Latest / Secret Movie Club Podcast / SMC Pod #210: Frederick Wiseman-Master Documentarian
Transcript
- 0:00Hello, Secret Movie Clubbers. Welcome to Secret Movie Club Podcast 210,
- 0:05Frederick Weissman Master Documentary.
- 0:18I'm the founder programmer of Secret Movie Club. It is wonderful to have you here as always.
- 0:24As some of you listening know, Secret Movie Club podcast 210 was supposed to be movies and AI.
- 0:31But between when I announced that and the recording of this,
- 0:36documentary filmmaker Frederick Weissman died at 95.
- 0:40I read a comment that I thought was spot on. Someone wrote, I thought he would never die.
- 0:45I thought he'd be with us forever. Because Frederick Weissman made documentaries
- 0:49from 1967 to his last doc came out in 2023, just a few years ago.
- 0:57So he was making docs for almost 60 years.
- 1:01And he didn't even start making documentaries until he was in his 30s.
- 1:06His movies have had a profound impact on me, and I would absolutely consider
- 1:12him one of the top filmmakers who's had a personal effect on me,
- 1:18who I shorthand as if I need to get into a certain vibe or feel that resonates
- 1:23with me, I watch his movies.
- 1:25And other people on that short list, I've said them many times,
- 1:29but would be Akira Kurosawa, Jean Renoir, John Ford, Rainer Werner Fassbender, F.W.
- 1:35Murnau, Louis Bunuel, Federico Fellini, Igmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, just to name a few.
- 1:41If you've never seen the movies of Frederick Weissman, I wanted to do this pod
- 1:47today because I think these movies will change your life and we are going to
- 1:52get into them in a moment.
- 1:53I am still working on the programming, but I will tell you that I believe,
- 1:58knock wood, that we have our program basically from March through July already, more or less.
- 2:07Now, I don't know that we're going to announce it all at once,
- 2:09but my goal here is to start announcing ASAP and basically never stop ever again.
- 2:16Please stay tuned for that. I will make announcements when I can.
- 2:21Secret Movie Club Podcast 211 will be Movies and AI.
- 2:26So we are going to take a break next week. We do three podcasts and then we
- 2:30take one week off, kind of like the Saturday Night Live schedule.
- 2:33I found it works for me. So we are going to keep doing that.
- 2:37We will be back March 6th with Secret Movie Club podcast 211,
- 2:42and that'll be the podcast on movies and AI.
- 2:46It also gives me a week or two to research a little more, think a little more on it.
- 2:51Stay tuned for that. As always, go to secretmovieclub.com. Our socials are at secretmovieclub.
- 2:57We have our biggest presence probably on Instagram and Facebook, but
- 3:03We have a YouTube. We have a TikTok. You can get on our newsletter by going
- 3:08to secretmovieclub.com, waiting a few moments, and entering in your email.
- 3:12And then we will be emailing you. I am hoping to resume that newsletter.
- 3:17We've been quiet for a month.
- 3:19I'm hoping to resume that in the next week or two.
- 3:21So stay tuned for that. And you
- 3:24can always email us at community at secretmovieclub.com. Okay, here we go.
- 3:31So frederick weissman is an incredible documentarian who has made dozens and
- 3:40dozens of documentaries his his genre what he's known for are his documentaries
- 3:46he did actually direct two features.
- 3:49Fascinatingly at the end of his career, not at the beginning,
- 3:52both in the 2020s, right before he passed away this year in 2020 and I think 2022.
- 3:59I haven't seen either of them. I've only seen the docs.
- 4:02First off, in case I say something so offensive that you hit off,
- 4:07you'd be like, F this podcast. I'm never listening to it again.
- 4:11Let me start by saying you can see most of Weissman's work on Canopy.
- 4:15If you don't know about Canopy, it's basically your library's streamer. So get a library card.
- 4:24I'm here in Los Angeles, so I have my Los Angeles public library card.
- 4:28You can go to any Los Angeles public library and get it today.
- 4:32And then go to Canopy. I think it's canopy.com or canopy.org.
- 4:36You use your library card. And at least the way it works for me is I get around
- 4:4312 to 14 rentals a month for free, and I need to watch them within 72 hours.
- 4:51So you have to really pick and choose, but they have an incredible,
- 4:56at least our canopy here in LA has incredible breadth of work that you can see
- 5:02from feature films to docs,
- 5:05to TV shows, to great stuff.
