The documentary diaries: Working experiences of a non-fiction filmmaker 9781784997571

Citation preview

The documentary diaries

For Tirtza once again with love and for Shaun Miller my wonderful Australian friend who has provided me with so much help, support and encouragement over so many years

The documentary diaries Working experiences of a non-fiction filmmaker

Alan Rosenthal

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Alan Rosenthal 2016 The right of Alan Rosenthal to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 1 7849 9302 3 hardback First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Frances Hackeson Freelance Publishing Services, Brinscall, Lancs Printed by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

Contents List of figures List of tables Introduction

page vi viii 1



1 Learning the ropes



2 Married to the Marimba

23

Production notes: budgets

43



3 Stalin’s Last Purge

Production notes: writing narration

4 Inspiration



5 Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs

Production notes: the production contract

6 The Brink of Peace

Production notes: writing the proposal

8

56 85 95 111 139 143 173



7 The First Fagin

180



8 Pitch perfect

214



9 Beyond the Velvet Curtain

223

10 Best advice

241

11 Hopes and Dreams

253

Production notes: the family film

265

Appendix: production details

271

Index

273

Figures (All images belong to the author, unless otherwise stated.)

1 The author (photo: Tal Rosenthal)



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



3 The author filming a commercial (photo: Richard Nowitz) 22



4 Alex Jacobowitz performing in the street (Married to the Marimba) © Alex Jacobowitz

26

5 Alex Jacobowitz performing for children (Married to the Marimba) © Alex Jacobowitz

41



6 Alex Jacobowitz in performance (Married to the Marimba) © Alex Jacobowitz

42



7 Poster for Stalin’s Last Purge

62



8 Solomon Mikhoels in Stalin’s Last Purge 64



9 Solomon Mikhoels and Itzik Feffer in Stalin’s Last Purge



6 13

65

10 Abe Osheroff and his wife Gunnel Clark (courtesy of the Abe Osheroff homepage, www.abeosheroff.org)

97

11 George C. Stoney (photo: Philip Pocock)

99

12 Antony Thomas © Antony Thomas

102

13 Antony Thomas filming Death of a Princess © Antony Thomas 104 14 Scene from Death of a Princess © Antony Thomas

105

15 DVD cover art for Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs 112 16 Adolf Eichmann in SS uniform (Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs) 113 17 Adolf Eichmann in a glass cage at the trial (Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs) 114

Figures

18 Filming Abba Eban (The Brink of Peace) 144 19 Abba Eban, King Hussein, Elia Sides, and the author (The Brink of Peace) 151 20 Camera operator Yoram Milo in Oslo (The Brink of Peace) 154 21 Applying make-up to President Mubarak (The Brink of Peace) 155 22 Crew in front of pyramids (The Brink of Peace) 162 23 Poster for The First Fagin

181

24 Pub scene (The First Fagin) 205 25 Ikey (Ryk Goddard) and Ann (Carrie McLean) in The First Fagin

206

26 Ikey (Ryk Goddard) in the penal colony (The First Fagin) 207 27 The author and his wife, Tirtza, as extras in The First Fagin 210 28 The crew at work (The First Fagin) 211 29 Oslo Opera House © Siljia91 / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-S-3.0 228 30 Two-page proposal for Beyond the Velvet Curtain (page one) 239 31 Two-page proposal for Beyond the Velvet Curtain (page two) 240 32 Debby Elnatan, inventor of the Upsee harness © Debby Elnatan 254 33 Rotem Elnatan (Hopes and Dreams) © Debby Elnatan

261

34 The Elnatan family (left to right): Shachar, Zohar, Rotem, Inbar, and Debby (Hopes and Dreams) © Debby Elnatan

263

vii

Tables

1 Budget for a one-hour video documentary The Brink of Peace

49



2 Outline budget for a fifty-two-minute video Married to the Marimba

53

3 Outline budget for a ten-minute supermarket publicrelations video

55



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

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The documentary diaries

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

Introduction

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

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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

Introduction

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

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1  The author.

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. 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

Introduction

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.

7

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

Learning the ropes

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.

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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 1

2

To be fair, I’m told that Stanford now runs one of the best documentary courses in the country, with all the latest mod con equipment. And its graduates have reached the top, and include the originator of The Sopranos. For a fuller discussion of relations with Shirley and George, see Chapter 4.

Learning the ropes

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

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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

Learning the ropes

2

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

the insanity but fun of my year and half with Israel TV in Jerusalem, Take One!3 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

3 Alan Rosenthal. Jerusalem, Take One! Memoirs of a Jewish Filmmaker (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).

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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

Learning the ropes

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 his photographer and editor. A Married Couple can be considered the inspiration for series like An American Family, but has never been given its due. I also looked at the director–editor relationship in two other films, Salesman and What Harvest for the Reaper. Gradually it became clear to me that, at least in cinéma vérité films, which were then the rage, the director often had only a vague idea of the film’s backbone, and many a time had to leave it to the editor to find the central theme and story of the film. The lesson here for me, which has continued to this day, is that the main work in documentary is thinking about where you’re going and what you want to do before you ever start shooting. Two other key lessons emerged for me from the interviews, the first of which actually follows on from what I wrote in the last paragraph. This was an approach, taught to me by Arthur Barron, which came out of our discussion of his film The Berkeley Rebels. ­Arthur insisted on the necessity for deep research and really getting to know your subject, and then writing a detailed note on the form and shape of the film you were aiming for. Arthur was then working for CBS, but though the notes were for his producer, he told me their main function was to help him clear his own head. The second additional lesson had to do with script writing. This is a subject normally fudged or dodged in most documentary courses, particularly when they follow the path of cinéma vérité. In this case my learning experience came when I talked to Antony Jay, a British scriptwriter whose major fame now rests on co-writing Yes, Prime Minister. Over tea in his west London house Antony told me how he came to write the narration for Richard Cawston’s film The Royal Family, about a year in the life of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. His words are worth quoting: In regard to shape I came to a simple conclusion. One of them was that people enjoy a story, a story that moves forward in a natural progression. An essay is fine, but it is very hard to sustain in television terms for more than thirty minutes. If you’re going over the edge of thirty minutes, you want a story about somebody. In other words you can talk generally about the reformation, but if you have a fifty minute program, you want to do the story of Luther’s life …

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  Another problem was that the film was never intended to be a sort of ‘keyhole’ on the Queen’s life. We wanted it to be a ‘theme’ program, but I thought that the themes could be brought in by the way, subservient as it were to the narrative commentary. In other words, you accepted the fact that you were primarily telling a story, but you also knew you were free to weave in the historical background or the theory of monarchy if the points seemed important and suitable openings occurred.4

Actually I stayed a whole afternoon with Antony, who talked to me generally about the whole art of writing narration. I felt like I was experiencing a terrific seminar being given by a script-writing master, all in the space of an hour. Keep your sentences short. Use adjectives and power verbs. Decide what’s best, first- or third-person narration. Remember that first-person narration allows you much greater freedom in expressing emotions. Always remember, you’re writing for the ear, not for the page, and not for a learned philosophical magazine. And never underrate your audience. Some people will know all about your subject. Some will know nothing. Try and find the happy middle, so that you get the information over to those who know very little, but don’t insult the intelligence of those with more knowledge. With half the interviews under my belt I sent the book proposal off to the University of California Press. To my astonishment, their main film editor Chick Callenbach sent me a contract within a week. It was absolute beginner’s luck. My relationship with the press went well, so that a few years later I suggested a follow-up book to Chick, with a slightly different angle. The first book, The New Documentary in Action, had looked at how films are made, in a fairly simple and straightforward way. In my second book, The Documentary Conscience, I wanted to get deeper inside the heads of the filmmakers. Changes were in the air. Equipment was becoming cheaper. Everybody felt they could be filmmakers. We were coming into the era of radical and political filmmaking. Feminist films were bursting out. And revealing and probing the innermost secrets of one’s family had become very popular. All this being so, the thrust of the new book became why did you make this film, and how do you think your films are going to change society? 4 Alan Rosenthal, The New Documentary in Action (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), p. 211.

Learning the ropes

Of all the filmmakers I now interviewed, one man in particular interested me above all the others. This was a Jewish filmmaker called Robert Vas, who had fled to England from Budapest after the Hungarian uprisings of 1956. Robert had made films about his homeland Hungary, the Soviet massacre of Polish officers at Katyn forest in 1940, Arthur Koestler, the legacy of Hiroshima, and the 1926 General Strike in England. The key to all Robert’s work was his moral fervour. Concern, commitment, passion – these were the words he used over and over again, and which guided him. Plus compassionate understanding, which was the force that bound everything together. We met one afternoon at the BBC, where we had coffee together and I explained what I wanted to do. Afterwards I gave him a copy of my earlier book, The New Documentary in Action. When I next met him I expected words of praise, but instead I got a deep scowl and quite a lot of scorn. In essence Robert said I had wasted my time writing about what he called superficial and worthless films like The Royal Family. ‘Who cares about the monarchy,’ he said, ‘it’s doomed for the rubbish heap. You should be writing about films that matter, films that really concern people, films that move people. Films that deal with reality, not films that tell us about fantasy lives.’ Well I was quite taken back, but his words went on resonating with me for days after. Eventually I interviewed Robert in his home in East Finchley, London, close to where I lived. For some reason we didn’t start talking till about 11pm, yet it turned out to be one of the strangest but best interviews I’d ever done. I started off with straight questions such as where was Robert born, and how did he get into film, etc., but soon put all that aside. Instead as Robert poured the cognac, and he poured a lot, we abandoned question and answer and went into a freeform discussion that covered everything from Nazism, to Soviet politics, to being an immigrant in Britain, and life as a freelance. What interested me was his take on the BBC: When I first started working in England the BBC was very open to new ideas and to the possibility of breaking in. It needed new people. Today this is much less so. When I came in there was a need for people with a personal eye making personal statements in visual terms in ‘one-off’ films. And this kind of thing is now almost a dead species in documentary … Everything now is large series – where one’s whole approach has to fit the style of a series by Alistair

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Cooke or Bronowski. Here the filmmaker merely provides visual backing material for these people and their ideas. That’s what so sad at the present time. In the past you knew that if you were only able to formulate a small segment of the truth it didn’t matter that much. Because what you didn’t say, other filmmakers would say. In the atmosphere then it was almost like being on the front line. There was discussion, action. And it was marvelous if someone could make a film better than you could, because there was a possibility to follow that up and outdo it. In Hungary before 1956 four people would sit down behind a coffee table, and it would be inevitable that they would emerge with an enthusiastic resolution. ‘We must make a film about our story. We must tell it all.’ I loved that atmosphere, and I cherished it … and I found it again briefly in England.5

I found the evening with Robert absolutely inspirational. His passion and his personal feelings fired me in a way which no one else had done before. I felt I had made a true friend, and looked forward to months, to years, of his company. Unfortunately that was not to be, as Robert died tragically of a sudden illness only a few months later. Robert taught me many things about film, but essentially he taught me about bearing witness. He taught me that the filmmaker is one who says ‘This is our world. See its joys and be happy. But also see its sorrows and learn from it, and don’t say that no one ever told you what the world was like.’ That evening, Robert put it to me this way. ‘I’ve brought with me a great many things to talk about. This baggage, this message which nobody ever asked me to talk about, is absolutely central to me. And I must talk about it to audiences that never experienced these things directly.’ Working on my two interview books, and the resultant meetings with so many fine filmmakers, changed the way I looked at documentary. Not only did I now feel more confident in handling the documentary vehicle, but I knew more about where I wanted to go, and what direction I wanted to pursue. So I felt my education was progressing. But I still felt I lacked a real immersion in film, that I had made too few films to be able to say I could really handle my craft. That all 5 Alan Rosenthal, The Documentary Conscience (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), p. 267.

Learning the ropes

changed when I went back to Jerusalem after lecturing for two years in Toronto, and decided to devote myself to filmmaking, with a little bit of university teaching on the side. Now when I had worked in Jerusalem a few years before, I had been on the staff of the TV company. In that situation I never had to worry about budgets, and provided I had a good idea I could just go out and make the film. Coming back as a freelancer was very different, with the work conditions much more difficult and confining. Yet looking back, it’s clear to me that these very limitations taught me lessons that were absent when I worked as a pampered member of the regular TV community. The way a freelancer worked was fairly simple. At that time Israel only had one TV station. Although it preferred to make all its films with tenured staff, by the time I came back from Toronto it had begun to contract films out to private companies. These companies in turn then contracted out the writing and directing to freelancers, and it was at this last stage that I entered the game. Since I was a founding father of the TV, so to speak,6 the work was fairly easy to come by, and I quickly became the house writer-director to a Jerusalem film company. However, I soon discovered the most appalling restrictions applied. For the permanent staff of Israel TV, neither time nor materials mattered very much. One could take between three and six months making a half-hour film, and not too many questions would be asked. Nine months on a film was not unusual, and one friend of mine boasted that quality demanded that he do no more than one film a year. The point is, no matter how long the film took to make, the TV paid a fairly good salary to the staffer once a month. Working as a freelancer, you saw the other side of the coin. We were told the station was broke, and the TV could only afford a pittance for our films. Thus – regrettably – time, money, and materials all had to be restricted. At that time, the total budget for a half hour freelance film was somewhere between four thousand and five thousand dollars. For such a film you were allowed three days research, three days for filming, and, with luck and a lot of pressure, eight or nine days for editing. You also had to shoot on a ratio of four to one. As often as not the research was done by the writer-director without any backup, and 6 This year is described in full in Rosenthal, Jerusalem, Take One!

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the production help was minimal. You never went out with a production assistant, and to have a production manager was to ask for the moon. In telling how he made the film Cast a Giant Shadow in Israel, director Mel Shavelson says that he met his first-time actors at 9a.m. and by noon they had already formed a union and were demanding higher pay. Hearing the story, I envied the actors. Unions didn’t exist in documentary work, and private production companies took full advantage of that fact. Thus an average shooting day would run to some thirteen or fourteen hours. Why didn’t we complain? Because it was a classic buyer’s market with everyone dying to get into the industry, no matter how lousy the conditions. You didn’t want to direct? Fine. There was always another director waiting outside the door. I also refrained from complaining because I was absorbing a tremendous amount. I was doing about five films a year, going everywhere and shooting everything. I shot films about the kibbutzim, about the deserts, about paper mills, about the Bedouin, about music, and even did a film on underwater archaeology. So I was filming in a tremendous variety of situations, and learning to deal with and speak to people from all sorts of backgrounds. For instance, if I was doing an interview with an ordinary townsperson I could simply meet him or her and ask questions. If I was interviewing a Bedouin Arab I had to go through a half hour ceremony of tea drinking, coffee drinking, and more tea drinking, and asking about family and children before I could l get down to business. Above all I was learning how to put a film together under tremendous pressure. As I mentioned above, we had few shooting days, a ridiculously inadequate amount of footage, and hardly any editing time. What was the result? First you learned to shoot at incredible speed. You learned how to come into a room, size up the situation, and how to cover everything very quickly with the two or three best camera angles. And all the time you shot you were thinking, ‘How will this edit?’ You also learned how to get to the essence of an interview very fast. Believe me, I envied the cinéma vérité filmmakers who could shoot for an hour to get two pearls of wisdom. We couldn’t do that. We had to get to the point immediately. I also attended most of the editing sessions. I wanted to see whether my jump-in, grab-it-quickly method of shooting worked. And from these intense editing sessions I also came away with a new perspective.

Learning the ropes

I watched how the editors worked, stored up their wisdom, so that if the necessity arose I could edit my own films. Well, of course, the result of all these pressures was that I made a lot of awful films, alongside the occasional good one. But that was par for the course. It couldn’t have been otherwise given the conditions we worked under. Yet the end result was positive. After four years of this kind of work I thought I could call myself a relatively efficient and reliable filmmaker. If you wanted a film made, I could do it, without kicking up too much fuss. One other thing happened during this period, which paved the way to the future. I set up a media company with a friend, and started to make films for the American market. Our reasoning was that there was a lot of interest in Jerusalem, both political and religious. Maybe Larry, my partner, who lived in New York, could raise funds in America, while I could be the expert in Israel. The venture worked, and we were soon doing company and religious films for all sorts of American clients, from Southern Baptists to Chicago charities and US tobacco companies. The learning curve here centered on how to deal with filmmaking as a business. How to manage budgets, so that your expenses didn’t run away. How to run an efficient office. How to deal with difficult clients, and how to sell yourself as the best. As I’ve written about this business side of things elsewhere,7 I won’t dwell on it here except to say one thing. These days most film schools do a pretty good job of teaching the basics of documentary filmmaking. What they don’t, and maybe cannot, teach you, is what filmmaking is like in the real world, and how you can earn a living once you leave the campus nest. It’s a pity, because such knowledge is vital for survival. As I wrote at the beginning of this chapter, I became a documentary filmmaker purely by accident. Now maybe the time has come to say it’s been immense fun, and I wouldn’t swap this job for anything. It’s always a work in progress. Tomorrow is always a challenge and you are always learning. What do I look for now? How to break boundaries, how to go beyond the margins of conventional documentary. Every year I’m astonished by changes. Once it was films such as Tongues Untied by 7 Alan Rosenthal, Succeeding as a Documentary Filmmaker: A Guide to the Professional World (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011).

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Marlon Riggs that opened my eyes. Now it’s the music documentaries of the British filmmaker Brian Hill that astonish me, or animation documentaries such as Waltz with Bashir. So I look and learn, and understand that the apprenticeship never ends.

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The author filming a commercial.

2 Married to the Marimba I used to think of myself as the intrepid explorer. I’d go out and hunt for documentary ideas with all the courage and determination of Captain Scott heading for the South Pole, or Neil Armstrong heading for the moon. Then it struck me that I needed my head examining. These bold men and true knew exactly where they were going. Their difficulty was getting there. But as a documentary filmmaker the whole problem was to find out where I wanted to go. I had no destination in mind. So then I changed tack. I dedicated my search for film ideas to sources that would stimulate my creative juices. It required strict discipline. Up at dawn. An ice cold bath. (Just joking!) A quick run. Then scour the newspaper for possible subjects. Kentucky miners’ strike? Not for me, as I’ve never fancied going down mines. Hollywood brothels? No good as I lived in Europe. Penguins dancing across the snow? Interesting, but who are you going to talk to as you make the film? Why hadn’t I understood that you don’t choose documentary subjects, they choose you? There you are, sneaking along in your usual doze when the sly bastard of an idea comes up from behind and bashes you behind the ear. Then in case you’ve missed the point, it whams you again behind the other ear for good luck. Such was the case with Married to the Marimba. This time the lightning struck in Munich where I was giving some workshops at a local film school. Its atmosphere was attractive but strange. Empty beer bottles littered the halls; the students were often away at political rallies, and those that actually turned up to classes looked like Dior models or refugees from the Gulag; I was also told that the head of documentaries ran a travel business, so one only saw him at the beginning and end of term. In short the place was joyfully anarchic, but turned out some good filmmakers. Though I met students on Saturdays, I had Sundays off and used the day to explore Munich. It is an attractive city, with elegant shops

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and many great beer gardens. That it was Hitler’s jumping-off point is gracefully concealed, and who can blame them. Anyway, wandering along on one blissful blue-skied Sunday morning, I stumbled across a pedestrian mall devoted to street performers. They were there in their dozens, in all shapes and sizes. All were exhibiting different skills to induce the good natured passerby to dig into his or her pocket and contribute to the performer’s well-being and alcohol content. There were the usual three-chord British rock guitarists. Also the ever present Peruvian musicians, stifling under colorful ponchos in an eighty degree heat wave, and singing out that they’d rather be a hammer than a nail. (Better them than me!) A Michael Jackson lookalike was also trying to avoid killing himself as he did a particularly difficult breakdance that involved spinning on his head for five minutes. If he could only have done that standing up, I thought, he could have joined the Royal Ballet. Further down the mall two Russian accordionists wearing generals’ uniforms were belting out ‘Kalinka’, while twelve green-skirted, red-bonneted maidens from the Volga did accompanying folk dances. Altogether the mall could have served as a unique poster for United Nations harmony. As I proceeded down the mall, tossing a euro here and there, my eye was suddenly caught by a large crowd at the end of the street. By the sound of the applause something special was taking place. I couldn’t see what was going on but I could hear strains of Beethoven, and Mozart being played on some wild instrument that I couldn’t immediately identify. Eventually I made my way through the mass of people to be greeted by a rather unusual sight. In the middle of a half circle of smiling music lovers stood a lone figure, his back to me, confronting what looked like a 10 foot long xylophone, or marimba. After hushing the crowd he seemed to caress the instrument with his body, and take energy from the onlookers. Soon a superb rendering of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue was drifting across the mall, the notes wafting up to embrace the spires of the local church. In conclusion the performer bowed to the crowd, which was clapping away enthusiastically, and for the first time I got a good look at him. The performer was 6 foot tall, slim, with a full head of dark hair. He was wearing a black suit and tie. So far so good. However, on his head was a black kippa, or skull cap, while two strands of hair, usually

Married to the Marimba

known as peyas, had been allowed to grow long and were wrapped around his ears. To complete the picture a full curly beard framed a very handsome and mischievous face. Head covering! Peyas! Beard. Black suit. Unbelievable as it may seem my performer seemed to be a full blooded, ultra-religious orthodox Jew. Now to many people, seeing a very demonstrably religious Jew playing a xylophone on the streets of Germany may seem like an everyday occurrence. Something not to be commented on, but to be accepted as a fact of life, rather like taxes always rising. But for me the shock was enormous, equivalent to a Roman Catholic being slightly surprised to see the Pope dancing a tango down Broadway. To wind up his act the performer played Mozart’s ‘Rondo alla Turca.’ This is a very lively piece, and if you’ve ever learned piano you probably played it to your aunts’ admiration on your tenth birthday. If it’s tricky to play at speed on the piano, then it needs sheer devilry to bring it off on a xylophone. Undaunted, the hammers raced across the keys as we were treated to a performance of which the great Mozart himself would have approved. For its part the audience showed its appreciation by throwing handfuls of coins and notes into the performer’s bucket. Financially he was obviously the most successful musician in the mall. The performer had placed a few biographical notes on a music stand. When I was able to read them, I received another shock. The xylophonist lived in Jerusalem … my own home town – and played percussion in the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. Concluding this was all arranged by God, I introduced myself to the performer and invited him for a beer the following day. He agreed, then hurried off to wrap up his act. The last I saw of him that day was him wheeling his marimba along the street, a bucket of coins dangling from a hook, before he loaded his monster into a red van. And so, purely by chance, Alex Jacobowitz entered my life and the seeds were planted for the ten years evolution of Married to the Marimba. Alex didn’t strike me immediately as a subject for a film. That conclusion only hit me after we had breakfast and got to know a little about each other. When we met he seemed almost a different person. This time he was wearing a vivid yellow T-shirt, blue jacket and sported a Stetson. The image of the devoted Jew seemed to have been replaced by that

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4  Alex Jacobowitz performing in the street.

of the Mississippi gambler. As I got to know him better I would realize that Alex was a man who could play many parts. Over coffee and hot croissants I explained to Alex who I was, an English filmmaker working in Munich. I liked street music and was fascinated by the level of his professionalism as opposed to many of the other street musicians. I was also working in Jerusalem and had thought it might be fun for us two Jerusalemites to meet and swap stories. But Alex’s were infinitely more interesting than mine. He was an American, born in Binghampton, New York, and had studied music in Fredonia College, a name etched into fame by the films of Groucho Marx. At Fredonia he had taken the art of percussion very seriously. Though an excellent drummer he had suddenly fallen in love with the xylophone, or to use an African term, the marimba. Pop music was not for him. Mozart, Bach and Beethoven were his gods, and his dream was to be the world’s best marimba player, celebrated from New York to Moscow. While continuing his studies in Manhattan a friend from Juilliard had suggested that there was easy money to be had playing on the

Married to the Marimba

streets of the Big Apple. No slouch, Alex had dived in and found that he had a great knack for drawing crowds. At this point I asked Alex roughly how much he earned per week on the streets of Munich. The answer astonished me, and I almost decided on the spot to give up filmmaking. Some time in the mid-eighties Alex decided to take a year off in Israel. While there he worked on a kibbutz and also found a place as a percussionist in the highly regarded Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. More importantly, like many visitors to Israel, he found God and decided to become an observant Jew. Alex also decided to get married to an old girlfriend. He then smiled at me. ‘Know how many kids I’ve got?’ I shrugged, and hazarded a guess. ‘Two, three … ?’ ‘I’ve got seven.’ My questions then began to multiply. Seven kids? Where do they live? How old are they? How does he care for them when he’s away? Gradually the strange framework of Alex’s life began to take shape. For half of each year he lived in a small village close to Jerusalem. Much of that time he studied in a yeshivah, a religious seminary dedicated to learning and analyzing Jewish texts such as the Mishnah and Talmud. On Fridays he would take his children to the kotel, the ancient wall of the Second Temple and pray with them there till the Sabbath came in. The other half of the year he would say goodbye to wife and kids, and fly to Europe. There he would hire a marimba, and play on the streets of Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Berlin and Munich. Occasionally he would also venture further afield to perform in music festivals in Kraków and Copenhagen. During this time a van became his home, other street performers and musicians his friends, and the world his oyster. As he was quick to tell me, he’d also become a media personality. He’d been featured on various TV shows in Germany and on radio shows in Switzerland. He’d recorded for Sony records, and sold his cassettes along with each performance. Finally, although still not forty, he’d written a book of memoirs (in German) which, if I liked, he could show me in the local bookstore. All this intrigued me. On the one hand I sensed Alex was inclined to exaggeration. He made his living by selling himself and his personality to his audience, and the more extravagant he appeared the better for the receipts. And yet obviously there was a basis of truth to

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most of his stories. Could it be I had a film subject here? I hinted as much to him, and we agreed to meet in Jerusalem and talk further. Why did I think the story of Alex might make a good documentary film? Firstly he was a dynamic and charismatic personality. He struck me as one of those people who would be very engaging on TV. He also had a very interesting history, and I believed people would want to hear it. The scope of his travels would make for fascinating photography. Beyond all this he could open up a secret world for us: one of my main criteria for a good film. Through Alex we could penetrate the world of the street performer, seeing how he or she thought, lived, planned and survived in different environments. Finally I thought Alex was a truly excellent musician whose performances people would really enjoy seeing on the screen. All this I relayed to Alex, who lapped it up joyfully. People had made small TV segments about him, but a full-scale film … well that was different. However I warned Alex this wouldn’t be a PR film, but beyond the music we might want to explore some deeper issues with him. I also told him I would welcome his suggestions but in the end I’d make the film as I saw best. He was a bit dubious about this but finally agreed. But first he wanted to explore my credentials a bit more. I faxed them to him, and he seemed satisfied. Finally there was the question of money, and ownership of the film. Would we pay him for participating? No! But if he helped raise money for the film, I told him he could then share in the profits, if and when they ever came. Would he be able to sell DVDs of the film at his performances? Probably yes! So we went on back and forth, Alex never totally satisfied with the arrangements. I didn’t blame him, but I had no money and wasn’t going to make promises I could no way keep. A few things were clear to me from the beginning. This would be a very low budget film, not necessarily a bad thing. Low budget because I didn’t think we needed much to produce it. My last few films had used a terrific amount of archive material, and the expenses had been horrifying. Here we could shoot with a very small crew, use the new semi-professional mini cassette cameras, plan for a few trips abroad, and keep our expenses to the minimum. Secondly I knew I wanted a partner. One who could be jack-ofall-trades. Someone who could shoot, record, write, edit, and help problem solve. Also someone with whom I could drink and share

Married to the Marimba

a few jokes. I was temporarily fed up with the lone wolf approach to filmmaking, and thought it might be fun to share the joys and delights, and the inevitable sorrows and heartache. OK, I know I’m piling it on, but I did think if I had a good competent co-director and co-producer this kind of film might be more fun to do. So I asked Larry to join me on this ride into the unknown. Larry was an old friend and we’d worked on many films together. He was reliable, resourceful, funny, and technically miles ahead of me. He was a mover and a pusher, and got things done. However, we rarely agreed on how to approach a film, and this could be both stimulating and tremendously infuriating. Unfortunately in Married to the Marimba it was often the latter. Larry liked the idea of the film and we sat down to plan things and to see what the film was really about. ‘OK,’ he said ‘according to what you say we’re dealing with a crazy hippy musician. Where do we go from there?’ After remonstrating that Alex wasn’t crazy and wasn’t hippy, we started shooting ideas at each other. The main lines were very clear. We wanted to show the trials and tribulations of an itinerant street performer, and demonstrate his survival methods. But I was sure there had been many films exploring that subject. What else could we look at that would add depth and dimension to the film? The two answers were fairly obvious. We would see how he maintained family relationships at a distance, and we would investigate what it was like to be an obvious Jew performing in public in Germany, where the Holocaust still cast so many shadows. When we started the film Alex had seven children. By the time we finished he had two more children. Personally I couldn’t understand how he could part from them for six to eight months a year and maintain any semblance of family life. Well maybe Alex would show me how, and put my doubts to rest. It was a subject worth exploring. For Larry, the vital question was location and identity. How could Alex, as a very distinct Jew, face the sons and grandchildren of possible Nazis day-in, day-out, in order to earn a living? So we had three key topics. And there was one other basic element I kept coming back to. Above all this would be a film about a top musician, and I personally wanted to feature his music throughout the film. That’s why people would watch it: the other topics were interesting, but sidelines. That wasn’t true of the final film, but that was my thinking in the beginning.

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So we had a line, and in a rough way knew what we wanted to do: make a good film we could eventually sell to the television. For a working title we settled on Gonna Travel On, to symbolize Alex’s life on the road. Eventually we used a title taken from Alex’s frequently used opening lines when giving a concert, ‘I’m married to the marimba. She’s my wife.’ Starting procedures were easy. Alex was in Jerusalem for a few months and myself and Larry (but mostly Larry) went out to film him on the streets. Unlike Germany, he dressed in a loose, opennecked Indian shirt, but kept the Stetson. The crowds weren’t quite as enthusiastic as in Munich, but were still pretty thick. As Alex joked with them, and invited them to join him in playing, I was once again amazed by his showmanship and musicianship. He was spot on. Meanwhile I wrote a short proposal and worked out two budgets, one high and one low. The high one was our ideal budget, if we could get a TV pre-sale. It allowed for a six-person crew, the most professional of equipment, lots of travel, ample expenses for editing, and about $25,000 in fees for producer, writer and director. It came to about $150,000, which was not an excessive sum for the film we wanted to do. I also prepared a budget on the assumption we got no funds, and that Larry and I would do all the filming and editing ourselves. We would not take on any assistants, would work from our home offices without putting in a charge, and would use our own semi-professional mini-cassette cameras, again without charging for them. Nor would we put our fees in the budget. This meant that $50–$60,000 of usual expenses wouldn’t appear. Not a great situation, but it would allow us to make the film. And if it turned a profit, great! This ‘low cost’ budget, which was mainly for international air fares, hotels, per diems and cassettes came to $12,000, which Larry and I found from our own pockets. Whether the timing was wrong, my contacts weak, or my proposal uninspiring, I don’t know, but the upshot was I couldn’t get a TV pre-sale. Quite a few stations said ‘Bring us the finished film and we’ll see,’ but no one was willing to take a chance. That was extremely disappointing, but knowing we could do the film on a shoestring Larry and I decided to continue shooting, and deal with major financial problems if and when they arose.

Married to the Marimba

The shooting itself was easy. We shot extensively in the USA, Israel and Germany, making maybe five trips abroad altogether. We shot in the streets, at concerts, in synagogues, in churches, at an anti-Nazi rally, and at Alex’s home. Well, maybe home is a misnomer, because we filmed him in a trailer, in hotels, and in a Berlin apartment, all of which served Alex’s wandering domestic arrangements. We also shot a very long interview with Alex, covering his life history, and his thoughts on love, life, career, and the pursuit of happiness. In the end this provided us with a lot of the narration. The filming was also done over ten years. I never meant that to happen but the film kept drifting away. One problem was that other fully funded films kept cropping up for Larry and myself, and of necessity they took priority. The logistics of us all getting together was also very difficult. Another problem was that I wasted a lot of time looking for non-existent funding. We could also never quite settle money matters with Alex, nor for a while get him to sign a filming release. As a result, and in retrospect I’m not quite sure why, I lost a bit of my enthusiasm for the film and for six years did little to push it to conclusion, except some desultory filming now and then. Then one day I talked to Larry who’d always berated me for dropping out, and said ‘Let’s wrap up Alex. Are you still interested?’ I then e-mailed Alex. I wrote him ‘Let’s meet. Let’s see if we can finish the film.’ Alex had changed. He had two more children. He was divorced, but had a lovely new companion. He’d prospered and now owned a flat in Berlin. He was also giving workshops all over the world from Australia to South Africa. And he’d grown a bit plumper. Though not really forgiving me for my inconsistency of drifting in and out of production, he was willing to forget the past and go forward. He told me what he was doing over the next few months, and I planned to film him in New York, Berlin, in Weimar, and at a church concert in Hanover. I also told him I wanted to film him with his family in his permanent home in Kiryat Arba, near Jerusalem. This was all accomplished relatively smoothly, so that not long afterwards I could tell Larry I thought we had enough material to start editing. And then began what was probably the most difficult period of the film as Larry and I started going off in different conceptual directions.

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In the beginning all was harmony. First we typed out transcripts of all our interviews. Most were with Alex, but there were also a lot of street interviews, discussions with his family, talks with his friends and comments from students and teachers who had met Alex in his workshops. Larry and I read them, and then separately marked in red the passages that interested us. We’d shot on the run, not always thinking where we were going. Now was the time to find real direction and shape. So we started discussing what were the best sequences we had, what we could use, what areas the film could properly explore and portray, and the form to be taken by the script. And here we ran into trouble as it seemed that, for all our preliminary discussions, we had totally different ideas on where to place the film emphasis. I wasn’t totally surprised because Larry and I had so many discussions during filming, we knew we disagreed on a few things, but didn’t realize how strong those disagreements were till we had to buckle down to the editing. In a sense the situation reminded me of that wonderful old French comedy film Bastille Day. In the film two directors decide to make a film together. But one is only interested in action, and gangster situations. The other is much more interested in love and romance. They then alternate in their filming. So a shootout sequence is followed by a courting scene, which turns into a rooftop chase, which is followed a kissing scene on the river, and so on. Well that was the situation between Larry and myself. Essentially, or so it seemed to me, Larry wanted to make an analytical hard-hitting probing documentary about Alex. He wanted to do a thorough investigation of Alex’s family situation. He didn’t quite swallow Alex’s confessions of being a good father, and a good husband, and was wary about his religious convictions. He wanted to interview a son who had gone to Texas, and wanted to talk to Alex’s old Rabbi. He also wanted to bring Alex’s new love much more into the film, and discuss the problems or otherwise of their relationship. Larry was also wary of Alex’s line about working in Germany to improve German–Jewish relations. I think he saw Alex’s working there as purely financially motivated. In short, I don’t think he liked Alex very much. I thought Larry was wrong, both in his view of Alex and also in the direction in which he wanted to pull the film. I thought Larry’s kind of analysis was too invasive, and that most of the questions he

Married to the Marimba

wanted to ask were none of our business. I argued our film was about an excellent musician and his music, the difficulties of his profession and some of his successes. I did not think the audience would be interested in a deep analysis of Alex’s private life. If and when they came it would be to hear, see and enjoy Alex’s playing, and smile at his over-the-top personality. So we went on, back and forth, never quite solving our disagreements. Two things had to be decided before we could start editing. What was the line and progression of the story, and how much narration, if any, should we use. We decided to hold off discussions on the second point and I went off to write a script outline. Now many films are easy to edit and plan because they fit into a clear pattern. I’m thinking of journey films such as The Rolling Sadhu, where an Indian mystic undertakes to roll on the ground from central India to the temple of his Goddess in northern India. Then there are the search films such as Family, where a man goes looking for the father who disappeared when he was a child. And there are war films such as D Day, which cover the Normandy landings in World War II. They are fairly easy to edit because they are impelled by dates and time, and usually follow a chronological progression. Investigatory and crisis films like The Chair also tend to follow the chronological pattern. Married to the Marimba clearly didn’t fit into that pattern. Like many cinéma vérité and observational films, such as High School by Fred Wiseman, its subject matter danced all over the place, its themes varied, and it didn’t help that it was shot over ten years. So the task was to find a logical and emotional line, subject-driven where the progress would seem inevitable. In other words the film could be written and structured a dozen ways. My challenge was to find the best structure, where only one thing seemed clear at the beginning. That was that we would have to have five or six major marimba performances throughout the film. My first editing outline was as follows: 1: INTRODUCTION: ON THE ROAD We see Alex driving inside his van. He says something like ‘I’ve been on the road for twenty years. The life of a musician is very lonely. But it’s all a journey of discovery. Who am I? Where do I want to go?’ etc.

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We possibly overlay this with an old Peter Seeger and Weaver’s song ‘But I feel that I’m going to travel on … ‘ SUPER FILM TITLE: GONNA TRAVEL ON 2: ALEX PLAYS IN JERUSALEM MALL: 1998 Alex is playing the marimba in the street. The function of the scene is to see Alex in action, and how he handles the crowd with laughter and jokes. It should be a good, funny, lively scene. 3: ALEX’S BACKGROUND (mostly stills) Narration: ‘Alex Jacobowitz was born in … etc. etc.’ Alex then explains in his own words his early life in Binghampton. How he went to music school and took up the marimba. Goes on to talk about his awkwardness his first time on the streets in New York. Maybe we can use the clip where an old lady says ‘You’re a nice boy, but can you make a living?’ Narration: 1985 Alex decides to live for a while on a kibbutz in Israel. We use color shots of Israel. Alex says: ‘I thought I’d try a six months sabbatical. I played in the Jerusalem orchestra but it wasn’t for me. I married. I wanted a Jewish life and a family. I had seven kids, then divorced. It was very difficult.’ 4: GERMANY: in Munich with son Alex’s decision to head for Germany. Alex: ‘The Germans have an affinity for music. They love tradition. But I had a certain fear of going to Germany. I took my son.’ They meet at Tegel airport. Alex plays in Munich street. Big enthusiastic crowd. Girl says ‘I like Alex. His being a Jew means nothing to me.’ 5: FAMILY DIFFICULTIES We see various scenes with his son in Munich and Leipzig. Son says he was embarrassed his father is a street performer. Difficult to keep close family relations when on the road. Scene in Alex’s van when son says grandmother does not want him. Alex looks after him after divorce. 6: MUNICH AND DACHAU We see splendors of Munich and Marienplatz. Alex’s feelings being in that great city. Explains its Nazi past to his son. See Dachau concentration camp.

Married to the Marimba

7: ALEX’S JEWISH CONNECTION Alex explains it’s hard to keep up Jewish traditions on road. He puts on prayer shawl in van. Practices for concert in Orienbergstrasse synagogue. Alex walks around and inspects synagogue. Plays concert in Rotunda. 8: DIFFICULTIES OF A STREET PERFORMER (here I want a possible montage of short performance bits) Alex discussed problems of a street performer. Choosing spot. Weather. Crowds. Competitors. Rain. Didn’t expect to do this at music school. Good days. Bad days. Sometimes earn a lot. Often little. Difficulties with police. 9: MELBOURNE: AUSTRALIA Narration: Alex film was laid aside for a few years. In 2007 we found him in Melbourne, giving a master class. ALEX WITH STUDENTS IN MASTER CLASS. 10: SHORT INTIMATE SCENE: ALEX ALONE PLAYS At music school fell in love with the marimba: ‘She’s my wife.’ 11: BACK IN ALEX’S HOME IN JERUSALEM Alex with family. Explore difficulties of his home life. Alex has remarried and brought his German wife to Israel. Interview wife and kids. Their reactions with Alex away. 12: REESTABLISH BERLIN See boats. Church. Brandenburg Gate. Narration: ten years have passed and Germany still exerts a major pull on Alex. Living in the van is a thing of the past. With success he now has two apartments. Alex walks the streets. Show him in apartment, and with friends. Friend: ‘He is a great and interesting musician.’ Show his Jewish life in Berlin. He prays in synagogue. Makes a Sabbath dinner. 13: ALEX PLAYS IN HANOVER CHURCH Narration: Christian communities have also come to know Alex and asked him to perform. Alex performs in church. Minister explains why he invited Alex. 14: WEIMAR ANTI-NAZI RALLY: the changed Germany Alex plays a little in main square. Main concentration on the rally. Narration: Has Germany changed? Show Holocaust memorial. Can one be a Jew in Germany today? Alex says yes. His wife says no.

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Alex and friends at restaurant discuss identity. Alex says he would never be a German. But he’s also not an Israeli, just an American. Friend says identity doesn’t matter. 15: NEW YORK AND CONCERT We see Alex on Broadway, New York. ‘This is where it began. My first performance was here. Strange to be back.’ He gives klezmer concert in East Side synagogue. 16: ALEX DRIVING DOWN ROAD AS IN FILM BEGINNING He asks himself questions. How long can I go on like this? With grandchildren will I have to settle down? Will I have to settle on a permanent home? CREDITS: song as beginning ‘Gonna Travel On’.

Well to say I was dissatisfied is putting it mildly. When I reviewed the editing outline I knew it wasn’t very good. I seemed to have forgotten all the basic precepts. It was jumbled. It was incoherent. And it went all over the place. There was no logic to the order of the sequences, and no emotional build. I’d broken all my own rules and come up with something truly bad. Why had that happened? I’m not quite sure. Maybe I was too anxious to finish the film. Maybe just too anxious to get the whole thing off my back after it had dragged on for ten years. Normally my sense of an editing line is pretty good but here my faculties and skills had totally deserted me. Larry also thought it was pretty bad, and said he’d take a bash at doing a different edit outline. Well, why not? I wished him luck, said I’d wait to hear from him, and went back to reading Stieg Larsson. Now whereas I was concerned with the relationship of sequences, Larry was much more concerned with narration. This is more or less what he came up with for openers. OPENING NARRATION: this story is about a troubadour. A vagabond. A story teller in the classic mode. (SHOTS: Archive shots of troubadours, cutaways of Germany, street shots at night, hands of xylophone mallets, pull out.) NARRATION: but the time is now. The place is Europe. Mostly modern Germany. Mostly in the streets. The story is about a guy who may have lost his way in his youth, only to find himself deep in music. A story of an artist,

Married to the Marimba

perhaps, consumed with performing. A soloist. An oddity. A little known performer outside Germany but known in Germany. Known for his unusual instrument. The marimba. Which he has mastered to the extent that he can play Bach and Beethoven. But most intriguing is his face, the visage of a religious Jew playing klezmer and pop on the streets of Germany. Today. Taken as a package the image cried out for clarification. The performer’s music always attracts an audience. His persona entertains them, his attire intrigues them. So much so that there is always someone left behind to buy a CD, ask a question, or to invite Alex for a beer. A street performer speaking German with an American accent. Speaking American. Speaking Hebrew. But wait. There’s more. There’s two children with him in religious dress, speaking Hebrew. More confusion. These are children; two of nine. But he’s no longer married. A man who spends at least eight months on the road can’t be a good husband or father in the classical sense. Maybe he’s just your typical weirdo street musician hustling for a living. But in Europe one learns street musicians are considered part of a profession, complete with a license. One even has to pay a fee for the stage that attracts the audience. MUSICAL INTERLUDE INTERVIEW WITH HISTORIAN ON STREET MUSICIANS IN EUROPE … (later in film) FOOTAGE FROM TEN YEARS AGO NARRATION: Soon Alex was spending more and more time playing in the streets of Europe. (Interview with ex-wife) Alex’s wife decided enough was enough and after ? years of marriage asked for a separation. Perhaps raising seven children on her own was trying …

Well if I hated the outline I had written myself, I thought Larry’s version of a script was also not up to standard. First it went against everything I believed made for good narration writing. It went on and on for ever and ever. It told you exactly what to think, and it was like wall to wall carpeting. It left no room for the imagination, and no room to breathe. It was also intrusive and slightly moralizing about Alex’s private life in a way I had already told Larry I didn’t want. I told all this to Larry rather bluntly, and for a few weeks neither of us were on particularly good terms with the other. Then after putting the problem aside for about six months I decided to try a rethink.

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This holiday from Alex actually helped, and suddenly a solution seemed very clear, very easy, and I kicked myself for not seeing it in the first place. This was Alex’s story, right? So he should be the one to tell it. There would be hardly any narration. It would be Alex’s story in his own words. That sounds easy but Larry found himself very suspicious of everything Alex said. Larry thought Alex was evading certain essential truths about himself, and if we only used his dialogue we would essentially be supporting his version of the truth. For my part, I said that if that’s the way Alex wants to see himself, I was not going to interfere. We were not doing an investigative piece, but a simple portrait of a musician. It was exactly what we had been arguing about for months, but those arguments as to what the film was about had obviously not been put to rest. Reluctantly, very reluctantly, Larry agreed to go along with my line. I then suggested something new to Larry. Both he and I would reference ourselves in the film. We’d been following him for years, so let’s tell the audience why. And when Larry was seen in some of the sequences, questioning Alex, the audience would now know this handsome baseball-capped fellow was actually one of the filmmakers. For once we had instant agreement, and I typed out a few possible lines of brief commentary to be voiced by Larry which we could easily put over Alex playing in the street. My friend Alan and I make documentaries. We first met Alex ten years ago when he was playing on the streets of Munich. He was the strangest street musician we’d ever met. His personality and playing intrigued us. So we decided to follow him for a while with a camera. See who he was. What he did. This film is the result.

I also wrote a few lines here and there of connecting narration where I knew we would need to focus certain sequences. One such sequence, and very important, dealt with the physical day-to-day problems of being a street musician. Starting with Alex, Alan and I slowly began to ask questions about the whole world of street musicians. Who were they? Where did they come from? What about difficulties and competition? And was it really worthwhile playing in the streets. Eventually we began to sense some of the answers …

Married to the Marimba

Finally the narration was lean and sparse, leaving Alex and his friends to provide most of the dialogue. In rewriting the edit outline I was also helped by two matters. First we had obtained some excellent material of Alex giving a master class to children in South Africa, and playing in a musical festival there. Second, and thinking very much about the ending of the film, we had recorded an interview with Alex at a café in Jerusalem summing up his life. Here we asked him some hard questions. Was he a happy man? Yes, enormously so! Was he worried what his grandchildren would think of him being a street musician? No! Did he ever intend to give up life on the road? Not while he had breath and vigor. And looking back would he have changed his life? Not really! Armed with the new material I went to do the corrections. We needed a new vigorous opening. OK. Show some New York scenes, and then Alex playing in a synagogue, where he says who he is and what he does. The ending would be Alex summing up his life (the new interview) and then a beautiful top shot of him playing in a synagogue as the credits roll. The South African scenes would strengthen the middle. Then put order and growth in the sequences, which I had neglected earlier. Thus I decided to bring the whole sequence of Alex explaining the difficulties of street life much earlier in the film. I also moved the church concert in Hanover almost to the end of the film giving us a major and uplifting climax that had been missing before. So refreshed, we got to work. Below is the new editing script. 1: NEW YORK Street scenes. Alex plays in synagogue and introduces himself to the audience. ‘I’m Alex. This instrument is the marimba. And she’s my wife.’ Concert. NEW TITLES COME ON: ‘Married to the Marimba: A Street Performer’s Life.’ Alex talks in street, how he first got started. 2: JERUSALEM SCENES Alex plays in street. How we met Alex. He walks around kibbutz where he lived. 3: GERMANY: DIFFICUTIES OF A STREET PERFORMER Alex on location explains all difficulties of selecting site, competition etc. His son visits. They live in Alex’s caravan. Alex and son visit Dachau camp. The German experience.

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4: MASTER CLASSES Alex gives master class in Melbourne, and in South Africa. A different side of his life. Plays in South African music festival. 5: BACK TO GERMANY: YEARS HAVE PASSED Reestablish Germany. Alex now has two apartments. Many friends. Major street performance. People say how good he is. He plays in Weimar and takes place in an anti-Nazi demonstration. Night out in a strange night club with friends. The celebration of Sabbath on the road. 6: BEING A JEW IN GERMANY Alex prays in synagogue. Rehearses a concert. Questions are multiplying. How does he feel about himself and Germany. Discusses this with two musician friends. 7: FAMILY PROBLEMS Visit with Alex and family in his Israel home. Wife and kids discuss difficulties of Alex’s absences. ‘Father away. Very difficult.’ 8: CAFÉ ARGUMENTS Larry meets with Alex and Yehudis, his other half, in Jerusalem. Discussion on identity, feelings about Germany, and Israel. 9: MAJOR CONCERT IN HANOVER CATHOLIC CHURCH 10: ALEX IN JERUSALEM SUMS UP HIS LIFE 11: CREDITS OVER BEAUTIFUL RECITAL

This time I thought the editing script made sense. We had no money for an editor so Larry undertook the task, which took about six weeks. He did an excellent job. We then had some screenings for friends, took some of their advice and ignored the rest. Their major help was showing us which scenes fascinated them, and where the film dragged. Alex came to the screening and presented us with thirty comments. Some were invaluable, others less so. He liked the film, but obviously would have liked it to be more performance and PR oriented, instead of traditional documentary. We thanked him, and the others, raised a glass and the film was more or less over. On and off it had taken us ten years from start to finish. All that remained was to send it to festivals, find a distributor and some TV showings, and get some of our money back.

Married to the Marimba

5

Alex Jacobowitz performing for children.

Overall it had been an interesting experience that taught me a few lessons. The first was that if you are going to work with a partner, make sure you are really of one mind as to where you are going, and what you want to do. Here my disputes with Larry had cost us both a lot of energy, emotional pain, and wasted time. The second lesson was to think much harder about the planning of sequences and their emotional build-up when doing a vérité film. The third lesson, really part of the second, was that shape, structure, and rhythm are all important. OK. Hopefully I’ll heed my own warnings in the future.

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6

Alex Jacobowitz in performance.

Production notes: budgets In Married to the Marimba I basically plunged ahead without thinking too much about budget. This was contrary to my usual rule, which is to never start a film without having some clear idea of what costs will be involved. My usual procedure is as follows: first, I try and lay down a very fast budget outline, with a rough estimate of costs for main areas … personnel costs, equipment costs, travel, editing, etc. That gives me a ball park idea of what I’m in for. Later, when maybe I’d done an outline script, or a fuller shooting plan, I try and draw up a detailed production budget. With that figure in mind I deal with the formal draft production contract, arguing terms and conditions. Because I have a very concrete idea of the needs of the budget, I am now much less likely to make mistakes in the terms I require from the sponsor.

The budget In budgeting, we often face a number of conundrums. Do you budget according to script, or do you script according to budget? And how do you prepare a budget, which is normally demanded very early by commissioning editors, when you haven’t done the main research? There is no absolute answer to these questions, as the conditions under which you make each film will be different. Only one thing is important: your budget must be as complete and as accurate as possible. Unless you budget realistically you’re likely to finish up bankrupt. Below are the major items that appear in most film and video budgets; this list should serve as a good first guide. If something occurs to you that does not appear here then add it, as you’ll probably need it. A Research 1 Script research, including travel and hotels, books, photocopies, library viewing expenses

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2 General preproduction expenses, including travel, meetings, etc.

B Shooting 1 Crew cameraperson/dp assistant cameraperson sound person lighting technician production assistant driver and/or grip production manager make-up artist teleprompter operator 2 Equipment camera and usual accessories: special camera equipment, such as fast lenses and underwater rigs. A new camera resource that has become very popular is the GoPro camera. This camera is the size of a deck of cards and generates an HD, high-resolution image that is rated at broadcast/feature film level. It can shoot under water, in low light levels, and/or be mounted on a car, bicycle, helmet, skateboard, etc. The cost is around $300 US. tape recorders and microphones lighting 3 Location expenses vehicle rental gasoline crew food hotels airfares location shooting fees 4 Computers, PT cards, portable hard drives, and digital tapes If you are recording onto digital video and audio cards, you will need a portable hard drive or high memory computer to store the contents of each card. Always bring enough cards so you can load a fresh one and keep shooting. Card lengths vary, but the most common is twenty to thirty minutes. Many cameras record onto both tape and a card, so there is automatic back-up of the content. Some documentary makers still

Production notes: budgets

prefer recording everything onto tape. The ability to quickly change tapes enables the crew to maintain sustained shooting. Digital MiniDV tapes can record up to sixty minutes. Film is becoming less and less common because of its expense, processing, and time limitations. C Postproduction 1 Editing editor assistant editor editing room supplies and equipment, including video off-line 2 Other post-production expenses sound designer music and sound transfers video window dubs graphic creation narration recording sound mixing negative cutting off-line and on-line video editing final cut mastering duplication: web files and DVDs 3 General office expenses, rent, telephone, faxes, photocopying, etc. transcripts music and archive royalties errors and omissions (E&O) insurance insurance legal costs dispatch and customs clearance voice-overs translations advertising, publicity, and festivals messengers payroll tax provisions 4 Personnel writer director

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producer narrator associate producer researcher general assistant D Company provisions

1 contingency 2 company profit

Ninety percent of the above items occur in most documentaries. The other 10 percent depend on the size and finances of your production. If the production is small, there may be no associate producer or general assistant, and you may also find that you are not only writing and directing but also doing all the research. Two points. First, the crew is normally budgeted per day, and the editor and assistant per week. Equipment rental is also budgeted per day. Besides the above, a few other items occur from time to time, and they are worth noting in your checklist: computer graphic images graphic design studio use actors special wardrobe special props donations and presents Most of the items in both the main and miscellaneous lists are obvious, but others require some explanation because a miscalculation can have grave effects on the budget. I have discussed a few of these items below in more detail. Stock and ratios. It is extremely important to sense at the beginning how much film stock, video tapes or memory cards you are likely to require for your shoot. A film that can be preplanned to the last detail and has fairly easy shooting may require a ratio of only five to one. A more complex film, however, may require a ratio of twelve or fourteen to one. Equipment. Some people own their own equipment. I don’t, though I share two editing computers and screens with a partner and am thinking

Production notes: budgets

of buying a Sony HD camera. Generally I prefer to rent the equipment according to the needs of the particular film; sound systems are important to think out before you start shooting. Crew and shooting time. One reason for doing a decent script before shooting is that it helps you predict the shooting time needed. These days the minimum cost for a crew and equipment is somewhere in the region of $1,500 a day. If you want the best DP and the fanciest equipment, your costs may go up to $3,000 a day. These costs are still realistic for a very professional shoot. On the lower end, because of the smaller equipment sizes and digital camera capabilities, a crew of two can handle all the tasks. The trouble is that you are dealing with a lot of imponderables. The only useful guideline, then, is to err on the generous side. This is also true about editing, as it is often impossible to say whether the editing will take eight weeks or ten. CGIs. Computer graphic images are being employed more and more in documentary films, particularly in docudramas and films dealing with history. I don’t particularly like CGIs, but many commissioning editors have fallen in love with this new technology. That’s fine, but you must note that CGIs are very expensive, so budget accordingly. Graphic design. It is also becoming more and more fashionable to employ some fancy graphic designs in your credits or in the film itself to jazz up your film. Used wisely, there is no doubt that good graphic designs can enhance a film.. But graphics are expensive. So be warned! Royalties. Royalty payments may be necessary for the use of recorded library music, certain photographs, and film archives. Most of the time that you use ready-made recordings you will have to pay a fee to the company that made the recording. The fee is usually based on the length of the selection you use, the geographic areas where the film will be shown, and the type of audience for whom the film is intended. The rate for theatrical use or commercial television use is usually higher than that for educational purposes. Occasionally, you may be able to arrange the free use of a piece of music if the film is for public service purposes. The position with photographs is slightly different. If the photographs are not in the public domain, you will have to make an arrangement with each individual photographer. It makes sense to hunt around for options on different photographs or to find photographs in the public domain.

