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Declaration of independence
Michael Roemer films stories he can believe

Hank Hoffman

Michael Roemer. Photo by Harold Shapiro.

These days, independent films are everywhere. They play art-house theaters and some cross over to the multiplexes. There is even a cable channel dedicated to independent film. Things were very different when director Michael Roemer made the 1964 landmark indie drama Nothing But a Man with Robert Young, a friend from college.

In 1962, when Roemer and Young began research and writing Nothing But a Man, “There was no independent film movement,” recalls Roemer. “There was a very small group of people, all quite friendly with each other.” The filmmakers clustered in New York City, not Hollywood. There was almost no chance of getting shown in theaters. Film festivals were their only hope for screen time. (Roemer doesn’t believe it’s much easier today, though, saying, “It’s still terribly hard and you always lose your shirt — if you have one.”)

Nothing But a Man explores the relationship between Duff Anderson, a railroad section gang laborer played by Ivan Dixon, and Josie, a preacher’s daughter and teacher played by jazz singer Abbey Lincoln. Both are African-Americans striving to live with dignity in a Deep South gripped by rampant institutionalized racism and the threat of violence. The film was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1994.

Roemer, working with Young as his partner, also wrote and directed the comedy The Plot Against Harry. Made in 1969, the project was shelved for two decades. It was finally released to wide acclaim in 1989. Additionally, Roemer wrote and directed the feature fiction films Pilgrim, Farewell (1982) and Haunted (1984) as well as the documentary Dying (1976). He has published 12 screenplays and the book Telling Stories, an analysis of the power and contradictions inherent in narrative.

Born in Germany in 1928, Roemer, who is Jewish, escaped the metastasizing Nazi persecution when he was 10. He attended boarding school in England and immigrated to the United States in 1945. His love for cinema began with the movies he saw while in boarding school.

“I was really taken by them for a simple reason: I believed them,” says Roemer in an interview at his home. Roemer has taught film and American studies at Yale since 1966. “I’m not postmodern at all in my approach to movies. Films always seem very real to me, more so than theater.”

An English major at Harvard — he and Young both graduated in 1949 — Roemer says he “belonged to the first generation of undergraduates who had a passionate interest in film.” Despite a lack of encouragement from the university, Roemer and his friends founded a film society. With Robert Young and others, Roemer made a feature film, A Touch of the Times. Roemer says the number of books on film at Widener Library at the time barely filled half a shelf. The likelihood that one could make a living in the film industry seemed remote.

After graduation, Roemer entered his name with a placement bureau. Three weeks later he got a call from producer Louis de Rochemont, who was looking for a driver and typist. De Rochemont’s company specialized in documentary-style fiction films like Cinerama Holiday. Roemer served a valuable eight-year apprenticeship with de Rochemont. Starting as a “college boy,” or gofer, he worked his way up to production manager.

After he left de Rochemont, Roemer directed educational films for the Ford Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and, indirectly, for the Heath Publishing Company. In four years, Roemer recollects he made close to 100 films.

“I proved to myself that I could handle fairly large sums of money, a schedule, and a lot of people,” remembers Roemer.

The turning point for Roemer came in 1961 when Young invited him to work on a documentary for NBC about Sicilian slum dwellers. Although cinema verité was coming into vogue at that time — many of the pioneers were friends of Roemer and Young — Cortile Cascino, also known as The Inferno, was not cinema verité.

“We were still very much in the old mode,” says Roemer. “We watched old silent movies and how they were cut. We believed in images, which were downplayed in verité, very legitimately.” Although the film depicts wretchedly poor conditions, Roemer describes it as “very beautiful, oddly enough, because the camera work was so extraordinary.”

But NBC, for reasons that remain unclear, refused to show the film. Roemer and Young quit NBC. Making Cortile Cascino, however, prepared them for Nothing But a Man. They learned how to navigate a foreign culture together, concluded that they needed to be independent to stay true to their vision, and realized that their strengths complemented each other. Young had met some extraordinary young African-American activists in the south while working on a previous film and suggested they make a film about that milieu.

In 1962, Roemer and Young took a research road trip through the south. It was a dangerous time. Civil rights activists were being murdered and attacked. Driving in Young’s car with its suspicious New York plates, Roemer recalls, “We had a sheriff trailing us all the time.” They stayed in a “kind of underground railroad, passed from one civil rights home to another.”

