4

Hard Lessons in Hollywood Civics

Managing the Crisis of the Liberal Consensus

“The Confessions of Nat Turner,” both the book and the proposed film, are symptoms of a tragic racial problem. I’m rocking the boat because I have grave fears about the future. . . . Why use the motion picture camera, the most powerful method of communication known in the world, to perpetuate a mythical Nat Turner, when the real Turner was a better man? We’re stuck with too many myths in this country.

—ACTOR OSSIE DAVIS, 19681

The 1965 Watts Uprising in South Central Los Angeles did not immediately affect Wolper Productions’ output. The Hollywood studio was busy settling into its new home at the Metromedia headquarters on the Sunset Strip. David Wolper thought that selling his company in 1964 to the fastest-growing communications conglomerate in the country was not so much a matter of selling out as of buying in, an opportunity to continue making documentaries and also move into fiction features, live performance, and short-format sponsored films. Under the leadership of entrepreneur John Kluge, Metromedia had developed from a two-station television company to a large entity with broadcasting, out-of-home media, publishing, mail marketing, and local entertainment divisions. Moving from New York to Los Angeles, Kluge expanded the KTTV station to build a massive home base for his communications empire. Metromedia’s development anticipated a trend toward corporate diversification where film and television production constituted one part of a conglomerate’s varied business pursuits.² Kluge was one of the major donors to Community Television of Southern California, the nonprofit that helped launch the public television station KCET. He saw Wolper Productions as both a commercial investment and a way to build the company’s reputation for intelligent programming. He said he was trying to create a “thinking man’s network.”³ Wolper assumed the role of vice president of Metromedia and retained his position as leader of the studio he built from scratch. In the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, his organization’s documentaries smoothed the transition from the presidency of Kennedy to that of Lyndon B. Johnson, from the constellation of policy initiatives and tenets that constituted the New Frontier to the new president’s vision of an expanded welfare state, increased technological innovation, and aggressive foreign policy that made up the Great Society. Transforming Johnson’s policies into streamlined, character-focused narratives, these documentaries asserted that a partnership between an active government and a motivated citizenry could solve any problem, including what Johnson perceived to be particularly complex situations like domestic poverty and the global spread of communism.

As the 1960s progressed, Wolper Productions’ partnership with Metromedia turned out to not be as fruitful as originally anticipated. The studio split with the conglomerate in late 1968. But even as Hollywood experienced a seismic economic downturn toward the end of the decade, Wolper’s pivot to independence proved an easier challenge to navigate than trying to retain his studio’s claim to relevance as a civically engaged producer of documentaries. The conventional Cold War narratives on which the studio had built its reputation seemed increasingly out of sync with calls to Black Power, protests against the entrenchment of corporations in public life, and growing opposition to American military interventions in Southeast Asia. Wolper Productions tried to find its footing within a shifting social landscape. The studio’s attempts to document the country’s relationship to electoral politics indexed a pervasive crisis in cultural liberalism and resulted in some instructive failures.

FLEETING IMAGES OF THE GREAT SOCIETY

Wolper Productions’ three clusters of Great Society documentaries included presidential portraits, programs on contemporary American culture, and historical compilation films. These documentaries were geared toward exhibition on commercial television, at select festivals, and in venues such as schools, libraries, and community centers. The core brain trust of Wolper, Mel Stuart, Alan Landsburg, and Jack Haley Jr. designed the programs in collaboration with the old guard of the entertainment industry, young up-and-coming filmmakers, the Washington, DC, intelligentsia, and archives around the world. Similar to the studio’s past programs, the documentaries were relentlessly affirmative, showing individuals seizing opportunities and overcoming obstacles by working hard and relying on a supportive government. They depicted a rosy vision of American democracy that rhymed with Lyndon B. Johnson’s photo-book This America (1966). Acknowledging the challenges—automation, distribution of resources to a large population, environmental fallout—that threaten a growing society, the president wrote in the preface, “I believe that a great society can master its dilemmas” before going on to proclaim, “All our domestic programs and policies converge on a common set of aims: to enrich the quality of American life; to provide a living place which liberates rather than constricts the human spirit; to give each of us the opportunity to stretch his talents; and to permit all to share in the enterprise of our society.”4 Wolper Productions’ films argued that strong presidential leadership and a robust policy agenda were necessary for creating a dynamic America, and made visible the lives of individuals who were building this society.

Programs in the first cluster tried to ingratiate Johnson, who came across to many as a rough-hewn Texan, to the public. The task was all the more necessary given his predecessor’s movie-star looks and charismatic personality. These documentaries also reinforced the idea that a democratically elected chief executive would act wisely on behalf of the populace. The Making of the President: 1964 (1965) begins with radio dramatist and Hollywood actor Martin Gabel’s booming narration, “Power in America is carried by no assassin’s bullet. It must be freely given, freely won.” In addition to the documentary including the familiar voice of Gabel, who had served as narrator for the previous The Making of the President film, this latest installment once again involved Theodore H. White adapting the script from his recently published book. Telling the story of the 1964 presidential campaign with a distinct focus on Johnson, the documentary provides quick flashes of backstory for each candidate, and describes the competition of the primaries, the national conventions, the final election, and its immediate aftermath. Gabel’s voice-over, set against newsreel footage, still photographs, and television reports, recounts Johnson’s political maturation. Following his stint teaching underprivileged children in the hill country of his home state, Johnson enters politics as secretary to Democratic congressman Richard Kleberg in Washington, DC. He then returns to Texas to become head of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s National Youth Administration. His political career moves from senator, to vice president under Kennedy, and then to president, where his race for the highest office results in his defeating the bigoted, trigger-happy, antigovernment Arizonan Barry Goldwater. The Making of the President’s support of civil rights legislation is seen as encapsulating what the Johnson administration viewed as a constructive path toward progressive social change: nonviolent rather than violent, integrationist rather than separatist, grounded in the mechanisms of the liberal state rather than aligned with radical grassroots activism.

