...made a short documentary about Truman Capote, With Love from Truman: A Visit with Truman Capote (1966, 30 min.). The Maysles chose Capote as their subject because of "the perceived parallels in artistic approach" (Vogels 68-9). At the heart of the "perceived parallels" was the desire to capture reality. The Maysles brothers' work with Capote led to an ongoing friendship. This intersection of founding Direct Cinema filmmakers and a defining New Journalist writer provided the perfect opportunity to discuss the Direct Cinema filmmaker's claim to "capture reality" that has led to their being criticized as naive and idealistic in a postmodern milieu. In August of 2002, I had the opportunity to interview Albert Maysles at Albert Maysles Films, Inc., his Manhattan office.

Sharon Zuber: I'd like to start by talking a little bit about your work with Capote and your relationship to New Journalist writers.

Albert Maysles: All this talk about New Journalism but never the documentary filmmakers ... it's crazy. I never thought of going so far as to say that we had influenced them but at least there were parallels, if not one influencing the other, but it was always the New Journalism and the printed word.

SZ: I want to explore how both movements seemed to emerge at the same time, from some of the same motivations.

AM: You may want to reach out beyond that, and now we've got all this reality stuff, so-called, which is bizarre. In fact, in a way the reality stuff is more like Chronicle of a Summer--the French--and has nothing to do with the American movement in the written word or in cinema. Interesting, huh?

Actually, it really goes back before that. The spark that In Cold Blood provided us with was the very notion that literature, the novel, became nonfiction, and that this could be translated into the documentary becoming a feature. The feature film, until Salesman [1968, with Charlotte Zwerin], was always a dramatic, fictional entity. We aspired to carry that feature, dramatic form into nonfiction the way Truman had done in the novel.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The first insight into that probability came to us from a friend of ours, at a cocktail party, who said she had just read a book called Of Whales and Men. It was kind of a modern-day, nonfiction Moby Dick. A doctor went on board a whaling expedition--he was Scottish, I think--and the whaling expedition began from England, I think, in the 1950s, at a time when English-speaking whalers existed. After that it became just Russian and Japanese entirely. So this doctor went on board and got to know each one of the men right from the start, because he had to examine them. And it turned out that the harpoonist was a Chicago taxicab driver. It utterly fascinated us. This was before we knew about Capote's book. We thought maybe a film had already been made on this sort of thing, and we found there was some sort of a short. And through that we found a man who had just lived down the street here, an American who had been on a whaling expedition. And we chatted with him until 3:00 in the morning. The first thing he said though was, "Look, if you're thinking of taking me with you, forget it, because I still can't stand the smell of those whales." By 3:00 in the morning, he turned to me and said, "When are you leaving [on the whaling trip]?"

Whaling had such a fascination. It turned out that when we read the book in 1964, maybe ten years had gone by, and there were no English-speaking whalers, so we dropped that possibility. Then Truman came along and revitalized us, and when we finished the film [about Capote[, David had lunch with Joe Fox specifically to talk to him about what we might do. Joe came up with the idea--what about door-to-door salesmen? We talked about it and thought it was great because we both had experience selling door-to-door. Separately, I sold toilet brushes and the Encyclopedia Americana, and my brother sold Avon products. We were enchanted with all the possibilities, but we just had to find the right guy or guys. So there were several months we spent researching this because there are all kinds of salesmen ... but none of them had that greatness that we were looking for. And then a researcher discovered a company in Chicago, the Mid-American Bible. And they had four salesmen doing the New England territory. That gave us the Bible, sold as a product--so American, right? It's like the difference between doing a film with turtles or with whales. This was the whale and not a turtle.

And then, coming from Boston and being Jewish and being at odds with the Irish kids, who liked to pick fights, we never really quite resolved our problems with the Irish. In a way, the fighting-fist to fist (errgh!) at least gave us physical contact with the people. But there was no cultural, social contact with each other as kids. And we missed that. These guys were Irishmen selling the Bible and from Boston. I've come to think that many a great work of art almost has to be autobiographical, because it taps into the need for self expression. There are things in one's life that are unresolved ... that are seeking from your heart and soul to express themselves, and this was one of them.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

So with Mid-American Bible supplying us with these guys, we looked them up and went out one evening with each of them and decided, yeah, this is it. There was still a lot more to be discovered [after selecting the subject]--we didn't know if the film would be about the four men and their manager or that one of them would become a central character, we certainly didn't know who or what would be behind the door each time they knocked, but we had high hopes.... In fact, after we made the film I remember browsing through Bartlett's book of quotations, and I came across a quotation by Charles Lamb, the English poet, "There's no sound more beautiful in the world whether in the country or the city than the sound of the knocking at the door." And of course in reality, when it's a salesman knocking on the door it's not all good.

SZ: You've often mentioned how important it is to have a relationship with the person you're filming. What kind of relationship did you develop with Capote when you made your film about him for television?

AM: First of all, we didn't have the prejudice against homosexuality that was rampant at that time in American life. We were told after the film came out, when it got shown on PBS at that time, that at least 20-30 percent of the public, upon watching it for 2-3 minutes, turned it off because of his feminine voice. I am hoping that wouldn't happen today, but that's what it was at that time. And that didn't turn us off at all. We certainly had an open mind about that stuff.

SZ: There is an Arts and Entertainment special about Capote [on video] in which they scan The New York Times guest list to the Black and White Ball. Your name and David's name are on it; did you go?

AM: Yes, yes. It was funny; there was a big spread in ... Cosmopolitan magazine? Or maybe even it was Look magazine. I think it was the inside spread, both pages, and you saw so many people there. In front was a table where you could pick up an appetizer, and my cousin, who was about twenty years old at the time, said, "Oh! there's Albie looking for a snack, David must be looking for the women" (because he wasn't in the picture). It was taken to be, at that time, the greatest party of the century. Still is. So many of his celebrity friends were there, journalists, people in politics and entertainment, and it was to celebrate Katharine Graham's birthday.

That [the invitation to the ball] attests to the fact that we became good friends. And I remember very distinctly that after we finished the film, he was one of the first to see it. You never know for sure how he is...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Post Script
Renov, Michael. The Subject of Documentary.(Book review), June 22, 2007

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