Stranger Than Fiction: Justin, now that this film is complete, in a way there’s some closure to this search. How does that feel, after having spent so much time on the search, to have it ended and out there?

Justin Duerr: It feels incredibly satisfying and wonderful and great and superb and spectacular and marvelous. But how do I really feel? That’s how I really feel.

STF: Colin is it you who oversees the online discussion about the Toynbee tiles?

Colin Smith: Yes.

STF: And since the film came out at Sundance has that picked up more?

Smith: Not really. People have been really interested, but people who turn up on the discussion board tend to be more interested in speculating about the mystery. There’s been a little bit of that.

STF: It’s funny, on the way over here I noticed a little tile skeleton man on West 3rd Street. There’s a suggestion near the end of the film that there are imitators out there of the Toynbee tiles. Are there any clues to that activity?

Smith: Yeah, there are definitely a number of copycat movements. The yellow stick figure tile that you’re referring to is—I think a Philadelphia-based artist, he’s definitely active in Philadelphia—who’s designs, probably a lot of you have seen them because there are a lot of them, the yellow space man figures. They’re all over the U.S. and the West Coast as far off as Seattle. He was influenced by the Toynbee tiles, but obviously he’s doing a different design and he has a different material to make his design. But there are people who are making actual Toynbee tiles that are copycats. The House of Hades are the most prolific ones, and they’re all over Manhattan, so keep your eyes out for them. Some of them have their own messages that are inspired by the Toynbee tiles and are really well done. And some of them are just copycats of the actual Toynbee tiles.

STF: Jon can you talk about putting this film together. You draw from a lot of disparate sources including archival footage. Talk about the amount of time you spent following these guys around.

Jon Foy: We started in April of 2005 so it’s been just about six years. My memory’s not so good, I can’t remember everything I’ve done over six years. We shot the ongoing investigation I would say until early 2007, so that’s kind of the time frame of the story. Then we just started going back through all of these interviews and sifting through it and figuring out how to build the case that we want to build. From there it was just a matter of, we want to make this clear, we want to make this clear, so what material do we have, and what can we drum up? And how can we use this material of someone we have? That was the process.

STF: Matt you did the illustrations for the film. Can you talk about what went into that, what source material you were drawing from?

Matt Rota: I probably know the least here out of anyone on stage about the Toynbee tiles. Jon contacted me right after I’d gotten out of graduate school, and I’d never heard of it. He sent me a lot of information. I still wasn’t one hundred percent clear about what the film was about, it was a mystery. But you sent me these general descriptions, and some of the messages off of the tiles, which were very visual. So the angle I approached it from was the idea of this big mystery and conspiracy so I tried to surround myself with that. There was imagery like the mafia and the Soviets and the government and the media. I did as much as I could to draw from that, knowing little about this, but getting inside those cryptic messages as best as I could. I just tried to give everything a conspiratorial, tense edge to it.

Foy: I loved how your stuff came out. I should say that Matt was very much in the dark—this is the first time he’s seen the movie. I would only add that when I saw Matt’s work—and Steve was actually the one who had first pointed Matt out to me because he saw his work in the Philadelphia City Paper—I said this is perfect. I don’t feel like I needed to give him a lot of direction because I feel like when you pick the right person you let them do their thing, and Matt did his thing and it was perfect.

STF: Steve, I want to ask you as someone who has a great devotion to these tiles. Do they continue to hold as much fascination when you come across a new one?

Steve Weinik: It’s been a long process and many years. Honestly, it’s not the same as it was when I was 13 or 14 years old and I saw one on the street and was like, wow, what is that and how did it get there and what does it mean? Because we’ve really answered all of those questions. I do have a sort of obsessiveness that continues on. I will look for them everywhere I go. If I’m visiting a new city I check for them at the intersection I think they would turn up—usually the busiest intersections. That’s almost a habit now that I can’t break. If I’m at a rest stop or in a city street, every time I cross the street, especially in New York or Philadelphia, I’ll look for a new one. That continues on, but the mystery of it we investigated pretty thoroughly and I think answered most of those questions.

STF: Just look both ways when you’re standing in the middle of the street.

Smith: That was the most dangerous part of this. We weren’t in a war zone or anything, but we’re standing in the middle of the street or lying down.

Foy: Steve drove up here with me and some other folks from the movie and Steve was pointing out tiles on the highway.

Weinik: No, I was pointing out where tiles used to be on the highway.

Foy: Justin and I went on a car trip last week and Justin was pointing out where tiles on the highway were.

Audience: Justin, imagine that you wake up and look around and realize that you can see every human that’s ever lived and the sky is all these funny colors and you must be on Jupiter. What do you think is happening?

Duerr: It’s funny that you asked that question, because often, many, many times in the course of filming this movie when we would almost get beaned by traffic, we would say, you know how this movie is going to end? We’re all going to wake up in Jupiter. To answer your question with complete honesty, I would think, well I must have been resurrected dead on the planet Jupiter. And I hope that the Minority Association or the powers that be, if there be any kind of hierarchical power system—the tiler never makes that clear in his writings exactly. He says we should put all forms of government aside to concentrate on this. He doesn’t really make clear what kind of hierarchy, if any—I would hope there wouldn’t be any on Jupiter after you’re resurrected. If there was anything like that I would hope they would be merciful to me. Otherwise I’d be pretty happy, it sounds nice. There’s a lot of room there.

Audience: While you were making it, did you see a difference between how street art is discussed versus the tiles. Was street art given a legitimacy that the tiles weren’t?