Seven Days in the Life of the President (1965) further fleshes out Johnson’s character and demonstrates that the administration’s beliefs have led to concrete actions. Produced in association with Time-Life Inc., it was the most anticipated episode in the studio’s eight-part March of Time series (1965–66).⁵ Unlike the original theatrically released March of Time films (1935–51), which dramatically staged historical events, the newer version relied on archival footage as well as on-location shooting. For Seven Days, a small crew, including cinematographer Vilis Lapenieks, shadowed Johnson for a week to try to place viewers in the president’s shoes. At the beginning of the episode, noir actor and radio announcer William Conrad’s voice-over intones: “In his vision, he is sure, he would desalt the sea and heal the sick, rebuild the cities and enrich the farms, retrain the old and educate the young. . . . He has given the dream a name, the Great Society.” The bulk of the program looks at the president and his administration as they try to locate this “dream” in policies that square with domestic and international goals. So, too, does the program show Johnson’s comportment as embodying the stability and resolve of the nation. The documentary takes the viewer inside the West Wing, on a stroll around the White House grounds, to press corps briefings, aboard Air Force One, and to Johnson’s Texas ranch. Lapenieks captures the everyday act of Johnson eating breakfast and reading the newspaper; press secretary Bill Moyers and special assistant Jack Valenti communicating with journalists, politicians, and administrative staff; the diplomatic gestures of Johnson formally greeting foreign dignitaries; and the political ceremony of the swearing in of officials. The president’s ability to ceaselessly work and make resolute decisions, the film implies, has led to policy achievements in education, civil rights, and the arts. His passing of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act is one of the climactic moments of the film. The ceremonial signing of the legislation is itself an occasion to cinematically document the inner workings of the Johnson administration.

The latter part of the episode concentrates on the question of whether the United States should send additional troops to, and increase aerial strikes on, Vietnam. While the ramping up of US involvement in Southeast Asia was hardly news by the time Seven Days aired, the documentary wanted to showcase the administration’s process of decision-making under pressure. In this way, Seven Days resonated with Drew Associates’ television documentaries on Kennedy, which were built around the representation of the successful negotiation of a contemporary crisis. This is exemplified in Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (1963), which focused on the controversy surrounding the racial integration of the University of Alabama. In Seven Days presidential decision-making involves consulting an inner circle of trusted experts. Johnson meets with his foreign policy experts, secretary of state Dean Rusk, secretary of defense Robert McNamara, and national security advisor McGeorge Bundy. He also reads over briefings, consults with outside military officers, and retreats to the Oval Office for quiet contemplation. Seven Days casts the official government position to escalate involvement in Vietnam in a positive light, presenting it as a careful decision to confront the communist threat of the Viet Cong. In a news conference, Johnson claims, “Retreat does not bring safety and weakness does not bring peace.”

A second cluster of documentaries centered on civic achievements. The Race for the Moon (1965) looks at the next step of what the program calls the “great adventure” of space travel: the training of US astronauts for a mission to the Moon. The show considers whether Project Apollo ought to strive for Kennedy’s initial goal of a lunar landing before the end of the decade, or instead follow a gradual and perhaps less costly timeline. Slanting toward trying to meet the 1970 objective, the documentary surveys the expanding infrastructure in cities such as Houston and situates space travel within a Cold War context of competition with the Soviet Union. Princeton professor of astronomy Martin Schwarzschild enthusiastically asks interviewer Bill Stout: “Do we want to be a great nation, accepting a challenge and the opportunities that are given to us, or do we want to relax in lethargy?”

Another program in this cluster, The Way Out Men (1965), profiles professionals loosely connected through their drive to push boundaries and to amplify the social impact of their work. Scientists, engineers, and artists are seen excelling in surgery, theoretical physics, abstract painting, musical composition, computer processing, and urban planning. Citing the ambitious state of American invention, narrator Van Heflin tells viewers, “Never before has man’s horizon widened so far.” The program visits theoretical physicist Murray Gell-Mann at Caltech, avant-garde classical music composer Lukas Foss in Buffalo, New York, and experimental biologist and psychologist James McConnell at the University of Michigan.

Revolution in the Three R’s (1965) examines the reimagining of the classroom as a creative laboratory to cultivate dedicated teachers and curious students. The program takes its title from the multipronged initiative in education. The Los Angeles Times noted that the “revolution” sought to update curricular reform in “reading, writing and arithmetic” to more effectively connect different levels of schooling, promote interactive forms of student learning across the humanities and sciences, and support teacher training.6 The documentary ventured into schools in Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Harlem to investigate collaborative approaches to problem solving and computer-based instruction. Special notice was paid to new classroom patterns designed to increase social cohesion and enhance student productivity.

As in previous years, a steady stream of new talent flowed to Wolper Productions. The studio offered employment to young editors, cinematographers, sound technicians, and aspiring directors, giving them the chance to hone their craft while also earning a paycheck and at times taking a lead role on a production. Filmmakers, however, were denied complete editorial control, which remained the purview of Stuart, Landsburg, Haley, and Wolper. In some cases people found employment at Wolper Productions by way of a personal connection or interest in documentaries. In other cases, Wolper recruited talent for the purpose of innovating the studio’s line of films and to meet the demands of an expanding organization. For example, he brought the twenty-nine-year-old Chicagoan William Friedkin to Los Angeles after seeing his award-winning television documentary The People vs. Paul Crump (1962) at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Friedkin had worked his way up from the mail room of Chicago’s WGN to direct live programs. His chilling documentary about the wrongly convicted Crump, who was on death row for the alleged killing of a police officer in a robbery at the Libby, McNeil and Libby packing plant, led to the eventual commutation of Crump’s sentence.⁷

