Interview: Sarah Colt on the PBS Documentary “Walt Disney”

Posted on September 13, 2015 at 3:18 pm

Sarah Colt’s two-part “American Experience” documentary about Walt Disney is a fascinating look at one of the towering figures not just of film history but of American history. Disney revolutionized film and the way we tell stories with his animated features, nature documentaries, and family entertainment. He created a new industry and a new way for families to vacation together with Disneyland and the Disney World properties. He was a pioneer of new technologies from sound recording to photocopiers and animatronics. And he built one of the world’s most successful businesses. It premieres September 14 and 15, 2015, on PBS stations.

Director Sarah Colt told me that the Disney company opened up its vast archives for her with no restrictions and no right to review the film before it was made public.

It was really an amazing thing and we were thrilled. It made the project possible. From a documentary film maker’s perspective who has worked on a bunch of historical films this was like a dream come true. Because I was making a film about an artist, a filmmaker, and an animator. So not only was there material of him and the behind the scenes kind of stuff that you are always looking for but also his work. To be able to use big chunks of “Snow White” as part of the story was just amazing. So that was just incredible. I’ve never made a film about a filmmaker before. That was very fantastic to have all that material. And their photograph collection is very well organized. They have a really good database and we could access what we needed. The footage of the behind the scenes kind of material was harder to find because the Disney Company. They are not a professional archive and that’s not their main purpose so not surprisingly their collection is not necessarily all in one place, it’s in lots of different places and it was a lot of work. They totally helped us but it wasn’t a one stop thing where you just look in a database and there’s all the material. There was a lot of hunting and talking, asking questions and then were these big moments of excitement when we found things. I’ll give you an example, the footage of Disney playing baseball with his colleagues. I had seen it once somewhere in another film but we were not finding and nobody at Disney could find it and then all of a sudden they found it and not only did they find it but it had sound. Most of the footage from that era as you probably know doesn’t come with sound attached, so we do sound design. So when you hear those voices cheering Disney as he is hitting the balls and running the bases, those are the voices of the people there and those kinds of finds were very exciting because they helped to really tell the story in a way that you wouldn’t be able to do without that kind of material.

Disney’s fascination with using new technology is a theme of the documentary and there is a charming example of one of his earliest cartoons, before he had his own company, with a real little girl interacting with animated characters, like this Laugh-o-Gram production from 1923, featuring Walt Disney himself.

He was an innovator, no question in a lot of different areas, and technology was definitely an important part of his ability to innovate. So he was always pushing things. It wasn’t that he was actually inventing things but he would see how other people were doing things and he had these ideas to take them to the next level. I think sound is a great example of that and we use that as our main example of his technical innovation in the film. Other cartoonists were using sound and experimenting with sound and sound was becoming a part of the movie business. But what Disney did with sound was to take it and really make it an integral part of what the film was about so that the film didn’t make sense without sound, instead of the sound just being kind of layered on top of it. He had a way of pushing things and what I think is really interesting too is that he understood the potential. It wasn’t that he figured all these things out, it was like he had an idea and then he would surround himself with the most talented people in every category. If you’re thinking about artistry, the most talented artists, when it came to technology the most talented people with that, so a perfect example is his collaboration with Ub Iwerks. You know Ub Iwerks was very talented but also he really was technically amazingly savvy. So Ub helped Disney take things to the next level. I don’t think alone either of them could have done what they did but together they did these amazing things. So Disney was always collaborating with the top people. Now he was always in charge, there was no question that he was the visionary, he was in charge but he recognized talent and he was able to attract talent. And that’s how I think his technological innovation happened because I don’t think, he certainly wasn’t technical wiz, it was more that he was figuring out how to do that with other people’s talent.

But the documentary is frank in showing that he cultivated talent and he appreciated talent and yet he alienated a lot of the talent, resulting in a strike and defections to a rival studio, both which hurt him deeply.

He was a complicated boss. I think he was a very good leader. He knew how to create a sense of excitement, he knew how to translate vision and get other people excited about it but at the same time I think he could be quite insensitive. He treated some people very kindly, very well and then treated other people not as well and he was very unaware of how he alienated people. As the film portrays, the strike is the ultimate example of something that could have probably been avoided by a leader who had been more aware of himself and what was going on around him. He was blind to things that were happening right in front of him and so he could be a very difficult boss. I think he was very demanding. He demanded the highest level of performance from people and some people did very well under that but some people were mad that they were not being properly compensated. They were working long hours without being recognized for the work they were doing. I think he could be very difficult and so he was charming but he was also I think demanding and difficult.

