're shooting it? [Wiseman] Well... [Martin] How do you have to detach yourself as a director or as a filmmaker, from the reality. [Wiseman] Well, you do...Once it's on film, it's film, and in order to reduce 100,000 feet or roughly 50 hours of material to an hour and a half or two-hour film, you have to be fairly cold toward the material. I mean, it's not that you're not involved in it. You're involved in making a film out of it at that point, and you're trying to make the best film you can, so that whatever... It's not that you're not sympathetic to the people or anything like that, but it's just that you have to look at it as material, and you're going to be fairest to the people if you make the best

film you can out of it. [Martin] A lot of people, I'm sure, in our audience probably have the notion that, when a film is being shot, there is a tremendous amount of equipment around. There are lots of lights and cameras and so forth. If you look around the studio, for example, there are three cameras and lighting and so forth. But when you go out and film, what kind of a crew do you use? [Wiseman] Well, there are three of us. I direct and I do the sound. I work with a cameraman. And the third person carries the extra film and the extra magazines. The camera is handheld. The tape recorder and the mic are handheld. No lights and very fast film usually, which is pushed generally. And that's all. And so you're completely mobile. I mean, in a sense, documentary film of this sort is a sport, and you have to, you know, keep in shape because you're running around all day and that's part of the fun. But you have to be prepared to go with whatever is happening and follow it to whatever conclusion takes place.

[Martin] Let's talk a little bit about Latino, which you've just completed. Tell us a little bit about the film and some of the problems that you've had with it. [Wexler] Well, it's the story of a Chicano Green Beret that gets sent to Central America to fight in a secret war to advise the Contras, a group of ex-Somoza Guardia people based in Honduras who invade into Nicaragua. At that time, they were making border raids into Nicaragua. And it's about his reevaluation of his career as a soldier and as a Green Beret. That's roughly the story. [Martin] Now this is a pro-Contra, anti-Sandinista... [Wexler] Uh, no, it's a film about a Chicano Green Beret who was sent to work with the Contras to invade into Nicaragua. I would say it's not pro-Contra. My views are

against a mercenary army being funded by the CIA in a country like Honduras and invading into Nicaragua. And, at that time, as I say, it was a secret war. The secret was only from the American people. It was called the secret war until Newsweek broke the story, after the war had been going on for almost a year. So my position and the attitude of the film is one against the Contras, against the CIA- supported mercenaries, and for the right of the people in Nicaragua to to determine their own destinies. [Martin] Would you call it a controversial film or would it be seen as a controversial film? [Wexler] Well, if you have a contrary viewpoint then it becomes controversial. [Martin] OK. [Wexler] So, that I think that, since the administration has a contrary viewpoint, to that extent it's controversial. [Martin] Which leads me to the next question then for both of you and that is distribution of films, either they be theatrical features or

documentaries, when we're dealing with that kind of subject matter. Have you run into any difficulties? Are they open arms at the major studios so they want to distribute you? [Wexler] Oh, well, I guess it's directed toward me if you're asking you about the major studios. The major studios are all part of multi-national corporations, and these multi-national corporations are not interested in rocking Reagan's boat. And neither is public television, I'm sure. But the position of the Reagan administration, viz a viz Central America, is one which is not something which multi-national corporations and big distributors like Paramount, which is part of Gulf and Western, and Colombia, which is part of Coca-Cola, would necessarily think kindly of about, so that getting that kind of distribution is very difficult. Latino now is playing in three cities in the U.S. and doing very well in the theaters, but

it's with a small distributor on a smaller scale than say Rambo or other films which are more jingoistic and more militaristic. [Martin] You really think that there's a there's a major problem with the major companies in distribution? You really think that they're threatened by films such as say Medium Cool? I know you had quite a bit of problem with Paramount at the time in distributing that. You think someone is back there behind the scenes saying you cannot distribute this because its... [Wexler] No, they just decide, in their own viewpoints, what's good business and what isn't good business. And, certainly, it's not good business for a multi-national corporation to have its motion picture division do something which would rock the boat, which might affect a ruling by the SEC or the IRS or any other governmental agency with which they have to deal with daily on a very high level. [Martin] How about you, Fred, any distribution issues? [Wiseman] Well, I mean, I'm working in a different world, on a smaller scale, in a sense that my films...Well, after I made a number of films, they began to be financed by Channel 13, the public television station in New York and

now, I get the money from the program fund of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and they're broadcast on PBS. So that that is the major... PBS is the major distribution outlet for my films initially, and then they go into the 16-mil distribution. I have had no problem with PBS on anything that I've made. They've broadcast it exactly as I've made it, the length that I've made it, and there's been never any editorial control, and they don't see the film until it's finished. [Martin] So they don't say anything at all? They don't want you to cut anything or... [Wiseman] Well, not so far, you know, knock wood. [Martin] But you have had some legal problems in a couple of your pictures. I know that with Titicut Follies, the Massachusetts Supreme Court, restricted your distribution of that to certain types of individuals, lawyers, social workers, and so forth. Why that? [Wiseman] Right, Titicut Follies was the first film I did and that was made independently and had nothing to do with public television. After the film was finished and it was shown at the New York Film Festival, the

