Stranger Than Fiction: How did you get involved with this project? Seeing the personality of Natalie, and how passionate she is, seems like a great fit for you. How did this all happen?

Barbara Kopple: Well, [co-director] Cecilia Peck and I decided we wanted to do a film on the Dixie Chicks. And this was even before they made the statement. And they went, no, no. They had a [Dixie Chicks] website crew with them that captured the statement, thank goodness. And we went back to them and said, now can we make a film with you? We had a whole discussion with them and they looked at our other films, and they said, you’re on.

Audience: I noticed that you played around with time, between 2003 and 2005. Could you talk a little about that?

Kopple: We tried to do a linear structure, but it just fell flat.

Bob Eisenhardt: I think all the editors had a gut feeling that it couldn’t be told chronologically. But we kind of had to prove it to ourselves, and for the longest time, it didn’t work. It was very confusing, and it was hard to find the right jumping off point that sent you backwards. About three times during the process we strung it together chronologically to look at it. It made it for about 30 minutes and then everybody fell asleep. We finally got the time passages to work, then it was a question of getting the right moment to leap back and the right graphics and the right pacing.

Jean Tsien: As a way to help us edit this film, we had hundreds and hundreds of index cards made in the editing room. And there were days we were just staring at the wall in silence…

Eisenhardt: Moving these cards around and looking at them and then arguing about whether it would work or not.

Kopple: And as always, there were certain things we wanted in, and that other people didn’t. We were working with so many different editors and different sensibilities, but the discussions that we had were sensational, because you just couldn’t say, no. You had to explain how it moved the story forward or what it gave the characters, so it was very egalitarian in the editing room.

Audience: It’s such a well edited film, but it’s also such a great verite film. So I’m guessing you spent a great deal of time with them. I’m curious about that, and how your relationship with the three women developed over time.

Kopple: I think, for me, the three women were so amazing. They were about transformation, they were about courage, they were about sisterhood. I really wanted to have friends exactly like the Dixie Chicks, because they were there for each other for all the big moments. The wonderful part of it was that most of the time we could just be there filming, and they just went about their lives. They were in so much crisis, or trying to write their songs, or having babies. And we were totally unimportant, and they just allowed us to film. So it was very good. But, Natalie does speak her mind all the time.

Audience: Did they ever get mad or frustrated with you?

Kopple: I think the heaviest thing was when they came to see the film for the first time, because we didn’t let them see the anything until the film was in fine cut. I’ll never forget it, it was my birthday, actually. We got wine and things for them to eat, but probably not enough wine. So they came in and they were looking at it. It was in Bob’s editing room and we were watching them watch the film. And it wasn’t as if after they film they went, oh, that was so great, or, we really loved it. It was as if they were watching their lives go by and remembering all those painful things and their body reactions were all doing different things. I remember that Natalie had never heard Martie say that she would give up her career for her. When she heard that, she touched her leg. I think it brought them together, but I think it really freaked them out to watch the film. It was as if somebody had climbed into their souls and exposed so much about them.

STF: Did you think about filming them watching the film?

Kopple: That would have been too hard. No, we didn’t.

Audience: How did you decide to when to stop filming and start editing. Because I was surprised that their big Grammy sweep, which to me was their “fuck you” to the whole industry, I was surprised that it wasn’t in there. Was that a conscious decision.

Kopple: I think we said what we wanted to say. As filmmakers, we always want to put everything in. But the film had been finished by then, and we just cheered from the sidelines, and sort of enjoyed the moment of them being able to say, “screw you,” to everybody.

Eisenhardt: We did film a whole other concert. We felt it would be important to show them coming back to the United States, not just seeing it in London. There was a fairly huge shoot in Detroit. And we took one look at it and said the other scene has all the emotion in it, and we didn’t use it.

Audience: During the segment in Dallas, what was the mood with the crew?

Kopple: We didn’t film that. The [Dixie Chicks’] website group filmed that. So I can only guess. But I know that Martie and Emily were petrified for the Dallas show. And they moved apart from Natalie, so she was sort of standing on the stage and they were at the far side of the stage. There was so much at stake for all of them with their families, but they did it.

STF: There are so many emotional moments in the film, and in that moment, Natalie is almost marching into battle as she walks onto the stage. She says nothing, but it’s so powerful. Her shoulders are hunched forward.

Kopple: Also, the really beautiful part of that was her husband, Adrian [Pasdar], was there and just hugged her. He didn’t really travel with her that much, but for this particular one he came because he just wanted to be there for her.

Audience: What was it about the Dixie Chicks that made you want to do a film about them before they made the statement?

Kopple: We knew Adrian really well. He had lived in New York. He would always tell us stories about the Dixie Chicks and how fascinating they were. Cecelia, who was also friends with Adrian, started hanging out with them, and she called me and said, come on, we’ve got to do this. We just thought they were fascinating creatures. They weren’t political then, they were doing country music. It was looking into a space we had never seen before, we had never looked at before. Then it evolved into such a total transformation, and doing unbelievable creative work.

Audience: What was the film’s reception in the country music world?

