Albert Maysles on professional mauling

[Tony]

We all know how Welles was shattered by Pauline Kael's articles in the New Yorker which were previews of her frontal assualt disgiused as her introduction to the published script of Kane: of how Welles felt personally attacked by her, and subsequently ghost-wrote "Rough-sledding with Pauline Kael" as a response and some have said made "F For fake" as a riposte, arguing as he did in that film that ultimately authorship doesn't matter, thereby sidestepping Kael's questioning of his authorship and simultaneously articulating one of the central tentents of post-modernism before it had a name.

Well, here's an excerpt of an interview with Albert Maysles of the famous Maysles brothers, the team which made the early doc. on the Beatles, Gimme Shelter, a little 10 minute film on Welles talking about the sacred Beasts idea, and many others. It's interesting because here's another person who was professionally mauled by Kael, and his reaction to it:

Why did Pauline Kael accuse you of fabricating the whole of Gimme Shelter?

Well, I can't read her mind, but people have told me--people who know their work thoroughly--how more than anything she wanted to appear to be clever, so that she would invent things to make a better story. What a wonderful thing to come up with, these guys are supposed to be these documentary filmmakers and here they are staging everything. It made for wonderful, scandalous reading: what an angle to work. But the angle is totally false. She said, too, in Salesman that the main guy Paul Brennan was not really a Bible salesman but that we'd paid him to play the part. Then there's the implication that we were guilty of murder, or at least complicit, because we'd staged Gimme Shelter. And that really, you know, that really struck a blow more so than any other negative comment about what we do. That really... That was particularly hurtful. Especially because THE NEW YORKER wouldn't repudiate any of it. I went to the editor whom I happened to know and we went through every line of Kael's piece and told him where it was just bald fabrication. And he said, "Well, if what you say is true than Kael should answer to it, let's call her in"--but she wouldn't come. With all that evidence, he should have fired her on the spot.

Did it feel malicious to you? Personal?

Malicious, sure, but damning to the very core of what I believe and of what I express and how I choose to express it. No comment against my work could be more hurtful or untrue than that.

The Beatles.

That was 1964 and my brother and I had made only one film, Showman, before that. But in making that first film I had designed a camera that allowed me to work independently of my brother in that there wasn't a cable connecting us: he could go where the best sound was and I could shoot where the best angles were. We could get a near-perfectly steady picture now, we could zoom-in and zoom-out and maintain focus, establish sightlines and still get deep behind the scenes. That was their first visit, The Beatles, to America. We had done something technologically before a lot more primitive--Primary broke a lot of that territory. Looking back on The Beatles film, I'm proud of it because it seems in hindsight to be a nice snapshot of the optimism and excitement of the early- and mid-sixties. And then there's Gimme Shelter, which was the end of it all.

What made you a good match with Godard? You worked with him on the "Montparnasse-Levallois" segment of 1965's nouvelle vague anthology film Paris vu par....

Oh! I'm surprised that you know about that. Well the way that we worked together was one step above Cassavetes. The film that we made together, we didn't know what I was about to see. I didn't know anything about the scenario and when I walked on the scene everything was ready for me and I had no direction from anybody. I was directed by the events, just like in a documentary. I don't know that anybody's ever done that again. But if you know any young filmmakers looking to make a film, I'd say to give that a shot--it sure made for interesting stuff. That same year, 1965, my brother and I were approached by Orson Welles and spent a whole week with him in Madrid, going to bullfights and such. And during that time he said in sort of an offhand way that we should make a film together. So my brother and I filmed him talking about the projects that we should make. It would have been very similar to Godard, those two guys were very similar that way--he said he wanted to write a script and then to throw it away.

And here's a nice quote from Albert Maysles from another recent interview:

AM: Orson Welles put it beautifully. Someone gave me his quote recently. “The camera person should have an eye behind the camera that is the eye of a poet.” He’s not talking about lighting, he’s not talking about the size of the negative.

[R Kadin]

Tony - It seems Ms Kael might have been a serial mauler. Here's Michael Moore reminiscing about her treatment of his first theatrical release, Roger and Me:

...What was so incredibly appalling and shocking is how she printed outright lies about my movie. I had never experienced such a brazen, bald-faced barage (sic) of disinformation. She tried to rewrite history, saying that Flint had not lost 30,000 General Motors jobs, that it was only -- only! -- 10,000! She wrote that I had rearranged the chronology, that places like AutoWorld were built before the GM layoffs. She wrote that a few things in the film never happened, like the cash register being stolen when Reagan visited a restaurant in Flint.