- 5:08And Frederick Weissman has like 30 movies up there. So go to it.
- 5:13And watch him there. So there you go. That's really the most important thing
- 5:17I can tell you from the start.
- 5:19Weissman is a fascinating character. He is Jewish, born in Massachusetts.
- 5:25He actually started as a lawyer and a law professor.
- 5:30He went to law school and he never really liked law. I did a little research ahead of this pod,
- 5:35and I heard him say that he spent most of law school,
- 5:39he actually found a hack for the tests that if he showed that he was really
- 5:45thinking about the alternatives and could find counter arguments that wouldn't
- 5:50be as obvious and just showed he was inverting whatever the legal issue was,
- 5:54he would get good grades on the final.
- 5:56So he actually spent most of his time going to a local library and just reading
- 6:00about great works of art and watching great movies.
- 6:02And this led him. Ultimately, he was a law professor and he didn't he didn't
- 6:08like being a law professor, but he was paying the bills.
- 6:11But he had taken his students to a.
- 6:17Prison for people who were deemed criminally insane.
- 6:22And he wanted them, he felt that it made them better advocates if they saw where
- 6:29their defend, if they were defense attorneys,
- 6:31where those clients would go if they didn't do the job right,
- 6:36because he felt that it would be very sobering to see what it was like to be
- 6:41in one of these institutions.
- 6:42Well, basically, he knew the administrators at the institution so well that
- 6:49he asked them if he can make a movie and they okayed it.
- 6:51And this movie became Titty Cut Follies.
- 6:55Now, I'm really alighting over his biography, but he also spent a few years in Paris in the 50s.
- 7:01And he said it was like the perfect time to be in Paris because he was with his wife.
- 7:05And he said you could just see every single kind of movie you wanted to see in Paris.
- 7:09He was basically going to movies with Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard in the French New Wave.
- 7:15And I think, weirdly, you can see that film-lover, cinephile background,
- 7:22movie culture background in his work.
- 7:25I don't think a stretch to pair him or equate him a bit with the French New
- 7:32Wave and some of those things that were happening at that time. Yeah.
- 7:36Nevertheless, he got the permission and he shot this movie and edited it and
- 7:42it became Titty Cut Follies.
- 7:44Now, Titty Cut Follies, I'm trying to think, it's a jump ball for me between
- 7:50Titty Cut Follies and Welfare as my two favorite Weissmans.
- 7:54And again, bear in mind, I've only seen seven. There are like 40 plus.
- 7:59Titty Cut Follies is unlike anything you've ever seen.
- 8:02What's really interesting about that movie was it came out in 1967,
- 8:06but almost immediately was pulled.
- 8:09When the state of Massachusetts saw what Weissman had cut, it's ultimately a
- 8:14very scathing film, and we'll get into why, about that institution.
- 8:20It was a source, I think, of tremendous embarrassment. So they basically used,
- 8:27ironically, since Weissman was a lawyer,
- 8:30they used defensible legal arguments about why actually the movie couldn't be
- 8:34shown, that there was invasion of privacy, that Weissman had never gotten, you know, the releases.
- 8:40Now Weissman ultimately was able to
- 8:43argue against that there was those statutes and
- 8:46things didn't exist when he made the movie and because
- 8:49the movie was about a public institution a taxpayer funded public institution
- 8:54there were certain protections on the part of the filmmaker that he was able
- 8:58to present in court but that argument took 25 years Titty Cut Follies was not
- 9:03re-released to the public until 1991 or 92 and I think.
- 9:09The irony for me is that's when I saw it. Weissman's movies played on PBS and I turned on this movie.
- 9:17It was on, you know, I wish I could remember this memory a little better than
- 9:21I can, but I just know that I came into Titty Cut Follies maybe 10 minutes into the movie.
- 9:27There's what he does is one of the structuring things.
- 9:31The administrators and wardens of the prison put on a like talent show every year.
- 9:39And it's called Titty Cut Follies
- 9:41because Titty Cut was the name the indigenous folks of that area gave.
- 9:46But they put on this show, this talent show called Titty Cut Follies,
- 9:50and he intercut that show, which is very sort of silly and amateurish and light
- 9:56and people dancing and singing.