Although inspired by the consciousness of the civil rights movement, Nothing But a Man is a deeply personal film, not a political polemic. The movie depicts the ways in which the pressures of racism batter the black family. Duff Anderson’s father is an alcoholic who has abandoned him; Duff himself has a young son from whom he is estranged. Duff’s attempts to build a rooted life with the educated Josie are undermined by his refusal to meekly accept racist taunting as the price of holding a job. Particularly important to Roemer was capturing the economic dimension of racism.

It was also a very personal story for Roemer. He says, “My father was not an alcoholic but he was a very difficult man who lit out like Duff Anderson’s father.” Roemer had also been marginally employed, and, as a Jew in Nazi Germany, experienced the impact of virulent racism firsthand.

The film was mostly shot in New Jersey. Roemer says, “We couldn’t have shot it in the south with an integrated cast and crew. Someone would have been killed.” A groundbreaking movie, Nothing But a Man eschewed both minstrelry and white liberal pieties for an almost documentary-like representation of black life. Roemer now laments that the film didn’t capture the humor in black life. But that sense of vitality and energy, if not in the foreground, is evident in the use of then-current Motown songs on the soundtrack.

Needless to say, there were few venues for such a film in the United States in 1964. The movie was hailed at the Venice Film Festival in Italy in August 1964 and at the New York Film Festival a month later; it had a limited commercial run at big city art houses. Nothing But a Man was universally well-received and was purportedly a favorite of Malcolm X. It grew to cult status over the years through showings on the college and art-house circuit.

Despite the recognition and acclaim accruing from Nothing But a Man, Roemer is quick with a critique of his own work. “Without being aware of it, I had absorbed the industry ethos,” Roemer says. “I knew how to get people on the side of the film and on the side of the main character.” In fact, Roemer’s work on Nothing But a Man prompted offers from California based on his ability to craft a strong and, in his word, “manipulative” narrative. “As a filmmaker, I had to move away from that because otherwise I was just going to go down the mainstream. I didn’t want to; it wasn’t where I was at home.”

Roemer says James Earl Jones, then an unknown actor, turned down the part of Duff because Duff isn’t angry from the start. He agreed with Jones that, in real life, Duff would be angry from the get go. But Roemer knew he wouldn’t get the audience on Duff’s side if he wrote it that way.

“I understand and appreciate why I did it,” Roemer says now. “But in later life I did not get myself into a situation where I had to compromise what I thought was true in order to make the truth more accessible to other people.”

The Plot Against Harry was, in important ways, a reaction by Roemer against Nothing But a Man. It was set in a milieu closer to home, that of middle- and lower-middle-class New York Jews. And where Duff Anderson was a figure of heroic dimensions — easy for audiences to identify with — Harry Plotnick is a schmuck. Played by Martin Priest (who also played a threatening racist in Nothing But a Man), Harry is a small-time bookie and loser just out of prison. “There’s a whole Jewish tradition about losers,” says Roemer, “and Duff is a winner.”

The failure of The Plot Against Harry, Roemer says, “probably saved my life. I became a different person and started working on different material.” The positive response to his documentary Dying, about three people facing the end of their lives, garnered him enough of a reputation to make Pilgrim, Farewell. Roemer considers this his best film. About a woman with terminal cancer who also struggles with her alienation from her daughter, Roemer says, “It’s quite beautiful but you have to have a strong stomach emotionally.” In his films after Nothing But a Man, Roemer says, “the struggle to connect is so much more poignant because it’s so much harder.”

“I don’t want to play it safe. I want to go where people don’t want to go,” declares Roemer. “It’s going to the unknown that’s exciting.”

That’s true independent filmmaking.

Nothing But a Man and The Plot Against Harry are available on DVD through newvideo.com. New Video is also currently assembling a set of Michael Roemer’s other films for release.



Pulitzer-winning local author explores life of a notorious New York City madam

Steven Scarpa

	Debby Applegate. Photo by Beth Dixson.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Debby Applegate has begun work on a new biography chronicling the life of notorious madam Polly Adler.

To Applegate, historical books are time machines, a way to immerse oneself in a new world. So, after spending a long spell in the 19th century researching her biography of minister Henry Ward Beecher, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, Applegate was looking for a subject a touch more modern, if she could be accused of searching for a topic at all.

“After finishing with Beecher, I said, I’m never going to write a book again. It is a terrible way to make a living,” she joked in a recent phone interview.

While wandering through the stacks at Yale’s Sterling Memorial Library, a book jumped off the shelf at her.

“I picked it up because it had a racy red cover,” said the 42-year-old author, a city resident since receiving her doctorate from Yale University in the early 1990s.

The book was Polly Adler’s 1953 autobiography A House is Not a Home. A few pages in, Applegate was fascinated. Chronicling Adler, a notorious New York City madam during the Jazz Age, would mark a departure from the staid 1870s.