Duerr: It’s really strange because in the street art world, or whatever you want to call it, there’s a big disconnect between the horizontal and vertical worlds. If you’re doing street art that is vertical based—if it’s on a wall—people look at that one way. If it’s horizontal—on the ground—people look at it in a completely other way. That makes perfect sense. The way we orient ourselves in our environment has a lot to do with how our species evolved. We walk upright, that’s pretty strange. And we scan our environment from five to six feet up with our eyes, so we’re kind of designed as a species to notice stuff that’s in this horizon line. Stuff on the ground, or stuff high up in the air, is a whole different story and I think people compartmentalize them totally differently. I think the street art community at large in regards to graffiti and such always pretty much completely ignored the tiles or anything about the tiles. I never really heard them discussed in street art discussions until they gained a lot more attention in the press and stuff. More legitimacy or less? I don’t know about legitimacy but people always thought of them very differently.

[Q&A has been edited for clarity and length]

Photos courtesy Simon Luethi:

When the credits stopped a resounding applause shook the IFC theater. When it subsided, the sister of the film’s barrel-chested lifelong fisherman Pat “The Chief” O’Donnell quietly told a reporter, “My brother was incarcerated for 7 months right after the filming stopped.” One gets the feeling Shell Oil does its real dirty work when no one is looking. Her voice steady, her words tinged with an impossible mix of pride and sadness, O’Donnell revealed the emotional and financial devastation her brother experienced and is still experiencing.  As a husband and father to four children he missed the birthday of his youngest 9-year-old daughter while he was in jail. Equally difficult for O’Donnell, a modest crab fisherman, was that he doesn’t get paid if he doesn’t work.

The importance of The Pipe is ultimately that it exists as the sole illumination of the plight of the Rossport citizens. The mainstream media attention has long since withered as the battle endured. And over time, the diversely passionate townspeople have splintered only to reunite as more brutish truths of the oil company’s intentions are revealed.

As Domhnaill introduces us to the citizens we realize this is a group not unlike ourselves. Yet they are functioning to survive against impossible circumstances. In a cruel irony, many of the local police dispatched against the protesters are the childhood friends of those they now bully and take to jail.  In another scene, as O’Donnell navigates his small fishing boat into the path of the world’s largest vessel—the Shell pipeline-laying Solitaire—Domhnaill’s shot provides an almost perverse sense of the odds. Is it only a matter of time? You may be sad, you may be outraged, but one thing you won’t be is indifferent. Following the screening, Stranger Than Fiction Artistic Director Thom Powers spoke with Ó Domhnaill and Lysaght.

Stranger Than Fiction: What has the response to the film been?

Answer:  Here there is a great network. People tell each other [about the film].  Word of mouth has been very important. Here is just the same with the Irish people social networking especially. We have a Facebook page and website.

STF: How long did it take to film?

A: I thought I would be there for six months. I ended up staying three years. I fell in love with the story and the people. We finished it last July. Then we were picked for Toronto Film Festival.

STF: What drove your interest?

A: When I started researching in 2006, one of the local politicians had been jailed for corruption and the other resigned over the Shell situation. Shell was the first company ever to be given compulsory acquisition powers. When Shell interfered or ignored the laws and decisions that were issued, the justice system turned a blind eye. The people are of limited resources.

STF: What was it like after you wrapped?

A: When we were done filming we had 400 hours and really two stories. One was the corporate part and the other the human side. About Pat, Willie and Mary. From the corporation side we found that Europe would only act if damage had been done. It is retroactive. It really is a global story how political and business can go against the good of the citizens.

[Q&A has been edited for length]

STF: Bob, some of the people in the audience don’t know the background of Drew Associates. You were a writer at Life magazine and convinced Time Life to back you in funding equipment to make films. You had a bunch of trial short films and then the real breakthrough that [D.A.] Pennebaker and others worked on was Primary, about [John F.] Kennedy. So Primary is 1960, the film we watched was shot in 1961. Can you put in perspective for us this film, and what your company was doing with filmmaking at that time?

Robert Drew: I met Richard Leacock—I was looking for a way to put Life magazine still pictures into motion, and I thought it could be stronger if people talked and moved and did things onscreen. I fell asleep every time I looked at a documentary film. It took me several years of study to figure out why. And the reason why was, at that time, documentary films were all told—scripted and directed—and they were lectures. And lectures are dull. That’s why documentary films were dull. You just saw tonight a masterpiece by Jim Lipscomb which shows what can be done in a documentary film if you are smart enough to pick the right subject, wise enough to pick the right people, lucky enough to have the right equipment and tie into a story that is very compelling. That’s really what I was after. I just have to congratulate Lipscomb again, before he dies—he’s getting old you know. And congratulate myself on setting up the situation where he could operate. I mentioned Leacock a minute ago. Leacock and I made a film in 1957 which stimulated both of us to go on to making Primary in 1960. I have a short, less than three-minute excerpt from that film.

STF: We have a clip from that, but I want to hear from everyone else and then we’ll come back and see this clip from the 1957 football film you did. Jim, you were a writer, editor at Life magazine and you joined the Drew Associates crew. Can you talk about why you moved from the magazine part, and what interested you to join this film crew?

James Lipscomb: Drew and I were both writers and editors at Life magazine. I remember the first time I saw one of these films I thought, oh wow, that’s reality. We’re trying at Life magazine to tell reality with still pictures, but he told reality with film and by capturing people themselves. When I thought about capturing reality, I thought, I went to Miami High, I know what it was like to be there when the teams were playing Edison, particularly. And wouldn’t it be great to film it, and just tell the whole story. Not just from what’s going on in the field, but what goes on before the game, during the game, at halftime. That would be bringing reality to the screen. So I went to see Coach Fowle and asked, do you think you could permit it? And he said yes, and you can even film at halftime. I went to Coach Mooney and he said yes. So we started filming those players and coaches on the school grounds, as you saw, long before the game. Trying to capture the reality of what this competition meant to all of them. That’s what I hope we got across.