- 9:59Horrific day-to-day things that are going on at
- 10:02the institution at the prison and i immediately like
- 10:06stopped on this and saw this
- 10:09editing and i was a teenager at the time and i
- 10:13was i was hooked i was like what something's going on here this is this is really
- 10:17unsettling but brilliant you knew it was brilliant right away and so titty cut
- 10:22established a weissman style that he essentially kept his whole life that never gets old.
- 10:30There's like endless variation within it. I find that there are certain filmmakers
- 10:34who get a little wrapped up in their own style a little too much for me until
- 10:40it becomes hermetic or they're just repeating themselves.
- 10:43And that's, you know, it's hard to constantly be challenging yourself and pushing
- 10:47your boundaries and succeeding.
- 10:50Somehow Weissman was one of the rare few, which is why I equate him.
- 10:54I really do put him up there with the greats
- 10:57you can watch his movies and uh
- 11:00they're never they're just always amazing and
- 11:03his style was very different from most
- 11:07documentaries you've seen there is no voiceover there are no talking heads there's
- 11:15no uh jazzy or sexy animation or fun animation or title cards or What he does is Weissman will go.
- 11:24This is his process. I did a little research on this.
- 11:27He doesn't like to actually spend too much time. He decides what he wants to do.
- 11:31He might spend a day at the location just so that he knows where he's going to go.
- 11:36But he doesn't want to miss out on filming something brilliant.
- 11:39He just wants to be filming. So he's.
- 11:41After that day, he shows up with a very small crew.
- 11:44He was often the boom operator, interestingly, at least at the beginning,
- 11:48not the camera operator.
- 11:50And he shoots for six to 12 weeks, so about a month and a half to three months.
- 11:56And then really, for him, it's in the editing.
- 11:59He often has up to 150 hours. and I was fascinated to find that he has a system
- 12:07that I use that must just be a system that comes to people naturally.
- 12:12I mean, it makes sense to me now that I think about it. He calls it a three-star Michelin system.
- 12:16I was weirded out when I heard him say that because I use a three-star system
- 12:20too, and I think I use it in the same way he does, which is why I think it must
- 12:24become a thing if you're going through tons of footage that becomes intuitive.
- 12:28But he'll watch all the footage, log all the footage, which you have to do for
- 12:32anything, but especially for docs.
- 12:34And then he'll give the footage a one, two or three star rating,
- 12:37depending on how gripping he thinks it is.
- 12:40And then he'll start cutting the individual scenes because he often will have
- 12:45a scene where they filmed it for an hour, but he knows it's got to,
- 12:48you know, cut down to six minutes or five minutes at most.
- 12:51And then he'll try to find a way of connecting them. And then he'll try to find
- 12:55an overall story or structure in what he does.
- 12:59Now, Weissman says that he doesn't come to a thing with a preconceived notion. And I believe him.
- 13:06I take him at his word because the final works feel like that.
- 13:09And that he tries to let his experience of the shooting and then what the material
- 13:16and the editing tells him determine what the point of view is going to be and
- 13:19what the story is going to be. I also believe that.
- 13:22But it's also true that Weissman, like many great filmmakers. He has a point of view.
- 13:28I think you'd have to call it wry and humanist.
- 13:31Bit satirical and ironic, a bit biting, biting in the way that Fassbender,
- 13:37Rainer Werner Fassbender is biting and also humanist.
- 13:40And you have to imagine his politics are roughly center left.
- 13:46It's not as if you see different docs and the politics are totally different in each one.
- 13:52I don't really get that vibe. But I do also feel like he is a documentarian
- 13:56and I think he's open to feeling he's wrong about something.
- 14:01And he's, you know, I have no idea if he's religious, to give you an example.
- 14:05I don't think he is. I think he's probably secular and Jewish,
- 14:10which often you find with Jewish filmmakers in America, not always, but often.
- 14:15And there is a secular Jewish feeling. And I say this as somebody who half my
- 14:21family is secular and Jewish,
- 14:23that's just fascinated with systems and institutions and how things work and
- 14:27has an inside-out feel, but in a movie like Essene, which is about Benedictine monks in Michigan.
- 14:34All respect is given to their spiritual beliefs and their spiritual journey.
- 14:38And the movie even ends on a very profoundly, I think you can,
- 14:42I think what's great about it is it ends on a sermon that one of the Benedictine
- 14:46monks gives during a mass or service, but it's just as meaningful if you're
- 14:51secular as if you're spiritual,
- 14:53which is probably why Weissman chose it, sort of on the importance of listening.
