The documentary diaries: Working experiences of a non-fiction filmmaker

Introduction

A year after I first started studying film my father asked me two questions. ‘Do you know what you’re getting into? And can you make a living at it?’ Blithely I answered ‘yes’ to both queries. In reality I hadn’t got a clue what I was getting involved in. I’d taken a few film courses, which weren’t very good, and I’d learned a little about Flaherty and Eisenstein. But could I call myself a filmmaker? No way. I was totally wet behind the ears.

Unfortunately, it seems to me most film schools – but not all – leave you that way. You learn a little bit about filmmaking, and learn to strut around proudly with a camera and tripod on your shoulder. Your red scarf also dangles delightfully over your Manchester or Birmingham University T-shirt. From the outside, with your beard, you could be taken for a young Steven Spielberg. If you’re a woman maybe you see yourself as Kathryn Bigelow. But inside you’re quaking. Where do you go from here, and how do you sustain yourself in the hard professional outside world? Have you learned enough to cope with everything? You’re definitely not sure.

And the same is true, even if you pick up your filmmaking elsewhere.

Well the aim of this book is to stop you quaking. Give you courage. Help you on your way. Its goal is to assist you, the filmmaker, to bring your films to fruition in the real world. My method is that of using casebook examples and analysis. My hope is that when you read about a few films I’ve made, and which I discuss here in detail, the experience may help you understand and cope with the everyday challenges of making documentary films. And that’s vital when you’re out there standing alone.

In one sense these notes are a continuation of my last book, Succeeding as a Documentary Filmmaker.¹ However, whereas that book set out the main guidelines for success, my present goal is to delve into the subject in depth by scrupulously analyzing the filmmaking process itself. I want to show you, almost microscopically, what happens from the birth of the idea until a film is completed. This means covering all the hurdles, and the bumps, and other obstacles along the way, including inspiration, proposal writing, finance and marketing. Hopefully you can then avoid many of the traps, work in peace, and eventually receive a BAFTA, or an Oscar or an Emmy for your work.

My approach to this learning process is by showing you how I developed, produced, and worked on seven films. Four are major documentaries, the fifth a feature-length docudrama, and two are works in progress. All have and had multiple problems. None of the completed films were easy to make. Occasionally I have laid out for you the proposals that got the films off the ground.

At the end of several of the chapters I’ve also added a short section called ‘Production notes.’ These notes usually amplify and explain further some central problem raised in the chapter. Thus Chapter 11 ‘Hopes and Dreams’ deals with the specifics of making one particular family film. The notes which follow, however, tell you about making family film in general. When I made Stalin’s Last Purge I used a lot of narration, parts of which are reprinted as examples of when and how to use narration. However the chapter is followed by notes which enlarge on the whole art and craft of narration writing.

Sections of these Production notes originally appeared in my book Writing, Directing, and Producing Documentary Films and Videos² and are reproduced here by kind permission of Southern Illinois University Press.

As you’ll see the book starts off with a chapter I call ‘Learning the ropes.’ This simply tracks my own growth and development as a filmmaker. I‘ve put it in to show that we all go through a hard learning process. In between the chapters analyzing specific films, I’ve added a few sections setting out some general observations on filmmaking and filmmakers. I call them ‘Intermissions.’ Here I discuss subjects like pitching, distributors, and a few other things that would otherwise fall through the cracks

I’ve chosen to examine my own films not because they are necessarily great films (though obviously I think they have their merits) but because by using them I can intimately trace all the trials and tribulations of getting them made. If you can learn something from my pratfalls and problem solving, then I’ll know the book has been worthwhile.

Using case studies to show how an industry works is, of course, not new. Every business school from Harvard to Stanford uses this method. However the case study, as opposed to film anecdotes, is rarely used in film teaching. That seems a pity. Mark Harris’s excellent book Pictures at a Revolution³ analyzes the making of the five movie nominees for the 1967 Oscar. Mark’s book is now being used widely as a course text. So maybe things are changing.

Every filmmaker has his or her style, inclination, and particular choice of favorite subjects. For myself I like making political and historical films, and films about music and children. On the other side I tend to veer away from current political problems, and using my films to make radical messages. This may be a fault, but we are who we are. I’m also not a great fan of cinéma vérité films, though I’ve done quite a few.