Kopple: We thought that this film was going to show in so many cities and really show theatrically in a lot of different places, and it did show in some. But in certain areas, it was never shown. The interesting thing is that the Weinstein Company, which distributed the film, did focus groups at the very beginning—in New York and I think Kansas. And it got the highest reviews that the Weinstein Company had ever gotten. Even in Kansas, they didn’t like the politics so much, but they really loved the Dixie Chicks and their families and wanted to see more of it. I think if people went to see it, it touched them. I went to Washington, D.C. and one of the right-wing group members was in the audience. He started saying things before the film. After the film, I called him up and asked him to be on the panel with me so everybody in the audience could get a sense of why he felt the way he felt about the Dixie Chicks. At the end of the film he got up there and said, you know, I really love this film. He said, I shouldn’t be saying this, but I really love it. For me, it’s just getting out there and showing it and communicating with people. People fear what they don’t know and what they don’t understand.

Audience: Did the change in the political winds from 2004 to 2006 change how you edited the movie, or how they movie was promoted?

Kopple: I think we just wanted to make a good movie. We used all the scenes that we thought would do that. The distribution company, the Weinstein Company, wanted to make it more political. At the very end when it was decided they were going to distribute it, they asked us to put in a few political pundits, so we did that, but that was as far as it got. I think the Weinstein Company really thought this film would get the Republicans out of office. We just thought the film was about freedom of speech, it was about sisterhood, it was about feeling betrayed. It had so many larger, universal issues.

Tsien: When we first started the project, we were actually at the beginning of the making of the album. So there were 500 hours from 2003 and we had no idea what was in the footage. So we really had to comb through every single frame. We didn’t even know the statement was caught on film, we discovered that. We were just finding nuggets.

Eisenhardt: You could barely hear the statement, it was shocking that they captured it. It was a great gift to have the 600 hours of footage, I don’t know what we would have done without it. These guys were with the Chicks all the time, and we loved them because they pressed themselves up against the wall and were in the corners and didn’t bother the Chicks at all. But they got all that stuff. The meeting in the hotel room after London. But for me, it wasn’t really about the politics, it was about the friendship. Now, the political landscape has changed so much, it’s strange seeing the involvement in that moment. What stayed with me was the sisterhood.

Audience: I was wondering what it was like to shoot Rick Rubin. Did you have any interesting experiences with him?

Kopple: He’s very camera shy and laid down on the couch a lot.

STF: He had prayer beads that he used to help him in meetings.

Kopple: His iced lattes, he had his dog. Nothing outstanding other than he has the golden touch, and it seems like everybody he works with becomes megastars and their albums do so incredibly well. We weren’t able to capture his magic, but I’m sure it’s there.

Audience: Can you talk a little more about the dynamic between the three women. Was there tension between the band members?

Kopple: I think that if there was a conflict it was about the kind of music that they were going to play. I think Natalie wanted to go more into rock and for Emily and Martie country just meant everything to them. They were a little nervous, I think, when Rick Rubin came into the picture and were trying to figure out where they were in all of this and trying to preserve what they did best. Natalie was trying for a while to find herself and Martie and Emily just did a country album maybe about six or eight months ago where they were singing and playing, just the two of them together. Courtyard Hounds is the name of the group.

STF: This is a great film with a great story and great characters, but when did you know that you had something special. Or at what point in a project do you get this gut feeling?

Kopple: Sometimes we didn’t know that, and sometimes we were wondering if audiences were every going to really look at this. And then, I don’t know, sometime it started to come together. It really leapt off the screen, and we felt that we had the right structure and the right dynamic. We loved it, and we knew if we loved it, maybe somebody else would.

Audience: Many times I’ve felt like within documentary, music films are considered a minor genre. Have you felt that way about the film?

Kopple: I’ve done a lot of films that could be considered music films, but I’ve never thought about them that way. We did Woodstock Now & Then, we did a film called Wild Man Blues about Woody Allen and his jazz band. But I don’t look at this as a music film, I look at it as something about sisterhood, about friendship. It’s about so many of the universal themes that we all care about that it goes far beyond being a music film. I don’t think that we’ve ever really done a music film because there’s always stories attached, and always human elements attached.

David Cassidy: We keep talking about the concept of friendship, and how fortunate can we be as filmmakers to have three extremely talented women who are trying to figure out what they just went through, and to find catharsis through their art. Thank goodness they are so talented because they did find peace. And how fortunate we are that we could find such a brilliant ending because that comment from Martie that Barbara spoke about before, every time I start to tear up a little bit because it’s such a powerful statement. And I’ve seen it dozens and dozens of times. Every time I hear the music I think about what went into the writing process, and it’s not just three women with pens and paper, but they’re really trying to figure out what they just went through and who they’re going to be at the end of it.

Stranger Than Fiction: I have to say that this is a really fantastic film—powerful, provocative. I watched it a couple of days ago and it provoked a lot of feeling. It just made me feel angry when I finished watching it, the situation that these two guys were in. How did you come to this story?