Friedkin was excited about bringing his love for European art cinema and investigative reporting to Los Angeles, but quickly found that he had to redesign the style and message of his films when working for Wolper. In his memoir, The Friedkin Connection, he recalls his difficulty incorporating “subliminal cuts, jump cuts, unexpected transitions” into his film The Bold Men (1965), a documentary about people in life-threatening professions who exhibit mental fortitude and physical strength. He shot a welder on skyscrapers, a high-diving stuntman, a firefighter of oil and gas fires, and a racecar driver. Friedkin’s rough cut emphasized the characters’ vulnerabilities and their complex emotional relationships to their jobs. Upon seeing Friedkin’s finished documentary in a viewing session, Wolper allegedly threw his shoe at the screen and shouted, “This is the worst piece of shit I’ve ever seen!” and demanded that Mel Stuart step in to do an overhaul edit. The final cut, complete with what Friedkin called “wall-to-wall” narration, eschews vulnerabilities in favor of heroic depictions of confident professionals.

Friedkin’s The Thin Blue Line (1966) explores (then) state-of-the-art policing in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Rochester. Minimizing any mention of police brutality or systematic discrimination against the minority communities they are supposed to be serving, the show commends police officers as ethical public servants. Friedkin depicts them using sophisticated audio equipment to coordinate and dispatch officers to high-tension situations. Throughout the program, law enforcement personnel allege that police are the ones threatened by the so-called “crime epidemic.” Van Heflin’s voice-over emphasizes that police officers are involved in a battle of good against evil, protecting the innocent and catching criminals. Observations of a drug bust in downtown Los Angeles, a place that the show proclaims to be a home for “pushers and addicts,” document a performance of swift justice, from the beginning stages of planning, to the stakeout, to the moment of intervention, to the arrests, to the sentencing.

Historical compilation documentaries that cast the United States in the role of benevolent peacemaker and leader of the “free world” comprised the third cluster. The one-hour films France: Conquest to Liberation (1965), Prelude to War (1965), The General (1965), and the three-part The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1967–68) delineate the Allied fight against Germany and Japan during World War II. Korea: The 38th Parallel (1965), Japan: A New Dawn over Asia (1965), and China: The Roots of Madness (1967) separate old regimes from contemporary geopolitical realities. The documentaries map Asia according to its willingness to cooperate with the West: friendly democratic societies provide economic and political support versus communist powers that are portrayed as domineering and resistant to diplomatic ties. Traditions of technological accomplishment made up a subgenre within this cluster. And Away We Go (1965) examines the cultural history of the automobile in the United States, from the introduction of the horseless carriage around the turn of the century, to the post–World War I Henry Ford era, to the current moment of high-speed driving on highways crisscrossing the nation. The Epic of Flight (1966) traces the twentieth-century development of the aircraft, beginning with the Wright Brothers and ending with modern jet-engine planes.

These three groups of Great Society films were generally well received by news periodicals, the industry trade press, and entertainment magazines. They won Peabodys, Emmys, and USIA Cine Golden Eagle awards at festivals. In 1966, Wolper Productions was the focus of a five-week tribute exhibition at the Huntington Hartford Gallery of Modern Art in New York. The curator, Raymond Rohauer, wrote in the accompanying catalogue that Wolper “has explored nearly every facet of contemporary American life and created a vivid history of the country and its people that will be viewed by millions in the future.”8 New programs that moved away from politics and toward cutting-edge entertainment would continue to garner praise from journalists and members of the film and television establishment.

Underwater documentaries with famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and subsequent nature films pushed the techno-aesthetic horizon of nonfiction and impressed critics. Wolper collaborated with Cousteau for the final installment of a four-part National Geographic series for CBS. The World of Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1966) expands on the oceanographer’s Oscar-winning World without Sun (1964), and follows him and his team of six “oceanauts” as they harvest natural resources for three weeks at Conshelf III at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, off the southern coast of France. Living in a spherical undersea vessel, Cousteau and his crew conduct a series of experiments and demonstrations to prove the efficiency of operating on an oil rig, marine stock farming, and hydroarchaeology. Wolper then orchestrated a deal between his studio, Cousteau, and ABC for the twelve-program The Undersea World of Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1968). The show was less about the pursuit of science than the desire to craft floating, underwater views of the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Gulf of Aden using a sophisticated array of color photography cameras, sound recorders, and lighting equipment. The programs were well suited for television, with the small screen akin to the porthole window of a ship—or what Wolper once claimed to be a fishbowl in the living room. Cousteau’s personable charm increased the programs’ appeal; the Frenchman made the ocean alluring.⁹ New York Times journalist Jack Gould commented on the follow-up broadcast, Savage World of the Coral Jungle: “His remarkable equipment for photographing what happens beneath the depths is a continuing source of revelation and fascination. Last night he reported on the interdependence of fish and a coral reef, a strange and absorbing underwater city where the dead polyps raise the reef’s height and the fish seek the shelter of the reef’s protection.”¹⁰

As the 1960s progressed, the praise given to some of Wolper Productions’ documentaries seemed to provide a distorted sense of the studio’s representation of pressing social realities. At home, minority street protests in cities such as Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Baltimore, and Newark, along with the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, intensified a crisis in the integrationist vision of racial harmony espoused by civil rights leaders and architects of the Great Society. With calls for Black Power as well as the rising brown, yellow, red, and women’s liberation movements, minorities saw self-determination as decisive for claiming their rights as citizens, combating institutionalized racism, and lifting their economic standing. Overseas, the escalation of US involvement in Vietnam inspired demonstrations against the Johnson administration and its drafting of young adults to fight an unpopular and unjust war. Even the government’s official position on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which Wolper Productions had used to solidify its civic reputation, was called into doubt. In 1966, Esquire published “A Primer of Assassination Theories,” which included thirty-five versions of Kennedy’s murder. That same year, the books Inquest: The Warren Commission and the Establishment of Truth and The Second Oswald along with the book and documentary Rush to Judgment critiqued the decision-making process of the Warren Commission and its findings.11 During this period, Wolper Productions navigated a shifting position within the film and television industries and struggled to maintain its social relevance.