This means that my films tend to be highly structured, often dependent on very thorough research, and occasionally involve the writing of complex narration. So in one way they are very different from vérité. And yet the two forms share many similar problems. These include writing proposals, choosing your team, raising finance, persuading a commissioning editor to support you, and getting the film to market. All these common subjects are raised in the films I’ve chosen, and come up again and again.

For example, both Chapter 2 ‘Married to the Marimba’ and Chapter 5 ‘Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs’ discuss the pros and cons of working with partners, and show you what happens when there is harmony, or where things break down through disagreements. The problem of raising a budget comes up in all the films, and is discussed most thoroughly in Chapter 6 ‘The Brink of Peace’ and Chapter 7 ‘The First Fagin’. Chapter 3 ‘Stalin’s Last Purge’ addresses the difficulties of working internationally, as does ‘Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs’, while ‘Brink of Peace’ shows how infinite patience and stubbornness can be required when working with a broadcast station.

Apart from the section on my own film history, which I advise you to read first, it really doesn’t matter too much in which order you read the chapters. They all touch on very different subjects, though key questions such as finance and distribution keep coming up in most of them.

Married to the Marimba looks at the lifestyle of an itinerant musician who plays a xylophone in the streets of Europe, and drives his van from Zurich to Munich. Since he is away from home nine months a year, and has nine children, family problems accumulate. I made this film with a co-director, and our disagreements take up a large part of this chapter.

Stalin’s Last Purge examines the last days of Stalin, and the brutal actions of the KGB. It does this by following the fate of a group of artists and poets murdered by the secret police. Shot mostly in Russia, the film touches on the difficulties of working abroad, and the necessity of finding the right interviewees for your project.

Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs: early in my career I got caught up in the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. He always denied his role in genocide, claiming he was merely a small cog in the wheel of the Nazi juggernaut. The discovery of his secret diaries intrigued me, as they showed a totally different and more evil personality. I thought this new perspective might provide the basis for a film. Feeding and intertwining the diaries into the script became one of the major challenges of the production. At a later stage, though the film went well, the difficulties of working with a foreign co-producer became overwhelming, and taught me some very hard but necessary lessons.

The Brink of Peace is a film about the Arab–Israeli peace process I made for 13/WNET New York. In form it’s a very conventional film. It shows an occasional on-screen expert, and uses a lot of narration. So why did I include it? Because more than anything else I’ve done it shows how difficult it can be working with a not too helpful major network.

The First Fagin came about when a friend told me the story of an English nineteenth-century criminal, Ikey Solomon, whom many people thought provided Charles Dickens with the idea for the character of Fagin, in Oliver Twist. Ikey went through two prisons in England, and spent time in two other jails in Tasmania. What intrigued me was the idea that we could use the main story of Ikey to look at crime and punishment in England and Australia in the nineteenth century. Eventually I made the film as a docudrama with a great Australian co-producer. Besides looking at the challenges of a three-country co-production, I’ve also used the chapter to bring out issues of making a hybrid documentary, developing proposals, research, and scriptwriting.

‘Beyond the Velvet Curtain’ (Chapter 9) deals with the development of a four-part series on opera, while ‘Hopes and Dreams’ explores the challenges of making a complex cinéma vérité family film.

In the ‘Production notes’ chapters I’ve tried to focus on a few subjects that needed a wider discussion than I could provide in the film analyses. Thus ‘Pitch perfect’ (Chapter 8) confronts the problem of pitching. At one time or another we have all had to pitch our films, sometimes to willing ears, often in the face of boredom. This chapter looks at a few pitching sessions I’ve attended, and adds a few hints that may help you when you’re out there facing the crowd.

‘Inspiration’ (Chapter 4): in the last few decades we’ve become very familiar with the guru – the sage who sits at the top of the mountain doling out advice. Though I’m wary of anyone who gives you directions in life, I have to admit that two or three people have indeed given me great advice at various times, as I’ve tried to get a handle on this business of documentary. This section pays tribute to two of them, and tries to point out why their inspiration was so necessary and useful.

‘Best advice’ (Chapter 10): I used to be suspicious of distributors. To my mind they sold your films, but grabbed most of the money. Then I met a Canadian distributor who not only became a good friend, but also gave me some excellent advice on marketing. This advice was given to me during a correspondence of over a year, and I’ve selected some of our key discussions that I thought could help you as well.

You finish a book, and you wonder what you’ve left out. In this case I know exactly what’s missing. I haven’t mentioned the films that never got off the ground: proposals by the dozen that remain buried in my bottom drawer. These proposals include films on my boyhood friends, the golden age of California, a film about my mother, a film about Kabbala in California, a film on Jewish pirates of the Caribbean, the hunt for the true cross of Jesus, and a British spy film.