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Part of the answer regarding high royalty costs is to hunt for film in the public domain, such as film held by the various National Archives in many countries. Errors and omissions insurance. Errors and omissions insurance, or E&O insurance as it is generally called, basically insures the filmmaker against being sued for breach of copyright or for libel or slander of someone in the film. It provides payment for a legal defense against a court action. However, it is very expensive and can cost between $5,000 and $8,000 to purchase for a one-hour film. While almost a necessity in the USA, the need for E&O insurance is usually ignored in films made for Europe. General insurance. We have insurance because of Murphy’s law: what can go wrong will go wrong. Having insurance helps you face chaos and catastrophe with a certain equanimity. Insurance should cover equipment, film, crew, properties, and third-party risk. It should also cover office and equipment, errors and omissions, and general liability. Advertising and publicity. What filmmakers often forget is to allow for postproduction advertising and publicity. The completion of the film itself is only part of the process. Later you will want to enter it into film festivals, make advertising and publicity brochures and posters, and take the film to various film markets. All this requires money, so make sure that an allowance for such items appears in the budget. Personnel. Payments to the writer, director, and producer usually appear as lump sums, though the director may also be paid by the week. What should they be paid? There is no fixed rule, though many people pay the writer about 5 percent of the overall budget and the director about 12 percent. A lot depends on the bargaining position of the parties General overheads. Overheads can amount to a surprisingly high proportion of your costs, and adequate allowance should be made for them in the budget. Thus, you must think about office rent, telephone bills, travel costs, administrative help, transcripts, messengers, duplicating services, and any general help. Contingencies. However well you budget, you may find that the film or video costs are running away with you. The usual problems are that you need more shooting days than you thought or that the editing goes on longer than you reckoned. The contingency element in your budget shields you from the unexpected; it’s a hedge against overruns. I usually budget about 7.5 percent of the total budget as contingency.

Production notes: budgets

Budget example. Up until now, I have tried to provide you with a broad overall view of what to expect and what to put in a film budget. However, in order to let you see how this works in practice, I’ve set out below one detailed budget (Table 1) and two less expensive outline budgets (Tables 2 and 3). The first is the estimate for a major network film, The Brink of Peace (see Chapter 6), with everything budgeted down to the last dollar. The second budget relates to Married to the Marimba, and illustrates an outline rather than a detailed budget. The third budget represents an outline sketch for what might be involved in a simple ten-minute public relations film, with few location or logistics problems, and that could basically be filmed by just two people. Table 1  Budget for a one-hour video documentary The Brink of Peace Project length: 8 months Producer and staff

Weeks

$ Rate

$ Total

writer-producer-director

28

2,250

63,000

associate producer

22

1,000

22,000

production assistant

24

750

18,000

researcher

8

700

5,600

production manager/ coordinator

7

1,200

8,400

PR fringe: 12% of $78,900

9,468

SUBTOTAL

126,468

preproduction Persons

$ Cost

$ Total

Egypt

Travel

Days

2

280

560

Jordan

2

150

300

Norway

2

930

1,860

USA (NY–Washington)

2

200

400

Eilat

2

160

320

150

750

taxis and phones Israel van and gas

400 5

per diems

16

2

50

1,600

hotels

13

2

150

3,900

extras SUBTOTAL

650 10,740

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Days

$ Cost

$ Total

cameraperson and betasp video

21

1,250

26,250

equipment soundperson

21

300

6,300

lights, lenses, etc.

21

150

3,150

van rental and gas

21

150

3,150

7

50

2,100

make-up artist

6

200

1,200

per diem

6

50

300

Accessories:

per diem shoot (6 people)

expendable

500

PR fringe (USA): 16% of $3,450

552

helicopter (3 hours)

750

SUBTOTAL

2,250 45,752

Production air travel Persons

$ Cost

$ Total

Norway

Crew

5

930

4,650

Egypt

5

280

1,400

Jordan

5

150

750

USA

5

200

1,000

Eilat

6

160

960

12

5

200

12,000

2

6

50

600

per diem with hotel per diem Eilat with hotel

Days

extras

2,000

excess air baggage

1,500

(5 bags/10 flights) SUBTOTAL Production Israeli travel

24,860 Days

Persons

$ Cost

travel in Israel

7

5

50

1,750

hotels

2

5

100

1,000

SUBTOTAL

$ Total

2,750

Production notes: budgets Travel costs for talent

$ Total

Norway

1,600

Egypt

350

Jordan

150

USA (NY–Washington)

200

per diems with hotels

2,800

SUBTOTAL

5,100

production cost subtotal

78,462

Shooting stock

$ Cost

$ Total

tapes (70 × ½ hour)

30

2,100

(5 × 1 hour)

60

SUBTOTAL Archive material

300 2,400

Days

$ Cost

$ Total

rights USA (20 minutes at $3,000 per minute)

60,000

rights Israel (10 minutes at $1,000 per minute)

10,000

library/viewing days

15

100

1,500

archive researcher

15

175

2,625

copying & rights to stills

1,000

transfer tapes (15 tapes)

60

900

transfer time (20 hours)

60

1,200

PR fringe: 16% of $2,625

420

SUBTOTAL Editing off-line editor

77,645 Weeks

$ Cost

$ Total

18

1,800

32,400

assistant editor

10

800

8,000

avid rental and space

18

2,100

37,800

meals and supplies transcripts narration, recording, and edit

600

600 3,000 800

shoot stills

1,000

dubs with time code

3,000

PR fringe: 16% of $30,300 SUBTOTAL

4,848 91,448

51

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The documentary diaries Days

$ Cost

$ Total

editing

3

1,750

5,250

editor

3

500

1,500

Editing online

Paintbox and animation (Chyron)

1,500

sound editing effects

3,000

sound mix (15 hours)

250

D 11 stock for master

3,750 500

title sequence

2,000

music: original or cues

3,000

SUBTOTAL Office and administration rent

20,500 Months

$ Cost

$ Total

7

1,200

8,400

7

300

2,100

6

500

3,000

computer and printer telephone, fax, post

2,800

copies, stationery supplies bookkeeper

800

playback unit VHS and monitor

800

messenger

500

VHS stock for dubs

300

entertainment

600

shipping

1,200

SUBTOTAL

20,500

Professional

$ Total

legal

3,000

general liability

2,500

production package

2,500

errors, omissions, liabilities

3,000

SUBTOTAL

11,000

Miscellaneous

$ Total

research materials

1,000

consultants

6,000

SUBTOTAL

7,000

Production notes: budgets Travel and lodging, producer and talent to and in USA

Months

airfare: producer (4 return flights,

$ Cost

$ Total

1,200

4,800

2,500

10,000

TA–JFK) airfare: talent (4 return flights, TA–JFK lodging: producer (USA)

5

1,500

SUBTOTAL

7,500 22,300

TOTAL

468,463

contingency 7.5%

35,135

GRAND TOTAL

503,598

The budget in Table 1 was prepared for a major PBS production and was a very complex film to bring off. It meant shooting in five different countries, and coordinating everything was a nightmare. Luckily I had a great production manager and he was a wizard at keeping us within budget. Next, by way of contrast, is the outline budget I sent to various foundations regarding Married to the Marimba (Table 2). Table 2  Outline budget for fifty-two-minute video Married to the Marimba Persons

Days

$Cost

Total

DP

20

350

7,000

assistant director of photography

20

300

6,000

soundperson

20

250

5,000

production manager

15

250

Crew

SUBTOTAL

3,750 21,750

Camera and sound equipment camera

20

400

sound equipment

20

125

SUBTOTAL

8,000 2,500 10,500

stock cassettes and cards

1,440

SUBTOTAL

1,400

53

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The documentary diaries Foreign filming (Germany, United States)

Units

Days

$ Cost

Total

United States

1

1,200

1,200

Germany

3

800

2,400

Days

$ Cost

SUBTOTAL Travel and per diem

3,600 Units

car and gas

20

150

3,000

per diems

4

20

50

4,000

hotel

2

7

130

1,820

SUBTOTAL Editing

8,820 Units

Days

$ Cost

transfers

30

20

600

logging and viewing

30

20

600

digitizing

10

20

200

offline edit room

35

200

7,000

offline editor

35

400

14,000

online

3

400

1,200

online editor

3

400

1,200

narrator

1,000

1,000

translations for editing

1,000

1,000

preparing master tape

1,750

preparing master DVD

200

music and film archives sound editing music SUBTOTAL

5,000 3

800

2,400 1,500 37,650

Other expenses legal

1,000

insurance

2,000

office

4,000

posters and advertising

2000

SUBTOTAL

9,000

TOTAL BELOW LINE EXPENSES

92,720

Production notes: budgets Above-line expenses

$ Total

writer (5 percent)

4,673

director (10 percent)

9,346

producer (10 percent)

9,346

TOTAL ABOVE LINE EXPENSES

23,365

Contingency (10 percent of below line cost)

9,346

GRAND TOTAL

126,131

The assumption in the budget shown in Table 3 is that this is a simple inhouse video which can be made with you and a friend carrying out all the main production tasks. Although you are shooting and editing yourselves and actually own the camera and editing equipment, these items should be added so that you can see the real costs of the films.

Table 3  Outline budget for ten-minute supermarket public-relations video Days

$ Cost

$ Total

Crew cameraperson

5

250

1,250

soundperson

5

150

750

Equipment camera and sound

5

250

1,250

500

500

7

125

875

7

80

560

editor

10

250

2,500

edit room and equipment

10

200

stock and extras Travel and per diem van and gas food for 2 people (2 days extra for research) Editing

extras and sound mix Office, phones, insurance

2,000 1,500 750

sum allowed

3,000

writer, director, producer

3,000

GRAND TOTAL

16,935

55

3 Stalin’s Last Purge One of the things that I had really liked over the years was the possibility of giving documentary workshops in different countries. And the longer the period the better. So when I was invited by Ngee Ann Poly in Singapore to be a guest lecturer there for six months I was absolutely delighted. On arrival I was even more delighted to find that I only had to teach one and a half days a week. In addition I had a few hours of consulting, but nothing serious. As a result of these arrangements I had a lot of time on my hands. The only problem was that theoretically I couldn’t spend this time outside the college. This was because, following civil service procedures, I had to be seen to be at my desk from 8.30a.m. till 5.30p.m. Of course, like everyone else I broke the rules, but it still meant I had to spend a lot of time at my desk, in a room shared by six other teachers, all intently devoted to their computers. At first I thought I’d go crazy, then I saw the solution. Since you’re forced to stick around, do something useful. Something useful? Well, of course. Ngee Ann had a good library, and great film facilities. I had the answer. I would use the time researching and planning some film proposals. A few ideas had been bouncing around my head for some months, but one in particular kept drawing me back again and again. That was Communism and the Jews. When I grew up in postwar London one of the political ideas still floating around at the time was that somehow Jews as people, and Bolshevism as a movement, were somehow dramatically intertwined. However, I was intelligent enough to know that this idea of Judeo-Bolshevism, or that Communism was a Jewish conspiracy, was a myth perpetrated by Hitler, and spread by the Nazis. But it was also an idea that had unfortunately found fruitful roots among many Western intellectuals, as well as the ordinary working classes and middle classes. After all wasn’t Trotsky a Jew? And weren’t many of Stalin’s inner hierarchy, like Kamenev and Zinoviev, Jews?

Stalin’s Last Purge

This started me thinking that maybe, and I wasn’t quite sure how or where, there might be a film in all this. But where to start? I knew a fair amount about twentieth-century European history, but precious little about the real evolution of the USSR after 1917. Yes, I knew there had been a first provisional parliament in Russia in February 1917, and that the Communist revolution took place in the following October. I knew Lenin had returned from exile to lead the party, but died in 1924. I also vaguely knew there had been brutal battles regarding his succession, and that by 1929 Stalin had become the supreme leader. And like everyone else, I knew Stalin had instituted major purges in the thirties, murdering not just civilians but also getting rid of almost a third of his army elite. And that was it. In other words I was appallingly ignorant of Soviet history in any depth, and certainly in no place to start thinking about a film. At least, not yet. Not until I’d headed for the library and start immersing myself in Soviet history. At this point my objectives were relatively clear. I wanted to learn about the Soviet Union as fast as I could, so that I could see what might be the parameters of a film about Soviet Communism and Jewish involvement in the movement, and how to design and write a first proposal. And of course I wanted to find out whether my subject indeed held out good possibilities for a film, and that I wasn’t pursuing a fruitless endeavor. This meant an immense amount of reading, but only in a superficial and fast way. Later, I knew that if I did come to make the film I would have to get involved in the research in a much more serious way. For the moment, however, I just wanted to learn the bare bones of the subject very fast. Soon my desk was piled high with books on Soviet history, and on the life of the Jews in the Soviet Union. I’d left out the big complex books on the life of Stalin and Trotsky by people like Isaac Deutscher. Instead I concentrated on shorter but very reliable books such as A Concise History of the Russian Revolution by Richard Pipes, and Robert Conquest’s devastating book The Great Terror, about the purges of the thirties. I knew Conquest’s book had been severely criticized by dyedin-the-wool Marxists, but it seemed to me very reliable. I also added a few books to give me color and a broader flavor of the period, such as Gulag by Anne Appelbaum, and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore. These books covered me fairly well up to Stalin’s death in 1953, but I wanted to extend my research to the collapse of the Soviet

57

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The documentary diaries

Union in 1991. Here, as with the history of Jews in the Soviet Union, the internet proved an invaluable, if not always accurate source. Soon my desk was piled high with books on Russia, and my university colleagues, mostly expats like me, started raising their eyebrows. When I told them I was researching Eisenstein and Pudovkin, they seemed satisfied, and went back to discussing the best massage parlors in Singapore, or good nightclubs and restaurants where the prices weren’t too high. I didn’t go in for the massage parlors, but did join them in evening dining, because I needed to get away. This was because the research was beginning to have a strong negative effect on me. It’s one thing to know about purges and gulags in the abstract, but another thing to be confronted in detail with what these words meant. The gulags, the purges, and the spying were the means to run a slave state. Millions dying for nothing. Children betraying parents. Frozen deaths in prison camps run by gangsters as much as the guards. Death by a bullet in the back of the head. And everyone lorded over by Stalin, who was God, Messiah and King combined. After about a month and a half I began to get a rough idea of the total canvas, keeping in mind the whole time that my subject was not the history of the USSR, but Communism and the Jews. The main lines of the story were fairly simple. Till the early thirties a few Jews, like Lev Kamenev, Grigory Zinoviev, Genrikh Yagoda, and Leon Trotsky had played a prominent part in the revolution. Though Trotsky had founded the Red Army, he and Stalin had become bitter enemies. As a result Trotsky was banished from the party, and forced into exile in 1929. In 1940 he was assassinated in Mexico City on the orders of Stalin. The other Jewish associates of Stalin fared just as badly. Zinoviev and Kamenev were both executed in 1936. Genrikh Yagoda, once head of the NKVD, was similarly tried and shot in the head in 1938. Statistics also tell their story. In 1917 out of the 10,000 members of the Soviet Communist party, 366 were ethnic Jews. By 1930 the numbers of Jews in the party had dwindled to under 2 percent. This may have been happenstance, but by the late thirties a clear anti-­ Jewish line had overtaken the party. Thus between 1936–40 there was an almost total exclusion of Jews from Soviet policy making bodies. This line was explicitly reinforced by Stalin in 1940 with his order to Molotov to exclude all Jews from senior government posts.

Stalin’s Last Purge

Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 changed everything. Stalin needed all the help he could get, and this included turning to minorities like the Jews to assist him. In consequence Jews rallied for Stalin under the banner of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. Many prominent Jews joined the committee, including film director Serge Eisenstein, the poet Peretz Markish, and one of the USSR’s top scientists, Lina Shtern. But the choice for the leader of the committee was unanimous: Solomon Mikhoels, the renowned director of the Moscow Yiddish theater and probably the most famous Jew in the USSR. After its formation, an incredible amount of work was done by the Committee towards the war effort, including sending Mikhoels to the USA to raise money. After 1945 came a sharp bitter reversal. The happy working liaison between Jews and the Government was abruptly broken. The Cold War had started. Suspicion was everywhere, and with the new state of Israel seemingly linked to the West, Jews were suspected of dual loyalties. In repressing his wartime allies, Stalin now had Mikhoels assassinated by the KGB in 1948. Later, after a three-year arrest and secret trial, many members of the former Anti-Fascist Committee were murdered in Lubianka jail. Finally, in 1953, six Jewish doctors were accused of trying to poison Stalin and other members of the Kremlin. It was a sensational accusation, that would provide the Soviet newspaper Izvestia with headlines for weeks. History would know this as the Doctors’ Plot. A show trial was planned, with the execution of the accused destined to take place in Red Square. Luckily for the doctors, fate intervened. Stalin died suddenly in March 1953, and the trial was called off. When Khrushchev later denounced Stalin and his policies in his secret speech of 1956, many of those condemned in the earlier secret trials, like Peretz Markish, were posthumously pardoned. Much of the anti-Jewish bias of the Stalin years unfortunately lingered on under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. Synagogues were turned into factories; Hebrew frowned upon. As scores of Jews tried to leave for the West, many were imprisoned. Here the most famous case was that of Natan Sharansky. In 1977 Sharansky was accused of espionage, and sentenced to life in the gulag. Then came 1991, and the break-up of the Soviet Union.

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The documentary diaries

The history I’ve laid out above shows the picture presented to me after my first researches. Gradually, scanning it, I began to see where the problems lay, and where I might go. My first obvious conclusion was that the material was just too immense for one film. But then how many were we talking about? Two? Four? A six-part series? I wasn’t sure, so I started reviewing the material with an eye to compartmentalizing it. Gradually I saw a solution as to how the material might logically be divided up. We seemed to be looking at three distinct periods, all with their own characteristics. First there was the period 1917–39. This would take us from the revolution to the start of the Second World War. This period shows us the rise of Stalin, the political work of a few Jews at the start of the new regime, and their almost total banishment from the scene by 1939. So here at least might be one film, with a clear beginning, and a conclusive ending with the start of the war. Film two could start with the Nazi–Soviet pact drawn up by Molotov and Ribbentrop, and could go through to 1953. Stalin’s ­ death would then provide a fitting conclusion to the piece. For content we could concentrate on the story of Mikhoels and the Jewish ­Anti-Fascist Committee, the secret trial of the poets and scientists, and the dark cesspit of the Doctors’ Plot. Here I could also immediately see that Mikhoels might well provide the center of the film, with his dynamic personality, allowing us to use and expand the story of the Moscow Yiddish theater. Film three would then be relatively simple. We could show the changing nature of the USSR after Stalin, which could include an easing up on one hand, but also the iron hand still at work in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. For central incidents we could probably use the Leningrad hijack of 1970, and Sharansky’s imprisonment in the gulag. The hijack had been given worldwide publicity when a group of sixteen Jewish refuseniks (Jews who wanted to leave the Soviet Union) had hijacked a plane in Leningrad and attempted to flee the country. They had been caught, but their story had given worldwide publicity to the violation of human rights in the USSR. Again the end of the film would present no problem. We would show the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and could throw in the breaking down of the Berlin Wall for good luck. The theoretical problems were solved, but then reality flooded in. I could do a series of three films, but did I really want to? Maybe. I wasn’t sure. But first things first. And the first thing was to write

Stalin’s Last Purge

three separate proposals. That necessitated once more heading to the library, and devoting myself to the computer. However, in about two weeks I was finished. I had three proposals of about ten pages each, and they all looked fairly good. Then I took a holiday in Angkor Wat, Cambodia, and clambering around the Khmer temples brought me to my senses. I wasn’t working in an organization. I didn’t have backup. I didn’t have inexhaustible funds behind me. And I knew how killing and exhausting just doing one film would be. Three? I must be mad. So once more, decision time. I would do just one film, and maybe further down the line, when I was older and wiser I’d come back to the other two. Fine so far. But which film? The process of elimination wasn’t too hard. Film three – 1953–71 – was the least attractive to me. The events during this period had been fairly widely covered on TV, and there had been at least one or two films made about the Leningrad hijacking. The story of Sharansky’s imprisonment was riveting, but he’d already written an autobiography, and been interviewed to death. Although I knew if I did a film it could possibly deal more deeply and analytically with these issues, it still seemed to me best to leave the subject aside for the moment. So the choice became a toss-up between the early revolutionary years, and the war years, finishing with Stalin’s death. Both films seemed equally interesting, and equally viable, and then a video helped me make up my mind. I’d written about the possible series to a good friend of mine, Marina Goldovskaya. Marina was Russian, and had directed countless films in the USSR and now taught film at USC. After she’d received my letter Marina remembered she had a film with footage from the forties showing Mikhoels, the director of the Yiddish theater, in action. She quickly sent me the footage, accompanied by a sweet letter of encouragement. I put the video in the machine, and waited. Finally, in rather scratched footage there was Mikhoels, playing King Lear in Yiddish. And there he was again, in a play resembling Fiddler on the Roof, seen dancing and singing against sets that could have been, and probably were, painted by Chagall. And he was wonderful. He shone. He blazed. He was dynamic. And I could see it immediately. If we could put Mikhoels at the center of the film, and show plenty of his work with the Yiddish theater, we might have something which was completely unique and different. But there was another reason for putting him at the center. Although he was murdered in 1948, and left for dead on the snow of Minsk, talk of him kept permeating

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The documentary diaries

7  Poster for Stalin’s Last Purge.

Stalin’s Last Purge

the newspapers, till his story loomed large again in the affair of the Doctors’ Plot. So a decision had been made. I would do a film dealing with Communism, and Stalin and the Jews from 1939–53. All I needed was a working title. That didn’t take long. Stalin’s Last Purge. It sounded good to me. Short. Emphatic. Precise, and descriptive. All I needed was a few thousand dollars and I could go ahead. My time in Singapore was coming to an end, so I decided to leave all thoughts about money raising, and how to proceed, till I got back to Jerusalem. Once there I took a week to accustom myself to the old regime, then started back on Stalin. The prime function of the first proposal I’d written had been to show myself the possibilities of the subject. For fundraising, however, I needed a deeper and more thoroughly researched view of the subject. I knew much of the political framework of the period, but now wanted to find out more regarding the possible subjects of the film such as Mikhoels, and the poets and artists murdered by Stalin. Here two new books proved invaluable. Stalin’s Secret Pogrom by Joshua Rubenstein had just been published, and incredibly laid out the testimony and protocols of the secret trials of 1952. This was like finding a gold mine. The second book was Stalin’s Last Crime by Jonathan Brent. Brent’s book was all over the place but provided me with a deeper understanding of the complexities of the Doctors’ Plot. I also found a French biography of Mikhoels, written by one of his daughters. Then there was one further source of help, which I hadn’t considered in Singapore. Jerusalem was now full of immigrants from the Soviet Union. Many of the older ones remembered the events of the fifties very well. Often their parents had been caught up in Stalin’s machinations. So talking to them gave me the human and personal side of things, which was missing from the book research. This new research was invaluable in showing me where to broaden out. I could clearly see that Mikhoels was an extremely interesting personality. He was a director and thinker, and had made the M ­ oscow Yiddish Theater one of the great theaters of Russia, frequented by Jews and non-Jews alike. In the war he had become a tremendous propagandist for Russia, and together with the poet Itzik Feffer, had gone to the USA to lead a fundraising campaign. While there he had also become great friends with the famous Black singer, Paul Robeson. Postwar, memory of the visit to the USA made Mikhoels suspect

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8  Solomon Mikhoels in Stalin’s Last Purge.

in the eyes of Stalin, and became one of the reasons for his murder. This new research also told me a lot about the personalities murdered in the secret trials, people like Peretz Markish, the great Yiddish poet

Stalin’s Last Purge

9  Solomon Mikhoels and Itzik Feffer in Stalin’s Last Purge.

and playwright; Benjamin Zuskin, Mikhoels’ deputy at the theater; and David Bergelson, another great playwright of the time. A proposal is a means to raise money. It outlines the possible film in as attractive a way as possible, tells you something about approach and style, and gives you some facts about the director and producer. It also tries to indicate to the viewer why he or she should back the film. This is what I call the WIFM (‘What’s In It For Me’) element. Eventually the film may parallel the proposal, or it may differ. To repeat the obvious – the proposal is there to persuade someone to dig into his or her pocket and give you the wherewithall to make your film. OK: I wrote a new proposal, but where could I go with it? To put it another way, what bodies would have a self-interest in helping promote such a film? Immediately I thought of two institutions at the Hebrew University, where I taught. First there was the Leonard Nevzin Russian Research Centre. Surely my idea was at the center of their interests? Wrong! The project was not for them. Then I tried

65

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The documentary diaries

the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of anti-Semitism. Here I knew the director of the Institute, Robert Wistrich, and had a little more success. They were willing to put up $2,000. Not much, but a start. However, the $2,000 gave me enough cash to travel to New York and hunt around. And there I hit the jackpot. For about fifteen years I had submitted various projects to the Charles Revson Foundation, without much success. I had met the President of the foundation, Eli Evans, when he had backed the series Heritage, which I had worked on for 13/WNET. Afterwards we had become quite good friends, and I rarely came to New York without having dinner with him. Our friendship meant that he would view my projects with sympathy, but till Stalin, he didn’t feel inclined to support them. But as luck would have it, the Stalin proposal came at exactly the right time. Evidently the foundation had recently financed the translation into English of the protocols of the trials involving Peretz Markish and others. Till the overthrow of the Soviet Union the protocols had been kept under wraps. Once they became available to the world, the Revson Foundation heavily financed their translation and dissemination. Since my film would obviously make wide use of the translation, and indirectly publicize Revson’s help, my application fell on willing ears. The result was two or three meetings in which I explained my project in depth, and how I wanted to use the trial protocols. I then had to wait just a mere few days before I was told I had been given a grant of $25,000. Joy was not the word. Euphoria was more like it. This was actually the first film where, acting as an independent producer, I had managed to raise some serious money. To celebrate, I took some close friends out to dinner. After that I went down to the huge B&H camera store on 34th Street and bought myself a Sony PD 150 video camera, a first rate Sennheiser mike, a radio mike, a camera tripod, and plenty of tapes. All this stuff I had sent straight from B&H to New Jersey, thus avoiding sales tax. Later I had a friend bring all the equipment back to Manhattan. I had the equipment. I was no longer dependent on hiring a crew and expensive cameras. I was in business. Back home I thought for a while as to how best to proceed. I obviously needed to write an outline script. This would show me the shape of the film, the problems, where to shoot, what stills to look for, and suggest how and where interviews might contribute to the script.

Stalin’s Last Purge

This was not a cinéma vérité piece. It would not be a piece to be found on the run. All the problems had to be solved before shooting. Now I also knew I didn’t want a dull history lesson, where the narrator simply acts as the voice of God giving you facts. So interviews, if I could find them, would be vital to enliven the script. The obvious thing then was to write a fast outline, and at the same time look for interviewees that I could add into the script later. And here, as with the Revson Foundation in America, I had some extraordinary good fortune. I mentioned before there were a large number of Russian immigrants in Jerusalem at this time, and consequently I had started asking around the university if anyone knew people connected with trials or with Mikhoels. A friend then mentioned to me that the theater archives and museum of the university might be able to help. Their head was a warm, and very sympathetic Russian woman called Luba, who was reputed to know everyone. I phoned Luba, made an appointment, toddled off to the archives, and found I had hit the jackpot. For starters the archives had a section totally devoted to Mikhoels and the Yiddish theater. This was because Mikhoels’ daughters – Nina and Natalie – had donated many of their father’s photos, papers, and even costumes from the theater, to the center. Here was an absolute treasure trove: photos of Mikhoels in all his roles; stills from theater productions; Mikhoels’ medals and awards from Stalin; a few of Mikhoels’ letters, and also photos taken at his state funeral. The biggest surprise, however, was to find out from Luba that she knew many of the people connected to the secret trial, and the Doctors’ Plot, and most of them were living not far from Jerusalem. This group included Nina and Natalie, Mikhoels’ daughters, now in their eighties; David Markish, a writer, who was the son of the murdered Peretz Markish; the daughter of Benjamin Zuskin, who’d been dragged from a hospital at night by the KGB before his imprisonment; Lev Bergelson, the son of another murdered writer; and Dr Lias, whose mother had died in prison in a later purge. I felt like hugging and dancing around Luba, who in five minutes had shown me how the film could really take off. When Luba then told me I could use any of the materials in the archive for free, I felt I was in heaven. This is the kind of luck and good fortune all filmmakers need but which so rarely happens. As time went on Luba and

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I became really good friends, and I continue to bless her, even at the distance of a few years. My first interviews, which I shot with my new camera, were with Natalie and Nina Mikhoels, both now in their early eighties. They lived together in a tiny apartment near Tel Aviv, with photos of their father perched precariously on overcrowded bookshelves. Both were wonderfully warm and gracious. Natalie, a tiny lady, forever smoking, mostly told me stories of her father’s role in running the Yiddish theater. Nina, a year or so younger, was most useful in relating how fear and suspicion permeated all their lives. ‘At home we rarely talked because, and here she pointed to the ceiling, ‘microphones were all over the place. Instead we wrote on bits of paper, which we then burned.’ She then told me how she accompanied her father to the station, on his fateful trip to Minsk, where he was murdered. ‘I saw KGB men everywhere. A few got into the carriage with Dad. I told him I was frightened. He said “Don’t worry.” Then a few days later they phoned me to say Dad was dead!’ Four years later Nina was studying at a theater school in Moscow. This was the time of the Doctors’ Plot, and suddenly the newspaper Pravda came out with major headlines accusing Mikhoels of having been involved in an alleged plot to poison Stalin. This was four years after Mikhoels’ death. The news came out while Nina was in the student café. ‘The other students looked at the paper, at the headlines, and one by one they moved to the other side of the table. They didn’t want to get contaminated by appearing to know me.’ After concluding with Natalie and Nina I went to see Lev Bergelson and David Markish. Both their fathers had been shot in Lubianka jail. What I wanted from them was their reactions on and after the seizure of their fathers. Lev Bergelson, a grey-bearded scientist, recalled very clearly the coming of the KGB. ‘There was a knock on the door. They told Dad to pack a suitcase, just for a few days. But we never saw him again … Then they came and arrested all of us, and sent us to Siberia.’ This arrest of the families was news to me. Evidently once a family member was accused of a political crime, the rest of the family were sent into exile, often to work in the mines. The same thing had happened to David Markish, who was exiled to Kazakhstan. David had questioned the KGB captain about the arrest, who had answered ‘Think yourself lucky your family only got ten years exile. They could have had twenty-five.’ Markish also told me of seeing slave camps

Stalin’s Last Purge

being built, which were said to be for thousands of Jews, whom rumor had it Stalin wanted to send into exile after the alleged Doctors’ Plot was exposed. I knew David had been in a prison camp when Stalin had died, so, thinking of the end of the film, I asked him how the rest of the prisoners reacted. He looked at me with a smile. ‘The prisoners, they cried, they wept, they broke down. They were idiots. Didn’t they realize it was Stalin who’d put them there. As for me,’ and David paused. ‘Me, I didn’t cry. I was happy!’ This failure to acknowledge that Stalin was at the root of the evil empire also came out when I interviewed Alla Bergelson, Benjamin Zuskin’s daughter. ‘When they took Dad away, I didn’t understand it. Other parents had been taken away, but mine? I thought it was obviously a bureaucratic mistake. An error of some clerk. Because Stalin, no he couldn’t be responsible for this.’ The interviews made me very happy. I thought the material was good, extremely interesting, and heartfelt, and I felt the interviews would easily integrate into the film. I knew I might have to do some more, but I had more than enough material for the time being. So now to the script. For me, one of the guiding principles of doing a script is to get the structure right. With the Stalin script I could see two problems at the outset. We had the overall story of the Stalin years, and we had the story of Mikhoels and the secret trials. The problem here was how to integrate them. But the second problem was the story of the Doctors’ Plot, that suddenly spun off in another direction. I juggled the first problem for a while, then saw a relatively simple solution. I would have a short prologue that would set up Mikhoels’ death, the idea of the secret trials, and the overall attack on Soviet Jewry. This hopefully would whet the appetite of the viewers. The start of the film proper would then give us a short introductory look at Stalin up to 1939, and introduce the idea that though the Communist party proclaimed freedom it also persecuted Russian orthodoxy and Jewish tradition. I could then say Yiddish, however, was tolerated as an ethnic language, and that would allow us to introduce ­Mikhoels’ story, and his connection to the Yiddish theater. All this was easy to write, and in the first draft came out as follows.

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NARRATION In January 1948 a man was found dead on a winter swept road in Minsk, Byelorussia. There were no witnesses. It seemed like a hit and run case. But the dead man was no ordinary citizen. He was Solomon Mikhoels, the most famous Jew in the USSR outside the Kremlin. As director of the Moscow State Yiddish Theater in the thirties his productions had become the focus of Jewish life and pride in the capital. In the war Mikhoels had assumed another role … spokesman for Soviet Jewry, and propagandist against Hitler. But now he was dead. In the year following Mikhoels’ death numerous Jewish friends and associates of his disappeared into the clutches of the secret police. Thus – with the hidden assassination and midnight arrest – began the fatal assault on Soviet Jewry. Title: STALIN’S LAST POGROM The Soviet Empire lasted seventy years before collapsing in 1991. For two and a half decades it was ruled by one man … Joseph Stalin. It was his arm that showed the way, and his outstretched hand that meant life or death. His decades of power had seen millions executed or exiled to the gulag. Now, nearing seventy, he would begin his last purge.

As I wrote, I was also thinking of possible accompanying pictures. Death in the snow? Obviously we needed a snow scene. Once we mentioned Mikhoels as director we could use photos of him and theater production stills. Talk of him as propagandist? Well I knew there was archive of him talking at a war rally. Mention of the secret police and disappearances – maybe I could find stills of the murdered men. Footage for the collapse of the Soviet empire? Here I wasn’t sure, but that could wait a while. On the other hand ‘rule by one man’ was easy. Maybe here we could use a May Day rally in Red Square, and a close-up of Stalin. In other words, in the beginning I was trying out a rough structure and narration, content to think about visuals later. My second problem, after trying to integrate Stalin’s history and introduce Mikhoels, was how to glide into the Doctors’ Plot. The difficulty lay in the chronological order of things. The natural progression of the film had been to show Mikhoels’ murder in 1948, and continue to the secret trial of the writers in 1952. The Doctors’ Plot, however, though it got publicized in 1953, had its origins way back in

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1950 and 1951. This jerk back in time would be difficult, and needed very careful finessing. Here I decided I could use Stalin’s seventieth birthday as the pivot to turn the film towards a different direction. The writing of the crucial narration was fairly easy. NARRATION Stalin’s seventieth birthday was marked with celebrations throughout the country. Now he was King, savior, and messiah rolled into one. But beneath the surface Stalin’s Cold War fears were multiplying like cancer. Close to home he saw treachery and enemies everywhere. The Jews-the secret police-even his close associates. The seeds for a grand purge were first planted when a Jewish doctor called Yakov Ettinger, who attended Kremlin officials, was arrested in November 1950. He was charged with spying for Israel, and defaming the State. And there was an extra charge … trying to kill high officials by using wrong treatments.

[AR: I then thought I could try and find an interviewee who could tell us about Ettinger in prison, and resumed the script as follows] Following Ettinger’s death in prison a devious plan was forming in Stalin’s mind. He would create an imaginary conspiracy of Jewish doctors intent on murdering Kremlin leaders, then claim the secret police had refused to investigate it. This way both the Jews and the secret police could be purged in one go.

I had a beginning and a middle, all I needed was an end. That was fairly simple. The main event at the end of the film was clearly the death of Stalin. It made for a dramatic finale, and clearly brought closure to the period. There seemed to be, however, a few codas that needed to be added, mainly dealing with changes in the USSR after 1953. They included the collapse of the accusations in the Doctors’ Plot, and publication of the dismissal of the charges in the secret trials. I also knew I’d have to mention the collapse of the USSR in 1991, and the subsequent emigration of thousands of Jews to the USA and Israel. For final film shots I thought I could use a public ceremony in Jerusalem, commemorating fifty years since the deaths of Mikhoels and others. The ceremony would then mix into close-up shots of the murdered writers, and the film would conclude with great archive of Mikhoels dancing and singing.

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Slowly, gradually, I was edging into the script. I was noting down possible beginnings and endings, and also trying to solve certain problems of script placement. At the same time I was also considering where the interviews might fit in. The next stage of the process was relatively easy. First I made a rough outline of the total film, with main sequences and suggested interviews, from start to finish. Then I sat down and in about a week wrote a draft narration, with suggested visuals at the side of the commentary. I read it all over, and realized it lacked one thing: some expertise to give my narration weight. By this time I knew my history well enough, but I needed a few people to give the film scholastic authority. Now I’m not a great lover of ‘experts’ being used in film, but here I thought their use was justified. I was dealing with a complex subject, and needed to get things absolutely right. After hunting around I was led to two esteemed experts. One was Joshua Rubenstein, who’d written the core book on the secret trials. The other was Professor Stephen Cohen, of NYU. Both were very photogenic and added gravitas. After a little arm twisting both agreed to help, and also to act as advisors on my script. That task accomplished, I added them into the script outline, with a suggestion of what subjects I thought they could cover. For example I was pretty sure Joshua would be very good on the character of Mikhoels, and developments with the anti-fascist league. I thought that Stephen, on the other hand, could give me a deeper understanding of Stalin’s attitudes at the beginning of the war, his fears in the Cold War and his growing paranoia. Stephen was the master of the catching phrase, one of which, commenting on the Nazi–Soviet pact of 1939, went immediately into the script. ‘Hitler was Stalin’s only friend. And he too betrayed him.’ With the script well in hand, I was almost finished with preproduction, for me, the hardest part of the film. My argument has always been that the main job, for narration-driven films, is to get the preproduction right, and that includes doing a draft script. Once that’s done you can usually see clearly where you want to go, and the rest is easy. Or fairly easy. In this case, the last of my preproduction chores was to start thinking about visuals. By this I meant archives and stills. Planning for a shoot was something that could come later. In my latest draft script

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– the fifth – I had inserted, as I‘ve mentioned, a few suggestions for visuals. Now I had to think about the question more seriously. I had to consider what I needed, what could work best, and where I could get the material cheapest, or even for nothing. And there was one other thing to consider. I had to give my editor a range of possibilities. I had to give him or her a large range of materials so that that there would be plenty of room for choice and selection when we got down to serious work. From my script I made a list of required shots. They included a lot of Mikhoels’ at work and at play. I needed stills of the murdered poets, actors, and writers, and of those accused in the Doctors’ Plot. And I needed plenty of stills or archives of Stalin at different stages of his career. My list came to over 100 shots. Now the challenge was to find the material. Here I saw four main sources. The first was the Hebrew University theater archives, and any stills I could get from people I’d interviewed such as Natalie and Nina Mikhoels. The second possibility was going to NARA, the US National Archives in Washington, which I thought would have lots of materials on the Second World War. The advantage of NARA was they could supply materials without you having to pay copyright, but you did have to pay for processing. My third source was archives in Russia. But I wasn’t sure how to get access to them, so put that thought aside for the moment. Lastly I had a few Russian filmmaker friends, like Marina Goldovskaya, who I thought might be able to help. Here Marina turned up trumps, giving me material she had shot in 1991 at the time of the collapse of the USSR, and which I used as bookends at both the start and end of the film. Marina also helped me in another way. I knew I’d have to shoot in Moscow and needed to connect with a film company there who could assist me. Here Marina again proved a boon, giving me the name of a friend, whom she also thought could help with archives. I immediately contacted Natasha (what other name could she possibly have) who said ‘yes’ to everything. If I sent her a list she could immediately get to work on the archive hunt, and if I told her what I needed for a shoot, she could get to work on that as well. As I knew I’d have to be in Moscow for ten days, at least, I said we’d wait on the archives till I arrived. The work on the Israeli archives I did myself, with everyone proving very helpful. For NARA I found an American researcher, Sally, who for a small fee, agreed to go to Washington and do the search.

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I gave her a basic list of my needs, but like the best of assistants she came up with a lot more that was helpful. For example she came up with a great shot of a poster board with Stalin’s face on it, floating high above the landscape. I could see immediately that this heroic image really symbolized Stalin as the Messiah and supreme overlord. Sally also found some shots from an old Soviet feature film, showing actors playing a young Lenin and a young Stalin having tea together. This sequence later allowed me to say ‘Stalin saw himself as a great hero in the tradition of Lenin, and invented a touching relationship between the two of them for Russian cinema. But the truth was, Lenin despised Stalin, and continually warned others against him.’ The archives were coming in. Phase one was over. Now was the time to plan the main shoot in Moscow. The timing for the filming was actually not decided by me, but by others. Joshua, my expert, said he’d be in Moscow on certain dates in January. And Natalie and Nina also said they might be in the capital at the same time. I knew it would be invaluable to have Joshua on the spot, and with Nina and Natalie I could visit where they lived, and take them to the site of the old theater. And generally Moscow would be a good place to capture their impressions and memories of everything that had happened. Preparation was now needed on two fronts. I had to decide what to film, and made a list of possible locations by consulting my script. They included a few theaters, war memorials, Red Square, graveyards, the Kremlin walls, Moscow station, the subway, government buildings, and Lubianka jail. But all that was just for starters, because I knew once in Moscow a dozen other locations would occur to me. That was all easy. What was more difficult was settling down for a few weeks with a ‘Teach Yourself Russian’ book, so that I could learn a few phrases, and a few keywords like drasvutya (hello), spasiba (thank you), and gdye (where is). When I also added the words for hotel, restaurant, taxi, and OK to the list, I thought I should be able to get by. I knew it would also be necessary to learn the Cyrillic alphabet so that I could at least read street and subway names. This took longer, but was fun. With everything in order I contacted Natasha by e-mail to see if the dates were OK with her. They were. We then got down to details. She would supply me with crew, van, camera, and assistant for five days at a very reasonable cost. She’d send a car to pick me up at the

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airport, and would also get down to hunting for archives once I gave her my list in Moscow. With that all taken care of I went to get an air ticket, booked a hotel, and started looking for some warm underwear. I’d been warned about Moscow in January, and didn’t want to succumb to the elements before doing any shooting. Moscow was a shock. I’d last been there in 1990 for a conference, and everything had changed. In 1990 there was hardly a car on the roads. Now the traffic was horrendous, and even worse than Bangkok, which was saying something. And what cars! I walked down New Arbat Street and in the space of 150 yards counted three Bentleys, two Rolls Royces, two Daimlers, and an assortment of BMWs, each guarded by a muscleman in a black suit. On my first visit there were no cafés to be seen, and nothing in the shops. When I’d gone into GUM, Moscow’s famous department store, all I had seen on sale were fifteen pairs of green sandals, all the same size. In 1990 McDonald’s opened a Moscow branch, and I remembered a line of over 200 yards long as people waited for western hamburgers. Now there were cafés and restaurants on every corner, while GUM boasted the most modern fashion outlets from Karl Lagerfeld, Prada, and Dolce and Gabbana, to Ralph Lauren and Armani, and perfume boutiques from Dior and Revlon. As Aldous Huxley might have remarked, ‘Welcome to the Brave New World.’ Now on to work. Natasha turned out to be a highly intelligent woman who’d been a former student of Marina. Her office was the size of a shoe box, and was reached by a nineteenth-century claustrophobic and panic inducing iron elevator. From this cubbyhole Natasha ran both a film business and a book publishing business. Natasha was all attention. She cleared her desk, brought in some tea in glasses, introduced us to her young red haired assistant Sophie, and we got down to business. Sophie, she told us, would be my guide, production assistant, and translator. The crew and equipment were all in place, but could I pay in dollars, not rubles? Yes, we could start tomorrow, just tell Sophie where she could pick me up. Now where were we going to shoot? I handed over the shooting list. No problems, but then she examined the list further. ‘You want to shoot in Red Square. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe the guards stop you. Hmm! You want to shoot outside Lubianka jail (now a site of offices.) Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe the guards stop you.’ I was beginning to get the picture. Maybe Moscow hadn’t changed that much after all.

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After we reached agreement on what could be shot, which reduced my shooting list by a quarter, I showed Natasha the list of the archives I wanted. They ranged from Stalin’s speeches, and victory parades in the Red Square in 1945, to Mikhoels’ performances, Paul Robeson’s visit to Russia after Mikhoels’ death, historic shots of the Lubianka, and the days of mourning after Stalin’s death. I then asked Natasha if it would be Sophie who’d take me to the archives to help me get what I wanted. Natasha shook her head. ‘You no go archives. Russian archives take you by nose if they know you foreigner. You pay, pay, pay, much more than locals. I go archives for you with list, and get you fifth of price.’ This sounded good to me so I gave her the list, and asked her to get me VHS viewing copies, with time code. Ten minutes later Sophie took me to my riverside hotel, the Ukraina, which dominated the river bank just opposite the Russian parliament building. The Ukraina was standard Stalin monumental architecture. It was massively built, with its central tower reaching up more than twenty-four floors. To inform you of its Stalinist heritage, huge hammers and sickles were carved into the top walls, adjacent to massive concrete Soviet stars. And in case you missed the point, the ceiling of the large interior hall was covered with an inspirational fresco painting of red flags, huge muscled Soviet workers, tractors, and buxom farm girls. At least that’s the way I hold the scene in my memory, but maybe I’m imagining the tractors. Though hotel security men in black suits were everywhere, there was no babushka on each floor guarding the keys, nor did my modest cell-like room appear to be bugged. Downstairs, on the second floor there was a decent restaurant, thronged by a number of well-dressed tourists, watching a pianist bashing out Chopin with supreme élan. To tell you the truth I’d expected worse, and felt quite cheerful as I ate my first chopped herring and downed my first vodka of the season. The start of the shoot did not go well. It took us hours to move about in the dense traffic. Thus though a garden with broken Stalin statues was only a mile and a half from Gorky Park, where we’d begun filming, it took us three quarters of an hour to go from one site to another. My cameraman was also, by my standards, deadly slow. A simple shot would take half an hour as he polished and re-polished lenses, and then waited ten minutes for a leaf to fall. Also we argued. He was very reluctant to let me look through the lens, and check a

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few shots, which is my practice if I don’t know the cameraman. In short, the day was basically a disaster, and things didn’t bode well for the upcoming week. The situation didn’t improve the next day. At 8a.m. I got a call from Sophie that the cameraman was ill, and maybe, possibly, they could find a replacement by 2p.m. I asked Sophie to ring me back at nine so that I could think things through. The decision was relatively easy. I had my camera with me, and I’d shoot myself. I wasn’t the world’s greatest cameraman, but was certainly passable. This way we could abandon working with a cumbersome crew, and guided by Sophie, I could move around Moscow very fast using just buses and subway. I told Sophie what I’d decided and she passed on the information to Natasha, who said she understood. Sophie then met me at 10a.m., and armed with my camera and a lightweight tripod I went out to say hello to a rainy overcast Moscow. The day was dark and gray, my spirits anything but. Without the hindrance of an equipment truck, Sophie and I moved around very fast. Though there were masses of police in Red Square, we managed to film without being bothered, probably being seen as casual tourists. Filming outside the Lubianka, the old prison, worried me a little bit more, because here I wanted close-ups of all the Soviet shields and emblems decorating the walls. Well, all we could do was plunge in. So I asked Sophie to keep a look out for police, took out the Sony and went ahead. Contrary to all Natasha’s warnings, no one stopped us. Filming the exterior of the Kremlin was easy, and I finished the day feeling very satisfied. However, before saying goodbye to Sophie I got her to ring Natalie and Nina, who’d just arrived, and also asked her to contact Joshua Rubenstein. This was all accomplished smoothly, with early meetings being set up for the next day. My first cup of coffee of the day was with Joshua, at a small café in Twerskia Street. I had asked him how I’d recognize him. His answer, ‘Just look out for Gene Wilder.’ He was right. The resemblance was amazing. Josh was a mine of information, and of really great help on two issues. First he had all the prison mugshots of the men and women who’d been accused in the secret trials, and showed me them over coffee. The photos were in full face and profile. What I saw were stark, sad, bitter pictures of people facing death, the effects of torture and mistreatment clearly evident in their faces. I asked Josh whether I could use them in my film. ‘Absolutely.’