- 14:58But what I'm trying to say is that I know that that material could have been edited.
- 15:02You can even see it within the material he used in Essene. He could have made
- 15:06a very anti-religion, oh, this is a cult, this is weird.
- 15:11Some of the material is a little culty and weird.
- 15:14But instead, he gives full humanity, full respect to his subjects.
- 15:19And at the end, whether or not you're a spiritual person, you definitely feel
- 15:25as if the people involved were not made fun of.
- 15:29Although I will say that sometimes they're looked at a little ironically,
- 15:34but Weissman toes that line pretty amazingly.
- 15:37So coming back to end with his process.
- 15:41So, you know, he edits and edits and edits and edits and edits.
- 15:44And then he said the last part, which he really enjoys, which I don't do,
- 15:47but maybe I should start doing.
- 15:48You can find this article on editing by Frederick Weissman.
- 15:52That's great. It's only like three pages, but he says, then,
- 15:55once he thinks he's done, he goes through every decision he made and asks himself
- 16:00why he made that decision.
- 16:02And he finds that really fun in the process.
- 16:05That kind of thorough approach, you feel in the movies, because I've never felt,
- 16:12why is this here, or that's indulgent, or that, I mean, I feel the rigor.
- 16:17I feel the rigor of that process in the best possible way in Weissman movies.
- 16:28The along with that structure I talked about, which which grabbed me as a teenager,
- 16:33I mean, it's a bracing structure.
- 16:35There are scenes in there where he captures things that you've never seen that
- 16:40make you go, oh, oh, all right, that's that that that's real mental illness.
- 16:47There's a very famous scene of a guy who is probably a racist and probably I
- 16:55think he's delusional and he thinks he's a saint or something.
- 16:59And he is preaching to other inmates in the jail during their free time.
- 17:06And he preaches. And then at a certain point, it just becomes gibberish.
- 17:10He's like, and the Lord said to me, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta,
- 17:14gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta, gotta.
- 17:15And then he just does that. And Weissman films him for a few minutes and he
- 17:20says some crazy racist things.
- 17:22And so you see his mental illness and how it expresses itself.
- 17:26And you see things you just don't see in performance often.
- 17:30The nonsense word thing is amazing.
- 17:34One of the sequences in the movie one of the other things
- 17:37that weissman often does in the best of his
- 17:40work is there he he captures
- 17:43something that becomes the sequence the the standout sequence in the movie now
- 17:48the whole movie is great but there's one that people will often always talk
- 17:51about and i find that interesting because that's like uh movies you know even
- 17:56the best movies will even the seven samurai people will talk about the final
- 18:00battle in the rain kind of thing and.
- 18:03Wiseman often has a final battle in the rain kind of sequence,
- 18:07no matter what the topic is.
- 18:08And in Titty Cut Follies, he returns to intercutting at the end.
- 18:12But this time he shows the war. And this is a bit disturbing and unsettling.
- 18:18So just fair warning for everyone who's listening. He shows an inmate who refuses to eat and they,
- 18:25for some reason, the warden and some of the other employees decide to force
- 18:31feed this guy and they stick a tube down his mouth into his stomach and just
- 18:38pour paste into a funnel.
- 18:40And then he intercuts it with this guy dead. The guy died from it.
- 18:44And, you know, they intercut the final autopsy, I think, and sort of like dealing
- 18:49with the body with them force-feeding him.
- 18:53And, you know, what I think you get is that people who aren't documentary editors,
- 19:00or just think a lot about movies, you might say, yeah, come and film us,
- 19:03you know, that we're honored, we want to show what we do.
- 19:06But if you're not aware of how
- 19:08material can be cut, like that kind of cross-cutting to make a comment.
- 19:14You know, it's at your risk, at your peril.
- 19:18So it's really a movie that inspired a lot of rethink about that and reform.
- 19:23And it's an incredible film.
- 19:26There's not an ounce of maudlin-ness or sentimentality. That's something I love.
- 19:37In Hospital, there is a hilarious and heartbreaking sequence of somebody who
- 19:42comes in. he's just like drug experience high, high off his gourd and he's freaking
- 19:48out in a room and then he projectile vomits.
- 19:51And it's like one uninterrupted sequence.
- 19:55Weissman's obviously editing to condense however long he was with this guy and
- 19:59that this guy allowed him to put this in the movie is incredible,
- 20:03but it is, it is like nothing you'll ever see in a movie and narrative feature.