Katie Galloway: There’s an article in the movie, when the informant is revealed. And I assume many of you probably know a little bit about the story, and may have known the twist, but it gets a great response from audiences who don’t have a clue. When I first read about it in the New York Times it was early January 2009 and the headline was, “Activist Unmasks Himself as Federal Informant.” The story was about two young activists from Midland, Texas, which I thought was interesting, this informant and the allegation of entrapment. I also assume many of you are familiar with the pattern of cases around the country since 9/11 where there’s an FBI sting, domestic terrorism accusations and a counter-allegation of entrapment. I know in the current issue of Harper’s there’s a piece by Petra Bartosiewicz, and she does a great job of telling the national story. The people who are mostly affected are Muslim youth in the U.S. I know Mother Jones is dedicating a whole issue to that broader story.

STF: One of the things that struck me about this film, it’s not just a film about politics but it’s also about guys interacting with each other and male bonding and rites of passage. Can you talk about that powerful relationship that developed between Darby and Brad and David.

Galloway: I don’t know how much you glean from the film, sometimes I forget where the film ends and my knowledge ends. Brad’s father and grandfather were rodeo cowboys. The grandfather was pretty close to Brad, but his father ... was just not around much. [Brad] admits to sort of looking around for a father, even though he wasn’t conscious of it at the time. A powerful male figure closer to his age that he respected was something that he craved. David’s Dad, I think, is an incredible father. He’s a bit of a hothead. I don’t know how much of that you get from this, but he sort of pushed David toward trial ... and David didn’t always feel comfortable with that. [David] had a very tumultuous childhood being bounced around, and was sometimes without his father for long stretches. [David and Brad] both acknowledge that that was a big part, sort of seeking this older male’s love and respect. They also describe Brandon as like a tough football couch that you love, but that is sometimes very troubling. Sort of putting them to the test again and again. It’s not just the father issues, but really what everybody goes through when becoming an adult, being put to a test by an older male figure.

STF: One question I had was about the interview with Brandon Darby. Did you shoot that or did somebody else shoot that, and when was it done? It seemed to have a different texture.

Galloway: Fortunately for us, since he didn’t agree to participate in the film, he was the spokesperson for Common Ground Relief, which was an organization that did incredible work after Hurricane Katrina. He founded it with a former Black Panther named Malik Rahim and Scott Crow, and some others. Scott Crow, for any of you that caught the cover of the Times a few months ago, is the activist in Austin who’d been watched for three years. Brandon did tons of interviews, a couple of really good ones that we drew on mostly. One was by a German filmmaker, that sort of close up one. And so we were able to license it, thankfully, because for a minute there we thought we didn’t have a film. For a long time Brandon agreed to participate once the case was over, and then he changed his mind and we thought, oh shit, we don’t have funding.

STF: Did you milk that footage for every last second, or was there a lot of it?

Galloway: There will be more online at the POV website. We licensed it by the minute so the whole interview won’t be there, but there’s about an hour and a half there, and then another maybe hour and a half to two hours that another filmmaker made. That’s the footage where he’s sort of saying, we need to think about the people we love and we trust, and he’s got the fist behind him. That’s a student filmmaker.

Audience: How did you get the law enforcement agents and the prosecutors to talk candidly?

Galloway: Here I owe a real debt of gratitude to Lowell Bergman, who Al Pacino played in The Insider about the tobacco industry and 60 minutes pulling the story and all that. He was an early funder of the film and a coproducer with the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkley. When we went to go watch David’s trial, he said, when you’re in town just call the FBI and say you’d like to have coffee and meet with them and tell them what you’re doing. No cameras etc. So that’s exactly what we did and were sort of stunned to find that they were happy to meet us for coffee. We met with their public affairs officer, E.K. Wilson, the guy driving through the film. It turned out that he had worked the case and then it got transferred, so we got lucky that way. We met him, kept in touch with him, and then when we asked [FBI headquarters] for permission much later, they went back to Minneapolis and said, what do you think? They agreed to give us the interviews at that point. It wasn’t as hard as I thought, but I’ve made other films about prisons and at that initial point of human contact, some of the walls come down.

STF: Was the prosecutor and were the FBI as convinced of what they were saying in the film off-camera as they were on-camera? Did they 100% believe that what they were saying was the truth?

Galloway: I think those are two different questions. They had a complete poker face, a united front, on 99% of the time. E.K. Wilson admitted at one point that nobody wants to be put on domestic terrorism because there aren’t any domestic terrorists. It’s so incredibly bloated with so few real terrorists—they’re called aspirational, not operational. And I would argue that almost all of the cases since 9/11 have been aspirational, i.e. people who couldn’t have done anything. I don’t know if they believe it. I’ve seen again and again with prosecutors I’ve interviewed that there’s a true believer quality to some, and Jeffrey Paulson has that true believer quality. It’s really a black and white world and these are the bad guys.

Audience: I wanted to ask about the production of the film because there were so many interesting layers—the phone calls, journal entries. Some of those were reconstructed and some of those were source material. I’d love to hear about that process.