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What was equally helpful was that Josh supplied me with the names of two people that he thought I should interview in regard to the Doctors’ Plot. One was Nadia Bergelson, daughter of a journalist, who could probably tell me about the atmosphere in the city in the dark days of January 1953. The other name he gave me was Yakov Ettinger, son of the first doctor accused in the Doctors’ Plot. Again no time was wasted as Joshua rang both, and arranged film interviews with them the next day. A few minutes later Nina and Natalie, whom Josh knew even better than me, arrived and joined us for hot chocolate. They were in Moscow to take part in a Mikhoels’ memorial festival arranged by the city. No one spoke of the irony that first you murder someone, then years later, you celebrate his life. Briefly I explained to the sisters what I was doing, and got them to agree to take me later to places where they’d lived and worked. With Sophie now joining us in the afternoon, I talked to Natalie outside the first location of the Yiddish theater. Here she described how they lived above the theater, and how Chagall painted backdrops for the production. Later Nina showed me their second apartment, and described the family’s fears when the secret police started closing in. All good stuff, which I knew would easily fit into the film. Back in the hotel in the evening, as I relaxed over a beer, I started thinking about filmic atmosphere. One of my feelings about the film was that I should not just relate the main stories, but should also try and convey the atmosphere of the times through impressionistic photography that would stimulate the viewer’s imagination. Here the location and construction of the hotel proved a great help. For example, looking out from the windows of the 22nd floor, I could get a huge panoramic sweep of the city which I could photograph at all times of the day. Dawn was good, but so was midday, when black smoke would engulf the city, and its buildings and factories. But shooting at night was best. At eight in the evening a long lens would give a very blurred and eerie impression of traffic moving slowly along the main boulevards. Shooting from the highest floors at night also allowed me to look at half-shuttered windows, and show the grotesque shadows of huge dark buildings only half a mile from the hotel. My room was also a good place for filming. If I ruffled the bed, and shot through the window curtains into the room I could well suggest

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the frightened atmosphere felt by someone as the police knocked on the door. Then again, from my bedroom window I looked down on a courtyard where dark figures moved stealthily around huge cars. This I thought, would make a great scene to suggest the spying and constant surveillance of the KGB. Using similar techniques I went around the city with Sophie, in the next few days, trying to find locations that would indicate an atmosphere of fear. We found abandoned graveyards. We entered desolate buildings, to shoot dark and crumbling stairwells. We shot in gloomy railroad yards, and also filmed every huge Stalinist building we came across. We also looked for local color such as rain and crowds in Arbat Street, and accordionists in the subway entrance. I also went hunting for a big red Soviet flag. Though busts and pictures of Putin were everywhere, no one could lead me to a Soviet flag. It didn’t even exist in the Museum of the Revolution, which was now mostly decorated with pictures of Putin meeting be-gowned Church dignitaries. In between these sessions I did an interview with Yakov Ettinger, the contact given to me by Josh. A photo of his dead father, also called Yakov, was on the sideboard, and he’d put his father’s medical books on the table. Ettinger’s father was reputed to be the first doctor arrested in the Doctors’ Plot. Yakov only spoke Russian, and Sophie translated after each take. His words were straightforward, but very hard to digest. ‘Dad was put in an isolation cell. They beat him, and tortured him, and he suffered very much. When I finally got access to his file I saw that he had suffered over twenty minor heart attacks.’ Yakov himself had also been arrested, and had been placed in solitary confinement for half a year. But as he said, ‘They got nothing out of me.’ This story of confinement and torture was repeated to me a month later in Israel when a Doctor Lias told me how his mother, then a young doctor, had also been intimidated by the KGB. ‘She was in prison. They wanted her to incriminate other doctors, still free. They said the doctors were suspect, and had asked her to give poison treatments. She thought suicide would preserve her silence. She knew if she talked the KGB would come and kill me too.’ After a week I was satisfied with what we’d shot, and started making plans to leave. Natasha had found a load of archives for me, and said the material was excellent. There was no time to view it all, so I had to take her words on trust. That evening I went out with her and Sophie for dinner, and together we raised two or three glasses of

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vodka. The plan was to edit in Israel, and then I’d return for a few days if extra shooting was needed. As for the VHS archives, I could edit them in to my rough cut, and then get Natasha to send me the masters. The plan seemed fine. We raised another glass. I said ‘dosvidanya,’ and I was on my way. In Jerusalem I decided to look at finances. They were low. I was now about to start editing, and knew, from my budget, that the whole process through to film completion would cost about another $25– $30,000 dollars. And even if I could find that I would have made no money on the film, not as producer, not as writer, and not as director. Not a good situation. So before even thinking about the editing I arranged for another trip to New York. I needed to find funds, and that seemed the best place to look. I also needed to go there to film interviews with my two experts, Josh, and Stephen Cohen. My first port of call was the Charles Revson Foundation. The foundation had helped me jump-start the film, and I thought a progress report was in order. They liked what I told them, and also listened to my tale of scarcity of funds. Unfortunately no one jumped out of his or her seat to press a cheque into my hands. Instead there were smiles, and ‘Thanks for coming.’ A second New York visit elsewhere was more fruitful. I’d once made a film about an eccentric American millionaire called Leon. We both enjoyed singing and had, for the stretch of the film, become good friends. At the time he had said he was interested in Soviet Jewry. Now was the time to put him to the test. He passed with flying colors, and two days after our meeting Leon sent me a substantial check. Then came some visits to friends, and a few small foundations, which together netted me about $5,000. Well, we were getting there. Then came the really good news. Revson had looked at their end of the year situation, found they had a few dollars left and gave me another grant almost as good as the first. So with joy in my heart, and a few dollars in my pocket, I had a smash-up dinner with friends before going to film Josh the following day. He looked good on camera and gave me exactly what I wanted. Steve Cohen was equally fine, and gave me some good insights into the changes in the Soviet Union due to the Cold War. And then came the snowstorm I’d been praying for. Let me explain. My film was set to begin dramatically with a violent snowstorm, to the accompaniment of the words ‘In January 1948

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a man was found dead on a winter swept road in Minsk, ­Byelorussia.’ Well, it’s OK to write narration like that but you had to back it up with a snow scene. And neither in Israel, London nor in Moscow, had I found snow. Now New York was glorious with it. I shot a snow storm at night from the roof of the thirty-five-story apartment building where I was staying, with snow blinding all the street lamps. I shot snow packing up doorways, and being trampled underfoot. And I shot snow, piles of it, in Central Park, with oncoming car lights cunningly defocused through the branches of a thick bush. It wasn’t Minsk, but you had to be practical. And snow is snow. Who would know! A few days later I headed back to Jerusalem, mission accomplished, and ready for stage three: postproduction. My partner Nissim, a great editor, was not available to cut the film but had suggested a young woman, Adit, about three or four years out of film school. Adit was fast, bright, and creative. Just what I needed. I quickly cued Adit in, and we sat down together for a few days to look at the US, Russian, and Israeli rushes, and go over the archives Natasha had found for me. All looked good, especially the archives. We had the German army surrendering at Stalingrad. We had a fabulous parade after the war in Red Square, the troops throwing German regimental banners on the ground while General Zhukov rides by on a white horse. We had moving footage of Mikhoels lecturing, acting, and making propaganda speeches. There was Stalin footage galore, ranging from his endless speeches to the firework celebrations of his seventieth birthday. And we had a truly magnificent sequence showing the country’s mourning after Stalin’s death, with women and children weeping, and huge train engines blowing their whistles as we hear Chopin’s funeral march. I discussed the footage with Adit, got her reactions, and then went home to update the script, and put in all the new interviews. I then gave Adit the new editing script and left her alone. My belief is that once you choose an editor, and you’ve made your instructions clear, you leave them to get on with it, at least until rough cut. Of course, occasionally I peeped in, and took a look at how a few sequences were going, but basically Adit was left to her own devices. Now it was time to think about music. I had no money for a composer, but didn’t think I needed one, because there was a much simpler solution to hand. We could use Russian traditional songs, marches, and folk music. Though normally I would be very careful about

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copyright infringement, I thought most of this music would be free, having been recorded when the USSR was outside certain complex copyright rules. With this in mind I went to a music expert, Arieh, with whom I’d worked at Israel TV. He didn’t think there would be a problem, and set about hunting for a variety of songs, particularly patriotic Russian marches. After I explained about the presence of the KGB and prisons, Arieh also prepared for me what I might call stings, or tension music to beef up those sequences. Later after we’d prepared a rough cut, I knew we could show him a DVD and finesse the music. In the middle of the editing we suddenly found we had a major problem relating to the Russian archives. Adit had been using the VHS archive copies as her base, and had integrated the archives into the film very well. With them all in place, I had written to Natasha, giving her the identification and time codes of everything we needed, and asked her to obtain the masters of all the shots, without which we couldn’t finish the film. The material arrived fairly quickly, but on checking though we realized it was all a big mess. Half the archives we wanted were missing, and we’d also been sent archives we had never ordered. The only solution was to go back to Moscow and sort things out on the spot. Natasha was apologetic, and it seemed that something like time code identification was almost unknown in the Russian archives. Or at least that was the story I was given. As it would take about a week to clear up the mess, I settled in once more at the Ukraina, and drew up a list of extra shots that would help the film, many of them suggested by Adit. As a result I did a lot more shooting of crowds, particularly entering and exiting the subway. I was also lucky in that Moscow was covered in thick snow, and this gave a different sense of the city to the one I’d filmed earlier. Lastly permission came through for me to shoot in the theater where Mikhoels had staged the last of his productions. Here I mainly wanted to get a feel of the old theater, with its red chairs and deep crimson curtain. With most of the editing done, I knew how the scene would be used. First we’d see the theater, and the glorious chandelier. The curtains would be closed. Then, as they slowly opened we’d see ­Mikhoels on stage in all his glory. Technically I knew it would be a bit tricky, but a nice effect if it worked. With shooting almost over Natasha told me the material was almost ready. In the end it was a cliff hanger, and I only got my hands

Stalin’s Last Purge

on the new masters an hour before I had to take off for the airport. There was no time to look at the stuff, and all I could do was pray that this time the archives had got it right. Next morning Adit checked the materials. We were home and dry. Under Adit’s careful eye and excellent judgment the final editing went very smoothly. By now the script was very clear, and the narration was looking very polished. I’d enjoyed writing it, and the words came very easily, with the occasional slight flourish, as when I tried to explain the preparations for a Doctors’ Plot trial in Red Square. ‘The axe was being whetted. The noose made ready. And the guillotine prepared … but the drama would unfold in a very different way.’ It was essential to get the ending of the film right, and I thought about it for a long time. In the end I concluded by showing a group of Russians meeting at an open-air memorial in Jerusalem. The memorial plaque was dedicated to the memory of Mikhoels and others who had been murdered. Among the crowd present I focused on Natalie and Nina, Alla Zuskin, and David Markish, all of whom appear in the film. From there I cut briefly to head shots of Peretz Markish and Benjamin Zuskin taken in prison. Then in conclusion we see a repeat of the joyous shots of Mikhoels dancing and singing onstage. The narration went: NARRATION On August 12th, 2002, a small ceremony was held in Jerusalem, honoring the writers and artists murdered by Stalin. It was fifty years from the date of their death. Soviet Jews had been deceived, manipulated and persecuted, but they had never been traitors. They had not been dissidents, but Soviet patriots. Their memories and legacy will endure, while the statues of Stalin lie shattered and abandoned in the dust.

The film premiered at the Jerusalem International Film Festival. Nina and Natalie came to the showing, and I invited them onto the stage, whereupon everyone stood up and applauded them for two minutes. Afterwards we had a party, where glasses clinked, everyone hugged, and I went home a little tipsy but satisfied. The following morning I went out for coffee alone, and started thinking back on the film. What struck me first is how films and ideas change. I had thought I was going to do a simple political historical

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film on Jews and Communism. Instead the film had become the deeply moving story of the sufferings and endurance of three or four wonderful families. It was not the film I had dreamed of, but I was proud of what had emerged. I also realized how open everyone had been when I talked to them. My questions had probed the very center of their past sorrows. I had asked them to tell me about death and murder, about the assassination of their nearest and dearest. I had asked them to evoke memories they would have perhaps preferred to leave sleeping. Normally I might have felt ashamed of doing this, felt that I was exploiting them for the sake of my film. But not here. In this case I really felt that everyone wanted to talk, that the talking acted as a kind of therapy. And we had in a small sense become family. Nina and Natalie had become part of my life, and I was very glad about that. Finally I knew I had been very lucky. We all need luck, and for once I had more than my deserved share. I had not had to look, hunt, and search for interviewees. They were given to me on a plate. The Russian connections, which could have been difficult to find, came after just one or two letters. And lastly, and unbelievably, the funding had come relatively easily. It wouldn’t be so easy in the future, but for once I’d been blessed.

Production notes: writing narration Stalin’s Last Purge was absolutely dependent on dynamic and powerful narration. And it was something I very much enjoyed writing. Doing it reaffirmed what I’ve always believed: though many films can exist without narration, and younger filmmakers tend to avoid it, narration can often be a tremendous help in making a good film. Complex essay, historical, or political films for example, almost always demand commentary if they are to achieve any level of seriousness. Narration can quickly and easily set up the factual background of a film, providing simple or complex information that does not arise easily or naturally from the casual conversation of the film participants. It can complement the mood of the film, and above all it can provide focus and emphasis. It does not have to judge what is seen, but it should help the viewer understand more fully the significance of what is on the screen. The job of these notes is to provide a few hints and suggestions so that when you are required to write narration, you can do it well.

The function of narration The broad function of narration is to amplify and clarify the picture. It should help establish the direction of the film and provide any necessary information not obvious from the visuals. In a simple but effective way, it should help focus what the film is about and where it is going. In Stalin’s Last Purge, I wanted the viewer to understand from the start that he or she was going to follow both a personal story and a series of state crimes. With that in mind, I wrote the opening as follows: In January 1958 a man was found dead on a winter swept road in Minsk, Byelorussia. There were no witnesses. It seemed like a hit-andrun case. But the dead man was no ordinary Soviet citizen. He was Solomon Mikhoels … the most famous Jew in Russia outside the Kremlin.

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  As director of the Moscow Yiddish theater his productions had become the focus of Jewish life and pride in the capital. In the war Mikhoels had assumed another role, spokesman for Soviet Jewry and propagandist for Stalin.   Now he was dead … but was it accident or murder?   In the year following Mikhoels’s death, numerous associates of his disappeared into the clutches of the secret police and Lubyanka jail. Thus, with the hidden assassination and midnight arrest began the fatal assault on Soviet Jewry.

Narration can also help establish the mood of the film, and it is particularly useful in bridging filmic transitions and turning the film in a new direction. The first thing one learns in journalism is to let the reader know the five Ws: who, what, when, where, and why. Those are useful starters and reminders for writing narration, but only starters. So where does one go from there? The basis of writing most narration is finding interesting facts and presenting them in the most gripping or imaginative way to the viewer. Facts are the raw material of commentary. The writer’s job is to use them judiciously to make the narration come alive and sparkle. Below we can see how Agnieszka Piotrowska introduces some fascinating facts in a very simple but effective way in her film The Bigamists. Bigamy, which used to be a hanging offense two hundred years ago, is still a criminal act punishable by prison …   Most bigamists are men. There are very few women bigamists. Mostly we don’t betray, we nurture. [So] when a bigamist woman is caught it causes a sensation.

The above is very good, but what is less clear is how far the writer should add value judgment to the facts. Some writers take a purist position on this matter, arguing that while it is permissible to draw attention to certain situations and present evidence about them, the final judgment must come from the viewer. That’s fine as a basic rule, yet there are times when the writer feels so passionately about a subject that his or her own commitment and point of view must be expressed directly in the narration. So Agnieszka writes ‘Mostly we [women] don’t betray, we nurture.’ On the other end of the narration spectrum are the films of Michael Moore (Rodger and Me, Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 911, Sicko).

Production notes: writing narration

Neutrality is not a goal. He always has a cultural and political agenda that he writes it into his narrations and on-camera scenes. Mix in some humor and often debatable research and you have his formula for making his points through the documentary form. Voice and style Before you actually begin writing the narration, you must consider what voice and style are most appropriate for the film. Is your style to be somber and serious, or are you aiming at a lighter and more folksy effect? If you are doing a historical film, you will probably adopt the former. If you are doing a film on tourism or animals, you might prefer the latter. I say probably because there are no iron-clad rules. This is an important point, for very often you are writing not in the abstract but for a particular narrator. Thus, if Christiane Amanpour, or Wolf Blitzer were presenting a film, the language might be very serious; If, however, you were writing for actors such as Kenneth Branagh, Judy Dench or Meryl Streep, then your narration could go almost any way imaginable. If the documentary does not have a presenter, as most do not, you have to decide what perspective you want to use – first, second, or third person. The essay or the film on history or science tends to use the formality and objectivity of the third person. The effect is rather distant and cool and runs the danger of being slightly authoritarian. Nevertheless, used well, the third person can be highly effective. As suggested above, the use of first and second person helps involve the viewer. Here is an example of a film written in the third person and then in the second: Third person One turns the bend and sinister mountains immediately confront the viewer. On the right a dirt track is seen to ascend to a black hilltop from which can be heard strange noises. Thus, the stranger is welcomed to Dracula’s lair. Second person You turn the bend and immediately confront dark, sinister mountains. On your right a dirt track climbs to a black hilltop from where you hear strange noises. Welcome, my friend, to Dracula’s lair.

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To my mind, the latter version, using the second person, is far stronger and more effective for this film. And there is one more thing, which I want to stress. Writing in the second person can create a sense of dialogue and conversation, of commonality with the audience. It takes you, the viewer, into the film and gets you involved. So, in The Bigamists Piotrowska asks, ‘How would you feel if your husband was somebody else’s husband? How would you feel if you were that husband?’ Your final option is to write in the first person. It’s a form I like because it allows for a tremendous number of nuances. It’s far less linear than the third person, and it allows you to be more experimental. And, of course, the more personal form makes for a more human and closer identification with the viewer A few years ago I was asked to write the narration for a film on the Yom Kippur War between Egypt and Israel. The film, Letter from the Front, was a string of hastily edited battle sequences, and I was brought in to write the commentary after the film had already been edited and mixed. The film had no storyline to speak of, and my task was to write to pictures and sequences that couldn’t be changed and went all over the place. My answer was to use first-person narration from the point of view of one of the soldiers. That way, the narration could dart all over the place and still reflect the inner tensions and feelings of someone in the midst of war. The following sample suggests my approach to the problem: Visual Audio You keep running, and when Soldiers lying alongside cars, you stop there is this overwhelming in tents, absolutely tired. tiredness, not just of your body but of your whole being. Where are your friends? Where are those you love? And you feel a terrible heaviness covering everything. Now I find time completely Soldiers talk, write letters, sleep on the grass, etc. standing still for me. There’s no yesterday and no tomorrow … no normalcy, no reference points. There’s only the immediacy of this moment. We are all still mobilized, and plans, future, home life – all these things are vague and unreal.

Production notes: writing narration

The shot list for narration sequences In order to write good and accurate narration you have to prepare a shot list. This means going through the film and listing the length and description of all the key shots and sequences. This is something that you (the writer) should do, rather than the editor, as each of you will view the film differently. If your film is about a university, then your first few shots might consist of groups getting off buses, students talking to one another, a cluster of buildings, more students, the occasional professor, and then a drastic cut to a lesson in progress. Your subsequent shot list might look like this: Seconds Picture 10

Buses arrive at campus.

4

Students get off buses.

8

Groups of students talking.

5

A Japanese student close-up.

6

A Burmese student close-up.

8

Old buildings.

7

New campus buildings.

10

Group of students with guitars.

12

University professors enter campus.

8

A professor looking like a hippie.

15

Science classroom.

Once you have your shot list, and are armed with your basic outline script which you’ve prepared earlier, it’s very easy to write the appropriate narration, even at home and without seeing an editing screen. Style and language Who are you writing for? When I work, I assume that I am writing for a good friend. He is sitting beside me watching the film, and in a simple but effective way I want to make the film more interesting for him. I’m not going to use pompous or super-intellectual phrases, but straightforward and conversational language. However, I am going to turn my imagination loose, letting it go

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off in any direction that will make the film more dynamic and alive for my friend. Let me suggest tentatively that there are two underlying rules of narration: (1) Don’t describe what can clearly be seen and understood by most people; (2) however, do amplify and explain what the picture doesn’t show. Apart from these, there are no real rules to writing narration, but there are quite a number of hints about the process that may help you along the way. Writing for the ear. The journalist writes for the eye, but when you are dealing with narration, you are writing for the ear. And there’s a world of difference. That generally means your vocabulary has to be simpler and more immediately understandable. You can’t go back. Another essential difference between text and film writing is that in the latter you can’t go back. Your writing has to be clear and make its impact immediately. This very much affects the order in which you express things. A news article might say, ‘Rockefeller, Louis B. Mayer, the Queen of England, Alexander the Great, and Rasputin all loved horses.’ A film script would put it this way: ‘Rockefeller loved horses. So did Louis B. Mayer, the Queen of England, Alexander the Great, and Rasputin.’ Grammar and slang. Your narration may be grammatical and follow the normal rules of writing, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. Your writing does not stand by itself. It is meant to accompany pictures, and the only important thing is the effect of that final combination. Most of the time your writing will in fact be relatively standard. You will probably avoid anything too archaic or literary and keep to a simple structure. What do we mean by literary or archaic? You could say, ‘A million pounds sounds like a lot, but compared to the national deficit it is an infinitesimal amount.’ The problem here is that the expressions ‘national deficit’ and ‘infinitesimal amount’ may be a little too complex for the film, so a simpler version might be, ‘A million pounds sounds like a lot, but compared to the government’s debt, it’s peanuts!’ Summary and rhetorical questions. In films you can’t stop and go back. But what you can occasionally do is summarize where you are before moving on to another idea or sequence: ‘So there were the British soldiers in Stalag Luft Nine. Six hundred of them from all ranks. They had fought the good fight … and lost. The question was whether they would simply

Production notes: writing narration

give up or try to escape. Next morning the German guards found the answer!’ The above contains both a summary and a transition to your next moment. Simple, powerful sentences. Narration seems to work best using short, simple sentences with the main action verb fairly near the beginning. I am not saying that you cannot use more elaborate structures, with multiple ideas and a whole series of dependent clauses, but you have to be much more careful in your writing. Here is what I mean by the simple, strong sentence: ‘The Scottish troops were young and untried. They came from Glasgow, from Edinburgh, from Aberdeen. Few had ever been as far away as Liverpool or London. Now they found themselves a few hundred miles down south, ready to invade mainland Europe. Few knew it, but D-day was only hours away.’ Directing attention. When you write, you can make the viewer see anything you want. Although there may be a mass of information on the screen, your words will show the viewer what is significant. But your words do more than direct attention. They are also there to give meaning. We are doing a film about the American South. Suddenly we see a river, trees, a paddle-wheel steamer, houses in the distance, a few horses moving around. What does it mean? Nothing until we add the commentary: ‘All was quiet, not even a breeze. Few knew or cared that a young man had been lynched on that tree just a day before.’ Write it that way and all the attention goes to the trees, and the scene takes on an aura of horror. Atmosphere. One of the challenges of narration writing is to add an extra dimension to what can be seen on the screen. We are not talking about adding information or facts, but about enhancing the mood of the film. We are trying to get inside the scene and bring it to life. One way to do this is with careful use of the color words, of adjectives, of words that add texture. The words are there to complement the image, and when everything works in harmony the effect can be tremendous: In the bitter coldness of the night the jeeps went around collecting their burdens. Husbands said goodbye to wives, sweethearts to lovers. Faces were pale, lips cold, eyes wet. Few words were said as the last jeeps departed into the clinging mists, carrying the men to the darkness of the waiting planes, loaded bombers, and an unknown dawn.

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The particular versus the general. On the whole, particular descriptions work better than generalities. We are doing a film about banking and have to tell the story of Joseph X. Smith. We don’t have much to work with. In fact, all we have on screen are some fairly dull photographs of Joseph as a young man with a cigar, and a photograph of him around age sixty. One version of his life might go as follows: He made his fortune with gambling and real estate. Eventually he was worth £10,000,000 and opened his first bank. He certainly lived very well and had dozens of women. But the crash of ’29 hit him hard. Eventually he lost all his money and lived the last days of his life where he’d started out, in the slums of the East End of London.

Written this way you don’t remember much about Joseph Smith. He is a gray character, soon forgotten. But if you particularize the details of his life everything changes: He made his first money with a £10 hundred-to-one bet. He won an oil well that was thought to be dry. It wasn’t, and within a year he owned half the town. Later he gambled in Europe with King George V, kept four mistresses who all had to wear the same red velvet dress, had his Rolls-Royce painted green … but he finished up selling vacuum cleaners door to door.

It’s a bit exaggerated, but you certainly remember the guy. Narration plus interview. Very rarely do you find a film that is all narration. Most films are a blend of narration, sync interviews, and voice-overs. It is therefore worth thinking over carefully how you can best combine all the elements. A good way is to keep the narration very factual and let the voice-overs and sync provide the emotional experience of the film. Problems It’s very easy to fall into certain traps while writing narration. Most of the traps or problems are obvious, but every writer falls victim to them sooner or later. Below I have listed a few of the most common pitfalls. Lists and statistics Although many individual shots are remembered because of the emotional force of the image, this doesn’t work for narration. In fact, one of the most disconcerting things for a writer is to realize that very little of

Production notes: writing narration

the narration is remembered ten minutes after the film has finished. If the broad details of the message are remembered, that’s enough. That said, it becomes obvious why we avoid lists and statistics. They rarely make an impact at the time and are forgotten in five seconds. Occasionally numbers are necessary, but they have to be used wisely to be effective. The task of the writer is to make cool, abstract figures come alive for us in human terms. Brian Winston did this brilliantly while writing the script for Out of the Ashes. Brian needed to say that the SS troops, operating in Russia, killed more than a million civilians in just over a year. How could one bring something so monstrously incomprehensible down to earth? This is what he wrote: ‘Close behind the front lines came the mobile killing squads of the SS. In sixteen months they and other members of the German army shot nearly one and a half million Jews – two human beings a minute for every hour of every day for nearly five hundred days.’ The last half of the sentence is vital, because only then do we grasp the enormity of the crime. Wall-to-wall narration Overwriting is one of the cardinal sins of filmmaking. Your narration should be sparse and compact. Say enough to make the point and then shut up. You may think that piling detail on detail will improve the film, but that’s rarely the case. More than likely you are just turning off the viewer by the sheer volume of your words. Remember that the picture needs room to breathe and that the viewer needs space and time to digest and reflect on the narration. Another essential point is that very often narration is redundant, and you are better off letting the pictures make your point. If you are showing a musician riding a bike on the South Downs, don’t cover the whole scene with words. After telling us that as he rode his imagination soared, let the music take over. Clichés Watch out for the cliché, the hackneyed phrase. At one time, all the authors on feature film writing used to enjoy themselves by listing the most popular clichés: ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,’ ‘There’s only one doctor who can help you. And he’s in Vienna.’ We laugh, but we do the same thing in documentary. We see a phrase that is good, and then use it so often that it ceases to have any impact.

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Writing for different viewers In television you have to adjust your narration to accommodate a wide spectrum of viewers. For example, if you are doing a film on history, some viewers may know your subject well, while others may know nothing. The answer lies in finding a subtle way of presenting your information so that both sides feel happy.

4 Inspiration It’s 5pm. Midsummer. Upstate New York. The Flaherty film seminar is now into its fourth day, and we are all a bit punch drunk and drugged from watching movies morning, noon, and night. The windows are open and the sun is flooding in across the crowded room. It’s been a long day, but we all know in another half an hour there will be a pre-dinner break. Then the wine will come out, the cocktails will flow, peanuts will be crunched, amorous liaisons will commence, and the discussions on films, personalities, money problems, and breakthroughs will continue without end. I’m thirsty. Yes, I could do with a glass of cold chardonnay, or even that awful plonk they served yesterday and called chenin blanc, but I can wait. I can wait, because like the other forty people in the room, I’m fascinated by the two men chatting with each other at the round table in the middle of our circle of chairs. One is small, wears a dark suit, and has a slight foreign accent. He has long, very long silver hair, is eighty-one years old, and fragile, but emanates a clear dynamism. The other, well, he could be Ernest Hemingway’s younger brother. God, look at those shoulders. Massive. Is it my imagination that the women around me are stricken, and bedazzled? Probably not. And that shock of hair, and thick grey beard. That’s a face that should be on Mount Rushmore. For his part he wears blue overalls. Obviously a man of the people. The subject they are discussing is the Spanish Civil War. The older man had filmed it, primarily from the side of the Republicans. The younger man, well not so much younger because he’ll never see sixty-five again, fought in Spain as a volunteer, much like George Orwell. They swap stories like old comrades. ‘Do you remember the Ebro? Do you remember when that bastard Franco launched his attack on Madrid? Do you remember when those German planes came over and we lost fifty men, women and children? And were you really there in Barcelona when I was filming … ?’ And so on and so on. We in the audience listen in awe, and silent admiration. We know we’ll

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remember this afternoon. We know we are privileged, and that few others will ever see Joris Ivens and Abe Osheroff together again in informal discussion. Like most filmmakers of my generation I grew up with the legends of Joris Ivens. A pioneering Dutch filmmaker, he had made wonderful experimental films like Rain and the The Bridge. Later he had turned to political filmmaking, made films in the USSR, and specialized in making films on the Chinese revolution, his most famous film being The Four Hundred Million. I thought many of his films were politically naive, but still recognized his genius, determination, and amazing body of work. And here he was at eighty-one telling us not only about Spain, but about his newest film which he’d just completed with his wife Marceline Loridan. I’d met the other speaker, Abe Osheroff, a few years before. We’d become close friends and I’d interviewed him for my book, The Documentary Conscience. In his early twenties Abe had organized unions in New York, and during the depression had been arrested when he helped evicted families return furniture to their houses. In the mid1930s, while working as a carpenter, he had felt the pull of the Spanish Civil War, and had joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to go fight the good fight. After serving in the Second World War, Abe had continued his battles for social rights and civil rights, often being pursued by the FBI. Then, at the age of sixty he had returned to Spain (still under Franco), to make a film on the civil war he called Dreams and Nightmares. The film was not just a memoir, but as he told me, was made to protest against US aid to Franco. And so the two men talked, actually way past cocktail time. But who cared. It wasn’t just their stories that captured us, but something about their spirit. Afterwards I tried to analyze what that something was, and then it hit me. It wasn’t just that they were men of the left, or that both had fought for social justice. It was that both exhibited an incredible passionate force. It was as if both had said ‘We are only here once, we are going to live to the full, we are going to stretch life to the limits, we will stretch the envelope. We will make mistakes, but we are here to live, to work, to enjoy, and to make this a better world.’ In a word, and I hope it doesn’t sound trite, both provided an incredible inspiration to anyone young like myself, who was searching for his or her way. Looking back I can see that Joris and Abe were actually only the first of four or five people who’ve guided me on my way, and who

Inspiration

10  Abe Osheroff and his wife Gunnel Clark.

have shown me how life can be lived, and what might be the right path for a documentary enthusiast. Now we all need inspiration. We all need mentors, and I thought, leading off from Joris and Abe, that I’d share with you some memories and thoughts about two other people who helped form me as a filmmaker, and person. I met George Stoney for the first time in 1965, when he saved my life. I’d come to New York from Stanford to take up a film apprenticeship with Shirley Clarke, a maker of experimental films. She had promised me, when we met in California, that I could be her main assistant on a feature she was about to make. However, when I met Shirley for breakfast in the Chelsea Hotel she said, ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry. There isn’t a job. You’re not union. I can’t use you. Did you really come three thousand miles to work with me? Pity! I guess I should have told you. Sorry again.’ I cursed Shirley for her thoughtlessness but she

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did me one immense favor. She gave me George’s telephone number and said I could try him for a job. So began a wonderful lifetime friendship with a man who in a sense became my first guru. George was then making sponsored documentaries, and I worked with him as camera assistant on a movie called The Furlined Foxhole. It was made for an insurance company,and was not one of George’s best. But it helped me to get to know George, and also his crazy, superbly talented cameraman Terry Macartney-Filgate. Together they made a great pair. George, fastidious, meticulous, and great on script; and Terry, iconoclastic, acid-tongued, devastatingly brilliant, and very funny. Both taught me the rudiments of filmmaking. Life with George never finished when he called ‘cut.’ You were welcomed at his home, treated to drinks at New York’s Irish pubs, and more important, made welcome at his lectures. At that time George was teaching at Columbia, and I was invited by him to sit in on the screenings and class discussions. I marveled at his technique. His lectures embraced you, and seduced you. It was a friend talking to a friend. So, as I saw All My Babies and other films of George’s, I gradually completed my Stanford education. Only later did I realize how privileged I’d been to meet George at such a pivotal point of my life. He was the first to show me the way, but more on that later. I left New York soon after we finished Foxhole, but kept in touch. This meant a hasty lunch in Montreal, coffee in a Greenwich Village eatery, dinner in Jerusalem, vodka in Moscow, celebrating his birthday with other filmmakers out on Long Island, or hearing about a problematic faculty situation at NYU over a Chinese meal. We talked about everything, especially the new frontiers of film and video. So slowly I got to know him in depth, and learned to appreciate his background, and the full range and compassion of this gifted teacher, filmmaker, and human being. George came from North Carolina. He’d worked vigorously in the civil rights movement before becoming a reporter, and later a maker of industrial films. This period didn’t last long, as he soon took up the banner of social activism. His enthusiasms were invigorating and stimulating. Video cameras could change the world. Access television, for which he was a pioneer, could change education. The task of television was to give a voice to the voiceless. Filmmaking shouldn’t be confined to an elite, and (years before Challenge for Change, the Canadian social documentary TV series) he advocated that communities

Inspiration

11  George C. Stoney.

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should make films about themselves rather than leave their portrayal to an outside body. Teacher, preacher, prophet – he was all these rolled into one. I’ve written elsewhere about George’s films1 but two stay very much in mind. First there was How the Myth was Made, an analysis of the reality behind Robert Flaherty’s famous Man of Aran. In Myth, George showed how Flaherty glossed over the real conditions of contemporary Aran, to make a moving myth of the island community. I think George very much appreciated Flaherty’s work, but thought the essence of documentary was to show the truth, rather than deal in falsification, however well intended it might be. The second film of George’s that I like very much is The Uprising of ’34. Uprising is about the legacy of a textile workers’ strike in 1934, which was brutally crushed by the factory owners. The film shows George at his best. This is our history. This is how we behaved. This is what we’ve done. Let’s learn from it. Beside George’s films, a few other important things about him have stayed with me over the years. First there was the humor, which was sly and unexpected. Sharp, cutting, but never unkind. Second there was his trimness, health, and vitality. I remember being at a Flaherty seminar once and had risen at 7a.m. to try and swim in the ice-cold lake. George was the only other person out. He was in the water frolicking away to his heart’s content. When I refused to follow his example he looked at me with disgust. ‘I thought you English were strong. How mollycoddled can you get?’ It was only then that I realized George would probably be in his element in the Hindu Kush, doing operations on the tribesmen with his penknife. The third integral element of George was his kindness, compassion, and support of his students and friends. At various times in my life I turned to George for help and advice. His response was always fast and total. I needed a letter for faculty promotion. It was written immediately and I blushed when the copy he sent me showed me how supportive he’d been. I needed a blurb for a bookjacket. Again he wrote in the most gracious terms imaginable. And if a student or associate of his made a film he always wanted you to know how great it was, and that you had to run, not walk, to see it.

1 George Stoney, interviewed by the author in Alan Rosenthal, The New Documentary in Action (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971).

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All this stems from the tremendous generosity which lay at the very core of George. And it was this generosity which led to my only falling out with him. We were both at a screening and had seen a film which I thought was puerile, suffered from too many politically correct attitudes, and was overall pretty awful. In the post-film discussion, at which the filmmaker was present, I stated all this in no uncertain terms. George was appalled. Why had I been so cruel? Where was my tolerance and compassion for the filmmaker? Where was my understanding of what he was trying to achieve? George was right, and after the screening I wrote him a letter trying to heal the breach that I feared my words might have caused in our friendship. In the end, one thing above all else characterized George, and that was his sense that film had a mission. Films can do good. Films can and must change the world. The good fight must be remembered and the struggle continued, whether it is the fight of the unions, the oppressed, families in Quebec, Indians in Montreal, or blacklisted singers. A very small incident characterizes all that for me. One of George’s students had made a film about the shooting of Godfather II in New York, and how it had upset street residents. The student knew he could sell the footage to Hollywood, but George pressed him to leave that and use the film as a tool to organize a protest of the street residents. A friend of mine once jokingly referred to George as ‘St George.’ I understood what he meant. George always had to be in there fighting, urging, encouraging, and above all, leading the way. For me and countless others he showed us the way. George taught me that films must be made with passion. That you can’t sell out. He taught me that films can be a tool to a better world. He once put all this to me very succinctly. ‘The good film is the film that rocks the boat.’ Sadly, George died in July 2012. He was 96. I had last seen him four years before in New York. He was rushing. There was another film he had to do. There was a publicity screening by his friend Judy that he wanted to attend, and there was also this student film he wanted to look at. The pace would have exhausted someone forty years younger, and was still relentless. The passion was still there. Above all the fire was still burning. My friend Antony Thomas is a totally different type. George was a scraggy thin balding southerner, whose portrait would not have

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12  Antony Thomas.

been out of place in the painting American Gothic. Antony is a tall, strapping athletic type whom you could well imagine leading a cricket team in to bat, or running and winning the 3,000 meters in the Olympics. But like George, he too has inspired me. My first meeting with Antony was in a café in downtown Jerusalem. We’d been corresponding for a few months, and then HBO (Home Box Office) sent him to Israel to research a few possible docudrama stories. For me this was a lucky break, as I wanted to interview

Inspiration

Antony about his work on Death of a Princess, a film which had hit the headlines of every European paper a few months before. Now, instead of doing the interview by mail, we could do it face to face. I hadn’t known what to expect; certainly not this tall, extremely handsome man, whose white hair did not become his youthful film-star face. Later Antony told me that yes, he had acted at one time and thought of becoming an actor, then documentary had taken its place. Antony has presence, but after a while it’s not the star quality that hits you, but his sincerity, and his integrity. You begin to see that like George he is a man who wants to change the world with his films. But he is not the ‘hit-em-over-the- head’ confrontational radical filmmaker, personified by say someone like Michael Moore. Instead there is a cool intelligence, that works on you by reason, rather than by an overblown slick emotional appeal. Of course, I didn’t see this all at once, but only as I got to know Antony over the years, and after exchanging endless conversations with him. Antony’s most famous film is probably Death of a Princess, but in fact he’s made more than forty films for the BBC, Channel Four, WGBH, and HBO. He’s from the UK, though born in India. That means like many another brilliant English filmmaker, he is almost totally unknown in the USA, except in certain elite circles. While Erroll Morris, Michael Moore, and Frederick Wiseman dance in the headlines, Antony stays quietly in the background. It is not his style to parade his Emmys, BAFTAs, and Peabody awards. But they are there, proclaiming him as one of the finest and most modest filmmakers of his generation. Death of a Princess is a docudrama about the public execution of a Saudi Arabian princess and her lover in a sordid market place in Arabia, on the edge of the desert. Condemned for adultery, the princess was shot in front of a motley crowd by a member of her grandfather’s staff. A few moments later her lover was beheaded in front of the same crowd, who’d only just left the mosque at the end of midday prayers. Though the story was hushed up in the local media, it eventually found its way into the English newspapers. Antony seized on the story, researched it for six months throughout Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, then went back to shoot it as a docudrama on location, with actors playing the principal roles. He told me he couldn’t shoot it as a documentary, because the people involved were afraid of their lives. So he kept the stories, but changed names and

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13  Antony Thomas filming Death of a Princess.

locations, so Ahmed, an engineer from Medina, becomes Abdul, a driver from Riyadh. And so on. What gives the film its force, are its social and political implications. It tells the story of the Princess, as a complex Rashomon fable, but then uses the story to open up controversial sides of Saudi Arabian life. Thus it delves into the lifestyle of the rich, sexual hypocrisy in a Muslim country, and a mutiny in the air force. But above all it looks at the way women live and are treated in an Arab society totally controlled by men. The day after the film was aired, it provided headlines across almost every British paper, because certain accusations had been made, and for once the veil had been drawn aside concerning life in the land of the princes and the sheikhs. As more and more conflicting stories appeared in the press, a major debate opened up in the British Parliament, both approving and condemning the film. When the

Inspiration

14  Scene from Death of a Princess.

debate and criticism threatened a major diplomatic confrontation with the Saudis, the British Foreign Secretary apologized to them for his former condemnation of the execution. For his part, Antony was accused of fabricating a good deal of the film, something which he totally denies, and which denial I totally believe. Lying for sensational effect is just not part of the man. But few people bothered to question Antony in any depth. Controversy over the film increased when it was scheduled for an American broadcast by PBS (Public Broadcasting System). Five stations belonging to South Carolina television, as well as stations in Houston and Los Angeles, refused to show it. The Saudi Arabian ambassador protested to the State Department. Mobil Oil, which funds a lot of PBS programs, called the film ‘A New Fairy Tale,’ and ran huge newspaper adverts against the film. Mobil also urged PBS to exercise responsible judgment in the light of ‘what is in the best interests of the United States.’ The ads did not mention Mobil’s own economic interests in Saudi Arabia.

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Many of the issues raised by Princess are still with us today. Freedom of speech, and freedom to choose certain subjects for broadcasting, are still under fire in too many places. Here I include the ­Western world, not just the Middle East. One wonders whether Princess could be made today. I have my doubts. It was broadcast just once in ­England. As another script writer told me, ‘You always know when your docudrama has worked. They never rebroadcast it.’ In the end Antony managed to say what he wanted and go on living a normal life. Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, has not been so lucky. While Antony was in Israel, and after I’d interviewed him, I asked him to dinner. Then we went out for coffee. Later he, myself and my family went on a few trips together, and gradually the intimacy grew and blossomed into a very deep and meaningful friendship. Although we live in different countries, these days we manage to meet about twice a year, normally in a great Greek restaurant in Hampstead, in London. Then over shish kebab, humus, and white wine we manage to catch up with each other. Mostly it’s me listening to Antony, as I drink in where he’s been, what he’s been up to, and what films he’s been making. Antony’s influence on me is different from that of George. George taught me that film was there to be used by the community, to record history, and to right wrongs. Antony’s influence has been slightly different. Like George he is a keen political critic, but in his attacks he uses a rapier instead of a broadsword. A good example of this are the three films he made in the late seventies on apartheid in South Africa for the BBC. They all avoided the blunt frontal attack, but subtly undermined apartheid in the words of the oppressors themselves. Following the first film The Cape Times wrote, ‘After this, the South African Department of Information might as well fold its tents and steal away.’ More recently Antony made The Tank Man about the protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989, where one lone man confronted a squadron of Chinese tanks. Antony asks ‘Who was he? What accounts for his actions?’ Like Princess the story opens up to discuss the suppression of history. This battle against an oppressive regime was followed by a similar expose in 2010 in For Neda, which may be Antony’s saddest and most moving film. As the world came to know, Neda Agha-Soltan was shot by a sniper while protesting over Iran’s rigged elections, but had her

Inspiration

tragic death captured on multiple cell phones. Quickly she became a key symbol of protest against the regime of the mullahs. But who was she? This Antony attempted to find out, assisted by a brave Iranian journalist called Saeed Kamali Degghan, who managed to film Neda’s family in secret. In the end it seems the regime had slaughtered not just any woman, but the very woman who epitomized the struggle for freedom in Iran. Neda had been a fighter for women’s rights, and for personal freedom. She had lived and struggled for change, fighting for a new enlightened Iran. Thus, as in Princess, a single focused story brings out layers of truth about a whole society. While making the film, Antony directed and advised Saeed from London. During that time Antony and I talked constantly on the phone, he in England, myself in Jerusalem. He was going through hell, what I call ‘the dark night of the soul.’ What right had he, he asked me, to put Neda’s family at risk? What right had he to put his friend Saeed at mortal risk? Maybe he should abandon the whole enterprise. I had never known Antony so down, so depressed, and tried to give him what minimum assurance I could that all would be right in the end. As it was, the result was one of the most moving and inspiring films I have ever seen, and because of its effect might well have been called Neda Lives On. The film went out to raves in the USA. But in England it was a different story. ‘We are not sure we have a program slot. Maybe if you wait a year. Yes, we agree, a good film but Neda is not our top priority.’ And so on. This was the most blatant pusillanimous stupidity by a broadcaster I had ever come across. The best thing I learned from Antony was that he taught me to think laterally, to use my brain more widely, and tackle subjects which are vitally important to us but which most filmmakers neglect. Among these subjects I would number the place of religion in the modern world. By this I don’t mean the simplistic attacks on what some people call Islamo-fascism, or journalistic onslaughts on the Vatican. Instead I am thinking about a deep intellectual and philosophical analysis of the place of religion today, carried out in a very serious but compelling documentary program. Gradually I realized this really was Antony’s forte. In Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be Done Antony went to Texas to look at the political ramifications of religious fundamentalism. Inter alia he interviewed ‘born-again’ Christians, looked at the careers of

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Jim and Tammy Bakker, and the pursuit of money under the guise of requesting religious donations. In a later film Celibacy, Antony investigated the whole question of celibacy for ordained clergy in the Catholic church. In his opinion the thousand year-old doctrine had parallels in the Church’s attack on Galileo, who argued the earth went round the sun, not vice versa. Eventually the church came round to acknowledging Galileo’s theory, but only in 1992. Antony’s view was that the church’s insistence on celibacy, might be the signal for the death of the institution. At the time that Antony made Celibacy the Catholic church was under severe attack for the mounting sexual scandals in both Europe and the USA. This was a period when priest after priest was publicly accused of having molested young men or boys, and TV was bombarded by program after program discussing the subject. But Antony’s film went much deeper than the usual media blast. According to Antony ‘No one was asking why had all this happened. It seems to me there was a connection between celibacy and the reports one was seeing, but no one was asking why celibacy? Who benefits?’ Not surprisingly senior Catholic church authorities roundly rejected the film, refusing to discuss its premises and questions. Not content with having questioned the need for religious celibacy, Antony went on to make a film The Qur’an, about the holy central inspirational book of the Muslim faith. Here with the threats against Salman Rushdie in the back of my mind, as well as the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim fundamentalist, I warned Antony he was on dangerous ground. Other friends were bombarding him with the same warning, and obviously the possibility of such a threat was not something Antony took lightly. Nevertheless he went ahead, producing a fascinating two-hour film for National Geographic on the origins and place of the Koran in modern Muslim life. The film does not pull punches. It looks at the problems of the origins of the Koran, the treatment of women, and the possible misreadings and misinterpretations of various verses. It also looks squarely at Muslim fundamentalism. Though often critical the film is at its best when it allows the viewers, watching a group of mixed European Muslims at prayer, to understand and sympathize with them, and see how religion lights up their lives. In summing up The Qur’an the Miami Herald wrote ‘the film avoids political correctness and religious jingoism, and provides insight into the world’s most ideologically influential text.’

Inspiration

At the time of writing this section Antony is working on a film about Charles Darwin and his theories. It is also about the opposition to Darwin, mainly in the USA, by the modern Creationist movement. Basically Creationism rejects the conclusions of scientific research, empirical evidence, and all theoretical conclusions which contradict a literal Creationist interpretation of the scriptures. It’s clear that the passions involved in the Scopes Monkey Trial2 have not gone away. Now Antony has entered the fray. The film is heavily scripted, and although I’ve only read Antony’s proposal, seems to depend on a dialogue and discussion between Darwin and the Creationists. One interesting line appears in the proposal, which is repeated several times by Antony. It is to the effect that the Creationists whom he wants to interview in the film must not be consciously belittled or made to look foolish. Their views are to be presented, and left to the viewer to judge. I thought about that statement and realized that is something else Antony has taught me: to have compassion and understanding even for those whose views we probably reject. I was also asking myself, why is the film so important now? The answer seems to be clear. Because we live in a world where, what seem to many of us a few outrageous and harmful religious beliefs deeply affect our politics and ultimately our way of life. Discussion is therefore vital, which makes Antony’s debate and raising of these questions so topical and necessary. And that’s it in a nutshell. Antony has taught me to raise questions others ignore. And to raise the questions quietly, rationally, and to really listen to the other side. Furthermore, he has taught me compassion and patience. For all this I thank him. So there we have it. Brief recollections of two or three people who have influenced me on the journey. There have been others, like Leslie Woodhead and Brian Hill. Again they rank among the pantheon of neglected British directors, but there has been no space to write about them here. And I have also learned from my friend, that great Australian director Dennis O’Rourke, who taught me to jump off the cliff, and take chances. Unfortunately I cannot say I have been seriously influenced by any women directors. I know there are some wonderful ones around, 2 A 1925 Tennessee trial where a teacher was accused of violating state law in teaching the theory of evolution in a state-funded school.

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like Marina Goldovskaya, but I have not been lucky enough to either know them or work with them. My loss. Is there a lesson in all this? Maybe. If you get the chance to work with someone really great, or the chance to learn from some great teacher, go for it. Sit in the dust of their feet, and absorb their wisdom. These things stay with you forever.

5 Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs Adolf Eichmann? The name still rings a faint bell, but not much more. The usual response is ‘Wasn’t he a Nazi, or something,’ or ‘He had something to do with the Gestapo, I think, but I’m not sure what.’ Adolf Eichmann was born in Linz, Austria in 1906. After joining the SS in the thirties he eventually rose to the rank of Obersturmbahnführer, the equivalent of Lieutenant Colonel in the British army. His fame, or rather one should say infamy, rests on the fact that he was the major organizer of the Nazi holocaust against the Jews of Europe in the Second World War. Because of his passion and organizing ability he was charged with the round-up of Jews from France and Holland through to Hungary, the Balkans, and Greece, and dispatching them to Hitler’s death camps. At the end of the war Eichmann claims he told his superior, General Muller, head of the Gestapo, ‘I will gladly jump into my grave happy in the knowledge that five million enemies of the Reich [the Jews] have already died like animals.’ After the war Eichmann, like many other Nazis on the run, fled to Argentina using a laissez passer somehow procured from the International Red Cross. In 1960 he was captured by the Israeli Mossad (foreign intelligence service) in Buenos Aires, and brought back secretly to Israel in an ElAl plane. A year later he stood trial before an Israeli court in Jerusalem, accused of fifteen war crimes and crimes against humanity. After being found guilty he was sentenced to death, the only death sentence ever imposed in Israel. I got involved with Eichmann’s story twice, in two totally different ways, once as a broadcaster and once as a filmmaker, and this chapter presents some of the thoughts and memories that have been drifting through my head for over forty years. It also discusses some of the traps you can come across when dealing with what seems to be public domain material. In April 1961, just out of my teens, I was working as a volunteer on a kibbutz in northern Israel. I’d come to the Holy Land to make a film

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15  DVD cover art for Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs.

about children of the kibbutzim, and was at the preliminary stages of research and getting to know the kids. One day, while working in the kibbutz cow shed, I was told I’d received a very urgent call asking if I could come to Jerusalem and work on a program for Capital Cities Television as assistant producer. The call was from Milton Fruchtman, who had brought over a team from the USA to film the Eichmann trial. Israel still didn’t have television, as the Prime Minister thought the contraption would ruin Israeli culture. Milton, however, had the foresight to see that the trial was major news, and should be broadcast to the world. After months of discussion with the Israeli Government he got the green light. But he needed a key assistant – someone who’d worked in TV and could do any job from camera switching to emergency directing. But there was a major problem. Due to the Prime Minister’s ban, there were few TV personnel in the country. As luck would have it I had sat next to

Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs

16  Adolf Eichmann in SS uniform.

Milton’s secretary Judy in my Hebrew language class some months ago, and had told her about my TV training and experience in San Francisco. So by pure chance I became the right man in the right place at the right time.

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17  Adolf Eichmann in a glass cage at the trial.

A few days later, after packing up my things at the kibbutz, I found myself in a small makeshift TV control studio located above a Jerusalem bank. Four flickering screens were set up across from me: three relayed pictures of the courtroom, full of black-robed lawyers and judges. The fourth monitor showed a dark-suited, tall, middle-aged man, seated in a bulletproof glass booth, flanked by two police sergeants. His fox-like face was thin and sharp, and his hair receding. Heavy dark glasses sat on a bony nose. This was my first view of Adolf Eichmann, the man dedicated to organizing and implementing Nazi Germany’s ‘Final Solution.’ Like everyone else in Israel, I’d read about the trial preliminaries in the newspapers, and listened to the radio accounts of the personnel involved. But now Eichmann was to become personal for me. For four months I was to watch him intimately minute by minute, hour by hour, on a small screen, as I managed all the switching, lined up

Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs

the cameras in the morning, and just occasionally did some relief directing. In addition to these jobs, I also had to help review Eichmann’s actions at the end of the day, as we prepared an hour of trial highlights for world broadcast. The course of the trial and the verdict, once well known, has possibly been forgotten. On 11 December 1961 Eichmann was sentenced to death for crimes against the Jewish people, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. After his appeal was rejected, he was hung in May 1962. His body was cremated and his ashes tossed into the sea. Five decades have passed. After all those years, the feel and sense of the trial still vibrate inside me, together with the haunting memories and the small murmurs that still come to the surface despite the passage of time. And the ever troubling questions still remain. Who was the real Eichmann? Who really was this man who argued he was a mere cog in the wheel of the massive Nazi machine? Who really stood behind the immobile face of that bureaucrat of death? In my memory, witnesses rise again to tell their unforgettable stories of the Holocaust. They detail the world of the death camps, the murder marches, gas chambers, and crematoria. It was a world that extended far beyond Dante’s Inferno. I hear the story of Rivka Yosselevska climbing desperately from a grave of 300 bodies, and of the last despairing letter of someone flung from a train witnessing his enduring passion for his wife and children. I remember Dean Gruber, who’d spent years in the camps, preaching a doctrine of love, and describing Eichmann as a ‘block of ice.’ And I remember Yechiel Dinur, who in a trance-like state described Auschwitz as another planet, where the denizens had no names, no parents, no children, and where not a single concept of inhabitant resembled those on earth. When he completed his testimony he fainted on the stand, and had to be helped away. Perhaps more than any others, Dinur’s statement helped those of us who had not been there realize that it would be futile to even try to understand the death camps. Our imaginations are not equal to the task. From April to August I led two lives. One was a life of darkness, memories, shadows, pain, and death. The other was a life of brightness,

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children’s voices, fragrant smells, bird calls, blue skies, warm evenings, and the soft sighs of a Jerusalem night. My entrance to the netherworld began at nine, when I went in to check on the cameras and the day’s arrangements. Watching Eichmann in his glass box, day after day, everyone present seemed to ask the same question. Who is Eichmann? And what responsibility did he bear for these monstrous Nazi actions? To the very last, Eichmann appeared emotionless, a human iceberg. Only once did I see him show any expression other than injured innocence. Films of the liberation of the death camps were being screened in the courtroom. The house lights were out, but from the control booth, on a monitor, I could see Eichmann in close-up. As the corpses of Bergen-Belsen were bulldozed into their final resting place, a muddy pit, Eichmann, on camera, seemed to smile. I was shocked and re-ran the tape later on that day. The smile was irrefutably there. This was the man who maintained that the SS oath justified everything, even killing one’s father if commanded to do so. This was the man who was able to say on the stand, ‘My heart was light and joyful in my work, because the decisions were not mine.’ This was the man who sat through the trial unmoved, shuffling documents, wetting his lips, keeping his notes. The trial was not his concern. As if the acts were not his responsibility. Many journalists like Martha Gelhorn, the third wife of Ernest Hemingway, covered the trial. Writing in The Atlantic Magazine in February 1962 she made an interesting observation on Eichmann, which very much matched my own feelings. ‘The normal reaction to a man alone, in trouble, is pity. One man, however odious his wrong doing, becomes pitiful when facing society in all its power … yet this man in the dock arouses no such feeling, not once, not for an instant … No single gesture, no passing expression of his face lays claim to our sympathy.’ The historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt expressed a slightly different view while writing a series of articles about the trial for The New Yorker. In her articles, which were later published in book form under the title Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt argued that Eichmann was an ordinary man, his actions arising from ‘the banality of evil.’ In other words, all of us have the capacity to be an Eichmann. At the time I was not able to accept her arguments. I had

Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs

to wait nearly forty years before the answers became clear to me as I worked on the film Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs. While awaiting the verdict of his trial, Eichmann wrote a self-serving memoir that he entitled Graven Images. He had hoped it would favorably sway the judges’ opinions. The papers failed to help him and the authorities, fearing the papers might provide encouragement for Neo-Nazis, locked them away for forty years in Israel’s State Archives, with access barred to all and everyone. Eichmann’s writings were not released until February 2000, when they were finally opened for use in the Irving–Lipstadt Holocaust libel trial in England. Hearing of their pending publication, Nissim Mossek, a brilliant Israeli documentary producer-director, with whom I’d made a few films, asked me to write and direct two films based on those memoirs. Of course there was no guarantee he could raise the budget, or that I would get paid, but that’s the nature of many documentary enterprises. You take a risk, and hope everything will work out. Until that time, only two major TV films had been released using the Eichmann Trial materials. One, made by America’s ABC News, was basically a simple rehash of the trial, plus a few interviews. The second, The Specialist, made by Eyal Sivan, hardly featured any witnesses, and the material had occasionally been re-edited out of continuity. It seemed to me a travesty of the proceedings. So it appeared to me that there was a place for another new film, but could we really find something new to say about Eichmann or about the actions and attitudes of his fellow Nazis? I wasn’t sure, but I thought our film might provide an opportunity, through examining Eichmann’s history, to look at the thoughts, actions, and rationale of some major Nazi war criminals. This might be something new, and would make a change from the usual, but so necessary, recital of the misfortunes of the victims. I was hopeful that we could make two good interesting films until I read the prison memoirs, a discussion of which was the raison d’être of our enterprise. The memoirs start off: ‘I have seen hell, and death and the devil, and the senselessness of destruction. I would like to write a warning to today’s youth as well as to the future … I want to comment on what has happened, and present an overall description of what took place … It was the most terrible dance of death of all times, and I describe all of it as a warning.’

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Though starting dramatically, the pages told us little of interest, and virtually repeated what Eichmann had said at the trial: that he was an ordinary man, a lowly official without real power, a mere cog in the German war machine, and bore no responsibility at all. As I read them I got more and more depressed as far as our films went. I could see nothing that would act as a basis to tell us something revelatory about Eichmann. So why proceed? Because I then rediscovered the Sassen tapes. Actually, I should have remembered them earlier, because a few of the pages had been quoted at the trial, although no one paid them much attention at the time. The sixty-seven tapes, amounting to more than 600 transcript pages, had been made by Willem Sassen, a Dutch journalist and exWaffen SS officer, who had recorded his conversations with Eichmann over a period of six months in Argentina in 1957, when Eichmann was still free and on the run. Sassen had originally intended to publish the conversations after Eichmann’s death and give the proceeds to his family. But in the end, he sold them to West Germany’s Stern magazine, and to Time-Life publications in the USA. Life magazine published two extracts from the tapes in November and December 1960, but then suspended further publication due to protests by American Jews. Because of financial bickering with Sassen, including his demand for an exorbitant fee for their use, which the Israeli government refused to pay, the original tapes couldn’t be produced at the trial. The only transcripts allowed as evidence were a few pages signed and validated by Eichmann himself. Later, after the blaze of the trial, few people, apart from specialists in Holocaust history remembered Sassen and his recordings. They seemed relegated to the mists of history.1 However I told Nissim, who now wanted to co-direct with me, they could be just the thing we needed. After considerable effort Nissim obtained a copy of the full Sassen transcripts from the Israeli Government archives, and had them translated into English. After going over them briefly, and seeing how vastly they differed from Eichmann’s ‘official’ memoirs, 1

Since I wrote this chapter Bettina Stangneth has published Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (New York, Knopf Doubleday, 2014) which makes extensive use of the Sassen diaries and directly opposes Arendt’s view of Eichmann.

Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs

­ issim and I knew we did indeed have the basis for two films which N we could call Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs. The next step was to digest the transcripts and other materials, and see where they led us. To this end I spent hours reviewing all the sources, rereading attorney general Gideon Hausner’s memoirs of the trial and the trial transcripts and comparing the prison memoirs with the Sassen revelations. Often the Sassen transcripts confirmed or enlarged what Eichmann had described in his prison memoirs. But they were at their most explosive when Eichmann ventured his real feelings, which had been so carefully guarded and concealed at the trial. In the Sassen tapes, Eichmann was talking about himself, and the workings of the Nazi system while he was still free. He was not yet under the threat of the gallows, nor was he cautious. Here was an Eichmann without any remorse, boasting and glorying in what he had done. Here Eichmann reveals himself as a passionate, zealous man, happy to celebrate a weekend with his mistress at a Hungarian lake, slightly surprised to find that the killings and round-ups in Hungary had gone so easily. And here, finally, was the real Eichmann, ready to talk not just about himself but also about the actions and attitudes of other Nazi officers. Here was an Eichmann who could say boldly, ‘I wasn’t an ass or a donkey. I knew what I was doing. I believed in it with all my heart.’ In the end, although we used a great deal of trial footage and also did extensive interviews for our two-hour documentary, the heart of the film came to be based on the Sassen documents. In order to determine the shape and feel of the film Nissim and I sat over innumerable cups of coffee, throwing ideas back and forth till we were in accord with what seemed to us the right track. The solution was actually fairly obvious and straightforward. Using the transcripts as our basic source we would relate the history of Eichmann and his actions from his early days in Linz, through to his joining and gradual progress through the SS to the rank of sturmbahnführer; we would look at his relation with the system, his fellow officers, and the Nazi hierarchy; and we would investigate his very nature and character, and actions of his that revealed particular viciousness or savagery. Looking at things another way it really meant we would have to travel through Europe and once more retell the history of the Holocaust, but this time through the eyes of the murderers, rather than the victims.

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In order to make a start we needed money. So my immediate task was to write a decent proposal, and only afterwards to think of tackling the script. The proposal took me about four days. Much of this time was spent doing extra research, lifting books from the library on the history of Germany and the Second World War, and talking to a few experts on German history. And much of the time was spent just sorting out my own thoughts. In the end I wrote three or four different kinds of proposals, of different lengths and addressed to different bodies. Knowing that many commissioning editors baulk at anything of length I first wrote a simple one-pager. I wrote another proposal, expanded to considerable length that I thought we could use to apply to institutions like the National Endowment for the Humanities. Another proposal was aimed specifically at European TV stations, and a fourth was geared towards Jewish donors. Again some proposals had lengthy background explanations, while others took it for granted that the readers knew Eichmann’s history. Once finished I handed the proposals to Nissim, whose job now was to raise the money. While he was doing this I went abroad to give a film workshop, and write a first draft script. At that time I usually went once a year to the Swiss Alps, to give a two-week course in documentary. My destination was the European Broadcast School, which was situated in Montreux, a lovely tourist town surrounded by snow-clad mountains, green vineyards, and which nestled close to Lake Geneva. I had been teaching there as a visiting instructor for a few years, and as my duties only involved a two-hour seminar with the students each morning, I had four hours a day left for some concentrated work where no one would bother me. My desk was just under a big bedroom window that looked out on the mountains, and the pleasure steamers on the lake. An ideal place to concentrate and get down to business. To start with I took a sheet of paper and jotted down a few guidelines which I thought would help me with the script. Unike vérité films I knew the script would have be very thought out, thoroughly researched, and use very detailed narration. My notes, in no particular order, went roughly as outlined below: • Full narration script needed • Film progresses chronologically from Eichmann’s early life in Linz, to the guilty verdict and his cremation. Spine of the film

Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs

is progress of Eichmann’s life and career. Against this background we also present the rise and fall of the Third Reich. • Parallel to Eichmann’s life we see how the plan for the Holocaust and extermination of Europe’s Jews is put into action. This will probably necessitate filming throughout Europe. (Budget implications?) • We use Eichmann’s diaries (voiced by an actor) to lead us through the film. Eichmann’s own memoirs will be supplemented by standard narration to fill in missing details, and guide us through the war’s developments. • We will use extracts from televised trial as and when necessary. I can see these extracts being used mainly at the beginning and end of the film. Almost definitely we will use the extract of Eichmann being charged with war crimes. • We need people to tell us about Eichmann, his character, his personality, how friends and fellow officers saw him. Obviously we can find comments about him from witnesses at the trial, but can we re-interview them today? Make a full list. Can we find Eichmann’s son? Would he talk? Doubtful. Note: various war criminals discuss Eichmann at their war crimes trials. Best example Rudolp Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz. Look into remarks of people like Martin Bormann, and Eichmann’s own deputies. Can we find Eichmann’s personal jailer? Gabriel Bach, the assistant prosecutor might be an excellent person to interview. • Read the total archives of the trial as soon as possible. We need to talk to curator of State archives. • Think about photos and archives. Cost? Are they in public domain? • Can we find film of Sassen himself? There may have been a few more notes, but I think I’ve put down all the essential points as they occurred to me in Montreux. Usually I don’t waste much time before starting writing. My attitude is to get something down, get into the script fast. You may make many mistakes. You may make false starts, but that can all be corrected. Just put your head down and start to work. You’re not a poet waiting for a muse. You’re a professional filmmaker. You’ve done this many times before, so get on with it.

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Here, however, I had one or two more things I had to do before I could start. First I needed to make a timeline of events in Europe from 1918, the end of the First World War, till 1945, the end of the Second World War. This timeline would include the birth of the Weimar Republic in Germany; Hitler’s arrival on the German political scene; Hitler becoming Chancellor; passing of the Nuremberg laws; invasion of Poland and start of the Second World War. And so on and so on up to the surrender of Germany in May 1945. Then I drew up a second timeline. This essentially was the chart of Eichmann’s life. This timeline was even more important than the European timeline, and I charted Eichmann’s biography in considerable detail. Eichmann was born in Linz in 1906. Put that in. Hitler grew up in the same town? Important? Maybe, so put that in as well. He came from a Lutheran family; worked for an oil company; joined the SS in 1932; got married; worked as a guard at Dachau concentration camp; joined the SD (security service), moved to Berlin and started specializing in Jewish affairs. And so I went on, putting in a mass of facts, still not knowing how important they were. And as the 1930s wore on, so the details started accumulating. Eichmann catches the attention of Reinhardt Heidrich, head of the SD; is asked to supervise the expulsion of Jews from Austria; his organizing talents are recognized and he is promoted; helps organize the infamous Wannsee conference which details a plan to murder the 11 million Jews of Europe – the Final Solution; organizes and oversees the dispatch of Jews to Auschwitz death camp; 1944 goes to Budapest and expels half a million Hungarian Jews to the death camps in a mere two months; after the war flees to Argentina. The work I was doing, the sorting and the sifting, seems a rational clean office job. It wasn’t. It was an emotional nightmare. As I was checking and sorting all the facts the horror, insanity, and obscenity of the death camps kept hitting me. How on earth had the Nazis cold-bloodedly led so many millions of innocent people to their death? And over and over in my mind I kept seeing pictures of old women, young children, and helpless men being pushed naked into the gas chambers. The result was, in spite of my earler plans I had to take a great number of breaks, and go and get coffee, walk by the lake, and feed the ducks. Then, head slightly cleared, I’d go back to work.

Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs

With the timelines out of the way, I started to get down to the heart of the film. We were making a film based on Eichmann’s diaries, right? OK, so what parts do we use, and from which diaries? The one written in prison, or the Sassen memoirs? How do we amalgamate them? What do we leave out? Actually this wasn’t too difficult a choice. The Sassen memoirs showed the real unvarnished Eichmann, while I could use the State archive memoirs for comparison. I’d gone through both memoirs very thoroughly in Israel, and had noted down with a yellow marker what passages seemed important or revelatory. Now I had to coordinate the work, or lay everything out so that I could eventually take some rational decisions. So again I placed a number of sheets of paper on my desk, with lines ruled down the middle of the page. One side of the page I marked ‘State archives’, the other side I marked ‘Sassen diaries.’ Then, painstakingly, I set out the main and most interesting incidents and passages as shown in the diaries. After a while the notes from the Sassen diaries dominated the pages. They revealed a totally different man from the person in the State memoirs. Here in Sassen, we read in Eichmann’s own words, of an arrogant boastful man, disdainful of his subordinates, and totally indifferent to the fate of his victims. Capable of peacefully playing his violin at home, he is not above tearing up his wife’s Bible and throwing it at her. He is a man cocooned in self-deception. There are ‘scoops’ in the Sassen memoirs totally absent from the State archive documents. Thus Eichmann suggests that Eva Braun, Hitler’s mistress for so many years, had been a pastry cook in a prominent Nazi’s household. He clearly states that the Nazi policy thrived on deception. ‘We had words for the concealment of annihilation. We never used the word “kill”. We used terms like “special treatment”, “final solution of the Jews” or “expulsion to the east.”’ As for knowledge of the death camps, ‘Of course everyone knew, the birds were chirping from all the trees.’ Above all, and I wrote all the references on my guide sheets, we see Eichmann as a man passionate about his job and his mission, who can say in the Sassen memoirs, ‘I must confess I did not greet this assignment with the apathy of an ox. I was fascinated by it.’ As he writes, and as I noted down, Eichmann’s arrogance and imagination knew no bounds and culminate with the words he puts into the mouths of two generals Kaltenbrunner and Muller. The war is ending, disastrously for Germany, and after allegedly telling Kaltenbrunner,

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head of the SS, that he is going to lead a troop of partisans and fight on in the mountains, he has Kaltenbrunner say, ‘That’s good. Now Himmler can talk to Eisenhower differently in his negotiations, because he will know that if Eichmann is in the mountains he will never surrender.’ Even that claim is not enough for Eichmann, so he adds in the Sassen diaries, ‘My immediate superior General Muller said to me “If we had 50 Eichmanns we could have won the war!!”’ By the time I got back to Jerusalem I had already sketched out the first ten pages of a draft script, which took me from Eichmann’s birth to his joining the SS in Austria. But I soon realized I had made a false start. I wanted to commence in Linz, Eichmann’s birthplace, show a few tourists walking around, and then say something like ‘Few tourists wandering around this beautiful spot today realize that both Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann were born here.’ Dull! Dull! Totally awful. I then thought again, and jotted down two alternative openings, one taken from the State archives, one taken from the Sassen memoirs. The first went ‘I have seen hell, and damnation and the devil.’ The second went ‘When I realized the necessity for a final solution I carried it through with all the fanaticism that an old Nazi would expect of himself … I worked relentlessly to kindle the fire. I was not just a recipient of orders. I was an idealist.’ These openings would change with time, but they got straight to the point. They gave you a sense of the man, hit you hard on the head, and to my mind weren’t a bad beginning. In Jerusalem I sat with Nissim for a few days in his office, as he brought me up to date on his own work while I’d been away. This mainly concerned raising funds, which we estimated would amount to at least $200,000. Nissim had taken the proposal to a few Israeli broadcasters, who had reacted very indifferently. Their argument was that Eyal Sivan’s film The Specialist had said everything on the subject (which seemed to me utter rubbish), and in any case the budget for documentaries was exhausted for the year. However, there was some compensating positive news. A film company with whom Nissim had worked in Hamburg was quite interested, and wanted to pass the project on to NDR to look over. NDR was a German public television company, and if we could get our feet in there it would be excellent take off.

Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs

Nissim was also readying himself to pitch and discuss the film with buyers at a few documentary markets in Israel and abroad. The first pitch didn’t go well, and finished up with Nissim having a furious argument on stage with a British commissioning editor. After Nissim had made his pitch the British CE started totally to belittle the project and personally insult Nissim. It was a hackneyed subject. No one was interested in Eichmann any more. Why had Nissim wasted the time of the conference by bringing up his proposal? Nissim, a man of fierce passion, was almost ready for a fight, till he managed to cool down. That, however, was not to be the end of the matter. A mere few years on, the same CE put out his own film about Eichmann’s history and Eichmann’s intimate friends. Suddenly the ‘hackneyed’ subject was fresh and new. Well, you can draw your own conclusions. If the first pitching didn’t go well, the second, at MIP (a European TV sales market) was a different story, and Nissim came back from Europe absolutely beaming. First NDR, the Hamburg-based station was quite interested. Could we send them a developed treatment? Nissim had also spoken to EO, a Dutch evangelical TV station with whom he’d worked before. After hearing Nissim’s description of the project they promised to put up 50,000 Euros, or about $70,000. We were on our way. Life then really started to get hectic as we started firing on all fronts at once. As the script was the key to the project I kept turning out different drafts as more information came in. For example, we did preliminary interviews with Eichmann’s Sefardi jailer, and also with judge Gideon Bach who had been deputy prosecutor at the trail. Both men gave us their early impressions of Eichmann, which I then stuck into the script fairly early on. Nissim and I then traipsed off to the State Archives library and started photocopying the relevant sections of the more than seven volumes, and 1,700 pages, of the trial transcripts. Here we decided to concentrate on the opening of the trial, these pages having a reference to the Sassen documents, all pages that showed Eichmann speaking (mostly in cross examination), and the sections covering the end of the trial. We also extracted the testimony of five or six witnesses who had actually met with Eichmann before the war, or had seen him in the camps. My job was then to pore over the pages, highlight the most interesting passages and see how and where they might fit in and illuminate the script.

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By this time the draft scripts for the two films were now looking quite bulky. In Switzerland I had begun to lay in sections of the memoirs themselves. Now I was adding extracts from the trial, and seeing where I could place new interviews. At the same time I was beginning to roughly sketch out narration that would explain and elucidate matters, add comment on the diaries, or just provide links between sections. I didn’t bother about finessing things, I just wanted to get the script roughly shaped out with a good beginning, fascinating content, and sharp ending. And initially everything went in, till I had two documents each of about ninety pages in length. This didn’t worry me, as I knew cutting would come later. I say two scripts, but in fact it was one continuous script cut in the middle. However we knew the films had to have slightly different shapes. Thus film one essentially covered Eichmann’s early life, development, and ascendancy in the hierarchy of the SS. It covered Eichmann’s actions in rounding up the Jews of Austria, and basically ended with the start of the Second World War and the completion of the German campaign in Poland. Film two started with the German invasion of France and Holland, and showed Eichmann in full action, organizing the infamous Wansee conference, and traveling throughout Europe from France to Hungary to speed the Jews to the death camps. For a climax we would use extracts from the final days of the trial, with the film culminating in the guilty verdict, and Eichmann’s execution. As I proceeded with the scripts, Nissim pursued his negotiations with NDR. They promised to put up something like $130,000, but wanted to see full treatments, and then asked to see the draft scripts. I was a bit wary of sending out the drafts, and both Nissim and I decided to hold off a bit. However we did get the Germans to send us a draft contract, amounting to some twenty-five pages. This had to be scanned with an eagle eye, particularly with reference to what territories we retained, what were our obligations, when and at what intervals the money would be paid, how and when the film was to be delivered, and a hundred other details. As a former lawyer it became my task to review the contract, and make sure we weren’t getting in over our heads or making contractual promises we couldn’t fulfil. Now that we had rough scripts we could also start pushing ahead with the hunt for supporting stills and archive footage. What this meant in practice was that if the script referred to Eichmann’s

Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs

boyhood or early jobs, we knew we would need coverage of Linz and life in German small villages in the thirties. If the script referred to the SS, or Heidrich, then we knew we had to look for pictorial coverage. If we were talking about the invasion of France and Holland, then that too would have to be covered. And so on right through the script. In regard to stills I got some from the Israel Government Film ­Archives. These were mainly of Eichmann in jail. We also sent a team to Europe to look at German stills. This was in addition to Nissim sending a very specific list to the Koblenz film archives in Germany asking for everything from German village bands, to the speeches of Hitler at the Reichstag, the German parliament. All this required time, and also a lot of money. Yes, we had promises but for the moment the coffers were empty. Parallel with all this activity I had now drawn up a list of footage we might need from the trial itself. This we knew we could obtain from the State Archives as they had copies of both the original twoinch tapes, and also duplicates on VHS tapes. The archives had promised us full cooperation and said we could use the footage for free. This was an assumption that would later cost us dearly. At the time, however, we foresaw no complications. The result was I buried myself for a week in the archives, and ordered some forty dubbed tapes for possible use. When they arrived at our office, Nissim and I logged and scanned the tapes, and made notes as to where extracts from them could be used in the film. It was now time to move forward and think about what we needed to shoot. Although the archive and stills would cover a lot of the script, we knew that to bring the films alive we would have to supplement all that with a fair amount of location shooting. Now our story virtually covered the whole of Europe, but there was no way with our limited budget (still based on promises) that we could shoot all over the place. We would have to be very specific in our objectives, and try and do everything in about ten days. However two things helped us to eke out our minimal funds. First, we had obtained a promise from Hungarian TV to give us a crew for a week in exchange for the right to show the films three times. A shoot in Budapest was vital for us, because that’s where Eichmann had made his headquarters towards the end of the war. Second, we got help from Danish TV. I very much wanted footage from D ­ enmark, where Eichmann had been totally frustrated by the actions of the

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Danes in ferrying hundreds of Jews to Sweden on the eve of a Nazi round-up. But we just didn’t have funds for such a shoot. However, on a visit to Copenhagen where I’d had to give a course, I got a promise from a Danish TV station similar to the one in Hungary. They would give us a crew for three days, again in exchange for the ability to show the films a few times. Now we also needed to shoot extensively in Berlin and in Prague. We chose Berlin because that had been the main base for Eichmann and was also the Nazi capital. Prague entered the picture because it had also been a command centre for Eichmann, and was close to Terezin concentration camp. That it was also extremely photogenic was an added factor in our choice. So we huddled for a few hours in the office and came up with a plan. Nissim, myself, and our camera person, Tom, would head for Berlin where we’d shoot for three days. We’d then part ways. Nissim and Tom would head for Prague and Terezin, where they would use our camera for all the shooting. Meanwhile I would head for Budapest and Copenhagen, and link up with our promised Hungarian and Danish crews. Nissim and I needed to be in Berlin for another reason, as well. NDR wanted a meeting to discuss general matters. They also wanted to look at the fifth draft of the script, after already having been given drafts three and four. As arranged, Nissim and I duly turned up at the imposing Berlin headquarters of NDR, to meet with Johann, our would-be commissioning editor. At least I think that was his name. My mind has blurred out that fact, for very good reasons. The meeting was a disaster. Though it started well, with handshakes and drinks, it turned out Johann and his yes-man hated the script. Well, not exactly hated, but found it full of mistakes. Eichmann wasn’t a lieutenant colonel, he was an obersturmbahnführer. Didn’t we know the difference between army ranks and SS ranks? And Eichmann was twenty-eight not twenty-seven when he worked in Dachau. And why hadn’t we put in Eichmann’s wife’s middle name into the script? And so on, and so on. Most of the criticism was of this insubstantial variety, with only a few suggestions being really concrete and helpful. But all was not lost. I suggested that if Nissim would like to take another drink and explain to the yes-man where we intended to shoot in Europe, maybe Johann could sit down with me for an hour, and we could review things. Not particularly pleased, Johann agreed to this

Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs

suggestion, and for sixty minutes I entered many of the suggestions into the script. I also agreed I’d do more homework and thoroughly revise the script in Israel. Johann, suddenly brightening up, then had another suggestion. Maybe he’d come to Jerusalem in a few weeks’ time, when we’d finished shooting, and I’d revised the script , and we could take matters further. On this suggestion we raised a glass, and all went out for dinner which Nissim paid for. Later in our hotel Nissim, Tom, and myself consumed half a bottle of Arak. We needed something to ward off depression. It worked, but rendered all of us only half-awake the next morning, when we found ourselves in the middle of a Berlin love-fest. Wading our way through crowds of girls in bathing costumes, colored cloaks, and head flowers and boys in Spiderman suits, we headed blearily down town. Our first shoot was in the Berlin official records centre, where, after traversing vast caverns full of documents we turned up and filmed Eichmann’s application to join the SS. The file was actually quite fascinating, particularly Eichmann’s affidavit as to his own spotless Aryan record, and his wife’s similar Aryan background. Later we filmed Eichmann’s headquarters, now a hotel, and atmosphere shots around Wannsee lake, scene of the infamous Wannsee conference in January 1942. After another few days soaking up Berlin’s past we all separated, Nissim for Prague, myself for Budapest and Copenhagen. The shoot doesn’t stay particularly in my memory. I was hunting for background and location materials to back up the text. There were no particular difficulties, and it was no great challenge. I was working to a precise shooting list I’d prepared in Israel, and all went according to plan. Working with foreign crews that I didn’t know was OK, but not great. In Budapest I had a team of four, but no one was really inclined to work more than a few hours a day. So I collected the crew at 10a.m., not a moment before, and had to make sure we stopped for lunch at 1p.m. Though we resumed at 2p.m., I also had to make sure we were back at the studios by 5p.m.. Not an ideal way of working. And that I didn’t understand Hungarian and they didn’t understand much English also didn’t help much. But we got the work done. Copenhagen was easier. I had a one-man crew and Nikolas did everything: drove, shot, recorded, and chatted in good English. He knew the town and countryside well, knew the bars, and was willing to work very hard. Great guy. Unfortunately none of the material was

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used in the final film as we decided to drop the subject of Denmark as our films were getting over long. But my two trips gave me one tremendous plus. In Budapest I went to the National Archives, and for virtually nothing they gave me tremendous material dealing with the Nazi actions in Hungary, and the street battles after the Soviet troops arrived at the end of 1944. Similarly in Copenhagen, the TV station supplied me with archive not only of the German occupation, but also of major events of the war such as German paratroop landings in Holland, and Paris after 1942. Without all this help the archive material would have cost us a fortune. Meanwhile, via phone calls, I heard Nissim and Tom were collecting good material in Prague. They’d filmed in Terezin, got excellent shots of the capital, and had also collected a few interviews with ­Holocaust survivors. Soon we all reassembled in Jerusalem and collectively looked at the material we’d shot and gathered. We were all very satisfied. Most of the archives we’d ordered had come in from the Bundesarchiv. Our trial dupes had also arrived. Our stills had been entered and logged. Apart from a few extra interviews Nissim wanted to do, we were almost ready for the next stage: postproduction. But first there would be the crucial visit of Johann, with one of his colleagues from NDR. Almost make or break time. Well, we were as ready as we would ever be. Before Johann arrived I had sent him another two redrafts, which he had requested. But there had been no comment. So I was a little anxious as Nissim and I drove out to meet him at Ben Gurion airport. I needn’t have been. He was all smiles and ‘Wonderful to see you, my friends.’ He even liked our ramshackle office which we’d cleaned up for the occasion. Usually it looked as if a tornado had swept through it, but in Johann’s honor we had cleaned, swept, dusted, and left two bottles of wine and some cognac conspicuously on the office table. Johann had also brought some good German wine with him, and a yes-man, called Jurgen, who was introduced to us as a historical advisor. He seemed a nice enough young man, and joined us eagerly as we opened one of the bottles of Nissim’s wine, leaving Johann’s for later. Well, talk about day and night. If our afternoon with Johann in Berlin had been a disaster, the four days Johann spent with us in ­Jerusalem were an unmitigated success, and couldn’t have been

Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs

better. Johann went through our archives and loved what we’d found. He looked at our selection of trial pieces, and thought they were very well chosen. He thought the material we’d shot abroad was good and contributed very much to the film. He also looked at our new interviews and approved them. Finally – and this was the jewel in the crown – he even liked my script. ‘A vast, vast improvement. It needs a few touches and polishes here and there, but it’s now really good. I congratulate you.’ So, in a terrific relaxed party mood, all of us full of bonhomie, we went out one evening for a last supper, with Nissim again footing the bill. Expensive, but who cared. We seemed to be home and dry, all this confirmed by Johann’s parting words. ‘I promise you, I promise you. I’ll get the contract signed within three weeks, and first payment a week later. You’ll see. Don’t worry!’ I should have heeded my father, who used to say ‘When they say “don’t worry,” that’s when you head for the hills.’ But who knew what was to come. As we finished our cognacs Johann added a few words as a kind of parting gesture. ‘You won’t mind if Jurgen looks at your scripts in Germany, and adds a few words of advice here and there. It won’t cost you much. He’s very good and will be well worth it.’ Nissim and I exchanged quizzical glances. ‘Won’t cost much?’ ‘Well I only charge $300 a day,’ said Jurgen, ‘and from what I’ve seen and the way things are going I don’t think I’ll be needed for more than three or four days, at most.’ Nissim swallowed hard. I could see he was calculating, four say five days. Well that would be a maximum of $2,000. And we’d be getting $130,000 from the Germans in the end. OK, the budget could bear that cost. So we all raised another glass and said ‘Fine. Lechaim! To life.’ One lives and learns. Not one of my father’s maxims, but a saying we should all have engraved on our hearts. Johann had said, ‘You won’t mind if Jurgen adds a few words of advice?’ The few words turned out to mean e-mails every day, and a seeming desire on Jurgen’s part to totally rewrite the script. Most of the advice was superficial, and in my mind mostly worthless. Typical of Jurgen’s comments was one regarding the vital documents relating to the Wannsee conference, which we had photographed from a book. The Wannsee Conference in 1942 was where the Germans had debated how to implement the round-up and

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murder of Europe’s eleven million Jews. Jurgen’s complaint was that the viewer might see we had filmed the documents from a photocopy. Now if he could go to Wannsee from Hamburg, for three days, he could photograph the original documents, and the viewer would clearly see the texture was different from a photocopy. Travel would be, say $400. Two nights at a hotel, say $300. And he would only charge us two days’ work instead of three. He then added, ‘Maybe in a month, when we’ve cleared up things I can come to Jerusalem and spend a week or so with you finalizing the script.’ I may be misjudging Jurgen. He may have had a brilliant historical mind, really intent on helping us to deliver the best script ever. Maybe! But the impression left on Nissim and myself, was that Jurgen wanted to make as much money of out of us as he could. For a few weeks Nissim and I didn’t know what to do. Nissim had started the editing. It was going well, and we were using a script I had finessed after Johann’s visit. But every day came a new, and often offthe-wall comment, or more often a new demand from Jurgen. To add to our worries Johann wasn’t really answering our e-mails, except to say ‘Hope all is going well with Jurgen.’ And he certainly wasn’t saying anything about sending a signed contract. Nissim and I tried to ignore all this, and pushed on with the film, which was beginning to look very powerful. The beginning was punchy, the story well told, it was visually interesting, intellectually fascinating and – vital for us – emotionally moving. Above all, and both Nissim and I agreed on this, it really did provide a new perspective on Eichmann. I had always wondered who was the real Eichmann. Now the viewer could see the answer on the screen as Eichmann removed his mask, and revealed himself in the words he had spoken to Sassen. Talking about a forced expulsion, with men, women, and children dying along a 200-mile death march in winter, he says, ‘They were old people. It’s clear when you chop wood, chips will fall.’ And there were the words of Eichmann we inserted almost at the end of the film. ‘I worked relentlessly to kindle the fire. I was not just the recipient of orders. Had I been that, I would have been an imbecile. I was an idealist … I am only sorry for one thing. That I wasn’t tough enough. That I didn’t fight these interventionists. Now you see the damned results. The creation of the State of Israel, and the reemergence of the Jewish race.’

Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs

Then for a few weeks there was silence from Johann, and a total cessation of e-mails from Jurgen. Meanwhile Nissim and I continued to work on the films at our own speed. Then came an explosive e-mail from Germany, signed by Johann, basically saying ‘Sorry, but we’ve decided not to go ahead with the film. Instead we’re joining up with the BBC, and using a film they are doing on Eichmann and his circle.’ This was a double whammy. Not only had we lost our main budget source, but NDR was now aligning itself with the very commissioning editor who’d told Nissim, ‘Eichmann … no the subject is dead. How dare you suggest such a hackneyed subject.’ To say this was extremely painful is to put things mildly. We were devastated, and in total shock. On the positive side the films were almost finished, but on the negative side Nissim now had immense debts which he wasn’t sure he could pay, and I could see my own writer-director’s fees were fast vanishing down the drain. Looking back we could see that all the negotiations and visits had been for nothing. Had Johann been stringing us along from the start? Did he just want a paid visit to Israel? Did he just want to see that Jurgen made some money? I doubted all that, but still there were many unanswered questions. However, Nissim and I had learned one major lesson. You don’t move till you have a signed contract. That had been our undoing. We had gone on and on in blind good faith, in particular delivering draft after draft, with nothing on paper. Well, never again. Eventually our two films premiered at the Jerusalem International Film Festival, and got excellent reviews. They were screened in Holland, got sold to a few German stations, and had a good if not brilliant TV exposure in the USA. I thought Nissim could have pushed the distribution much harder, but I think all the energy went out of him when the Germans backed away, and the BBC made their own Eichmann film. Anyway, both of us decided to call it a day, put our troubles behind us and move on to something new. But then came another bombshell. We were sued for breach of copyright relating to the trial tapes. Two bodies in Jerusalem held copies of the tapes, the Israel State archives, and the Spielberg archives of the Jerusalem University. As mentioned, we had obtained use of the archive tapes for free from the State archives. Now the Spielberg archives were claiming they owned exclusive copyright, and were suing Nissim, myself, and the State archives for something like $50,000.

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Two questions arose for me. Did they really hold the copyright? And in any case, why were they charging for something that, as far as I remembered, was always held out as available free for public use? To answer the questions I asked the State archives if I could examine their files on the history of the tapes. As we were both on the same side in the case, they gave me access. It turned out that at the end of the trial the tapes had been sent to Capital Cities TV in the USA. A few years later, after erasing some of the tapes, Capital Cities sent a copy, as promised in an earlier agreement, to the State archives. Somehow, through other intermediaries, a copy also finished up in the Spielberg archives library. Where the actual copyright lay looked as if it might take as long to find out as the resolution of Jarndyce vs. Jarndyce in Charles Dickens’s novel Bleak House. However, what mainly interested me was the right of public use, because I had strong memories of that point being raised and debated when an agreement was first made to film the trial. It was also a point I was passionate about. Everybody had to hear about the trial, and to put a price on that seemed to me disgusting. So, to investigate the issue I went back to the early public transcripts of the trial. And there it was. The judges had declared filming could go ahead, because they recognized the public’s right to know about all the trial proceedings. Not only did they recognize that fact, but urged the widest possible distribution of the trial footage, which was one of the reasons it was offered free to world networks. We told all this to the Spielberg archives, and asked them to withdraw the case. They didn’t, and the case went to trial, though by this time my name had been removed as one of the defendants. The result was more or less as I’d hoped. Basically the judge ruled that the archives were in the public domain, though the Spielberg archives could be slightly compensated for maintaining a copy. In the end, Nissim paid about $1,000 into court, and that was the end of the story. For us it was a good ending, but couldn’t compensate for the months of worry, with a $50,000 possible fine hanging over our heads. So the films were finished. Our pockets were empty, and Nissim was deeply in debt. Yes, we had learned a few lessons. Not to be too trusting. To sign contracts before going into partnerships, not afterwards. And to be very careful over copyright issues. But did we regret making the films? Not for one moment. Eichmann’s story had to be told to a new generation. And his offences and those of his

Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs

henchmen had to be exposed and publicized over and over again. Yes, it had been a very difficult film to make, but in the end both Nissim and I were very proud we’d done it.

Script extract EICHMANN: THE SECRET MEMOIRS PICTURE IDEAS (PRISON MEMOIRS) Eichmann photo (cell) I am now in jail in Israel. Presentation of the evidence in court has been concluded. There will possibly be a wait of 2 or 3 months till the court reaches a verdict. I have already said at the trial I would like to sit down and write a warning to today’s youth as well as the future. Montage war scenes I have seen hell, and death and the devil, and the senselessness of destruction. I wish to tell the story here and comment on what has happened. The summation is tragic and I am in a situation in which I can present an overall description of all the conditions that enabled what happened to take place. Gradually ‘super’ photo of EICHMANN in his cell.

I have seen the horrors of the operation of the machinery of death, and I have seen those who supervised the work and its execution. It was the greatest and most terrible dance of death of all times, and I describe all of it as a warning …

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Then title over photo TITLE ADOLF EICHMANN: THE SECRET MEMOIRS NARRATION The words are those of Adolf Eichmann … SS Officer, war criminal, and one of the major figures responsible for the murder of over five million Jews in the Second World war. The words and sentiments are taken from the memoirs Eichmann wrote while in prison in Israel in 1962. Yet less than five years earlier Eichmann had dictated another set of memories. They are known as the Sassen documents, from the name of the man who recorded them. Together the two memoirs give a unique insight into the thoughts, feelings and evolution of a dedicated SS officer. They also shed a revealing light onto the actions of many senior members of the Gestapo and Nazi security services. Finally, and most painfully, they describe the evolution and execution of the Holocaust from the point of view of the oppressors. But the memoirs were created in two totally different situations, and in circumstances as opposed as night and day. Because of this the diaries often collide, and conflict in their differing attitudes and recall. Argentina Photo Eichmann

In 1957 Adolf Eichmann was living in

Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs

secret in Argentina. Though hunted as a war criminal he had succeeded in building a new life for himself in Buenos Aires. His few friends are mostly ex-Nazi officers like himself. Eichmann photo general Argentina shots Suddenly a Dutch fascist journalist called Willem Sassen appears. Sassen works for a neo-Nazi newspaper and had an idea. Eichmann will respond to questions from Sassen and record his memories for posterity. The memoirs will be published after his death. Proceeds will go to his family. Eichmann talked to Sassen for six months. In the end the talks, conducted over drinks, covered sixty seven tapes, over 600 transcript pages. At start of the recordings Eichmann identified himself as a German, a retired Obersturmbahnführer, whose SS job was to handle Jewish matters for the Gestapo. SASSEN MEMOIRS Originally this centered on finding whether a person was a gentile or a Jew. If he turned out to be a Jew we were the authority which deprived him of his German citizenship and property. Ultimately we declared him an enemy of the state.

After the Führer gave the order for the physical annihilation of the Jews our

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duties shifted. We supervised the seizure of the Jews and the trains that took them to their final destination. For all this I will answer. I was not asleep in those years. NARRATOR

Eichmann also defined where he stood at the moment of disclosure.

EICHMANN MEMOIRS I am writing this story at a time when I am in full possession of my physical and mental freedom. Influenced and pressed by no one. I am tired of living as an anonymous wanderer between two worlds, wanted even by the police in my homeland. NARRATOR

Eichmann knows many of his associates have written about the war. Now it will be his turn.



Recorded in freedom these are unapologetic, memoirs of a still proud member of the Nazi Reich.

In future they will be known as the Sassen Documents or Memoirs.

Production notes: the production contract One of my reasons for including a discussion of my Adolf Eichmann film in the book was to give you a warning of what can happen if you don’t settle a contract before filming. Now I know most students don’t bother with contracts, but there comes a time when you have to take them seriously, so it’s worthwhile knowing how to approach the subject. Once you have an idea of the budget, you are in a good position to negotiate or finalize your contract with the sponsors. You may have made an informal agreement with them, but it’s better to have a short memorandum in writing that records the basic terms of the agreement. You can begin shooting on the assurance of a handshake but I wouldn’t unless I knew the sponsor extremely well. My experience with the Eichmann film shows what can happen when you ignore that. And remember one essential rule: this is a negotiation process, and you get what you bargain for. The contract may run to three pages or thirty, but in reality there are only a few points to consider, with all the rest being elaboration. I have set out below the main elements of most contracts and have tried to bring to your attention some of the points that you should consider in detail. Definition of length and purpose. The contract will generally define in its first few paragraphs the kind of film you are doing, its object, its maximum length, and the gauge in which it is being shot. So it may read, ‘This is a one-hour, 16mm color film on the treatment of deafness for use in specialist schools,’ or it may say, ‘This is a half-hour digital video film on frog jumping for educational television.’ The main thing is that you understand clearly what you are contracting to deliver. Time and manner of delivery. The sponsor will try to get you to commit to a specific delivery date. I prefer to put in a definition of intent rather than commitment: ‘The filmmaker will endeavor to deliver the film by such and such a date,’ or ‘The filmmaker understands that the film is due for

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presentation on July 15, 2016.’ Avoid being penalized for late delivery. This is important, since even with the best intentions in the world, there may still be delays. The contract may also specify how many prints, or video files are to be delivered. I usually designate one, with any others to be paid for by the sponsor. If you are doing a digital video, the sponsor will probably require a number of masters and DVDs. You should also double-check whether copies have to be delivered in any foreign formats, such as PAL or SECAM, if you are working in the USA. In some contracts, the sponsor asks for all the rushes, original tapes, and negative to be handed over at the conclusion of the film. If you have film that may be valuable in the future as stock footage, try to hang on to the negative. Personal responsibility. Some contracts may demand that certain people do specific jobs; this usually concerns the writer and the director. The clause is fair enough. However, you should allow yourself an escape hatch in case of unforeseeable factors such as illness. Film cost and payment schedule. The agreement should state clearly both the overall sum that the sponsors will pay for the film and the times of payment. In most cases, payment will be made in stages, and you should try to ensure that those payments come at convenient times. A typical payment schedule on a $100,000 film or video might look like this: 1  $10,000 on signing the contract 2   $10,000 on script approval 3  $30,000 on commencement of shooting 4   $20,000 when shooting is completed and editing starts 5   $10,000 on approval of fine cut 6   $10,000 on completion of mix 7   $10,000 on delivery of print or tape Sometimes the number of stages is reduced to only three or four, which might be (1) signing contract (2) commencing shooting (3) approval of rough cut, and (4) delivery. One vital matter is to try to get the contract signed and some money paid before stage 2 script approval. Unless you do this, the sponsor can hold you over the barrel with its approval, asking for more and more script changes before you have even signed a contract. This means, in practice, that you are doing a tremendous amount of work without any

Production notes: the production contract

formal guarantee or agreement, and the tension will drive you crazy, which is what happened with Eichmann. Here I did six drafts of a 110page script for German television and even then the contract didn’t get signed. A good rule is first the signatures and then the work. There is, of course, a rationale behind the timing of the payments: your big costs are going to be shooting and editing, so you need money in advance to cover these stages. You also need money for your own salary and living expenses; thus, I like to receive about 20 percent by the time the script is approved. If I am doubtful about the number of shooting days or if the sponsor argues for the inclusion of something that I am not sure about, I try to put in a clause covering additional payments. The clause might read, ‘The sponsor (the television station) will pay for any additional days shooting at the rate of $1,000 per day and will also pay for any film stock used on that day at cost.’ Approvals. The contract should stipulate someone who can act as the sponsor’s agent and give approval at various stages of the film. In most cases, the person giving the approval is the person with whom you have been dealing from the first discussions of the film, but not always. Get somebody who is intelligent and sympathetic and understands a little about film, and you’re home free. Get the opposite – and it happens – and you’re in trouble. Ownership. The best position is for you to try to own the film. You need to establish from the start what rights you have in the film, and ultimate ownership is best. Contrariwise, the television station will usually try to ensure that it owns the film because, of course, it’s worth money. Even though you are the contracted producer-director, you may be able to argue that the sponsor should share eventual ownership with you. If you enter into a coproduction deal with a major network, then the station itself will probably have a standard contract. This usually calls for joint raising of production funds, for an equal share of the profits, and for the station to be able to show the film four times within three years. Miscellaneous contract clauses. The above items take care of the most important points, but there is no limit to the things people will dream up to put into a contract. So what else can arise? Contracts are drawn up by lawyers who try to protect their clients from every catastrophe, real or imagined. Their answer is to put in the necessary, the unnecessary, and then some. There may be a discussion of

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publicity. You may be asked to take stills. You may be requested to refrain from immoral conduct. You may be asked not to hold yourself out as an agent of the sponsor. I have already stressed the points that are vital for you, the filmmaker. If you feel that an obligation is unfair, reject it. You may have to explain your objection at some length, but don’t accept the clause just because someone has written it in. Finally, if a lot of money is involved and you feel uneasy about your obligations or uncertain as to what you are really committing to, get yourself a lawyer – not one who merely sells real estate, but one who understands something about the entertainment business. It’s costly, but the advice will probably pay for itself in the end.

6 The Brink of Peace I grew up with war. As a kid in England my first memories include German rockets over London, and buildings being bombed only two streets away. Since living in Jerusalem I’ve witnessed five wars and various military incursions. As I write, a ceasefire has been called in an eight-day war between Israel and Hamas. During this time over 1,500 rockets, many made in Iran, fell on Israel. In reply Israel made massive aerial attacks on the Hamas rocket bases in Gaza, many of which were placed in civilian centers. Over 150 people were killed in this period, mostly Palestinians. For the moment there is calm. One wonders for how long. I made films about three of the above Middle Eastern wars. None of the films were about the politics and the reasons for the wars. Mostly I was trying to capture the feelings of men, women, and children caught up in these conflicts. I was trying to capture their confusion as their worlds split around them. And I wanted to capture their yearnings and dreams of peace. In 1998, however, I was presented with a different challenge, a film about the aftermath of war. Abba Eban, a former Israeli foreign minister and noted world statesman, asked me if I wanted to work with him on a film for 13/WNET New York, about the Oslo Peace process, and subsequent events leading up to an rapprochement with the PLO and a peace treaty with Jordan. Do Americans like baseball? Do the English like cricket? What a question. I’d have given my right hand to make such a film. According to Eban, he’d been discussing the film for some months with Bill Baker, head of 13/WNET, and Baker thought it was a great idea to present Eban’s personal views on the situation. My name had been mentioned as producer. I’d made a few films with Eban in the past, and had done major work with 13/WNET on their Heritage series a few years earlier, which had received excellent ratings. So I was a known quality, easily approved by the broadcaster. Could I now come to New York quickly so that we could pursue the idea further?

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18  Filming Abba Eban.

This sounded great till I arrived in Manhattan and went to see Tammy Robinson, the effective head of programs at 13/WNET. T ­ ammy had seen my work, approved me as producer director, but dampened my enthusiasm very quickly. Words were fine, but as far as getting the project off the ground there was a long, long way to go. Yes, Bill Baker liked the concept, and Eban was waiting for take-off, but WNET had no money. Period. At least not for projects initiated outside WNET, and outside of the usual framework. I had suspected this might be the situation. In the past I had seen 13/WNET as a pleasant organization to work with, but a bit stodgy and unimaginative. It ran a few pet programs on nature, New York, and culture, and had had a great success with its Heritage series. But in spite of talking the good talk, it didn’t have a brilliant history in the support of independent documentary makers. This was not a great situation, and worried me a great deal, so I asked Tammy, ‘How do we get things moving?’ Her answer was not encouraging, and indicated we were in for a marathon race rather than a quick 200 yard dash.

The Brink of Peace

Tammy thought for a while, looked out of the window, shifted a couple of the gold film awards on her desk, and outlined her plan. First she suggested I should spend a few months writing a project proposal. Unfortunately there was no money to support me during that time. With that proposal in hand maybe they could raise money for research and development. How long would that take? Maybe another six months. During research and development, I could write a tentative script; then, with the script in hand, they might be able to raise money for the actual production. How long in turn would that take? Oh, difficult to say. Maybe another nine months. When I pointed out to Tammy that at that rate we would be ready to start the film in another five years, she just shrugged. That’s the way it was, and that’s only way 13/WNET could make the film. So good luck. I went to see Eban, who was also visiting New York, to talk over the difficulties. He’d thought after his conversations with Bill Baker it would all be plain sailing, and was a bit taken aback when he heard of the money problems. On Eban’s recommendation I went to see Eli Evans, chairman of the Charles Revson Foundation, who was to provide me with enormous help later in the funding of a film on Stalin. Eli was not a man to waste time. He knew about the film, thought it an excellent and timely idea, and couldn’t understand 13/WNET’s procrastinations. If such a film was going to be made, then we should snap into action immediately, and not after the millennium. Thus after an hour’s conversation, with my expressing my wish to get down to work as soon as possible, I walked out of Eli’s office with the promise of a small grant for writing for the proposal. We also discussed strategy. The top echelon at 13/WNET was for the film, but the second tier seemed a little hesitant about putting much energy into the project. Tammy hadn’t even proposed appointing a special fundraiser to help us. The most she could suggest was that that she would help, if Eban himself could go hunting for funds from various people he knew who were concerned with the Middle East. In other words it was Eban’s project, let him go find the money, and WNET would add the honor of its name. In the event, and this is jumping the gun a bit, almost the entire budget for the film was raised by Eban. If you remember that 13/WNET would take 21 percent of the budget for overheads you can see why it’s often more profitable to be a broadcaster than a filmmaker. But who has the choice?

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I wrote the proposal in about five days, in between doing some guest lecturing at Stanford University. For years Israel and the surrounding Arab countries had been officially at war. Sometimes it was war as we usually recognize the term, evidenced by the big tank battles of the Six Day War in 1967, and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, between Israel, and Egypt and Syria. Often there were minor flare-ups between the parties, and however calm the situation seemed there was always tension in the air. A secret meeting, however, between a few private Israelis, and Palestinians in Oslo in 1993 paved the way for a breakthrough. ­ Months later came the famous meeting and handshake on the White House lawn between Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, and Israeli Premier, Yitzhak Rabin. All under the chairmanship of President Bill Clinton. A year later Jordan and Israel signed a peace agreement. A new way forward seemed possible, till tragedy intervened. In 1995 Yitzhak Rabin, who had been a key figure in pushing the process forward, was assassinated at a peace rally in Tel Aviv by a young right-wing fanatic, Yigal Amir. These events then, were the ingredients of and the background to my film. My task now, in the proposal, was to describe and analyze what had happened, what was happening in the present, and also to try and say a few words about the future. All with the intent of persuading some generous person or institution to give us money. It was relatively easy to write the proposal as I had been researching for months and concrete ideas about how to make the film had been in my head for weeks. However, as I wrote the proposal it was as if Yitzhak Rabin, who was so much for peace, was bouncing around my brain the whole time. However in many ways this proposal was quite different to anything I’d had to write before. Usually a proposal describes a simple story you want to do, or tells you about a character or a situation you want to follow or explore. Here I was dealing with the complexities of politics, that few people could follow, and the history of a region not many Americans knew much about. There was one dynamic story that could be set out chronologically – the secret Oslo meetings – but the rest of the film would involve a lot of speechifying, and the presentation of a multitude of characters from different countries. Nevertheless, it was fairly easy to write a simple opening statement.

The Brink of Peace

No place has been more volatile in the past nor presents such hopes for the future as the Middle East in 1996. In fact few events in our generation have aroused such intense reactions as the Middle Eastern peace process and its dramatic rollercoaster fluctuations. It is quite clear that the outcome of the struggle will affect the world for decades to come.

Continuing in the same vein, I then sketched out an executive summary. On September 9th, 1993, Yasser Arafat wrote to Yitzhak Rabin that the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist in peace and security. On the same day Rabin wrote that the Israeli Government had decided to recognize the PLO as the representative of the Palestinian people and commence negotiations for peace. Together these sensational documents, negotiated at Oslo, set off a peace process which has revolutionized the Middle East. For the first time in fifty years two peoples, involved in a tragic struggle that has witnessed immense suffering on both sides, saw hope for the future. 13/WNET proposes to develop and produce a one hour television documentary which will trace the evolving peace process. This vitally important program will illuminate the history, dilemmas and immense challenges for change now confronting the Middle East. The outcome of this situation will have major consequences not just for the peoples of the area, but for the West in general.

I then added that Abba Eban would host and narrate the program, that the film marked the resumption of an old and very successful partnership between him and WNET, and that the film would expose millions of viewers to one of the key dramas of our time. After discussing budget and a time plan for the film, the proposal ended with a short discussion of style and approach. ‘The film will be a combination of essay and story. It will be built as a drama, with incidents, events and happenings illustrating the larger picture. It will show passions and emotions as we depict the turbulent events of the past three years.’ All this was fine except for two comments in the last paragraph, which came back to haunt me. ‘And the film will provoke. Its object is not just to record a process and a series of events in time, but to echo and reflect on the wider issues of war and peace between nations. And finally, the film will be extremely balanced, with both Arab and Israeli views given due airing.’ I wrote the proposal in January 1996, delivered it to Abba Eban and 13/WNET, and waited to see what would ensue. I was fairly happy

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with what I’d written, but was worried as to who would read it, and that it wasn’t aimed at a specific organization. Normally when I write a proposal I have a specific recipient in mind, but not here. Would 13/ WNET put it out to big shots like the Ford or Rockefeller Foundation? Would we make a submission to NEH (The National Endowment for the Humanities)? Would it go out to some internationally concerned philanthropists? I didn’t know. Then two events transpired that advanced the action but also changed the course of the film. On the positive side Eban very quickly started raising substantial amounts of money from people who were worried about the Middle East. They probably thought that Eban could provide a necessary and deeper perspective on the situation than that provided by most newspapers. That development was great. On the negative side I watched with horror as the whole peace process seemed about to unravel. First came the shattering terrorist bombings in Jerusalem in February. This was followed by a disastrous mini-excursion by the Israelis into Lebanon. Finally Israeli elections returned right winger Bibi Netanyahu as prime minister by a majority of half of 1 percent. This was a tremendous defeat for Shimon Peres, one of the main architects of the peace process and did not bode well for the future. Netanyahu promised ‘peace with security’ but I had my doubts. What was clear was that though we had started the film with the idea of celebrating the peace process, reality was dragging us somewhere else. This process was reflected in the working title I chose for the film. In the beginning, I thought of using Days of Destiny or The Road of Hope. A few months into the following year I changed it to States of Decision. By June and July, I was almost ready to call the film Down the Drain, as I considered those few words to be the most accurate reflection of the state of the peace process. By October 1996, it was clear we had half of the production budget, which was looking very large, and had doubled from my original estimate. Anyway, having had a good sum promised to us, I begged 13/WNET to let me go ahead and put some ideas on paper. The answer was a very emphatic no. There could be no action till all the money was in the pot. Well this worried me both in terms of the film, which seemed stalled, and also my own personal position. I had expenses, I had to make a living, and I couldn’t afford just to wait around doing nothing. This being the case, I once more went back to my lifesaver, Eli Evans at the Charles Revson Foundation. With cap in hand, I explained the situation and asked him if he could make me a

The Brink of Peace

small grant so that I could begin writing a draft outline script. Then, if we did raise all the funds, we could plunge straight in without a delay. Again, showing immense faith in the project and in Eban and myself, Eli decided to back us for another life-saving sum. Now I was faced with the main test in considering the first draft. What did we want to say in the film? What should be its span? Who should appear? How would we get into the film and how would we end it? And what was Eban’s role? Of course I had been thinking about these problems for months, but now I had to put it all down in a draft script. The last problem, Eban’s role, was maybe the trickiest. In the past I had made four fairly successful films with Eban about Middle Eastern politics and history. In those films I had written the scripts after a certain amount of consultation with him, and he had generally trusted my judgment and left me alone to get on with the filmmaking. In the peace film, however, he saw his role as chief executive editor and wanted to be consulted on every little detail. Since he was a perfectionist, had virtually raised all the money himself, and had put an immense effort into bringing the project to fruition, I could very much understand his concern. But it wasn’t really the money that was the issue. Eban, who had after all been one of Israel’s most outstanding foreign ministers, saw the film as possibly his last major comment on Israel, the Middle East, and world affairs. So he desperately and passionately wanted the film to succeed. The difficulty from my point of view was that Eban wasn’t a filmmaker. It was enough knowing I would have 13/WNET peering over my shoulder the whole time, but at least (or so I thought) there were a few experienced broadcasters there. But Eban, when you got down to it, didn’t have that much understanding of the complexities of making a film work. Yes, he was highly astute, a brilliantly intelligent and concerned politician, and maybe one of the world’s greatest orators, but he wasn’t a filmmaker and his judgments were not those of a filmmaker. As a result there were a greater number of disagreements than usual between us regarding style, content, and commentary. Our most violent clash came over my wish to include in the film the assassination of Yehi Ayash, who was seen by Israelis as a Hamas terrorist and their mastermind bomber. After his killing there were riots in Gaza. The assassination of Ayash, allegedly by the Mossad, had initiated a series of revenge bombings in Israel by Hamas, and I believed that it was important that Ayash’s death and its consequences

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be shown. Eban kept insisting such a sequence was unnecessary. In the end it stayed in the film, but I don’t think Eban was ever very happy about it. Let me put the dilemma another way. Clearly the film was not just a standard documentary. If it was going to have any value it had clearly to reflect Eban’s point of view. That’s why Bill Baker, head of 13/WNET, had been so keen on the film to start with. It had to represent the personal observations of one of the world’s last great statesmen on one of the most pressing issues of the day. But it couldn’t just be a political statement. It also had to be humane and down to earth, and moving and emotional, and this wasn’t always easy for Eban. This was very acutely reflected when I met with Eban in his New York hotel room and we started discussing the people we should interview. Eban, or Aubrey as I was more accustomed to call him, wanted the statesmen. He wanted, and probably rightly so, to talk to Yasser Arafat and Bibi Netanyahu, King Hussein and President Mubarak, Shimon Peres (Rabin’s successor in the Israeli Labor party), and Abu Alaa and Seib Arakat, important politicians on the side of the PLO. For my part I wanted to talk to the Arab in Gaza, to the settler in Hebron and to ordinary people in Jerusalem and on the West Bank. Another difficulty was that whereas Eban had a very clear perception and brilliant analysis of events leading up to the peace process, he seemed to me less sure of his footing in dealing with events after Oslo. But then who was? Eban was also inclined to be much more optimistic about the outcome of the peace process than I was, and we would argue considerably as to whether that optimism was justified. Before getting down to write a rough first draft I also had to think of the shape and form of the film. This was an extremely tricky matter, because I was trying to tell two entirely different stories which, unless I was careful, would conflict with each other in terms of style and approach. The first dealt with the negotiations of Oslo where two Israelis, and two members of the PLO (still seen as an outlaw organization in Israel) had met in strict secrecy to see if a peace rapprochement was possible. This was a straight, fascinating narrative story involving wonderful characters such as Norway’s Terje Larsen, Professor Yair Hirschfeld from Haifa University, and Arafat’s banker and advisor Abu Alaa. The second story, and entirely different in texture and feel was what happened to the peace process after Oslo. I found this latter story very difficult to formulate till I realized it could be conceptualized in the form of the letter ‘W.’ The two inner

The Brink of Peace

19  Abba Eban, King Hussein, Elia Sides, and the author.

arms of the W were the Arabs and the Israelis who, putting it very simply, were trying to advance the process. The two outer arms of the W were those forces, Jew and Arab, settler and terrorist, who were opposed to the process and in many cases trying to wreck it. In practice, this formulation also fitted neatly into a chronological narrative. Possibly our most serious problem was the ending. How on earth were we going to come out of this unholy mess? What message were we going to leave with the audience? This couldn’t wait till the day of judgment, and I wanted to get it straight before I plunged into the body of the script. After consulting with Eban, I wrote the following as a first draft conclusion. EBAN ON CAMERA We are at a turning point. I would like to believe that the Middle East has been irreversibly transformed, but it is difficult to predict the future.