One of the film’s most moving sections concerns the brief time Disney spent as a child in the small town of Marceline, Missouri, which he thought of always as the happiest time of his childhood. Disneyland’s Main Street and many of the settings of his film reflected his idyllic memories of Marceline.

Right from reading the first biography it was clear that Marceline was a hugely important place and whether it’s a real place or more of an imagined memory of a place it was crucial and so it was clear that we needed to include it in both his upbringing but also how he remembered it. And so we were especially happy to have footage of his return to the town with his brother as adults. It was just such a wonderful way to be able to take note of how important Marceline had been to him as a child and how important it was to him. And then what better way to see him as a middle-aged man in a suit kind of visiting this little town in the Midwest and how important it was. So I feel like that’s where my job as a documentary filmmaker is so fun because it’s like you’re using these finds that you have, we found that footage and I was like, “Okay, this is the scene and this is going to be how we really show how it builds into Disneyland and what does Disneyland mean and so Marceline is in a way kind of a version of a Disneyland for Disney. For Walt Disney it is this place in imagination, a place where he felt safe, a place where he was with animals and nature and an escape from the troubles and the problems of real life and so I think that’s what Marceline represented for Disney and then Disney takes that and makes Disneyland.

Colt wants the film to show people Disney as a person, a man of vision, a man of sentiment, and a dreamer who always liked to remind people that it all started with a mouse.

When people hear “Disney” they may think of the company or its products. It’s very easy now especially with the amazing success of the Disney company since his death to forget who he was and that he was a real person. I want people to be able to take away that he was human and that he was human both an exemplary human being and also he had flaws, and he was complicated and that some of his greatest successes came out of difficult things from his own personal life and experience. And that it’s a layered and much more a kind of deep and interesting story than the legend of Walt Disney.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgdeLgCdUNc

Interview: Kim Campbell on Caring for Glen Campbell and “I’ll Be Me”

Posted on September 4, 2015 at 12:07 pm

Glen Campbell…I’ll Be Me is a beautiful documentary about an ugly disease. Glen Campbell, one of the most popular and successful musical performers of all time, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2011. As memories, words, and some basic concepts about daily life became fragile and then disappeared entirely, the music stayed with him. And so, his family took him on one last performing tour. The audiences were understanding, applauding even when he forgot the words or repeated a song he had just played. But backed up by his children, he played brilliantly and he loved the audience and they loved him back. The documentary is the story of that tour, of how Alzheimer’s affected Campbell and his family, and, with commentary by friends and fellow musicians, about how all of our lives are touched by the tragedy of dementia and cognitive impairment.

Campbell’s wife Kim is in every way the heart of the film. Her loving spirit and devotion are deeply moving. It was a pleasure to speak to Kim about the film, which is Glen Campbell…I’ll Be Menow available on DVD.

What has it been like for you to see how audiences respond to this film?

It’s been amazing. Everywhere we go and show the film people are really moved. They feel like we’re telling their story and they feel like it’s bringing Alzheimer’s out of the shadows into the light and helping remove the stigma of this disease.

What is it about music that seems to be able to reach people with dementia even when words are failing?

From what the doctors told us, music involves all the different regions of your brain at the same time and everything is stimulated at once. It just seem to promote the health of the brain, to keep everything working. They say that it may have kept Glen from progressing as quickly as he otherwise might have had he not been playing music. It’s a natural memory aid. People have used music to memorize things for years, for centuries. I think when you hear songs from your past on the radio or something you remember everything, you remember where you were when you heard it and the smell of the ocean and colors and what you were wearing and it just seem to trigger everything to do with your memory for some reason. And it brings joy to people. And joy of course brings a sense of well-being. So it’s a good therapy for people. I think all the arts are. There is a video clip of Glen relating to color and singing while he is painting and it’s really beautiful. So I am a big advocate of all of the arts for people with dementia. Really for everybody, for caregivers too. The art is therapeutic.

How is Glen doing now?

In March of 2014 our family joined the Memory Support Community in Nashville and Glen began residing there but recently about a month ago I brought Glen back home so now I’m caring for him at home again. And it is extremely challenging, he’s at the point where he just need one-on-one care round-the-clock. And it’s such a joy to have him back, emotionally it’s much better for me but physically it’s really challenging, I don’t get much sleep. He still has moments when he can become combative. I’m sporting a black eye this week that I got just trying to change his pants. You know that’s a part of Alzheimer’s that people generally don’t talk about. Your desire is to protect someone’s dignity but I really don’t think it has anything to do with dignity; it’s a disease. And this is typical for all people who have Alzheimer’s. They can’t express themselves verbally anymore and they don’t understand what’s going on, if you are trying to bathe them or take their clothes off or something their natural instinct is to lash out. So it’s just something that you don’t talk about that I think needs to be out there so that people can understand the tremendous challenges it is to be a caregiver for someone who has dementia.