Most of them started from the idea that I had a great story. This is to me what documentary is about: you can tell wonderful stories about fascinating people and their adventures and escapades. And you are the go-between: the magician who can open the secret doors, peep in, and tell the world what wonderful sights you’ve seen. Why did these films never get off the ground? The usual answer was finance. I couldn’t raise the money. Rarely did I give up easily but after a couple of years of poking around with an idea, I usually had to accept that either I was a terrible salesman, or no one was interested in my great idea. Usually the films failed because of a combination of these two things.

1 The author.

And yet I learned one thing. Don’t give up. Sometimes success comes simply because a new TV commissioning editor has come in who thinks your idea is great. Sometimes the mood of the times changes. The idea that didn’t work five years ago is now suddenly in. And sometimes you see a new way of raising the budget. So I never throw away a proposal.

Over the years I’ve come to see myself as resembling a man on a desert island. I write my proposals, probably four or five a year, and put them in glass bottles. I then chuck the bottles into the sea, and hope that some time someone will find at least one of the bottles and answer my message.

So we live in hope.

If this book helps you, which I sincerely hope it will, then get out there fast and start putting your messages into bottles. I wish you the best of luck. I know someone will find them and hear you.

1  Alan Rosenthal, Succeeding as a Documentary Filmmaker: A Guide to the Professional World (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011).

2  Alan Rosenthal, Writing, Directing, and Producing Documentary Films and Videos (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007).

3  Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).

1

Learning the ropes

I became a documentary filmmaker by accident. Because of my guitar.

Some people dream of being filmmakers. You know their stories. ‘At the age of three I was making cinemascope films for my parents to show on my birthday. By the age of five I’d built a multiplex theatre out of cardboard, and was showing my epics to my kindergarten friends. By seven I was reprimanded for making my first sex film, etc. etc.’ Well not me. I wanted to go to university and be a lawyer. My parents liked this idea. Maybe I could keep them in their old age.

In due course I went to Oxford, and studied wonderfully useful courses such as Roman law. So I learned how to manumit (free) a slave, and what legal action to take when a table fell on you. You punished it by sawing off a leg. Eventually, trying to delay that fatal day when I would actually have to go out to work, I got accepted at Stanford Graduate Business School to study for an MBA. Then fate intervened.

In order to supplement a scholarship given to me by Stanford, I used to play the guitar and sing at local folk clubs, and at parties. Having been born in England and having a British accent was useful, especially when singing bawdy Elizabethan songs. However, the most popular songs, if there were a lot of married couples present, had verses like ‘When I was single, my pockets did jingle, and I wish I was single again, again … I wish I was single again.’ Of course, those were the days before political correctness became the rage.

Anyway, after one of these song sessions, someone asked me to come and sing at a small TV studio in San Francisco. Well, why not? The session went well, but one thing surprised me: the technicians handling the cameras were all students. This definitely needed investigating further, so I asked two of them out for coffee. Over a ghastly brew that in no way resembled coffee (those were the pre-Starbucks days) I asked Nancy and Dick what their appearance at the TV station was all about. The answer was simple. They were taking an MA in film at Stanford. Well, not actually in film; in theatre and communications, but film and TV studies were a major part of the curriculum.

Now, as I told you, I hadn’t been a film buff at the age of three, but I had wasted a lot of time during my law studies watching Bergman, and had at one time contemplated applying for a job at the BBC. If film was being taught at Stanford, maybe I could combine that with my business studies. It was an interesting thought, so I went off the next day to see the Stanford head of film studies. And did he sell me a bill of goods!

According to the good Prof., graduates of the Stanford program were working as directors at ABC and NBC head offices in New York, were tracking across Afghanistan with cameras as we spoke, were managing a few British studios, and were rising to the top in Warner Brothers and Paramount. Now I am as gullible and as starry-eyed as the next guy, so without more than five minutes thought I signed on to do a minor in film. Then came the surprises.

When I went to inspect matters more closely I found the film department consisted of about ten students, and was taught by two or three instructors who had probably worked in film before Methuselah’s time. As for film equipment, that was something else. The department had one wind-up Bolex camera that took 100 foot spools. It had three broken-down lamps, resting on battered stands, and an ancient splicer. As for sound, forget it. There was no proper sound recorder on which you could do sync, though there was a small tape recorder for wild sound.

