In late June of 1946, media hype over the first post-World
War II test of an atomic weapon was hitting a fever pitch. News of the imminent
Operation Crossroads detonation of the “Gilda” bomb at Bikini Atoll on June 30,
1946 (U.S. time zone) screamed from headlines and blared from radio broadcasts.
There was even a (true) story about atomic scientists pasting a pinup photo of screen
star Rita Hayworth on the weapon they had named after her hit film.
One of the people reportedly listening to the radio coverage
on A-Day was a young nurse named Susannah Gregory. The story goes that she
became so despondent about the Bomb, that approximately an hour after its
explosion, she hurled herself off a Los Angeles rooftop to her death. Accounts
of her suicide ran the following day – amid all the other articles about the Able,
aka “Gilda,” test. The sad story of Nurse Gregory – captured below in headlines
– was in stark contrast to the otherwise celebratory coverage of America’s
atomic arms monopoly in action.
ATOMIC BOMB SUICIDE
NURSE, GLOOMY OVER A-BOMB, LEAPS TO DEATH
BOMB WORRY
FEAR OF ATOM LED TO DEATH
LISTENS TO BOMB, JUMPS TO DEATH
GIRL HEARS A-BOMB REPORT, TAKES LIFE
The Los Angeles County Coroner’s section of
Susannah Gregory’s death certificate states that an “investigation” was held
regarding the circumstances of her demise. A more comprehensive “inquest” was
not conducted. I spoke with a clerk at the Los Angeles County Medical
Examiner’s office who told me that they still retained a copy of the two-page
coroner report. The document was described to me as being very limited: Names;
addresses; cause of death; date of death and little more. There is no mention whatsoever of the atomic bomb.
The Los Angeles Times account was far more colorful:
“A 23-year-old (sic) registered nurse, depressed by radio
accounts of the atomic bomb test at Bikini, yesterday leaped to her death from
the top of the 13-story apartment building at 626 S. Rampart Blvd., police
reported.
The woman, Susanah (sic) Gregory of 3755 W. 59th
St., broke from the arms of her sister Jane, who had sensed Susanah’s (sic)
intentions, and dashed across the roof. Several members of the cast of the
musical show, OKLAHOMA! were sunbathing on the roof and saw her jump.
Mrs. R.L. Garlish (sic), an aunt with whom the nurse was
visiting, told Police Dets. W.A. Cummings and E.W. Jokisch that Miss Gregory
had been visibly depressed by the Bikini broadcast and feared for the future of
the world.
The aunt, sister and victim had gone to the roof for a view
of the surroundings when the tragedy occurred.”
The “aunt” (who was not related to Ms. Gregory, but who may
have been a friend of the family from Illinois) is not quoted or even mentioned
in the coroner investigation. She is likely Juanita Garlich [1913-1970] who was
married to a Roy Louis Garlich [1910 - ?].
Did the Los Angeles press and the wire services run with the
most sensational aspect of Ms. Gregory’s suicide – regardless of the facts – as
a tie-in to their Bomb test coverage? Maybe. But it is difficult to confirm the
reason or reasons behind her fateful decision because everyone associated with
the event is deceased. The police report that might have contained quotations
from Mrs. Garlich or Jane Gregory no longer exists. And, as mentioned, the
coroner’s “investigation” hardly lived up to its title.
Susannah Gregory’s hometown newspaper in Illinois, the Aurora Daily
Beacon, did not reference the Bomb in their front page story on her death. The
writer did, however, report that she had been in “ill health since moving to
Los Angeles.” Was this a delicate reference to clinical depression?
The piece headlined “FORMER AURORA GIRL KILLED IN 12 STORY
FALL” ran in the Beacon alongside an Associated Press story on the previous
day’s events at Bikini:
"Aurora and Batavia friends were shocked today to learn of
the death in California yesterday of Miss Susannah Gregory, 22, daughter of Mr.
and Mrs. James H. Gregory, former residents of this community, in a fall from a
twelfth story window (sic) of the Arcady Building, Los Angeles, Calif.
According to friends here, Miss Gregory had been in ill
health since moving to Los Angeles with her family last fall. Details of her
fatal plunge have not yet been learned.
Born in Aurora, in December, 1923, ‘Sue,’ as she was known
here, resided with her parents on Grand Avenue, and attended the Nancy L. Hill
School. Even as a child, she established a reputation for possessing a
brilliant mind, and she was regarded as one of the most popular little girls on
the west side. She had many friends here, whom she frequently visited after the
family moved when she was about 12 years old to Milwaukee, Wis., and then to
Evanston.
Susannah was graduated from Evanston High School, and in
June 1945, from the Presbyterian School of Nursing, in Chicago. She went to Los
Angeles following her graduation, and had been working in recent months with
her father, who has established a mimeographing business of his own in
connection with an advertising agency in the California city.
Susannah was baptized in the Calvary Episcopal Church in
Batavia, the hometown of her mother, the former Elinor Burke. Her father is a
former West High and University of Illinois athlete, and served as an ensign in
the first world war, and with the Merchant Marine in the last war.
Funeral services will be held Wednesday in Los Angeles, and
the body will be cremated. Friends have been asked to omit flowers.
Besides her parents, Miss Gregory is survived by an older
sister, Jane, and several relatives in Batavia, Chicago and Springfield, Ohio."
