George Stevens Jr. - Conversations at the American Film Institute with the Great Moviemakers: The Next Generation

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2012 by the American Film Institute
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Conversations at the American Film Institute with the great moviemakers : the next generation / edited and with an introduction by George Stevens, Jr.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-95771-9
1. Motion picture producers and directorsUnited StatesInterviews.
2. Motion picturesProduction and direction. I. Stevens, George, Jr., 1932
II. American Film Institute.
PN 1998.2. C 613 2012
791.430232092dc23 2011043741

Jacket design by Abby Weintraub

v3.1

For

Elizabeth Stevens

On September 1, 2010, the American Film Institute welcomed the forty-first class of the AFI Conservatory. This opening day for Americas future storytellers included the screening of a new film, Love and Other Drugs, and when the lights came up, the creative ensembleall of whom are AFI alumnitook to the stage: Ed Zwick, director, producer, writer (75); Marshall Herskovitz, producer, writer (75); Pieter Jan Brugge, producer (79); Steven Rosenblum, editor (76); and Steven Fierberg, cinematographer (95).

The view from the audience was seminar enoughthat the tradition captured in these pages had been reborn in a new generation. It was not lost upon the filmmakers that their move from the audience to the stage was a seed planted years ago at AFI.

These treasures are preserved and presented here through the passion of George Stevens, Jr., the founding director of the American Film Institute, who continues to support the organizations mandate by bringing the words and the wisdom of our nations storytellers to all who love the movies. A light should also shine on the contributions of Jean Picker Firstenberg, who served as director of AFI for over twenty-seven years. In her first year of this extraordinary tenure, Jeannie created a permanent home for AFI high in the hills of Hollywood. And, finally, I would like to acknowledge the trustees, faculty and staff of AFI, each and all who believe in the singular power of the moving image: that it is more than amusement or amazement, but an art formone that records Americas cultural legacy.

Bob Gazzale
President and CEO, American Film Institute

We are beginning here today a Center for Advanced Film Studies that will entrench itself in the film present and provide new talent for the film future I believe that while it may not be possible to train people to make films, it is possible to create a climate in which people can learn to make films, where aspiring artists can absorb, in a relatively short, intensive period, insight that others have wrested from the experience of an entire career.

George Stevens, Jr.
September 29, 1969

In 1970 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., the eminent historian who was a founding trustee of the American Film Institute, described the place of motion pictures among the arts in America in this way: Film is the only art in which the United States has made a real difference, he wrote. Strike the American contribution from drama, painting, music, sculpture, dance, even possibly from poetry and the novel, and the worlds achievement is only marginally diminished. But film without the American contribution is unimaginable. Schlesingers thesis crystallized the feelings that led me to invest myself in AFIs founding. It was a reminder that the motion picture had been the most potent vehicle of the American imagination and deserved to be preserved and nurtured in the country of its birth.

The men who made the movies that inspired Schlesinger were pioneers who came to the new medium with no models to look to and no formal training for the tasks at hand. D. W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, King Vidor and their contemporaries came to moviemaking with experience in the theater or vaudeville, or in some cases with no dramatic experience at all, and they figured out how to use cameras and film to tell compelling stories. It was an era of breathtaking innovation, and the people who worked alongside these men in a thousand apprenticeships were to become the directors, writers, cameramen and technicians who would be the mainstays of a burgeoning new art, telling stories and exploring the mysteries of American life.

Woodrow Wilson was the first president to screen motion pictures in the White House, and in 1915 when he saw D. W. Griffiths epic The Birth of a Nation, he observed, It is like writing history with lightning.

Half a century later, on September 29, 1965, another American president, Lyndon Johnson, stood in the Rose Garden of the White House and declared, We will create an American Film Institute that will bring together leading artists of the film industry, outstanding educators and young men and women who wish to pursue this twentieth-century art form as their lifes work. I watched that day as Johnson put his pen to the law that established the National Endowment for the Arts, the organization that would foster the creation of the American Film Institute. As founding director of AFI, I shared with my fellow trustees the dream of creating a conservatory that would be a bridge between the study of film and the filmmaking profession.

On the night we opened the Center for Advanced Film Studies in 1969, Harold Lloyd screened his classic comedy The Freshman, then met with the fellows who had come to AFI to learn filmmaking. Lloyds seminar was an historic first step toward a tutorial tradition at AFI in which master filmmakers would pass their knowledge and experience to the next generation. The setting was the stately stone mansion in Beverly Hills called Greystone, which had been the home of E. L. (Ned) Doheny, Jr., son of E. L. Doheny, the oil baron who was involved in the Teapot Dome bribery scandal of the 1920s. The younger Doheny and his secretary-chauffeur were found dead in one of the bedrooms in what was reported as a murder-suicide, a tale of intrigue worthy of a school for storytellers.

Lloyd was accompanied by his close friend King Vidor, and that night these accomplished and gracious men in their seventies set the tone for the AFI series that continues today as the Harold Lloyd Master Seminar Program. In the audience that night were young people in their twenties, the first class of eighteen AFI fellows, which included Terrence Malick, Paul Schrader and Caleb Deschanel, who would soon embark on film careers of their own.

James Powers, a correspondent for the Hollywood Reporter, described that first night in an article, Film Institute Bows with Harold Lloyd and The Freshman:

It is as old as Socrates, of course, the method that Stevens and the institute have chosen to preserve and regenerate the most American of arts. The institute calls it a tutorial system. Most of the young filmmakers are already expert in the technical aspects of their craft. By exposure to the great figures of Hollywood film, they will be inspired and propelled into doing something with that craft.