So what are you doing to try and takes care of yourself? You can’t take care of him unless you are in pretty good shape.

Well, I pray a lot and I’m so blessed to have our daughter Ashley and our son Shannon and our nephew, Matthew. They’ve all been a part of our care team for so many years and they’re still living at home with me and helping. So I have got family and friends around, so that’s really important because you don’t want to become isolated. So many people are isolated in a home with someone with Alzheimer’s and they don’t have any help or the moral support of having somebody else there to help you. But I exercise, I take ballet, and that’s very therapeutic for me. I think it’s really important to raise awareness about Alzheimer’s and educate people about Alzheimer’s and so I’m doing that. I recently did a real estate course to get my mind off of Alzheimer’s and learn something new because I am aging, too. I am 57 and for my brain health I need to keep learning. So that was really fun. And it helps to meet people that are going to the same thing that I am. I’ve met a lot of women around the country who have husbands that have Alzheimer’s. I think it’s really different thing to have a spouse with Alzheimer’s than with a parent who has Alzheimer’s, emotionally different and so to have those friends has really been a great support to me. And I don’t belong to formal support group but I believe that those are really important and people should seek those out in their communities. I’m just blessed that it kind of happened organically with me to meet people in the same situation around the country and connect with them we stay in touch and visit each other and talk on the phone about what we are going through. And I try to eat right, too, all the natural things.

The film really makes clear that while people with Alzheimer’s and their caregivers have a lot in common, there are some very big differences.

Right. The thing is if you see one person with Alzheimer’s you’ve seen one person with Alzheimer’s. It’s different for everybody but at the same time it’s similar for everybody. There are standard things that people generally go through. Not everybody becomes combative but many do. Not everybody goes through retrogenesis but many do. Glen hasn’t really regressed and started becoming a child but there are childlike things that he began to do like his fascination with color. That is kind of beautiful actually because the way they begin to look at the world is like a brand-new life. Glen would look at the sunset and just get so emotional about it, “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!” So you try to find beauty and joy in the obvious tragedy. It’s your brain dying and you’re losing your memory but there’s still beauty to be found and Glen still seem to recognize me and we love each other and hug each other and still there are moments when we really connect deeply, when we look into each other’s eyes. And for the longest time Glen still would say things like, “We are so blessed!” Or he would go over to the window and raise his hand and say, “Thank you heavenly father!”

So I knew that he still senses God’s presence and we’re still connected to God and that really gave me a lot of comfort. Now he has really progressed with his dysplasia so his ability to communicate verbally has diminished severely. He doesn’t understand anything anyone says to him but we still communicate with smiles and hugs. At least it’s so funny because he still has his personality to some extent that he’s always been an entertainer, and so even now he’s still telling you jokes. It may not make sense, the words don’t really relate to each other but he is telling a joke so he laughs and laughs and laughs hysterically which makes us laugh and that makes him happy. So we try to appreciate each day for what it is and we just love each other and try to make the best of a bad situation. What can you do?

Tell me about some of the support activities you are working on.

We’re also excited that the I’ll Be Me Alzheimer’s Fund will create programs that will lift the spirit of caregivers and also fund research. What we want to do is give an award to young scientists, give grant to somebody like gave Mayo Clinic or a place like Johns Hopkins to hire a young scientists and involve them in Alzheimer’s research because generally scientists doesn’t get involved in research until they are older. It’s really exciting. There are lots of great companies working as hard as they can to find their drug or therapies are hopefully a cure. So we’re hoping that that is going to speed up the process.

If somebody came to you and said, “We’ve just got the diagnosis and I don’t know where to turn,” what would be your first piece of advice?

You have to educate yourself. That’s the first thing and the Alzheimer’s Association is really helpful. That’s where I went to start learn about the disease and learn what kind of resources there are available to you. You have to build a support team around yourself. It’s important for the person who has Alzheimer’s to have that support and the caregiver needs support. You can’t do it on your own — it takes a team. I would advise them to not let it get you down, do what Glen did and keep living your life and not worry about it. Don’t worry about tomorrow. Jesus said, “Don’t worry about tomorrow, it has enough worries of its own.” And a cheerful heart is like a good medicine so keep yourself a healer, keep living your life. Educate yourself and surround with people that you love and who will support you. And be honest with people, because when you are honest with people and let them know what you’re going through that gives them permission to step in and help, it helps to remove the fear. I think people are afraid, “I don’t know how to relate to someone Alzheimer’s” and they just stop coming around because they are afraid that they will say the wrong thing. But if you talk openly about it, it helps them feel a bit more comfortable with you. And then you’ve got more support.