Susannah Gregory’s cremains were buried at Forest Lawn in
Glendale, California on July 3, 1946. There is no grave marker there today
because at some point – Forest Lawn isn’t sure – the cremains were disinterred.
It is not clear what became of them.*
Jane Mallory Gregory, Susannah’s older sister, died in 1997
leaving no survivors.
Their father, James Henry, died in 1970 and their mother,
Elinor, died in 1983.
Rightly or wrongly Susannah Gregory [1923-1946] will forever remain
a footnote to the Operation Crossroads “Gilda” atomic test. Rest in peace.
NOTES
*I called the cemetery where Susannah Gregory’s mother is
buried. There is no record of Susannah Gregory's cremains having been interred with her mother
at the time of burial in 1983. I was unable to determine the final
disposition of the remains of Susannah’s father and sister.
Nurse, Gloomy Over A-Bomb, Leaps to Death, Los Angeles
Times, p 2, July 1, 1946.
Note: The detail in the cited article about cast members from a production of
OKLAHOMA! sunbathing on the roof of the Arcady Hotel is plausible because a
production of the show opened at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles on May 5,
1946. Source: Los Angeles Citizen News, May 6, 1946.
Former Aurora Girl Killed In 12 Story Fall, Aurora Daily
Beacon, p 1, July 1, 1946.
Note that the article gets one significant detail about Susannah
Gregory’s suicide wrong. She jumped from the roof of the building, not from a
window. This fact is confirmed in the death certificate.
Death Certificate, Susannah Gregory, County of Los Angeles,
Registrar-Recorder, County Clerk.
Coroner Report, Susannah Gregory, Los Angeles Medical
Examiner, via telephone call with clerk, June 7, 2024.
"It's got, of course, arguably, the best
film-within-a-film that anybody's ever created. That's certainly unthinkable
now that you would stop a film dead for that length of time and show something
that deeply deranged." - Steven Soderbergh, filmmaker
INTRODUCTION
A half-century ago this week, Alan J. Pakula’s political
assassination conspiracy thriller THE PARALLAX VIEW premiered in the United
States. The original reviews were mostly favorable and the box office receipts
were modest. Today the Warren Beatty film is widely considered to be a classic
- the second entry in Pakula’s “Paranoia Trilogy” (preceded by KLUTE in 1971
and followed by ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN in 1976). In 2021, the film was
reissued in a deluxe Blu-ray edition by the prestigious Criterion Collection.
Oddly, the key sequence in THE PARALLAX VIEW that elevates
it above the other conspiracy dramas of its era was mentioned by only a handful
of critics during its original release in 1974. If you’ve seen the film, you
know the sequence. It is the mind-blowing four-and-a-half-minute tour de force
of “visual material” that is screened by the diabolical Parallax Corporation for
Joe Frady (Beatty) to determine if he has assassin potential. Film Comment
later called it “an ingenious montage of primally evocative images…with
astutely manipulative music scoring.”
Several years ago, I began researching the history behind this
extraordinary piece of filmmaking. I obtained copies of some of the production
records and I interviewed one of the key people behind its creation. In
addition to reading the original novel and screenplay adaptations, I also
reviewed numerous articles, reviews and book excerpts.
This post presents what I have learned about THE PARALLAX
VIEW Test Film.
“SOUNDS A LITTLE CRAZY”
Director Alan J. Pakula [1928-1998] completed principal
photography on THE PARALLAX VIEW on July 5, 1973. By all accounts, it was a
chaotic production filmed during a three-month Writers Guild strike. In a
telephone interview, Pakula’s assistant on the film, Jon Boorstin told me that
the scenes of Warren Beatty’s character coming into the Parallax Corporation’s
screening room, sitting down and then getting up after the “test” were probably
“the very last things that were shot.” Boorstin confirmed to me that it is Pakula
himself as the voice of the test instructor who directs Beatty to his chair.
In between these two unremarkable shots was a “big hole”
that needed to be filled. Boorstin conceded in his interview that the idea of
wrapping a major studio movie with such a huge gap “sounds a little crazy.” Though
Boorstin explained, “It was a gamble, but that’s how he (Pakula) played. He’d
take risks like that. A lot of his brilliance was in making the most of the
situation he was in. He had an impromptu quality.”
The situation Pakula found himself in was partly due to the
source material for his movie. The novel, THE PARALLAX VIEW (1970) by Loren
Singer and the screenplay adaptations by Lorenzo Semple Jr. and David Giler all
had unsatisfactory “test” scenes. One of the test scenarios, as presented in
the screenplays, involved killing a kitten at a bar in front of Beatty’s
character in order to gauge his reaction.
Boorstin told me that he is not certain when exactly the
call was made to replace the kitten scene with something else. “I was not a
party to the decision. I was not part of pre-production. I was hired a few days
before shooting started.” He adds, though, that he did write a five-page memo
to Pakula recommending other possible “tests” including one based on the
Milgram compliance experiment conducted in the early 1960s.
Pakula’s goal, as Boorstin understood it, was to “blur the line between killer
and reporter.” But the “tests” that Boorstin’s memo proposed may have been too elaborate
for a production already under scheduling pressure. Also, as Boorstin said in
an email, the scene would have involved the Warren Beatty character in a
“staged scenario” as opposed to immersing the audience in the same experience.