- 20:08I mean, now, obviously they have their own pleasures, but you know,
- 20:11you're what, you know, immediately you're like, this happens all the time in a hospital.
- 20:15Someone comes in freaking out from some bad drug experience.
- 20:20And this poor guy, I think it's acid. He just like starts projectile bombing.
- 20:26You have to see it. It's crazy. Now, if you don't like that kind of thing,
- 20:30or you don't have a stomach for that kind of thing, I get it.
- 20:32But if you're somebody who just, when you see cinema, you're like,
- 20:36whoa, I cannot recommend it enough.
- 20:38As seen, I've already talked about a little bit.
- 20:41One of the things that's interesting, though, about the way that,
- 20:44uh, Weissman structures films is he's a lot like Lubitsch Ernst Lubitsch and that Lubitsch would.
- 20:52Give you one plus one, but he wanted you to add that up to two when he was making
- 20:57his comedies and his feature films.
- 21:00And Weissman is the same. You, you do need to lock in and pay attention because
- 21:04it's really in how he cuts the material that the material comments and relates
- 21:10on each other. And he talked about this as well.
- 21:12So in Essene, there's an early scene where this older monk, Benedictine monk,
- 21:17talks about how he doesn't like the younger monks calling him by name or being
- 21:21friendly with him and him just saying that he's only in his life had four or
- 21:25five people who call him in a familiar way by his name.
- 21:28And those were his childhood chums and that he really prefers respect in his
- 21:33last name and with everybody else.
- 21:35And then a few scenes later, it cuts to this same monk who talks about not liking
- 21:39to be called by his first name, going in regular clothes to a hardware store
- 21:44and looking for a potato peeler.
- 21:46And he talks to the salesman there, who he knows, and they're just calling each
- 21:50other by their first name.
- 21:51So you see, and it's not, you know, it's some indictment of the monk that he's
- 21:57not aware of this inconsistency or double standard, But that is very much part of what Weissman does,
- 22:06which is he does point out, and this is just life.
- 22:10This is all of us. We're all these sort of condensations of inconsistencies
- 22:16that somehow add up to an identity, that add up to a uniqueness.
- 22:21Weissman points these things out. But the great thing about him not narrating
- 22:26or hammering at home or, you know, just letting you add up one plus one is you make that.
- 22:32Connection and then you decide what what that means
- 22:35and you get thinking about it welfare along with
- 22:39titty-cut follies is probably those are my two favorites welfare is a much longer
- 22:43movie i think it's about two and a half hours weissman made a few movies that
- 22:48were three four hours near death the one about people dying in the hospital
- 22:53is i think five hours six hours so.
- 22:57Welfare is like a two and a half hour three hour movie and it's almost entirely
- 23:01people going to a welfare office in New York.
- 23:04And it's a very, it's a huge welfare office. It's, you know,
- 23:07I feel if I'm remembering it right, you get the feeling like there are at any
- 23:10given time, 50 people minimum to 100 people waiting, and then 10 to 20 people
- 23:16behind the desk servicing them.
- 23:18And this is a movie in 1974, or it was released in 1974, that really captures
- 23:25New York during its rough patch.
- 23:28You know, this was roughly the same time that Scorsese made Taxi Driver and
- 23:32Mean Streets and when, you know, or Serpico, Lumet Serpico.
- 23:36When you see these movies in New York in the early to mid 70s network,
- 23:41you know, you can see the cities struggling.
- 23:44And the 70s, too, you got Watergate and Nixon and inflation and yada, yada. So what is...
- 23:52Fascinating about welfare to me is you see this system, you see this institution,
- 23:58you see when it works, you see when it doesn't work, you see that it's people,
- 24:03which is really important.
- 24:05It's not this nameless, faceless bureaucracy, as you might think.
- 24:10It might be inefficient. It might be wildly eclectic.
- 24:14It might be wild in its moments that it's successful and helpful in moments that it's not.
- 24:19But you see the people coming into the office, you see the people administering
- 24:24the welfare, and it becomes this beautiful portrait of a slice of America.
- 24:32Just the incredible melting pot and diversity of people and personalities in America.
- 24:41And what I love about these docs as well, is that somehow people.
- 24:47You're seeing how people really are. It's, you know, and now something I haven't
- 24:52talked about that I do think about, I thought about a lot with the Benedictine monk doc Essane.