Drew: Lipscomb was a thinker, a writer. He put words on paper for Life magazine, and he organized pictures and so forth. When he came to work for us, I thought of him as a journalist, which I thought of myself as, and I thought of Hope Ryden as, as differentiated from a photographer. Our idea was to find stories, set photographers up and get the film made and edited. One day Lipscomb came to me—and he was a correspondent, not a photographer—and said, Bob do you mind if I take one of our cameras home to take pictures of my baby? And I said, sure.  A week later he showed me some of the film, and what do you know? The film was well composed, and most of all, it was stable. New cameramen, or old cameramen, even, have trouble being stable. Actually, camerawomen have a better time being stable, because they’re shorter and wider and so forth. But Lipscomb shot some very good stuff on his own child. The next thing I knew he was out shooting stories. He was an all-around super person who could shoot pictures and organize them.

Lipscomb: When I went to see [Drew], the first film I wanted to suggest was because I had seen Chubby Checker in a concert and he rolled his hips and his shoulders and his hands and everything. And I did a still story about him. But the way we got it was we flashed him in, in different positions, and put those pictures in Life magazine. But the whole time I was doing it I was thinking, the action is so much more exciting than the still pictures that we can get of Chubby Checker. I went to him and said, let’s do Chubby Checker. I ended up not making a film about Chubby Checker, but I did end up with permission to do a film about Miami High.

STF: Let me turn to Bill Ray here. He’s one of the stalwarts of the Life photography crew. Bill, how did you enter into the Drew Associates crew?

Bill Ray: I’m not sure, but I just want to thank everybody up here on the dais for leaving all of the dirt and scratches on that print.

STF: Bill, according to the credits you were following Heywood Fowle. I was wondering if you had memories of that time.

Ray: I didn’t realize at the time what an awful coach he was. I thought he was kind of a maniac, and of course you always want a maniac to photograph. It’s much better than a sane person. Give me the craziest person in the room, we’ll do a story on him. But I didn’t realize really what a bad coach he was. Giving some poor football player hell about something that happened ten minutes ago isn’t going to help anybody.

STF: Hope, you were taking sound with Pennebaker, is that right? I would love to hear your memories of that time.

Hope Ryden: It was powerful, I don’t know what else to say. I think we were all exhausted all the time. Maybe we weren’t all nice to each other, because we were all tired. But we got a film, and it was terrific Jim. I’m so proud that I was in on that. That’s the first time that I was on the field with anybody here, from the Drew Associates. It was exhausting. We’d go from one possible scene that might be useful—maybe somebody at home—different places to get material to make a film. It’s not a film if it’s just a game, you’ve got to get everything. So we were running around like crazy and I was exhausted. But it was a good start because every film that we ever did was exhausting, so I found out from the beginning.

STF: Penny, can you tell us what your role on the film was? You and Leacock were kind of roaming around, right?

D.A. Pennebaker: This was the first time that we’d assembled a real gang to rob a bank. Up until then, at most two or three people had gone out to make a film. And they sort of sat with it and nursed it and finally brought it back and secretly edited it if they could get away with it, and turn it in. This was the first time that we really decided to do a big caper, as it were. There was nobody exactly in charge, but there never was. It’s hard to explain to people about this film. I was reading about Robin Hessman’s film that she did in Russia, in the Times today, saying she was lucky that she got the home movies. We expected to be lucky. We would have been really disappointed if we hadn’t been lucky, although we never would have started saying, we’ve got to be lucky or this film’s dead. It was like a walk in the woods, you really didn’t know what was going to happen. That’s what made it interesting for us. But it made it interesting for the people we were filming, because they knew we didn’t know. We were all kind of on a blind hunt to have a film happen in front of us.

The difference between the documentary when I first perceived it was really that it was a story told by somebody. And it was filled with pictures and sometimes home movies, but basically somebody told you a story, which is a time honored method of telling stories. Suddenly, the camera made possible a story in which you actually witnessed what happened, which is really fantastic when you think about it. You actually see the volcano go off. Up until then, you’d only heard somebody tell you what it was like. If you’re really going to do that, if you’re going to witness something, you don’t know what you’re going to witness until it’s happened. So you have to go out with a kind of blind faith that luck is on your side. I’ve never doubted that somehow it would happen the way it should, but I’ve never known, or even expected that you could script. The problem for us was always when you got this material all together—and in this case there was five or six people. Claude Fournier had come down from Canada to join us, so I think there was six of us filming, maybe more. But everybody was sort of filming what took their interest. We didn’t know what we had until you sat down and looked at it on an editing machine.

It was a different process, you had to then make theater, because that’s what people would want to see. They didn’t want to see blind luck take place in front of them, they could watch that at a baseball game. They wanted to see theater that people had put on stages for years, and that was a different kind of thing and it took us a while to come between those two and make it work. But the theater of it was important. Hearing the coaches lines was important, dialog was important. All of those things were crucial, whereas prior to that in the documentary they didn’t matter much because the narrator would tell you what he said, or the story would tell you. To actually hear the coach say to the guy who’s sitting there, desolate, because he’s been kicked out of the game, this is the last game you’ll ever play in your high school career. He might have taken out a club and hit him on the head—this is a kid. He’s probably fifteen, sixteen years old. That’s an amazing thing. You probably could have had an actor act that, and written it out, but people would say it’s not real. But when you see it and hear it, it’s so real it kind of makes your back crawl. It’s the witnessing that really makes it work.

Lipscomb: There’s one thing along that line. A critic who saw this film said that when Coach Mooney picks up a board and bangs it on the table—as a stimulus to send his crew out to play—the critic wrote in the paper, they pushed this coach to bang a piece of wood. I was as surprised as the players were surprised, and they were inspired. The critic, however, had to think the cameraman put him up to it.