Less complicated than devising the final test, but still
critical to the plot, was the written Parallax Corporation questionnaire. Boorstin
said in an interview for the Criterion Collection in 2021 that it was his first
contribution to the movie and that he “based it on the Minnesota Multiphasic
(Personality Inventory).”
Pakula revealed to a seminar audience at the American Film
Institute in 1974 that it was Boorstin’s faux questionnaire sheets that
inspired him to do the examination scene as a short film: “He originally got
the verbal tests that we showed (in the film). They were based upon real verbal
tests. And I changed them to pictures and still pictures. That was my idea. I
wanted to…I thought it would be a wonderful exercise for me to just have the
use of still film and sound and music…to tell a kind of story.”
Boorstin concurs that it was Pakula’s vision to do the Parallax
Corporation’s test as a film that Beatty’s character views versus other options.
“It was his movie,” Boorstin told me, “He was driving the bus. He was open to
learning from other people during the process, but the basic concept was his.”
Boorstin explained the importance of the Test Film in his
Criterion interview: "Alan realized this is what the movie was about -
this crucial scene which proves to everyone that Warren Beatty is a potential
assassin. So, we were talking about this a lot. About how do you create a test
you can't fake. And what would it look like and what would it be about. Alan's
brilliant idea here was he wanted to put us (the audience) through the same
test. And he wanted us to feel the potential in us to be that assassin… So, we
had to craft this three-and-half minute experience. And, you know, I was scared
shitless, basically. I didn't know...There was nothing."
“AT LEAST FOUR MONTHS”
In the Alan J. Pakula Papers collection at the Margaret
Herrick Library in Beverly Hills, California there are folders labeled
“Parallax View – Special Sequence” that document the evolution of the Test
sequence. There are meeting notes. There are doodles. There are pages devoted
to thematically organizing the assembled images. And, most of all, there are
numerous pieces of correspondence regarding rights clearances for those images.
I reviewed the material for this post.
On September 19, 1973, Alan J. Pakula; Jon Boorstin; Don
Record; and Ben Ashe of Pacific Title and Design met to discuss the “TEST FOR
ALAN PAKULA ‘PARALLAX VIEW’ VISUAL TEST SEQUENCE.” A September 21, 1973 memo summarizes
the meeting and how “50 visual subjects” will be “tested and photographed.” The
memo goes into detail regarding how the images will be shot and processed with
optical effects recommendations. Cost: $6,600.
Don Record, one of the meeting participants, was an
extraordinarily gifted art director and title designer whose work includes the
title sequences for the original PLANET OF THE APES (1968); DOCTOR DOOLITTLE (1967); VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1967) and many other films. He is listed in the on-screen end credits of
THE PARALLAX VIEW as Consultant Designer.
“We had a meeting
with Don Record,” Jon Boorstin recalled in our interview, “and we wound up
going with a simpler approach – much simpler than what Record was going for in
the meeting.” Boorstin elaborated, “We had a contract with him to do the test
sequence and he had a sense of what we were trying to do. Don found some very
useful stuff. He came up with the sexual stuff. He found a lot of the images.”
Another document found in the Pakula Papers is a typewritten
page summarizing an October 2, 1973 meeting with Record that offers a
fascinating glimpse into the early phase of creating the Test Film. In it,
Boorstin notes that “Don currently tracking down pics of alcoholism, drug
abuse, the good life (incl. positive whiskey stuff), Hitler, from his contacts
and library.”
Also discussed in these notes are abandoned ideas such as
the “possibility of shooting certain subjects ourselves to get what we need.”
The second half of the page has columns divided into
subjects in a “tentative” effort at structuring the Test Film: FAMILY;
POLITICS; ALIENATION. Under these column headers are sections that take us from
Domestic Bliss; Americana; Loneliness to the Swinging Life; Adulation of
Political Heroes; Alcoholism and Drugs to Raw Sex; Riot and Assassination;
Corpses and Violence. The notes state that the “…sequence should build in
menace.”
Finally, Boorstin adds at the bottom of the page, the
following directions:
“While there are not clear-cut
separations between sequences, balance should shift as indicated. Pictures
should be re-used as much as possible, changing meaning by judicious
juxtaposition and use of portions of pictures in different ways (e.g. just hands)
or subtle alteration of pics.”
Boorstin also described the creative process behind the
creation of the Test Film in his 2021 interview with Criterion:
"Alan and I spent a lot of
time talking about what this would be. And Alan's key idea was to use those
title cards - Power, Father, Mother, Love - and having the images evolve from
being very benign to being very threatening then to being very angry and
vengeful."
"Alan did a brilliant job and
I helped him with the choice of images - both finding them and how to edit them
and shoot them. I'd go down to Chinatown or I'd look through magazines. I went
to the Village Voice and found this picture of a bunch of guys and
brought it to Alan and he said 'Yeah! That's great, let's use that!' And then
we'd talk about it and we'd go out and find more and it was creative like
that."
"If you could say it in words,
you wouldn't have to show the movie. And what's wonderful about this three-and-a-half
minutes is you can’t say it in words."
The other key member of this four-person group was Wilson S.“Willie” Hong Jr. who worked for Don Record almost until Record’s death in 1980.
Record’s surviving partner Lollie Ortiz told me in a telephone interview that
“Willie was Don’s still photographer and cinematographer and he used him all
the time.”