In Theaters For One Night Only: How to Change the World

Posted on September 2, 2015 at 3:54 pm

Greenpeace activists protest at the stern of whaling factory ship. (Greenpeace Witness book page 48-49) (Greenpeace Changing the World page 11 similar photo)

How to Change the World, the critically acclaimed, award-winning documentary, comes to select U.S. theaters this September 9, 2015 at 7:30 p.m. local time, presented by Fathom Events and Picturehouse Entertainment. The documentary looks at the very early days of the modern eco-movement. Using never-before-seen footage, it tells the gripping story of a courageous group of men and women, led by Robert Hunter, who set out to change the world and in the process sparked a revolution.

The event will include an exclusive live Q&A from the London premiere event hosted by respected broadcaster and journalist Mariella Frostrup. The panel will feature legendary fashion designer and longstanding Greenpeace supporter Vivienne Westwood, director Jerry Rothwell, Hunter’s daughter Emily Hunter and other special guests to be announced.

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Documentary Environment/Green

Being Evel

Posted on August 27, 2015 at 5:13 pm

Evel Knievel was an international celebrity in the 1960’s-70’s, known for three things: showmanship, stunts that succeeded, and stunts that failed. He was recognized for jumping over 19 cars in his motorcycle, for crash-landing after trying to jump over the fountains of Caesars Palace, and holding the Guinness Book of World Records title for the most broken bones. He was an iconic figure in his white leather jumpsuits trimmed with stars and stripes. Over the 37 years that ABC’s “Wide World of Sports,” seven of the top ten rated episodes, including the most-watched of all time, featured Knievel.

He influenced and inspired a generation of daredevil kids, those who transformed his stunts into a whole new category of amateur and professional competition called extreme sports (“having a high level of inherent danger”). And he inspired a lot of idiotic behavior from people like Johnny Knoxville, who made a career out of doing stupid stuff on television and getting hurt, and who has now made a documentary about the man he says he thought of not as a daredevil but as a superhero. He was a star for what he dared to do but he was a bigger star for staying with it even when he failed. “Fast, faster, and disaster,” says Knoxville, but, as the film makes clear, “He captured my imagination like nobody else.”

Knoxville warns us up front that Knievel was not entirely admirable. And, as a friend comments in the film, his career followed the same arc as his famous “Skycycle” stunt, when he attempted to ride what was essentially a small rocket across a canyon. What went up, came down, eventually, in a spectacular crash.

This portrait, co-produced by George Hamilton, who played Evel in a 1971 film, is frank but sympathetic, with archival footage and interviews with Knievel’s friends, family, and fans.

Robert Craig Knievel was born in Butte, Montana in 1938, where he was raised by his grandparents. He was close to his first cousin, Pat Williams, elected to Congress nine times. In the 1940’s, Butte was a town of coal miners and prostitutes, where disputes were settled by fistfight and no one took a misdemeanor like petty theft personally. When a cop referred to him as “Evil” Knievel, Robert adopted the name, changing the i to an e, to make it “less evil.”

Knievel married a girl from Butte (she admits that he sort of kidnapped her, but she did not seem to mind) and they had three children. He sold insurance for a while, getting mental patients to sign up for policies to set a sales record and then he sold motorcycles. To promote the motorcycles, he started doing stunts. And then he kept doing stunts to promote himself. “How do you convince people to come to a sport they never heard of?” Evel knew how to tell a good story. We see him on talk shows, and later, after the Hamilton film, we see him spouting some of the dialogue written for his character. He didn’t like the film, but he knew a good line when he heard it. “He created the character and then tried to live the part,” says one of his friends.

He was a showman and a salesman. He had sponsors and licensing agreements. The Ideal action figure was one of the most popular toys of the era. He made a fortune and he spent it — planes, boats, jewelry. His enormous safe had a gold-plated motorcycle covered with cash.

This all happened during the 70’s. Knievel’s star-spangled stunts were a welcome distraction from the corruption and disappointment of the Watergate era. But Knievel was less successful at clearing his own distractions. All those injuries meant painkillers. That might have been a factor in his brutal attack on a former colleague, which ended in a guilty plea, a jail sentence, and the cancellation of lucrative endorsements and licensing deals. All those fans meant lots of girls. His wife left him. His health was shot; he had a liver transplant, a hip replacement, a spine fusion. His money was gone. Perhaps most difficult for him, his audience was gone.