Ryden: I think that what Penny said was very interesting. What was different about the way that we were making films was that we never knew how it would come out. Prior to that documentaries were collecting film of something that everybody knew how it came out. While we shot it, we didn’t know who was going to win, if anyone was going to win, if they called the game off because it was raining. We didn’t know what was going to happen. I studied drama at the University of Iowa, and one of the books that I read was from a Russian who said that in real drama, it doesn’t matter if you succeed of fail, it just matters that you care. And that was what our films were all about. We didn’t know who was going to win. If you were following somebody that you cared about a lot and she wanted to win, it didn’t matter that she didn’t win. The film was just as good that she didn’t win. And I realized that this Russian was a genius, he really set me off on a good path when I was very young in college.

Drew: There was a lot of talk among us as we made different films about what made good films, what made them strong. And Hope Ryden came up with a sentence that stayed with me forever, and I try to live by it in a way. She said, you can care about a film to the extent that the people in the film care about what they’re doing. It’s roughly what she said, and it’s absolutely true. If you want to make a film that fails, make a film about people who don’t give a damn.

STF: Steve, as someone who was in the film I want to get you in on the conversation. How much were you aware that this film crew was there documenting this game?

Steve Diamond: Not so much, although I do recall thinking at the time that this person wouldn’t have said this except that a camera was on them. Our right tackle, Carl “The Snake” Robbins, said, “C’mon Miami High, we’re Stingerees!” He never said anything like that before. Coach Mooney never before or after banged that thing. When that happened, I said, geez, he knows the camera’s here. But other than that they were totally unobtrusive, invisible and just let nature run its course. I just want to say I’m honored to be on this platform with these people who took a football game and turned it into a piece of art.

STF: Steve, the screening that took place two weeks ago in Miami with so many players and Coach Mooney, what was the reaction of the players seeing this 50 years later?

Diamond: You have to remember it is 50 years ago, and that whole thing about when I was a child I spake as a child. Things were different then, it was a simpler time. And the single all-consuming passion in your life could be something as basic as, let’s beat the other team. There was maybe four people sitting there who were teammates of mine. And it was all, “Yeah, that was a good one!” To other people it’s a documentary, to me it’s just a home movie. There are my friends, there are the cheerleaders, there’s the rain. I would like to share one thing about this. I still have tactile memories of that first touchdown, that I don’t have for anything else. We drove the defensive tackle five yards back into the end zone, and wound up on the ground with a fat ass defensive tackle on my head. I can still feel the wet grass on my face, and I can smell the lime that was used for lettering in the end zone. I didn’t know whether or not we’d scored until finally I heard a canon going off, and I thought, yeah, we did it! That just brings back specific memories of that time.

Drew: I know that most of the points that your team scored were scored right over you. My question is, how did you do it? The guy in front of you was a great football player, how did you keep opening up the space physically?

Diamond: Because I was better. [Laughs]. Actually the Miami Herald did have an article about the game the next day. But they also had a side article on me, just saying, geez, this guy did a good job. I was happy with that.

STF: Steve, did you go on to play football in college?

Diamond: Some people might not call Ivy League football, football, but I did play for Harvard and our senior year we had a Ivy championship team and I was All East. And I did graduate cum laude in general studies, so I wasn’t just a pretty face.

Audience: Who was responsible for the racy images of the cheerleaders? [Laughter]

STF: There’s a few pointed shots of cheerleaders legs and derrieres and the question was who had the eye for that?

Pennebaker: I did find myself standing in the middle of the field with a camera and suddenly I thought, well I don’t belong here. But I didn’t know how to escape so I just went around with them.

Audience: I’m just amazed how close up you were to these individuals and they act as if there’s no awareness of your presence. How was it that you got them to relax and ignore you?

STF: Today there are so many more cameras out there that we’re used to it, but in 1961 it was very novel, so I think the question is well put.

Lipscomb: What started off was, we were filming them at practice at the high schools long before the game. And when we were filming them, we weren’t asking at all what they would do, and we weren’t suggesting what they should do. We were just recording what happened. And pretty soon they got used to us and they weren’t thinking about the end product at all. For us, just getting people used to our presence was the crucial way to get footage that was real.

Diamond: I might add to that, the camera people, as much as they could be, were very unobtrusive. And we had other things on our minds, which was going out and practicing, being the best we could and winning a football game. It was just another piece of static, a distraction. We just focused on what we had to do.

Pennebaker: Also our cameras were very homemade cameras and they didn’t look serious. I think that helped.

Lipscomb: They were also among the first cameras that a cameraman could just carry on his shoulder. That was an important move to getting this kind of film.

Ryden: Also the cameraman could stand away and zoom in and get the picture. The sound person had to get the sound. And, of course, the sound was so loud in this picture that you didn’t have to be anywhere special to get the conversation. But usually you had been hanging around that person so long that they didn’t care, they didn’t know what you were doing anyway, you were just following them around. And they knew you liked them, they had to know you liked them. That was important, at least in the films I made. I felt it was very important that people feel like, well she understands if I make a mistake and she never says anything anyway.

STF: Victoria Leacock whose father Ricky was a cameraman on this is here.

Victoria Leacock: One of the stories that my father always told about shooting on this film was, he and, I think Penny too, were on the bus with the losers. He said that out of many tense things he’d filmed over the years that was one where he really thought that one of them might just sock him in the face. He was worried. But he said they filmed, but it was a very tense, unhappy, long bus ride.

Pennebaker: And they were big, I was surprised that high school students could be quite so big, they towered over me.