Boorstin recalled in his interview with me that Hong shot
images for the Test Film sequence on an animation stand. “I would direct him
based on what Alan and I had discussed.” According to Boorstin, in many cases
they shot from the actual source image. He told me that the careful viewer can
see magazine creases in some of the images in the released film. In an email
Boorstin added, “I have fond memories of evenings with him doing the shoots.”
Alan J. Pakula himself spoke at some length about the Test
Film at a seminar held at the American Film Institute in 1974. If, at times, he
sounds like a psychology professor, it is because in his high school years he
contemplated becoming a psychoanalyst. According to Pakula’s biographer, Jared
Brown, the director’s “interest in psychology…only grew over the years.” It
makes perfect sense, of course, that THE PARALLAX VIEW Test Film was conceived
of by a person with a deep fascination with the human psyche.
"I worked on that for at least four
months. One of the reasons I’m slow was, one, getting the pictures, getting the
rights to the pictures, and then playing with them…endless playing with slides.
And I’d put one there and one there. And I wanted to use all those mother,
father…the most primitive kind of almost elementary school images, childlike
images. And there was a story behind that. I mean there is a story through that
whole thing. I tried to make it look like a couple of lovers. But on the
simplest level, one, it starts out with love…and that fascinated me that you
come and they test for hostility, and to find a gunman or a killer’s
personality…and the first word is love…and all these happy bourgeois images,
and father and all the wonderful ideal fathers we’ve been told we’re supposed
to have, and country and that’s just what country is supposed to be, and
motherhood, oh, God, it’s just perfect. And everything is all as it should be.
And then it starts getting into
what is for the person involved, or might be. Father becomes possibly a
Depression figure, an ‘Okie’ who’s been hurt by society, who’s worked hard and
has obviously been destroyed in some way. Many other versions of father come.
And mother becomes a kind of broken figure. And then you go back to the start
where everything’s happy and the way it’s supposed to be, and then it comes
back to what it’s really like for that kind of person.
And honing it all down is the
definition of me, one’s sense of one’s self. And it starts out with baseball
players and kids on bicycles and they’re all cheery. What we’re all supposed to
think of ourselves in the best of all possible worlds. Totally well-adjusted
and wonderfully extroverted simple people. And then it goes, winding up with in
contrast to that key figure who is the man in the prison cell, actually the man
in the prison cell and that hungry child on the bed and then that man in a
mental cell huddled on the cot looking down, the impotent, passive person cut
off from the world.
And people who are attracted to
that kind of violence, the kind of assassination fantasy, very often there’s
that great fear of impotence, the great fear of passivity, that great fear of
being destroyed by the world. And then we pop back to all the people being
happy. And he’s caught in that…and there’s another media image, and that’s
Superman, there’s the manic me, that’s the aggressive me as compared to the
passive me. And they keep coming back, and you have the choice of of being one
or the other. You can be destroyed by the society, you can be left out, you can
give in to your sense of impotence…And wanted him to look at that cartoon
figure because I wanted it to be the most infantile sense of a super hero
fantasy. And everything doesn’t mean what it does anyway. Suddenly you look at
those things of Nazi-ism, swastikas…you know, you’re playing around with George
Washington, and suddenly there’s George Washington and a swastika at a Nazi
Party rally, and there’s Kennedy…and it’s like nothing’s really with us anyway.
And it whips you out of the unfairness of this world where everybody has
everything, steak and meat and gold and fame and sex and love, and why have I
been left out? But you can be Superman or else you can give up and be that, be
destroyed. You can be Superman and break out and destroy…and that’s a happy
note…and make the world well again by destroying.
And then I played with some other
things. I played with the sexual guilt that kind of a man can have where there’s
a whole kind of Oedipal thing, where there’s a picture of mother, and suddenly
there’s a picture of a boy who looks like he’s opening his trousers. It’s sort
of like he’s exposing himself to mother. And using all the love images, and
using them in terms of mother, and just examining one of the Oedipal guilts
there. And then suddenly the castrating father figure, leaping after him in
that kind of shadow on the wall. It looks like a penis shadow, like it’s going
to destroy, running after the little boy to destroy him, to punish him [ed.
note: this Ralph Crane photograph titled “A Boy’s Escape,” was published in LIFE
in 1947]. And then you get the cruel father figures, and then the confusion of
father and authority, and authority being father, and if you kill authority,
you kill father. So, all of those things are really examined in there. And
sexual confusion, and the confusion of sex and violence. You go from the couple
making love happily…and it winds up in shooting. You shoot somebody. And I
wanted to play it to just keep whipping them up and whipping them up and
whipping them up until he breaks through. So the final test is, for somebody
taking that test, do you get that excited or not? Do you have that kind of
personality that you would get that excited.”
And in a Boston Globe interview that was published at the time of THE PARALLAX VIEW’s theatrical release, Pakula said that he wanted to “use as many familiar photographs that we’ve seen in LIFE magazine and grown up with as possible.” The director told the Globe writer that he wanted a “rootedness in American folk images.”
“HE WOULD FUSS OVER EVERY FRAME”
Once all of the images for the Test Film had been selected
and shot, it was time for Alan J. Pakula to work with his editor John W. “Jack” Wheeler to weave all the pieces together. Boorstin told me that editing was
Pakula’s “very favorite part of filmmaking” and that he was a “very tenacious
editor.” “He would fuss over every frame.” Boorstin described the process for
me in our interview: “Alan was with Wheeler. Jack would cut it. Alan would talk
with him, Jack would recut, Alan would come back. Rinse Repeat - recutting all
the time.”
