Hard Lessons in Hollywood Civics

As Wolper Productions continued to make documentaries and experiment with fiction, the studio provided a professional entry point for promising talent and off-and-on employment for filmmakers involved with New Hollywood features. This chapter investigates Wolper Productions’s output during a period in which the film and television industries faced a precarious financial situation. The studio helped create a political imaginary for Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society. Additionally, Wolper Productions’s forays into programs with Jacques-Yves Cousteau charted a fresh path for nonfiction. Packaging American history or capturing recent events, however, soon proved to be a troublesome venture. Wolper Productions’s prospective adaptation of William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) was one of the earliest attempts by a major studio to make a commercial film about black power themes and figures. The opposition to the film, however, resulted in a public relations disaster for Wolper Productions. Wolper and his circle came to understand the importance of having community support from the minority group the studio sought to represent.

Introduction

Beginning in the late 1950s, a combination of political and cultural forces made Los Angeles a national center for documentary media. The early filmmaking of Erik Daarstad in both Hollywood and Bunker Hill demonstrates the close relationship between documentaries produced under different circumstances and with conflicting ideological motivations. This introduction maps the different institutions involved in documentary production in the city and investigates the rise of the documentary as a contentious form of public history. Brief summaries of this book’s seven chapters outline the trajectory of liberal and more radical film practices between 1958 and 1977.

Studio Documentary in the Kennedy Era

The Sputnik launch, the network quiz-show scandals, and the election of President John F. Kennedy inspired the desire to strengthen the body politic through educational forms of mass media. This chapter argues that Wolper Productions occupied an essential position on the cultural front of Kennedy’s New Frontier. Documentaries about citizens, politicians, and the Cold War functioned as narratives of assurance. With the assassination of Kennedy, Wolper Productions became the preeminent custodian of the fallen president’s memory. The studio’s films documenting Kennedy’s rise to the highest office (The Making of the President: 1960 [1963]) and his death (Four Days in November [1964]) performed an important social function during the period of transition to the Johnson administration.

The Rise of Minority Storytelling

This chapter explores filmmaking in Watts, East Los Angeles, and Little Tokyo in the aftermath of the Watts Uprising. These areas appeared on screen as complex communities, not simply as “slums” or sites of loss. Prominent filmmakers included Joe Saltzman (Black on Black [1968]), Lynne Littman (Womanhouse Is Not a Home [1972]), Robert Nakamura (Manzanar [1970–1971]), Sue Booker (Doin’ It at the Storefront [1972–1973]), and Jesús Salvador Treviño (América Tropical [1971]). The combination of grassroots activism and government legislation inflected the training and production practices of these documentarians during their time at commercial broadcasting stations, UCLA, and the public television outlet KCET.

Wattstax and the Transmedia Soul Economy

This chapter focuses on Wattstax (1973) and the different players involved with its creation. The film’s vérité-style footage of Stax artists and fans in the Los Angeles Coliseum, residents in the surrounding neighborhood, along with testimony from comedian Richard Pryor, constituted far more than a standard concert film. The documentary foregrounded a feedback loop between everyday black experience and cultural expression. Wattstax also served as the crucial pivot project for Wolper’s push toward minority subjects, Stax’s attempt to become a film studio, and numerous crew members’ personal efforts to advance their careers.

Downtown Development and the Endeavors of Filmmaker Kent Mackenzie

At the same time that Wolper was building his studio and staffing it with the producers Mel Stuart, Alan Landsburg, and Jack Haley Jr., film school graduates were looking for employment in the city. This chapter focuses on Kent Mackenzie, who, like other talented, university-trained filmmakers, worked for Wolper Productions, the USIA, and film firms that catered to the educational and business sectors. These jobs offered a rewarding alternative to studio fiction but also entailed ideological and formal constraints. During this period, Mackenzie drew on the resources of his day jobs, along with the pro bono efforts of his colleagues, to make The Exiles (1961). Examining the major thrust of Mackenzie’s career reveals the professional challenges and opportunities for young filmmakers interested in making socially engaged documentary.

Conclusion

The conclusion explores the branding of Los Angeles as a “world city.” The metropolis would be prominently on display as the home city for the 1984 Olympics. This conclusion also looks at broader issues concerning the deregulation of the media industries and the retrenchment of the welfare state under President Ronald Reagan. Finally, the conclusion argues how, in an era of increasing privatization, conservative politics, and tabloid programming, documentarians were still able to draw on film practices of the past and to devise new strategies in order to advocate for progressive social change.

Numbering Our Days in Los Angeles, USA

This chapter considers more resistant forms of national remembrance than those created for the bicentennial celebrations. As Hollywood docudrama incorporated minorities into a streamlined vision of the American social fabric, alternative films depicted a more contentious relationship between a historic present and past. This chapter argues for the persistence of filmmakers’ interest in documentary, even as they experimented with other media or blended fiction and nonfiction. Long-form films and photo-books by the collective Visual Communications (Wataridori: Birds of Passage [1974] and In Movement: A Pictorial History of Asian America [1977]), documentaries made from the collaboration between anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff and director Lynne Littman (Number Our Days [1976]), and the artisanal filmmaking of Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep [1977]) presented more nuanced stories about the resilience of the city’s marginalized communities. Their work on Asian Americans in Little Tokyo, elderly Jews in Venice, and African Americans in Watts denounced national myths of bootstrap individualism and upward mobility, as well as industrial decentralization and uneven downtown redevelopment under the Bradley administration.

Roots/Routes of American Identity

Bicentennial events in Los Angeles spoke to black mayor Tom Bradley’s plan for shaping the city into a business-friendly, multicultural metropolis—a plan that would reach fruition in the next decade. This chapter looks at Wolper Productions’s principal role as architect of a patriotic culture of national commemoration. Without a cinematic record of early American history, the studio turned to “docudrama” as the solution to a narrative problem of documentary historiography. Combining the form and style of period fiction with the truth-telling charge of documentary, docudramas such as Sandburg’s Lincoln (1974) and I Will Fight No More Forever (1975) were a novel kind of prestige programming. Docudrama could command high ratings and claim the pedagogical intent of educating viewers. Wolper Productions made network series and specials on American Indians, African Americans, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century political leaders, which culminated with the studio’s twelve-part miniseries Roots (1977).