The Masters of Cinema Series

Catalogue

Production Notes

by Howard Junker, 1969

To accompany the theatrical release of Salesman in 1969, a transcript of the film was published by the New American Library. Alongside a script, of sorts — an equivalent of the “nonfiction novel” pioneered by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a major influence on the Maysles brothers — production notes were provided by Howard Junker (who later founded ZYZZYVA, a journal for West Coast writers and artists). Long out of print, Junker’s writing on Salesman is reprinted here by kind permission.

In the early days — 1960–1964 — there was all that solemnity about cinéma vérité. (The Maysles prefer the term “direct cinema.”) Every statement made by the pioneering filmmakers rang with evangelical conviction. Lightweight sync sound equipment had liberated the documentary. Enter the total filmmaker – the two-man, highly mobile, almost invisible crew. Capable of capturing reality as it happened. Not working from a script, but relying on the spontaneous observation of a subject in action. Then letting the story tell itself, find its own form. And afterward, not pulling the continuity all together with a voice of doom narration. In fact, trying to renounce every vestige of the omniscient, directorial, documentary mind, striving to create a direct relationship between filmmakers and subject.

Side by side with the proclamations were the debates. Just how unobtrusive is the two-man crew? How oblivious do subjects become? How ethical a mode of observation is the camera-which-attaches-itself-like-a-leech? And, finally, how objective – or subjective – could direct cinema be? Would its farthest limit be para-journalism or could a feature film of fact – a true work of art – be made?

A concerted effort to develop techniques with lightweight equipment was made in New York in the early sixties by Drew Associates (Bob Drew, Ricky Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, Greg Shuker, Jim Lipscomb, and the Maysles). Most of these films dealt with public contests – Kennedy vs. Humphrey in the Wisconsin primary, a high school football game, a race at Indianapolis, an international piano competition, the fight to win parole for a condemned man. These films had built-in drama, athletic excitement. They rose to a climax that always overshadowed the petty, everyday stuff, which made up their bulk. The Maysles’ Showman (1963) followed movie magnate Joseph E. Levine and also possessed a larger-than-life quality, an automatic glamour, topped by the (unanticipated) moment when his La Ciociara (Vittorio De Sica, 1960) won an Oscar for Sophia Loren.

However, one of the Maysles’ basic contentions was that direct cinema did not have to deal with life and death, sensational events. They believed that spontaneous shooting might permit a more relaxed structure in the final film, one that did not lead from one slam-bang scene to the next, always pointing toward a clearly perceived, big-time payoff. Everyday people living out their daily rounds – that was what the Maysles wanted to film.

It took a long time for the Maysles to find a suitable subject for their first feature. They began their search haphazardly, polling friends, querying people they met at parties. Along the way, they made a film that followed the Beatles on their first American tour in 1964. They did a mini-profile of Truman Capote for National Educational Television. They filmed Marlon Brando being interviewed by a series of television announcers to pitch his latest film. And they did a host of straight commercial jobs – promotions, TV spots, industrials. The usual meet-the-payroll stuff that a commercial film house has to turn out. Of course, they also had shooting assignments like Jean-Luc Godard’s segment of Paris vu par (1965).

By early 1966, it was definitely time to make a feature. The first possibility was suggested to Al by publicist Simone Swan, who recalled a New Yorker profile of whalers. Perhaps a film of the men on a six-month expedition from England to the Falkland Islands. The only trouble: there were no more English speaking whaling crews. Then Truman Capote, while being filmed by the Maysles, proposed an alternate hunt – for the big turtles around the island of Tobago, a subject his friend, the author-explorer Peter Matthieson, knew all about. David met with Matthieson but the Maysles decided that turtles were, after all, just turtles.

Then David began to consider some of the emotions and events he reacted to so strongly in books like The Grapes of Wrath and Ulysses. Something about adventure, the gift of gab. One passage near the end of The Iceman Cometh seemed to sum up his feelings about wandering, about hanging around hotels, about small-time tragedy and adventure — Hickey is talking about his prospects: “I’d met a lot of drummers around the hotel and liked ’em. They were always telling jokes. They were sports. They kept moving. I liked their life. And I knew I could kid people and sell things. The hitch was how to get the railroad fare to the Big Town. I told Molly Arlington my trouble. She was the madam of the cathouse. She liked me. She laughed and said, ‘Hell, I’ll stake you, Kid. I’ll bet on you. With that grin of yours and that line of bull, you ought to be able to sell skunks for good ratters!’”

David also searched for a story idea over lunch with various book and magazine editors. One day, Joe Fox of Random House, recalling his own experiences, suggested filming a book salesman — or a Geritol salesman. David allowed that they had once considered encyclopaedia salesmen for a short film but felt that a long film would require different, more sympathetic qualities: a pitch that was more honest for a product with greater metaphorical overtones.

Then David ran into a high school classmate who was selling Catholic Bibles in Manhattan. He was, in fact, Jewish, obviously not a religious fanatic. David went along to see how he worked – and the decision was quickly made that here was a real possibility. From that point, it took almost five months to find the right Bible salesman. Finally, the field was narrowed not to one man, but to a group of four, working together out of Boston.

Thus far the search had seemed fairly impersonal – looking for something that would make a good film, whatever that might be. But now, and increasingly throughout the production, the autobiographical, depth implications of the subject chosen began to surface. The Maysles themselves had grown up in Boston, raised by two Russian Jews who had been brought over as infants. Philip Maysles, who died in 1945, worked thirty-four years as a post office clerk. Ethel Maysles, the subject of the Maysles’ next film, taught grammar school and now lives in Boston. One more bit of background, difficult to assimilate, but not to be ignored: both Al and David majored in psychology in college: Al taught introductory courses at Boston University for three years.

Both Al and David had also done some selling – Fuller brushes, beach chairs, Avon Calling. And Al sold encyclopaedias for three weeks after college.

“I liked the idea of going up and knocking at a door,” says David. “But I didn’t like the idea of selling something, you know, an emotional pitch where the product isn’t really wanted. That never attracted me. It’s the idea of guys out on the road. Like Hickey. Hanging around hotels. Moving on. Meeting strangers. Their stories. I love their adventures and their pipe dreams. Paul Brennan, for instance, is very much an O’Neill character, the way he romanticises everything, the way he gives his buddies nicknames.”

Al’s slant on selling is slightly different. He sees it in terms of trust, in terms of meeting someone and immediately being accepted or rejected: “I was the first son and the hopes of the family were put in the form of a burden on my shoulders. David was a beautiful kid, curly hair. My parents thought of him as having a pure, love-me nature. Like a flower, you know, he would blossom and no one had to bother with him or expect anything. But I grew up with a fantastic need to trust and be trusted. And that’s why, I’m sure, the Guggenheim project I wanted to do (in 1965) was to meet somebody and begin filming them right away. Just to see what would happen. There’d be trust in each other, right off the bat. And that was also one of the elements in Salesman. You knock on the door, and if you can’t be trusted right away, you can’t get in the house. The whole method of making movies spontaneously is like that, too. It’s not really researched and preconceived. It’s on a hunch. It’s on trust and with an enormous risk – of every type. It all depends on immediately breaking down the barriers of strangerhood.”

Only when they were well into the shooting did the Maysles begin to sense how much Paul Brennan resembles their father. Says David: “My father was one of two Jews in the Boston post office, which otherwise was Irish-Catholic. Now get the idea with Paul. Paul is from a low-income Irish family, and the Irish mother, of course, wants her son to be a policeman or in the post office. You know, join the ‘fahrce’ and git a ‘pinshun.’ But Paul becomes a salesman. Now the irony is that our father should have been a salesman – that was the low-income Jewish ideal. But he went to work for the government, joined the ‘fahrce’ and got a ‘pinshun’.”

“We really loved – we liked Paul an awful lot,” adds Al. “Like my father, he’s a guy who has a soul, but he’s never really found a way to put it into his work. We liked the other guys, too. But it’s like In Cold Blood. Capote reads about this extraordinary event in the newspaper and says, Kansas sounds interesting, I’ve never been there. So he goes out there. He’s pretty much set on doing the book, but he hasn’t even met the reason for doing it. Which is what Perry turns out to be very much like himself.”

The Irish-Jewish thing about Paul proved particularly fascinating for the Maysles. “The Irish kids,” David remembers, “used to ambush me on Jewish holidays – and on St. Patrick’s Day too. But I admired all those Irish-Catholic kids on the hockey team. My father was kept down by their fathers, and yet he liked them. He had a marvellous brogue and he’d do some of the same jokes Paul does. And the funny thing is that Paul’s big heroes are Jake Javits and Arthur Goldberg. Always Jews. And my hero has always been O’Neill, you know, and Joyce.”

Let it be repeated: not much of this personal resonance was apparent in the beginning. At first it was all fairly unconscious. There were these four salesmen, and, as David recalls, “They just seemed colourful. They had intriguing faces. They told good stories. We knew they were sort of getting fed up with New England. Winter was coming on, and they would probably try new territory. We didn’t know it was going to be Florida. But they were going to be making a move, which is always a nice dramatic change. We also knew there would be a sales convention, and that the sales manager visits them and peps them up every once in a while. And a few other things.”

Among those other things was a very good analysis of the ritual of selling. At one point, the Maysles even considered including a separate “chapter” on selling, much like the cetology chapter in Moby Dick. This insert was never actually put together, but the ritual was broken down, spelled out on a piece of pink scrap paper:

1. Choosing the area.
2. Speculation – “It’s not the bum territory, it’s the bum in the territory.”
3. Reflexology – To establish that yes frame of mind: scrape the feet, nod the head, customer will nod, say yes, yes, come in.
4. Romancing – A very sexual thing, the point being to get to that close or climax.
5. Qualifying – Is your husband home? What’s his job? Like a boy out on a date trying to make a girl. He wants to find out when her mother is coming home. If I can get a quick no, it’s better to get the hell out.
6. Closing – Get that signature.
7. Aftermath – Constant chatter to avoid buyer’s remorse. Haven’t you got a lovely home? And be sure to have the Bible blessed to get the full benefit out of it.
8. Postmortem – Compare notes, check orders, telephone wife.

“We think a film is like a trip,” says David. “If we knew everything that was going to happen, we’d be terribly bored and we’d never do it. We’re interested in the process of discovery. We’re looking for things we never had any idea about. On the other hand, before we start we have a few things in our back pocket that we sort of expect. To build up your self-confidence, you have to know a few things you’ll be able to get. It’s like preparing yourself to improvise. You don’t want to rehearse, but you don’t want to fall on your face, either.”

After David had satisfied himself that Kennie Turner’s team of salesmen was the right one, Al joined them for a day on the road, Route 128 near Boston. It was November, 1966. And it so happened that they saw, but didn’t film, a vital part of the salesman’s ritual: rushing to cash the cheque. “The ink was still warm,” Al recalls of that race to the bank. “You see, you can never start filming too soon.”

There may always be incidents and bits of dialogue that are missed, just as there is always material in the rushes that seems fantastic but cannot be worked into the continuity. However, the repetitive nature of door-to-door selling virtually guaranteed numerous opportunities to get the complete ritual. In any case, the Maysles feel there are very few moments so unique that their equivalents will never recur. “Sure,” Al admits, “there are some things that will make the film and either you get them or you give up. But any time you’re with somebody, and you’re shooting, and you have an eye for it, whether they’re eating or looking at television or whatever, you can get their sex life, their family life, everything.” Al cites the marriage of Paul’s daughter, which took place some eight months after shooting was completed, but was filmed anyway: “Out of the entire day, the only thing worth putting in the film was when Paul’s ex-wife, who rented him a tuxedo and everything, was putting him down. And Paul was just standing there, taking it. Like a little boy being whipped. That shot was so typical of Paul, but the wedding itself couldn’t be worked into the film. Anyway, it was exactly the same shot you find in the beginning when Kennie tongue-lashes him. First Paul is laughing, then he’s just standing in the corner. It’s the same scene, only told in a different context.”

As to the private, extracurricular lives of the salesmen, little of that was even shot. “We got a lot of poker playing,” says Al, “but the guys aren’t drinking anymore so there wasn’t any of that. And if they had picked up a hooker or something like that, I probably wouldn’t have wanted to film it.” “The key to making a good film,” adds David, “is to have a real solid relationship with the people you’re filming. They respect you and you respect them. These guys would work hard – ten, twelve hours a day. And they’re loaded with insecurity. They don’t make a cent if they don’t sell. And they have their family, they have their cars to keep up. So it’s very tense. At the end of the day they’re exhausted. But at the end of the day, they’d see us, and we’d still be working. Planning, changing magazines, making calls to New York. They said we were the only guys they ever met who worked harder than they did. So they respected us. And they were amazed someone would risk so much money making a film about them. They couldn’t possibly imagine how it would turn out, if it would ever be shown or who would be interested.

“So the critics who say we were condescending – they’re the condescending ones. The ones who never admit anyone exists below the middle class. Somehow they think it’s condescension to show some of the supposedly foolish or outrageous or otherwise damaging things we showed. But we didn’t ask for anything. It was a fair game. The salesmen said whatever they wanted and they did whatever they wanted.”

The Mid-American Bible Company itself placed only one restriction on the filming, and that restriction, says Al, cost him “the greatest scene of my entire life.” The company refused to allow any filming of the Sunday morning solicitation in front of the church – when the salesmen set up a table with samples and ask for addresses. “It was like a Greek drama,” Al recalls. “It would have been the opening shot of the film. It was six o’clock in the morning on a wintery day. The steam is coming out of people’s mouths. And there’s this old-fashioned church with three, big, arched doors. High steeple. And a sort of Supreme Court-type stairs. At the top, a bridge table with a little cover on it. And these four hustlers, standing along the whole front of the church with little white cards in their hands. People coming in, bleary-eyed. ‘We’re showing the New Catholic Library in this parish. The Father’s going to make an announcement. Can we have your name too?’ And the ones who’d react, who might be ‘moochy,’ would get starred as potential knockovers, you know, round-heels. And they’d be hit right away Monday morning.”