STATE OF FRACTURE

In late 1968 Wolper Productions separated from Metromedia. The conglomerate faced antitrust litigation due to its proposed merger with the Transamerica Corporation, which owned United Artists. Wolper was satisfied with the move to independence. He felt that he was being spread too thin across a number of administrative tasks and did not have enough time to devote to nurturing individual films and series.¹² The departure went against the current trend toward studio mergers, which were caused by the financial downturn in the film and television industries as well as by changing models of production and distribution. The old majors suffered from a declining theater audience, competing forms of entertainment, and unanticipated box office flops. MGM, Paramount, and Warner Bros. sought financial stability with larger corporate parents. Studios adjusted their production calculus toward stylistically innovative narratives that engaged topical issues. Given that Wolper Productions was a smaller studio working in multiple sectors of film and television, it found it advantageous, at least for the immediate future, to retain its semi-independent status and partner with media organizations and personnel to work on its varied projects.¹³

Individuals would frequently work for Wolper Productions as well as contribute to the low-budget, countercultural features of the emerging “New Hollywood.” For example, after The Thin Blue Line, Friedkin went on to direct the burlesque comedy The Night They Raided Minsky’s (1968), the queer drama The Boys in the Band (1970), and the police thriller The French Connection (1971). Vilmos Zsigmond worked as a cinematographer for Wolper Productions on The Story of . . . series, and then shot the teen horror film The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies (1964) as well as the revisionist Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) and the Southern drama Deliverance (1972). Walon Green wrote and directed nature documentaries for Wolper Productions and also penned the Western The Wild Bunch (1969). John Alonzo shot nature and social documentaries for Wolper, the Roger Corman bandit film Bloody Mama (1970), and the road film Vanishing Point (1971). But while Wolper Productions personnel labored on the front lines of New Hollywood, for the most part the studio’s output followed the story arcs and themes of its past films. The documentaries projected nostalgia for an era when it seemed as though liberal governance could unify the country.

Wolper Productions tried to make the American military, which had long fascinated the studio, the subject of captivating cinema. But even as Wolper gave World War II an elaborate fictional treatment, complete with high production values and a star-studded cast, his features fell flat. They didn’t necessarily attract the kind of ire and controversy that John Wayne’s ode to counterinsurgency, The Green Berets (1968), garnered from major journalists and intellectuals. However, they were often described as stale and out of touch.14 Wolper Productions first adapted to the screen a literary account of the American-Canadian First Special Service Force, which during World War II captured the Nazi mountain outpost Monte la Difensa. This became The Devil’s Brigade (1968), made with United Artists and starring longtime military actor William Holden and Cliff Robertson, who had played John F. Kennedy in PT 109 (1963). Journalists panned the film as a tired rehashing of World War II movie tropes. Vincent Canby’s New York Times review opined: “There is hardly a character, a situation or a line of dialogue in The Devil’s Brigade that has not served a useful purpose in some earlier movie or television show. Now, with the passage of time, the characters, the situations and the lines have begun to look very tired and very empty, like William Holden’s eyes.”¹⁵ Not only was the film considered cliché, it exuded a wistful longing for past military glory while remaining unengaged with the climate of protest against the Vietnam War. Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times called it “dull, inept and offensive.” George McKinnon of the Boston Globe wrote that “the two-hour film seems old-fashioned. It tends to romanticize war at a time when the whole nation nightly views a real war on television.”¹⁶

The Bridge at Remagen (1969), the studio’s follow-up to The Devil’s Brigade, fared no better. The underlying story deals with the Allied seizure of the Ludendorff Bridge, which helped bring the war to an end in 1945. Production fell apart soon after on-location shooting began at the Davle Bridge in Czechoslovakia. Wolper had to defend the film against claims from the East German press and the Soviet official newspaper Pravda that the production was a front for CIA intervention in Czech political affairs and surveillance of the Dubček government. These charges resulted in restrictions placed on the use of military resources during shooting. The presence of Warsaw Pact tanks rolling through city streets—the effective end to the Prague Spring—forced the film crew’s hasty retreat out of the country. They first went to Hamburg and then to Rome to finish shooting.

Wolper attempted to leverage these difficulties for publicity, including a two-page Variety spread containing a shot log of the vicissitudes of production, but this advertising campaign backfired. It took attention away from the film itself and made audiences more aware of the disconnect between the movie and the contemporary moment. Gary Arnold of the Washington Post wrote that The Bridge at Remagen was a “combat melodrama” that filled a Hollywood quota of World War II fare: “If Wolper isn’t filling the quota, another producer will be along to take his place.” The Chicago Tribune’s Clifford Terry commented that the film was an “extravagant, glossy exercise of soldiers in simulated combat” and a “shamefully wasteful” use of resources.17 Clear-cut representations of American military heroics no longer constituted a sturdy tent pole around which liberal ideology could coalesce.