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EBAN NARRATION The Arab Israeli dialogue does not exist in a vacuum. It is sited in an area of fundamentalist passion where revolution and upheaval is always on the horizon. Against this background we can understand what a failure of the peace process might lead to … an inferno of explosive antagonisms and volcanic hatreds. Generations might have to pass before anybody would attempt such a peace process again.

Eventually I was told by 13/WNET that we had all the money, and we could go ahead with the filming. I had been lining up a list of interviewees and decided to start with a few of the statesmen, the first on my list being President Mubarak of Egypt. I had been wary of Egyptian formalities and bureaucracy, but at Cairo airport (before the Tahrir Square revolution), we were given celebrity treatment. The fact that we were traveling with Ambassador Abba Eban and were about to interview the President was only half the story. The other half is that I had a superb production manager and co-producer, Elia Sides. Elia opened doors and achieved results that seemed impossible. He worked quietly, efficiently, and knew everybody. He had paved the way to kings and princes and, what was more impossible, would later get us in to see some key members of the Islamic Jihad and Hamas, both regarded as terror organizations by Israel. I didn’t know what to expect of Cairo, but because of Elia and his planning and foresight it was all going as smoothly as a Sunday stroll in Central Park. At least it was that way till we tried to leave the airport. With Eban there was no problem, because an Egyptian welcoming committee had whisked him off to the hotel in a magnificent Mercedes. For myself, my four-person crew and equipment, the Egyptians had provided a miniature Russian car that was dangerously overcrowded with even two people in it. I was really put out, but such a situation rarely phased Elia. Turning to an Egyptian army officer in the car park, he told him such things wouldn’t do, as we were on a visit of national importance that included the filming of the President. To my surprise, and I was learning something every minute, the officer immediately commandeered a huge army van, ignored the protests of the waiting driver, smiled, and wished us a wonderful stay in Cairo as he waved goodbye.

The Brink of Peace

After a night at the Hilton Ramses, we got ready for the drive to the palace. I was worried about time. The interview with Mubarak was for 9.30a.m. It was now 9a.m.; the streets were choked with traffic. In the event, I shouldn’t have worried … except for my life. We went in a group of five. Leading the column were two police motorcyclists, sirens screaming. Following them was a police car, blue lamp spinning, wheels scarcely touching the ground. Third for take-off was Eban, sitting sedately in a black chauffeur-driven Bentley, followed in turn by four security men in a white Honda. Last, but by no means least was myself, driver, and crew, in the equipment van. While the rest of the traffic moved at about ten miles an hour, we hurtled past at about ninety (or so it seemed) leaving, I supposed, death and destruction in our wake. I can’t be sure because my eyes were closed in fear as we missed an eight-wheeled lorry by two inches. Mubarak was then at the height of his powers, his downfall impossible to imagine, and was the model of affability. Groomed, and with hair dyed jet black, he waited for us in a room decorated with miniature golden sphinxes. This was all fine but the interview itself was a bit disappointing. But then I hadn’t expected very much. Mubarak was a side player in this particular process, and I expected, and got, little more than clichés. They were all there, expressed in a very forthright way by a very impressive president, but they were no more than clichés, just about useful for a twenty-second sound bite in the film. We are supporting peace with all our efforts. We would like to reach a fair solution which will lead to a permanent peace and stability in this part of the world … Egypt has sacrificed a lot of peace and we are still supporting peace by all means …

This stuff could certainly put you to sleep or make you turn to another TV channel. It was neither illuminating nor interesting. But Eban was happy. He’d met Mubarak and that had made his day. If President Mubarak looked the picture of health, Yasser Arafat looked anything but. I had crossed into Gaza with Eban, two Israeli journalists, and my crew. As a filmmaker I was pleased we’d got the interview. As a person, some of whose friends had been killed by murderers sent by Arafat, the meeting was something I could easily have done without. When I saw Arafat my first impression was that he was ill. His hands trembled, his face looked ashen, and his whole demeanor

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20  Camera director Yoram Milo in Oslo.

spoke of depression. As the negotiations were blocked at this time, I could understand the reasons for his mood. We had interviewed Mubarak alone. By contrast Arafat, dressed in battle fatigues, and wearing a keffiyeh, was surrounded by six advisers. Eban had decided to do the questioning in this case and started off in Arabic, which he’d studied at Cambridge University. This startled Arafat who possibly wasn’t used to Eban’s classical use of the language. Being worried how this would come across on US TV, I asked them both if they would mind going on in English. That was fine, and again, as with Mubarak, the answers came in clichés. The Israelis are not implementing accurately and honestly what has been agreed upon and signed at the White House. Mr Netanyahu has frozen everything: all the negotiations, all the committees. I would like to see the complete involvement of the American administration in this case.

Eban asked Arafat what message he would like to send to the world about the attitude of the Palestinian nation to the peace process.

The Brink of Peace

21  Applying make-up to President Mubarak.

In spite of all the difficulties and troubles, we are committed to the peace process. We are appealing to everybody to protect the peace of the brave.

As hinted above, I was not happy with the interview. One reason was that although I had prepared, and gone over some questions with Eban, he was acting as if he was in a parliamentary political debate. He was not asking the hard questions that would make the interview interesting and worthwhile listening to on TV. Yet he had insisted that he be the one to talk to Arafat. Nevertheless, when Eban had finished, I tried a few more pointed questions myself. Why had the Palestinian authority published an ordinance threatening death to anybody who sold land to Jews? Why, after so many years of armed conflict did he decide to go for a political solution? And how did the reactions of Hamas and Islamic Jihad affect Arafat’s plans? The first question he dismissed with a smile. The ordinances were not to be taken seriously. All this just a week after an Arab businessman was assassinated on the West Bank for such an act of treason.

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As for the political solution, he had decided on it way back in the seventies. We stated our aim and target to achieve peace many, many years ago. You have to remember my speech in the United Nations in 1974, when I said I’m coming carrying an olive branch in my hand.

This was interesting, because what I remembered was the hand gun he also carried to the podium. As for Hamas: Hamas is different now. Some of them, most of them, have accepted to deal with the peace process, and two of them are ministers in my cabinet.

I’ve set some of these remarks out at length because you can see the dilemma of the filmmaker. Does one simply use the interview as is, or comment on remarks that, putting it simply, seem a little farfetched if not outright lies? While Eban returned to Jerusalem, I went on to interview Razi Hamed, a senior member of Hamas, who edited the Gaza Hamas newspaper. His office was over a garage. To enter, you negotiated dark, winding stairs. You were then searched for weapons. In one corner of the room was a framed picture of the Dome of the Rock, from where Mohammed is said to have ascended to heaven. On the table lay proofs of the latest edition of the Hamas newspaper. Razi Hamed himself was about thirty. Dark. Bearded. Passionate. Angry. Here for once there was frankness, with the usual banalities laid aside. Settlement, sovereignty, Jerusalem, refugees, borders. Nothing is solved. I am against it because it didn’t take into consideration the minimum rights of my people. I don’t want to live under the occupation. I want my flag, my identity, my respect, my dignity.

This was good stuff. Honest. Straight from the heart. We talked a bit more, but my last questions to Razi were about Arafat and armed resistance. Armed struggle is not our first option, but Israel doesn’t understand any language but the language of force. Therefore we have to go on with the strategy of armed struggle. Many of the Palestinians say we should go back to military operations. This is a war between two peoples, and nobody can tell me to forget the rest of my homeland.

The Brink of Peace

One of the main difficulties while we were shooting Brink of Peace was trying to cross borders – Palestinian territory, Egypt, and Jordan, loaded with film equipment. Nothing was ever simple. When we had started the film under an Israeli Labor government, relations had been good between Israel and Egypt. With Netanyahu as prime minister there was a distinct cooling off. So to get into Egypt strings had to be pulled at the highest level. Getting into Gaza for general filming, when we’d finished with Arafat, was also complex. Suddenly the Palestinian authority, with no notice, had decreed that massive forms had to be filled in for journalists’ visits, and you had to be accompanied by a ‘minder.’ More than once I found myself on one side of the border, arguing with Arab police colonels at a security post and talking with Elia on a cellular phone half a mile away on the Israeli side as we tried to figure a way out of the impasse. Even when the border crossing was relatively easy, bureaucracy and the unwillingness of minor officials to make decisions could also be barriers. Crossing into Jordan just north of Eilat, with all the necessary forms to hand, in theory couldn’t have been simpler. But then the Jordan customs officer started questioning us about our TV camera. This problem we had considered in advance and had secured written permission to bring in a video news camera. But, said the customs officer, wasn’t a video camera a small camera? And could a TV camera be defined as a video camera? He would have to phone headquarters to check things out. In the end we waited for three hours, till long after the post had shut down, while telephone messages went back and forth to Amman, to higher and higher officials, till permission was eventually granted. Had I been naive in waiting, and had the official been delaying things merely in order to get a bribe. I don’t know. I didn’t choose that path, but nevertheless we got through. Eventually we crossed into Akaba at nine in the evening. After a quick meal we started the two-and-a-half-hour journey to Petra, where we were supposed to film the next morning. I wanted to film this glorious spot to show how peace between Israel and Jordan had increased tourism on both sides. In Petra I had secured permissions galore – permissions on permissions – enabling us to take our van through the winding hills into the back entrance to the historic site where we could capture the glorious remains of Petra’s Nabatean kingdom. I thought nothing could go wrong. I was mistaken. Four miles into the hills, ready to wind down

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on Petra we were stopped at a ramshackle police hut manned by a lone teenaged guard. We showed him the passes. No good. Why not? The pass said the van could go to Petra but said nothing about its occupants. I tried using logic. Was the van supposed to drive itself into Petra? No use. So back to the tourist office for more passes. The end of the story was farcical. When we returned to the same police post an hour later, the original guard was gone, and the new one waved us through without any examination at all. While being occupied with the interviews and the filming in Jordan, I had left the archive searches to my associate producer, Larry Price. I had provided Larry with a first list, but told him to feel free to go wider. Larry, super meticulous, then provided me with material on every aspect of the peace process that one could possibly need. Much of it was, in the end, to prove superfluous, but at first I wanted to have as wide an option on materials as possible. After all we were only paying at the first stage for screeners, and the cost wasn’t too high. The key sections that Larry found on terrorism and incitement were, however, vital and terrifying. They were vital because they provided the visual support for the film. And they were terrifying because bunched together they presented a horrific picture of events that time had erased from our minds. For instance I had forgotten how obscene were the Israeli rightwing demonstrations against peace and against Rabin just prior to his death: Rabin adorned with a pig’s head and dressed as a Nazi officer, and Zionism being carried away in a coffin. Then there are the pictures of the Arab-inspired terrorist incidents: Beit Lid, Afula, Tel Aviv, Bus 13 Jerusalem. Then again Jerusalem. The pictures take on a certain similarity. Always there is the wreckage and the burned, twisted skeleton of a bus or a car, or the interior of a café. There are torn, bloodied bodies on the ground, the ambulances, the soldiers assisting, and witnesses sobbing as they recount what happened. And always in the background a small special group hunts endlessly for the smallest scraps of human bodies so that they can be prepared for burial. Over the years one learns to live with terrorism, or, as some politically correct papers put it ‘the necessary reactions of guerrilla fighters.’ But it never ceases to shock. Soon after I first came to live in Israel I went shopping one Friday morning in a Jerusalem market. Five minutes after I left, a bomb exploded three meters from where

The Brink of Peace

my car had been. Thirteen people were killed. A few years later, a young couple I had befriended, who lived just across the staircase from me in our apartment building, were killed by a pipe bomb in a Jerusalem square. Two years before I started this film, an American friend’s daughter was killed while travelling by bus to the university. And so on, without end. These were the incidents, particularly the hotel bombings of February 1996, that killed Shimon Peres’s election hopes, and maybe killed the peace process. In a fierce general election battle Peres reiterated the hopes of Oslo, while Netanyahu only had one message. He would combat Arab violence with all his might. I interviewed Peres in his office in Tel Aviv. It was not a good day. A few months earlier he had been deposed from the Labor Party leadership by Ehud Barak. That was clearly still on his mind. Today he was rushed, harassed, and to cap it all we had come late because of immense traffic hold-ups, for which he gave us hell. For the moment he was no longer a major player in the peace process, and we knew our questions were going to reopen some wounds. In the event his observations were insightful, often funny, and without any sense of regret. I asked him what he thought about Arafat. When you think somebody is a terrorist, life is very simple. He doesn’t laugh. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t get excited. But then, all of a sudden when you see him not as a terrorist but as a human being it’s a sensation for you … And what we agreed with him was not about a plan but a method. That instead of fighting each other we shall have a dialogue, to change terror for negotiation … Regarding a Palestine state and Jerusalem as its capital Arafat said: ‘Don’t I have the right to dream?’ And I said the difference between a dream and an agreement is that for a dream you only need one. For an agreement you need two parties.

I next went to see Bibi Netanyahu, the Prime Minister. Getting past all the security checks took half an hour. Eban was with us. He had never met Bibi and I wondered what he would make of a man whose views were so opposed to his own. Here I hoped to get some fireworks, which would enliven the film, and shift it from the mere speechifying which was beginning to worry me. There were two things Eban and Netanyahu shared. Both had been Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, and both were superb speakers. Netanyahu’s verbal facility had always fascinated me.

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His policies were something else. I always saw him as a gyroscope, someone who spun very fast, who always stayed upright, but went nowhere. However as a film performer he was excellent: blunt, forthright, telling you exactly what he believed in and how he saw things. The mandate I was given was to bring peace with security, which is the only peace we could have. But the other side has fashioned a model that says every time they have disagreements we are about to descend into a cataclysmic war in the Middle East. Secondly they often unleash violence and encourage terror. And, of course, that is unacceptable. I don’t want a process, I want a resolution.

What did he think of the future of Jerusalem, and an Arab state? Jerusalem is the hardest part. I have yet to see the Palestinian leadership turn to its constituents and say, ‘Well, we’re not going to get it all. It’s not all feasible.’ As for a Palestinian state, well the term state implies a collection of powers that I believe would threaten Israel and would threaten the peace. If you ask me point blank on a Palestinian state, then I’ll tell you I’m against it because I don’t want those powers to accrue to our neighbors in such a way as to threaten the peace.

Personally I didn’t agree with Netanyahu’s assessment, nor did Eban, but I knew we had some powerful controversial material for the film. It was clear to me as the film progressed that I needed a very articulate spokesman on the Arab side, someone who would be as effective in stating the Palestinian point of view as Bibi was in talking for Israel. Dr Hanan Ashrawi, Arafat’s minister of higher education seemed the obvious person, yet I approached her warily. I had heard her talk numerous times on television, and had always been struck by her bitterness and the sharpness of her attacks on Israel. However, I thought she would be the perfect foil against Bibi. She would be provocative, and I doubted that she would talk in platitudes. I went to interview her without Eban and I wasn’t disappointed. What did she think of the actions of Hamas? That was asked a few days after another terrorist attack. Well, no one had the right to transform a political position into a means of violence that would claim innocent human lives, but the Israeli fundamentalists were just as dangerous. What were her opinions on Arab democracy? That was a difficult issue inside Palestinian society, but the Arabs had a dual legacy of injustice. First there was the legacy of exile, and dispersion,

The Brink of Peace

and therefore of revolution, secrecy, and armed struggle. Secondly, there was a legacy of occupation and therefore a mentality of resistance to authority. The two mentalities had to be transformed to fit into a nation-building mold. Gradually I became aware of a certain pattern. No matter what the question, the answer always ended up with an attack on Israel. Only when I asked Ashrawi about the future of Jerusalem did her answers become a little less vitriolic. It is a symbol of our continuity, of our culture, of our history. But I don’t look upon it only as a celestial city. The solution has to be much more terrestrial. I believe sharing Jerusalem is going to be the real solution. If you solve the problem with political pragmatism Jerusalem can be the capital of two states.

I had been in Gaza a lot of times since the late 1980s and had always emerged depressed. This was particularly true during the first Intifada (uprising). Silent, wary Israeli soldiers patrolled the alleys. Children slunk along the walls. The streets were filthy, the garbage piled high. Faces peered through shuttered windows. Smoke rose from burning tires. Everywhere a sullenness hung over the city. The poisonous fumes of hatred penetrated everything. It was a city you fled from and tried not to think about while drinking your safe cappuccino in Tel Aviv. And this was the place I knew I had to go back to for the film. I wanted to see what had changed after the momentous meeting between Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawns. I remembered Gaza as the most bitter and contentious area under Israeli occupation. Now, two and a half years after Oslo, I wanted to see what Arafat had done for the city. What I saw was the difference between night and day. Though the refugee camps still festered, and it was still a place of squalor and poverty, you could almost tangibly feel the new spirit in the air. It was the little things you noticed: the way the children walked upright in the center of the streets, rather than by the side of the roads, the smiles, the general cheerfulness of the crowds. Where Israelis had patrolled, order was now being kept by blue-uniformed Palestinian police. Here and there a policewoman directed traffic. Where housing had stagnated there was now a building boom. Tractors worked at the end of every road. Concrete blocks were sprouting

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22  Crew in front of pyramids.

everywhere. In the center of the main square of the city, just behind the huge billboard poster of Arafat promising to regain Jerusalem, huge bulldozers were tearing savagely into the gravel prior to building a new roundabout. And everywhere the green Palestinian flags: fluttering from telegraph poles, attached to schools, floating over the market place. As I put it later in the film, ‘a people manipulated for years by Israel and foreign Arab states was now establishing a national identity.’ I came to Gaza to capture the changes and also to interview a number of Arabs. These were ‘the men in the street’ that Eban wasn’t so keen on, who had been found by the ever efficient Elia. I’d spoken to quite a number on my research forays but eventually decided to interview just three or four. Were they typical of public opinion? Did they express what the majority were thinking in Gaza and the West Bank? I don’t know. They just struck me as articulate, feeling people, whom I sensed expressed a centrist, balanced point of view. Or maybe I was kidding myself. Maybe I chose them because they were expressing just what I wanted to hear. These are the games we play in making documentaries.

The Brink of Peace

Juma was typical of the Arabs I interviewed. He was thirty-eight, a part-time policeman, and I talked to him in his house with his kids running around our knees. Juma had served as my guide around Gaza and seemed very honest and forthright. He was the one who had pointed out to me the bizarre situation that many people in the city drove ‘legal’ stolen cars. These were cars that were known to be stolen (usually in Israel) and therefore had to be registered with a red license plate. Once registered they could be driven, but not sold. Juma also told me about the corruption that went on in Gaza, and had pointed out one or two of the new businesses that thrived through ‘connections and blackmail.’ To my surprise, he also talked freely about the harsh regime in the Gaza jails and the fear of prisoners who now looked back almost longingly on their time in Israeli prisons. This he could talk of personally as he and his three brothers had spent quite a lot of time in Israeli jails during the Intifada. His younger sister had been killed by an Israeli bullet during this time. Over the course of an hour I asked him what he thought of Arafat and the general situation. When Arafat came to Gaza [after exile in Tunis] we went crazy. It was as if the whole world belonged to us. He gave us a land where we Palestinians can eat, move, talk, sit, make love and breathe freely.

This was good stuff and became the basis for voice-over in an excellent sequence in the film, where I showed archive of the jubilation and excitement of the crowds, with guns firing in the air, as Arafat drives through Gaza. After the question on Arafat, I asked Juma about his thoughts on Hamas. They don’t want there to be peace. Hamas wants to stir up Gaza and inflame passions. They don’t want there to be peace. We are very much disturbed by these crazy people who try to blow up buses. They didn’t dare do this at the time of the Intifada. Why are they trying to kill people now when there is peace?

Juma’s words were sadly prophetic. In 2005 the Israelis left Gaza. However in 2007, after brief fighting against the Palestinian El Fatah organization, Hamas took over Gaza and expelled El Fatah. Finally I told Juma about Razi Hamed’s dismissal of the achievements of Oslo. What did he think?

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After Oslo we got many things. We haven’t got everything but we’ve got a lot. Our children can live without fear of the soldiers coming, without an atmosphere of killing. If a family wants to go out at night and leave the kids, have a stroll, walk, laugh, it’s possible … I want to tell you the truth. We really hope and want that there will be peace. But Oslo was not enough. The truth is that the Palestinian people and the Israeli people must learn to live together. And that is possible.

Juma’s opinion was definitely not shared by Dubek – Dubie Weinstock – an Israeli park ranger I talked to in Gush Etzion. Sitting on a small rock, his jeep parked on the stones below us, Dubek looked me straight in the eyes. I say this to anyone who asks me. This land is bitter with blood. Jew. Christian. Arab. Here blood was spilt before 1967, after 1967, and it will be spilt again after Oslo.

Dubek, a solid, balding man in his late fifties, had personal reasons for his pessimism. A few years before, his elder son had been shot and killed in an ambush by two Arabs. Now he rides around with a rifle in his jeep waiting for the day he will find the murderers. Elia had known Dubek a long time and thought he would be able to express for me the feelings of the Israeli settlers on the West Bank. The discussion of the settlements was one of the key issues of the film, and I wanted to be sure it was covered well, and fairly. This was essential because although the Israeli–Palestinian dispute is about many things, at heart it is a fight about land, about two peoples’ claims to the same territory, the West Bank. In 1977 Israeli Jews had been encouraged by the new right-wing government to settle on the West Bank. At the time I made the film their numbers had grown to over 120,000 settlers. Surrounding them in a few cities and dozens of towns and villages, live over a million Arabs. Dr Abdel Heide Shafi, whom I’d talked to in Gaza, had been very blunt about the whole situation. For him, the Israeli presence in the occupied territories was illegal. The Arabs had the right to all the occupied territories, including the whole of Jerusalem, and only their return would make for peace. Dubek gave me the other side. He had lived in Gush Etzion, a group of kibbutzim and villages south of Jerusalem, till 1947. The Etzion block had been lost to the Arabs in the Israel’s War of Independence, and many of its Jewish inhabitants killed. In 1967, following

The Brink of Peace

the Six Day War, Dubek and others had moved back to the area, resuming, as it were, their birthright. Though I was not myself an advocate of West Bank settlement, I could see that many settlers felt a deep bonding between themselves, the Bible, and Jewish history, and I felt strongly that this sentiment should be expressed in the film. As far as I could judge, nothing would move Dubek from the rocks and the stones and the trees around Gush Etzion, and I wanted the viewers to understand why. They expelled my grandfather from the Old City of Jerusalem in 1936; otherwise we would still be living there. The war didn’t begin today; it has lasted many years. The problem with my people is they have no regard for land. How was it possible after two thousand years of exile they couldn’t return? I’m trying to maintain the link with the land, with the soil, for myself and my children. The link between my people and this land is closer, harder, stronger than any other people has with its land. If a people has been in existence for three thousand years, and then decides to return, you can see the proof of its bonding with the land.

As I mentioned earlier, when contemplating the whole project, I had seen fairly quickly that the film had two components, possibly necessitating two distinct styles. First I had to tell the story of the secret meetings in Oslo. This was a fairly simple narrative story, easy to relate, and would require only a few days shooting in Norway. The second element was the give and take, and all the arguments after Oslo, which was almost a different film. Well I’d almost finished collecting material for the post-Oslo section, and now the time had come to tackle the Oslo accords, which I would obviously place early in the film. The Oslo agreements are clearly one of the most intriguing diplomatic accords of recent years. They came into being due to chance and a lucky turn of fate. In 1992 a Labor government had been elected in Israel on a platform of peace. It was clear that direct dialogue was needed between Israel and the PLO, but farcically Israelis were forbidden by law to talk to the PLO or its representatives. The answer, secret talks away from the eyes of the world, is attributed to various sources. Abu Alaa, a key adviser to the PLO, was the first to suggest Norway as a go-between. Another player was Terje Larsen, a

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Norwegian working in Gaza, who was trusted by both sides. Obviously a secret back channel was needed. Together Larsen and Abu Alaa concocted the idea of secret meetings in Norway under the guise of an academic seminar. On the Israeli side, the main secret player was Yair Hirschfeld. A Haifa University professor, with no government ties but a solid background in the situation, Hirschfeld could meet with the PLO without arousing suspicion or publicity. In practice he would be reporting to Yossi Beilin, a member of the Israeli parliament, very close to Shimon Peres. In trying to cover the Oslo meetings for my film, I was intrigued by three aspects. First, there was the immense secrecy surrounding the whole operation. Second, I thought it would be good to show where the meetings took place and how atmosphere and isolation could affect negotiations. Last, I thought we should examine the human relationships among the Oslo negotiators, and show how trust was achieved among the participants after so many years of suspicion. Everyone I interviewed had a tale to tell of tremendous efforts to maintain anonymity, and stop any news of the meetings leaking to the press. Because of this, Abu Alaa, a sharp, sparkling-eyed ex-­banker and Arafat’s chief negotiator, was almost prevented from entering Oslo. The first time I came, it was all done so fast I didn’t have a visa. So the police at the airport said, ‘Where’s your visa?’ I told them I didn’t have one. ‘So who are you visiting?’ I said, ‘I don’t know, but I think someone is waiting for me.’ I didn’t want to mention Terje Larsen. Afterwards I said to Terje, ‘Why do you do it like this? And he said, ‘We’ve got to keep it secret.’

Yair Hirschfeld, one of the secret Israeli negotiators and a very jovial type of guy, had a similar awkward experience. His came when the foreign visitors were asked to use another peculiar stratagem. The Norwegians asked us to use other names at the hotel. Not our own. One time I came back to the hotel at midnight. I had to get the key at the reception, and then the lady on duty asked me, ‘What is your name?’ I looked at her and apologized. ‘I’m sorry, but I forgot my name.’

Oslo itself was too public a place for the ‘academic’ sessions. As a consequence Larsen arranged for the private estate of the Beauregard

The Brink of Peace

paper company, one hundred miles from Oslo, to be put at the disposal of the negotiators. Larsen’s cover story was that an academic retreat was necessary for some foreigners to discuss Middle Eastern issues. Here numerous confidence-building talks took place between January and May 1993. Elia had gone before me to do preproduction in Norway, and arranged everything with his usual skill. A few weeks later I took him and my trusted cameraman Yoram Milo with me from Israel, picked up a van, equipment, and a local production manager in Oslo, and went straight to work at Beauregard. Here I understood what isolation could do. The country house stood in a few acres of lovely wooded grounds. Dark green lawns sloped down to distant roads. Inside the mansion pastel rooms with soft red and green furniture opened up into each other. Crystal chandeliers graced the ceiling. An old grandfather clock stood on the stairs. Hunting paintings adorned the yellow walls. I told Yoram I saw the scene being covered in a series of slow pans, slowly dissolving into each other, over which we’d be hearing the different voices of the negotiators. Yoram saw it immediately, and did a great job in and out of the house, the scenes being enhanced by a golden setting sun. Beauregard evoked a world of quiet comfort at the turn of the century, a world where all usual inhibitions could be dropped, a private world where you might risk saying the unthinkable and dare to state the impossible. This is at least how Hirschfeld saw it. Between us the relations were very very good. We liked each other and there was a very positive atmosphere. The difficulty was to show that while the negotiations go on, and one or the other takes a difficult position, it shouldn’t have a negative effect on our relationship.

In the end it was Abu Alaa, interviewed at his house near Jerusalem, who revealed to me the essence of the meetings that contributed to their success. When we first started to talk together I said, ‘Look, if we go back to history, we will speak a hundred years without results. If you are ready to speak about tomorrow, and what we want for tomorrow, I think we may reach an agreement.’

Later Abu Alaa insisted on an upgrading of the Israeli delegation. This was possible since Israel had recently legalized meetings with the

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PLO. As result of the request Uri Savir, director general of the ­Israeli Foreign Office, was sent to Oslo to take over the discussions. The academic discussions had become official negotiations. These meetings were held at a ski cottage near Oslo, used by Norwegian cabinet ministers. When we went to film there I was once more struck, as at Beauregard, by the beauty of the site, the quietness and the isolation. As the sky was a dazzling blue, and the sun sparked rivets off the gleaming snow, I had to ask Yoram, my photographer, not to make it too ‘chocolate boxy.’ In the film I detailed the ups and downs of the negotiations, and the arguments about the contents of the agreement. I also detailed Shimon Peres’s secret visit to Stockholm to conclude the negotiations. I knew the signing of the agreement had been filmed. Could we get hold of it? A challenge. After making tremendous efforts, Elia managed to track down and borrow the videotape that the N ­ orwegian police had made of the secret signings between the two sides. This was a tremendous coup for the film. In the video you can see that each side is welcomed in a luxurious private mansion by the Norwegian Prime Minister. Peres and Hirschfeld, Terje Larsen and a few others sit on chairs around the walls. A serious Uri Savir and a smiling Abu Alaa initial the documents; then both make short speeches. What was going through their minds? This is the way Uri Savir put it to me. I had a very strange feeling. It was the contrast between a dozen people in a small room, the curtains closed, the secret cameras of the Norwegian police taking pictures, and doing something totally clandestine which had enormous historical repercussions.

Although we hadn’t finished filming, we started editing in New York, at 13/WNET, in mid-May 1997, giving ourselves till the beginning of August to finish. Here we were up against the gun, because a broadcast date had already been allocated for mid-September, and the film had to be turned in six weeks before. I wasn’t too worried, but I had a lot on my mind, including redrafting the whole script and organizing the editing. The draft script I had written months ago was, in practice, merely an outline plan, showing all the elements. Who could we use. Where would we shoot. What stories might we tell. How would we begin and end the film, etc., etc. Now I had to totally revise the script, and

The Brink of Peace

write a full narration. Luckily the structure of the new script stayed basically the same. Open with the dramatic meeting of Rabin, Arafat, and Clinton on the White House lawns and the formal signing of the Oslo agreement. Then show how the secret meetings in Oslo led up to that moment. Follow that by the beneficial effects of the agreement, including Arafat’s return to Gaza and peace with Jordan. The second half of the film would then show the deterioration in the situation, and I would finish up with comments on the future from a number of the participants. The task then became where to place all the interviews, how to open up the film visually, and how to integrate into the film some of the political events of the last six months. Finally there was the overall task of simplifying a complex situation for viewers who knew nothing of the Middle East. Unfortunately the editing didn’t go well. To begin with the whole fabric of the peace process seemed to be crumbling. Israel had started building in south Jerusalem, an action regarded as extremely provocative by the PLO. A major terrorist attack had occurred in Jerusalem’s open-air market, and a crazy Jordanese soldier had slaughtered six ­Israeli children who were on a school outing. My fear was that we were saying goodbye to the peace process, and the film would be outdated before it ever hit the screen. The second thing was that problems were arising in my relations with 13/WNET, or more specifically arising with my supervisor. Although my main boss was Tammy, the film theoretically should have been overseen by the Head of Documentaries. But there wasn’t one. While 13/WNET searched for a new executive someone – let’s call him Jim – had been appointed on a temporary basis, and to put it mildly, we just didn’t see eye to eye. I didn’t think much of Jim’s political acumen or vision, and was unsure of him as a filmmaker. He, for his part probably had the same doubts about me. So we fought, on film approach, who should appear, and how the script should be written. The climax came when we had a screening of an assembly cut for Abba Eban and his wife Suzy. While Eban was quiet, Suzy’s remarks revealed that she knew little about film. She wanted her husband to dominate the film, and disapproved of so many Arabs being interviewed. OK, that was a point of view, and I could understand it. However, Jim then started ripping into the film in front of Eban and Suzy. With difficulty I kept my calm, but afterwards had a furious row with Jim. My point was that his remarks, which may or may not have

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been fair criticism, should not have been made in front of the Ebans. After this Jim and I scarcely talked. But I was not blind to criticism and a few weeks later, showed a rough cut to Tammy. She’d heard about my arguments with Jim, and more or less decided to take over the supervision herself. Except for a few things, she liked the cut very much. I felt very relieved, because to have worked much longer with Jim would have been impossible. Eventually, of course, Jim and I made a wary peace, and I incorporated some of his better suggestions into the editing. Money was another frequently occurring problem. All monies raised came in to WNET, and I had agreed a budget with them. That was fine. The difficulty arose from the fact that the broadcasting station was very wary and a little dilatory in dishing out all the necessary production expenses. Now I was dealing with expenses amounting to over $250,000. The bills usually came to me from everywhere: airlines, my crew, hotels, restaurants, and I had to forward the bills and get them paid by 13/WNET, or refund money from my account. So every week I got calls from Elia and others, ‘Where’s our money?’ I was the point man. I was employing them, not 13/WNET, so they looked to me for repayment. Eventually everything was paid, but it was like getting blood out of a stone. Little of this worried the 13/WNET executives. Their big concern was that the film should be balanced and should not be seen as overtly pro-Israel. Because of this they kept picking on little things. Why did Israelis speak English so fluently, and why did the Arabs in the film often speak in strangely accented voices? And why was my language so loaded? Why did I have to call Yitzhak Rabin ‘general turned statesman?’ Wasn’t that overdoing it? Couldn’t we just call him ‘army officer turned politician’? These matters faded as we struggled to finish the film. This meant numerous sessions with Eban and my script consultant, John Fox, to get the wording of the ending correct. We wanted a conclusion that would acknowledge all the differences and yet sustain the note of passion and hopefulness we all felt. What came out was not all that different in the end from what I had scripted nine months before. EBAN ON CAMERA: The Middle East has been irreversibly transformed by the Oslo agreements. Things have been said that were never said before. Things have been done that were never done before … There are, however, no guarantees for the future. Dedicated opponents of peace can still dismantle the

The Brink of Peace

accords bit by bit, till every element of friendship, trust, and cooperation has been undone. That must not be allowed. NARRATION: The success of the peace process may not lead to utopia, but it will stop the endless cycle of wars and violence. For both Palestinians and Israelis a path has been shown in which the opportunities transcend the dangers … But unless the path is vigorously pursued generations might pass before anyone will attempt such a peace process again.

At the beginning of September, absolutely exhausted, I went for a holiday in Denmark, and then back to Jerusalem. The film itself, now entitled On the Brink of Peace, was finally screened at the beginning of October and on the whole got a good press. I thought I was home and dry, but not quite. In November 13/WNET started forwarding to me some of the protest letters it had received, mostly from rightwing American Jews. It was my duty, they said, to answer them. There weren’t many, but they hurt. On Camera, a Jewish magazine devoted to accuracy in Middle East reporting, called the film ‘a skewed history that blackened Israel’s past.’ Someone called Eban a biased radical. One letter to WNET said In mentioning the Palestinian administration Mr. Eban doesn’t mention its brutality, denial of civil rights, and torture of prisoners … Although this document is an improvement on WNET’s past deliberately inaccurate and inflammatory reports on the Middle East it still falls short of the balanced and objective presentation of information you are obligated to provide the public.

In my written answer to this letter, I said that the program was never meant as the final definitive history of the peace process. It represented the personal view of the process as seen by Abba Eban, one of Israel’s most distinguished statesmen. I then restated what I had been trying to do – not argue the rights and wrongs of each side, but present a broad balanced spectrum of views regarding the peace process. ‘Given the time at our disposal it was clear that many interesting things would not come up for discussion, from feelings of Arab prisoners towards Arafat to Israel’s failure to provide a clear passage between Gaza and the West Bank.’ Much water has flown under the bridge since I finished the film. It was a very hard film to do, but I was very proud of it. But looking

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back on it, it’s a film that saddens me immensely. The basis of the film was hope, and the idea that a better future was possible for both Palestinians and Israelis. Since then we have seen both small and large wars between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In the south Hamas has taken over Gaza completely; an extreme right-wing government dominates Israeli politics; and civil war rages in Syria. Just a month before writing this chapter fighting again broke out between Hamas and Israel. Over fifteen years ago I wrote ‘dedicated opponents of peace can still dismantle the accords bit by bit, till every element of friendship, trust, and cooperation has been undone.’ Sadly the words proved very prophetic, leaving a future that looks very bleak.

Production notes: writing the proposal You want to get the film off the ground. You want to find a sponsor and money. What’s your next move? You have to write a formal proposal that will define your thinking and then publicize and get people interested in your project. A proposal is, first and foremost, a device to sell a film. It can serve many other functions, such as clarifying your own thinking and showing your friends what you want to do, and it will provide information useful to all sorts of people. It will show your working hypothesis, lines of inquiry, point of view on the subjects, and all the wonderful dramatic and entertaining possibilities. The proposal can do all those things, but you should never lose sight of its main goal. The central purpose of your proposal is to convince someone, maybe a television commissioning editor or some organization head, that you have a great idea, that you are efficient, professional, and imaginative, and that you have a great team working with you. In other words its goal is to get your foot in the door and sell your film idea.

Style and main topics There are no cast-iron laws about writing proposals – only some good hints and sound advice. My main rule, and I expand on this later, is to write one or two very strong opening paragraphs. Somehow, you have somehow to grab the immediate attention of a jaded commissioning editor. You use your strongest hook or bait. Below is the opening of a proposal I did for a film called Waves of Freedom. One night, shortly after the end of the War in Europe twenty-year-old Paul gets a mysterious call at his Brooklyn home. ‘Paul, do you want to save your people? If so come to the corner of Third Ave. and Fifty-ninth tomorrow at nine. I’ll be wearing a black leather jacket and carrying a New York Times. If I put the Times in the wastepaper basket, you’ll know

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the FBI are onto us. Come another day.’ Crazy! thinks Paul, but he turns up and follows the guy into his office. He tells Paul ‘We know you were in the navy during the war. We want you to ferry ships from New York to Palestine. But if the British capture you, you’ll get hung.’ That night Paul says good-bye to his family, and is on his way.   Unknowingly Paul is getting involved in one of the strangest underground wars of the century. A war that pits the might of England and its Royal Navy against 150,000 remnants of battered Europe …   This is a film about Americans and Canadians and courage and British struggles to hold on to power as its empire disintegrates. This film is the dramatic story of the clandestine journey of Paul and other volunteer friends and their battles with the British across the waves of freedom.

In the opening lines of the proposal, I deliberately wanted to tantalize the readers with an atmosphere of cloak-and-dagger mystery. I wanted them to ask, ‘What is this strange underground war? What are these clandestine journeys, and battles with the British?’ Having hooked them, I hoped they would be intrigued enough to read through the whole proposal and give it some major consideration. A few commissioning editors did exactly that, and it was later taken up by ARTE France. The hook is fine to get you started, but how do you proceed? For a start, aim for simplicity of style, clarity of language, and brevity. Let’s just think about style and language for a moment. Consider brevity. Brevity may not always be possible, but it’s a worthy ideal. Few commissioning editors or would-be sponsors have the patience to read long proposals in detail. A concise, dynamic, entertaining proposal written on three or four pages is much more likely to get attention. Sometimes one page is enough. This is particularly true as regards preparing proposals for film markets. At those venues, one and a half pages is the maximum. Obviously, there are exceptions to the above. Sometimes, you simply cannot reduce your great film idea to a few pages and still do it justice. But scrutinize your proposal for padding and delete it. What is implicit in the above is that sometimes you may have to write two, three, or even four differently shaded proposals for the same project, each time toning and altering the proposal according to your audience Sometimes, you’ll take the same basic idea you’ve sent to one station but alter its thrust and length to accommodate a commissioning editor with different needs

Production notes: writing the proposal

Content and organization What should the proposal discuss, and how should it be organized? Again, I emphasize there are no absolute rules and that the proposal is usually written with a specific person or organization in mind. I usually include most of the following items in my proposals • film statement • background and need • approach, form, and style • shooting schedule • budget • audience, marketing, and distribution • filmmakers’ biographies and support letters • miscellaneous additional elements Film statement The statement formally declares that you are making a proposal and usually suggests a working title. It indicates the length of the film and may define its subject matter and key audience. Often, I like to commit the idea of the film to one simple statement and the simpler, the better. This helps the reader to see immediately where you are going. If you can’t do this, then you know something is wrong. Only a few lines are necessary, as indicated by the following examples: SockoPixNixes at BO. This is a proposal for a two-part series, each fifty-six minutes, on the historical and commercial influence of Hollywood’s Variety magazine. Because We Care. This is a proposal for a thirty-minute film on St Catherine’s Hospital to be shown to potential donors for fundraising. Background and need In this section, the opening few paragraphs set out any information necessary to acquaint the reader with the subject. They also incorporate the hook mentioned earlier. If the film is topical, then the amount of background information thought necessary might be small. If this is a history film, then background information might have to be quite extensive. ­Basically, this section lets the reader see why the topic is interesting and

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why such a film is needed or is of interest as entertainment or information for general audiences. It’s your invitation to the reader, the equivalent of the circus barker’s ‘Roll up, roll up to see the greatest show on earth.’ You must pay attention to the words need and interest. Many topics are out there begging to be made into films, and your job is to persuade the commissioning editor that your film is so dynamic and vital for the audience that it just must be made. Although I’ve stressed the necessity to show why the film is needed, you won’t have to bother in many situations about that element. Here I am thinking about films in which the entertainment value is so obviously very high that that factor alone will sell the film. The background sketch can be short or long. You must ask yourself, ‘What is the sketch really doing? Has it provided the reader with sufficient information about the central premise of the film to make a reasonable judgment about it? And have I provided enough information to intrigue the reader to go further?’ The background information should be a lure to fascinate the reader, to make him or her say, ‘What a marvelous possibility for a film.’ Approach, form, and style Approach, form, and style are normally defined after you’ve researched the subject. The research usually suggests the best way into the film. Yet, in most cases, at least a tentative approach will be asked for at the proposal stage. Your ideas sound fascinating and appealing, but how will you carry them out in practice? Where is the drama in your story? Where is the conflict? Where are the emotions and character development? This is where you must be down to earth. If your approach or structure is tentative, then say so, or indicate two or three approaches you would like to investigate further. Possibly, the most popular film style these days is cinéma verité, or observational documentary, but it is also the hardest to write about on paper because you are not sure what you are getting into. Nevertheless, you have to make the effort. Some years ago, I was asked to do a film on British prisons, a subject I knew very little about. My first feeling, before I had done any research, was that this should be a people film rather than an essay film, a personal film from both sides of the bars. In my outline proposal, I suggested a film around the experiences of five individuals. The first two would be a guard and a warden, representing the administration. The other three would

Production notes: writing the proposal

be prisoners: one about to serve a six-month sentence, the second a lifer, and the third about to be released and whom we would follow in his first three months of freedom. I was sure I could find these characters, and that the different experiences of the five over half a year would provide an illuminating and moving picture of the prison system. I set all this out in the proposal and also indicated there would be minimum narration; instead, the film would hang on the thoughts, feelings, and comments of the five ‘stars.’ I was a bit worried about the extended shooting time and told the sponsors this would affect the budget. I also told them if budget was a problem, I could cut down the number of my characters and shoot everything within a month. Here the style and approach were very simple and very easy to describe. Where possible I like to indicate early on whether there will be formal narration, direct dialogue, or a great deal of voice-over. I also occasionally say something about visual style if I think that will be an important element of the film. Shooting schedule The shooting schedule is one of the more optional items in the proposal. Include it when time is of the essence, for example, when you have to capture a particular event or shoot within a particular season of the year. For example, you want to do a film about two sailors that climaxes with the Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race. The race is a once-a-year event, so you have to let the sponsor know that money has to be available early to cover the shooting expenses. You also put in a shooting schedule or estimate in a proposal when you feel you have to protect yourself. This is so you can turn to the sponsor and say, ‘The proposal says very clearly we need six months, so don’t tell me now I have to do it in three. It just can’t be done.’ Budget If you are sending a proposal to a foundation, you will probably have to provide at least an outline budget in the proposal. If you are answering a request for proposals, for example, if a museum has declared it wants a film to go along with a specific exhibition, then you may have to submit a budget. In most other cases, I would leave all reference to budgets out of the proposal because you don’t want to scare the sponsors off till you’ve talked about the proposal with them and had some feedback.

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However, I suggest that as you work on the proposal, you also prepare an outline budget for your own interest. This will bring you down to earth and help you to prepare appropriate and realistic targets for your proposal. Let us assume you are doing a film, say, on the history of British engineering feats, whose subject requires a tremendous amount of archival research. A few moments consideration of budget will tell you that you are going to need over $200,000 to make the film. The BBC or Channel Four, however, might only give $40,000 maximum for such a documentary. You know immediately you’d better send your proposal elsewhere for further back-up support. Audience, marketing, and distribution Like budgeting, any discussion of audience and distribution within the proposal is usually optional rather than obligatory. If a sponsor has put out a request for a film to train factory workers, or you want to propose a film for a long-running documentary series for the BBC, then you will not have to say anything about distribution in the proposal. But it is not a hard-and-fast rule. Thus, if your film for the BBC is about the Dead Sea Scrolls, it doesn’t hurt to add that the film could be shown in many museums and could also become a best-selling DVD. Biographies and support letters Towards the end of the proposal, it is customary to give a short biographical description of yourself and the other principal filmmakers involved in the project. What the sponsor is primarily interested in is who you are and what your track record is. This obviously presents some difficulties if you are a beginning filmmaker with only a small body of work behind you. You may want to consider trying to get a major filmmaker to join his or her name to the project as adviser or co-director. The known name will add clout to your project and get it considered more seriously. Even if your track record is limited, add any letters of praise for your earlier work and all mention of festivals you’ve attended and prizes you’ve received. Include any support letters from organizations or individuals who’ve shown a liking for your idea and any letters from any television station that has shown an interest.

Production notes: writing the proposal

Miscellaneous additional elements Your idea is to sell your project and get it off the ground and moving; therefore, you add anything you believe will help people understand and support your concept and get the proposal accepted. This might include materials such as maps, photos, and drawings. It might include the names of any academics who are acting as your advisers. And it might include a full revenue plan if your documentary is aimed at a theatrical release. You should also think seriously about making a video demo when you are considering making a long film for television. A video demo is a three- to five-minute video that highlights what the film is going to be about. This preview can be one of your strongest selling tools. The great proposal on the history of London or Edinburgh, or Loch Ness takes on a greater strength when you show the power, mysteries of, and beauty of the place. One last word. You may have written a great proposal, but you have to get it seen and read. That requires perseverance and determination to knock on all doors, make telephone calls, send e-mails, do follow-ups, and have patience in the face of rejections because you know in spite of everything, you are going to get this film made.

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7 The First Fagin In 2012 I made a feature docudrama called The First Fagin. It wasn’t my first docudrama, but being set in the nineteenth century presented very different problems to others I had made. It took about three years to put the film together. The journey was difficult, problematic, but very enlightening. The time and date of the birth of The First Fagin can almost be noted to the minute. I had been in Australia for a month giving a documentary workshop at the Victoria College of Art, in Melbourne. I enjoyed the city and went to watch cricket, and observe the antics of the Melbourne Grand Prix. So for days my nostrils had been inhaling oil smells, while my ears had been shattered by the screech of racing car tires. Enough is enough. I needed a break so I joyfully accepted the invitation of my friend Helen Gaynor, a very experienced filmmaker, to come to dinner, and share a good bottle of wine. Helen and her husband Arpad had just come back from a holiday in Tasmania, the small island off Australia’s southern coast, and were raving over its delights. According to them Tasmania boasted wonderful food, exquisite white wines, and a very picturesque shoreline. All this was good to hear, but then Arpad said something that made me prick up my ears. While motoring around near Hobart we went to visit the old tourist village of Richmond. It has an ancient police court, an antique inn, and loads of nineteenth century cottages … the kind of houses that have long vanished from Melbourne. But the most interesting place was the jail. It dates from about 1830, and while we were there they told us the most incredible story. Evidently, round about the early 1830s the jail housed an English Jewish convict called Ikey Solomon. He’d been convicted of theft and receiving stolen goods, and then transported from England to Australia to serve a prison term of fourteen years. OK. There were many prisoners like him, so why was he different? Because rumor

The First Fagin

23  Poster for The First Fagin.

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had it that Charles Dickens had been inspired to create the character of Fagin, the rascally Jew in Oliver Twist, after hearing the story of Ikey. So what do you think of that?

Arpad filled another glass and looked at me. Then the light bulb flashed. You know those cartoons, where a man has an idea, and a bulb switches on above his head? Well, it was exactly like that, and it took maybe half a second after Arpad had finished his story, before my head started to start to spin. ‘Helen, Arpad,’ I said, ‘there’s a film there.’ Films are born out of moments of madness, and that was one of those moments. Some instinct deep inside me had immediately switched on to say here is a fantastic filmable story. Both Helen and her husband Arpad caught my crazy enthusiasm, so we immediately poured some more wine. Then I said (prophetically as it turned out to be), ‘Maybe it’s something we can do together. Let me look into it, and we can discuss it a bit more before I leave for Europe.’ That night I googled everything I could find about Ikey Solomon. By using different sources I gradually got the picture. Ikey (or Isaac, if you wanted to use his proper name) was born in London about 1782. His father Moses was a Jewish immigrant from Bavaria. Ikey had run with the gangs of London, married young, and then got caught by the police for pickpocketing. As a result he spent six years in the hulks, British prison ships spread the length of the Thames river. On release he had rejoined his wife Ann, and opened up a business in London’s East End, as a receiver of stolen goods. The business prospered, and Ikey became rich, fathering a large family. Then came his downfall. After being accused by the police of theft Ikey was shoved into Newgate prison, from which he staged a dramatic escape and fled to America. In revenge the police framed his wife for theft, and she was transported to Australia. Out of love and madness Ikey then sailed to Australia, to Van Diemen’s Land (now modern Tasmania) to rejoin Ann. After a year of freedom during which he opened up a shop, Ikey was hijacked by the Governor of the island, George Arthur, and forcibly taken back to England, where he was tried for theft at the Old Bailey. The sentence was fourteen years prison in Van Diemen’s land, starting off in Richmond jail (where Helen had first heard about his story) and then he was transferred to Port Arthur, the island’s most savage penal colony.