In return for their cooperation, the Maysles agreed to cover transportation, food, and motel bills for the salesmen – and pay them $100 each – and contribute toward the cost of the company’s sales meeting. Total cost: $15,000. “We wanted to be fair,” says David. “We wanted to insure that what they did was spontaneous, that no one was ever in our employ.

“Very few customers objected to being filmed, once it was explained that we’re doing a human interest story about this gentleman and his three colleagues. And we’d like to film his presentation. We’d never use the word ‘sell’,” says David. “Usually the reply would be like ‘Oh, a human interest story. OK, come in.’ And when it was over, we’d ask them to sign a release, which was in petition form, so they’d see a bunch of other names. And that would help them sign. Less than ten percent refused to let any filming take place. And only one customer refused to sign a release. Occasionally, when The Gipper thought of it, he would jump the gun and tell the customer about the dollar he would receive for the release and suggest applying it to the down payment. He could be heartless.”

Because the salesmen were performers by trade, it was relatively easy for the Maysles to become invisible, that is, disappear from the scene and let the action unfold by itself. “Your control in this kind of filming,” says Al, “consists of letting it happen. You can actually exert your willpower just to let a person blossom forth. Then when the situation begins to turn off a little bit, without even saying anything, you can pull back in. It’s like talking to someone you’re in love with. You reach the point where you’re just listening. It’s as though you were paddling a canoe and then you just let it go on its own. Sort of guide it along, but without the paddle. You listen, you look. And it can be a gesture, some subtle movement, or whatever – your presence – which controls her.”

In the course of shooting, it becomes necessary to make some minor compromises with the general policy of nonintervention. For example, it was necessary to return to Florida to pick up shots of a motel cleaning lady, some Miami Beach hotels, and the bewildering “Muslim” street signs of Opa-locka – Sinbad Avenue, Sesame Street, and Sharazad Boulevard. Also, one day while Paul was driving along he was asked to do one of his routines about The Gipper, The Rabbit, The Bull. “This had to be one of the last things filmed,” declares Al. “After that, Paul would have said, ‘Well, what do I do now!’ So there’s a good reason never to ask for a performance. It’s not only a bad habit; once you begin, you can never use that person again.”

In all, the shooting took some six weeks. The editing, by David and by Charlotte Zwerin (contributing editor Ellen Giffard, and assistant editor Barbara Jarvis), took fifteen months. It proceeded intuitively, in a manner not readily put into words. The first assembly or rough cut boiled thirty hours of footage down to an hour and a half. That took five months. “And it didn’t work at all,” Charlotte remembers. “It was a total disaster. So it was a matter of refining and refining and refining the material until it began to work.”

“That sounds odd, but that’s the way it was,” David adds. “We would try different things, different continuities, until finally the connections between the scenes began to work and so did the overall timing.”

Slowly a metaphor did begin to emerge, a basic triptych:

1. Boston, winter, bad territory.
2. The sales meeting, grandiose philosophies, big predictions.
3. Florida, sunshine, the El Dorado, and finally desperation.

Slowly, too, the main plot came to be seen not as the story of four salesmen so much as the development of one character, Paul. And the problem became keeping a balance between Paul and the others and not setting him up as a loser from the beginning.

In the end, some themes of the film did not become fully apparent until well after the production was completed. While lecturing at the University of Texas, for example, the Maysles found themselves talking about anti-commercialism, how their attitude toward success could be summed up in the line, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?”

As David puts it, “Paul is the salesman with the most soul. Which is why he can’t be a salesman. He wants to make a warm pitch, not a cold one. He wants to talk to people. And he talks himself right out of sales. Many times. And he analyses, overanalyses everything. And he spends too much time speculating about the territory. Whereas any really tough top-notch salesman knows it hardly makes any difference; ‘It’s not the bum territory, it’s the bum in the territory’.”

Not surprisingly, only Paul admits that being filmed had an effect on him. He is no longer selling Bibles – he has moved to Washington, D.C., where he now sells aluminium siding for houses. How much did the Maysles serve as a catalyst for Paul’s disaffection? How much did talking in front of the camera serve to crystallise Paul’s image of himself? For a short while a year after the filming, The Gipper and The Rabbit stopped working together, but now they are again pursuing “the Father’s business.”

All four salesmen have kept in touch with the Maysles, sending cards, telephoning long distance, having dinner when in New York, borrowing money. Recently, just after reviews began to appear, Paul concluded a letter to Al and David:

Ultimate satisfaction can only be derived by an artist when he per se feels he has done a worthwhile job. The hell with critics or anybody else. You both should feel very proud.

All the world’s a stage And all the men and women merely players They have their exits and entrances And one man in his time plays many parts

This is one part I will always be proud of. Lead on Macbeth and tell Arthur Miller I am ready. The Best TOUCHSTONE