In short, the situation was pretty awful, and I would have quit in a week except for one man. This was a young instructor called Henry Breitrose, who was an inspiration. He made you believe that in spite of the lousy equipment you too could become a Bergman or a Hitchcock. Or, more precisely you could become a Flaherty or a John Grierson, because, as I was to learn, the emphasis of the department was on documentary.

So, we had rotten equipment, but I loved it, and lapped up everything I could read and learn about filmmaking. I went out and learned how to handle the Bolex, and shot a film on dance. In the small department cellar I learned how to use the splicer and glue to make primitive cuts. I learned that when you lose the tapes with all the music you’ve selected, Vivaldi will always work instead. And I directed a film on three artists. Put simply, I was stupidly in heaven.

In reality, Stanford gave me a tremendous enthusiasm for documentary, but taught me little about technical matters.¹ Most of my real film skills and know-how I picked up later, starting in New York.

In order to get a film degree at Stanford, one of the requirements was that you had to work for three to six months in a real professional situation. To satisfy this obligation I worked for a while as a general studio hand at KQED in San Francisco, then headed for New York to work with an experimental filmmaker called Shirley Clarke. This didn’t work out, but instead I met another director called George Stoney who took me on as a camera assistant to a man called Terry Macartney-Filgate.²

Though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was working with one of the great documentary cameramen of the sixties. A pioneer of cinéma vérité, Terry had shot some superb films for the National Film Board of Canada, including the two classics, Blood and Fire and The Backbreaking Leaf. He had also joined Ricky Leacock and Don Pennebaker in filming Primary, about John Kennedy. So I was learning from a true master.

Terry taught me two things: how to enjoy New York, and how to shoot. And maybe the first was most important. Together with Terry I roamed Manhattan from Riverside Drive down to Wall Street. Often, to my astonishment, he would turn his raincoat around and rush up Broadway pretending to be Batman. He knew all the bars, the best and cheapest restaurants, and what to see and where to go. Among other good treats he introduced me to McSorley’s Old Ale House. At the time no women were allowed, the floor was covered in sawdust, the standard meal was boiled beef and cabbage, and the waiter automatically brought you two beers. To have had only one would be to admit you weren’t a man.

Though quite a prankster in his spare time, Terry was all concentration when we worked together on George’s film about New York problems. Much of the time he hefted an Arriflex 35mm on his shoulder as he shot with a long lens down Broadway to Times Square, or in reverse up to Columbus Circle. Always he would explain why he used a particular lens for a shot, and what its effect would be. He was a great enthusiast for back lighting, and introduced me to its charms, particularly if the picture was slightly under-exposed. He also taught me when and when not to use a tripod, what to look for in people, and how to interview and talk with the camera in your lap. But as much as all the technical lessons, I also absorbed a great deal from Terry about documentary in general, what to look for in any situation, and how to structure a film.

Unfortunately we only had three months together before I left for England to see my family. I had surprised them a bit with my turn towards film, but my father was always encouraging, and just told me to work hard and keep away from wild women. I’m not sure what he meant by the latter words, but I told him I’d keep that thought in mind.

To earn a bit of money I started writing feature articles for the newspapers, about odd aspects of life in the USA. These included articles on visits to huge American secondhand car sales parks; the performance of cheerleaders at football games; Beatnik San Francisco; modern hunters for gold in California who used scuba-diving equipment in their searches, and even how to buy a telephone in Chicago. If these subjects seem banal, one has to remember that to us Brits, the USA was another and very strange planet in those days.

The question of how to continue my film career after getting home was answered when I met a guy called Peter Cantor at a party in London. Peter worked as an editor for the BBC, and wanted to go to Israel and shoot a film about watering the desert and life on a kibbutz. He had an old Bolex camera and had collected about 5,000 feet of black and white film from his BBC cameraperson friends. Added together that amounted to about two hours of raw stock. This material was made up from odd snips of unused end film from the standard 400 foot reels everyone shot with. When Peter heard I had studied film at Stanford, he didn’t enquire what that meant, but just asked immediately ‘Do you want to come with me and shoot?’ Well we were both a bit sozzled, and I hadn’t found any of Dad’s wild women at the party to distract me, so immediately said yes.