Her complete fabrication of the facts was so weird, so out there, so obviously made-up, that my first response was this must be a humor piece she had written. A quick check of even a pro-General Motors publication like The Flint Journal (12/31/89) would confirm to anyone that the correct figure of jobs eliminated in Flint in the 1980's was indeed 30,000 (another 25,000 people have been sacked since I made the film).

But, of course, she wasn't writing comedy. She was a deadly serious historical revisionist. What was even more shocking was how some journalists picked up on her "facts" and reprinted them verbatim, without once lifting a finger to look up the correct number in the local Flint newspaper.

He then excuses her somewhat by surmising that she must have fallen victim to GM's aggressive and allegedly fact-based counter-campaign. With Welles, the Maysles and Moore as four notches on Ms Kael's smoking pen, perhaps such soft treatment is less than warranted.

[Tony]

Thanks for that, RK; what is really distressing of course is that Welles was trying to get financing for TOSOTW just as Higham came out with his pseudo-Freud about Welles's "fear of completion" in 1970, Kael went for the jugular with the Kane authorship question in 1971, and Housman put the icing on the cake with "Run Through" in 1972.

Possible financiers at the time could ruminate on these three texts and Welles's apparent inability to finish a movie (look at all those unfinished pictures!), his lying about being the author of Kane (as it was really a studio picture whose real author was Mankowitz) and his ability to be a violent egomaniac capable of throwing sterno cans aflame at business partners (as he did, once, at Housman) and ask themselves if they did indeed want to get involved with this maniac.

It's no wonder he never got the money to finish a dramatic film again after the publication of those three books.


I remember him saying "I'm just a poor slob trying to make movies".

[Store Hadji]

That's an ironic quote by Moore...it sounds exactly like what people say about him and his films these days.

What people? Those on the other side of whatever fence Moore has decided to call attention to.

[Tony]

Store: Let's keep this about Welles and Kael, and that time period for Welles career, and not derail to a political thing, please. If we go political, Jeff will lock it, I'm afraid.

thanks!

[Store Hadji]

I wasn't being political. It's just an ironic quote.

[Tony]

Store: without getting political, how do you see Moore as being ironic in that quote? It seems dead straight to me, a direct complaint about being unfairly attacked by Kael who was known for corrupting the truth in order to get readers: Welles was only the most notorious victim of this, and the Maysles brothers and Moore are merely other victims.

I honestly don't see the irony, unless you are being rhetorical...

[Store Hadji]

The irony is that what Moore said is almost word-for-word what people say about Moore's own work.

[Store Hadji]

Anyway, to get back on topic, here's the text from the aformentioned short Maysles Brothers film, WELLES MADRID JUIN 1966:

Welles: It goes without saying that to be a bullfighter takes guts. And skill. Because if a fighting bull can kill a tiger, an elephant, then obviously it can kill a man. And very easily. But he doesn't do it often or there wouldn't be bullfights, because of course bullfights aren't a, a form of sport, they're a tragedy. A bullfight is a tragedy in three acts, and these noble creatures [gestures to bulls in pen], who are waiting for their death this afternoon, are the heroes of that tragedy. The tragedy of the bullfight, of course, is based on the innocence of this creature. Well, of course, his innocence, his perfect virginity, is the basis of the tragedy of the bullfight.

But I think I should emphasize, now, that the picture we're going to make is not the story of a bull or the story of a bullfighter. It has this world, this world of brave fighting bulls and, uh, bullfighters as its background. Or rather as its scenery. For our story is really the story of people who follow bullfights, the kind of people who live off bullfights, economically and also emotionally, because there's now a whole new generation of, uh, foreigners as well as Spaniards who spend the entire summer going from country fair to country fair following these, uh, these corridas in big bull rings like this one and in very small ones in the country. But our story is about a special group of these, the richest and smartest and chicest, the jet-set ones, and it has to do with a kind of voyeurism, a kind of, well I don't know, I'd call it emotional parasitism. And it has to do with the whole mystique, not of the bull, about which we read so much, perhaps too much, but the whole mystique of the, uh, the He-Man.

This picture we're gonna make is, uh, against He-Men. The people who go to bullfights, not occasionally as tourists do, but who are passionately addicted to it, those afficionados...that, uh, part of the afficionados who have the Hemingway mystique, oh, who got hooked through Hemingway...and our story is about a psuedo-Hemingway. A movie director who belongs to that, uh, well that, that, that league which in, in Spain they call the Macho. That means very masculine. Mooie macho, with a lot of hair on the chest, you see? So the, so the central figure in this story is the fellow with, you know, you can hardly see through the bush of the hair on his chest. And, uh, you know, he was frightened by Hemingway at birth, and this fellow, ah, uh, he's a tough movie director who has killed three or four extras in every picture. Whatever the picture is, it's his pride that three or four of 'em died. That's, you know, that's his stuff.