Wheeler’s role, Boorstin said, was “realizing Alan’s
vision,” adding that “Jack was a very good enabler.” Boorstin also said that he
himself would view cuts on a Moviola with Pakula and offer suggestions.
Pakula also briefly discussed the editing process with Filmmakers
Newsletter in 1974. “…I work very closely with the editor. I am obsessed
with that, and in THE PARALLAX VIEW more so than before.” In response to a
question about whether he did the cutting himself during editing, Pakula said
he did not. “No. I’ll sit at the Moviola, not all the time, but a lot.
Sometimes I’ll stop and start in the projection room, and other times at the
Moviola; it all depends.”
Of course, the stunning musical score of the Test Film is
integral to the completed piece. Pakula spoke highly of composer Michael Small,
with whom he had worked on two previous films, including KLUTE, during his AFI
seminar in 1974: “And then Michael came in and the music is so crucial. It
contributes. Music and sound is so important to me and I always allow room for
it in making the film. It must be a sound perception. And in that he started
out with a simple Americana and then it just builds into this kind of acid rock
hysteria.”
Pakula’s biographer Jared Brown interviewed the composer not
long before Small’s death in 2003:
"Working on a tight deadline, Michael Small then
composed and recorded music for the sequence in a few days. As he recalls, 'I
don't think Alan even heard it. It was just one of these magical events.'”
Small told Brown that he considered his entire score (including
the Test sequence) for THE PARALLAX VIEW to be his very best.
It isn’t exactly clear when Small completed his scoring for
the Test sequence itself, but according to Lukas Kendall of Film Score Monthly, the final day of soundtrack score recording was February 8, 1974.
THE PARALLAX VIEW opened on June 19, 1974 in New York City
and in Los Angeles on June 26, 1974. A few critics immediately understood the
singular achievement of the Test Film sequence, while some other major
reviewers like Vincent Canby of the New York Times completely ignored
it. Canby was generally unimpressed with THE PARALLAX VIEW and gave it a negative review.
Here are some quotes from critics in 1974 who were moved to
write about the Test sequence.
Variety’s “Murph.” wondered in his review who exactly
was responsible for “the dazzling five minute fast-edited test sequence.”
Cinefantastique’s Dale Winogura called the Test
sequence “an affecting emotional manipulation” and compared it to the “trip” in
2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY: “A direct participation experience that the protagonist
goes through as well as the audience. It is a classic sequence…”
The Boston Globe’s Patrick McGilligan described it as
“an extraordinary and clinical insert in an otherwise chilling movie.”
The Hollywood Reporter’s Cynthia Kirk wrote in her
review that the “visual test” “becomes the film’s greatest triumph.”
The Atlantic Monthly’s Joseph Kanon called the
sequence “extraordinary.”
Newsweek’s Paul Zimmerman wrote that THE PARALLAX
VIEW was a “dazzling exercise in montage and melodrama.”
The Boston Phoenix’s Janet Maslin called the Test
sequence “crucial” and described it as “an extraordinary series of
arch-American slides.”
Gordon Gow in the British film magazine Films &
Filming wrote, “The entire indoctrination film is a satire at once
disquieting and wry, an incitement to the paranoia that breeds maniacal
‘saviors.’”
“IN THE AIR”
THE PARALLAX VIEW Test Film is an original, breathtaking and
powerful work of filmmaking, but it was not produced in a vacuum. It is very
much a product of its time, but also bracingly fresh to most contemporary
viewers.
The style of rapidly cut photomontage or kinestasis was
percolating in film schools by the mid-1960s. LOOK AT LIFE, George Lucas’s
first student film at the University of Southern California in 1965 is an
example of the form that, in a very basic way, anticipates elements of the
PARALLAX Test Film.
But it was Chuck Braverman’sAMERICAN TIME CAPSULE that
really popularized the style of kinestasis. The short film was first broadcast
on THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS COMEDY HOUR on CBS on the Sunday before the 1968
presidential election. It proved to be such a hit with viewers that the show
ran it again the following month. Braverman went on to create many other
photomontage short films including the dystopian title credit sequence for
SOYLENT GREEN which was released the year before THE PARALLAX VIEW.
I reached out to Braverman to ask him if he recalled what
his reaction was to the Test Film in THE PARALLAX VIEW when he first saw it. He
replied by email: “My reaction was that I wish I had been asked to produce the
montage. I enjoyed it and now plan on watching the film again as I have not
seen it since it was first released.”
There were a couple of other notable short political films that
preceded PARALLAX that have a similar thematic feel. In the controversial Barry
Goldwater campaign film CHOICE (1964), archival clips and stills of wholesome,
patriotic America are juxtaposed with images of riots, vice and corrupt
politicians. The film ends with rapidly cut clips interspersed with title cards that
read “CHOICE” with a white background (for Goldwater’s Republican America) and a
black background (for Lyndon Johnson’s Democratic America).
The NIXON NOW (1972) campaign commercial with a theme song
by the Mike Curb Congregation (“Reaching out to find the way to make tomorrow a
brighter day…Nixon now, Nixon now… He showed us how…”) celebrates Republican candidate
Richard Nixon as a savior figure. It has a very PARALLAX vibe to it, but
without the dark complexity, of course.