Galloway: We thought we’d be covering the trial, and then we didn’t get access to the courtroom. So the idea of the heart of the story being following these two guys and their families going through the legal process—we found out pretty quickly the heart of the story was what happened between Brandon Darby, Brad and David in the six months leading up to their arrests. Fortunately for us, because there was a trial, there was a discovery process, and there was a lot of material presented at trial—phone calls, Brandon’s letters to the FBI. That’s a voice actor who’s our voice of Darby in this film. But all the words of Darby were his real letters to the FBI, and one was really the backbone of the entrapment case. We had a lot of surveillance footage. The Department of Homeland Security gave the Twin Cities a $50,000 grant just for surveillance cameras at the RNC. It turned out that we as taxpayers have access to that footage, and someone gave us a tip about that. We just went through hundreds and hundreds of hours to find our characters on these various corners where we knew they were. The Wal-Mart footage—Wal-Mart tapes us all, I’m sure you guys know that. It would have been a lot harder to get all that had we not had access to it through discovery and the kindness of the defense attorney. We didn’t get anything through the Freedom of Information Act, although we FOIA’d everything. For a year and a half we got nothing but redacted stuff. And then we had reenactments, and those are, I hope reasonably easy to detect. Although they’re sort of tricky because there are a couple of real scenes that we have—like Bradley calling his mother and saying, they’re threatening me. Or David talking to his girlfriend. People think those are recreations and they’re not. Everything pre-2009, there’s a kind of treated, abstract quality to the footage and it’s intercut with interview bites.

Audience: Given that the film’s subject is pushing up against government conspiracy and government oppression, I was wondering if you ever got any pushback from individuals or agencies yourself in the process. Did anybody say, there’s a line in the sand, don’t cross it?

Galloway: Very early on my film partner Kelly Duane de la Vega—she had been the one interacting with Darby initially. And her e-mail was shut down when we first got to Minneapolis, and we called her service provider and they said that it would be back up after we left Minneapolis. That seemed to be very clearly related to the story we were trying to tell. A sort of early scare tactic, and it was scary. A lot of paranoia on our parts through the making of the film. We went to Brandon Darby’s house after he told us he wouldn’t participate. He lives in an undisclosed location and we figured out where it was and showed up at his house. He called the FBI and threatened us and all that. I was waiting, when I went to Hot Docs [in Canada] to get stopped at the border and have my computer confiscated and all that, but no such drama.

Audience: Can you talk about why Brandon flipped and when he flipped, and when was he outed as being an informer?

Galloway: Somebody dropped his name in court, and then it was known. So he then wrote this open letter to the activist community. Why he flipped, there are all kinds of theories about. One is that he was never a, quote, real activist and I think that is trajectory from early on is very suspicious. We’ll talk about it over beers and I can tell you what I think. But I would say a majority of people believe that he really fell out with the activists he had founded Common Ground with. It was a nonhierarchical organization and he was a very hierarchical guy. All sorts of things were going on there and he sort of fell from grace within the organization. A majority of people you’ll talk to will say he had a hero complex and that didn’t fit with that organization at that point. He was befriended by this local police sergeant, and then became the hero in the eyes of the FBI, or so he thought. That was before he was involved with this case. He was involved with another case [as an informant] very briefly. A guy named Riad Hamad who was a Palestinian rights activist who Brandon was working with. He wound up bound and gagged in Lady Bird Lake in Austin, dead, and it was ruled a suicide within 48 hours. And so that now has its own life in conspiracy. That was a really hard one to leave on the cutting room floor, but there’s only so much you can do in one movie.

Audience: The government, what do they need to convict somebody?

Galloway: I’d say the heart of the answer is the definition of entrapment that gets accepted at trial. There are two main definitions. One is the one that the prosecutor gives you at the beginning of the trial. You can take someone to the edge of the pool, but you can’t push them in. That was arguably what happened here. This informant, over the course of six months took these guys to the edge, including telling them in the van on the way up about this Italian anarchist hero who was chucking Molotovs, but then didn’t tell them, go make the Molotovs, here’s the money. There’s another definition of entrapment that I think of as the common sense definition, which is, if the government had never been involved with the accused, would they have committed a crime. That’s the one that was ultimately accepted in David’s first trial. I think that’s why he got a six-six split, which is insane. An entrapment defense is notoriously difficult to prove. He was lucky he had that definition in his case. But then he says that his win was based on his lie.

Audience: Has David seen the film? What’s his state right now?

Galloway: David just saw it about a month ago, first by himself and then with 20 of his closest friends in prison. They really responded to the phone calls and being cut off at that moment where you’re trying to convey that critical piece of information to your loved one. Apparently there were shouts and screams in the room when that happened. That was one of my happiest moments, hearing that all of the people watching it feeling like their experience was reflected in the film. He loves the film, thankfully. The e-mail he wrote us, it’s beautiful and we’re going to ask his permission to post it at some point. But we have it tacked over our edit bay back at the lab, because that’s the review you care about more than any other.

Steve James: The film, when it came out, elicited a strong response. We certainly got our share of positive responses, I’m heartened to say. But we also got some strong negative responses, and one of the strongest was from J. Hoberman at the Village Voice. I wouldn’t say I’ve heard it all, but I’ve heard a lot, and thought a lot, and felt it all myself. I would love it if this weren’t what happens too often at screenings, especially film festivals, where people are shy about expressing themselves or their reservations or outrage. I’ll take positive remarks too, if there’s any of that.