State of Massachusetts, somebody read the reviews, somebody there who knew how to read, and was upset by the film. And action was brought against it on two grounds: One, that I had allegedly breached an oral contract giving the state the right of final censorship, and, two, that the film was an invasion of privacy of one of the inmates who is shown naked in his cell. And there was no written evidence that I had given anybody the right of censorship, and I never have, and I don't know any documentary filmmaker that ever would. At the time the film was made, there was no right of privacy in Massachusetts. I'm talking about the legal right of privacy, not any moral issue connected with privacy, and for the right of privacy to exist, it has to be either legislation or common law tradition and neither of that was true in Massachusetts. But they found a right of privacy for the first time in this film as a way of preventing the film from being seen. The state had a

double conflict of interest, really, because, on the one hand, the state is in the position of what's called parens patriae, taking care of the inmates. On the other hand, the film is very critical of the way the inmates were being taken care of. So my feeling was, although obviously there were those who disagreed with me, that the state was using the privacy argument and the contractual argument to prevent the citizens of Massachusetts from seeing how their tax money was being misused or not used. The original decision in the case was that the negative of the film should be burnt and the trial judge described the film as a nightmare of ghoulish obscenities. And I hope, someday, that I'll be able to put the film in a theater, so I can put on the theater marquee [all laugh] a nightmare of ghoulish obscenities. [Martin] You'll get the audience for that, yes. [Wiseman] But the Massachusetts Supreme Court said the film had value but could only be seen by limited audiences, consisting of doctors, lawyers, judges, legislators,

people interested in custodial care, and students in these and related fields, but not the merely curious general public. [Martin] And you have to have consent, a consent form for that. [Wiseman] When the film is shown, a week before the screening, I have to inform the court and the attorney general's office of the time and place of the screening. And then, within a week after the screening, sign an affidavit that everybody that saw it is within a class of people allowed to see it and file that. [Martin] Fred, how do you get around that the common problem that anybody who shoots documentaries has and that is to get a consent and release form from the people in front of the camera who are, they call it acting, for lack of a better term, or just performing? [Wiseman] Well...I wouldn't prefer to use, but all right. I, sometimes before but usually after the sequence is shot, I will approach them with the tape recorder running with the mike out in front of me and explain that I've got the tape recorder on and tell the people why the film is being made, how it's going to

be used, where it might be shown, that a lot of people might see it, and end up by saying, "Is it all right to have taken your picture and recorded your voice? And if they say, "Yes," I then say, "Well, can you give me your name and address, and I'm asking for this because this gives me a contemporaneous record, the fact that I explained it to you and you said it was OK." And if they say yes, well then I've got it, and if they say no, well, then, even if the sequence is shot, I don't use it. [Martin] So it's perfectly...that that will hold up in court in case it's... [Wiseman] Well, it's never been challenged. I have never had any difficulty since 1967. [Martin] No one has ever come up to you after a film and said, "What have you done to me?" [Wiseman] No, there have been people that haven't liked the films, but they haven't -- that's only in a couple of cases -- but there's never been any court action. And curiously enough, in those situations where the people who gave me permission ultimately didn't like the film, when they first saw it they liked it, and they only turned against the film when they didn't like the way they were characterized in print, in the reviews of the film. [Martin] Gentlemen, how do you measure the effectiveness of your film,

either in social change or whatever? Is there a way of measuring that? [Wexler] Well, I don't think so. I don't think there's a way of measuring it. I don't...I wouldn't want to spend a lot of my time measuring it out. I might be interested in how well people respond to certain things in films which we construct, just as a filmmaker. But the degree of effecting of social change I think would be a pretty tough one. [Martin] Fred, how about you? [Wiseman] Yeah. I agree. I mean, there's no way you can measure it. [Martin] You haven't caused any laws to change or litigations to come about or government agencies to change their mind about... [Wiseman] I mean... There's no... Some people, I think, myself included when I first started, you like to think, but it's naive, that there's some kind of one to one connection. The fact of the matter is you're providing people with information. It's not the only source of the information. People see other movies, they read books, read play, watch news or whatever. And they use their own good judgment. And, if it has an

effect, it's you know elliptical, circuitous, subterranean, however you want to describe it. And it's not quantifiable, unless some social scientist knows how to do it. I certainly don't. [Martin] And the minute that we have left I want to ask you both a quick question on the future of American films, where do you think it's going. Do you have an opinion about what's happening with the American film industry right now? Haskell, how about you? [Wexler] Quick answer to a quick question. Video. [Martin] What do you think of video? [Wexler] That's where it's going. [Martin] You think film is going out? [Wexler] I think film as we know it is going out, yes. For the masses of people. [Martin] Do you think a video can do as good a job as a film. [Wexler] No. [Martin] Why not? There's another half-hour here but... [Wexler] Well, by the nature of a video screen, by the nature of the size of the audience, where it's seen, how it's seen, by the nature of the medium. [Martin] Have you ever thought about working in video? [Martin] Oh, I have.

I do. [Martin] So you've kind of been drawn over to it then? How about you, Fred? [Wiseman] I'm too old to learn anything about video. So I'm going to go out on film. [Martin] You've never done any video at all, though. [Wiseman] No. [Martin] So you're going to live and die on film. [Wiseman] Right. [Martin] New projects coming up for you? Anything? [Wiseman] Right, I just finished a movie on a racetrack which will be on public television on the 4th of June. [Martin] And that's about, what, 90 minutes? [Wiseman] No, it's actually about an hour and 54 minutes. [Martin] Why did you select a racetrack as a sport? [Wiseman] Well, I wanted to do a movie about a sport, and I think horses are very attractive looking, and I think the human scene around a racetrack is particularly interesting. [Martin] Haskell, do you have something coming up for you? [Wexler] I do, but I'm superstitious, and I don't want to talk about it. Right now, I just want people to see Latino when it comes to their theaters. [Martin] Great. Our very special guests today on Spectrum Hawaii have been two gentlemen in the film business. One is Haskell Wexler and the other, Frederick

Wiseman. Thank you both for joining us on the program today. It's nice to have you here. And thank you for joining us on Spectrum Hawaii. Hope that you enjoyed the program, and we'll see you next time around. Aloha. [music] [gentle folk music] Spectrum was funded in part by grants from the Davies Charitable Trust

and from the people of Chevron in Hawaii and by the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts.