Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin: 'Salesman' (1968, 1969): Take Two

Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin: Salesman (1968, 1969). The Maysles Brothers had previous experience at being door-to-door salesmen. They understood the lifestyle, and the stakes.   

Criterion Collection DVD. Chapter listing, including "Lost in Opa Locka," Florida. 

Much of the film spotlights Paul "The Badger" Brennan, who is in decline as a salesman from better years. "An orchestral version of 'This Land Is Your Land' is heard on Brennan's radio as he drives through the snow to a series of appointments with clients who are not home. The irony could not be clearer . . ."  ~ Joe McElhaney's Albert Maysles. Contemporary Film Directors series. University of Illinois Press, 2009, page 46.  

Today's Rune: Defense. 

Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin: 'Salesman' (1968, 1969): Take One

Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Charlotte Zwerin: Salesman (1968, 1969). Thanks to The Criterion Collection, it's still circulating among interested parties in DVD format. 

This documentary in black and white, ostensibly about Irish American Catholic Bible salesman, shows us a microcosm of (any kind of) sales work. Although with Salesman we specifically see a grueling door-to-door kind of selling, peddling and hawking in their various forms date back, one suspects, thousands of years. Selling is a truly social, virtually relentless activity with a long history.  

Direct cinema style: prospective Bible buyers let Albert and David Maysles film their interactions with the salesmen, but unlike "Reality TV" today, they don't seem much concerned about appearance or action. (Charlotte Zwerin edited the raw footage into a coherent "story" with a sort of beginning, middle and end, but no intrusive narration).

Two questions for now. One: how much of an "observer effect" distorts what might have otherwise happened had there been no cameras, just salesmen and clients?

Two: How have sales techniques changed along with technology and living patterns, specifically since Salesman was made in the 1960s? Or have they?

Today's Rune: Journey.

Joe McElhaney: Albert Maysles

The Maysles Brothers were major players in documentary filmmaking, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Stylistically, their influence continues to rocket through the present and beyond us into the future. 

Beyond Albert Maysles (1926-2015) and David Maysles (1931-1987) and "direct cinema," consider who they were lucky enough to work with: not only gifted editors like Detroiter Charlotte Zwerin (who in turn directed Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser, 1988),  but also John F. Kennedy, Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Orson Welles, Marlon Brando and Truman Capote. Two of their most easily recognizable films are Gimme Shelter (1970) and Grey Gardens (1975). The latter, focusing on "Big" and "Little" Edie Bouvier Beale and their crumbling tomb of an estate, has attained cult status. 

I have a copy of the Criterion Collection's edition of Salesman (1969) in the pipeline, and will likely post on it in the near future. 

Joe McElhaney's Albert Maysles in the Contemporary Film Directors series provides a useful overview of the Maysles Brothers' work, historical context, and thoughtful consideration of the cultural impact of direct cinema / cinéma vérité.

Question: what's your response to documentary film? And, in the print world, how about creative nonfiction vs. fiction? 

Today's Rune: The Self. 

Charlotte Zwerin's 'Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser' (1988)

Sometimes the name and the named match perfectly. Such is the case with North Carolina-born jazz pianist-composer Thelonious Sphere Monk (1917-1982). 

To gain insight into Monk's world, Charlotte Zwerin's Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (1988) is highly valuable as a record of the artist, letting us see him perform, stand still while walking in circles, mutter and sporadically interact with others in what appears to be quite an otherworldly manner. His original compositions are part of the jazz canon, complex and powerful -- "Straight, No Chaser," "Blue Monk," "Bemsha Swing," "Epistrophy," "Ruby, My Dear," "In Walked Bud" and "'Round Midnight" -- for example.   

Detroiter Charlotte Zwerin (1931-2004. Cinema verité director who worked with the Maysles' brothers on Gimme Shelter and made several other excellent documentaries) utilizes priceless archival footage in a highly effective manner. 

Zwerin, Bruce Ricker and Clint Eastwood co-produced Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (Eastwood especially helped with the financing). 

Monk's son T.S. (also a jazz musician) provides insight into his father's unsettled mental states (sometimes catatonic, in fugue states of sorts, as if checked out of Earth from time to time), and we gain an appreciation for Monk's wife and sort of chief of staff Nellie as well as his "special lady friend" and patron, Pannonica "Nica" de Koenigswarter, both of whom informally shared responsibilities for keeping Monk together. Finally, let's not fail to mention his withdrawal from the music scene into quietude during the last decade of his life, combined with his affinity for cats and a silent piano. From Koenigswarter's pad in Weehawken, New Jersey, Thelonious Sphere Monk could contemplatively gaze at the Manhattan skyline to his heart's content, never having to perform on stage again.  

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Exile on Main Street II

Hey folks, it's the 40th anniversary of the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, immortalized in Gimme Shelter, the 1970 documentary by the Maysles brothers (Albert and David) with Charlotte Zwerin. Just as the Stones were weighed against the Beatles, Altamont was weighed against Woodstock -- the supposed end of the hippie dream in Nixonian America, amid the raging US-Vietnam War. Still, the balance sheet was even at Altamont: four deaths and four births. And the beat went on. Kent State and Jackson State shootings were just around the corner, and Watergate, too.




















"Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!": The Rolling Stones in Concert, recorded during the 1969 tour, was released in 1970: it's one of the best concert albums ever released so far as I know. What's more, the 40th anniversary edition now out includes tracks that might have been included in a two-disc set in 1970, before it was decided to stick to a single disc release. It's all there now: bonus tracks, B.B. King, Ike & Tina Turner, and film footage. How cool is that? (As an aside, the record title comes from a similarly titled song by North Carolina bluesman Blind Boy Fuller/Fulton Allen, who died in Durham, North Carolina in 1941).



But the best album by the Rolling Stones was yet to come with Exile on Main St. in 1972. This album has so much to offer that even decades later, I'm still absorbing its richness. Above is a promo, featuring Mick Jagger on piano. More on Exile in due time. Dig it, Jack!

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

Woodstock and Altamont at Forty

Forty years ago today, Woodstock wrapped up with Jimi Hendrix playing an electric voodoo version of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Woodstock and Altamont (December 6, 1969) are both thought of best, I think, in the context of their times, and not placed in a mystical vacuum.

While reading Nixonland, here's another perspective -- Rob Kirkpatrick's 1969: The Year Everything Changed (2009). And here's a link to his cool blog:

http://www.robkirkpatrick.com/blog/

Going from the book cover, I'd say IGGY AND THE STOOGES are the winners in terms of shifting cultural embrace over the decades -- probably the least recognized of cultural icons in 1969 at the time . . . I dig!



Life magazine put out this special edition on Woodstock in 1969.


Rolling Stone's LET IT BLEED issue, early 1970.



The Criterion Collection DVD version of Albert & David Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin's documentary, Gimme Shelter (1970), with special features.

A salute to JC for his recent nod to Jimi Hendrix and Woodstock, and congrats on finishing his Ph.D!

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.

Northern Gothic: The Beales of Grey Gardens

Edith Bouvier Beale, once a successful model and aspiring actress who later lived a gothic life in Grey Gardens, a dilapidated 28-room house in East Hampton, N.Y., with her mother and dozens of cats, raccoons and opossums, was found dead in her small apartment in Bal Harbour, Fla., on Jan. 14. She was 84. . . . . (Douglas Martin, "Edith Bouvier Beale, 84, 'Little Edie,' Dies," New York Times, 1/25/2002)

Flashback to 1975. The Maysles brothers' (Albert and David) Grey Gardens documentary.

"Listen, kid! I'm extremely organized. I know exactly where to look for this stuff. I've got it under control right here, but I can't find it. Get it?" (Little Edie)

"It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present. You know what I mean? It's awfully difficult." (Little Edie)

Fast forward to 2006. The Beales of Grey Gardens, a sort of alternate take on Grey Gardens from the same filmmakers (though David Maysles died in 1987).

Fast forward to April 18, 2009. Michael Sucsy and HBO present a biopic version of Grey Gardens starring Drew Barrymore as Little Edie and Jessica Lange as Big Edie.

For so much more, see Buster's Grey Gardens News at: http://greygardensnews.blogspot.com/

Pop music aficionados will probably have seen or at least know about the Maysles brothers' Gimme Shelter (1970), the documentary that follows the Rolling Stones to Altamont in 1969.* In Grey Gardens, see Little Edie perform "The VMI March," something close to my heart because I briefly served time in the Virginia Military Institute barracks in the late 1970s, at the time of the Guyana Tragedy at Jonestown.

*(with Charlotte Zwerin, of Detroit).

Today's Rune: Journey.

Gimme Shelter

When she performed at CBGB's on its last night before closing this past October, Patti Smith pointedly chose to sing The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter." More recently at her Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, she sang it again. Given today's global setting, it's not hard to ponder why.

I've always thought "Gimme Shelter" has had staying power partly because of its grinding haunted sound and partly because of its colorful lyrics.

Ooh, see the fire is sweepin'
Our very street today
Burns like a red coal carpet
Mad bull lost its way

War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away
War, children, it's just a shot away
It's just a shot away

Rape, murder!
It's just a shot away
It's just a shot away

Even the uplift -- "Love, sister, it's just a kiss a way" -- sounds ominous these days.

The Stones are great because they've always viewed the world through the primal scrim of the blues, and no matter how successful or rich they've become, they still seem to see it that way.

Gimme Shelter, a rough and tumble documentary about their 1969 tour culminating at Altamont, California, provides a grim counterpoint to Woodstock hippie utopianism. The Maysles brothers (Albert and David) with Charlotte Zwerin released the film in December 1970.

Between the time of the free concert at Altamont and the film's debut, US President Nixon had ordered an American military incursion into Cambodia, protesting American students had been gunned down by "authorities" at Kent State and Jackson State, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix died from drug-related deaths, and The Beatles distintegrated from internal bickering. "All You Need Is Love," indeed.



Today's Rune: Protection.

From the Detroit Bunker: Not Fade Way!