The First Fagin

These were the bare bones of the story, but the narrative seemed to me to have even more potential than I thought. That was very encouraging. Then on Google I saw that a woman called Judith Sackville O’Donnell had written a slim biography of Ikey just four years ago, and the book was published by a Melbourne publisher. Well, I had been working through the night and thought the pursuit of Judith and the book could wait till the morning. After breakfast the following day, I phoned up the small press that had printed Judith’s book and asked them if they could give me her telephone number. Now in London the publisher would have hummed and hawed, then asked me to send in a letter, and maybe after two months I might, or might not have got a reply. In this case the publishers not only gave me Judith’s phone number, but also sent me a copy of the book. I skimmed through it very fast just wanting to get a general impression. It looked very good. The story had plenty of flesh on its bones. What was particularly exciting to find out was that Ikey had become a media hero and was cited as one of the most famous criminals of his day. When he had escaped from Newgate jail all the London papers had written about him. Sixpenny pamphlets about him were also available on every street corner, often inventing the most extraordinary and implausible stories about his life. He was said to have shared a mistress with the Prince of England; to have run a brothel and to have enjoyed the favors of ladies with names like Cherry Bounce and Slinging Sal; to have been a great swordsman, and to have run gangs in London for fifteen years. He was also said, and now we were back to the Fagin story, to have trained little boys to be pickpockets. All this increased my excitement, and I knew the sooner I could meet Judith, the author of Ikey’s biography, the better. The same afternoon I phoned Judith. I explained I was a writer and filmmaker, and would like to talk to her about her book. So far, no mention of a film. I asked her if we could meet, and was told no problem, so we arranged a rendezvous in two days’ time at the Melbourne Arts Centre. How would we recognize each other? I told Judith I would carry a film magazine, and she said she’d carry her book. Judith turned out to be a serious-looking grey-haired woman, of about sixty. She wasn’t a professional historian, but her interest in Ikey had been aroused when a famous Australian author had written a book a few years before called The Potato Factory. Its villains were a slimy evil Jewish couple called Ikey and Ann Solomon, and their

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stories paralleled the lives of the real Solomons. In the novel Ikey, a dealer in stolen goods, was about as disgusting as they come. Judith realized this was a total anti-Semitic libel, and in her fury had researched the Solomons and eventually produced her own book The First Fagin. Judith intrigued me. But how would she respond to the idea of a film? Slowly I revealed who I was and what I wanted to do. I was a British filmmaker, had lived in London, and was intrigued by Ikey’s story. Like Ikey I was Jewish, could well understand his background, and I had a reasonable reputation as a documentary filmmaker. I thought Judith’s book, with all its research, might provide the basis for a film, which would probably be a documentary, but might even be a reconstructed docudrama with actors. Had anyone else approached her about doing a film? Not really. Then came a question from Judith that had me laughing. ‘That’s fine, Alan, but how much do I have to pay you?’ Gently I explained it was the other way. I told her if I really thought there was a possibility of a film I’d like to take an option on the documentary and docudrama rights for the book. I would pay Judith a small amount for a threeyear option, and during that time would try and raise production funds. If I was successful, then I would pay Judith a larger sum for the full rights, and if I wasn’t, she would still keep the option money. Judith liked the idea, and I told her I would call her before I left ­Melbourne. In fact I called her within two days to tell her I wanted to go ahead, and told a friend of mine Shaun Miller, who was a film lawyer, to start drawing up the option contract. Later I told Helen what had transpired and met with her and her husband Arpad for lunch along the river. They were as excited as I was, especially when I said wouldn’t it be fun if we could all work on the film together. I would write and produce it, Helen could help me direct, and Arpad could come in as an adviser on Dickens and his times. I then said goodbye to them and took a flight to Sydney to meet another old friend, Storry Walton. I had worked with Storry years before when he was deputy head of the Australian National Film School. Storry is one of those renaissance men, good at everything. An excellent documentary and drama director, he is also a music savant, raconteur, a very good writer, and a superb organizer. He is also a good friend, and I’ve turned to him more than once for advice. This time we met for drinks at Central

The First Fagin

Quay in Sydney. I hadn’t seen Storry for six years, and apart from a gray Father Christmas beard he hadn’t changed much, and still exuded a tremendous warmth. I told Storry about the possibility of a film on Ikey, and his enthusiasm immediately bubbled over. ‘Yes, you could do it this way. You could try for funds over here. Screen Australia might be interested. And yes, yes, yes, it is a terrific idea.’ Well, I tell you, these are the friends you need when you are not too sure of yourself. And then I asked tentatively, ‘Storry. Would you like to help in some way. Research? Co-producer? Associate producer? Think about it.’ Storry leaned over, beer mug in his left hand, and gripped me with his right, ‘I’m with yer, mate!’ After seeing Storry I had one more meeting in Sydney with Veronica Fury. Veronica had been a student of mine years before in Queensland, and we had formed a very strong bond. I had thought she had tremendous talent, drive, and promise, all of which had come to fruition in the intervening years when she had really blossomed as a producer. Though from Brisbane, Veronica was in Sydney for two days, so luckily we could meet over breakfast. Briefly I told her about my idea to do a film on Ikey. I also told Veronica that as so much of the story took place in Tasmania we would obviously have to do a great deal of shooting in Australia. This being the case I would be delighted if she could join me as co-producer. The bargain was sealed with a kiss and a hug. On the plane back to Jerusalem I started thinking about what I might be getting into. Bottom line? A week after hearing the story of Ikey for the first time I had written a check for an option, and already started to put together a team. And my bank account was empty. Well I always knew you had to be a bit mad to make documentary films, and it was clear that insanity was still running in my family. While having coffee in a Bangkok airport stop-over, I started wondering how to proceed. Obviously I would have to do a lot more investigation on Ikey till I knew his story backwards. I would also have to do a lot of background research, so that I could place Ikey in his proper historical milieu. Once I’d absorbed all that I could start thinking of writing a proposal and raising money. So three more questions. Were we talking about a documentary, or a historical docudrama with reconstructions? And besides that question, who might be interested in the project, and what would be the budget? It was here, as I started

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to do calculations, that I started to realize what I was possibly in for. A major documentary production in England or the USA might cost anywhere between $200,000 and $400,000. In the case of Ikey, even an idiot could see that the film might cost way over $400,000, and if we did it as a docudrama even more. Once back home I took a month to immerse myself in Ikey’s story. I reread Judith’s book, this time much more slowly, and found it invaluable. The research was immaculate, and plotted Ikey’s life very clearly from his birth in East London to his death in Hobart. Judith had investigated court records in both London and Tasmania, and they provided incredible details of Ikey’s life and actions. Judith also laid out very well how society regarded crime and thieving in Ikey’s day. In addition to Judith’s book I found another book, Prince of Fences: The Life and Times of Ikey Solomon by a British author, J. J. Tobias. Whereas Judith’s book gave a very full picture of Ikey’s life in Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land), Tobias’s book gave a fuller picture of life and crime in London in the early nineteenth century. As I began to fill in the details of Ikey’s life I also started looking at the possible Charles Dickens and Fagin connection, which had been the initial spark for me. Here details were hard to come by. It all seemed merely conjecture. Multiple suggestions and possibilities offered themselves. Many people did indeed believe that Ikey was the model for Fagin, but few facts were offered up as proof. My way into this conundrum was to read a fair amount about Dickens’s life, and the origins of Oliver Twist. The world of Fagin and Ikey definitely fascinated Dickens, who, at least in his early years wrote a lot about crime. The question of the fugitive, and convict transportation to Australia also interested him. In Great Expectations Dickens wrote about Magwitch’s escape from the Hulks (prison ships), an incident which reminded me of a key episode in Ikey’s life. But Ikey’s story, and that of his family, also raised other film possibilities in my mind. Ikey spent time in four prisons in his life. Two of the prisons – Newgate and the Hulks – were in England. Two other prisons, Richmond and Port Arthur penal colony, were in Australia. Ikey’s wife Ann also spent time in the Cascades, then a new women’s prison in Hobart. It struck me that here was a chance to broaden out and look more widely at crime and punishment in England and Australia in the nineteenth century. This idea pushed me in turn to read a lot of books about the prison and transportation system of the time. The most interesting was Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore,

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which documents the whole history of the transportation of British convicts to Australia. Slowly the outlines of the film gradually crystallized in my mind. I saw it as involving three clear strands. The main story, and the film’s backbone, was the life and adventure of Ikey, a likeable man who was once seen as ‘the most famous criminal of his time.’ The second story was the description of crime and punishment in Ikey’s time. This was a period when children aged twelve could be sent to the gallows for stealing a loaf of bread and where a judge could sentence twenty prisoners to death in one morning. This element of the film would grow organically from episodes in Ikey’s life. The third story would be an investigation into whether Ikey was really the inspiration for Dickens. Finally I thought I was in a position to write a proposal incorporating all of the above. It turned out to be the longest proposal I’d ever written, amounting to about sixteen pages. The beginning of it is set out below. I called the proposal, Searching for Fagin, a ninety-minute documentary special. In order to capture the reader’s maximum attention I decided to start off with a bang. SEARCHING FOR FAGIN (Proposal) In May 1827 a man was about to stand trial in Britain accused of theft and receiving stolen goods. If found guilty he would either hang, or be transported to Australia. However, a day before the trial he made a sensational escape from London’s Newgate jail and fled to America. More incredible news followed. In an act of folly, based on love and passion, he then sailed to the notorious penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land (today Tasmania). Here he hoped to rejoin his beloved wife who was, herself, serving a sentence of 14 years transportation from England on the prison island. Like Dick Turpin three centuries ago, and Nadal and Federer today, Ikey totally captured the imagination of the general public. Seeing the headlines, one young writer became fascinated with the story of Ikey. His name: Charles Dickens. Soon after Ikey’s escape Dickens wrote his famous novel Oliver Twist. In it he created one of the most famous characters in all of English literature … a scoundrel and criminal called Fagin. It is our belief that Fagin was almost totally inspired by Ikey Solomon … an intriguing idea which our film examines in depth.

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In Searching for Fagin we bring to life the dramatic, turbulent career and adventures of Ikey Solomon, the first Fagin … and one of Australia’s most famous convicts and icons. But our film for world audiences is also about crime and punishment, and Dickens’ involvement in both. Using Ikey’s amazing story as the backbone of our film we move from the thieves’ dens, criminal courts, and sordid jails of London to the rocky coasts of Australia and Van Diemen’s Land. There we look at the life of the convicts, the chain gangs around Hobart, and the mind shattering prison of Port Arthur … And in the background we see Dickens striding around London, investigating prisons, and observing the convict transport ships and hulks. Gradually we show how this whole panorama ignites his imagination to create Fagin, Magwitch, and a whole coterie of scoundrels and heroes.

I then went on to sectionalize the proposal, anticipating the questions of the reader. Thus the first section after the above introduction gives a brief description of some of the key points of Ikey’s life. Looking for Ikey Solomon When Alec Guinness played Fagin in David Lean’s film he made him hunched and repulsive, very close to Dickens’ description of the ‘old Jew.’ Yet contemporary portraits of Ikey Solomon, the possible model for Fagin, show a slim good looking young man with a dandified haircut. The portrait comes from the cover of the Universal Pamphleteer, one of the many booklets of the time that celebrated Ikey’s escape and general derring-do. Under the title of The Life and Exploits of Ikey Solomon, Swindler, Forger, Fencer and Brothel Keeper the pamphlet presents us with a man whose exploits beggar belief …

My object in the first two pages of the proposal was to present a man whose character, and adventures would thrill and intrigue any audience. Having hopefully drawn the reader in, the proposal then went on to outline the mood of the times, how I thought the film could be made, and the background of the principal creative members of the team. Thus I suggested the film would be a combination of documentary and reconstruction. What I didn’t insert was how much the film would cost, as I didn’t know myself, and I also didn’t want to frighten anyone away. Over time the full proposal went through about six different versions. Part of the exercise was to sharpen and focus the proposal itself. Part of the effort, however, was to adjust the proposal to the needs

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and whims of different broadcasters. Thus, with the Australians in mind, I underplayed Ikey’s time in England, and overemphasized his experiences in Australia. For the Brits, by way of contrast, I stressed the Dickens and Fagin connection. In addition to all this I wrote a one-pager, for distribution at film festivals, and for commissioning editors with little patience, and I also wrote a slimmer six-page proposal. Then I started casting my bread upon the waters. The proposal was not difficult to write, but where to go from there? That was the main question. I’d been in frequent e-mail and Skype correspondence with Veronica in Australia, and sent her the long form proposal immediately I’d finished it. I thought she could start hawking it around various Australian broadcasters like ABC or SBS. For my part I decided to target the BBC and Channel 4 in the UK. Both, sadly, turned me down. I didn’t see any of the big American channels like Discovery or HBO going for the film, so where else could I turn? Now a few years before I had done a fairly successful film for ZDF, a German public TV company linked to ARTE, who worked out of Mainz. I doubt that they would be interested in the film because it was such a British–Australian centered story, but I thought it was worth a try. But again I needed an ‘in’, because I didn’t think a cold approach would work. The opportunity came when I was asked to a film festival in Berlin, which gave me the chance to meet up again with a good friend of mine from ARTE, Peter Gottschalk. Peter met me one evening in my hotel, and over drinks I talked him through proposal on Ikey. Peter then took the proposal to read overnight, and we agreed to have a longer discussion at breakfast. When we met Peter had both good news and problematic news. The good news was that he loved the proposal. The problematic news was that Peter ran a pure documentary strand, and didn’t think Ikey would fit in to his kind of programs. But all was not lost. ZDF had a slot for historical dramatic features. Maybe it would find a home there. He now needed to think whom he could approach. Peter was as good as his word, and ten days later I got an e-mail from a ZDF history/drama producer called Peter Allenbacher who’d heard about the film from his department head. I was curious, and asked Peter what had attracted him and his boss. Here I was in for a surprise. Both men were totally disinterested in the Fagin and Dickens aspect, after all who in Germany knew the story of Oliver Twist,

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or had heard of Dickens? No, what interested ZDF was the curious and haunting story of Ikey, and above all the ability of the film to examine crime and punishment, and murder and hanging in the England of one hundred and seventy years ago. I wrote about all this to Veronica, who was overjoyed. Later, in a number of telephone conversations, I tried to explore with Peter Allenbacher, my possible commissioning editor, what he really wanted, where we might be going, and how I should proceed. What ZDF wanted was a very dramatic exciting film for its Saturday evening audience. It could be a combination of documentary and drama, but drama should predominate. Ideal length was ninety minutes. So was Peter saying they had accepted the film? No! What I had to do now was write a five-page treatment outlining the action of the film which would then be sent up to the big boys in Mainz. A committee of elders would then review the treatment, along with forty others, and give their yea or nay. The exercise was good. It made me think seriously about story, form, and progression. I wrote a quick treatment, and sent it to Peter, who delivered it to his bosses. We had three tense weeks of waiting before Peter phoned to say the project was accepted. At that point my heart started beating again. Actually I was very, very excited, because in one brief moment the film had turned from an exciting but intangible dream project into one that could possibly be made. So ZDF was in. But for how much, and what did their participation mean? And when would I see a contract? Peter couldn’t help me on this, he was just the commissioning editor. For anything to do with rights and money and legal matters I had to talk to the accounts department. They were not the easiest people to deal with, and we argued back and forth on many contract details. For example, they only wanted to pay when the film was finished. I said no. We needed money to pay for actual production expenses. Finally, we agreed: 30 percent on commencement of filming, another 20 percent when we started editing, and the rest of the sum when we finished. It all looks easy on paper, but it took four phone calls, five letters, and two months to get to that agreement. Figuring out rights and timing was easier. For their contribution ZDF wanted the three years broadcast rights for Germany, France, Switzerland, and Austria. The rights for the rest of the world would belong to me, or whatever company I was working with. This was

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good, because it gave us the chance to actually make some money from the film. As for delivery Peter suggested a two-year date from the signing of the contract, but added he was willing to be flexible on the matter. All these developments I passed on to Veronica, and agreed to meet her in a month in Sitges, a Spanish seaside resort near Barcelona where both of us would be attending a film conference. The first day we just caught up as old friends do, and attended the conference cocktail parties. But the second morning we sat seriously over bitter coffee at a café on the seafront, and got down to business. Both of us had done budget estimates (mine wildly wrong as it eventually turned out) and thought we’d need a minimum of half a million dollars to make the film. ZDF had promise us $140,000 so we only had to find $360,000. Only! Only? My key question to Veronica was what could we raise in Australia. Veronica is ever the optimist and in two minutes she was outlining a plan which if it worked (which it didn’t quite) would not only allow us to make the film, smoke cigars, and drive dashing sports cars, but also allow us to put something aside for our next film. But all this was contingent on this being seen in Australia as an Aussie film. I saw no problem in that, although it meant that Veronica’s company, WildFury, would be the one to sign all the contracts and receive all the money. I trusted Veronica totally, and that’s all there was to it. Veronica’s plan was three-pronged. First, we could go to the Australian broadcasters. If one of them liked it that would bring in $90,000, which in turn might release another $100,000 from Screen Australia, the main government organization supporting films in Australia. Of course the catch was, if you didn’t hook a broadcaster you couldn’t get access to Screen Australia’s money. The second dangling hook was thrown out to various states’ Film Councils. Usually if you were from, or making a film in a particular state like Victoria and employing locals, you could get a decent state grant. Veronica lived in Queensland. We’d probably shoot in Tasmania, and edit in Victoria. So for starters we had three State Film Councils we could approach. Lastly we could look for investors. I doubted we would find many, but we could try. Having theoretically more than covered the budget, we ordered more coffee and cakes, and then walked back to the conference to become our serious selves once more.

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Now let’s cut to a year later. I’m sitting with Veronica in a hotel lobby in Adelaide where we are both attending a documentary conference. The organizers have asked me to give two talks, and generously paid my way to Australia. This is a great chance to meet up again with Veronica and assess where we are financially and generally. We are sitting in big green armchairs, cold coffee and soggy buns in front of us. By coincidence, the background music from the bar is the song Joel Gray sings in the musical Cabaret: ‘Money makes the world go round, the world go round …’ And I’m thinking, it also helps to fund films. We’ve had a disappointing morning. Both of us have talked to the commissioning editors of the ABC and SBS TV networks. The reply has been similar in both cases. ‘Convict stories? No! We’ve got them coming out of our ears. There’s nothing new to say there. Sorry, mate. Try something else.’ This is disastrous. Without a broadcaster, it’s doubtful if we can get Screen Australia to give us money. I also have to relate the bleak English situation to Veronica. A friend of mine had suggested that a film fund based in the east of England might be able to support us if we did a great deal of filming around the Norfolk area. I had applied to the group, only to find they had gone bankrupt when an official made off with some money. To make matters worse the British Government had abolished the UK Film Fund, which usually gave support to projects like ours. In the course of general exploration I had also gone along to see Adrian Wootton, the head of Film London, which provided location advice for people who wanted to film in the metropolitan area. I explained the Ikey Solomon project to Adrian over coffee, and then Adrian came up with an idea that proved invaluable. ‘Did you know that 2012 is Dickens’ bicentennial? There’s going to be a lot of celebrations in his honor. And lots of film screenings. So why don’t you tie that idea into your advertising. Present your Ikey Solomon film as a new perspective on Dickens’ work.’ Brilliant! As I relate all this to Veronica I see her eyes light up. One of her ideas is to apply for funding from the Melbourne Film Festival, which each year gives two or three special grants to Australian filmmakers. Maybe they would go for the Dickens Bicentennial link. Worth a try. For her part Veronica tells me that Film Tasmania is in, though we don’t know for how much, and Film Queensland is looking good, though they haven’t finally committed themselves. As to ABC, SBS and Screen Australia, she’s not throwing in the towel but will make a formal application to each.

The First Fagin

We finish our coffee and then do the rounds. There’s a lady at the conference from PBS. We arrange a meeting, though I don’t expect much from it, and am later proved right. There’s also a guy from Foxtel, another Aussie broadcaster who agrees to see Veronica in an hour. Then Veronica and I go off for another coffee with an independent producer called Pat from Canada. At this point I’m running to the toilet every ten minutes. Draining one cup of coffee to make room for another. Pat, from Toronto, is a very experienced producer, and a year before had finished a major TV series on Captain Cook’s voyages. Veronica and I want to see him to sound out money possibilities in Canada. Not good, unless there is a strong Canadian connection. Difficult. I knew Dickens had lectured in the USA but not Canada. ‘Well,’ says Pat, ‘Maybe we could stretch it a bit and have Dickens give a reading at the start of the film in Toronto. That might give us a necessary Canadian connection.’ I say I’ll think about it. We all shake hands, and promise to stay in touch. Veronica has to be off to the airport, so we have a final conference and plan the next few months. For her part Veronica will pursue money matters and try and make a strong case to Screen Australia and the Melbourne Festival film fund. But she also tells me she’ll need a script to start building a realistic budget. I tell her that’s fine and I’ve already been doing some preliminary work. However I add that I’ll need to do a research trip in Tasmania itself, to see where Ikey lived, worked, and was in prison. Is there money in the budget for that? Veronica thinks. We do some calculations. Such a trip needs at least $3,000. Well, we can probably put that under script development. OK, let’s go for it. It’s now two months after the conference, and I’m shivering in a Hobart hotel room. Outside it’s five degrees below zero. Downstairs Storry Walton, my old pal and mentor from the Film School, is waiting for me in the bar so that we can plan tomorrow’s itinerary. I’ve asked Storry to come on the Tasmania research trip because he’s a great planner, knows the island well, and is a most enjoyable travel companion. We’ve been four days on the road. During that time we’ve gone north to Sarah Island penal settlement in Macquarie Harbour, visited Richmond jail, and spent a full day at Port Arthur penal colony. Between 1812 and 1834 Sarah Island was the most feared place in

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Australia. Situated on the wild west coast of Tasmania it was so remote that, as one writer 1 put it ‘those sent there as punishment felt condemned to an underworld … Some chose death or were driven mad by the brutal conditions.’ Both Storry and I thought the island was a great place for filming – dark and threatening – but have reluctantly come to the conclusion it’s outside the parameters of Ikey’s story. Richmond jail on the other hand, was perfect for us. The nineteenth-century jail was still almost totally intact, with broad exterior sandstone walls, and a few gloomy cells with heavy chains fastened to the floor. On the walls of the jail there were some posters of the times, outlining rules for prisoners. One gloriously read, ‘The maximum beer ration allowed to the prisoners is four pints per day.’ As we walked around the jail a loud speaker kept telling us this was where the famous prisoner Isaac Solomon lived for three years. We spoke to the manager of the jail. Filming? No problem. Just say when. Port Arthur Penal Colony has left both Storry and myself with mixed feelings. Ikey had spent almost a year in the penal settlement, before being released. Conditions had been awful, with the prisoners being put to work in mining, felling trees, and boat building. There was a huge old prison building we could film, and another building with plenty of cells, and a space for prisoners’ exercise. This was all to the good. What was offputting was that Port Arthur had become Tasmania’s principal tourist attraction. It had been prettified, with lush green lawns, beautiful bushes, trees, and restaurants, and was overrun by busloads of tourists. Filming was possible, but it would have to be through the cracks, so to speak. Each day the weather has grown more bitter, and now both Storry and I are suffering from minor colds. But duty is duty, as I tell Storry in the bar. Luckily we are spending all today around Hobart, where both Ikey and his wife initially landed. Our first port of call is the art gallery, where Storry has arranged for the main curator to take us around. Our key interest is nineteenth-century pictures of Hobart, and prisoners at work. We look at them intensely, knowing we’ll need a lot of back-up period art work for the film. The curator also shows us the basement of the gallery. It’s cavernous. The walls are wooden and huge beams stretch across 1 Hamish Maxwell-Stewart, Closing Hell’s Gates (London: Allen and Unwin, 2008).

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a low ceiling. Storry and I look at each other, with similar thoughts in our mind. Dressed up, we could turn this into a prison, or maybe a ship’s hold. Now time to move on. Storry threads our small rented Hyundai through the streets of Hobart, and we make our way to the Cascades jail, or as it was sometimes known, the Women’s Factory. Here Ann was imprisoned twice while she was in Tasmania. Apart from a long brick outside wall, little remains of the prison except for a few blocks of stone. Not much to film here, but maybe we can do a stand-up interview with someone describing what the prison was like. Or else we can cover the scene with art work. Around tea time we go and visit two Tasmanian historians, James Boyce and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart. Both have written definitive books about nineteenth-century prison life on the island. We chat about the past, and it’s clear that my savage picture of convict life has to be seriously modified. Robert Hughes’s book, The Fatal Shore, which has been my bible till now, creates the impression of convicts being jailed all the time, with the rod and the whip used unsparingly. Now both James and Hamish tell us that in reality the convicts worked relatively freely as day laborers, and intermixed openly with the free settlers. Yes, there was a curfew, and church once a week, but life could have been very much worse. As for women, they usually worked as maids in farmers’ households. And what about Port Arthur Penal Colony? That was for maybe a sixth of the prison population who were serious criminal offenders. This information may be the most important piece of research I’ve done in Tasmania, and even as I drink my tea, I know some of my thoughts about the script will have to be drastically revised. While saying goodbye Hamish presses a CD into my hand of convict songs. He tells me it might be useful. Now just one more port of call: the old Hobart jail. Here the surrounds are sad, even tragic, but marvelous for filming. We see iron-barred cells, a hanging platform. There’s a broken-down prison chapel, with twelve ascending rows of wooden benches which I know I can use somewhere in the script. Best of all we have a choice of not one but two ancient court rooms, with stairs leading up from the cells. Storry and I know immediately that once dressed up either can stand in for the Old Bailey where Ikey was put on trial. The jail and its possibilities has made our day. So Storry and I go to the pub to celebrate and take farewells. Tomorrow he goes back to Sydney, while I fly back to Europe. Research trip over.

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Now comes the hard work. No more procrastinations. I have finally to get down to write a viable filming script. Usually I try and write a very fast first draft. This helps me sort out issues of approach, form, shape, and style. Later I go back, and add, amend, and rewrite up to seven or eight drafts, till I think I’ve got things right. Looking back on my notes on The First Fagin I see I did twelve drafts. As a story, Ikey’s narrative was straightforward. He’s born in London. Marries. Goes to prison. Escapes. Looks for his wife in Australia. Gets hijacked by the Governor of Van Diemen’s Land. Stands trial in England. And is then sent to jail in Australia. Later he’s freed, but is separated from his wife. Finish. As a film, however, there were a few basic matters to sort out before I could start writing. First, were we going to do a full docudrama, a straight documentary, or a hybrid? Everything argued for a hybrid, in other words a mixture of both forms. To start with, from a practical point of view I couldn’t see myself raising enough money for a full docudrama. On the other hand doing the film as a straight documentary was almost impossible. I had only one drawing of Ikey, and no photos of him, or his family. Also Ikey’s early life in London was lived in a pre-photography era. Yet the need to show the social and political feel of the times, as required by ZDF, clearly pointed to a documentary style, with narration, and maybe with experts. Also if I solely concentrated on Ikey, I wouldn’t be able to say that much about crime and punishment at that time. So little by little practical matters dictated that I think of a hybrid film, with say 65 percent being done with dramatic reconstructions, and 35 percent using standard documentary techniques. Sounds good, but I was worried. Would the fusion of the two approaches really work? I’d seen this done in a few films, but knew the combination of styles was always a difficult thing to bring off properly. I then had to start thinking how to approach the subject. Here I sought the advice of an old friend, Michael Eaton. Michael is one of England’s best docudrama script writers, with classics such as Dr. Death and Why Lockerbie? under his belt. Michael was also a Dickens expert, so in seeking his advice I knew I couldn’t go wrong. In due course Michael, who lived in Nottingham, said he could join me in London for a day. We met at the underground, I took Michael home, and for an hour we discussed a number of possible

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approaches, only to dismiss most of them very quickly. For example, we thought maybe we could have Dickens walking around London and telling us the story. Too complex. Well what about having Dickens giving a lecture on Oliver Twist, and he opens by asking the audience ‘Did you know Fagin was based on a real person? No. Well let me tell you about him.’ That, we thought, might have possibilities. After about two hours we hit on the obvious. Why not have Ikey talk directly to the film audience, and reflect on his life? Then as he recalls certain things, we go to that scene in a drama reconstruction. Well where could he look back from? At first we thought we could have him talking from a cell in Port Arthur penal colony. This we rejected fairly quickly, because it still left the end of Ikey’s life uncovered. Then I remembered Ikey had founded Hobart synagogue. Why not have him talking through the night in the synagogue, and as dawn breaks, and people come in to pray, he takes his stuff and goes out in the early morning sun. That seemed a good way in, but then I suggested one more approach to Michael. What if Ikey is telling his story to Dickens, who’s on a visit to Australia. That seemed to have possibilities till Michael told me Dickens never visited Australia. So that idea went down the drain, and we settled on the Ikey monologue linking approach. After Michael returned to Nottingham, where he lived, I continued to send him drafts. Two of his main shafts of wisdom stay very much in my memory. Where possible, he suggested, use contemporary documents and letters in the script. They add authenticity. I followed this advice, and used two long letters from Ann and Ikey in the film. Ann’s letter, which is extremely moving, was written from her prison cell while awaiting transportation to Australia. It’s basically a plea to the King to let her take her children with her into exile. Ikey’s letter was also written in prison, while awaiting sentencing, but addressed to the home secretary. The letter is a plea for mercy, and outlines all of Ikey’s sorrows and misfortunes. I used extracts from it throughout the film, as it gave a very effective indication of Ikey’s thinking and state of mind. Michael’s second word of advice related to emotional high points. He suggested that I find key high points of the story, and underline them for all they were worth. For example, Ikey is in torment in New York when he discovers that his wife has been sent as a convict to Van Diemen’s Land. Ikey is racked with guilt. But what could he do? If he stayed in London he could have been hanged. And now? Should he

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take a ship to go and find Ann? But if he does he’s risking imprisonment again. I followed Michael’s advice and the scene worked beautifully, as did a few other scenes which I felt needed emphasizing. On the whole I tried to make the script as authentic as possible, avoiding scenes or incidents conjured out of my head. But even so, I felt I needed to add one or two scenes that would allow viewers to see inside Ikey as a family man. So I put in his wedding, a Sabbath scene, and a rather nice scene where he is celebrating the birth of a son. I also created a scene of Ann arguing with and hitting Ikey once he joins her in Australia. I thought this was necessary to show Ann’s pain at having been left alone by Ikey for so long, and having suffered the humiliation of becoming a convict. Aside from the dramatic scenes, the writing of the straight linking narration was fairly easy and straightforward. Early on in the script I put Ikey in the context of the aftermath of the French revolution and the end of the Napoleonic wars. Later, when Ikey is in prison, I wrote in a few words about the state of prisons and punishment at the time. Again, when Ann and Ikey are sent to Australia I used that as an opportunity to write narration about convict transportation and the founding of the penal colonies. The wording of the early drafts stayed fairly unaltered in later drafts, except that several times I decided to have the message put over by a few experts on camera, rather than have it heard as voice-over narration. After having done the suggested fast first draft I reviewed it, and found one thing missing. I had dropped in a few hints about the Fagin connection, but somehow the whole subject was not well integrated into the script. Then again it struck me that I had missed something very obvious. I had adopted the device of Ikey talking directly to the viewers as he tells us about his life. But why does he do that? Why does he think we should be interested in hearing his story? I had never thought about that, and then the penny dropped. He’s talking to us because everybody thinks he’s exactly like Fagin, and he’s not. He’s a family man. He likes children. He’s not evil. The only things they have in common is that they’re both Jewish, and both are receivers of stolen goods. Ikey thinks Dickens has libeled him by creating the character of Fagin, whom everybody thinks is based on him. Now the only way to disprove this libel to the world is to tell his story. I liked this idea and found it very easy to develop. So I wrote in a scene almost at the very beginning of the film where we see a

The First Fagin

middle-aged Ikey in a pub in Van Diemen’s Land. In the pub someone is giving a reading from Oliver Twist. As the reader describes the evil Jew Fagin, one of Ikey’s friends nudges him and says ‘Hey, Ikey that could be you. Fagin could be you. Is he you?’ In disgust Ikey leaves the pub, enters a dark room, and then in a temper tells the audience he’s not Fagin, and if you listen to his story he’ll show you why not. I thought this film start now propelled us easily into the story. Only one problem was left. How can we open the film with a bang, and draw in the viewers immediately? Easy. Let’s show the viewers Ikey’s sensational prison break, that immediately establishes him as a media hero. Then directly after that we can show the pub scene and the film is under way. That problem solved, I wrote the first draft in about six days. This is how it all appears in the final script, with straight narration, the pub recreation, and Ikey’s opening monologue all linked together. FILM OPENING PRISON EXTERIOR AND INTERIOR: DAY. 1827. Foggy street. A hansom cab drives past, then halts in the street. We go to the inside of the prison. A man is being dragged down stairs by guards. His hands are manacled. Boots along the corridor. Bolts of door being drawn. Prison door opens. IKEY is thrust into the street by two jailers. They push him into the cab and get in themselves. As the cab goes along the street we see the jailers are drugged and asleep. Ikey knocks on the roof of the cab. It stops. Ikey grabs a key from the sleeping jailer and gets out. The cab driver unlocks the handcuffs, and gives Ikey a coat. Ikey waves to him, and makes off. NARRATOR: When Ikey Solomon, the most notorious receiver of stolen goods in England, masterminded his own brazen escape from custody, the authorities were furious.

Ikey had been arrested for theft and they’d hoped for a public hanging. But instead he’d outwitted the authorities and simply disappeared.

Sequence of drawings showing Fagin, the cover of Oliver Twist book and a photo of Charles Dickens. NARRATOR: The public loved it. The popular press painted Ikey as Robin Hood, gang boss, and demon lover. But the celebrated English author, Charles Dickens, turned Ikey’s fame into infamy.

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PUB INTERIOR. NIGHT. We see a sign saying ‘Tonight. Reading from Oliver Twist.’ A group of men are seated close to the bar, listening to a plump man called THACKERAY, who talks to the audience, and then reads from Oliver Twist. IKEY and a friend JOE are more distant, separated from the others and drinking at the bar itself. THACKERAY: Welcome Gentlemen, for a reading of another installment of Charles Dickens’ magnificent story of poor Oliver Twist. (He reads) The walls of the room were black with age. There was a frying pan on the fire, with sausages cooking, and standing over them was an old shriveled Jew whose villainous countenance … Ikey has been listening to all this in fury, and then his friend Joe tries to console him. JOE:

It’s just a bit of fun, Ikey. You’re much better looking than that old Jew.

NARRATOR: In Oliver Twist the loathsome Jewish criminal Fagin was believed to be inspired by Ikey himself. THACKERAY: Fagin took out a magnificent gold watch, and sparkling jewelry … NARRATOR: But Ikey’s life was far more extraordinary than any fiction written by Charles Dickens. EXTERIOR THEN INTERIOR OF HOBART SYNAGOGUE. 1848. IKEY enters small room in coat and hat, which he then takes off. He reaches into a cupboard, takes out a box and puts it on the table. As the scene proceeds he takes newspapers and pamphlets from his scrap box, occasionally reads from them, and often throws the papers or pamphlets down onto the table in disgust. After the end of his first few remarks he turns and addresses himself to the camera … speaking directly to the audience. IKEY:

That book!! Charles Dickens!! (He throws book on table)



It’s even worse than the pamphlets (throws pamphlets on table)



My gang terrorized the city! My wife ran a brothel! I had a dozen mistresses!

(IKEY now addresses the camera directly)

Well, everyone thinks that Fagin’s based on me, on my past. Well I cannot perceive of a worse libel. Do you want to know what really happened? Do you?

The First Fagin

Writing the opening of the film was easy. Writing the ending was another matter entirely. The difficulty was that Ikey’s story ends badly. He is released from Port Arthur penal colony on probation, but on condition that he lives in the small village of New Norfolk for a few years. While there, he discovers that Ann has betrayed him and taken a lover while he’s been in prison. There is a tremendous family quarrel, and soon after Ann and Ikey decide to live separate lives. Later they divorce and Ann remarries. Given that Ikey only came to Australia because of his deep love and passion for Ann, the end is indeed tragic. Now I didn’t want to leave the viewer with a totally downbeat and depressed feeling. It seemed to me that wasn’t a good way to end the film. So in my wrap up, I tried to inject a few words of hope. ENDING HOBART SYNAGOGUE. INTERIOR. MORNING.



IKEY is packing up his things. He puts his papers back in his box slowly. Then talks to camera. IKEY:

In the end, it was best just to let Ann go, and just get on with things. You can’t ever guess the ending. After Ann left I got accustomed to a new life. And strangely I found comfort in this synagogue which I’d set up with a few friends of mine. They showed me support. I showed them gratitude.



The great Ikey Solomon, ladies and gentlemen. Love can take you places you never dreamed of.

IKEY continues to wrap up his things. A Rabbi enters, nods hello to Ikey, then starts to pray. Ikey finishes wrapping everything and replaces his box inside a cupboard. He then puts on his hat and coat, and makes for the door. NARRATOR: Ikey and Ann’s children went on to prosper in Australia, their son John becoming a successful businessman in Sydney. They’d left the old world in grief, little knowing that a new one, with immense hope and promise would open up, if not for them, then for the generations to come. WELLINGTON MOUNTAIN VIEW. EXTERIOR. DAY. IKEY emerges from the synagogue, and walks slowly over to a bench before sitting down, stretching out his legs, and contemplating the surrounds very slowly. The scene ends with a freeze frame, over which credits begin.

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NARRATOR: 76,000 convicts were transported between 1804 and 1853 to what is now called Tasmania. Very few have inspired Ikey’s lasting fame and fascination. It’s thanks in part to the writings of Charles Dickens that the Ikey legend has travelled from one side of the world and from one century to another.

During his lifetime Dickens never revealed whether Ikey was or was not the inspiration for Fagin. But this infamous and reviled figure has become indelibly linked to the legend of Ikey Solomon.

While I’d been working on the drafts things had been moving forward on other fronts. The money situation was beginning to look better. Screen Australia had decided to put some money into the film, and the Melbourne Film Festival had also decided to give us a considerable grant. But they had two conditions. They wanted to premiere the film, which meant we couldn’t show it anywhere else before their screening. Well that seemed OK. Secondly they wanted to link the film into the Dickens bicentennial, particularly as they were bringing down Adrian Wootton to talk about Dickens on film, at the festival. Their emphasis on the Dickens link meant I had to bring Dickens and the Fagin question a little bit more into the film, which I wasn’t sure was a good thing. Alongside the festival contribution both Veronica’s company and myself had decided to put a little money into the film, as investors. I had always been warned that as a sane filmmaker that was a crazy thing to do. However I felt I had to put some money where my mouth was, particularly as I had also got a few friends to invest. Finally Veronica had got our distributor to put in a little money up front, so we were virtually home and dry. The budget by normal docudrama standards was very low, but we thought with wise housekeeping we could just about bring in the film on what we’d raised. During this time Veronica and I had also asked my friend Helen Gaynor to join the team as co-director and to help me in the writing. We had jokingly discussed this possibility very early on at Helen’s house when the idea of the film had first arisen, but now as we progressed it made more and more sense. Helen knew everybody in the film business in Melbourne, and later would prove invaluable in recommending key personnel for the film, such as the cinematographer and art director. Helen also had a great record in directing drama for

The First Fagin

television, whereas my own experience was much more meager. It therefore made sense for Helen to tackle most of the drama scenes, while I handled the documentary side. It was a partnership that in the end worked out extremely well. Meanwhile, parallel to writing the script, I had also been trying to organize the graphics. The script now showed me what we needed, and I could think about the graphics more seriously. The list didn’t take long to organize. We needed, for example, English prisons, trials and hangings; pictures of the Hulks, the floating prison ships along the Thames; and lots of London streets and atmosphere around 1820. Most of this I found accompanying classic texts of the period such as Henry Mayhew’s well known London Labour and London Poor, and Criminal Prisons of London. Gustav Doré’s sketches of London also proved invaluable. A researcher of mine had also found excellent drawings in various period magazines such as The Illustrated London News. Most of the drawings were out of copyright, which was financially vital for us. Where sources wanted to charge the earth, like the Norwich Maritime Museum, we simply searched for other sources. While I was doing this Veronica had organized a researcher in Tasmania to do a similar job, and find us drawings of early Hobart, convicts at work, and early impressions of Port Arthur penal colony. Where there seemed to be a total gap, we organized an artist to cover the subject in simple drawings. For example I found out that when Ann was in prison in Van Diemen’s Land, the women often had to wear an iron collar with spikes for punishment. As we had no pictures of this practice we got our artist to draw us some. When do we start filming? The script was basically finished and I was anxious to move ahead. But Veronica was re-examining the very complex budget breakdown and checking it against the money we had in hand. Finally she gave the go-ahead. We would have to be very careful about everything but we could just about manage it, if we could do all the shooting within sixteen days. Helen, who would bear most of the problems of the shooting, had said yes. I also said yes – but then I’m a stupid perpetual optimist. So, having received a date, I made an air booking, and prepared for a four-month stay in Australia. After landing in Melbourne, I linked up with Helen, and prepared to go with her on a location scout in Tasmania, where we had decided to do all the filming. This decision had also guaranteed us money from the Tasmanian Film Board. Things were vastly eased at this

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stage because Veronica had brought in a Tasmanian company, Roar films, under the management of Steve Thomas, to take care of all the production arrangements on the island. Steve would be our third producer partner, and his company would arrange and take care of most of the hundred and one jobs on the shoot. These jobs ranged from recruiting local personnel and their equipment, to making location contracts, advertising for actors, and hiring the location chef. To accompany us on the location scouting trip, Helen had also asked along our art directors, Tim and Neil, and our cameraman Jaems Grant. Together we bounced around Tasmania for four days under the guidance of Catherine Pettman, our very efficient production manager. Some of the locations, like Port Arthur and Richmond jails, I’d previewed on my trip with Storry. But now we started hunting further afield, looking for locations that would serve as Ikey’s home, Governor Arthur’s mansion, or the house where Ann worked when she first arrived in Van Diemen’s Land. Catherine’s biggest discovery was an old estate that provided almost everything we needed. It had a large rambling nineteenth-century house, still stocked with furniture of the period. One room, with a crystal chandelier and oak-paneled walls, was absolutely perfect for Governor Arthur’s study. In addition, the estate boasted two large empty barns which Tim and Neil assured us they could turn into Newgate jail, and the interior of the prison ships that take Ann and Ikey to Australia. Besides location hunting Helen and I also held auditions among local talent. Helen had a very fast and efficient method of doing this. She brought in the actors in pairs, and gave them a scene to play together which she filmed on her iPhone. A week later in Melbourne we reviewed the auditions together and chose the supporting cast. Choosing the principals was harder. Here we got the actors to improvise a few scenes with each other. Two actors stood out: Ryk Goddard and Carrie Mclean. When we asked them to improvise a scene based on Ikey’s meeting with his future wife, they were really great. So we had our Ikey and Ann. I had, of course, written dialogue for the main actors in their key scenes, but when we came to film them we tried something a little bit different. Under Helen’s guidance they were shown the suggested dialogue, but then told they could improvise freely around it. Sometimes the dialogue stayed exactly as written, but often it was subtly changed by the actors to become more real and authentic.

The First Fagin

24  Pub scene (The First Fagin).

The shooting went very well. Altogether we shot about 180 scenes, in fourteen days. I couldn’t believe it. At the last moment I wrote in a bar room scene, showing Ikey slightly drunk and singing one of the songs, ‘10,000 miles away,’ I’d first heard on the CD Hamish had given to me. Otherwise we shot as planned. Much of the success was due to being thoroughly prepared, and having the daily shoots and schedule meticulously prepared by Catherine. We were also lucky in having a great crew and excellent actors, all of whom gave their maximum. On the last night, after the wrap party, Helen and I had a drink together. She had been overall boss of the set, had taken a very optimistic and very positive tone throughout the film, and though extremely overworked, had always presented a picture of calm and quiet efficiency. As I told her, while still sober, I really didn’t think we could have done it without her.

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25  Ikey (Ryk Goddard) and Ann (Carrie McLean) in The First Fagin.

Back in Melbourne it was almost Christmas, and it felt very strange. The sun was screaming down out of a clear blue sky. The temperature was in the nineties. Costumed Santa Clauses stood on every street corner, while shop windows were decorated with plastic snowflakes and model reindeer. Then I found I had a problem. My work visa, though valid for a year, had to be renewed every three months. And that period has almost elapsed. The only way to renew the visa was to leave the country and then return, whereupon the authorities would stamp the passport with joy, and allow you in again. So, feeling a bit peculiar, I flew to New Zealand on New Year’s Eve, had lunch for an hour in Auckland airport, and immediately flew back to Melbourne. Once more I was a legal tourist. We began the editing on 2 January. The idea was that I’d knock the film into basic shape for about seven weeks, and then Helen would take over supervision and finish the film while I flew back to Europe. We had a first class editor called Wayne, and if all went right all Helen would really have to do would be to supervise the fine cut,

The First Fagin

26 Ikey (Ryk Goddard) in the penal colony.

and oversee the recording and laying in of narration. Well you know Robert Burns’s poem about the best laid plans of mice and men … They gang oft agley.

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With plenty of film in hand the initial editing went like a piece of cake. Wayne was a very fast and experienced editor, and in no time we had an assembly cut. So all seemed on track. Then Steve came in from Tasmania, and Veronica came down from Brisbane, and together with Helen we viewed all the material, and began to see where the cracks were. The chief problem was that the experts we had on camera were much too stiff and uptight. So that meant a reshoot, with different and hopefully more relaxed experts. With the assembly cut finished we started to consider what was missing. Well, ships for one thing. Ikey and Ann traveled over 10,000 miles in the hold of three-masted wooden sailing ships, and I had written such scenes into the film. But where to get the ships? Once every couple of years dozens of these old ships sailed up the Derwent, Tasmania’s southern river, in a glorious romantic line. But we were in an off year, so no luck. Then Wayne had an idea. He’d edited the ­Captain Cook series, and the producer had used and shot a magnificent ship to show Cook’s voyages. Maybe … ? Immediately Wayne was on the phone to the producer. Yes, for a small fee we could use the footage. When it came in it was truly magnificent. We had this great old ship, Union Jack prominent, sails blooming in the wind, sailing majestically across the Pacific, at dawn, at dusk, and at midday. In addition we had men climbing the rigging, swabbing decks, and shown precariously balanced on cross arms. Besides the missing ships we also saw that the film needed to be opened up and allowed to breathe. Most of or our filming had been of Tasmanian interiors. Now we needed to show a bit of its beautiful countryside, and rocky coastline. Luckily Veronica had a tremendous archive of these kind of shots, which Wayne put in, to excellent effect. As the film progressed the time eventually came to think of music. Helen had a composer friend whom she thought might be good for us. We met, he looked at the film, and I outlined to him the kind of themes and mood we were looking for. After a week or so he brought in some examples of his work. Everything seemed fine, except that the background music for Ikey’s wedding scene seemed more Irish than Jewish. Later he brought in some more music, and again everything seemed OK. So that seemed one more problem solved. But time was moving on. With a pretty good rough cut in place I went through the film thoroughly with Helen one Friday, and got ready to leave for Europe two days later. The film seemed in very

The First Fagin

good hands, and with Helen and Wayne making a good partnership, I saw few things to worry about. Both promised to send me Vimeo copies of the film’s progress, so that I could still comment on what was being done. A day later, on Saturday evening, we had a small farewell party at my friend Ian Lang’s apartment. Ian played jazz on the piano, we drank wine to the accompaniment of Leonard Cohen’s ‘The Sisters of Mercy’, a few people sang, we all hugged, I said goodbye and the following morning I caught a Cathay Pacific jet to Hong Kong. Ikey was now safe under Helen’s supervision, and I had few worries, thinking that we were almost home and dry. Then came a few shocks. Two weeks after I arrived in Europe Veronica skyped to tell me that ZDF and our German commissioning editor hated the music. Not disliked. Hated it! I immediately phoned Peter in Germany to get specifics. No. It wasn’t a case of the music being wrong here and there. In his opinion it was all wrong. Well this was a major setback and we had immediately to bite the bullet. That sadly meant totally abandoning our old music, and finding a new composer who could start from scratch. Since we were now up against the gun in regard to our delivery date, we also had to tell any new composer he had to more or less finish everything in two weeks. Within a day Veronica told me she had found exactly the right person, Guy Gross. Guy was a young highly talented composer who’d done the music for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and was very highly regarded in film circles. By chance I also knew his family well, and had first heard Guy’s music when he was fourteen. So we roped in Guy, and working like the devil he turned in music which we liked very much. Each night Veronica would send me what he’d written, and I would listen and then get back to her with my reactions. To my mind Guy’s music was a cut above what we had had previously. The Germans agreed, and we started to breathe more freely. That left only one more problem to solve: addressing the Melbourne Film Festival’s increasing requests for additions and changes. The festival director had seen the script fairly early, and had liked what he read. This was important because the festival was giving us a substantial grant, and we had to make sure everyone was happy. Now, as we were almost at the finishing line, the festival director demanded two things. First he wanted even more mention of Dickens and Fagin in the film. I said no, enough is enough. This is not a film about Dickens. It’s about Ikey Solomon. Veronica and Helen, both

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27  The author and his wife, Tirtza, as extras in The First Fagin.

of whom have a more appeasing nature than me, said we could accommodate the request with just a few minor additional sentences.

The First Fagin

28 The crew at work.

The second request by the director was much more serious. He wanted two scenes removed from the film, which he argued had nothing to do with Ikey’s story. The first scene shows a girl of fourteen being sentenced to death by a judge. The second scene shows a condemned prisoner carrying his own coffin into chapel the night before his execution. Ikey and other prisoners look on as the prisoner weeps and the priest calls on the prisoner to repent. Both scenes were extremely powerful emotionally, and I had specifically written them in to illustrate the nature of the vile punishments meted out in nineteenth-century England. This time I decided to dig in, as did Helen and Veronica, and the scenes stayed in the film. Personally, while appreciating the festival director’s concerns, I thought he had overstepped the mark in asking for the changes, as that seemed to me the sole concern of the commissioning editor, producer, writer, and director of a film.

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To quote the Bard, ‘all’s well that ends well.’ It’s August in Melbourne. I’ve just arrived in Australia having come straight from a Chicago heatwave. To get here I’ve flown Chicago–New York–Paris–Hong Kong–Melbourne, and I’m wondering who had the worse voyage to Australia, Ikey or myself. I’m still dressed in my summer clothes, and I’m freezing. But I’m happy. Tonight is the premiere of our film at the Melbourne Festival. I’m staying four days, and immediately deposit my bags at the apartment of my lawyer friend Shaun, before meeting Helen for lunch. She looks in the best of spirits. The ardors of the last few months, and there have been many, have been put aside. Later Veronica joins us. We hug. The unbelievable has happened. Ikey’s in the bag, and tonight we put him before the public. There’s also some other good news. Sixteen commercial theatres have agreed to screen Ikey after the festival finishes. The Film Festival has a red carpet, which I ascend gingerly, holding on to Helen, as I’m still jet-lagged. Then photos. Handshakes. A pretty girl kisses me whom I don’t know … but I’m not complaining. We enter the hall. I sit between a nervous Veronica, who looks absolutely stunning this evening, and a calmer Helen. The auditorium is crowded and the film goes down very well. Afterwards Helen, Veronica and I answer questions from the podium, and are joined by Judith, who wrote the original book on Ikey. At 10p.m. everybody associated with the film adjourns to the upper room of a nearby small restaurant, where we have our own final party. The champagne is poured. Veronica makes a small speech thanking everyone. I’m delighted to see that Catherine and her boyfriend from Tasmania have come over, and that Storry has made the trip in from Sydney. Neil and Tim, our art directors are also here. Guy Gross, who saved us regarding the music, is present, and we embrace, not having seen each other for twenty years. Just after midnight I say my farewells, and it’s difficult. For the better part of six months most of the people present have been my family and have helped to pull off a major triumph. I realize this is one of the good moments in life, to be savored and cherished and honored. And once more it strikes me that films are a cooperative venture. The best films are achieved through a team effort. Here I’ve had a fantastic team to work with. Without them I’d have got

The First Fagin

nowhere. That’s why a filmmaker’s motto should always be ‘with a little piece of luck.’

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8 Pitch perfect Every so often a friend or a stranger comes up to me after the showing of one of my films and says, ‘Lovely film! By the way, have I got an idea for you. It’s about my uncle’s adventure in the Vietnam War and how he escaped a prison camp in the jungle. It could be a smash! A world beater!’ I listen patiently, then say, ‘You’re right. A great idea. But do you have the money for it? The finances for it?’ Then there’s an embarrassed pause, and the stranger says, ‘I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe you, as a director can … ‘ and the conversation trails off. Films need backing. They need financing. And times are changing. I won’t say it was easy in the old days. It wasn’t. But things were clear. You went to a TV broadcaster, outlined your idea, and if they liked it they possibly came up with the whole of the budget. Of course there were usually a few telephone calls, and letters beforehand, but you knew pretty soon where you stood. But life moves on. I’ve written about financing and co-productions in another book, Succeeding as a Documentary Filmmaker, 1 and hopefully covered the current situation fairly thoroughly. But two recent changes are worthwhile commenting on in a little more depth. These days, many submissions to commissioning editors are made online. That means you are anonymous, lost in the crowd, and have no human or personal contact with the recipient of the e-mail. You don’t know whether he or she even reads your letter, or promptly hits the delete button. I tried this online submission to the BBC a year ago, sending my proposal to three different commissioning editors, each handling different strands. Not one submission received a response or an acknowledgment. I felt like the guy who, while sitting in a plane, is asked politely by an attendant to write down my responses to the 1 Alan Rosenthal, Succeeding as a Documentary Filmmaker: A Guide to the Professional World (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011).