Wolper Productions’ Los Angeles: Where It’s At (1969) failed to relate to a rising tide of public opinion, this time on a local scale. The documentary reflected the studio’s past portrayals of Los Angeles as an expanding metropolis filled with professional and leisure opportunities. However, against a backdrop of urban unrest, it came off as an effort to manage the incendiary images of the city circulating in the mainstream media. Backed by mayor Sam Yorty and the Economic Development Board, the documentary tried to sell Los Angeles back to its disenchanted citizens and potential tourists. As city officials hoped to reinvigorate the reputation of Los Angeles as a place where residential developments, industrial sites, natural landscapes, and cultural establishments coexist in harmony, so too did the film take up the theme of cohesion. The documentary’s boosterist charge echoed the prose of glossy guidebooks such as Los Angeles: Portrait of an Extraordinary City (1968).This travel book declared greater Los Angeles “a scattering of communities that has evolved into a great urban complex, unified by ties of social, cultural and economic interest and laced together by a unique mode of transportation that enables people to pursue far-flung interests with little concern for time or distance.”¹⁸

The film’s opening spotlights the Port of Los Angeles as a major hub for global imports and exports of merchandise, produce, and raw materials. Inland lie the high-tech aerospace and defense industries, a public school system to educate the city’s youth, and beaches, hiking trails, art museums, galleries, bars, and movie theaters for recreation. In Natalie Wood’s quick cameo appearance, she proudly turns to the camera and says, “I like Los Angeles because I can go to the beach, the desert, the mountains, and the theater, all in the same day. Where else can you do that?” The film also details the proximity of Los Angeles to other enticing locales. By car, Angelenos are thirty-five minutes from Marineland, forty-five minutes from Disneyland, and three hours from Mexico. By plane, they are five hours from Hawaii and “two fast cocktails” from San Francisco. At the film’s conclusion, Yorty shares his thoughts while hovering high above the city in a helicopter. Los Angeles, he claims, is a city full of “beauty,” “hustle bustle,” and “excitement.” Such hyperbolic speech mirrors the documentary’s refusal to acknowledge the city’s deep social divisions and the ways racial discrimination and economic status directly impact access to the kinds of professional and recreational experiences it celebrates. In a speech Yorty delivered at UCLA on November 21, 1968, the crowd of students began to jeer when he mentioned that the “magnificent film” would be shown regionally as well as on airplanes and steamships to “advertise” Los Angeles.19 Van Nuys Valley News reporter Ali Sar reported that politician Alphonzo Bell Jr. “blasted the work as a puff film about Los Angeles” and that Bell’s aide mentioned that the “money might have been better spent.”²⁰

Wolper Productions’ documentaries about national politics not only signaled growing rifts between state leaders and frustrated Angelenos, but also amplified the studio’s own struggle to remain a relevant chronicler of the country. With Johnson under increasing attack from inside and outside the Democratic Party, culminating in his March 31, 1968, television announcement that he would not seek reelection, the Democratic National Committee pulled Wolper’s documentary Promises Made, Promises Kept (1968) from the Chicago convention in August. The committee-funded film was intended as a highlight reel of the president’s policy achievements, but was eliminated by convention managers fearing “it might set off hostile demonstrations.”²¹

The film’s removal and Johnson’s absence from the ticket were symptomatic of a breakdown in American liberalism, a crisis more fully felt in Wolper Productions’ account of the 1968 presidential election, The Making of the President: 1968 (1969). Like the first two films, the third installment centered on the presidential election, observing the campaigns of the Democratic and Republican candidates. But The Making of the President: 1968 was more interested in surveying conflicts than in concentrating on either the virtues of a specific individual or electoral politics as an effective democratic process. Theodore H. White, the patron saint of consensus reportage, delivers introductory remarks just as he had at the beginning of the other The Making of the President films. On this occasion he appears anxious:

Some people called 1968 the year of the grotesque, and it was. Lunatic events hammered us. . . . Somewhere along the way the old politics died, an era ended. The old politics had somehow given us the illusion of control. A presidential campaign . . . gave people a clear choice of direction. . . . Nineteen sixty-eight was the year we lost that sense of control. Not only the people, but our leaders too, leaders who tried to control the instruments of government and failed, failed overseas in Vietnam, failed in the streets of Chicago and Washington, failed in the streets of a dozen ghettos.

An array of television footage depicts a despondent Johnson, concerned about his administration’s investment in asserting control in Southeast Asia and the realities of the opposition to the campaign. Compounding Johnson’s worries are what he shares as the growing “communication gap” between his presidency and the American people, a gap widened by the contentious association between his administration and the press. Beyond the falling popularity of Johnson, narrator Joseph Campanella explains that Republican candidates Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan as well as Democrats George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, and Hubert Humphrey are candidates at war with one another. Campanella further argues that these men are speaking to targeted constituencies rather than to “the nation as a whole.” They are unable to unite the country within a context of assassinations, clashes of minorities with police, protests on college campuses such as Columbia, heavy losses in Vietnam, and dissent within the Democratic National Convention. Nixon wins not because of his visionary abilities to chart a new path for the United States, but because of an epochal breakdown in American electoral politics. The film offers no tools with which to repair the body politic, only an expression of its fracture.

The Making of the President: 1968’s implication that an absence of strong leadership has resulted in so much discontent doesn’t take seriously the motivations of people who have taken to the streets. As the New Left analogue to White’s moderate voice, Norman Mailer helped elucidate demonstrations such as the October 21, 1967, anti-Vietnam march to the Pentagon as socially significant and symbolic. His 1968 “nonfiction novel” The Armies of the Night focused on the experiences of the protestors and their fight against what he viewed to be authoritative state power (labeled “technology land” or “corporation land”) that controlled its citizenry through “packaged education, packaged politics” and plunged it ever deeper into war.22 The Making of the President: 1968 refused to comprehend why young Americans gravitated toward varying forms of confrontational protests against state power on the local and national level.