- 24:56And, you know, you probably have to think about it with a lot of these docs
- 25:00is these people know they're being filmed.
- 25:02I mean, there's a camera right there. It's not like now documentary filmmaking in 1974.
- 25:08That office had to have been lit. It was shot on film.
- 25:11The film cameras might have been easier and smaller, but they weren't phones
- 25:15like they are now. And they weren't totally unobtrusive.
- 25:18So there is an element where people know that they are being filmed.
- 25:24But at a certain point, they forget about the camera.
- 25:27And there really is where they get used to the camera. Maybe that's more accurate.
- 25:31There really is this incredible truth, beautiful truth and welfare.
- 25:36Welfare you just you'd study welfare and you
- 25:39can make a feature studying welfare just on maybe how
- 25:42to approach character and performance and acting and it's amazing multi-handicapped
- 25:47is a movie from the 80s and it's actually part of a series i only saw multi-handicapped
- 25:53but there's also deaf and blind but multi-handicapped deals with people who
- 25:58are both i think deaf and blind or have multiple issues and.
- 26:03Again, about an institution, I think a school that helps the kids, educates kids,
- 26:07just very humane, very nonjudgmental in an interesting way,
- 26:12maybe a little more forgiving in its approach than titty cut follies or even
- 26:21hospital to a certain extent.
- 26:23And it may be true now that I'm talking out loud that maybe the institutions
- 26:28that Weissman ultimately admires, and you get the feeling like he admires these
- 26:33people who've devoted their lives to people with multi-disabilities,
- 26:38that even if the footage, who knows, if the footage would have suggested incompetence
- 26:44or pettiness or could have been cut another way.
- 26:48They're multi-handicapped is just very warm and humane.
- 26:52In Jackson Heights was a movie he just made a few years ago and is often cited as one of his best ones.
- 26:57And I love it. And it just follows a community in New York City in one of the boroughs.
- 27:02And you just see all the different aspects of that community or as many as Weissman
- 27:07could film that make up this bustling,
- 27:11who knows, four to eight to 12 blocks in just the overall bustling metropolis that is New York.
- 27:19The mayor de Blasio of the time makes an appearance, which is really interesting.
- 27:24Later in the movie, you see the political, you see people, you come back to
- 27:30certain people, he cuts back and forth.
- 27:32But you do get a feel, you get a vibe for the community, and it's incredible.
- 27:39Everybody has, if you're into documentaries, different people like different kinds of styles.
- 27:45You know, certainly there's that incredible, there's American movie,
- 27:50which was made about 20 years ago now, one of the great documentaries there.
- 27:55It's really character based on the two main characters, the filmmakers,
- 27:59the best friends, and they talk to the camera.
- 28:02You don't really get in a Weissman film people talking to the camera.
- 28:07At the time that Weissman was making movies, when he started,
- 28:11he was part of or grouped.
- 28:13And he really, and I think it's right, he doesn't really belong in this grouping.
- 28:16But there were also the very famous movie makers D.A. Pennebaker and then the Maisels brothers.
- 28:23Pennebaker made, like, Bob Dylan's Don't Look Back.
- 28:26Pennebaker made the company recording of, or the recording of Stephen Sondheim's
- 28:31company, which I love. that talk. And,
- 28:35The Maisels are very famous for Salesman, Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter.
- 28:42And people would call Weissman style cinema verite, but it's not.
- 28:47And Weissman would say it's not really cinema verite.
- 28:50And, you know, the only thing I can determine there is Weissman often talks
- 28:54about how he views his movies the same way that a writer writes a novel,
- 28:59that he takes this material he's made and he really wants to tell a story.
- 29:03And I do think that there is that novelistic aspect to Weissman's work,
- 29:08which I love, that when you see like a Maisel's movie, like Grey Gardens or
- 29:12Salesman, which are dynamite films,
- 29:14they might really be focusing on a group or they might be focusing on characters.
- 29:19And it's not really massaging the material, so to speak, to tell a idea-based story.
- 29:29It's more, how can we really reveal fully these characters or this lifestyle
- 29:35or this event? And and but with Weissman, it's different.
- 29:40He's he's both going deeper and broader.
- 29:44And so there's something Tolstoy ask about what he does. There's something like
- 29:50a Russian novel about what he does.