Diamond: At the screening last Wednesday in Miami, I was hugging Coach Mooney and he said, you know you put on enough weight, you can now play football.

Audience: How many cameras did you use?

Pennebaker: I think six that worked. That was always the question, which of our cameras would work, because they were all homemade. I think Claude had an Arriflex and we let him use it because it was so noisy it didn’t matter. But the rest of us used our rebuilt cameras. When I did Monterrey Pop I remember that you can’t direct a lot of cameraman in a situation like this like you could a squad of soldiers or something. There is no objective, it’s just keep looking and like what you see. If you can, get it on film. You just let people go and find their own targets. It’s a funny thing to be involved with because it’s like a bank robbery where you’re not supposed to get the money. I don’t know what you’re supposed to get, but there’s no way whether you can judge whether you did it or not until you look at the film.

STF: I wanted to show this three-minute clip that Bob brought. Bob, this is from a film that you and Leacock shot a few years earlier. It’s another film about football. Do you want to set this up for us?

Drew: Ricky Leacock and I—him being a cameraman and me being a producer at that time, we had a meeting of minds, and we wanted to tell stories in the manner that has been described here. I got some money to go to Rapid City, South Dakota, and shoot a balloon ascension. That was my first film where I had a cameraman. He had a camera, which was an odd one. The balloon had floated after 30 days and fell down. I was sitting there with a cameraman, cameras, film and I hadn’t shot anything. And I was not going to go home without shooting a story. So I got on the telephone with all of the Life people in the West or Midwest looking for a story. I finally found a story which was a football game. So a football game became the first story ever shot by me and Leacock together. We did not have a good camera, we had an Arriflex with a Barney, which is a huge camera with blankets sewn all around it. We had one photographer and one sound man, myself. So we went to shoot a football game. In screening that stuff, you see hints at what might be coming. You also see the lack of a second camera, or a third camera, or a fourth camera. You see the lack of a Lipscomb, or a Pennebaker, whom I had never heard of at that time. No Hope Ryden. Just me and Leacock and a camera and a football game. You can see the inadequacies of what we were working with and of ourselves, and some hints at what might develop.

[Film excerpt is screened]

STF: Can you take us through some of the changes that happened between when this was shot in 1957 and Mooney vs. Fowle, which was shot in 1961?

Drew: In 1957 there was no camera that could take sync sound and be carried by a human being. The jury-rigged camera we did use was not a silent camera. One reason I chose a football game was because it was so noisy we might not hear the camera so much. What I valued and enjoyed about this so much was Leacock got a feeling, and I did too, for what could be. The enthusiasm, the spirits, the ups and downs and the intimacy in the dressing room. By the way, that’s the first time that I know of that a film was shoot in a football dressing room. Within three years we had the equipment, greatly due to Pennebaker, we had the ideas and we had the feeling for the story that allowed us to make Primary which we regard as the first cinema verite film in the United States.

STF: Someone asked me why this film was never shown in Miami. I wonder what your impressions were about that?

Lipscomb: It’s not just impressions, I’ve been told that there was a TV company in Miami that wanted to show it. However, it was made as part of a Time Life series, and Time Life was intent on selling the series, and not just one show out of the series. And they never did succeed in selling the series in Miami.

STF: I’ve heard rumors that people in Miami didn’t like the film because it emphasized football over education. I got the sense that people in Edison just didn’t like the way this story turned out and that might have made it controversial. I went back and looked at old articles in the Miami Herald from 1964 which are full of weird, different allegations including the implication that the directors had instructed Coach Mooney to slam the paddle and do other things. Anything else you want to say about that?

Lipscomb: I remember particularly the writer who said, these cameramen must have directed all of these guys to do these things because it’s so extraordinary. Like a coach banging on a wooden board before he sends his team out. What was real, was that I was as surprised as the players. And they were surprised and enthused. And they went out and won the game.

Thom Powers: As a film person, one of the anecdotes that intrigued me was that you found the files of correspondence between Upton Sinclair related to the Eisenstein film.  Was there any other example of Stalin’s interest in film or connections to film that stood out?

Jonathan Brent: He was always interested in film.  He was particularly interested in American Westerns and American films of all sorts.  He would call the members of the Politburo together very late at night to come to the Kremlin and watch a film with him, usually an American one.  Khrushchev writes about this in his memoirs.  In the archives themselves, there is a variety of material about film and Stalin’s interest in seeing film used to project Soviet ideology, Soviet power, and all of these things.  He clearly understood the power of film.  Clearly he recognized that this was the great mass medium and wished to exploit it as much as possible.  So he reviewed all films.

Powers: Were the films that he was watching with the Politburo allowed to be seen by the general public?

Brent: (laughs) For the most part, no.

Powers: What was his source for these prints?

Brent: Well, if they could steal atomic bomb secrets, they could get American films a lot easier.  (laughs)  They had people working in Europe, they had people in America - there were various trading links with the West, even in the 1930s, whereby these materials could enter the Soviet Union.  But for the most part, these films and materials like them were restricted to the nomenclatura – the elite of the Soviet system.

Powers: As you concentrate primarily on written documents in your work, do you stay in touch with archivists who are plowing through the film records? What is the state of film archives?

Brent: I know there is a huge film archive. I don’t spend that much time dealing with that since my main interest is the politic history of the Soviet Union.  But what became extremely apparent to me, and to anybody who studied this, is that that there’s almost no differentiation between cultural policy and political policy.  And this is a very important thing to understand.  In the United States, it’s pretty clear that matters of culture are dealt with by the left-brain, statecraft and the budget with the right-brain, and the two hardly ever meet. There is Lincoln Center on one hand and there is the Pentagon on the other.  The differentiation was never as distinct in the Soviet Union because they understood the power of culture to shape the mentality of the people and it was precisely this mentality that they recognized as the guarantor of the security of their system.  So they had to continuously nail that down. 

