hours a day, for as long as my unemployment laststhree more monthsand without salary.' So he says, 'Well, you can't beat that! When can you start?' I parked my '49 Chevy under the Bay Bridge every day, after the long drive from Canyon, where I lived with Kikuko Kawasaki, who was one of my real mentors and a dearly beloved. I got the Chevy from a wrecker for twenty-five dollars; it had to have its brake fluid refilled for every crossing of the bridge!
Marvin started me out rolling up sound film outs that were lying all over the studio. I'd play them through a little sound reader and label them with a grease pencil. So I got acquainted with how film feels and how it works. Later, a free-lance editor was splicing the track for a film for the Horseless Carriage Clubs, and I hung around behind him and saw how he organized footage, cut and spliced it with Mylar tape. Then I got to go out and shoot with another man, from Bechtel Associates, as
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his assistant; I took a few shots with his Bell and Howell which he was able to use. And then I started making a film with my dogs and my dear friend, Miss Wong. I remember Mr. McKinney at Multichrome Lab, on Gough Street, helping me out during this timelater his son, 'Mac,' took over the lab and was a friend to many of us.
Was the film with Miss Wong
[1961]?
a typical early sixties film where someone gets chased and you go through old buildings and all that.
There are some nice moments in that film.
Oh, there might be. I can't tell you how hard it was for me to edit. I had started to learn cinematographythat was hard enough. I had never used a still camera in my life before I picked up the Bolex, but after I was getting used to it, I tried editing and couldn't manage it. So I just hung around the studio and kept practicing. I would take a scene with the dogs and I would cut it one way, then another. It took me forever to develop a little bit of freedom. For quite some time, I was like a gymnast without any grace.
The issue of poverty and art was very important then, and it has always been of special interest to me. I had a friend in Berkeley, a very fine commercial artist, Jeff Belcher. He lived in an attic: everybody was living in somebody's shed, or in an attic or in the back of a cara lot of skilled people. I don't know how it is now, in the world at large, or among American intellectuals and poets, but then there were
people with skill and sensitivity but no place to live and no place to apply their gifts. Jeff was the only guy I knew at the time who had tried cinema, and when I announced to him that I was going to try it, he said, 'No, don't! You cannot make films by yourself, because one person can't do that many jobs, learn that many skills, alone, and without an income, and without a place to live. And where would you find the equipment and the materials? None of it's available to you. Never will be. You can't afford it, never will be able to. Don't do it, I don't want to see you broken!' Well, I had a lot of strength then, and I decided that was how I was going to use it. Later, I invited him to my first show.
I was discovering the principles of working. I saw myself going over the Oakland-San Francisco Bridge on the mission of the day like a knight. I wasn't twenty, I was thirty and headed toward forty, mature enough to learn, and to move toward consciousness at last. One of the many things I discovered was that what my friend had said in the very beginning was obviously true, and that as a result, there were not many of us trying to do this, and very few who understood that attempt. It was close to a one-hundred-percent effort. It was like war.
For me, poverty was really the mother or the sister of our craft and of our lives. Our aesthetic came from Sister Poverty, as Saint Francis used
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to say. Ron Rice was a good example of a poor guy, dead poor. He used machine-gun-camera film that half the time wouldn't respond to the lab developer. I remember him coming through town in the early Canyon days with two beautiful young ladies. He found some back room in Berkeley with these two lovely ladies. We were curious about the relationships, naturally, but we never asked him. He was kind of a severe guy, I thought. He was on his way to Mexico, and as you know, he never returned. He was working on a film, had it hanging up with the women's underwear on strings across his borrowed room.
I find that when we [Baillie and Lorie, his Filipina wife] go to the Philippines, in some ways we find the spirit we had at Canyon Cinema in the sixties. The key was, and is,
. At Canyon we recognized that one of the essential ingredients was necessity, and that to be heard you have to be needed. When we're in Lorie's village in Bobol, anything we can offer is needed. In a Philippine village, there's no such thing as Mom and Dad who live in a middle-class house, commute to work, and love their children, and when their child has a birthday, they have a little birthday party. In a village, everyone's a brother or a sister or a cousin, and all children are mine and my children are yours, and when they have a birthday, there's plenty of time because nobody's commuting, we're all unemployed. We had a dance last night for somebody who got married and today the daughter is having her fifth birthday and people cry and laugh and there's music and cake and all kinds of stuff is happening. Christmas takes two months! That was film art for ten years in America. We needed each other and enjoyed the process, regardless of its difficulties. It was hungry people making cookies all day!
How did Canyon get started?
We started Canyon Cinema about 1960, in Canyon, California, over the hills from Oakland and Berkeley. Kikuko was paying the rent and giving me the chance to free up my time to make films. Immediately, I realized that making films and showing films must go hand in hand, so I got a job at Safeway, took out a loan, and bought a projector. We got an army surplus screen and hung it up real nice in the backyard of this house we were renting. Then we'd find whatever films we could, including our own little things that were in progress'we,' there wasn't really any we, just myself for a whileand show them.
So I made a