STF: One thing you told me about the edit of this film was that you had gone through a pass yourself, and thought you were kind of hard on yourself. And then you handed it over to another editor who said, no, you can be a lot harder on yourself.

James: [laughing] What was interesting with Bill Haugse, who was also one of the editors with me on Hoop Dreams, when I showed the cut to him at that point, it was three hours and 20 minutes or something—I didn’t think it was done. I showed it to him and he said, I’d like to go back to the dailies. And I went, why would you want to go back to the dailies. And he goes, no, no, it’s fine. But I want to see everything you left out. Two things stick out in my mind to this point. One was he felt like the narration, there were times when I was taking myself more to task for making the film in the film. And he said, that’s great, but you’re doing it so much that it seems like a backdoor attempt at sympathy, which I thought was a really insightful comment. My other favorite Bill Haugse story is when he saw the scene with the Aryan Brotherhood guys around the truck, my version of that scene had everything except me stumbling all around and being completely undone by that guy. It was the weirdest thing because when I got in the edit room to start to cut it, I had no recollection of how he had done that to me. So I ended up cutting the scene the way I remembered it, instead of what happened. So when he got ahold of it, and he showed me the scene, it was like, okay.

Audience: Wendy, what was she thinking when she let him stay with her child? Did you ever ask her that?

James: I did ask her that. What she said was, every time she had been around Stevie, she had seen this tender side of him, which you do see in the film. He had always been great at playing with her daughter, she felt in a very appropriate way. This is what she told me, I think there’s some question here, but she said that she had never been clued in to some of the other stuff that he had been doing. It’s true that until this crime happened Brenda had never really spoken to anyone about being sexually abused by him when they were children, I know that to be true from speaking to Brenda. Wendy didn’t live right in Pomona. Her contact with Stevie was sporadic, so when this happened she claimed that she really didn’t know, and then all of this stuff started to come out that she said she was unaware of.

Audience: I saw this film when it was first released and it really affected me, especially the two women Tanya and Patricia. Their wisdom was quite affecting. My question is, have you had reactions from the people in the film since it’s been released?

James: I’m a strong believer in showing films before they’re done to the subjects. And not right before they’re done, as in, we’re mixing this film next week, and I wanted you to see it before it’s done. But when you can still do something if they tell you something you think is relevant and worthy of addressing. Wendy saw the film and she felt fine about the film. She wasn’t sure she wanted her daughter to see it for a while. I’ve lost touch with Wendy so I don’t know what her daughter’s reaction to the film was. But at the time Wendy felt like the film treated them with some sensitivity in her situation and felt fine about it. So did Brenda. Stevie’s mother kept telling me that she could only get about halfway through the film and then she would start crying and couldn’t finish it. I talked to her several times, encouraging her to watch it all the way through, and she said she could never get through it. But it was interesting because I would get calls from her occasionally in the years since then, like when the man she was living with passed away she called me in tears over it. I’m not saying I was a close confidant of hers, but for whatever reason she felt like she wanted to talk to me, among other people, I’m sure. I kind of decided she had made it all the way through the film. People would ask me, why did she consent to be in this movie. And my two-bit psychological analysis of this is that on some level, I think this was her penance for what she had done as a mother when he was a child. That she felt in some way, a need to confess her own sins. Even though she doesn’t really quite do it, I think by virtue of being in this film, it was that. With Stevie it was very complicated because he was in prison and we tried on several occasions to get the prison officials to let him watch the film, and they would not let him watch it. But he would receive correspondence from people who had seen the film, and he would correspond with them. And guards who had seen the film who would interact with him. When he finally got out, I wanted to go down and show it to him in person, but I didn’t want to hold him up from seeing it. So I sent him the film and said, if you want to wait I will come down and watch it. But I won’t make you wait if you want to see it. I kept expecting to have this profound discussion with him about the film, but we never really had it. He watched it and told me that it was okay, and that it wasn’t Hoop Dreams. I said, no it isn’t Hoop Dreams. And he said, I was kind of expecting something more like Hoop Dreams. I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that. And then I tried to talk more about it with him, and he said, somebody’s at the door, I’ve got to go. And that was the last thing we talked about with the film. With Brenda it’s interesting. She still lives in southern Illinois, Verna passed away a few years ago. I went down for the funeral, and Brenda at that time was telling me stories about people coming up to her over the film, and she was saying that it was virtually always a really positive experience. She told me this one story, she said one night she was walking across a parking lot in Murphysboro late at night, and this one big, tough tattooed long-haired guy came up to her. And she was fearful in the way he approached her. And he comes up to her and says, you’re Brenda in that film, right? I just wanted to say that film really shook me up in a good way. And I just wanted to thank you for being a part of that. I know there are a lot of people who, the last thing they want to do is thank anybody for making this film. But I have found over the years, this film more than Hoop Dreams or any other film I’ve ever done, I receive these impassioned e-mails out of the blue from people who find me after watching this film. And it’s usually people who’ve had this tremendous pain in their own lives, or a loved one that they have struggled with—sometimes its sex abuse or molestation. A lot of times it’s just a difficult person that they’ve wrestled with and didn’t know what to do with. And they felt compelled to write me about it.

