DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT

           

           Making our first candid film, PRIMARY (1960), was a spiritual experience based on something close to physical torture. My recollections begin in the New York laboratory of Mitch Bogdanowycz, who was to hand me our new portable camera to take to Wisconsin for a shooting deadline with Senator John F. Kennedy the next morning. The camera was not quite ready. I missed one flight, then another, then another. I became more and more agitated. The pressure I felt and was transmitting to Mitch was becoming frightening, I think, to both of us. Finally Mitch dropped the camera and rushed to a medicine cabinet. “Oh God,” I thought. “He’s going to commit suicide!” Mitch emptied a bottle into his hand but instead of swallowing the pills, handed them to me. “Tranquilizers,” he said.

            That was about the degree of tension we maintained for the next five days and nights. Richard Leacock handling the new camera wired to the Perfectone tape recorder I carried. There were wild cameras I assigned to Al Maysles, Terrence McCartney Filgate and D.A. Pennebaker.

            Our new light weight camera, an Auricon heavily modified by Mitch, weighed close to 50 pounds, including inverter, power supply and battery. It took 100 foot rolls of film. That meant we had to change reels roughly every 2.5 minutes. The lenses tended to lose focus, the film would sometimes jitter in the gate. We later learned that the wire from the camera to my recorder was broken the whole time. That meant our system for synchronizing the film and tape was disabled.

            Meanwhile Senator Kennedy and Senator Humphrey took us at our word, admitted us into their cars and buses, flogged themselves, and therefore us, to exhaustion every day. For a few hours every night the floor of our hotel room contained three large piles – of dirty clothes, disassembled equipment and human bodies littered with sheets of yellow paper from the pads I used to plan the next day’s shooting. It was not always easy to distinguish one pile from the other.

            But we were excited to our limits, fully aware that this was the beginning of a new kind of filmmaking in America. PRIMARY also opened the way to my making three more films on John F. Kennedy upon which “A President to Remember: In the Company of John F. Kennedy” is based.

 

                                                                        Bob Drew
                                                                                       Sharon, Connecticut
                                                                                  March 24, 2008