Our first action was to print visiting cards that said ‘World Television Documentaries.’ We knew we would need them to make an impression in a strange land. The card was a bit over the top, but my father always said ‘If you’re going to go for it, go for it big!’ And the cards worked, at least at the Israeli Embassy, where we’d asked for a meeting with the cultural attaché. He listened with sympathy to our story about being BBC filmmakers (well at least Peter was), who wanted to make a film about water and kibbutz life, and promised us help. In the end, when we got to Tel Aviv that meant a government car to take us around, and even free air flights.

I enjoyed Israel, which was hot, dusty, and dirty, but which exhibited colours and a landscape straight out of Van Gogh. We shot everywhere, in the mountains of the north, and in the deserts of the south, in the kibbutzim, and in the towns. Occasionally I would shoot and Peter would direct, and then after a day or two we’d swap roles.

When we got back to England two-thirds of the footage was usable, and the rest was awful. Peter then edited the film in his spare time and we sold it to the BBC. It was my first successful sale, and I thought maybe there was a future to this craziness. Technically both Peter and I learned a lot from our mistakes, and especially from the badly shot and dumped footage. But the best thing we learned was that sometimes you had to take a gamble. So the making of our outrageous visiting cards had been a bit impetuous, but their use had got us into strange places, and certainly saved us a lot of money.

In spite of my hopes I found it difficult to get entry into the BBC, so decided to complete my legal training and qualify as a solicitor (the equivalent of the American attorney who pleads in the lower courts and handles business legal matters). I then went to work in a law office that dealt with a lot of film matters, mainly financing, but kept my producing film interests on a low burner.

To this end I taught evening courses for the British Film Institute (BFI), which included teaching the staff at the John Lewis store in Oxford Street how to make films. This was a strange but wonderful experience as everyone came in grey suits, and in class called each other by their surnames. I also journeyed for the BFI to Birmingham or Coventry to lecture on documentary and show clips from the films of Eisenstein or Humphrey Jennings. To complement all this I also made a few low-budget films on the side. This was all going well till I got a life-changing call asking me whether I wanted to go to Jerusalem and help set up a television station there. Again madness took hold and I decided to leave my law office and go, and have recorded the insanity but fun of my year and half with Israel TV in Jerusalem, Take One!³

2 The author filming at the Suez Canal during the Yom Kippur War.

After life in Jerusalem I took a job for two years teaching documentary film at York University in Toronto. This was because I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to return to law, or go on with serious filmmaking. Israel had been fun, but the situation at the TV station had been totally chaotic, and didn’t promise well for the future. Toronto gave me time out to think.

While reviewing my own background and film education I realized that, apart from working with Terry and George Stoney, I hadn’t seen much of other filmmakers at work. That was obviously a grave omission, but also gave me an idea for my first book. Why not talk to fifteen to twenty filmmakers and simply interview them as to how they made their films, and ask them about the problems they encountered? Such books are common these days, but they weren’t then, and I thought if I could write a good outline a publisher might take it. I also thought I would learn a tremendous amount in the process, which turned out to be true.

Having come to the conclusion that such a book might work, I sat down to consider whom I could approach. Cinéma vérité had become very popular which argued for talking to Fred Wiseman, Don Pennebaker and Albert Maysles. These were the new observational filmmakers who were turning conventional documentary on its head. There were also a few good people at NET New York, the educational broadcaster, to whom I thought might be worthwhile speaking, such as Mort Silverstein, and Arthur Barron. Then there were the Brits, who were totally unknown in the States, but had done some incredible documentary work. Here I was thinking of people like Jack Gold and Peter Watkins, who had made a great film about an atom bomb falling on England. Peter’s film, The War Game, had caused a major controversy, and had basically been banned by the BBC even though they had commissioned it. If I could get Peter to speak to me about his problems I thought it would be a major contribution to the book.

The War Game also came under the genre of docudrama, a kind of hybrid between documentary and pre-scripted dramas with actors. I knew little about the genre and thought its techniques well worth exploring. To this end I added another great British docudrama film to my list, Cathy Come Home, which was a fiction film about the homeless, based on true life incidents. The film was written by Jeremy Sandford and directed by Ken Loach. Loach I never met, but I became quite friendly with Jeremy who taught me a great deal about dramatizing reality.

One of the subjects I really wanted to explore further in the book, was the relationship between members of the documentary film team. Most articles I’d read concentrated on the director’s view, but now I wanted to go a bit deeper, and see how the director related to the rest of his crew. With this in mind I did a number of multiple interviews discussing the same film. The most interesting experience here was discussing the Canadian film A Married Couple with the film’s director Alan King, and