Knoxville is an unabashed fan, but he is honest about Knievel’s failings. The movie has some unexpected revelations and telling details, but audiences are unlikely to agree that inspiring a generation of kids to risk their lives in crazy stunts is especially admirable. Knievel’s legacy, for better and worse, is more clearly tied to marketing and celebrity than to courage or integrity. The problem with making a reputation for stunts is that eventually, you crash and burn.

Parents should know that this movie includes a lot of preposterously risky behavior and injuries, references to sex, including sex with groupies and the effects of strong pharmaceuticals, and some strong language.

Family discussion: Who is most like Evel Knievel today? What was his most important influence?

If you like this, try: “Senna” and “Dogtown and Z-Boys”

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Documentary

Rosenwald

Posted on August 27, 2015 at 12:10 pm

Aviva Kempner, the director of the acclaimed documentaries about baseball star Hank Greenberg and television pioneer Gertrude Berg, has a new film about early 20th century Chicago businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Like the prior films, this one is filled with meticulously curated archival footage, illuminating historical insights, and thoughtful comments from experts and family members. And as in the earlier films, Kempner has found a fascinating story. Julius Rosenwald is little discussed now, in part because at his direction his charitable foundation was closed down after his death and in part because some of his initiatives to build schools for black children in the South were wrongly considered a perpetuation of the despicable “separate but equal” policy. This film shows what a significant, even definitive impact Rosenwald had in the era leading up to the Civil Rights movement. And an understated final revelation shows how far ahead of his time he really was.

When Jewish immigrants came to the United States from Eastern Europe — think of Tevye and his family at the end of “Fiddler on the Roof” — many of them became peddlers, or traveling salesmen. They didn’t even have to know English. They just had to be willing to trudge from farm to farm and town to town with a suitcase of goods. One of the highlights of the film is the compilation of depictions of these salesmen in popular culture, including an episode of “Rawhide” with Clint Eastwood trying to use Yiddish(!).

Rosenwald’s father was a traveling salesman who settled in Springfield, Illinois, where he knew Senator and then President Abraham Lincoln. Rosenwald and his brother followed their father into retail and later teamed up with Sears and Roebuck. Sears was a great salesman but a poor businessman, but Rosenwald developed the business practices, efficiencies, reliability, and use of new technologies to make the company into the biggest retailer and one of the biggest companies in the United States. His idea was that the then-new Sears catalog was a way to “drop a peddler in the mailbox” of Americans who were too far from the cities to shop in the stores. The catalog was aspirational — you could see what was possible. Congressman John Lewis appears in the film, explaining that he first knew he wanted an education when he saw in the Sears catalogue what educated people with jobs could buy.

When they needed more capital, Sears had one of the country’s first public offerings of stock. Rosenwald became very wealthy.

He was very influenced by his rabbi, Emil Hirsch, who taught him of the importance of tikkun olem — that it is the obligation of each of us to “heal the world.” And Rosenwald drew a direct parallel between the pogroms that Jews were experiencing in Europe and the racist assaults on blacks in the American South. In Hebrew the word for “charity” also means “justice.” And he was influenced by Booker T. Washington’s passion for education and empowerment. Washington brought Rosenwald to the Tuskegee Institute, where he was deeply moved by the self-reliance of the student body and the spirituals sung by the school choir.

With the same vision and focus on efficiency and responsibility he brought to his company, Rosenwald developed an ambitious program to build schools for black children in the South. The communities themselves had to raise part of the money and they had to build the schools themselves, similar to the approach of Habitat for Humanity in building homes. This meant that the communities were vitally involved and committed to the schools. With over 5300 schools giving black children the best educational opportunity they had ever had, the schools taught a generation who would grow up and provide the foundation for the Civil Rights movement. He also made grants to artists and scientists, including Marian Anderson, who used hers to study singing, and Dr. Charles Drew, whose innovation in blood transfusions has saved innumerable lives. He even gave a few grants to white southerners — Kempner shows us an application filled out by Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, better known as Woody.

And, as a title card informs us at the end, he contributed a third of the costs for the Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit that made his schools near-obsolete. That is vision.

Kempner’s film shows the difference one person can make by telling Rosenwald’s story, a critical history lesson and a welcome reminder of our own tikkun olem obligations.

Parents should know that this film includes discussion and depiction of bigotry, including lynching.

Family discussion: Who is most like Rosenwald today? What can you do to heal the world?

If you like this, try: Kempner’s other documentaries

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Documentary Race and Diversity