Pitch perfect

cabin and general service. I’ve stopped doing that because I know those responses will probably go straight down the escape chute without anyone looking at them. One recent trend, however, helps you slightly to avoid that often useless online submission. That trend is the growing enthusiasm for documentary pitching and selling markets. Markets like the Sheffield Documentary Festival, MIPCOM in Cannes, HotDocs, Leipzig, and MIP TV have now become essential venues for pitching opportunities, making sales, schmoozing, meeting people, and exchanging ideas regarding single films, and series, financing and coproducing. You are probably familiar with the pitch from films such as Robert Altman’s The Player. Here, we have a classic demonstration of the Hollywood pitch where an eager young script writer tries to sell his idea to a bored movie mogul in thirty seconds flat. Well, as in features, so in documentaries, where the pitch has invaded the non-fiction scene with some success. My first experience of this phenomenon was at a documentary conference some years ago, in Brisbane, Australia, where I’d been invited to talk about film ethics, and obscure British filmmakers. The conference was great, overflowing with wine and good cheer. The only problem was the language, which only occasionally resembled the mother tongue I’d been brought up on in England. After a while I learned that tinnies were beer cans, sheilas an awful word for girls, chooks were chickens, and pouftas were gay or weak males. I also discovered how to stretch out the word yes, to yeaaaahhh, and make it last for ten seconds. Being very nervous I had two whiskies before my talk, and as I rambled on could hear myself beginning to slur, or shhllurr all my ‘s’s. However, as all the twelve people in the audience were also drunk, and clapped at the end, the talk was deemed a success. The pitching session itself was held in a large white tent, accommodating about 300 people. As you entered, wine and beer were freely available, with munchies and biscuits on hand to make sure you didn’t drink on an empty stomach. Very considerate these Aussies, I thought to myself. While the general audience sat on white plastic chairs scattered in rows on the grass, the pitching participants sat on a raised dais at the end of the tent. To add color and variety it was decorated with Aussie and British flags, and adverts for cell phones, TV stations, and Australian cricketers. Altogether a carnival atmosphere prevailed,

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which only lacked some pom-pom girls or cheerleaders to whip up the throng. The combatants, because that was how I saw them, were divided into fifteen commissioning editors, and ten filmmakers who had been selected to make a pitch. In their honor, and for clarity, each commissioning editor had been equipped with a mike which sat on the table in front of him or her. Each also had a bottle (wine, whisky, water?) to help quench their summer thirst and concentrate their thoughts. In the centre of the dais, rather like a lordly ring master, sat the black-suited, red bow-tied master of ceremonies, whose function was to control and navigate questions and answers, and bring in the filmmakers one by one. As the girl sitting next to me said, ‘It’s like leading lambs to the slaughter.’ I had a load of questions about the procedure, but many were answered in the thick conference books placed on everyone’s chair. Basically they contained short summaries of the films on offer, a note about those giving the pitch, and a statement of how much money was being requested. There were also short bios of the commissioning editors who seemed to be gathered from England, France, and the USA, as well as Australia. I was impressed, but not my companion. ‘Looks good,’ she said, looking at the miniature photos of the CEs, ‘But they’re mostly wankers. You’ll see, when we have cocktails later, how many of them brought their girlfriends or lovers. Most of them don’t take this seriously. They’re just here for the ride, and can’t wait to bugger off to the rain forest.’ After a while the ring master – let’s call him Joe – announced the rules of procedure. The filmmakers would have seven minutes to make a presentation. The commissioning editors would then have eight minutes to respond and ask questions. From the filmmakers’ point of view victory would be achieved if at least two or three of the CEs indicated they would be interested in showing the film, or at least talking further. Facing a tipsy crowd of over 150 people on a hot summer’s day is not easy at the best of times, and the first filmmaker pitching was visibly quite nervous as he started speaking. He wanted to make a film about an Aboriginal township in Queensland, where a factory had gone broke, there was no work, prostitution was rife, and getting drunk was the order of the day. ‘Haven’t we seen this all before?’ asked one of the CEs. ‘Will there be any sex in the film?’ asked another. ‘Hm, don’t think my viewers

Pitch perfect

in Manchester will identify with the story,’ opined the BBC rep. Few of the other CEs were any kinder, with the filmmaker looking more and more unhappy as the proceedings meandered to a close. The next filmmaker, a woman, had an even frostier reception. She wanted to make a film about a Melbourne prostitute who came from a family of seven, where the father was a road digger, the family had been ejected from five homes, and her brother had accidentally shot her mother while cleaning his shotgun. ‘Not exactly a comedy, is it?’ said the CE from Discovery Channel. ‘Isn’t there anything positive you can tell us about the prostitute, what’s her name … Jane’ remarked another. And so it went on, getting grimmer and grimmer. My own reaction was a tremendous sympathy for the pitchers, but also puzzlement as to why they had been chosen when their stories looked doomed from the start. No wonder one needed wine to reinforce the proceedings. The third filmmaker, however, roused both the CEs and audience from the prevailing lethargy. He was a charismatic man of about twenty-five years of age. He had brilliantined black hair, sported a tuxedo, and wore spats, which I thought had gone out of fashion after the First World War. In his hands he held a gleaming pair of white and red shoes. Altogether he looked like a matinée dance idol of the thirties, and proceeded to act like one. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began. ‘My film is about white shoes. How they can change the world. How they can bring hope and a bright future to the denizens of a dark black universe. Imagine New York. Robberies everywhere. Thieves lurking in the alleys. But give all the criminals white shoes, and they’d come dancing down the streets. Give our politicians white shoes every time they come to an armaments meeting, and harmony will prevail. Spread white shoes amongst terrorists, and they will be so busy cleaning them there will be no more attacks.’ By now the whole audience was roaring with laughter. Here was a stand-up comedy act that deserved its own one-hour program on TV. A comedy act that would put Mel Brooks to shame. Was it a serious proposal? Of course not. But did it enliven the proceedings? You bet! What was clear as the afternoon went on was that social investigation films were passé. They were out. No broadcaster was interested in them What was also obvious was that most Australian stories were too provincial, and held not the slightest bit of interest for European or

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American audiences. So what was in? Animal stories, and docos that had a hint of sex like The Life and Death of the Beauty Pageant. And, of course, adventure stories. The gorier, the better. This was illustrated by the last filmmaker to present a pitch. He was an effervescent young man from Washington D.C. His project was entitled Sailing Down the River, but the subject matter was a far cry from a blissful afternoon boating on the Potomac. Dave came onto the dais with tremendous confidence, and a smile that wrapped around his head. He also came accompanied by numerous charts and maps, which he gradually unrolled during his ­seven-minute pitch. ‘My great grandfather,’ he began, ‘sailed down the Nile River on a raft totally alone, eighty years ago. After twenty miles natives began shooting at him with bows and arrows from the river bank. Being totally exposed he dived into the Nile, and was chased for 300 yards by two crocodiles. When he clambered onto a safe shore, different natives hailed him as a God and offered their most beautiful maiden as a wife. After five days there he found his raft beached at a small inlet. Once more he took off, and landed at a different island, where the natives showed him an amulet proving that the missing Jewish Ark of the First Temple was buried somewhere nearby. He swiftly organized a search party. Whereas they didn’t find the Ark, they did find gold.’ And so he went on, with each tale and adventure sounding wilder than the previous, and illustrated by a precise mark on his maps. Finally Dave closed his charts, and stood triumphantly in front of the CEs, his arms held out widely, in an inviting gesture. ‘And you may well be wondering what my film is about, ladies and gentlemen. Well, I intend to take a raft and repeat my great grandfather’s journey. I’m definitely going to find his gold, and if I don’t come back you’ll know I’ve been made a God.’ OK, I’ve exaggerated a bit, but his pitch was very much as I’ve set it out above. And the commissioning editors went mad. ‘Yes, yes. Please, please. We want it for Discovery.’ ‘No, we want it for National Geographic, and will give you a better deal.’ ‘Wait a minute, everyone knows the BBC is the proper home for these kind of films. Go with us and we’ll fly you out to Egypt first class, and make sure the finest boat builders are on hand to build your raft.’ That was my first experience of the open pitch, and a few days later I went home, a little bit worse for wear, but much wiser. How many films got made as a result of the pitching experience I don’t know, but

Pitch perfect

I’d like to think Dave survived his ordeal and graced the screens of many an American TV set. Since Australia, many documentary markets and festivals have adopted the pitching idea. So you can see pitching forums advertised from Hot Docs in Toronto, and AIDC in Australia, to IDFA in Amsterdam, Leipzig in Germany, DocAviv in Israel, and Sunnyside in France. They are very popular, and hold out the promise after a fast contact with a possible agreeable commissioning editor. Well, I want to get my films shown as much as anyone else, and a few years later, on the advice of a friend, applied as a pitching candidate to APIMED in Spain. Every year APIMED (The International Association of Independent Producers of the Mediterranean), a small film market in the seaside town of Sitges, near Barcelona, sends out an open call for film proposals for the MEDIMED documentary market. The submitted proposals, besides setting out the film idea, also have to include budget, producer’s background, details of funds already raised, and the names of any television stations already involved in the project. Later the proposals are vetted by various judges, and from the two hundred proposals submitted, maybe thirty are selected for the market. That may seem to you like a seven-to-one chance, but if your proposal is any good it probably gets through. The advantage of MEDIMED is that even if your pitch gets a zero from the CEs, Sitges is a delightful town in which to spend a few days, and the actual MEDIMED location is an absolute delight. Sitges boasts a wonderful seafront, straight out of a Raoul Dufy painting. Small yachts are anchored in the marina. The restaurants are superb and not pricey, and the ice cream out of this world. Old cannons look down on the harbor, while heterosexual and gay couples enjoy themselves making sand sculptures on the beach. Usually MEDIMED coincides with the local Fantasy Film Festival, which climaxes with its colorful annual parade of zombies, werewolves, and Frankenstein monsters walking down the main street and singing. Most monsters are covered with blood, and have knives through their heads. Altogether it’s an uplifting spectacle. MEDIMED itself takes place in the Maricel Palace, a mock palace constructed by an eccentric US millionaire. In order to register you mount to the palace via a huge stone stairway, to be greeted by two beautiful girls clad in gorgeous Catalonian native costume of yellow and turquoise. At least I believe they’re native costumes, but they

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could well have been designed by Dior. You enter via two huge doors decorated with heavy gilt plaster images. Inside you find yourself in a main hall that boasts blue ceramic walls, a Spanish red plaster molded ceiling, stone statues of virgins and angels, painted glass windows, hunting pictures from the nineteenth century, and as many rumbased cocktails as you can consume. One of the best things about MEDIMED is that it provides a preparation workshop for all those who’ve come to present proposals. This is usually conducted in a small intimate room by John Marshall, a very pleasant and helpful Englishman, who later acts as the chairman when the filmmakers make their formal pitch in front of the CEs. John actually helped originate the idea of international proposal forums and today I can say in truth that if I know anything about how to pitch it is because of John. His method is to go through the procedures, timing, the way questions will be asked, and make sure everyone is comfortable with the rules. Following that he lets everyone take a few minutes to outline their film, before he suggests how they can shape the pitch, make it more dynamic, and appeal to the widest segment of the CEs. He then gives everyone a minute to pitch, and lets the rest of the class comment. The reactions cover everything from deportment and hesitations, to the actual content of the pitch. Above all, John lets the filmmakers know he is on their side, and will try and see that their proposals are really heard by the most appropriate CEs. I’ve pitched at Sitges three times alone, and once with a friend. Each time I attended John’s workshop, which helped me focus on key elements. One vital point, of course, is voice and delivery. You are a salesman, and have to deliver your wares very boldly and vividly in an excruciatingly short time. Another important element is the opening, how to seize the crowd and capture attention. This was right up my alley as I am a bit of a ham. Thus one of my pitches began ‘This film is a combination of Indiana Jones meets the Da Vinci Code.’ Another history proposal of mine went ‘Imagine fire and terror spreading throughout Europe. Dark horseman thundering into the night. Corpses hanging from the gallows, and fear spreading through every town and village.’ Did my pitches fall on willing ears? Well one did, and eventually led to a contract with ARTE. Two were what I would call successful failures. Few commissioning editors went for them, but afterwards quite a number of people told me the pitch was excellent,

Pitch perfect

the problem was the subject. The films I wanted to do just were not wanted by the broadcasters. And here we come back to my remarks about the pitching session in Australia. One of my films was social investigation, the other about a health problem. The subjects were just not attractive to the broadcasters, who wanted dynamic sexy subjects that could compete with reality programs like Big Brother or Survival. A month before writing this chapter I was invited back to Sitges to assist John Marshall in coaching the filmmakers before their pitching sessions. To this end I was given the notes of twelve proposals, and met with each filmmaker for half an hour. The subjects ranged from problems of the Kurds, and old age homes, to Gypsy problems, Spanish women sold as wives at the age of thirteen, Palestinian fighters, free broadcasting in Myanmar (Burma), and plans for utopian housing. As I scanned the proposals there seemed to me to be one overall problem which most of them shared. Although many of the stories were interesting in themselves, they were far too provincial. Thus it was hard for me to see why a broadcaster catering to an American audience would be interested in the problems of a small Kurdish village. Nor could I see why broadcasting in Myanmar would interest a Finnish audience. In short, my main message to the filmmakers, was to try and make their pitch touch on universal themes and interests, even if it was a local story. Another problem that came up, and there was little I could do here to help the filmmaker, was when the story had been told over and over again. Here the case in example was the proposal about ­Palestinian fighters and refugees. The proposal in itself was excellent, but almost exactly the same stories with just a few minor variations, had been pitched at every film market I had attended. But my pitching advice session also taught me one thing: that my own judgment was sometimes way off, and I might have to go back to square one. Of all the proposals I’d read, two in particular seemed to me sure winners. One dealt with Turkish soap operas for women. The filmmaker wanted to examine how the films were made, and how they influenced Turkish, Greek, Cypriot, and Arab women in their daily lives. It seemed to me a very attractive proposal, with lots of dynamic elements that could hit a wide audience. Not one Commissioning Editor went for it.

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The second proposal dealt with the history of anarchism, an often violent movement, that had raised its head very frequently in Europe and the USA in the last century and a half. It was a film that I thought would be particularly attractive to the Spaniards, given the central place of the anarchist moment in the Spanish Civil War. The reaction of the commissioning editors totally surprised me. ‘No! We don’t want anarchism. History films, no one’s interested in them any more except the Nazi channel [the slang name for the European history channel]. Anarchism is as dead as the dinosaurs.’ Sitting in the main hall I couldn’t believe my ears. Only a few months earlier there had been semi-anarchist riots in New York and England to overturn part of the social scene. So what should we conclude? That commissioning editors are idiots? Well, maybe not quite, but often they are not the brightest of pennies, and often they are not the most adventurous of people. Many of them are bureaucrats, have not made films, but have wangled themselves into a position of power. This is a sweeping generalization I know, but my faith in the perception and wisdom of many commissioning editors has definitely gone down in recent years. So should we abandon going to these markets? In spite of my harsh words I don’t think so, because their real value may lie outside the pitching session itself. At a good market or conference like MEDIMED there are ample opportunities to mix freely with commissioning editors, agents, distributors, and fellow filmmakers. Tremendous contacts are made, ideas are discussed, e-mails and telephone numbers exchanged. Your mind goes into overdrive, and you come out charged and enthused, and with a much greater perception of what really plays in broadcasting today. And if you know that, you’re way ahead of the game.

9 Beyond the Velvet Curtain Over the years I’ve kept up with a few school friends. Apart from the occasional meeting we used to have a formal dinner every so often to commemorate and discuss ‘On Turning Thirty’, ‘On Turning Thirty Five’ etc. When we reached fifty we decided to abandon this tradition. The dinners, however, were great fun as we looked at each other, contemplated our growing waistlines, and discussed what we’d made of our lives. Two had become doctors. One was a lecturer in law at London University and one was a physicist working for IBM. Of the others in this motley group, four of us had chosen a life in the arts or media. Robin was a journalist on The Times, Neil was a street performer and theatre director, and I’d gone from law to filmmaking. And then there was Daniel. We all knew, even at an early age, that Daniel would make his mark, and he did. He got a double first in history at Cambridge ­University, became a lecturer at Sussex University, and also made a considerable name for himself as a writer and broadcaster at the BBC, and general lecturer on the Media Arts. Over the years Daniel had churned out a considerable number of distinguished books, and I was always asking him ‘Daniel, have you got one that would make a good film?’ The first book of his that appealed to me was The Hitler Emigrés. This was a book about the cultural impact on Britain of refugees from Nazism. The book contained some interesting individual stories, including that of philanthropist George Weidenfeld who co-founded the publishers Weidenfeld and Nicolson. However no story stood out as especially dramatic, and I also saw no way of linking two or three stories into a spellbinding film. So I said ‘Daniel, thanks, but this one won’t work.’ Then over coffee in his London apartment, one rainy autumn afternoon, Daniel showed me his latest book. It was called The Gilded Stage: A Social History of Opera. For about an hour I just dumped myself down on Daniel’s sofa and skimmed its 500-odd pages. The book

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was amazing. It was a look at the history of opera from a very fresh perspective, touching on finance, politics, the rise of the divas, the use of castrati, the ascendancy of the composer, the worship of the conductor, the use of opera by dictators such as Hitler and Stalin, and the place of opera in the twenty-first century. I shut the book and told Daniel on the spot, ‘Finally this is the one that can work for us. And maybe we can do it as a partnership.’ Back home I then started to read the book in detail, and figure out where we could go with the idea if we wanted to place it on television. Two or three things emerged very clearly. First, it was clear to me that there was no way the 300-year-old story of opera, with all its color and riveting details, could be told in one film. In reality we would have to think of a five- or six-part series. This meant, as a secondary consideration, that we were talking about having to raise an enormous amount of money. I did a rough calculation and it seemed to me, at first glance, that the films would have to cost at least between $400,000 and $450,000 per episode. In short we were talking of a minimum $2,400,000 for the whole series. Time to reach for the whisky glass. One other thing was obvious to me. The project was much too big for me to handle by myself. This being so I immediately started casting around for fellow producers who could help me bring the whole idea to fruition. My first port of call was John Marshall, the old friend of mine who’d done a wonderful series for Channel 4 on the Victorian house. I wanted John to be my English-based partner. Then I decided to approach Veronica Fury, in Australia. I’d worked with Veronica on producing The First Fagin. I knew her as a good friend and a sound and first-rate producer. Veronica’s reply was positive, and we left talk of details till later. I finally tried to interest two married friends of mine who lived in Toronto, Patricia Phillips and Andy Thomson. Pat and Andy had built up a huge documentary business before selling out to another company and were rated among the best producer-directors in Canada. Andy quickly replied with tremendous enthusiasm, ‘Yes. Yes. Let’s do it.’ Hearing that I knew we’d begun taking the first but very positive steps on what I was sure would be a long journey. Working together, Andy and I began to work out a structural and financial approach to the series. We had three producers, good! Well maybe each producer could be responsible for the financing and

Beyond the Velvet Curtain

production of two films. That would mean each had to raise about $900,000, roughly from his or her own geographical area. Andy would obviously look for sources in the USA and Canada, and John and I would hunt around in the UK and Europe. Of the three of us Veronica would probably have the hardest task as she was basically limited to Australia and New Zealand. Obviously certain problems would require one person to act for the whole series, such as finding someone who could research archives for all of us. With the rough framework of the series settled I then asked Andy, Veronica, and Patricia to give me a week or two while I worked on a proposal that would cover all six films. The proposal went through various changes. It incorporated the approach and set-up of the series, and also a page and a half description for each of the six films. Altogether it came to eighteen pages, with picture inserts. At the end of this chapter I have set out only the first part of the proposal (because of space pressures) but it shows clearly what we wanted to do and where we wanted to go. I also asked Patricia to draft a two-pager, which would give a very fast overview of the project. That too appears here. Then came a change of plans. Veronica told me she had decided to withdraw from the project. She doubted she could raise money in Australia for two expensive programs, and her distance from Europe was also a burdensome problem. The best she could offer was to try and get us some pre-sales in Australia that with luck could bring in a maximum of $20,000. So I went back to the drawing board after consulting with John, Andy, and Pat. Our solution was to drop two films, and reset the contents into four episodes instead of six. Obviously something would have to give in the end, and many ideas dropped, but we reckoned that kind of execution could wait till we were further down the road. With a proposal in place we now had to think how to proceed. I saw two challenges. Who would be best to write and direct the films, and how to raise the budget? For once I didn’t want to write and direct as I thought all my energies would go into producing. However, doing some second unit directing looked attractive, and I thought I would keep that in the back of my mind as a possibility to be raised later. For years I had admired the talents of Leslie Woodhead, former head of docudrama at Granada TV. Leslie had done everything from docudramas to ethnographic films to a history of TV in England. He

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was a highly intelligent, very down to earth Yorkshireman, and over the years we had become quite good friends. To me he seemed the ideal person to handle a couple of the films, so I immediately sent him the series proposal. To my delight he replied very enthusiastically, and said he’d like to do two of the four projected films, if the time projections fitted in with his very busy schedule. Another friend who I sounded out as a back-up director was Antony Thomas, about whom I’ve written earlier in this book. Like Leslie, Antony too said he’d like to participate, again depending on his availability. Having secured promises from two of the best directors in England I thought I was now in a position to present the proposal at a few pitching sessions, and also show it to some broadcasters. My financial strategy for the two films I had to make, was at the time as follows: I hoped that ZDF and ARTE, with whom I’d previously worked successfully, would each put up $150,000. After that I hoped I could get the Brits to come in for another $150,000 or more. I could then make up the residue of the budget from small stations and grants. To prepare for the pitching sessions, and ‘with the hope that blooms eternal within the human breast’, I printed some new visiting cards. They celebrated Beyond the Velvet Curtain, and proclaimed the name of the new company of Daniel and myself, which we’d called ‘Snowrose.’ (Rosenthal and Snowman). I also printed out some beautiful glossy color copies of the proposal, replete with glorious photos of fantastically decorated opera halls, charismatic long-haired conductors, ravishing sopranos, and handsome swashbuckling baritones. Having done that I was ready to go, and entered the project for pitching at a film market at Sitges. Where it was promptly rejected! It turned out, however, I needn’t have worried too much because the pitching method had changed. As usual the emphasis and main support was being given to new presenters, who discussed their films before ten broadcast commissioners and a big audience. What was innovative was that old hands, like myself, could present in a slightly different way. What we had to do was write a one-page description of our proposals, which would then be given to all the commissioners. Those who were interested in our ideas could then ask for a ­fifteen-minute one-on-one meeting with us. To my mind this was even better than presenting in an open forum.

Beyond the Velvet Curtain

The room for the one-on-one sessions contained ten tables, with constantly changing occupants, each welcoming a broadcaster and an anxious petitioner. In due course eight broadcasters signed up to talk with me. They ranged from someone from South Korean Broadcasting, to three from France, a couple from Spain, one from Ireland, and one from Holland. To each I gave my fully illustrated brochure, and delivered a brief run down on my background, and the project. However, as my morning meetings progressed my spirits began to lower. Thus the delegates from Spain and Holland all had the same message. ‘Lovely idea, but these days we don’t deal with serious music or opera. We don’t have the broadcast time for such programs.’ The lady from South Korea showed some interest, but though I wrote to her later, she never got back to me. Now I should mention at this point that one of the ideas I had been batting around had been to try and raise money from various European media funds. To qualify for the scheme you had to first bring six broadcasters on board, presumably to show your seriousness. To do this I had been offering the Spanish and Dutch broadcasters what I thought were fantastic terms, in order to get them to join up. ‘You don’t have to give much,’ I explained. ‘Say fifteen or twenty thousand dollars. For this money you in fact receive four films, instead of one.’ Irresistible, I thought. Well, I was wrong. It was very resistible. Once more it was ‘Sounds good, but not for us.’ In fact, only one broadcaster initially took the offering, a very bright young man from Dublin called Michael. He loved the idea and said his station would come in for $15,000, on delivery of the series. When I approached the French on the second day, the response was a bit better. While one from France Deux said ‘non’, two delegates from different sections of ARTE said ‘could be.’ In the end, both led me a merry dance for the next four months, passing me from division to division. The letters went something like, ‘Well, it’s not for our documentary slot, but we’re passing you on to our music division.’ Then later, ‘We’ve stopped doing opera in our music section, but our Head of Arts might well be interested.’ Two months later I received a letter ‘Sorry, our Head of Arts has been very ill, so we’ve passed your letter on to her deputy.’ Gradually our exchange of letters petered out in silence. This was a severe blow, because given our previous relationship I had counted on ARTE being a major backer. During this time I had to go to Oslo to give a documentary workshop to some Norwegian filmmakers. This had been arranged for

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me through a good friend, Arild Mehn-Andersen. While in Oslo I asked Arild to set up a visit and meeting for me at the very new and gleaming Oslo Opera House. As we went around backstage I kept thinking what a great place it would be to do some of the filming. I broached the subject with the Opera’s PR lady, who said yes, they’d be delighted. That gave me another idea, which I discussed with Arild over lunch. Both Oslo and Denmark had new opera houses, while the one in Sweden went back hundreds of years. Interest in opera was high in these places. Maybe we could get the broadcasters of the three Scandinavian countries to come in as a group and back the series. In return we could promise to do a lot of the filming with their crews, and maybe use a Scandinavian presenter for their regional broadcasts. Arild would be my point man, and would join us as region producer. It was a great idea, but again like many others it never really got off the ground. Arild did his best but there was just no interest from the Scandinavians. Though I had certain hopes from the pitching meetings, and from Arild’s efforts, my main aspirations, besides ARTE, centered on ZDF (Germany) with whose commissioning editors I had excellent relations. So after Sitges I wrote to ZDF, again stressing that though they

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Beyond the Velvet Curtain

would be putting up the money for one film, they would get four in return. Actually the pitch to ZDF was much more important than the pitching meetings because, as explained, I needed ZDF to take a serious main stake in the series. Here again I was out of luck, receiving a mainly negative answer. This made me sit back and face reality. Yes, the idea of a social history of opera was great, and yes, it could make an amazing series, but, and it was a big but, evidently most programmers thought such programs were for a very small elite, and didn’t think there was a market for such a series. Yes, there would have been a market twenty years ago, and there would have been program space twenty years ago, but life had moved on. Now all they wanted was pop music, A Star is Born and Strictly Come Dancing. Shows that would bring in the audience. This wasn’t news to me, but coming to grips with that reality was very hard. ZDF hadn’t been a complete turn-off, but the response was very lukewarm: more or less ‘Come back to us in three months and maybe we can think again.’ When I started to add everything up it seemed to me that Europe was a total loss. It wasn’t just that so many broadcasters had said no, but also that without four or five of them offering me some support I couldn’t approach the European media foundations. And if that was bad news, it was almost matched by what I heard from Pat and Andy, my Canadian co-producers. Like me they had started out with tremendous enthusiasm, Pat in particular working and reworking my original proposal till we were all happy. Then, when I had starting putting out feelers in Europe they had also started searching out prospects in Canada and the USA. Their biggest hope had been PBS (the US Public Broadcasting System) for whom they’d made many films in the past. In preparing this chapter I asked Andy to outline for me his experience in pitching to PBS, and reaching out generally in America and Canada. I thought the details would be interesting. This is what he wrote: I sent the project to Donald Thomas at PBS in Washington. He responded by saying he’d love to talk about it and that I should arrange a phone call with his assistant. I took this as a good sign. Why would he want to talk about a project he wasn’t interested in? So I arranged the call and was soon talking to Donald. He took almost

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an hour explaining why he didn’t want the program. The primary reason was that opera lovers who view PBS are well served by the broadcast of live opera. There wouldn’t be room on the schedule or demand from that audience for a documentary series about opera because that audience would prefer live opera. I tried to pitch it to the Smithsonian Channel at the suggestion of an American producer friend. I sent the one-sheet and three e-mails to the head of the Smithsonian and never got a whiff of a reply. Another colleague suggested I submit it to Ovation, a US channel whose declared goal is ‘to connect the world to all forms of art and artistic expression.’ I did this by e-mail and followed it up by a phone call. The e-mail was never answered and the phone call went to voice mail. In Canada I pitched it over lunch to the head programmer for History Television and she said it was not for them. I paid for the lunch. Bell Media simply turned it down. I sent it to Bravo who replied ‘at this time it’s not in accord with our programming needs.’ I sent it to TVO, who replied quickly saying it was an exciting and ambitious project that would be of interest to their audience but it was too rich for them. However they might consider acquiring it after it was completed. I also tried the Discovery Channel who said it wasn’t of interest to them.

Not ones to be put off easily Andy and Pat, on a whim, reached across the waters to Wales. Here a Welsh television station, S4C seemed interested to the extent that it was willing to put up some money for each hour. That was good, in fact very good, but only if a major broadcaster could be found to put up at least three-quarters of the funding. And so far that was eluding us. In this situation the main UK broadcasters like Channel 4, BSkyB, and the BBC seemed our last hope. While I was gearing up and rewriting the proposals for England my UK partner, John Marshall, was investigating various local funding and investment bodies such as the BFI, Creative England, Film East, and Film London, etc. All gave John a negative reply, usually claiming they only supported feature films not TV broadcasts. This gave John a new opera off-shoot idea, which we discussed at some length over Skype and e-mail. Maybe, John said, we could do a one off, hour and half, encapsulation of our series idea. This film could then be shown in all the

Beyond the Velvet Curtain

cinemas that screened Opera from the Met. I liked the idea very much but saw it as something that could only be done subsequent to the making of the series. As I reluctantly told John, I didn’t think we could raise money for a stand-alone. It seemed to me it would also require almost as much work as the series, and that trying to make such a film would distract us from our real series goal. John didn’t quite agree with me, but we decided not to pursue the idea. I had left approaching the British broadcasters till last for a very good reason. I wanted to come to them showing that I already had considerable backing from Europe and Canada. In the event I couldn’t do that. Instead I had to hope that the proposal alone would show the worth and excitement of the project. However I also hoped that adding the names of Leslie Woodhead and Antony Thomas, two of the finest documentary writer-directors in England, would show them that we could bring off a superbly executed and exciting series. My first e-mail was to Channel 4. I’d been warned by Antony Thomas, who’d worked considerably for the channel, that this probably wasn’t for them. However, to me it seemed worth a try. Antony turned out to be right as they replied that the project didn’t fit into their desired programming. These days, they said, they were aiming for a younger, less sophisticated audience. My second approach was to James Hunt at Sky Arts, a branch of BSkyB. I sent three e-mails. None received a reply. My last hope was the BBC. In the past they had had a fine history of supporting series dealing with painting and music. Given that background I thought Velvet Curtain might well tickle some commissioning editor’s fancy. After scanning the list of heads of BBC departments I decided to write to Jan Younghusband, senior commissioner for Music and Events. What follows is her reply. Dear Alan, Thank you so much for sending this idea to the BBC. While it’s great to see such an ambitious and exciting proposal, we are not able to pursue it at the moment. We already have a new opera series in production with Sir Antonio Pappano … so we are not looking to do a history of opera at the moment as we feel we have the territory well covered. We are also working on this new series with the Royal Opera House. I appreciate that this will be a disappointing response, but hope by making a quick reply you will have the chance to place the idea elsewhere.

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Yes, it was disappointing, but at least it was a much more sensitive response that I had received from Sky Arts and Channel 4. After seeing the reactions in Europe, Canada, and the USA, and all the negative replies in the UK I decided to call it a day. It was a very hard decision to make but I couldn’t see a way forward, at least for the moment. Both Andy and Pat agreed with the decision, but John ­Marshall, the eternal optimist, was all for rethinking our options. Maybe we could approach individual stations in say Wales, or Norway, and do a limited history based around their region, and highlight opera participants from their area. And to top everything off we could use a local presenter. Although John pressed the idea for a few months he could see I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic, so we let the idea drop. Looking back I have to ask myself what I learned from the experience. There were two major lessons. First I realized once more how invigorating it is to work with really creative and enthusiastic colleagues. John, Andy, Pat, and Veronica had provided tremendous support and drive from the beginning. They had injected hope into the project from the start, convincing me that it was a very worthwhile idea, and yes, it could be done. Then when I showed the series idea to Leslie Woodhead and Antony Thomas, two men whose judgments I especially valued, they too had immediately said they wanted to come on board. The second lesson has to do with choice of subject in today’s television climate. Here, misreading what was happening in the present, I had maybe allowed myself to indulge in fantasies of television arts coverage as it was twenty years ago. I had really believed there would be a place for a social history of opera on TV, but clearly I was a few decades out of date. I write that, and then I wonder if that’s really true. After all, why had so many of the commissioning editors called the series exciting and imaginative before they said no. Then I remembered something else. The Washington representative of PBS had told Andy ‘there isn’t room for the documentary series because the audience would prefer to see live opera.’ Was it possible he had it wrong? And why did it have to be a preference for one or the other? Couldn’t both exist together? It seemed and still seems to me that the series totally complemented live opera. It wasn’t meant to replace the hallowed and sanctified art, but to add to it, and comment on it in a way that could

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only bring joy and wonderment to the true opera lover, as well as the ordinary viewer. So maybe I’ll wait a year and try again. To see what we’ve been talking about all this time I’ve set out below the overall outline of the long proposal, followed by our shorter two-pager. What is missing is the content breakdown of the four series films, which followed what we have below. BEYOND THE VELVET CURTAIN A four part TV series on the Social History of Opera A SNOWROSE PRODUCTION Based on The Gilded Stage by Daniel Snowman Both King Gustav III of Sweden and the Duc de Berry were assassinated at the Opera. Napoleon on his way to the opera dodges two attempts. How? Callas was headstrong but did she really walk out on the President of Italy? Farinelli: his castrato’s voice was super but was his sexual vibrato better? Early Venetian audiences loved the opera, or was it just the in place to don a mask to make love in public? Fame does not mean riches. Witness Mozart and Vivaldi ending up in paupers’ graves. Opera conductors assuming the mantles of the gods, how did that happen? (page three) BEYOND THE VELVET CURTAIN ( shortened proposal) When Arturo Toscanini first started conducting opera at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, he was treated as a god. He was headline news. Women swooned. Riches rained down on him. Noted film director, Franco Zeffirelli received a similar welcome when he staged Tosca in London in 1964. The conductor-director had become super-star. Not so for Mozart or Vivaldi, they were entombed in paupers’ graves. A young Verdi, before he hit it rich, complained that he was being treated worse than a slave in a Roman galley ship. Callas and Pavarotti could not complain about their treatment or fortunes in the 20th century. Monteverdi’s operas were presented in small Royal palaces. He might envy today’s mass opera audiences in Central Park, New York, or the opera Nabucco performed at the foot of a mountain in the Judean desert.

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Today, from Buenos Ayres to Toronto, and from Sydney and Bejing to New York, and in almost every capital in Europe opera is thriving. Featured on television, and in film; opera is thrilling, vibrant and alive; it has become a favored directors’ playground, and audiences flock to it regardless of social distinction. How did all this happen? During the course of four TV episodes Beyond the Velvet Curtain tells the story of the creation, production and reception of opera from small privileged court entertainment in seventeenth century Mantua, Italy to its position in the digital age as a global business loved by the masses. AIM OF THE SERIES Traditionally opera programs are about composers’ lives and their works. For the first time, Beyond The Velvet Curtain brings you opera’s entire, thrilling ­story … but in a very different way. This epic series interweaves the social, sexual, cultural, political and economic changes and pressures that influenced and shaped the development of opera and its audience … over the course of four hundred years. Creators, performers and audience come together to reveal their part in this volatile, extravagant, once elitist art called opera. The series brings to life the social/sexual/cultural tension between opera and its patrons. Till the mid nineteenth century the opera was a place to flirt, smoke, drink, be seen, and make love behind drawn curtains of an exclusive box. Similar perhaps to today’s jazz clubs. The series takes us from the original opera house as social parade ground to today’s pseudo temples. The story of opera is inseparable from politics: from the Enlightenment to the French revolution, from Napoleon’s use of the opera box as a throne into 19th century nationalism that embraced Verdi, to Hitler’s dangerous worship of Wagner and Stalin’s cynical control of State Opera as a propaganda organ. And what of the composers and conductors? Today Mozart is considered a genius, but in his time he was forced to dine with the servants. Through Mozart and others the series addresses the changing status of the composer, from salaried servant to independent artist. We see Mahler emerging as the superb German composer, vying with Verdi as national hero. Again using Mahler and Toscanini as examples, the series tracks the evolution of the conductor from lowly keeper of rhythm to today’s super star. The spotlight turns on the star singers, their abilities, recruitment and nature of their lives: from Farinelli and the fame of the eighteenth century castrati to the glory days of Schwarzkopf, Callas and the Three Tenors. Their stories are enriched with the trials and tribulations of their supporting staff, orchestra, back stage workers, and the much overlooked opera chorus.

Beyond the Velvet Curtain

Opera was not only a European phenomenon, it took a foothold in England. Industrialization turned art, culture and social mores on their heads. The interaction of impresarios, socialites, and new bourgeois wealth influenced the rise in status of the composer from paid lackey to acknowledged maestro. The impresarios saw opportunity in the colonies and patronage flourished. Rivalries between the American robber barons resulted in the creation of the New York Met. Toronto, Canada now boasts arguably the finest opera house in the world and Australia’s has the visually stunning Sydney Opera House setting sail on land. Opera houses are springing up like mushrooms after the rain. Today thousands attend opera in open-air theatres. Mass media starting with phonograph recordings and radio democratized its reach. Caruso appeared on film as early as 1915. Hollywood gave us Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald in operetta. Later came the success of Carmen Jones, and The Great Caruso. A larger demographic influenced taste, thus The Death of Klinghoffer, and Harvey Milk, about the murder of a gay politician, represent our day and age. Opera still remains one of the most expensive of the arts. Will it stand up to popular TV, and theatre? Thus the series ends with the question … what of the future? KEY QUESTIONS: The series’ emphasis on consumption and reception of opera raises unusual and key questions: • Audiences stopped focusing on themselves and turned to the stage. When and why? • What precipitated the prima donna’s fiery reputation? • Was sexual desire expressed on stage and felt by the audience a key part of its success? • What influences did sources of finance have on this ambitious and expensive art form? • Better for opera (and the arts in general): dictatorships or democracies? • How did ‘elite’ opera take root in such self-consciously egalitarian societies as the USA, Canada and Australia? • Why are Sweeney Todd or West Side Story not operas, or The Magic Flute not a musical? • As a political leader was opera a safe place to go to be seen, or to be assassinated?

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THE APPROACH Beyond the Velvet Curtain is a four-hour series, each hour covering one to three main subjects. While the complete series will cohere into one overall picture of the finance, politics and social development of opera each hour will be stand-alone. Each episode is laid out in brief below, indicating what subjects will be covered and roughly how they will be approached. The writers and directors will enlarge on film style and coverage. For example, episode five deals with the building and financing of the New York Metropolitan Opera under the direction and the urging of the Vanderbilt and Morgan families. To root it in time and place the story is set against the vivid picture of New York and its populace between the Civil War and the turn of the century. Similarly the story of opera tours spreading into Canada features the rugged Canadian expanses, and its cast of trappers and hunters. Visual style The main shooting locations will be France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and the UK with parts of episode three and four being shot in the USA, Canada and Australia. The shooting will capture the mood and history of each location, the architecture and people; the joys of Venice’s carnival, Milan’s glory, Paris’s magnificence after Haussmann’s reconstruction, the glory of Handel’s London, Vienna’s majesty in 18th and 19th centuries, and Bayreuth as seen by Hitler. Music and singers A central feature of the series is a rich musical panorama using opera scores as background. The series offers opera enthusiasts and the general public alike the finest singers and conductors of today and yesterday. Where applicable, actual performances (often archival) will be used of Caruso, Gigli, Farrar, Sutherland, Domingo and Pavarotti and other greats. Re-creations Where relevant minor recreations will illustrate the life of the castrati, Handel surveying London, Mozart working, early audience behavior in Paris, a singer performing in a French salon, or an Australian band playing opera arias in a park. Interviews and archives The scripts will be written and reviewed by opera experts. To provide context on opera as a business, as art, and as historical phenomena interviews might include an opera student, an Italian opera historian, a member of the Paris

Beyond the Velvet Curtain

opera, or the executive balancing the budget of the Covent Garden Opera. The series will use the best of film and stills archives to enrich the visual landscape. The abundant materials available will make this a work of joy. Financing and production structure Beyond the Velvet Curtain requires considerable financing. The intent is to finance it through a consortium of various funding bodies in different countries, including European funds, the backing of different television networks, and private investors. Three main producers will handle this. Their credentials are attached at the end of this proposal. The major audience will come from television with marketing possibilities as a DVD best seller, and a secondary market in schools and universities. Producers and credentials [AR: After listing the Producers’ credentials I then wrote in a full description of each film. The proposal then ended with a list of contacts for the producers. Having done this very full proposal Patricia then prepared the two-pager below.] BEYOND THE VELVET CURTAIN (Two pager) A Four by One hour documentary series featuring: 1 Opera’s journey from 17th century palaces to today’s splendid opera houses, star lit theatres and high tech cinemas 2 Divas, Castrati and their sexual power; opera’s social/sexual shadow world of masked dandies, fops and courtesans 3 The rise of the lowly composer and conductor into the Gods of Opera 4 Kings, Emperors and dictators; including Joseph II, Napoleon and Hitler, their patronage, corruption and manipulation 5 Robber Barons’ vanity financing of massive opera temples to the Gods 6 This is opera – the full raw story. The sexual/social dance that swirled around it, the beauty and talent used and spat out by kings and dictators, the wizardry of entrepreneurs and financiers 7 Using a stunning variety of archive material, recreations and contemporary footage the series will assemble the players: Handel, Verdi, Mozart, Napoleon, Stalin, Franco, Wagner, Hitler, Domingo, and Callas among others come to pay their part in this thrilling spectacle.

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Today, opera is a global phenomenon, thriving, vibrant and alive. Energized with dynamic staging, sets and costumes it is now a favorite director’s playground. Featured on television, in film, and aided by new technology it is beamed to cinemas around the world. Audiences flock to it regardless of social distinction. How did all this happen? For the first time Beyond the Velvet Curtain reveals in an entirely new way the creation, production and reception of opera from small, privileged court entertainment in seventeenth century Mantua, Italy, to its position in the digital age as a global business loved by the masses. This epic series interweaves the social, sexual, cultural, political, economic changes and pressures that influenced and shaped the development of opera and its audiences over the course of four hundred years. Creators, performers, audience, kings, dictators and financiers come together to reveal their part in this volatile, extravagant, once elitist art called opera. Architecture is a key player and the evolution from court venues to small theatres to today’s grand opera houses is a twisted tale involving noble patronage, rising and falling kingdoms, Emperors’ whims, dictatorial manipulation, robber barons’ vanity, driven entrepreneurs and financiers. At the heart of this story is the story of the journey of the servile composer to superstar, the rise of the diva and Castrati to privilege and wealth, the creation of great operas mirroring the changing political landscape into today’s opera reflecting modern social themes, the influx of young artists from all walks of life, the transformation of audiences from the moneyed and titled to just plain lovers of music and art. Today opera competes with TV, sport, theatre and the Internet for dollars. Surviving 400 years was a great hat trick. So we leave it to the entrepreneurs and financial Houdinis of opera to have the last word on strategy. They are, after all, the descendants of those much maligned impresarios who dragged their troupes through Europe, begged for money, went bankrupt, revived to envision the possibilities of the new world, set sail with their troupes and tents to sing under the stars, beneath mountains, in snow and in deserts. So perhaps due to them we have the New York Met, the Sydney Opera House and Toronto’s Four Seasons.

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30  Two-page proposal for Beyond the Velvet Curtain (page one).

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31  Two-page proposal for Beyond the Velvet Curtain (page two).

10 Best advice I make films because I love the process, the excitement, the discoveries and friendships along the way. But somewhere inside of me there is always a tiny warning light. It’s saying to me, ‘Come down to earth. You are a professional. This is the way you make your living. But can you raise the budget for the film? Will people really be interested in the subject? And what is the best way of maximizing your returns once the film is finished?’ Many of these questions I’ve dealt with in Succeeding in Documentary, but they continue to bounce around my brain, particularly how to maximize returns. In my early years as a filmmaker, when I was either on staff at a television station, or working as a director for hire on a TV series, these questions didn’t bother me. I was getting well paid for my sixteen weeks or twenty weeks of work, and that was it. I owned no equity in the film, and anything it grossed went to the station. As a freelancer, however, who normally owns the film he makes, these questions come very much to the fore. In trying to increase film returns I’ve tried everything. Distributing by VOD (video on demand), iTunes, web sites – I’ve tried the lot. Well, almost the lot, because till recently I steered clear of distributors. I saw them as blood suckers. Sharks. Well that was till I met Gary Gladman, who showed me that agents could be human, funny, and quite helpful. The scene was the MEDIMED documentary conference at Sitges, which I mentioned in Chapter 8. Commissioning editors turn up. TV executives are in attendance. And eager filmmakers come by the score, plus their girlfriends and boyfriends. MEDIMED serves as a film market and also as a pitching opportunity. The flamboyant decoration of the Maricel mini-castle creates a great atmosphere, so many contacts are made, and good friendships blossom over a bottle of cheap red wine.

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At the second conference I attended I met a man who changed my way of thinking about docs. It was a Friday afternoon. As once before, I’d made a superb pitch that attracted not a single iota of interest. But while I was drowning my sorrows in a glass of sangria a middle-aged man approached me, smiled, held out his hand and said, ‘Great, great pitch! Wonderful idea. Sorry no one bought it. By the way, I’m Gary Gladman from Canada. I’m a distributor, and my company is ­Octapixx. Can we talk?’ So we talked. Over wine. Over dinner. Over a few hours. What emerged was the sense of a man with tremendous warmth, and very likeable. But above all it was clear he had a tremendous knowledge of film, film markets, and how to sell films world-wide rather than on a purely national basis. Well, to cut to the chase we became friends, he became my distributor, and over the years has brought me some good returns. But more than the financial rewards Gary has become my mentor, and from time to time has dished out superb advice of the kind that was never covered at film school. Usually this was the result of my pitching Gary some cockamammy project, which he would shoot down very kindly, whereupon he would tell me what I should be doing. When I was reviewing Gary’s missiles recently I realized that his advice was so good it was well worth sharing. I asked Gary if he would give his permission for me to reprint some of his letters. He said yes, and I’ve set out some of our correspondence below. So here goes. For six months or so I’d been working on my film about Ikey S­ olomon, discussed in Chapter 7, and had talked about it occasionally with Gary. March 19. Alan to Gary. Hi Gary, My Ikey Solomon film moves ahead, but the whole financing plan has changed, and the next few months are critical. If all goes well, we start shooting in Tasmania in October, then edit from November to January in Melbourne. Meanwhile, I’ve started thinking about another film, much simpler. I’m considering doing a film about the 100th USA bomber command, stationed in Norfolk, England, in the Second World War. The idea came to me after reading a book about them by one

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of their key officer navigators. They had tremendous losses, which we can’t even imagine. My idea is to convey a feeling of what it was to be on the base … Little Abbott, I think … in a strange land, far from home, knowing that your chances of death were extremely high after seven missions. I know that Norfolk area of England very well. I was there myself when I was serving in the RAF. The American bases, many deserted, still exist, if a little overgrown. They are situated in a most beautiful countryside, which has stayed virtually unchanged in sixty years. Every few miles you see another grey stone Anglo Saxon church. You go into picturesque rustic pubs, with Tudor facing and low roof beams, and they still talk about the Yankee Airmen, and have their photos on the walls. I’ve visited the air base museum of the 100th Command, and do you know who was one their top pilots, and they have a room dedicated to him? Colonel ‘Rosie’ Rosenthal, unfortunately no relation. He flew an incredible 51 missions, and was also a lawyer in Nuremberg after the war. So you can see the kind of personalities we’re dealing with. I think it will be easy to get excellent (and virtually free) archive material of the squadrons and the raids from the Washington National Museum. I also think a number of the servicemen are still alive … but not Rosie. My question – and vital … Is there a market for such a film? And if so, who would it be? And do you have any idea what stations or network we could approach? OK. I’ll leave it there. Warmest regards Alan

Almost on the same day Gary wrote me back. Not the one or two paragraphs I’d been expecting, but a virtual bible of advice. March 20 Gary to Alan. Alan! Alan! Alan! I really dearly like you Alan, and I would love to see you succeed as a documentary filmmaker at the highest level. And particularly

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economically. You are among my favorite documentary producers. But, as much as you know how to make films, you are not quite getting it. Go to page 20 of your new book, 1st paragraph. Therein lies the secret to economic success with documentaries. SERIES! Series, Alan. Anything less than a series is not likely to achieve a very high level of documentary revenue as a documentary special. That’s just the state of the industry as it exists today. As a distributor we do acquire lots and lots of one off documentaries, and we do sell them. But we go into a broadcast buyer and show 20 or 30 titles at a time. They’ll buy some of them and that’s worth our time and effort. However, if we went in with only ONE one-off, and the buyer said ‘NO, that’s not what I want,’ then we’d be done. A documentary strand needs lots and lots of documentary one-offs. But the broadcasters are producing most of them, themselves. Only a small percentage of what they need is acquired. But when we pitch a documentary series we get a lot more interest and have a lot more success, and ultimately the producer makes a lot more money. I’m not trying to imply to you that a 13-part onehour series would make 13 times as much as a single one-off film. No, that’s not it. The single one-off film is not likely to make any money. But the 13-part series is very likely to make money. A broadcaster has to promote what they produce or acquire. The amount of effort they can put behind a one-off is very small. The amount of effort they put behind a series is very great. They know that they can build a loyal audience over time, and even if it takes till episode four or five, they have hooked the viewers that they need, and those viewers will then want to catch up on the episodes they have missed, and they can do that when the broadcaster reruns the series. A one-off? They have to make the same marketing effort to get the viewers for the re-run as they did for the original transmission. Look, Alan, I know how hard it is to raise the funding for a one-off doc. It’s tough. And your thinking is it would be much harder to raise the funds for a series. But that may not be the case. Look, you

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may have the credentials, better than almost every other doc producer. You have the class, and the ability, and the knowledge, and the experience and the awards, and the profile and the credentials. Of course, you do need the energy to go out and make the pitches and convince the funders to let loose the money. Now to your US Air Force film. What I can tell you is that the demand for World War II documentary films is strong, and seemingly continues to grow stronger. Whatever we have in the way of World War II series – series, mind you – sells everywhere. (Our one-off WWII docs, at best, are included as an add-on to an order for a series.) World War II far outweighs any other war, whether it’s The Great War or ancient wars, or the Vietnam War or the wars involving Israel, or even the current war in Afghanistan. We have a 21hour WWII series that sells well (it covers the major battles). We have a 4-hour series, a couple of 5-hour series (5 episodes, that is), a 6-episode series, and so forth. They all sell well, and we need more. Now, competitively, we see in the market place that those WWII films that are in color (whether original color from 35mm film, or colorized) are much more in demand. I can tell you that the first time I saw Hitler, in full color, walking through Berteschgarden, sent shivers up my spine. I was transfixed. I had seen plenty of him in black and white, and I had seen plenty of re-enactments with actors playing him in color. But to see the real guy, that prick, in full color, woo hah!! And now there are WWII films in HD. And that’s where the market is now. Every broadcaster in every country wants HD content of everything. I know that you will argue that documentary films entail archive footage, and that’s true. But you also know if you have the original 35mm film it can easily (albeit expensively) be converted to HD. That’s what the broadcasters want and need. And even beyond that, of course, 3D has already raised its head. And as much as we were reluctant to look at 3D, the television manufacturers have now invested billions of dollars into making 3D a reality. With glasses, and now without glasses. Millions of 3D compatible televisions sets have already been sold into the consumer market place, and everyone is waiting as the broadcast content pipeline begins to fill up. We have a producer in Australia now producing a 6-episode (one-hours) wildlife series in 3D HD and we have the worldwide distribution rights.

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OK, so that’s your industry update. What does it mean in regard to whether or not you should attempt to secure funding for a oneoff one-hour documentary about the 100 USAF Bomber Command stationed in Norfolk during WWII. I believe that I have seen a film on that theme, but it may have been a feature film. [AR: probably Memphis Belle]. Every mission was like a suicide mission since the likelihood of returning to base was really low. A terrible situation, but a good story for television, no doubt. Is it economically viable? I think it’s a stretch, Alan. I can tell you that History Channel and Military Channel and the terrestrial channels with documentary strands are NOT looking for more black and white footage traditional documentaries from WWII, or for that matter, from any time in the past, and if the consumer wants to see such footage they can access it any time they want so easily on You Tube or a hundred other websites, instantaneously, I will never say anything against a good story. After all, films work only if there is a story. Feature films work only if there is a story. Television must have a story. And so, it’s the story that comes first. But it’s the delivery of that story, now, that is the make it or break it factor. Millions upon millions of HD compatible televisions sets are sitting in people’s homes now. Having a black and white film in HD makes a little bit of sense, but having color footage in HD about WWII would be fantastic. And I believe it would command funding for a series. Of course the story has to be there, and has to be sustainable over a series of 6 episodes if not 10 or even 13. Or at least a series of stories that are related, or even intertwined. You say that it’s easy to get archive footage of the squadrons and the raids. I am sure you have never asked the gatekeepers of that footage whether or not they have the ORIGINAL FILM FOOTAGE of those squadrons and those raids. Remember that Kodak supplied color footage to the armies of the Allies. However what we have at this point is color footage on Betacam SP (analogue). Good, because it’s color rather than black and white, but it’s SD not and not HD. Taking archival 35mm color film and putting it through the telecine for an HD output would make for a spectacular documentary series. Would that be picked up by commissioning editors? Oh yes. Would broadcasters acquire such a series? Definitely, in my opinion.

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I cannot give it to you any more openly or bluntly. As an old time veteran of documentary filmmaking, you have your knowledge and experience. But we now live in a world that moves at the speed of light, particularly in electronics and therefore television. As always, you have just received an answer to your query that is much longer (and hopefully more informative) than you expected. What you do with this knowledge is up to you my friend. Keep me posted. Best regards Gary.

Gary’s letter took me some time to absorb. I read it, then reread it. Without wasting much time I replied almost immediately. March 21 Alan to Gary Dear Gary A fantastic letter that I’m reading and rereading for its wisdom. I am also so grateful to you for taking such an immense amount of time to go over things in detail. By the way, we are shooting my Ikey film in HD. I didn’t include everything in my last letter, but recently my head has been brimming over with ideas. One of them I think I mentioned to you some while ago. As you know five years ago my partner Nissim Mossek and myself, did a two hour documentary on the secret memoirs of the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann. Nissim is thinking this could be remade as a three part film, each of one hour, and structured to cover the whole of the Second World War, and Eichmann’s actions in countries we had to leave out in the original. Countries like Denmark and Bulgaria. That is to say finally we would present the total instead of a partial picture. What do you think? I am also considering another series, but just for Israel, called The Heart of the Matter. It is not an original idea, but actually appeared as a series for Channel 4, England, and was made by a British filmmaker called Brian Hill. Brian’s idea was to interview multiple people on one subject, reduce their observations to a monologue for one person, who then

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acts out and tells his or her story to the audience. Each film actually consists of three sections. The ones I’ve seen were called The True Face of Prostitution and The True Face of Murder. Each film was divided into three parts, so in the prostitution film we see a prostitute, an elderly client and user of prostitutes, and a young girl forced into prostitution. They were absolutely great. I met up with Brian in England, asked him whether the series idea was copyright, and if I could adapt it for Israel. He was very friendly and supportive, and basically said ‘Just go ahead and do it. No problem.’ A wonderfully generous man. In Israel I’d like to adapt the series to include religion, and illegal immigrants. Unfortunately it’s not a series for the USA, or at least I don’t think so. Again thanks for your great letter. Alan March 23 Gary to Alan Hi Alan Glad to hear that Ikey is in HD. A good decision. Depending on the treatment of Eichmann, it could work, but I can tell you that 5 episodes would be better than 3. While both would be a mini-series again, the longer the better. If you could stretch it into 5, that would have a greater likelihood of success. Of course, that assumes that you could maintain the quality throughout. We have a series called Hitler: Anecdotes, Myths and Lies which is doing very well. It’s a 6 parter. 6 one-hour episodes. Produced by a Spanish producer. Really good. It’s sort of a biography of Hitler, describing his gang, his henchmen, and letting us know how good they were at what they did for a living. They were the best liars, ever. We have a mini-series called U Boats: Hitler’s Sharks, which is a better quality series in our opinion, but not doing so well. It’s 3 one -hour episodes. Too short. We have a mini-series called Heaven on Earth which is basically the history of socialism, from start to finish. It’s 3 one-hour episodes. Produced in the US for PBS. Really excellent quality. Dry subject matter, of course, but well done. It has sold well, but it took us a

Best advice

long time to get a lot of sales in over 50 countries. But that took us over 5 years. A typical 13-part documentary series of half-hour episodes gets placed in 70 or 80 countries. I like the sound of The True Face Of, or as you call it The Heart of the Matter. That could well be a successful formula for a series. But really, Alan, having Israel as the main theme for a television series does NOT provide promise for economic success. Go wider. You have to play to the majority of the population. Now just imagine a film is produced about all of the great inventions brought forth by Arab Muslims. Without making a joke, I know that the list would be short. They did bring us mathematics and even physics, but that was more than a thousand years ago. But even if the series focused on the great achievements of the Muslims way back then, it would do a lot better in today’s world of television. Why? Because it has not been done and there are 1.5 billion Muslims on this planet. I am not suggesting you produce such a series, and I don’t think you’d have the inclination. But my point is that if the series was produced, and it was 10 episodes long, even half-hours, it would get traction with broadcasters. The reality Alan, sad as it is, that a series produced by a British-born, American-educated vastly experienced producer is going to get more attention than if it were touted by the same producer who is now an Israeli. It’s a perception, and I know that you know that. But by compounding the issue by making your films Jewish-oriented or Israeli-oriented is great for Israelis, but does not lead to economic success. Unfortunately. The True Face of Politics The True Face of the Stock Markets The True Face of Medicine The True Face of Taxation The True Face of Film Studios The True Face of Love Or of the KGB, the Vatican, Nature, Death, Exorcism, Assassins, the Pentagon, Gandhi, just to rhyme off a few quick ones. That list appeals to me, Alan. Everyone today is enthralled by and mesmerized by investigation and behind-the-scenes and the truth about stuff. What is real? Cut through the bullshit and give it to us as it really

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is. That would be good television, good filmmaking, and make for some great documentaries. Just food for thought. Gary March 25 Alan to Gary Your food for thought (Canadian style) provides meals for us for a week, maybe even a month. I take your point about the limitation of Jewish subjects. It’s just that doing The True Face Of in Israel would be very easy, and after all that’s the place where I live. It would be strictly for local consumption, but could be done on a very low budget. There is also another point. I really do (occasionally) make films because I feel deeply about the state of my society, and want to change it, so what can I do! All best Alan

And so the letters kept on flowing. Gary told me that he respected my reasons for doing films in Israel but warned me I was in danger of taking the easy path. He wrote: Doing things the easy way is not usually the most exhilarating. But something somewhat difficult gets the juices flowing. Easy is just easy. Facing the challenge and beating it, provides the real rush that stimulates the intellect.