Powers: Can you describe where your overall project on Communism is today and where it is going in the future?

Brent: Today we are digitizing the personal archive of Joseph Stalin.  This is a huge project that will take 3 or 4 years and involves digitizing some 404,000 pieces of paper and putting them up on an electronic platform so that there can be worldwide access to these materials.  We have the project underway right now in Moscow and here in the United State and expect to have the first fruits of this about a year from now. 

In addition to this project that is going to yield incredible material about Stalin – how he thought, what he wanted, what his real ideas about Soviet ideology were and so forth – there are a number of other projects that are also continuing, including a very major one that I initiated 10 years ago called “The Children of the Gulag”.  It occurred to me that even after Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich and a variety of other memoirs and studies, no one really had dealt with the subject of what had happened with the children.  What happened with the kids whose parents were both arrested and they had no relatives – who took care of them? And I discovered that the KGB had in fact orphanages for these kids and they were being drawn into the system in this fashion.  In fact, the KGB thought these kids would become the shock troops of Soviet power for the future.  Instead most of them became criminals or went into the army.  Many of them simply disappeared.  But a lot of them are people you meet on the street in Moscow today. 

Powers: How many people are we talking about?

Brent: We’re talking about millions of kids.  Of course they also left behind drawings.  And I’m trying very hard to get my hands on these drawings.  But as of now, they are still classified as top secret, if you can imagine that.

Powers: But they’re actually collected and saved… that in itself is extraordinary.

Brent: In these orphanages, kids drew just as they do… they were normal kids.  Traumatized, but normal.  These drawings, if we could get them, would give us tremendous insight into the psychology of that time because it would be unmediated expression of their feelings and their thoughts.  It would be extremely important to see these materials.  And I think the KGB recognizes the power of them, which is why, as I understand it, it is still considered top secret.

Powers: As you talk about that it makes me think about documentary work that I’ve seen done about children illustrations from Nazi concentration camps and makes me wonder that there’s so much film documentary work done on that era and nowhere near as much on the Soviet system.  Do you find filmmakers approaching you about this kind of work?

Brent: No.  It’s very very difficult to explain.  I don’t understand it.  There should be a major film, and it should be called Gulag.  This is the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, and I do not wish to minimize the horror of the Holocaust, but this catastrophe of Soviet communism was responsible for the incarceration of at least 50 million people over time – of whom, a minimum of 20 million were sent to the Gulags.  The numbers of children who died unrecorded, whose names are unknown, whose births were unknown, whose parents were unknown, and whose causes of death were unknown – that number will never be discovered.  They were herded onto trains – and this is before Nazi Germany and Auschwitz – they were herded onto cattle cars in the 1930s, shipped from all regions of the Soviet Unions to Siberia where they were often simply left to die on the tundra.  Nobody knows who they were, what they did, why they died.  It is a tragedy of unbelievable proportions and nobody is interested in this.  It is a disgrace, I feel, in Russia today that despite the opening up of the Archives and the “liberalization of Soviet society” and all of that, there is still no museum of the Gulag. 

Powers: From the articles that I’ve read, it sounds like the archives are getting even harder to access under Vladimir Putin’s regime.  Is that your experience?

Brent: Well, that is a complicated matter.  In a way the publishing of these materials does not contradict the interests of this regime.  What they wish to do is not obstruct the publishing of these materials; they wish to centralize and control the publishing of these materials.  And there are many reasons for this – and some of them quite legitimate.  Just think about how our government protects the secrets of the FBI and national security going back 100 years.  Not that there was an FBI 100 years ago, but nevertheless, state secrets.  Try to get something on Martin Luther King out of the FBI.  What you get is 500 pages, all of it redacted.  So there is nothing abnormal about a state wishing to protect its secrets. 

What is very strange about this is that in 1991 the Soviet Union was declared defunct.  Yeltsin announced the disappearance of the Soviet State.  They renamed it, they called it the Russian Federation.  Government officials were thrown out of office.  A new administration was elected and people thought it would be a break from the past.  The protection of these secrets from the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s by the present government is a clear signal that they wish to restore continuity with the Soviet past.  Now, what the exact nature of that continuity is, we don’t know exactly at this point, but obviously it has an authoritarian base.  The behavior of Putin in many different areas, and Yeltsin before him by the way, is very authoritarian, not really structured as a liberal democracy and it’s not entirely clear where that government is going.  However, repudiating the Stalinist past is not antithetical to their present aim.  And so in our project, we have almost unfettered access to the Stalin materials.  As you get past Stalin into more recent history, it becomes more difficult. 

Powers: You asked a provocative question in the book that you were alluding to earlier: why isn’t the villainy of Stalin better appreciated and why doesn’t it bring the shock of horror that other 20th centuries crimes do?  I’m sure there is a unique answer for why that’s true in Russia and I’m not quite sure if you answer it in the book…

Brent: No, I don’t because I’m not sure there is one answer to it frankly.

Powers: But I wonder what your guesses are for why that’s true in the US where his villainy ought to be as appreciated as anyone’s villainy.

Brent: Well, it’s complicated.

Powers: Is the academia full of Reds?

Brent: Perhaps to some extent, but I don’t like to put it that way.  There is a bias in academia that has grown up over several generations that it is the protector of liberal democracy over the authoritarian impulses of the Right in this country, as symbolized in Joe McCarthy.  And it produced a very very odd consciousness, which was as follows: Joe McCarthy was bad; therefore as an upstanding American citizen, I have to oppose Joe McCarthy.  Joe McCarthy hated Stalin; therefore anybody who hates Stalin is somehow sympathetic to Joe McCarthy.  And this is a very normal kind of thing.  I don’t want to call it guilt-by-association, but it’s comparable to guilt-by-association.  In other words, whoever attacks Communism is inevitably suspected by the Left-wing in this country of harboring Right-wing ambitions and sympathies, which will ultimately lead you back to Joe McCarthy.  So, for instance, I am branded by a lot of people as a Right-wing reactionary Joe McCarthyite – which I’m not.  I’ve never been that. 