I sent video links and asked Jon Boorstin about these last
two films as well as the Lucas short. He replied via email: “Those campaign
films are intriguing. I don't recall seeing either one, though they certainly
resonate. Whether that was just what was in the air or something we'd seen I
can't say. The Nixon one might well have been seen. Don't forget with no video
yet, seeing things was a hit and miss matter. I think I'd remember the
Goldwater film. That is chilling.”
Boorstin said he had never seen the George
Lucas student film before viewing from my link. He added, “Interesting to
contrast his frenzied efforts to impose meaning on his images with Alan J.
Pakula’s approach.”
The one film sequence that is sometimes referenced in direct
comparison to the PARALLAX Test Film is the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) in which Alex (Malcolm McDowell) undergoes cinematic violence
aversion therapy. The image of a tortured-looking Alex with his eyes cranked
open has become iconic.
But the comparisons are misplaced as Boorstin explained in
his Criterion interview:
“The key scene is the scene where
they show Malcolm McDowell being brainwashed by the combination of images and
sound which is essentially similar to ours. But if you look at that as an
example - it's a well-made movie, a beautiful movie, and that's a great scene, but
it's a different thing. You cut to the character, you cut to a piece of the
movie he's watching. You cut back to the character. And it's really not about
what it is doing to us, it's about what it is doing to him.”
Boorstin added, "Alan (Pakula) said, no, no shots of Warren Beatty being
agonized or being tested or reacting to the thing at all."
Boorstin elaborated on these differences in an email:
“I maintain that the brilliance of
AJP's choice is that we aren't watching Warren take the test, we are taking the
test ourselves, unmediated and uncut. So we feel the emotions as they are
aroused in us, not only in Warren. The underpinning of the film, and what makes
it different from others, is that AJP is finding the emotional connection
between the journalist and the assassin, and then with us. In Pakula's tale,
the assassin shares personality traits with the killer, and we see those same
traits in ourselves as we take the test.”
WHAT WAS THE TEST SCORE?
Near the end of the 1974 American Film Institute seminar
with Alan J. Pakula, an audience member asks, “How did the Warren Beatty
character score on that test? I never understood that?”
Pakula responds that it was a “mistake” not to have included
a “segment” that explains how the Beatty character scored on the Parallax
Corporation’s test. But he then goes on to explain why it was absolutely not
necessary to include such a scene.
“…I should have had it in. But I
also find that when in doubt, make a bold leap…in films. But sometimes you can
explain so much, and where’s there a film…I always felt that PARALLAX depended
on a certain kind of hypnosis to work. And if you stop to explain to such an
extent that you break the hypnotic rhythm of the film, you make it more
believable on an intellectual level and the thing that may pull that audience
emotionally can fall apart.”
Fifty years later, it seems beyond question that Pakula’s
decision not to buttress the meaning of the test sequence with some awkward
follow-up scene was the right one. It was the crux of his entire film and it
needed to stand on its own.
ODDS AND ENDS
Items that I collected during my research that did not
really fit in the main post.
WARREN BEATTY’S OPINION OF THE PARALLAX VIEW
Warren Beatty did not promote THE PARALLAX VIEW in the media
when the film was released in June of 1974. Jon Boorstin told me in our
interview that he does not know what Beatty thinks of the film.
I was able to find one very brief quotation about the movie
from Beatty from “Film Night with Tony Bilbow,” BBC 2, October 30,
1975:
BILBOW: A film you didn’t produce, but I suspect was
important to you nevertheless is THE PARALLAX VIEW.
BEATTY: It was a film relating to the possibilities of
conspiracies in assassinations and politics in the United States. And you’re
right, I didn’t produce it, and it’s a film I respect. It’s subject that is
going to be reopened, it’s a very important subject and it’s part of the entire
reopening process that’s taking place in the United States now on the entire
fabric of the last 25 years of our life as a nation.
ALAN J. PAKULA RETROSPECTIVE COMMENTS ON THE TEST FILM: 1
The following quotes are from an archival video interview
with Alan J. Pakula included in the 2019 documentary, ALAN PAKULA: GOING FOR TRUTH.
"And I had in mind a certain
kind of psychological test that would define and attract an assassin and whip
him up and whip his blood pressure up."
"The whole idea of this film,
if there was a cautionary tale in this film and indeed there was a cautionary
tale for the '70s, is that 'Beware hiding behind all sorts of patriotic symbols
that seem all American. That can whip you up into a frenzy of excitement, can
be ideas that are not American, that are not democratic, that are not
free.'"
"What is the genius of this
country? What defines this country? Our ideas of great, the great 18th century
ideas of the Enlightenment, which is freedom and democracy, and that, indeed
other things can be hiding behind them and we can all be manipulated."
ALAN J. PAKULA RETROSPECTIVE COMMENTS ON THE TEST FILM: 2
Alan J. Pakula commented briefly on THE PARALLAX VIEW in a
1995 AFI interview included on the Criterion reissue of the film.
"(Warren Beatty's character
goes)...to a test to weed out people who would be potential assassins against
people who would not be. So, I designed this kind of free association test
sequence which is all stills and is designed to whip you up into a kind of
frenzy of rage if you are one of the people left out of the society. One of the
tragic people who is one of the unknowns in the society - people society
doesn't care about. This was a fascinating sequence."