“I was looking for a character that could tell the story of a time,” Applegate said.

Adler was born in 1900 and emigrated from Russia shortly before World War I, at the age of 14. She expected that her parents would join her shortly, but the horror of the Great War prevented them from joining her.

“She has a totally typical immigrant (experience) … then she got swept up by the fortunes of history,” Applegate said.

Struggling to make a living, Adler fell into a life of prostitution, and, in 1920, opened a brothel patronized by many of the most famous people of the era. In many ways, Adler became a star. Upon retiring from her career as a madam, Adler retired to Hollywood to lead a respectable, quiet life. Her life was immortalized on film in 1964, with Shelley Winters playing Adler.

“She knew anyone who was part of the demimonde in New York,” Applegate said. “A lot of the people at the highest levels of government, literature, and the arts were her friends and customers,” she said. “Her place was really a club, a speakeasy club.”

What fascinates Applegate about Adler is how the combination of unique historical circumstances and general trends of human nature come together to influence a life. In this way, Beecher and Adler are similar, both positive, proactive, and interesting people whose life journeys intersected with some of the most vibrant personalities of their respective eras. While Beecher, a charismatic preacher, sought relief from the strict bonds of his New England Protestant upbringing, Adler attempted to move towards a more respectable, mainstream way of life.

“He represented orthodoxy, the thing that everyone is rebelling against. He longed to break free of himself and step towards the liberal, uninhibited, and pleasurable. She wanted to be something more, but had no path to it … She’s coming at it from the opposite way,” Applegate said. “They both have legs. They have a deep intellectual significance and a lot of popular pleasure about them. They tell us something about the underside of history as much as they tell us about the public side of history.”

In reading Applegate’s biography of Beecher, one senses an abiding affection for the minister. She is beginning to feel the same way about Adler.

“It is very hard to write a biography unless you like your character somewhat,” she said. “But I’ve never met a biographer who, at some point in the middle, didn’t get tired of their character.”

Applegate didn’t begin her career thinking of herself as a writer. Writing was something others did, people who were masters of the craft.

“I always thought writers were magic. How do they make entire worlds come alive by slight of hand, with words and ink and pulp?” she said.

She was a denizen of libraries, fascinated by the circuitous routes of research.

“The beginning is the fun part, that’s how you get seduced … Even the middle part, thinking about it, is good,” Applegate said.

Applegate is a practically minded and meticulous writer, spending six hours a day locked up in the library.

“What do I have to do to keep my reader’s attention? I really don’t think writing is about self-expression. That is private … If you have the audacity to ask for someone’s attention, I think the goal shifts and you have to reward that person for giving you their attention,” she said.

While Applegate wouldn’t count herself as a master, even post-Pulitzer, she does believe herself a skilled journeyman.

“I have a tendency to write on the prim side, too many commas, too many sentences. I tend to be a bit of a mimic. Now, I find myself writing shorter, punchier sentences … more Damon Runyon than Harriet Beecher Stowe,” she said.

It’s still hard, and no amount of hours in the library, searching for obscure and delightful facts, can hold off putting pen to paper. Adler herself knew just how hard the process of chronicling a life, even one’s own, can be.

“Polly Adler, after she finished writing her autobiography, said, ‘If I’d have known how hard it was to be a writer, I would have stayed a madam,’” Applegate said.



Festival celebrates ‘shared experiences’ with ‘a landmark piece at a landmark time’

David A. Brensilver

A 2009 performance of Dance. Photo by Sally Cohn.

Three decades ago, Cynthia Hedstrom was dancing with the Lucinda Childs Dance Company when the choreographer entered into a collaboration that Hedstrom recently described as “a perfect triangle combination of artists at that time whose working methods and kind of conceptual approaches were very similar.” That collaboration, between Childs, composer Philip Glass, and artist Sol LeWitt, resulted in Dance, which had its premiere in 1979 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. LeWitt’s contribution to the piece, a 35mm film of the choreography that reflected the dancers’ movements as they happened live onstage, was restored last year for a production of Dance at Bard SummerScape. The work was performed last fall at The Joyce Theater, and will be presented this month at the Spoleto Festival USA in Charleston, South Carolina, and at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven, whose theme, “Celebrating Shared Experiences,” is clearly reflected in the creation and revival of Dance.

Hedstrom, producer and director of special projects at The Wooster Group in New York, talked about the collaboration that begat Dance. LeWitt, she said, came up with the idea of incorporating a screen the audience would be able to see through, with filmed dancers on one plane and dancers performing live behind it.