Powers: That’s what you get for writing for The New Criterion.

Brent: Yeah, well what did I write for The New Criterion? (laughs) That’s the funny thing about the Right in this country that in some places, like in The New Criterion, they’re actually open to things.  No Left-wing magazine would publish the things I write because it was exposing Russia and exposing Soviet crimes.  Certainly not The Nation, but I’ve also written for The New Republic and The New York Times and elsewhere and they were interested in what I was doing. 

Powers: I understand the generation of academics that came up in McCarthy’s time and came up with a memory of it, but I wonder if those generations will give way to a new understanding.  I think anecdotally of a book like Martin Amis’ Koba the Dread which when it came out, there were a certain number of reviewers saying “doesn’t everyone already know this”?

Brent:  Right.  Well, think of how long it took for Susan Sontag to repudiate Stalin.  She didn’t do that till the late 60s or early 70s.  No, no, no.  Up until Morton Sobell confessed publicly that he had been an accomplice with Julius Rosenberg, The Nation and Victor Navasky – who I love, who is a wonderful man – was still unwilling to give up the belief that Julius was innocent.  There are those kinds of deeply held beliefs.  Think of all the controversy that has sprung up even over this last 12 month period about the guilt or innocence of Alger Hiss.  It was all over the news when a couple of academics decided Hiss could not have been where the VENONA documents said he was at certain points of time and therefore Hiss could not have been the spy that the Right-wing in this country makes him out to be.  And this kind of translates quietly through individuals like Richard Nixon, and is passed on to the Right in this country today.  It gets transmogrified into questions of Civil Rights, Civil Liberties, Gay Rights, Women’s Rights… and I think although it’s true that the image of Stalin is far less vivid and vital in the minds of most young people today, there is still a sensibility that somehow attaches to feelings of sympathy for Socialism.  And if you have feelings for sympathy for Socialism, well then maybe the Soviet Union wasn’t all that bad.  So what are you doing digging up all this dirt? I can’t tell you how many people came to me when we first published The Secret World of American Communism.  And they said to me – here at Yale – why don’t you just let sleeping dogs lie? Why are you interested in stirring all this stuff up again?

Powers: I appreciate your time and your point of view.  My own political trajectory is on the Left, but my wife and her family are Latvian Jews who lived through several layers of that before they came over here in the 70s and I think that on the Left, there is a certain disregard for that history or a failure to come to terms with it.

Brent: I think that’s a good way of putting it. It’s a failure to come to terms with it.  Even though Anne Applebaum’s book on the Gulag was successful and a couple of others have been fairly successful, there is no real attempt to grapple with that history and to understand America’s engagement with it, and that’s the thing that’s disappointing to me. 

Barbara Kopple: First I would like Jeff, who is so knowledgeable about what is happening in unions today, to tell us something about yourself and your background and where the labor movement is going.

Jeffrey Grabelsky: My name is Jeff Grabelsky. I’m a union electrician by trade and a labor educator by profession and a radical trade unionist by conviction. I work at Cornell University and direct a program there that provides training, education and research and technical assistance to union leaders all across America. What I felt through the film is how timeless the recurring question of “Which side are you on?” is. And the irrepressible spirit of workers to stand up and fight back against oppression, which is also timeless. The workers who were struggling for union recognition in this fight were exercising a right that private sector workers won in the 1930s during the New Deal, which bestowed upon private sector workers the legal right to organize and engage in collective bargaining. The law that provided for that right, the National Labor Relations Act, says in its preamble that the reason why we should promote the practice of collective bargaining as policy—and that’s what it says, not that the government should remain neutral on this question—was that there was a recognition at the time, in 1935, in the middle of the Depression that employers were very well organized and workers were not. And as a consequence to that disparity in collective bargaining meant that wages were depressed because workers didn’t have the power of organization.

What those strikers were fighting for were not just the rights of those workers, but rights for workers throughout the economy to engage in a process that’s essential to a functioning economy and essential to a democratic society. When you look at what happened after 1935, literally millions of workers organized, the percentage of the workforce that was unionized in the 1930s was about 10%. Through the 1930s and the second World War millions of workers organized, the level of unionization rose from about 10% to about 35%, which meant that one in three workers in the economy enjoyed the direct benefits of union representation and collective bargaining. As the level of unionization rose, it meant that non-union employers were impelled to raise their wages for two essential reasons. One, to prevent workers from unionizing. And two, to attract and retain workers who would go to a unionized company if they didn’t unionize. What happened in the 70s is that the level of unionization began to level off, employers began to resist workers’ efforts to organize. And as the level of unionization began to decline, workers wages began to stagnate. Since the time of this strike, working Americans have essentially had a flat line when it came to their standard of living. The thing to keep in mind is in the 1930s, the right to organize was delivered to workers only in the private sector. It wasn’t until the 1960s when public sector workers won the right to organize. And what we’ve experienced from the 1960s, 70s to today is a significant rise in the level of public sector unions—about 30%-35% of public sector workers are unionized—but a continuing decline of unionization in the private sector—it’s below 7% today. There’s no way to really understand what’s happened in Madison, what’s happening across the country without considering the development of private sector versus public sector unionism. It’s really interesting that this strike takes place at a critical moment in the transition in the U.S. labor movement.