THE PARALLAX VIEW PRESS BOOK (Paramount Pictures, 1974)
Paramount Pictures’ promotional press book does not
explicitly mention the Test Film sequence, but Alan J. Pakula is quoted. Some
of his comments below are clearly about the Test Film.
"Talking about 'The Parallax
View' while in New York City to map out the advertising and promotional campaigns
for the film, Pakula noted that in his new film "the personal
relationships are certainly secondary to the melodrama and mystery. The picture
deals with a paranoiac delusion that turns out to be a total reality."
"It deals with a paranoiac delusion that turns out to be a total
reality." "It deals with a character, played by Warren Beatty, who
imagines the worst and suspects the worst. He imagines the most bizarre kind of
plots and the truth turns out to be worse than anything he could have imagined."
THE PARALLAX VIEW "demanded a
style which while seeming real and unstylized would nonetheless have a sense of
the surreal to it. It would give me a chance to attempt a kind of visual
comment on our society. On the way we live and our values without ever
discussing it." "One of the reasons I was attracted to 'The Parallax
View' was that it was the least literary things I've ever done. It depends on
visual storytelling. While it is based on Loren Singer's book, I felt it could
only be a movie." "The fascinating thing about melodrama is that
you're playing with the most infantile emotions of an audience. Scaring people,
terrorizing them. Using film to do that is fascinating." "When you're
cutting a film, you're manipulating emotions. It's very easy to horrify
somebody if you want to show a corpse being mutilated. I'm not talking about
that - that's a form of pornography actually. Real terror does not come from
any ghoul but out of the audience's fantasy terrors. In a sense I'm saying,
'how can I scare myself? How can I surprise myself." "It's been said
that in making a film that manipulates other people's fears, directors are
really dealing with their own childhood fears. For a man who dream a great
deal, as I do, controlling dreams by cutting them is an incredible thing."
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Special thanks to Jon Boorstin for taking the time to
discuss at length his work on THE PARALLAX VIEW. His insights regarding the
production of the Test Film were invaluable in writing this post. Watch Jon’s
Academy Award nominated short documentary EXPLORATORIUM on YouTube.
Visit Jon’s website to learn more about his writing and film
work.
Thanks to Lollie Ortiz for speaking with me about her late
partner Don Record and his friend and cinematographer / photographer, Wilson S.
“Willie” Hong Jr.
Thanks to Chuck Braverman, Steven Brower, Alan Andres, Tim
Goldsmith, Scott Saslow, J.G. Michael.
SOURCES AND NOTES
Steven Soderbergh comment regarding THE PARALLAX VIEW Test
Film is from the documentary, ALAN PAKULA: GOING FOR TRUTH (2019).
The reference to the Alan J. Pakula “Paranoia Trilogy” is
from Richard T. Jameson’s article, “The Pakula Parallax,” Film Comment,
September-October, 1976.
Date of Alan J. Pakula completing principal photography on
THE PARALLAX VIEW is from Variety, July 6, 1973.
All quotes from Jon Boorstin are either from my telephone
interview with him from June 12, 2023 or from the video entitled PULLING FOCUS:
CONSTRUCTING THE PARALLAX VIEW produced by Elizabeth Pauker which is included
as a supplement to the 2021 Criterion Collection Blu-ray reissue of THE
PARALLAX VIEW. All quotes are identified in the post. Quotes from Boorstin’s
emails to me are cited separately.
I read the source novel:
Loren Singer [1923-2009], “The Parallax View,” Doubleday
& Company, Inc., 1970. The “Test” scene in the novel is called an
“Interview” and it involves the journalist character (named Graham, not Frady)
going to a hotel for two tests that culminate in a bizarre eye exam involving
word association.
I read the following screenplay drafts:
THE PARALLAX VIEW by Lorenzo Semple, Jr. [1923-2014],
Undated.
THE PARALLAX VIEW by David Giler [1943-2020], First Draft,
February 13, 1973.
The Alan J. Pakula quotes in this post are, unless otherwise
noted, from “The American Film Institute Seminar with Alan Pakula,” November
20, 1974.
Parallax View – Special Sequence folders, Alan J. Pakula
Papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Beverly Hills, CA.
Biographical information on Don Record [1936-1980]:
Alan J. Pakula quote on editing is from Andrew Bobrow,
“Interview with Alan J. Pakula,” Filmmakers Newsletter, September, 1974.
Composer Michael Small [1939-2003] information and quote are
from the biography “Alan J. Pakula: His Films and His Life” by Jared Brown.
Back Stage Books, 2005.
THE PARALLAX VIEW soundtrack scoring recording completion
date was confirmed to me via a June 1, 2023 email from Film Score Monthly founder
Lukas Kendall who said FSM had obtained the data from the American Federation
of Musicians. The date is also included in the Film Score Monthly liner notes
to their 2010 release of the MARATHON MAN and PARALLAX VIEW soundtracks: https://www.filmscoremonthly.com/notes/parallax_view.html
Buried in a box at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas there is a short memo describing the death of a man at the classified federal emergency relocation site now known as the Mount Weather Emergency Operations Center (MWEOC) in Bluemont, Virginia. In a memorandum dated March 31, 1960, Leo A. Hoegh, the administrator of the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (ODCM), wrote the following to General Andrew J. Goodpaster Jr., President Eisenhower’s Staff Secretary:
On Wednesday evening an employee of a Navy contractor [ed. note: this company is Irons & Reynolds, Inc.] working on the WHASA (White House Army Signal Agency) communications project at REDACTED was killed by carbon monoxide. Four other employees are hospitalized [ed. note: press accounts name five individuals].