The Journey of Robert F. Kennedy (1970), written by the official Kennedy family historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., intensified The Making of the President: 1968’s elegiac tone. The Boston Globe’s Percy Shain wrote that the film “summed up the tragedy and turbulence of the 60s.”²³ The combination of home movies, newsreel footage of Robert Kennedy campaigning for public office, and interviews with Charles Evers, Robert McNamara, Art Buchwald, and Frank Mankiewicz gave rise to an image of Robert Kennedy as an erudite statesman and passionate supporter of integration, endowed with a gift for de-escalating domestic and international conflicts, and for bringing people together across racial and class lines to understand their common humanity. Los Angeles, once the city that had anointed John F. Kennedy at the 1960 Democratic National Convention as he announced his vision of the New Frontier, had become the city where Robert Kennedy was assassinated. Rafer Johnson, who campaigned for Robert Kennedy and was also the subject of an early Wolper Productions documentary, The Rafer Johnson Story (1961), wrestled the gun away from the assassin. Unlike the ending of The Making of the President: 1960 (1963), where the “passing of power” from Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy also signaled the passing of power from John F. Kennedy to Johnson, the conclusion of The Journey of Robert F. Kennedy offers no solace. There is no clear sense of either the future of the American welfare state or the country’s status as a leader in global affairs.

In a highly limited capacity, Wolper Productions did begin to experiment with trying to recalibrate its liberal posture to directly address the contemporary climate of protest. Responding to the Black Power movement’s reclaiming of American history and the growing dissatisfaction with integrationist comedies and dramas, Wolper Productions attempted a collaboration with Twentieth Century–Fox. The project focused on an adaptation of William Styron’s best-selling novel about a Virginia slave revolt, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967).24

THE TROUBLE WITH HISTORY

From the outset, Wolper Productions and Twentieth Century–Fox imagined the novel’s adaptation as a progressive prestige picture. Styron’s book was published in early October 1967, and Wolper shortly thereafter bought the screen rights.²⁵ As film historian Christopher Sieving argues, the film was one of the earliest, most elaborate, and most widely covered studio efforts to try to capitalize on the Black Power movement. The opposition to the project and the inability to create the film revealed, according to Sieving, “the chasm separating the best intentions of white liberal filmmakers from the values of African American critics and spokespersons in the 1960s.”²⁶ Certainly the project exposed the arrogance and prejudices of establishment filmmakers and the systemic racism that existed in the entertainment business. But debates concerning the politics of representation resonated beyond the scope of the project. The film’s turbulent preproduction life also highlighted a larger tension between the value of social history to the minority liberation movements and the profit motive of the culture industries. Furthermore, it underscored a localized conflict between white Hollywood producers and black intellectuals and activists in Los Angeles.

From Wolper’s perspective, the adaptation looked promising. The mainstream media and literary establishment had already vetted the book. Styron was considered a proud liberal of elite pedigree. The recipient of the distinguished Rome Prize for Lie Down in Darkness (1951), he had garnered acclaim for the antiwar novel The Long March (1952), which drew on his experience serving in World War II and the Korean War. In addition, he was an editor for the Paris Review. He thought of himself as a keen observer of the black experience and an authority on African American history. Styron, who was born and raised in Newport News, Virginia (not far from the site of Turner’s nineteenth-century slave rebellion), was eager to write about Nat Turner. Encouraged by his friend James Baldwin to pursue the project, he felt confident in his ability to navigate the relationship between fact and fiction.

Turner was a slave from Southampton County, Virginia, who, in the early morning of August 22, 1831, led a slave revolt against white oppression in which he killed his master and the master’s family, along with other white men, women, and children in the region. The insurrection was suppressed within two days and participating members as well as a number of slaves thought to be part of it were captured, tried, and executed. Turner avoided capture until late October, after which he was hanged. The lawyer Thomas Gray created a summary of these events based on his interview with Turner before his execution and published it as The Confessions of Nat Turner, the Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, VA (1831). The kind of fantastic and contradictory portrait of Turner that appears in Gray’s book was itself a topic of debate, obscuring as much as clarifying Turner’s actions. Aspects of Turner’s life, motivations, and the event itself went unaddressed in this text. Styron saw his own book as a “meditation” on history, an imagined account of Turner that would nonetheless seek to convey certain truths about Turner’s life as well as about the historical circumstances and effects of slavery. In his prefatory author’s note, Styron made clear that he sought to cleave to the “known facts about Nat Turner,” while also employing a novelist’s creative license and the “freedom of imagination” within the “bounds” of history to reconstruct events and “re-create a man and his era.”27

Styron’s meditation became an immediate best seller. Journalists commended the author for placing the deplorable system of slavery before the American public at a time when slavery was not often a subject of popular literature, film, or television. National news periodicals commented that by assuming the first-person perspective of Turner, Styron was able to explore the human experience of slavery in an imaginative and psychologically complex way; it was as if readers could inhabit the consciousness of Turner.²⁸ Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. deemed the book “the finest American novel in many years.” He went on to write that Styron, “without departing from the external realities of character and setting, . . . has perceived this episode with a clarity and penetration, at once loving and terrible, which gives it a timeless and even mythic quality.”²⁹ Featuring Styron’s book as its October 16, 1967, cover story, Newsweek praised it for giving Americans a valuable time machine: “Styron lifts us up and puts us down in the Virginia tidewater, 1831, and makes us think as a brilliant slave, we are convinced, must have thought.”³⁰ Baldwin said that Styron was productively starting an inclusive conversation about America’s past: “He has begun the common history—Ours.”³¹ When The Confessions of Nat Turner won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, Wolper and Twentieth Century–Fox were quick to congratulate Styron on the prize for the “distinguished novel” by taking out a large advertisement in Variety.³² Looking to move ahead with the adaptation, the Hollywood team hired director Norman Jewison, who had recently directed the Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night (1967) starring Sidney Poitier.