- 29:52And and that is something that I love. And then again, to compare maybe just
- 29:55to a few other filmmakers, people like Errol Morris, who made The Thin Blue
- 29:59Line, Gates of Heaven, Doctor, I think Doctor Death or Mr. Death, The Fog of War.
- 30:06You know, Errol Morris will really go cinema and he'll have people look directly
- 30:12in the camera and their interviews.
- 30:14And he's interrogating people and trying to get people to things.
- 30:17And you don't get that with Weissman as well.
- 30:21He's not he's not interviewing people. He just gets people to okay him to come
- 30:25and film whatever goes on.
- 30:31We'll end this on just saying to you that when I saw Titty Cut Follies as a
- 30:38high schooler or a teenager, it was revelatory to me.
- 30:44I've had that experience only a few
- 30:46times in my life where I came across something no one had told me about.
- 30:51And I stopped and I was like, I have to watch this.
- 30:54And I don't know if you've had that experience. I think it's even harder to
- 30:57have now in streaming because there's at least one point of agency you have
- 31:02to have in selecting the thing.
- 31:04And it's not the way it was. And I'm not, again, I'm not some,
- 31:08I hate, I'm not a nostalgia person. So I'm not saying back in my day.
- 31:12Although I guess I am kind of saying back in my day. What I am saying,
- 31:17though, is there was a time when you just turn on the TV and whatever was on
- 31:20was on and you would just flip through the channels.
- 31:23And even when there was cable, you know, if Turner Classic Movies was showing
- 31:26San Francisco, then if you wanted to watch Turner Classic Movies,
- 31:31you had to watch San Francisco. And that was great. And I love that.
- 31:34That actually happened to me in Prague.
- 31:36And the same thing happened here. I got on PBS and I saw Titty Cut Follies and
- 31:42I just I knew I was watching something amazing.
- 31:45That happened to me with Aki Karasmaki's Leningrad Cowboys Go America,
- 31:49which I've talked about.
- 31:50I just stumbled on it on Bravo. And I was like, what is this?
- 31:54This Finnish comedy where the band takes a road trip in America?
- 31:59That happened to me with a movie called 20th Century.
- 32:02That happened to me with Louis Bunuel's Viridiana, maybe the most essential
- 32:10of these kinds of things.
- 32:11Again, I think being shown on PBS or Bravo or something, and I came into it,
- 32:15thankfully, only about five minutes in, 10 minutes in.
- 32:19But something immediately, and it was just Viridiana was at the train station.
- 32:23But I was just like, wow, oh, I was in love. I was in love.
- 32:27And with Titty Cut Follies, I saw it. And Frederick Weissman is just a master.
- 32:34And I really hope you will see his movies.
- 32:39All right, Secret Movie Clubbers. Next week we are off, but I will see you or hear you or speak to you.
- 32:46Or we will commune. Friday, March 6th, that'll be Secret Movie Club Podcast
- 32:51211, which will be movies and AI.
- 32:55I really, I want to give it some thought, you know, Lao Tzu says and thought
- 33:00it is depth that matters.
- 33:01So I just want to talk about all the obvious stuff, all the chicken little stuff
- 33:05that people are talking about.
- 33:06I'd rather think it through. And, you know, this is going to be something we're
- 33:10going to all have to deal with and talk about. It's here.
- 33:12So I want to do that. I want to start that. I want to be part of just engaging with it.
- 33:17I really don't think the fighting it thing is, I don't see the value in that.
- 33:22I think, you know, if you look at the history of cinema, the people who stayed
- 33:28making movies, you know, when movies, sound came and people were like,
- 33:33no, silent films, those people did not work too much.
- 33:36And when color came and people were like, no, black and white, you know?
- 33:41And so when people in digital came, no, film, you know, I hate saying that,
- 33:45but it just so now that AI is here, it's like, no, AI, you know, it's here.
- 33:50So let's figure it out and let's just treat it as a tool and let's try to fold
- 33:57it in, make it productive, but keep cinema going. So that's where I'm coming from.
- 34:03All right. All right. All right. Have a great week, everybody.
- 34:07Thank you. Please watch some Frederick Weissman movies.
- 34:11You know, run the race, fight the good fight, keep the faith,
- 34:16make movies, find a way to really do it. Don't just phone it in.
- 34:22Try it for your own sake, you know, go for it, push yourself forward.
- 34:27And I'm going to try to do the same. And I wish you guys all the best.
- 34:32I will see you in a few weeks, hopefully with some movie announcements.