Then came a letter of criticism and disappointment from Gary. The Australian co-producer of my Ikey Solomon film, Veronica, who had met and spoken to Gary a few times, farmed the film out to an Australian distributor. This was after I had spoken to Gary many times about the film over a few years, and had often sought his strategic advice. We had never put it into writing, but the assumption was he would distribute a film that for once looked economically promising. Veronica however, needed money up front to help us fund the film. This Gary wasn’t too keen on. Because of this Veronica went with another distributor. Gary was quite miffed, and rightly so, and our relations cooled a trifle. After I apologized, and tried to explain the situation, Gary melted slightly, and I went back to him for advice.

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This time I wanted to know what he thought about the potential for a TV series on dreams. A friend of mine, a psychologist, used dream analysis while working with his patients. In a discussion at my home one evening he told me he wanted to prepare a few films for his patients and maybe fellow therapists. Would I, could I, help him and advise him? His idea was a very low cost, non-professional series of five or six films that would help his patients understand how he worked, and how dreams were used and interpreted in different cultures. Of course I said yes, and that I would give him any help he needed. As we proceeded on a very hand-to-mouth amateur basis, making the films purely for immediate and local use, it struck me that we actually had material for a very serious and potentially successful TV series. And, as usual, to test out my hypothesis and see if I was on the right track, I wrote to Gary. He replied the same day. June 1 Gary to Alan Understanding Dreams, a series of 6 one hour films. Good idea or not? An excellent idea. If done well it would be a superb idea. You do not seem to understand just how ‘right-on’ you’d be with such a series. We have two documentaries on the brain. We have been selling them all over the place. We are just acquiring a film on sleep walking, and expect it to do very well. A 6 part (6 one-hours) mini-series on dreams would be terrific. Shot with 1080p HD clarity, with an assortment of credible experts from a good assortment of countries (preferably the big market countries like Germany, Russia, Japan, France, and of course the U.S. and the UK), with some short re-enactments of dreams, CGI, giving the viewers a good understand of what dreams are, why we dream, the different levels of dreams, the interpretation of dreams, and so forth. Don’t write for hire. You’re a producer. Go out there, raise the money and do it.

Well, for once Gary’s advice fell on fruitful soil. Following his letters I spent a few months trolling everything I could find on dreams; I talked to masses of dream ‘specialists’; I attended dream workshops; and I started writing proposals. And my own dreams started multiplying, big budget dreams in color, wild, amusing, and sometimes terrifying. But I accepted that as the price one has to pay to get a film out.

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Where do we stand as I write? Two TV stations are seriously considering backing a six-part series in Europe, and one in Australia. So we are on our way. And I have to say, it all comes from the push from Gary. So I bless the day we met in Sitges.

11 Hopes and Dreams In this final diary chapter I want to share with you my thoughts about a film which is still in progress. It’s already taken off but I’m not sure it’s flying steady yet. It’s intended as a cinéma vérité piece, in the genre of family films. The film deals with music, ambition, hopes, and a boy with a severe handicap from birth, and it raises many problems. I can already see it’s going to be tough to bring off. It came about this way. Many years ago I used to sing and play the guitar and was very interested in folk music. Then I got married, and found out that as far as music was concerned I was a rank amateur compared to my two new brothers-in-law, who were total professionals. Ehud, my wife’s eldest brother played a harmonica, and his singing trio was already well known on the radio. Zohar, my wife’s younger brother was, for his part, an excellent jazz guitarist and was studying for his BA in music at the local conservatory. While at music school Zohar met Debby, a highly skilled violinist and five-string banjo player, and after a few months they decided to get married. Then came the question of earning a living. While ­Zohar gave guitar lessons, Debby formed a trio called ‘The Bandannas’ that played country and folk music at weddings, parties, and other celebrations. Debby also started going out on her own, playing a wild solo banjo and gypsy violin on similar occasions, as she led groups in American country dances. From the very beginning it was clear to me that Debby was a very dynamic and special lady. She struck me as the type who, a hundred and fifty years ago, would have been leading prairie schooners across the West, and heading the fight against hostiles and bandits. In other words one very strong, imaginative, determined, forceful personality. After a year or so of marriage Debby and Zohar had a son, called Shachar, the Hebrew word for ‘dawn.’ He was the kind of son every parent wants. Handsome, bright, always smiling, and – so it seemed from the start – also highly intelligent. Two years later a second son,

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32 Debby Elnatan, inventor of the Upsee harness.

Rotem was born. At first all seemed fine, then after six months came a major blow, when the doctors told Debby and Zohar that Rotem had cerebral palsy, probably as the result of a premature birth. The CP was extremely severe, depriving Rotem of the use of his legs, and severely limiting the use of his hands and arms. After months of digesting this information Debby decided she wasn’t going to stand idly by while her son was condemned to a life on the fringes. As far as she could manage things she wanted to see how she could help him to live a normal life, and take part in activities that all children participate in. Debby’s father had been very handy with tools and this was a facility Debby had inherited. Thus, faced with Rotem’s disabilities, her answer was to try and construct new kinds of chairs and walkers that would give Rotem much more freedom of movement. One of her ideas that took two or three years to perfect was a harness (the ‘upsee’) that attached the child to the parent, and allowed the child to walk, dance, and even play football. And on this I’ll have more to say later.

Hopes and Dreams

In due course Debby got pregnant for a third time, and this raised a major issue for her and Zohar. Should she continue with the pregnancy or not? The reason for the doubts was that Zohar’s brother Ehud had also had a daughter with cerebral palsy. The question in everyone’s mind was whether a malignant CP gene ran in the family, possibly endangering a future child. Myself, and my wife Tirtza, had been watching all these events from a distance, and also discussing them with Debby and Zohar whom we met for dinner most Friday nights. We had seen their joy when Shachar was born, and the sadness when Rotem’s disabilities were discovered. And we now saw the dilemma over the pregnancy. Thinking all this over I began to wonder if it might be possible to make a film looking at the situation. The reason was that a number of different thoughts had been running through my mind for some while. First I was drawn by and very interested in Debby’s drive to do something about her son’s disabilities. At first her inventions had been solely for Rotem’s benefit, but gradually she had started to see that her inventions or mechanical innovations might well have commercial possibilities. So at the time of her latest pregnancy she had already been reaching out to American companies like Johnson and Johnson that she thought might be interested in her work. This, I thought, might be an interesting line to follow over time. Secondly I was beginning to be fascinated with the idea of doing a portrait of a musical family, showing how they faced life, branched out, grew, and tried to make ends meet. This seemed fertile ground because in addition to the talents of Debby and Zohar, their elder son Shachar, now ten, was beginning to show considerable talent as a guitarist, after having been instructed from an early age by Zohar. In addition there was the tense line, that would only be played out and resolved over time, as to whether Debby should go on with or terminate the pregnancy. There was one final and overwhelming reason that made me think about doing a film. About ten years before I had made a short film for a health organization dealing with the problems of children with cerebral palsy. To do this I had followed the kids for three months, during which time I not only got to know the children, but was also tremendously moved by the sadness and difficulties of their siblings and parents. It seemed to me, thinking about all this, that Debby’s efforts to help Rotem lead a normal child’s life would give help and inspiration to these and other families in a similar plight.

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Before going ahead I had to speak to Debby and Zohar about the whole project. I told them I would want to film them and their children over a length of time, both at home and at work, and on holiday. And I would occasionally want to interview them at length. Their reaction was not terribly positive. They were very uncertain about the whole idea and not overwhelmingly enthusiastic. They felt the film would interfere with their lives and their privacy, and were not sure they wanted the exposure. From my side I re-emphasized the good I thought the film would do to other families with CP children, and slowly and gradually won them over. Then the question arose as to how much say they would have in the direction of the film. They asked if they could censor things; ask for sections of the film to be removed. Here I said ‘no’. I said it was a situation where they would have to trust me. I said I just couldn’t make a film where the final decision as to what would appear on screen would be in the hands of others. That would create an impossible situation for me. However, I made two promises. The first was that they could see the film rushes at any time they liked, and give me their reactions to the material. The second promise was that if they thought the film would injure or hurt their family in any way I would just abandon it. It wasn’t an easy promise to make but, as I told them, I thought that maintaining the ties of our strong family relationship was more important to me than any film I could make. Apart from talking to Debby and Zohar I also had my own wariness about the path I was about to undertake. I had seen a lot of family films, and had written a great deal about the genre. So I was well aware that I was entering a minefield. It was a genre unlike any other, with traps all along the way, particularly if you were one of the family members and not filming as an outside observer. Very often as in Joe and Maxie and Alan Berliner’s Nobody’s Business the family struggled against the filmmaker during the whole of the filming process, continually questioning and denying the value of the enterprise. After my friend Steve Thomas had made a wonderful film, Least Said, Soonest Mended, about his longlost sister who had been given up for adoption, his mother almost refused to speak to him. It was also fairly common for the genre to be used as used as ‘payback time.’ As my friend Lilly Rivlin said to me after making her own family film, Gimme A Kiss, ‘Personal memoirs are always difficult. After all, if there is honest revelation, someone always gets hurt.’

Hopes and Dreams

Knowing all this as I put out to sea I could only hope that I could avoid the rocks, and be granted relatively plain sailing. Preparing for the film was fairly easy. I had bought a Sony PD 150 camera and was very happy with the results, even though the sound was a bit tricky. I had also asked my friend Larry to help with the shooting. Now came the question of what to shoot, which was fairly obvious. Clearly we would need a lot of family scenes, Debby and Zohar at work in their various jobs, Rotem in school and receiving treatment, and the whole family at their musical activities. I also shot many scenes of Debby in her workshop working on her inventions. Apart from all this I wanted to look for special moments, crisis moments, decision moments, and of course wanted to be ready for the unexpected. However I had a lot of work on my plate apart from the Debby film, so when and how we shot was usually an instantaneous decision rather than the result of long planning. One thing that helped was that Debby would usually tell me what was happening with them all during the week. Zohar was about to perform one evening on the guitar at a local club. Right, film it. They were all going to a wedding and Debby would sing. Film it. A family dinner with relatives from the USA. Film it. Rotem learning to use an electronic wheelchair. Capture it. And so it went on for about six months during which time I filmed Rotem at school, Debby working on her ‘inventions’, Zohar teaching, Debby leading dance groups at a wedding, Debby and her ‘Bandannas’ performing at a park, Rotem and Shachar visiting the zoo, and Shachar learning to play the guitar. As I proceeded, without too much thought I gradually began to see what scenes had weight and potential. Filming Rotem at home was a must. He was going through a difficult period and crying a lot. Filming Debby during her pregnancy examinations at the hospital also seemed very important. I also captured Zohar and Rotem playing football using the ‘upsee’ harness, which I thought would eventually make a terrific sequence. Then again I filmed the whole family packing up as they prepared to move into a larger apartment, and of course captured their first day in their new home. Finally I kept my eye open for the very emotional moments, such as Zohar cradling and caressing Rotem after a medical examination. From time to time I also interviewed Debby and Zohar on film, or rather had conversations with them on camera. I wanted their

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thoughts on Rotem’s future, the difficulties of making a living as musicians, and of course on the progress of the pregnancy. After filming for about six months I wrote a short proposal asking for financial support and put it out to a few foundations. I also put in for a public pitching session in Europe, for which I made a three-minute supporting video promo. This went nowhere. After my appearance I was told ‘great pitch … but no one is really interested in these social medical subjects. Maybe try Discovery Kids.’ All very disheartening. Finally Debby gave birth to a boy, and to everyone’s joy the baby seemed perfectly normal and healthy. This seemed a great opportunity for filming and I captured Debby and the baby in hospital during the first week. A few days later I filmed the baby’s circumcision ceremony, in which he was given the name Inbar. It was a scene of much happiness and rejoicing, and was one of the few times when I saw the whole family relaxing and really enjoying themselves. About two months later one of the foundations I’d applied to asked me to come in for an interview, which I attended with Larry. We talked for about half an hour, and a week later they turned me down. Despite my disappointment the meeting had been vital for me. The reason was that it cleared my head. Although I was doing a lot of filming I didn’t really know where I was going with the materials, but had never admitted this to myself. The clear lines I had originally laid out for myself weren’t paying off. The family wasn’t really doing much music-wise. Rotem was stuck with his problems. And Debby didn’t seem to be having much success in marketing her inventions and wheelchair modifications. In retrospect I can see there was a film there but the foundation meeting had shown me that I was pretty lost. In the event I went on filming sporadically for the next two years but I knew my heart and enthusiasm had gone out of the project. Finally I decided to put everything aside and get on with my other projects. At that stage I’d shot about twenty-five hours of tape. Sadly I put the tapes into a cardboard box, and deposited them in my film cupboard. Would the project have a future? At that point I couldn’t see it. Nine years passed, during which time I got on with other films and wrote a few books. From time to time either Debby or Larry would ask me what I was doing with the film and all I could say was ‘waiting.’ I

Hopes and Dreams

couldn’t get myself to say I’d abandoned it, but that was what I was really thinking. Although my own enthusiasm and energy had diminished, Debby still pressed on with fantastic energy regarding her own projects. If her inventions were turned down by one firm she would immediately turn to another. If they also turned her down she’d try yet another venue. I saw all this from the side, had my own doubts about her prospects, but kept my thoughts to myself. It was lucky I did so, because I would have finished up with masses of egg on my face. The reason was that in spring 2014 Debby turned up trumps. She had connected with an Irish company called Lecky, who had finally agreed to manufacture and market the ‘upsee.’ This as I’ve mentioned was the harness that allowed parents and children up to about the age of eight or nine to walk or even dance together. Lecky held a big opening for the debut of the ‘upsee’ and invited journalists and broadcasters to attend. Debby also flew over to Dublin for the occasion. The result of the debut astonished everyone. Within a few days the ‘upsee’ had gone viral. The invention and Debby were now featured front-page on newspapers as far afield as London, France, and New York. The ‘upsee’ and Debby also starred in TV programs from the BBC and BSkyB to the Discovery Channel and PBS. The ‘upsee’ was also featured in extremely emotional photos and TV clips. One photo showed an eight-year-old girl (wearing the ‘upsee’ and supported by her father) walking down a wedding aisle dressed as a bridesmaid. Another showed twins dancing. For me the most moving and sensational piece was that of a little boy wearing a football shirt, supported by his father and the ‘upsee’, leading his local soccer team out on to the field. When they saw this disabled kid stepping out so bravely the crowd went mad with clapping and yelling. It was hard to watch the piece without tears coming to one’s eyes. I saw all this, congratulated Debby, and began to wonder if maybe the time had come to resurrect the film. It wasn’t just Debby’s success that impelled me, but many other things had happened in the family that could provide new material for the project. I had been aware of all these things but hadn’t paid too much attention. Debby’s spectacular take-off had, however, jerked me awake and I now began to revisit and re-evaluate the whole project in my mind. What were these elements? For starters over the years Rotem had grown into an extremely likeable and funny young man. His smile

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could light up a room, and occasionally he would come out with witticisms that had you bent over with laughter. His disabilities had not diminished, but he bore them with tremendous fortitude. I had also occasionally filmed him in the intervening years and it was clear he was born for the screen, his eyes riveting you with a sparkling and amused gaze. Meanwhile his elder brother Shachar, now a darkly handsome youth of twenty-one, had turned out to be a musical prodigy. Under the tuition of his father Zohar, his guitar playing had become outstandingly brilliant, and he was generally recognized to be one of the two or three top jazz guitarists in the country. He had formed his own musical quartet for which he also wrote the music, and was often invited to perform abroad in Spain, Austria, and Greece. Inbar, the youngest brother, now aged eleven, had also shown considerable musical talent. In his case not only did he play an excellent electric guitar, but was also in the process of mastering the double bass. This he played with a deadpan expression, giving you classical music or jazz according to your demand. With all these talents around it was only natural that the family had formed its own music group, which performed in Jerusalem and many other cities. While Zohar continued with and expanded his music teaching, Debby had been experimenting with fresh innovations and improvements concerning wheelchairs. Her latest efforts had been devoted to making a chair that would allow the user to sit and also attain a standing position with much greater ease than anything on the market. After the success of the ‘upsee’ all her efforts were now being devoted to trying to publicize this ‘sit-to-stand’ invention, as she called it. Looking at all these family changes I began to get very excited as I began to see the possibility of a different kind of film. Instead of the fairly standard ‘a year in the life of’ type film, we could do one that dealt with change over time. Hoop Dreams and Seven Up/Forty Two Up were the best and most inspiring examples I knew of in this genre, and I thought with luck I could do a similarly dynamic film dealing with change and growth. I had filmed extensively when the family was young, and had filmed sporadically over a number of years, and also knew that a lot of interesting home-video existed of those intervening years. And now I was about to begin again. Everything seemed ready for take-off.

Hopes and Dreams

33 Rotem Elnatan.

In my head I laid out the main themes of the project, which were much clearer to me than they had been ten years ago. The pursuit of Debby’s hopes and projects would be one main line, but I would also trace the effect her work and success had on the whole family unit. I also wanted to give a picture of the family as a musical unit. Separately from this I would also now pay special attention to Shachar as he laid out his career objective, aimed for the stars, and got ready to leave home. Finally of course, I would look very closely at what was happening with Rotem. He was eighteen years old, and was about to leave school. Till now he had lived at home, with a young Philippine woman living in with the family and helping him. It was clear the family now needed to find a place for him to live, away from the home of Debby and Zohar, a place where he could receive full, all day support and attention. How to arrange all this for Rotem wasn’t easy, and already many different views had been raised on the subject with Debby and Zohar often going off in different directions.

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After Debby’s ‘upsee’ success I started talking to her about resuming the film. She said ‘Let’s wait a while and think about it.’ So I waited, but meanwhile got on with some general filming of the family at dinner, and performing at various gigs, and Shachar performing with his jazz group in various small halls and nightclubs. In the end I met with all the family one evening and outlined what I wanted to do, and told them once more why I thought the film would open the eyes of all audiences and be of particular benefit to other families with CP children. I told everyone I’d have to do a lot of new filming, and this would also necessitate spending a lot of time with the family in order to capture the intimate moments. While Zohar and the three boys were OK with the idea, Debby was far from happy with my going ahead. Her opposition went in all different directions. Maybe it would be better if someone outside the family did the film. Already a few filmmakers had approached her with the idea of a film after her ‘upsee’ success. Then again she was frightened if I filmed her at work that maybe I’d inadvertently give away secrets that would invalidate any patent applications she would make. Debby also didn’t know whether the film and any attendant publicity would be good for the family. And so it went on for half an hour with the discussion swinging wildly both for and against doing the film. Finally Debby gave her rather unhappy approval and I got on with the filming. However, the problems that might and could arise came very much to the fore one Friday night a week later. I had filmed everyone at dinner, where the conversation centered around a performance Shachar was due to give the following Tuesday evening, and his progress with a record he wanted to put out. That all worked nicely. Then I got Inbar going wild as he swung the double bass and gave us his rendition of a New Orleans jazz player. So far all was good. Then as we sat on the couch, having tea and cakes, the conversation turned to Rotem’s future and the inability to find a good home for him. At this point everyone started getting very heated. Zohar was vehement that the local authorities weren’t doing enough. That they were too indifferent to the situation, and if they really wanted to they could help very much more. Debby for her part thought the local authorities were doing fine, and that Zohar was being super-critical. As the conversation became more and more fierce I kept the camera running, filming first Zohar then Debby. Then Debby turned to me, slightly angry, telling me ‘Alan, you absolutely cannot film this. The discussion makes the family look bad, and ungrateful. I also

Hopes and Dreams

34 The Elnatan family (left to right): Shachar, Zohar, Rotem, Inbar, and Debby.

don’t want the arguments between Zohar and myself captured on camera. We have enough problems without them being exposed to the world.’ Naturally I turned the camera off, and we all calmed down and got on with our tea. That evening however, after I got home, I was quite disturbed. Filmically the scene was marvelous, alive and sparkling. It showed the passions and problems involved in trying to see a way ahead for Rotem. And it emphasized what I’d always believed, that it was great to capture conflict on camera. I did not for one moment agree about the filming exacerbating family conflicts, but had to bend with and honor Debby’s wishes. However these major restrictions while filming, instead of being resolved in the editing, did not bode well for the future. It made me think I’d really have to agree a set of rules with Debby, as to how, what, and when we filmed, otherwise we’d be heading for disaster. Though I was a bit worried I settled down the next day to write a proposal which I could send to various foundations. I reckoned if I

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did most of the filming myself I would need about $50,000 to finish the film. But that reckoning was based on myself or Larry doing all the photography. If I wanted a really top-notch cameraperson to do the job, then I knew I’d have to add another $7,000 or so to the budget. Anyway I wrote the proposal, sent it off to two foundations and a TV station. That was two weeks ago. Now I live in hope. I think the film has great possibilities. If the foundations come through then I know everything will augur well for a marvelous and moving film. If no money comes through, then I’ll still go ahead, but it will make life much more difficult. I’ll just have to wait and see. So, as I said at the beginning of this chapter, we’ve taken off – a bit bumpily, but we’ve taken off. Now I just have to see how long it will take to reach cruising altitude.

Production notes: the family film Since the 1970s the family film has become an important genre challenge for filmmakers. The problem is how to make them transcend home movies. How to make your films ascend and fly, so that they speak not merely to your immediate family and circle but have the ability to touch on the universal and eternal. In short, you are faced with a hell of a challenge.

Indicate direction When you start your film, the odds are you don’t know where you are going. You’ve decided to talk to members of your family about the past, about roots, about a few family secrets. You are intrigued by the problems your grandfather faced on coming to the USA. You wonder whether the family was happier before Joe died in Iraq. You are curious about the branch of the family no one ever mentions. So intrigued, but without much direction, you plunge in without much direction. Now my fundamental belief is that before you begin your film you need to establish one defining statement, or one clear underlying concept, that will set you off in the right direction and provide the impetus for the film. ‘This film is about the search for the atomic bomb.’ ‘This video will discuss the role of the university in the twenty-first century.’ Unfortunately, and for very clear reasons, this rule is rarely observed in family films. In family films we often just do not know where we’re going. We work on impulse and feeling. Very often we wander for years uncertain of direction – and that’s all right. It’s all part of the game. You are searching for meaning and it may take years to emerge. But – and it’s a very big and important but – by the time you’ve finished the film, that meaning and that line must be there. And it not only must be there but also is usually very important to let the audience see this at the very beginning of the film. We do this because family films wander all over the place. They often seem to have no clear trajectory and it is easy for the audience to get

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confused. If you can define a clear line at the beginning, and tell the viewers where you hope to go, then it is much easier for the audience to stay with you and understand your twists, side steps, and convolutions. Let me give you a few examples where direction is defined from the start. Deann Borshay Liem’s First Person Plural starts with the words, ‘I’ve been several different people in my life. I had three mothers. Three different sets of histories. I’ve spoken different languages. Had different families. Different birthdays.’ We hear all this over bleached-out pictures of a pretty Asian woman of about thirty. We are again intrigued, but also know immediately this film is going to be about a search for identity. For her part, Lilly Rivlin starts Gimme a Kiss with a line that hits us all between the eyes. ‘Who of us knows our parents?’ This is then followed by Lilly’s brother saying, ‘What a hell of a life they had’; her sister commenting, ‘There was no hugging, no kissing’; and Lilly’s father saying of the mother, ‘I always loved her!’ Here, with ‘Who of us knows our parents?’ we are presented with a question that all of us have asked at one time or another but have probably never taken any deeper. A second line of inquiry into inter-parental relations is then opened up by the siblings’ comments and the father’s declaration that he always loved his wife.

Dramatic elements and structure The chief fault of films dealing with family relations is that they often wander about aimlessly, with little progression, pacing, or conclusion. I’ve indicated above that you need a good opening to put your film into orbit. But you have to follow up on the promise by delivering the goods. This means a good story, conflict, characters that interest us, scenes that touch us and move us, and a conclusion and closure. Occasionally you strike lucky and can sense many of these things before you begin your film. In Fahimeh’s Story, this is exactly what happened to director Faramarz K-Rahber and his line producer Axel Grigor. Before shooting, both men met a vivacious forty-seven-year-old Iranian immigrant to Australia called Fahimeh. Fahimeh had migrated to Australia with her children after an unhappy arranged marriage to a husband whom she could not divorce under Iranian law. Five years later, at the age of fifty-two, she has fallen in love with and married John, a seventy-seven-year-old retired army officer, with his own children. At this point Faramarz enters the scene to be

Production notes: the family film

told that the Iranian husband, Hossain, who does not know he has been divorced under Australian law, is coming for a visit. So in fact we have the perfect set-up. First, we have the marriage of two great interesting but absolutely contrasting central characters: Fahimeh, who is warm, funny, emotional, dynamic, and outgoing, and John, who is taciturn, dry, and slow-moving. What we obviously want to know is whether time will cement or crack this unlikely association. We then have the children on both sides, who are quite unenthusiastic about the union and even at times extremely angry at the liaison. And finally we have the awaited appearance of the Iranian husband who doesn’t even know he’s been divorced. It sounds like old recipe instructions. Stir well. Add an egg. Bake for an hour and you’ll have a great cake. With the above film ingredients, who can go wrong? In this case not K-Rahber and Grigor, who in the end produced a very fine film. Again you will probably not be able to define any of these things, story, character, and conflict when you begin your film. Your job is to disinter these elements as you progress and see that they are in place by the time the film is finished. The most common family film is that structured in the form of a search. This could be a search for the meaning of a person’s life (which is difficult to bring off) or a search for facts about a life. The second is easier because it is more tangible and often allows action as well as recollection to drive the film. In Gimme a Kiss, we learn fairly early that Lilly Rivlin’s father was a philanderer. All that is common family knowledge. Rivlin, however, takes the drama further by trying to find out whether it is true that the father had an African American mistress and whether as a consequence of the liaison she has an unknown half-brother. This quest adds a terrific drive to the second part of the film. Deann Borshay Liem’s quest in First Person Plural is more complex. In her search for identity, she discovers that her true identity has been concealed by fake adoption papers. Further efforts, all documented in the film, then lead her to her true Korean mother. But the final search is to discover whether her allegiance is to her birth mother or to her adopted American parents. This leads to a moving climax in which both families have a very emotional meeting in Korea, talk about their feelings, and help settle Liem’s dilemma once and for all. Another style of family film is when an alleged crime has been committed by one or more family members and the rest of the family must

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react to it. This reference to a sensational crime happened in the film Capturing the Friedmans. Director Andrew Jarecki decided to revisit the scandalous 1988 child sexual abuse crime because there was still a question of whether the convicted father and son had received a fair trial. Jarecki was challenged by the notoriety of the case and the conflicting stories of the father, mother, uncle, and two sons. As his new inquiry unfolded in 2003, another story arose. The town of Great Neck, Long Island, NY had originally been scandalized by the events and did not want to revisit the crime. Who is telling the truth and who isn’t? The documentary is a fascinating one and is a study in how hard it is for an outside filmmaker to remain impartial as a family reluctantly lets him into their confidences. The quest for self-knowledge, the need for reflection, the searing darts that burn the soul with reverberations of, Who am I? Why am I? What shaped me? may be the hardest search, but a number of filmmakers, like Marlon Riggs, Su Friedrich, and Jan Krawitz, have managed to achieve that.

Function and universality Do family films have a function? My personal feeling is that they very often act as therapy, as a cathartic, purging experience for the filmmaker. Often they seem to enable the filmmaker to come to grips with a relationship, as in Joe and Maxi, or to settle questions of identity, as in First Person Plural. Sometimes family films are referred to with scorn as ‘home movies.’ What do I mean by home movies and why should that be bad? I would suggest that home movies are generally unstructured and without a personal voice, are rarely creative, tend to be simplistically observational rather than analytical, and are of interest to only a very limited audience. In contrast, the creative family film must provide some wider social observation. It aims to bring sensitivity, feeling, understanding, and microscopic investigation to bear onto the complex web of family relations. Occasionally this concentration of gaze will bring pleasure. Often it will bring pain. But one thing it must do above all else: it must reveal and illuminate some universal aspect of human emotions and human actions. It should vibrate for us, the observers and members of the audience, and bring new meanings and understandings into our lives. This is easier said than done, but without these elements, the personal film will remained

Production notes: the family film

grounded, unable to take off, unable to provide inspiration to the wider world over the horizon.

Style The use of home movies and recycled images has become a staple of family films: Mom waving, little kids in beautiful dresses running, big grins, birthday parties, and so on. The problem is that we have seen this so often we stop really seeing what is on the screen. We merely see generic images and often miss their real message. Slowed-down and deliberately blurred images have also become clichés and should be used with caution. And the warning encompasses archival footage as well. But these are warnings, notes to ‘handle with care.’ They are not hands-off directives, because used intelligently, all of these devices can enhance the film.

Ethics When you film your own family, you are entering very dangerous territory. The capacity for harm is immense, and you need to tread very cautiously. You may believe you are working for the public good, or for your own therapeutic purposes, but often you are merely washing dirty laundry in public, even settling age-old family grudges. So be careful. Questions you have to ask of yourself are, who benefits, and who is liable to be harmed by your film? Generally your family trusts you. Because of that they allow you access to their thoughts and feelings, which they would probably deny any other filmmaker. Be careful not to abuse that trust. You know more about the possible long-range effects of the film than they do. Be aware of that. Protect them from the harm that they cannot foresee. Above all, avoid ‘rape with the camera.’ In Joe and Maxi, Maxi Cohen besieges her father, who is really quite angry about being forced into a situation not of his liking. Here the audience is left with a bad taste in its mouth. This abuse is not, however, to be confused with gentle persuasion of someone to appear in your film. When Oscar Berliner tells his son Alan that he is wasting his time filming him, he is really saying, ‘Persuade me, my life is interesting.’ There may seem to be only a fine line between the

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actions of Maxi Cohen and Alan Berliner, but in practice the gap is a mile wide. I would finally add one caution – don’t go to the other extreme. Don’t be too overprotective. What I mean by this is that in our concern for our loved ones, we can sometimes be too defensive and fail to ask the penetrating and necessary questions. Thus, in Minda Martin’s Mother’s Heritage, an investigation of Minda’s mother’s life and death, most of the family is interviewed at length except the father. This is a strange omission, as the father would undoubtedly have shed much light on the mother’s life. On being questioned on this score, Minda acknowledged the point but told me that she was frankly concerned for her father and didn’t want to bestir the embers of his loss. When I interviewed Minda she added some words that are well worth bearing in mind as a conclusion to these notes: In a narrative film the writer predetermines what will happen. In documentary it’s more like life, more open ended. The footage tells you where the film will end. I go as deep and as far as I can. I know I’ve asked all I could. Sometimes the answers aren’t what I wanted. Sometimes the answers lead me to further questions. Sometimes those answers aren’t put into the film so that you don’t hurt someone.

Appendix: production details 1  MARRIED TO THE MARIMBA Start: 2002 Writer-directors: Alan Rosenthal and Larry Price Filming: 2003–4, 2010–12 Film completed: 2012 Finance: Self-financed Distribution: German TV and US Cable TV 2  STALIN’S LAST PURGE Start: 2001 Writer-director: Alan Rosenthal Research: 2002–3 Fundraising: 2003–4 Principal funders: the Charles Revson Corporation and the Kroll  Foundation Filming: 2004–5 Film completed: 2006 Distribution: Israel TV and PBS 3  ADOLPH EICHMANN: THE SECRET MEMOIRS Start: 2000 Writer-directors: Alan Rosenthal and Nissim Mossek Research: 2002–3 Fundraising: 2003–4 Principal funders: EO TV and self-financed Filming: 2004–5 Film completed: 2006 Distribution: NDR, EO TV, Israel TV

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4  THE BRINK OF PEACE Start: 1997 Writer-director: Alan Rosenthal Research: 1997–98 Fundraising 1997–98 Principal funders: PBS and private donors Film completed: 1998 Distribution: 13/WNET and PBS 5  THE FIRST FAGIN Start: 2009 Writer-directors: Alan Rosenthal and Helen Gaynor Production companies: Rosenthal Films, Wildfury Productions,   Roar Films (Tasmania) Research: 2009–11 Fundraising: 2009–11 Principal funders: ZDF TV, Screen Tasmania, Screen Queensland,   Screen Australia and Private Donors Film completed 2012 Distribution: ZDF TV, ARTE TV, SWISS TV 6  BEYOND THE VELVET CURTAIN Start writing proposal March 2013 Film laid aside March 2014 7   HOPES AND DREAMS Began 2001 Work ceased 2004/5 Sporadic shooting 2005–11 Film seriously resumed 2014 During the period 2000–12 I also did various small films and the occasional company film. I also initiated a number of projects that I researched but never got off the ground, including The Sky’s the Limit, Dream Divining and The World of the Dybbuk: Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean, which I wrote for a friend, is still waiting to go into production. Is there any lesson here? Yes, you win some, you lose some, but you just have to go on.

Index Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations, page numbers in italic refer to tables. 3D 245 13/WNET 143–5, 147, 149, 152, 169 A Married Couple 15 ABC 192 Adit (editor) 81, 82, 83 Adolf Eichmann: The Secret Memoirs 3, 4, 111–38, 112, 247   breach of copyright case 133–4   contract 126, 131, 133   development 119   fundraising 120, 124–5, 126   inspiration 117–19   interviews 125–6, 130   lessons of 134–5   location shooting 127–30   notes 120–1   openings 124   pitching 125   premier 133   production details 271   proposal 120   research 130   script 121–4, 125–6, 131–2, 135–8   structure 119   supporting stills and archive footage 126–7 advertising 48 advisors 72 AIDC 219 Alaa, Abu 165–6, 166, 167–8 All My Babies 98 Allenbacher, Peter 189–91 Altman, Robert, The Player 215 Amir, Yigal 146 APIMED 219 approach, form, and style 176–7, 196–7, 236

approvals 141 Arab–Israeli peace process 4   see also Brink of Peace, The Arafat, Yasser 146, 153–6, 159, 162, 163 archive footage 126–7 archives 73–4, 76, 79, 158 Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem 116–17 Arieh (music expert) 82 art directors 204 ARTE 189–90, 226, 227 Ashrawi, Dr Hanan 160–1 atmosphere 78–9, 91 audience 89–90, 94, 178 auditions 204 Australia 180, 191 Australian National Film School 184 authenticity 197, 198 Backbreaking Leaf, The 10 Baker, Bill 143, 144, 145, 150 balance 160, 162, 171 Barron, Arthur 14, 15 BBC 11–12, 12, 17–18, 133, 178, 217, 230, 231 Bell Media 230 Bergelson, Alla 69 Bergelson, Lev 68 Bergelson, Nadia 78 Berkeley Rebels, The 15 Berlin 128–9 Berliner, Alan 256, 269–70 Beyond the Velvet Curtain 5, 223–38   approach, form, and style 236   budget 224   decision not to proceed 232–3   directors 225–6   fundraising 225, 226, 227, 230

274  

Index inspiration 223–4   lessons of 232   pitching 226–33   production details 272   proposal 226, 233–8, 239–40 Bigamists, The 86, 88 biographies and support letters 178 Blood and Fire 10 book rights 184 Boyce, James 195 Bravo 230 Breitrose, Henry 9 Bridge, The 96 Brink of Peace, The 3, 4, 143–72, 151   assassination of Ayash sequence 149–50   budget 49, 49–53, 148, 170   conclusion 170–1   Eban’s role 149–52   editing 168, 169   ending 151–2   funding and fundraising 144, 145, 148–9, 149   inspiration 143   interviews 150, 152–6, 155, 159–61, 162–5, 166, 167–8   Oslo accords section 165–8   preliminary discussions 143–5   production details 272   proposal 145, 146–8   reflection on 171–2   relations with 13/WNET 169–70   research 145, 158   reviews 171   rough cuts 169–70   screening 171   script 145, 149–52, 168–9   shooting 144, 157–8, 162, 162–5   structure 150–1, 169   visual support 158–9 British Film Institute (BFI) 12, 230 BSkyB 230, 231 Budapest 127, 129, 129–30 budgets 3, 19, 43–9, 148   company provisions 46–8   estimates 186, 191   expenses 170   family films 264   postproduction 45–6   proposals 177–8   research 43–4, 193   shooting 44–5

  ten-minute public-relations video 49, 55   see also individual films Canada 193, 230 Cantor, Peter 11–12 Capturing the Friedmans 268 Cast a Giant Shadow 20 Cathy Come Home 14 Cawston, Richard 15–16 Celibacy 108 Chair, The 33 Channel 4 230, 231 Charles Revson Foundation 66, 80, 145, 148–9 cinéma vérité 3, 5, 14–15, 20, 176–7 Clark, Gunnel 97 Clarke, Shirley 10, 97–8 Clinton, Bill 146 co-directors 202–3 Cohen, Maxi 269–70 Cohen, Stephen 72 commissioning editors 3, 128–9, 173, 176, 190, 192, 209, 214, 216–17, 218, 220–1, 221–2, 232 compassion and understanding 109 computer graphic images 47 computers 44–5 contacts 222 contracts 126, 131, 133, 134, 139–42, 184 controversy 103–6, 107–8 Copenhagen 128, 129, 129–30 co-producers 185 coproduction deals 141 copyright 82, 133–4 corrections 39 Creative England 230 credits 47 crew 14–15, 44, 46, 47, 129–30 customs 157 D Day 33 danger 108 Death of a Princess 103–6, 104, 105 Denmark 127–8, 129–30 dialogue 39 Dickens, Charles 4, 186, 189, 192, 202 Dinur, Yechiel 115 Discovery Channel 230 distribution 133, 178, 241 distributors 5, 241–52 DocAviv 219

Index docudrama 14, 196–7   see also First Fagin, The documentary 5–6 documentary series 244–5, 248–50 Dreams and Nightmares 96 Eaton, Michael 196–8 Eban, Abba 143, 144, 145, 147–8, 149–50, 151, 152, 153–6, 159–60, 162, 169–70, 170–1, 171 economic success, secret of 243 economic viability 246 editing 20–1, 168, 169, 206–8   budgets 45   final 83   instructions 81   masters 82–3   outlines 33–8, 39–40 editors 46 Egypt 152–3 Eichmann, Adolf 4–5, 111, 119, 123,   Graven Images 117–18   trial 112–19, 113, 114 Eisenstein, Serge 59 Elnatan, Debby 253–64, 254, 263 Elnatan, Inbar 260, 263 Elnatan, Rotem 254–5, 257–8, 259–60, 261, 262–3, 263 Elnatan, Shachar 253, 255, 260, 261, 262, 263 Elnatan, Zohar 253–64, 263 emotional build-up 41 emotional high points 197–8 enthusiasm, loss of 258–9 EO 125 equipment 44, 46, 46–7, 66 ethics, family films 269–70 Ettinger, Yakov 78, 79 Evans, Eli 66, 145, 148–9 experts and expertise 72 facts 122, 123 Fahimeh’s Story 266–7 Family 33 family films 253–64, 265–70   budget 264   change and growth 260–4   direction 265–6   dramatic elements 266–7   emotional moments 257   ethics 269–70   family conflicts 262–3   function 268   funding 258

interviews 257–8 privacy 256   proposals 258, 263–4   shots 257   structure 267–8   style 269   theme 260–4   trust 256, 269   universality 268–9   a year in the life of 260 Film Councils 191 Film East 230 Film London 192, 230 Film Queensland 192 film series 60–1 film statements 175 film styles 176–7 Film Tasmania 192 finance 3, 6, 28, 237  see also budgets; funding First Fagin, The 3, 4–5, 180–213, 181, 205, 206, 207, 210, 242, 247, 248   approach, form, and style 196–7   auditions 204   book rights 184   budget 186, 191, 202   dialogue 204   distribution 250   editing 206–8   ending 201–2   funding and fundraising 190, 191–3, 202   graphics 203   inspiration 180, 182–4   location scouting 203–4   monologue linking approach 197   music 208–9   pitching 189–90   preparations 184–7   production details 272   proposal 187–9   release 212–13   requested changes 209–11   research 186–7, 193–6, 203   rights 190–1   script 196–203   shooting 205, 211   treatment 190 First Person Plural 266, 267, 268 five Ws, the 86 Flaherty film seminar 97 For Neda 106–7  

 

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Index Four Hundred Million, The 96 Fox, John 170 freelance work 241 Friedrich, Su 268 Fruchtman, Milton 112–13 funding 80, 84, 120, 124–5, 126, 144, 148–9, 190, 202, 214, 225   cost and payment schedule 140–1   documentary series 244–5   family films 258   media funds 227   pre-sales 225   sources 65–6, 145, 191–3, 226, 230 Furlined Foxhole, The 98 Fury, Veronica 185, 189, 190, 191–3, 202, 208, 209, 211, 212, 224, 225, 232 Gaynor, Helen 180, 182, 184, 202–3, 203–4, 205, 208–9, 211, 212 Gaza 153–6, 157, 161–5 Gelhorn, Martha 115 Gilded Stage, The (Snowman) 223–4 Gimme A Kiss 256, 266, 267 Gladman, Gary 241–52 Goddard, Ryk 204, 206, 207 Gold, Jack 14 Goldovskaya, Marina 61, 73, 110 Gottschalk, Peter 189–90, 209 Grant, Jaems 204 graphic design 47 Grigor, Axel 266–7 Gross, Guy 209, 212 Gruber, Dean 115 Hamed, Razi 156–7, 163–4 Harris, Mark, Pictures at a Revolution 3 Hausner, Gideon 119 HD content 245, 246, 247, 248 Heart of the Matter, The 247–8, 249–50 Heaven on Earth 248–9 High School 33 Hill, Brian 22, 109, 247–8 Hirschfeld, Yair 166, 167, 168 historical docudrama   see First Fagin, The History Channel 246 History Television 230 Hitler: Anecdotes, Myths and Lies 248 Hoop Dreams 260 Hopes and Dreams 5, 253–64, 272   budget 264   family conflicts 262–3

  loss of enthusiasm 258–9   proposal 263–4   resumption 260–4 HotDocs 215, 219 How the Myth was Made 100 Hughes, Robert 186, 195 Hunt, James 231 Hussein, King of Jordan 150, 151 IDFA 219 inspiration 5, 23–5, 56–7, 117–19, 143, 180, 182–4, 223–4 insurance 48 international work 3   see also Stalin’s Last Purge interviews 32, 77–8, 79, 130, 150, 166, 167–8   commenting on 156   family films 257–8   men in the street 162–5   and narration 92   proposals 236–7   questions 155–6   research 63, 66–7, 68–9   script placement 72, 125–6   shooting 144, 152–6, 155, 162–5 Israel 11–12, 158–61, 247–8, 250 iTunes 241 Ivens, Joris 95–7 Jacobowitz, Alex 25, 25–9, 26, 29, 31, 39, 40, 41 Jarecki, Andrew 268 Jay, Antony 15–16 Jerusalem 12, 19, 25, 63, 67, 143, 148, 158–9, 160, 161, 165 Jerusalem International Film Festival 83, 133 Joe and Maxie 256, 268, 269–70 Johann (commissioning editor) 128–9, 130–1, 132–3 Jordan 157–8 journey films 33 Jurgen (script advisor) 131–2, 133 King, Alan 15 K-Rahber, Faramarz 266–7 Krawitz, Jan 268 Lang, Ian 209 Larsen, Terje 165–6, 166–7, 168 lateral thinking 107 Leacock, Ricky 10

Index Least Said, Soonest Mended 256 Lecky 259 Leonard Nevzin Russian Research Centre 65 Letter from the Front 88 Liem, Deann Borshay 266, 267 lists and statistics 92–3 Loach, Ken 14 location research 193–6 location scouting 203–4 location shooting 74, 75–80, 127–30   expenses 44   interviews 152–6, 159–61   permissions 157–8 Luba (research helper) 67–8 luck 84, 113, 213 Macartney-Filgate, Terry 10–11, 98 Mclean, Carrie 204, 206 marketing 3, 5, 178 Markish, David 68–9 Markish, Peretz 59, 64–5, 66 Married to the Marimba 3, 4, 23–41, 41, 42   budget 28, 30, 43, 49, 53–5   conceptual disagreements 31–3, 41   corrections 39   dialogue 39   editing 40   editing outlines 33–8, 39–40   first meeting with Alex 25–9   idea development 29   inspiration 23–5   interviews 32   lessons of 41   narration 36–9   production details 271   proposal 30   shooting 31   test screenings 40 Marshall, John 220, 221, 224, 225, 230–1, 232 Martin, Miranda 270 Maxwell-Stewart, Hamish 194n, 195 Maysles, Albert 14 media funds 227 MEDIMED 219–21, 222, 241–2 Mehn-Andersen, Arild 228 Melbourne Film Festival 192, 193, 202, 209–13 Mihaly, Arpad 180, 182, 184 Mikhoels, Natalie and Nina 68, 74, 77, 78, 83

Mikhoels, Solomon 59, 61, 63–5, 64, 65, 67, 70 Military Channel 246 Miller, Shaun 184, 212 Milo, Yoram 154, 167 MIP TV 125, 215 MIPCOM 215 monologue linking approach 197 mood 86 Moore, Michael 86–7 Moscow 74–5, 75–80, 82–3 Mossek, Nissim 117, 118–19, 120, 124–5, 126, 128–9, 130, 131, 132–3, 134, 247 Mother’s Heritage 270 Mubarak, Hosni 152–3, 155 Munich 23–4 music 9, 81–2, 208–9 NARA 73 narration 3, 70, 83   audience 89–90, 94   the five Ws 86   function 85–7   linking 198   neutrality 86–7   person 16, 87–8   problems 92–4   shot list 89   style and language 89–92   voice 87–8   writing 85–94 Natasha (researcher) 73, 74–5, 75–6, 79–80, 82–3 National Film Board of Canada 10 NDR 124, 125, 126, 128, 130, 132 Neil (art director) 204, 212 Netanyahu, Bibi 159–60 New York 10–11, 143–5 Nobody’s Business 256 Norway 165–8 objectives 57 observational documentary 176–7 observational filmmakers 14 Octapixx 242 O’Donnell, Judith Sackville 183–4, 212 On Camera (magazine) 171 online submissions 214–15 open pitching 215–21 options 184 original film footage 246 O’Rourke, Dennis 109

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Index Osheroff, Abe 95–7, 97 Oslo 227–8, 228 Out of the Ashes 93 outlines 33–8 Ovation 230 ownership 141 partners, working with 3, 28–9, 31–3, 36–8, 41, 202–3, 224, 232 PBS 193, 229–30, 232 Pennebaker, Don 10, 14 Peres, Shimon 159, 168 personnel, budgets 45–6, 48 Petra 157 Pettman, Catherine 204, 205, 212 Phillips, Patricia 193, 224, 225, 229–30, 232 Piotrowska, Agnieszka 86, 88 pitching 5, 125, 189–90, 214–22   attention grabbing 220   Beyond the Velvet Curtain 226–33   Canada and the USA 229–30   coaching 220, 221   Hollywood 215   markets 215–22, 226–8   meetings 226–8   open 215–22   UK 230–2 Player, The 215 Prague 128, 129, 130 pre-sales 30, 225 Price, Larry 29, 30, 31–3, 158, 258 privacy 256 producers 224–5 production managers 152 production partners 204 proposals 3, 5–7, 30, 61, 145   aims 120   approach, form, and style 176–7   audience, marketing, and distribution 178   background and need 175–6   Beyond the Velvet Curtain 226, 229–40, 233–8   biographies and support letters 178   budget 177–8   content 146–7, 175–9, 188, 233–8   cutting 174   family films 258, 263–4   film statement 175   finance 237   fundraising 63–6   goals 173

  hooks 173–4, 187–8   interviews 236–7   length 120, 174   long 233–7   main topics 174   opening paragraphs 173–4, 187–8   organization 175   printouts 226   provincial subjects 221   shooting schedule 177   style and language 174   targeting 188–9   two-page 237–8, 239–40   US Air Force film 242–3, 245–7   video demos 179   WIFM (‘What’s In It For Me’) element 65   writing 146–8, 173–9, 187–9 publicity 48 public-relations video, budgets 49, 55 Qur’an, The 108 Rabin, Yitzhak 146, 158 Rain 96 reality, dramatizing see First Fagin, The reconstruction see First Fagin, The reputation 184 research 3, 15, 19–20, 57–8, 63–5, 125, 130, 145, 203   background 186–7   budgets 43–4, 193   interviews 63, 66–7, 68–9   location 193–6   negative effect 58   and story development 58–61   supporting stills and archive footage 126–7   timelines 122 researchers 73 rhythm 41 Riggs, Marlon 22, 268 rights 190–1 risk taking 12 Rivlin, Lilly 256, 266, 267 Roar films 204 Robinson, Tammy 144–5, 169, 170 Rolling Sadhu, The 33 Rosenthal, Alan 6, 13, 22, 151, 210   career development 8–22, 13, 22   The Documentary Conscience 16–18, 96   Eichmann trial coverage 112–16

Index          

experience of terrorism 158–9 film education 1, 8–11 film style 3 first successful sale 12 freelance work 18–21   friends 223–4   influences 95–110   Jerusalem, Take One! 13   The New Documentary in Action 14–16, 17   reputation 184   Succeeding as a Documentary Filmmaker: A Guide to the Professional World 1–2, 21, 214   Succeeding in Documentary 241   teaching career 12, 13–14, 120   Writing, Directing, and Producing Documentary Films and Video 2   writing career 11 Rosenthal, Tirtza 210, 255 Royal Family, The 15–16, 17 royalties 47–8 Rubenstein, Joshua 72, 77, 77–8 rushes 81 S4C 230 Sally (researcher) 73 Sandford, Jeremy 14 Sassen, Willem 118–19, 123–4 Savir, Uri 168 SBS 192 scale 60 scholastic authority 72 scope, expanding 249–50 Screen Australia 185, 191, 192, 193, 202 script writing 15–16, 66–72, 121–4, 145, 149–52   advisors 72   false starts 124   first draft 196–9   interviews and 125–6   narration 85–94   polishing 131   redrafting 168–9   research 125   revisions 128–9   rough draft 126   structure 69–72 search films 33 second unit directing 225 sequences, planning 41 Seven Up/Forty Two Up 260

Shafi, Dr Abdel Heide 164 Sharansky, Natan 59, 61 Shavelson, Mel 20 Sheffield Documentary Festival 215 shooting 31, 205, 211   budgets 44–5   costs 47   location 74, 75–80, 127–30, 152–6, 157–8, 159–61   schedule 177 shot list, narration 89 Sides, Elia 151, 152, 167, 168 Silverstein, Mort 14 Singapore 56–8 Sitges 219–21, 226–7 Sivan, Eyal 117, 124 Sky Arts 231 Smithsonian Channel 230 Snowman, Daniel 223–4, 226 Snowrose 226 Solomon, Ikey see First Fagin, The Sophie (researcher) 76, 77, 78, 79–80 Specialist, The 117, 124 Spielberg archives, Jerusalem University 133–4 Stalin, Josef 4–5 Stalin’s Last Purge 3, 4, 56–84, 62, 64, 65, 78–9   advisors 72   editing 81, 82, 83   ending 71, 83   film series 60–1   fundraising 63–6, 80   inspiration 56–7   interviews 68–9, 72, 77–8, 79   locations 74   Moscow shooting 75–80   music 81–2   narration 70, 71, 83, 85–6   pictures 70   premier 83   preproduction visuals 72–4   production details 271   progression 70–1   prologue 69–70   proposals 61, 63–6   reflections on 83–4   research 57–8, 63–5, 66–7, 68–9   scale 60   scholastic authority 72   script 66–72   story development 58–61, 63   travel planning 74–5

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280

Index Stanford Graduate Business School 8–9 Stangneth, Bettina, Eichmann Before Jerusalem 118n starting procedures 30 stock and ratios 46 Stoney, George 10, 97–8, 99, 100–1, 101–2, 106 story 15–16   approach 176   choice 61, 63   development 58–61   drama 176   emotional high points 197–8 structure 41, 150–1, 169, 267–8 style, family films 269 subject choice 3, 232 submissions, online 214–15 Sunnyside 219 supporting stills 70, 73, 126–7 Tank Man, The 106 Tasmania 182, 193–6, 203–4 Tasmanian Film Board 203–4 test screenings 40 theme 16, 29 Thomas, Antony 101–9, 102, 104, 105, 226, 231, 232 Thomas, Steve 204, 256 Thomson, Andy 224–5, 229–30, 232 Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be Done 107–8 Tim (art director) 204, 212 Tobias, J. J. 186 Tom (cameraman) 128, 130 Tongues Untied 21–2 transitions 86, 91 travel planning 74–5 treatments 190 trust 256, 269 TVO 230 U Boats: Hitler’s Sharks 248 UK Film Fund 192

Understanding Dreams 251–2 United States of America 229–30 Uprising of ’34, The 100 US Air Force film 242–3, 245–7 Vas, Robert 17–18 Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of anti-Semitism 66 video demos 179 video on demand 241 visas 206 visiting cards 226 visuals 72–4 Wales 230 Walton, Storry 184–5, 193–6, 212 Waltz with Bashir 22 war films 33 War Game, The 14 Waves of Freedom 173–4 Wayne (editor) 206–9 weather 80–1 web sites 241 Weinstock, Dubie 164–5 What Harvest for the Reaper 15 WildFury 191 Winston, Brian 93 Wiseman, Fred 14, 33 Wistrich, Robert 66 women directors 109–10 Woodhead, Leslie 109, 225–6, 231, 232 Wootton, Adrian 192, 202 workshops 56 World Television Documentaries 11. Yosselevska, Rivka 115 You Tube 246 Younghusband, Jan 231 ZDF 189–91, 196, 209, 226, 228–9