Audience: Looking at the film now, what do you think happened among these people because the camera was in the room? What do you think would not have happened between them had you not been there?

James: It’s a hard question for me to answer for them. It would be a better question, of course, to put to them. At one point I talked to Brenda about why she agreed to do this, and why she was so courageous. She said that she felt like there were other people like Stevie out there and other families like hers, and if this could in some way help somebody, that would be great. I do think documentaries, especially ones in which you spend significant time with people over time, they become a therapeutic enterprise. We as filmmakers get something from them, clearly. They give over their lives and trust us to tell their stories. I think what the film can give them is to look at their lives in a different way. To see a significance that they didn’t see, simply because someone thought it was worthy of a story for a documentary. I think, at its best, documentaries should encourage people to have that kind of reflection. I know that for me, making this film was a complicated experience. That’s why the people who criticize it and villify me for having made it, I understand that feeling, because I was doing that myself. So how can I begrudge them for feeling that way? I’m not saying this says something great about me at all, but had I not made this film, I don’t know that I would have been in his life to the degree that I was. I think making the film gave me more of a reason to try and be involved, not just for the film’s sake, but also, I’d like to think, for his sake. I’m not saying that I would have not been involved once I knew what was going on, but realistically I can’t imagine I would have been there with the same degree of consistency and effort, because I live six hours away in Chicago, and I’m a busy person with my own family to raise. I don’t know if it would have happened.

Audience: I was really bothered by the Huber Home parents. I felt like they had such a strong connection with him, and I was bothered that in their reunion, they could seem so loving and like they cared so much about him, but they had just abandoned him.

James: I think I did them a disservice if that’s how you felt, and maybe that’s how all of you felt, God I hope not. I understand why you felt that way, but I hope it’s not a universal feeling. At the beginning of the film, Hal left to become a preacher. He had always wanted to be a pastor at a church, and he had gotten an opportunity to something that he loved and wanted to do with his life. And he couldn’t do both, he couldn’t be a pastor and a foster parent. That’s number one. Number two, wasn’t in there. I didn’t put it in because I felt that they were uncomfortable with me putting it in. But they had young children of their own that were living with them in that home, and they worried about what could happen to them. Stevie was getting sexually abused in that home, they worried about their own children. The other thing is, that is a really hard thing to do. Anybody that even does that for a period of time, my hat’s off to them, because that’s such a hard job. I think the tragedy of it for me, is that they were Stevie’s real chance at turning himself around, they were his best shot. And when they left, for reasons that I don’t condemn them for, his last, best chance left with them. Being there that day, I felt like that scene is the film in microcosm. It really is his whole life, everything that went wrong, everything that could have possibly gone right, but didn’t. People do move on. And I moved on, and I take myself to task, obviously, in the film. But I don’t make myself fully responsible for what happened to him. There were a series of abandonments in his life. I was part of that, and they were in their own way, and his mother was, clearly. His real father, whoever he was, was in his own way.

STF: This film is like Project Nim with a human being.

James: That’s a good observation.

Audience: The thing that really mixes me up about this film is, at what point do you continue investing in someone, and at what point do you walk away. I thought what your wife said was very moving, when she said, it’s his behavior, it’s not who he is. But at what point is somebody’s behavior who they are. I think it was heartbreaking, because you see so many moments where you feel like he’s coming back, or he’ll show remorse, he’s open to counseling. And then it’s the same pattern over and over again. I guess my bigger question is, is there anything he could do that would make you walk away?

James: I’m not in his life the way I was. I did go visit him in prison, but not as much as I should have. I wrote him in prison, but not as much as a should have, I sent him plenty of money. I think everyone has their limits. Brenda volunteered, when he got out, to oversee the disbursement of this $4,000 from film festival winnings because I was trying to do it from Chicago, and I was constantly telling him no to certain expenses.  So I said to Brenda, are you sure you want to do this, because for me this was the perfect solution. She’s there and she’s responsible. And she said, yeah, I’ll do it. I want to do it and I’m the best person to do it. Stevie is extremely frustrating, and prison has not done him well. Some people go to prison, and it’s not because prison can be a transformative, positive experience in the way it’s set up. But it does, for some people, transform them in a positive way. Stevie, spent all of those years in segregation by himself virtually,  He’s so damaged that he can’t seem to figure out a way to get on the right path. My wife, who works with sex offenders, —she’s had tough nuts like this before. She doesn’t think it would be impossible for him to change at all.

STF: You talk about people who come out of prison with positive experiences, some of those people populate your new film The Interrupters. Can you say a few words about that film. It’s another in-depth study.