Apparently a gasoline sump pump, or kerosene heaters, located at the bottom of the hole created the gas. Little is known at this time as to how it was discovered or how many men were in the area. Some of the casualties were stricken in the course of rescue operations.
OCDM personnel, guards and the fire company, assisted in the rescue, emergency medical treatment, administrative actions and transfer of the victims to REDACTED.
The Navy is conducting an investigation.
I was unable to find any follow-up correspondence regarding the tragic incident either at the Eisenhower Library or at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. A representative of the Navy's Judge Advocate General's office told me that he could find no record of the investigation.
But thanks to local newspaper coverage of the accident, we know the name of the man who lost his life at Mount Weather: Harry Wilburn Tibbs, a 32-year-old Virginia native with a wife and three young children. According to the Winchester Evening Star, Tibbs had been in a “shaft” helping clear out water from melting snow when he and several co-workers became “overcome” by fumes created by “a gasoline engine used to power a portable pump.”
The Commonwealth of Virginia Certificate of Death for Mr. Tibbs lists the cause of death as “carbon monoxide poisoning.” Under the section of the certificate titled “Describe How Injury Occurred,” Dr. James R. York wrote, “Exposure to gas fumes in closed building while at work.” Mr. Tibbs’ occupation on the certificate is listed as “Laborer” and his “Kind of Business or Industry” is entered as “Gov’t Installation.”
Harry Tibbs’s funeral was held Saturday, April 2, 1960 in Berryville, Virginia. The announcement for the service that ran in the Winchester Evening Star the previous day may be the first published reference to Mount Weather and its mission. It refers to the site where Tibbs died as the “Mt. Weather federal relocation project.”
Beyond the government documents and newspaper clips, who was Harry Tibbs? I reached out to his family to learn more. Hal Tibbs, Harry’s oldest son, was just five when the Mount Weather accident occurred. “I remember people coming to the house at night to tell my mom,” Hal told me in a telephone interview. “We were woken up and taken to our grandparents.” He added that his cousin had custody of his father’s clothes from the day of the accident. “I remember there was a tear in the khaki work pants from where, I assume, they tried to pull him up (from the shaft).”
Hal Tibbs has his father’s U.S. Army ring and Bowie knife from when Harry served in the Philippines from 1946-1947. Hal recalls that in civilian life his father worked in construction and in a slaughterhouse.
Hal says that, to the best of his knowledge, representatives of the federal government never reached out to the family after his father’s death to offer condolences or financial assistance. His mother, Charlotte A. Tibbs (now deceased), received a very small worker’s compensation settlement that was issued weekly over a period of years. She remarried in the year following the accident.
A little more than a month after the accident that claimed Harry Tibbs's life at Mount Weather, President Dwight Eisenhower visited the site as part of a civil defense drill known as Operation Alert. He received a tour of the facilities by Leo Hoegh. There's no documentary evidence that the president was ever told of the fatality.
Shortly after learning about Mr. Tibbs’s story, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with FEMA – a successor agency to the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization – to see if a memorial plaque exists at Mount Weather for those who lost their lives building the site. A couple of years later, a FEMA representative responded to my FOIA informing me that no such plaque exists.
Isn't it long overdue that the federal government officially recognizes the sacrifice of Harry W. Tibbs and others who have died building Cold War era relocation sites?
RESEARCH NOTES
Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library
White House Office, Office of the Staff Secretary: Records, 1952-61
Subject Series: Alpha Subseries
Box 21
Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization (4)
Hoegh to Goodpaster re accident at emergency location, 3/31/60
"Federal Project Mishap Kills 1, Sends 5 to Hospital," Winchester Evening Star, March 31, 1960
Judge Advocate General's representative to Bill Geerhart on October 12, 2022. The representative stated that he searched their electronic database as well as "a whole room of physical 3x5 cards" for the year 1960. No records were found for an investigation of the accident at Mount Weather on March 30, 1960.
Commonwealth of Virginia Certificate of Death for Harry W. Tibbs accessed via Ancestry.com
Tibbs Service, Winchester Evening Star, April 1, 1960
Telephone interview with Hal Tibbs conducted by Bill Geerhart, September 29, 2022
Worker's Compensation claim information was obtained from claim no. 507-404 (C60-117976), November 14, 1961, Commonwealth of Virginia, Department of Workmen's Compensation
Freedom of Information Act Request, FEMA, 2023-FEFO-00008. Response date: April 4, 2024
Other known fatalities resulting from the construction of Cold War era relocation sites are the following - all during the construction of Raven Rock (Site R):
LeRoy R. Fleagle [1926-1951]
Roland P. Kelly [1923-1951]
Charles S. Stanley [1910-1951]
It should also be noted here that in addition to the fatality of Harry W. Tibbs, the following five persons were hospitalized as a result of carbon monoxide inhalation at Mount Weather on March 30, 1960:
Arthur A. Breeden [1932-2012]
Arthur A. Fox [1927-1980]
Sanford B. Lam [1925-2014] (Mr. Lam had been employed by the U.S. Bureau of Mines)
Calvin L. Myers [1933-2019]
Delbert Monroe Payne [1932-2023]
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I am grateful to the family of Harry W. Tibbs for being willing to speak with me regarding their late father.