Even as the book sold widely and attracted favorable reviews, a critical backlash began to foment. Prominent black as well as white critics took aim at Styron for having relied too little on historical sources and too heavily on his racist imagination. They argued that Styron’s literary license did not simply provoke scholarly quibbles, but had distorted history and had contemporary consequences for understanding both Turner and the world he lived in. For example, Styron wrote that the Turner revolt was the “only effective, sustained revolt in the annals of American Negro slavery,” a grossly inaccurate assertion that Twentieth Century–Fox nevertheless circulated in its press releases for the film.33 This contention contradicted documented accounts of other rebellions leading up to and beyond the Turner revolt as well as daily forms of resistance to slavery that occurred on a smaller scale. Styron’s book denied that opposition was constitutive of the experience of slavery. Another contentious issue revolved around Styron’s avowal that Turner did not have a wife, which, journalists claimed, led to his characterization of Turner as a repressed celibate with sexual longings for white women. This contradicted nineteenth-century newspaper articles stating that Turner did in fact have a spouse. The New York Amsterdam News’s Gertrude Wilson remarked that Styron’s depictions of Turner’s fictitious desires for white women perpetuated some of the oldest and most damaging myths about black people and anxieties about racial integration.³⁴

A topical critique of the book and prospective film had to do with Styron’s failure to understand Turner’s present-day significance. The edited volume William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond (1968) argued that Styron’s novelization of Turner blunted the radicalism of his actions and created a weak figure. Writers in the anthology claimed that Turner was not simply a conflicted psychology and a vehicle to understand the cruelties of slavery; he was a socially motivated person who led a charge against an oppressive system. Historian Lerone Bennett Jr. wrote, “We are objecting to a deliberate attempt to steal the meaning of a man’s life.” Writer and Schomberg Collection librarian Ernest Kaiser professed, “[Styron’s] writing is impervious to Negro social change and struggle and to the facts of Negro history.”³⁵ Examining the situation from a symptomatic perspective, Hollywood publicist and sports journalist A.S. “Doc” Young called the hype around the book and film a result of the “truth gap” separating black experience from the readers and viewers of white-controlled mainstream media.³⁶ These criticisms gained force as Nat Turner was increasingly looked to as a unique kind of hero. Styron’s Turner clashed with how Black Panthers leader Eldridge Cleaver, historian William Aptheker, literary scholar Addison Gayle Jr., and poet Robert Hayden saw Turner: namely, as a revolutionary whose role in a courageous struggle against slavery made him an inspiring figure for the current post–civil rights era of Black Power militancy.

At first, those involved with the book and the adaptation assumed a range of defensive positions. Styron participated in a heated debate with black actor and activist Ossie Davis at the Los Angeles “political cabaret,” Eugene West, where he explained his motivations and defended the interpretive strategies he chose. The moderator, James Baldwin, defended Styron’s right to assume the voice of a black man as part of the freedom entitled to a writer; at the same time, Baldwin acknowledged both the ethical responsibilities of a writer to his material, and the likelihood that the film would reach a far greater audience than the book: “Bill’s novel is a private act, but what happens when it’s onscreen and disseminated at this time in our history? There’s a possibility that thousands of black people will die.”37 Wolper rejected the allegations brought forth against Styron and cited the positive press surrounding the project, stating, “I don’t see why they should challenge a book that has withstood the test of a critical press since last October.”³⁸ While more sympathetic to the protests, and committed to presenting Turner as a “black Gideon and a hero,”³⁹ Jewison nonetheless brandished his auteurist shield, declaring that he would not be swayed by the tide of public opinion: “I’ll make the film my way . . . and nobody is going to tell me how to do it. I’ll listen to all the people involved, but it will be done my way, and my way alone. That goes for the studio as well as for protest groups.”⁴⁰

The black left-liberal creative community in Los Angeles led the opposition to the film. Two former Universal employees, Vantile Whitfield and Louise Meriwether, who worked with the Performing Arts Society of Los Angeles and the Watts Writers Workshop, joined forces with Ossie Davis to create the Black Anti-Defamation Association.⁴¹ They set up an office in the mixed-class African American neighborhood of Leimert Park. The organization gained the support of poets H. Rap Brown and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), actor Godfrey Cambridge, congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Black Panthers of Los Angeles, members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the US Organization, and the Los Angeles branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Protests took the form of letters sent to Jewison, Wolper, and Jack Valenti, a petition against the production that ran in the pages of the Hollywood Reporter, and editorials in the mainstream and minority press.

It was not that protestors opposed any kind of film about Turner. Rather, they reacted to the specific way he would become a living person on the big screen and the implications of the representation. In the Los Angeles Sentinel Vantile Whitfield was quoted as saying, “Our goal is to create a mammoth movement protesting this crap, to make Hollywood aware of this tide of black power.”⁴² Echoing Whitfield’s criticism, Davis spoke out against the myths the adaptation would perpetuate:

The book does little more than help the attitude of unsophisticated readers. . . . The mass reception of this book makes me fear a need in the general white community to justify possibly brutal retaliation to the upheavals in our cities. I can accept a black slave being in love with a white woman on a southern plantation, that’s within truth. I cannot accept the fact that this kind of thought has become so predominant that since freedom over 3,000 black men have been lynched and castrated because some ignorant white[s] believed they were after their lily white women.43

Despite the various initial defensive positions held by above-the-line labor involved with the production, the steady stream of essays, editorials, and news articles that condemned the book and the proposed film persuaded them to see the project in a new light. Other factors also influenced the course of production. Petitions, lawsuits, and demonstrations by civic groups pressured the film and television industries to construct new platforms for minority voices both in front of and behind the camera. Furthermore, the Johnson administration’s widely discussed report by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders had concluded that the news and entertainment media had failed to provide professional opportunities for people of color, and had also failed to address topical subjects of interest to minority viewers. It was in this period, as Wolper and Twentieth Century–Fox were struggling with the Nat Turner project, that minority filmmakers in Los Angeles made inroads within public television and universities. It was also at this time that they began to create independent collectives in order to produce films about their own communities.