James: This film grapples with violence, focusing on the streets of Chicago. This organization in Chicago called Ceasefire has this interesting take on violence—looking it from a public health model, as if it mimics infectious disease. In part of the film, we follow what are called these three violence interrupters. They work for this unique part of Ceasefire that employs ex-gangbangers and drug dealers and convicts, and sometimes all three, who go out and mediate violent crises in the streets, in the neighborhoods they’re from. They have their ear to the ground. The creator of the program said they have the ability to intercept whispers, and try to step into the situations before they turn violent, or to prevent retaliation. So we follow these three interrupters. They’re all people who have literally turned their lives around in a profound way, they’re quite inspirational people. This is a film that has plenty of bleak and tragic things in it. I hope that it’s ultimately inspiring in many ways, because these are inspiring people and you see the work that they’re doing, and they’re effective in ways that I think will surprise you.

Stranger Than Fiction: Ron, front and center is Charles Kuralt as the correspondent, but the philosophical force behind these films is Arthur Barron, the producer. You knew him years after this, when he was a professor at Columbia University. Can you tell us a little bit more about who Arthur Barron was and where this fits into his career.

Ron Simon: He saw documentary, especially in the mid-60s, as a different type of vocation from the veteran documentary filmmakers who made up CBS news—you heard at the very end that this was a production of CBS news. It was a corporate product, and Arthur Barron wanted to be an individual. He wanted to bring a new sensibility to the documentary. He saw himself as part novelist, a little bit of a poet, and was trying to make a statement in this film. He had previously produced a film on The Berkeley Rebels, which looked at the Berkeley free speech movement. And he ran into a lot of obstacles at CBS news. He just could not create a document and let parts of it speak. If you had one point of view by the students, you had to let the administration speak, and that was CBS news policy. Arthur wanted to make a film with a very strong point of view, and he had to figure out how to do it. The macguffin in this film is that sociological questionnaire. Arthur said, if we can get the students to give us statistics, then I pretty much can do anything, we don’t have to have an opposing point of view. Arthur wanted to give his own viewpoint of what was happening in American society. So he used the questionnaire as a way to allow him to express himself.

STF: He has the scientific backing, then, that passes the muster of CBS news.

Simon: Yes, you can’t argue with it, because you would not need another opposing point of view because you had the statistics. That’s how Arthur conceived of this project. And he certainly came to Webster Groves, and admitted this, with preconceived notions, and for many documentary filmmakers that is not what you do. You experience the culture and then you try to recreate it in the editing room, especially with cinema verite. Arthur did not want to do that, he wanted to create this part novel, poem, a little bit statistics, talking heads—trying to give his viewpoint. For him it was very much a portrait of what was going on in American society, and he chose Webster Groves. He considered several different communities—he thought of Rye, New York, at one point. But he thought it was better to go to the heartland. And he also tried to make visual statements in this film. I don’t know if you noticed, but in the very first scene when the parents are talking, there’s car in the background. If you know about technology of the time it would be very hard for anyone to see that car. What Arthur did was flood the front yard with light so that car was present when he shot. It was his way of creating this little symbol of affluence, that you would always think of the parents and this car that dominates. One of the parents said, why are you putting up so much light. And Arthur said to them, well, I like your car. That’s what Arthur did in this film, and it was manipulative and he was very honest about it. Many documentary filmmakers would question that, but Arthur wanted to make a statement with his film.

STF: Something that always stood out to me about 16 In Webster Groves Revisited is the father with glasses and the pipe who comes across in the first film as a very rigid, narrow thinker. And then when you see him in the second film, he has a much more nuanced view and you get a different interpretation of what he said in the original film. I wonder if you know more about the circumstances of the making of the second film. I thought the second film came because there were so many complaints about the first film, but clearly they were filming the night it aired, and so there was some intentionality about it.

Simon: If you look at the cover of “Documentary Explorations,” you’ll see a picture of Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts looking at Gimme Shelter. And that was a big scene, here are participants actually looking at the footage. It was sort of an interesting thing for a documentary film to do. [16 in Webster Groves] was done about four years before Gimme Shelter, and I think it was Arthur very self-consciously wanting to do this experiment. And he thought about that French film Chronicle of Summer. It was really to show what his subjects thought of his film, and he was really making a statement. He wanted to even make a further statement, I think it’s part of Arthur trying to explore the impact of his film on his subjects. It did create a controversy, but most of the reviews that I read, especially from the New York press, looked down upon the Midwest. It was not as if any of this was happening in the Northeast, in New York City. It was really a Midwest sort of problem. But as we go along, it’s really an interesting portrait of where we are now, and this whole hierarchy. Arthur obviously wanted to deal with the class system, and he dealt with it here. It was a rich picture of what American society was like in 1966 and how we developed.

STF: For all of the quirks of the time that it was made, it’s still a strong, nonconformist point of view that’s being put across on mainstream television. An equivalent today is hard to imagine.

Simon: Arthur was probably the only filmmaker of the time to have the police chief be the fount of wisdom. No one else did that in a 60s film. Arthur did that, and that was sort of his personality.

STF: Is there anyone in the audience who has experience with Webster Groves or knew anything about the making of this film.

