documentarianism
Last night, or rather early this morning, I watched the utterly awesome American Zoetrope documentary on the bonus disc of the THX-1138 release.
Now, the whole early years of the film brat pack holds great mystique for me. Be a rebel, strike out on your own, form a powerful network of like-minded friends (who are all geniuses), buck the system, and then eventually make millions and millions by following your dream and being yourself.
For those unfamiliar with the term, the film “brat pack” refers to the first generation of filmmakers to emerge from the film schools in the 60s, who seized the film system then in flux and decline, and remolded it to their will by releasing a string of classic moneymakers throughout the 70s. Some of the names include: Steven Spielberg, Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Walter Murch, Bob Zemeckis and Bob Gale, Martin Scorsese, Brian dePalma. Some of their products include American Graffitti, The Godfather, The Conversation, Carrie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mean Streets.
There’s a strain of idealism and artistic ambition that runs throughout their individual and group stories which has always captured my imagination and piqued my interest. I’ve read lots of individual biographies of some of the participants, and I’ve read other biographical type books which at least in part cross paths with this loose-knit group at one point or another, to one level of detail or another.
The American Zoetrope story, which forms, if you will, the first chapter in the saga of the brat pack, was a San Francisco-based film production company / studio founded by Francis Coppola in 1969, with the ambition to make films outside the Hollywood system, and outside the traditional confines of the Hollywood production mentality. Coppola envisioned a studio where friends and collaborators would congregate, lending support to one anothers’ individual projects while they worked on banks of the most state-of-the-art equipment that money could buy. Coppola envisioned an entirely new production process, with movies made much like student films, stripped-down, lean, documentary-style, with lightweight cameras and mostly natural lighting, and virtually no studio work. Perhaps most important of all, each filmmaker was free to make exactly the film he or she desired, with no veto or forceful involvement coming down from Coppola in his role as executive producer.
It was a revolutionary dream, and those involved in it were transformed with excitement, led by Coppola’s tireless energy and boundless charisma.
Regrettably, the dream was not to be. In late 1971, when distributor/financer Warner Bros./Seven Arts saw Zoetrope’s first product, THX-1138, they were appalled. They demanded the return of the money they’d invested and cancelled all other projects in production. Coppola went into serious debt and, for all intents and purposes, American Zoetrope ceased to exist, its members scattering to the four film corners in search of new work.
Having recently read Droidmaker, which touched on these heady years early in the book, I was thirsty for more. And when I discovered that there was a well-regarded documentary on disc two of the THX-1138 DVD release, serious Netflix queueage ensued.
It was not a waste of time. There are actually two documentaries on the bonus features disc of THX, both produced by the same crew from the same interviews. The first is entirely about the life of American Zoetrope, and the second a shorter, almost addendum-like, documentary on the making of THX itself. Since the tales of the two are inextricably linked, both documentaries are best viewed back to back, which is what I found myself doing at one o’clock early this morning.
I do love me a good film history documentary, and this one doesn’t disappoint. As a film itself, it’s very well-done, edited with panache and directly informative. Unlike so many of those trashy A&E Biography type documentaries, there’s little in the way of hype or saccharine goodiness. Occasionally the swelling soundtrack is a bit — Hollywoody? — but, you know, whatever. A documentary is only as good as its subjects, and there is virtually every participant of the Zoetrope story on-camera here, totally ready to be forthcoming, as well as bystanders heavily influenced by this Coppola-Lucas journey, like Spielberg and Scorsese.
Perhaps most surprising is John Calley himself, who was head of Warners/Seven Arts from 1969-1975, effectively the antagonist of the Zoetrope project. For him to make an appearance, freely discussing the fact that, yes, his administration hated THX and, yes, it was they who severed relations with Zoetrope — it gives the documentary an impressive sense of completeness. Especially in light of the painful realization that, as someone states in the docu, if Calley had maintained his support of Zoetrope through their early growing pains, the fruits they would ultimately bear — like Apocalypse Now, American Graffitti — would very likely have gone to Warners.
I could go on and on and on — it’s one of my favorite blab topics — but I think I’ll just leave it at that and say, well, well worth a watch. It doesn’t matter if you’re a fan of THX or not. The opportunity to watch a documentary of this quality chronicling such an important and unique chapter in the history of filmmaking is one nobody should pass up.
And it’s narrated by Richard Dreyfuss, too, in his recognizable croaky voice. I’d take him any day over that buffoon who narrates those Biography things.