Moved by the protests against the film and understanding that the production needed to change, Wolper told the New York Times, “Every legitimate black organization in America came out against certain parts of the book, and I felt something had to be done. . . . You don’t go forward and make a film about a black hero if the entire black community feels it is wrong, any more than you’d make a film of ‘Exodus’ if the Jewish community felt it was wrong.”⁴⁴ Two adjustments involved hiring black personnel and agreeing to expand the film’s source material. Wolper brought on black playwright-screenwriter Louis Peterson to write the script. Peterson was a celebrated author who attended Morehouse College before going on to pursue graduate training at the Yale School of Drama and New York University. Peterson was also used to working across media, having written the Broadway play Take a Giant Step (1953) and adapted the stage production for the screen in 1959.⁴⁵ The title of the film was changed to Nat Turner, distancing it from Styron’s book, and actor James Earl Jones was hired for the lead role.

Following a meeting in late December of 1968, Meriwether reported: “Both Wolper and Jewison have assured us that they will project a positive image of Nat Turner as a black revolutionary, and that such things as slaves lusting after white women and raping them, slaves putting down the rebellion, homosexual incidents and other figments of Styron’s imagination, will not be included in the screenplay.”⁴⁶ But Peterson’s work on the script did not involve wholesale reconstruction. Peterson toned down Turner’s sexual longings for white women, but kept his obsession with the young girl, Margaret Whitehead. He replaced a scene where Turner witnessed a sexual encounter between his mother and a drunken Irish overseer with one of his mother denying a black sailor. Peterson also omitted scenes of rape, and made Whitehead’s death an accident rather than a climactic act of aggression on Turner’s part.

Social service outreach to African Americans in Los Angeles served as another strategy to mend the public relations crisis. Wife-and-husband teams involved with the film, including Dixie and Norman Jewison, Bea and Mark Miller, Suzanne and Lawrence Turman, and Dawn and David Wolper, started the coalition Neighbors of Watts (NOW) to raise funds to construct a childcare center in South Central. As outlined in a Los Angeles Times article, “NOW—A Good Neighbor Policy for Beverly Hills,” the center had a threefold purpose, providing childcare for working mothers, immunizations and nutrition courses, and a Head Start operation for early education.47 The center provided much-needed social services, as Watts had a mortality rate for children that was 70 percent higher than for the rest of Southern California, and 46 percent of all families were single-parent homes. NOW raised money by raffling off tickets to Hollywood premieres and hosting benefits.

To be sure, social outreach was nothing new to liberal Hollywood, but it had assumed a heightened importance and visibility in the aftermath of the Watts Uprising. Budd Schulberg’s Watts Writers Workshop constituted an early effort to use artistic expression as a form of social uplift and as a way to mediate the fractious state of race relations in the city. NOW’s fundraising and advisory board involved a mix of individuals connected to the entertainment industry, as well as health care and legal specialists who worked in the South Central area. Sponsors included an illustrious list of Hollywood insiders, some of whom had been involved with the Watts Writers Workshop. NOW’s big April 1969 charity concert took place at the Aquarius Theater in Hollywood and featured Frank Sinatra, Bill Cosby, Nancy Sinatra, Nelson Riddle’s big band, and Tom Smothers as emcee. Black mayoral candidate Tom Bradley, actors Martin Landau and Ricardo Montalbán, and journalist Shana Alexander were all in attendance.⁴⁸

Despite the changes in production and outreach for Nat Turner, the start of principal photography was postponed. The controversy that continued to swirl around the adaptation made Twentieth Century–Fox hesitant to move forward. Jewison soon dropped out to fulfill his contractual obligation to shoot Gaily, Gaily (1969) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971) for United Artists. A reluctant Sidney Lumet stepped into the directorial role.⁴⁹ He was focused on an array of practical problems associated with the production and appeared aloof concerning the project’s political resonance:

It’s going to be difficult technically. . . . We have to show cotton, tobacco and corn crops at different times—at planting, full-grown, at harvesting. Art director Gene Callahan and I will just have to arrange for some out-of-season rotation farming to be ready for our 10-week location schedule. I don’t know the first thing about it, being a Jewish city boy. The first question I asked 20th [Century] research was “How do you plant corn?”50

FIGURE 14: Advertisement for Nat Turner, Variety, July 30, 1969, 80.

Advertisements for the film proclaimed a March 1970 start to production, but delays combined with the poor financial state of Twentieth Century–Fox after a series of disastrous big-budget film investments left the Nat Turner project in a stalled state.51 NOW’s activities continued into the next decade, but the film that indirectly engendered its creation was nothing but a memory by the early 1970s.⁵²

As Christopher Sieving insightfully notes, the late-1960s Nat Turner film debacle discouraged Hollywood from pursuing well-funded black-themed features about controversial topics. Following the success of Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970), Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), and Shaft (1971), the majors looked instead to low-budget, black-cast crime dramas.⁵³ The Nat Turner project was thus instructive for Hollywood. Significantly, however, Wolper learned something different from what the other studios did. His company looked to refashion the minority prestige picture into a new kind of film. This was to a large extent due to Wolper and his colleagues’ recent experience of working on the Nat Turner project in such a charged climate of protest. They became more aware of the past struggles and contemporary political movements of black communities within and beyond Los Angeles, and interested in how cinematically addressing these issues could potentially attract large audiences. Wolper Productions also realized that a film about a minority subject needed to have the direct investment of minority participants. Successful films begin with productive partnerships. The studio would get a chance to exercise its newfound wisdom when the black-owned-and-operated record label Stax contacted Wolper about documenting the concluding concert of the 1972 Watts Summer Festival.