Kopple: I’m very curious about what the future of unionism is. I know for a long time people weren’t thinking about it in the passionate ways that people were in the 70s. I’m wondering if now that people are being attacked, that people are rising up, waking up and we’re going to have a really strong union movement again.

Grabelsky: A prominent academic, who was addressing a group of economists, and addressing this very question of what’s the future of the U.S. labor movement. He said, “The past ten years have seen changes of amazing magnitude in the organization of American economic society. One change to which I refer is the lessening importance of trade unionism. No one who carefully follows the fortunes of unions can doubt the relative decline of the power of American trade unionism. Many writers have counseled the leaders of American trade union movement to abandon their present forms of organization. There are no indications that anything of this kind will happen in the near future. It is hazardous to prophesy, but I see no reason to believe that American trade unionism will so revolutionize itself within a short period of time as to become in the next decade a more potent social influence than it has been in the past decade.”

These words were uttered in 1932 by a prominent economist shortly before tens of millions of workers were organized. I sort of have the same answer for you in terms of what is the future of the American labor movement. It’s always dangerous to predict. But I don’t think that anyone would have predicted the enormous response on the part of working people in Wisconsin. The response brings to mind this irrepressible spirit that you see in this film of workers who at some core level that there are fundamental rights worth fighting for. I’m an optimist by nature, but I think the response in Wisconsin indicates that workers on some fundamental level understand that they’re getting the raw end of the deal and the only way, as [United Mine Workers President] John Lewis says in this film, without organization, you have no power. Working people in this country increasingly believe and recognize that they’re living with more insecurity and less justice, and the only way to rectify that problem is through organization.

Kopple: Do you think it’s something greater than just breaking the union? Is it something the Republicans are doing to undercut the power of the Democratic party, because unions usually support the Democrats?

Grabelsky: There’s clearly a political element to the attack on the public sector unions. Today there are more workers unionized in the public sector than in the private sector. There are five times as many jobs in the private sector as in the public sector. American capital has been extremely effective in limiting the power and reach of unions in the private sector. The only remaining source of strength in the labor movement is public sector unions. Very clearly, going back maybe 10 years, public sector unions have been in the crosshairs. The only countervailing force to corporate power that has any meaningful resources or capacity is the labor movement, and the core strength there is public sector unions. It’s clear that if [Wisconsin Governor] Scott Walker and other Republicans can be successful in crushing public sector unions, than there’s no longer any countervailing force to corporate power. I don’t think it’s just about that. It’s also about the financial benefit that’s derived by companies when they don’t have a countervailing force at the bargaining table. This is both about money and power.

Kopple: As I look back on this film, and I haven’t seen it in a long time, I just thought about how this shaped me as a person. I was so lucky and so honored and fortunate to live through this period of time and be trusted and brought into this community by these workers. It was phenomenal, and also to see that these workers were willing to give up their lives for what they believed in. That, at a young age for me, just stayed with me and made me realize that I was going to take risks and do things in my life. If I needed to look back I’d look back at this film and see who my mentors were. It was a very important moment for me in my life. Since then I’ve done a lot of other union films as well as other films, but that core and passion, and those people willing to speak out for what they believed in are thing things that carried me through my life.

STF: Barbara what was it that drew you to the subject matter in the first place?

Kopple: I was listening on the radio, I think NPR or WBAI, and I was a wild one, wanting to go out and do something and change lives if I could. I heard that [United Mine Workers Union leader Joseph] Yablonski and his wife and daughter had been killed and there was a whole upheaval within the United Mine Workers known as Mine Workers for Democracy. I borrowed $12,000 and off I went. I came back and forth just to raise money. I hit off everyone I knew for birthday presents, Christmas presents, just to keep going.

Audience: A couple questions. Were you scared during the shooting? And also, when did you actually start filming? Some of the footage looked like press conferences.

Kopple: I started filming in 1972-73, and I ended in 1976. I got all of the Yablonski material from going through the coal fields and looking through archives and basements. I went off with boxes and boxes of material that I was able to use to tell the Yablonski story. Was I scared? Sometimes I was scared. Sometimes I was very feisty. When everybody had the guns that day I was very scared. I could feel juices in my mouth knowing these organizers that I looked up to were scared too, that made it a little more terrifying. What made it beautiful was the women, and their strength and how they just cut through everything by singing “We Shall Not Be Moved.” They had no fear whatsoever. There were times I was scared, but most of the time I wasn’t. I learned how to shoot guns, .357 Magnums. We lived with miners and were in their homes at night. We put mattresses on the floor because they’d shoot up the homes.

Audience: What do you envision your next passion project to be?

Kopple: I don’t know about passion and love, but Friday I’m leaving for southern Sudan and filming with Ellen Ratner—her brothers are Bruce and Michael Ratner. We’re going to be camped out. The astounding part of all this is that this women is freeing slaves, she is teaching people with polio how to breathe, she is bringing wealthy people there to build schools and basketball courts. We’re also doing quite a few other films as well.

STF: For people who are interested in staying on top of what’s going on, what are sources you would point them to?

Grabelsky: There are a few places in alternative media that cover labor struggles, like The Nation and In These Times. I think the problem is that we don’t have enough of an opportunity to follow really closely what is actually happening on the ground. Looking at some of that alternative media is helpful, but what we really need are some more films, and other cultural workers who can help construct a different narrative. Part of the problem is that you look at what’s going on in this film and think, yeah those miners really needed unions but things have changed and we don’t really need them anymore. That’s kind of the narrative, but there’s still lots and lots of workers who don’t enjoy the benefits of union representation. When we see workers who are trying to organize, provide whatever support you can. I think its important for people to both be well-informed about these struggles and provide whatever support you can.

[Q&A has been edited for length and clarity]