“The experience of filming it,” she said, “was very, just, technical,” and the choreography had to be absolutely precise for the visual elements to mesh.

At BAM, Hedstrom said, “I think (Dance) divided audiences.” It was abstract, she said, and some people had difficulty with that. It was not a narrative piece, and the choreography didn’t reflect dramatic, balletic movement. It required audiences to let go of expectations and let the music, dance, and film images affect them.

Childs first met Glass when she worked on Einstein on the Beach, an opera he composed with Robert Wilson that was premiered in 1976. Childs said recently that she and Glass decided to work together on another project, and that he suggested they meet with LeWitt.

“(LeWitt) didn’t really understand how his work would fit in,” Childs said. He didn’t think it made sense to add a visual element to an already visually complex aesthetic, and “I agreed with him completely.”

And then she realized that the dancers could be the décor.

“He came to rehearsals, he watched the piece, he followed my scores,” Childs said. The amazing part of LeWitt’s film, she said, is the editing he did, the effects he incorporated.

Childs talked about the revival of dance at Bard last summer.

“I said it would only be possible if the 35mm (film) … was transferred digitally” to a high-definition format and the soundtrack was redone.

Once the film and soundtrack were restored, auditions took place.

“Two hundred people showed up for the audition,” Childs said.

Of the 11 dancers she picked to perform Dance, “many of them weren’t even born” when the work was premiered in 1979.

To Mary Lou Aleskie, executive director of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, Dance “conveys the elemental desire to move to music.”

The Festival does great work, Aleskie said, “when it takes an important kind of world-resonant work and connects it substantially to our community.”

Programming Dance at this year’s Festival, Aleskie said, is an effort to “recreate (a) performance experience where no element was subordinate to another.”

Just as Dance is enjoying a revival, so too is the work of the late Connecticut native Sol LeWitt, who died in 2007. Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective, a collaboration between the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and Yale University Art Gallery, opened at Mass MoCA in 2008 and will be on view through 2033. Among the works in that exhibit is LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 692, which belongs to the Yale University Art Gallery and, by design, can be installed in multiple locations. It is also on display in the lobby of the Smilow Cancer Hospital.

Cathy Edwards, director of performance programs at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, talked about the simultaneous, renewed interest in Dance and LeWitt’s work.

“So many threads build increased resonance,” she said.

“The film that he made” for Dance, Edwards said, “is like nothing else. It’s intoxicating.”

“It’s a landmark piece at a landmark time,” Aleskie said, referring to the Festival’s theme, “Celebrating Shared Experiences,” the fact that this year’s Festival will be the 15th, and the fact that Hedstrom was the Festival’s first director of programming.

Aleskie and Edwards also draw comparisons between today and the mid-to-late-1970s, when Dance was created. The unemployment rate was high, David Berkowitz had been arrested in 1977 after terrorizing New York City, and, in a general sense, “everything was bad,” Aleskie said. Likewise, she said, talking about the present, “the world sucks,” and still, “there are really cool people out there making really cool things happen,” as Childs, Glass, and LeWitt did three decades ago.

In conjunction with Dance, the Festival will present Collaboration & Invention: A Conversation with Lucinda Childs & Philip Glass and Sol LeWitt: Transforming Art with Conceptual Ideas with Yale University Art Gallery Director Jock Reynolds. Also, Glass will give a piano recital, a performance that Aleskie said will be “an incredible capstone to the opening weekend.”

Dance isn’t the only work that reflects the Festival’s theme, “Celebrating Shared Experiences.”

David Leddy’s site-specific Susurrus, which will receive its United States premiere, is a piece in which “people are going to be listening to a radio play on their headphones as they walk through Edgerton Park,” Edwards said, seeing and experiencing the area from a new perspective. The National Theater of the United States of America’s Chautauqua! is, in Edwards’ words, a collaboration between the NTUSA and the community in which the work is being performed. French-Cambodian choreographer Emmanuèle Phuon’s Khmeropédies I & II and the cross-cultural jazz of Amir ElSaffar & Two Rivers Ensemble both celebrate deeply rooted traditions in a contemporary context, Aleskie said.

“We do bring the unique, the unusual into town,” Edwards said, that thought continued by Aleskie, who added, “It’s about what’s extraordinary.”

“The best way to show people the new way to the new way is to walk the walk,” Aleskie said.

Thirty years ago, Dance was a groundbreaking work. Three decades later, it still is.

“It’s a treasure,” Hedstrom said. “I’m not at all surprised that people are looking at it again.”

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