Audience: I’m from St. Louis originally and know Webster Groves really well. It is a nice community. Today it’s sort of a beacon of historical preservation of housing and nature. I came into it thinking I would see more of St. Louis in general. Webster Groves is not much different from many neighborhoods in the St. Louis regions, at least of a certain class and background. I’m surprised at the perspective which I think of as being a much more Catholic city. But it was really interesting to see the discussion on race and segregation. For a city that has such a large black population, it’s extraordinarily segregated, and it’s still a problem that they faced. But at the same time, it wasn’t really that shocking.

Simon: There is a famous resident of Webster Groves, Jonathan Franzen, the novelist. And if you go on YouTube, you’ll see his statement on the film. He was seven years old at the time. He’s been questioned about this film many, many times. Like a lot of residents, he did not like the idea of an outsider, someone like Arthur Barron—Jewish from Brookline, Massachusetts—coming into his community and defining it. I think it was more the outsider bringing some truths to who you are, much like a novelist. And Jonathan sort of questioned that, but I think that’s what you do as a novelist too.

STF: Jonathan Franzen mentions this film in his memoir “The Discomfort Zone.” Can you talk about where Arthur Barron went with his career after this?

Simon: When he was teaching at Columbia University he looked very much like producers of the time. He had a very bear-like look, with a beard. He reminded me of a Craig Gilbert-type, at least as he was portrayed in Cinema Verite—

STF: Craig Gilbert, who produced An American Family and was played by James Gandolfini in the recent HBO show Cinema Verite.

Simon: Exactly. He had that look about him. But he wanted to have this novelist viewpoint, so he very much wanted to get into fictional film. Around that time at Columbia he had a film at the Cannes Film Festival called Jeremy, which looked at two teenagers from New York who are both very artistically inclined, and it starred Robby Benson. It was that sort of film that he wanted to make, but it didn’t really have the resonance that his documentaries had, but he still strove to get into the fictional field. Somehow Jeremy began to define him, and instead of making films as part of the American New Wave, to be the Scorsese that he wanted to be, he was making more projects for juvenile television. He was doing after school specials, he was doing things for Mr. Rogers. I’m not quite sure how that turn in his career came about, because that’s not what he wanted to do. For some time he dropped out. When I became curator at the Museum of Television and Radio I was looking for Arthur because there was this one Bob Dylan film that he had made. When he worked at Metromedia he had done a film about Dylan in the studio with Odetta. I wanted to find that film and show it, pair it with Don’t Look Back or something. I had great trouble finding Arthur. I talked with several people he had worked with at CBS who said he had dropped out. He had a divorce, he had worked closely with his wife Evelyn and had disappeared, he was very hard to find. In the late 90s he turned up and he was head of the communications department at Emerson. I headed up there and saw him, and did not recognize him at all. He had somehow been ravaged by disease, he didn’t have that big, bearish look. He was rather a small man, and he didn’t really want to talk about this era at Columbia or his documentary films. He died about a year later and it’s surprising that there was nothing in the Times. He was sort of forgotten, and there’s very little about him now. But, as I mentioned, in the late 60s, early 70s, he was prominent in many of the books, many of the magazines.

STF: He made a notable film about Johnny Cash [Johnny Cash - The Man, His World, His Music].

Simon: He did, he produced that film. And that film was just remastered a few years ago, I guess Robert Elfstrom was the director of it. A real interesting portrait of Cash as part of his time. So he did that film at Metromedia when he did the Dylan film.

STF: At the Paley Center for Media, you can go in and watch any of these films for the price of your admission.

Simon: Exactly, they’re a part of our collection. We have 150,000 programs. We really have a really good documentary collection, especially of the network news in the 60s and 70s, there are a lot of interesting things that were done. A lot of experiments. There were hundreds of hours of documentaries on network television in the 60s, and that sort of changed as economics changed. I very much recommend two documentary portraits that Barron did after this, when he was at PBS. He sort of went back to the black and white verite days. This film Factory is very interesting because he looks at the different layers of management and workers at this ring manufacturer. It really gave a full-bodied portrait of what it was like to work at a New York company. Unlike Salesman, by the Maysles Brothers, which just looks at these four traveling bible salesman, you really get a look at this whole corporation. I think that’s what Arthur was after, he wanted to give a full portrait. He did one other documentary called Birth and Death, that’s exactly what it was. You experienced the first part of the documentary about a couple giving birth to their first child, and the second half watching a man slowly die of cancer. A real interesting juxtaposition, but that was Arthur. He wanted to try to give a full picture if he could.

STF: One other footnote I wanted to add, if you were watching the credits of 16 In Webster Groves Revisited you might have seen the associate producer on that is Peter Davis who went on to make Hearts and Minds, the Academy Award-winning film about Vietnam. Peter at that time was working within the CBS news documentary crew and made many distinguished programs there including The Selling of the Pentagon, which we’ve shown here before. But Peter has said to me how much working on this film and working with Arthur helped influence him in his career.

Simon: And if you read the literature of the time, Fred Friendly, who was president of CBS news at the time, really talked about Arthur Barron as someone with a vision of how to change documentary. And I think his career took a change, he was reflecting on what to do at Columbia, then he sort of tried feature films, and it just didn’t work. It’s sort of sad that he just didn’t stay with the form, because I think he worked much better in documentary than he did in any other form.