Full of charm, full of charm...everyone thinks he's great. So in our story, he's riding around, following a bullfighter and living through him. You know, he's become that lovely young fellow in th-...in, in, in, in, in the beautiful costume and that fellow's danger is his danger, that fellow's success is his, and so on. But he's become obsessed by this young man who has become in a way his own dream of himself. He's been rejected by all his old friends. He's finally been shown up to be a kind of voyeur, a peeker [?], a second-hand guy, a fellow who lives off other people's danger and death.

And then of course the way we're going to shoot it, we're going to shoot it without a script. I've written a script. I know the whole story. I know everything that happens. What I'm going to do is get the actors, in every situation, tell them what has happened up to this moment, who they are, and I believe that they will find what is true and inevitable from what I've said. We'll photograph that and go on to the next moment. We're gonna make the picture as though it were a documentary. The actors are gonna be improvising. You either get it or you don't, you know, it's uh...it can't take too long. I, I, I think the whole thing is eight weeks at the most. 'Cause it's got to be just that time - the time it really took.

Nobody's ever done it before, you know. There isn't, no, why, why do, you know, I've, I've improvised a scene with an actor or something, but to take a story like this and see if it'll work - all I know is how it ends and how it begins. I really know what I would make if I were photographing it and giving them page by page, but I'm gonna hide the script. I don't want them to know that. Because I think if the actors are right - and they have to be people of a certain kind of substance, 'cause they have to be actors used to being People, 'cause it's all about important people, people who are images, you know, a terrible word...all that - so we get those kind of actors together and say "here's the situation, here's what you did yesterday, here's what you did twenty years ago, here's what you think about him"...start shooting!

Because we've been cranking along in movies too long the same way, you know. It's the most old-fashioned business on Earth. It's a wonderful medium, but nobody's done anything new in it. And they're beginning to now, in France and so on, but they take a basic situation and they let, you know, there's a certain kind of freedom [he actually says "freeple" and rubs his eye], but I would like to take a whole story, give 'em group of people and see what happens within that. And what I've got is a very nice, solid, framework, which is a temporada, you know, the ferriers [?] and all that, and see what goes on.

The greatest things in movies are divine accidents. Sometimes I've had those accidents. You know, I made a picture in which somebody reached through a window in Touch of Evil and found the egg, the yolk of an egg, that uh, uh, uh, ah, a pigeon had dropped. And we made a whole scene about it, you know. You can do those kind of things, and then control them - but I want to go further. I want to find out what skilled, intelligent people - actors - can really do, being themselves - acting.

Question: And aren't you afraid, though, that the end result won't have any control and any form? I could -

Welles: Not a bit. No, I really am not. Not with all that going around it. Not with a, not with a firm line of, uh, of, uh, if you see, if you see a man on his way to death...and you must have known people like that...I don't mean on his way to death by reason of, ah, of fatal disease, but on his way to death truly. You see that man, you see how people will rea-...I think, I think, you may have many choices about how it will happen, but that end is as clear as anything in the world. What people have decided on their death, they've got it. And there's a terrible pull toward it. And you've got two people. And you've got and this is, uh, uh this is a picture about the love of death.

So we have a picture about those people who watch a bullfight, following one bullfighter or another. What are they doing? Are they waiting for his death? Are they waiting for him to rise into Heaven like a Saint? What strange instincts are motivating these people? Those people, who are light-headed and nonsensical and seriously evil, is living off, off of the idea of death.

So we have a picture about the people who live off bullfighting because they want money, and the people who live off bullfighting for emotional reasons, because they are living second-hand. They are experiencing life and death and sex in a second-hand way. And those people are our cast.

[Store Hadji]

Sacred Beasts would ultimately morph into TOSOTW, keeping the director and his obsession, but dumping the bullfighting scenery.

Did Welles keep the improvisational nature of the scenes? Did his actors NOT read the script? If so, then what resemblance does the published version of the screenplay bear to what was actually shot? Do the few scenes available (Jake's birthday party, Billy screens the rough cut) appear in the screenplay exactly as shot? Might the published screenplay actually be cutting continuity?

I've only seen a few snippets of TOSOTW and haven't seen any version of the screenplay...

[Tony]

Thanks for the transcript; a few years ago, that little film was on the internet, and I downloaded it, but lost it when I upgraded my system. Do you know if it's still on the internet?

As for the script, it was on sale about 2 days ago, complete with photos, and went for about 50 bucks on eBay.