THE FOLLIES OF DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING - PART 4Frederick Wiseman's 20-Year Fight
The movie became a tool for so many different people’s agendas.
That’s exactly right. So then there was a 19-day trial, where they made three principal allegations…
First, that the film was an invasion of privacy of the inmate named Jim, the man who’s shown naked in his cell. Second, that I had breached an oral contract giving the state editorial control over the film.
Was there anything like that?
There was no document whatsoever that in any way supported that view. But still, the superintendent testified to there having been an oral contract.
So he perjured himself?
Yes. Richardson, a very clever lawyer, cooked up that theory as a way of asserting that I had contracted away my First Amendment rights. He was afraid that I would get the case removed to federal court.
Because federal courts are really by the book on constitutional law.
Yes. And it is possible to contract away your First Amendment rights, so they were trying to prove that I had.
The third assertion they were making was that all the receipts of the film should be held in trust for the benefit of the inmates.
They really wanted to nail you.
The judge found in this case a right of privacy for the first time in the history of Massachusetts.
Wow. I’m surprised they’d made it to the late 60s without having set a privacy precedent.
On the contract issue, the judge simply believed the state over me. I said X, they said Y, and the judge—who was specially appointed to deal with the case and who had absolutely no sympathy for the film at all—decided in their favor. He also decided that all the receipts would be held in trust for the inmates.
So it was a resounding state victory. But I’ll bet there wasn’t any money there to hold in trust anyway.
Yes. At that point there were no receipts! He also declared that the negative should be burned.
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Still from Titicut Follies.
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Jesus Christ!
He described the film as a “nightmare of ghoulish obscenities.”
It’s more like a documentation of ghoulish obscenities.
The next thing I did was appeal to the Massachusetts Supreme Court. They decided that the film had value but could only be seen by limited audiences: doctors, lawyers, judges, health-care professionals, social workers, and students in these and related fields, but not the “merely curious general public.” And this was on condition that I give the attorney general’s office a week’s notice before any screening and that I file an affidavit after that everyone who attended was, of my personal knowledge, a member of the class of people allowed to see the film. Those were the conditions under which I could screen Titicut Follies.
In other words, effectively impossible.
Effectively impossible! What was I going to do? Interview everybody who wanted to see the film? Five years later, a new attorney general was appointed in Massachusetts. My lawyers went to see him and he agreed to modify the injunction so that I could show the film if I could rely on someone’s representation to me that the audience was going to consist of the accepted class. If a teacher at, say, the University of Illinois, wanted to show the film, he had to sign a form saying that the audience was going to be within the class of people allowed to see the film, send the form to me, and I would have to file with the attorney general’s office and the clerk of the supreme court. And then, within a week of the screening, I would have to file another piece of paper verifying that the people seeing it were within the class that were allowed to have seen it.
It’s too many hoops to jump through. Did anyone go through all this to screen it?
Well, yes. There were a lot of people that wanted to see the film so they went through that, you know, charade.
Were film students allowed to see it?
No. Nor were journalists.
So it would have been illegal for a journalist to view Titicut Follies.
Yes. But it’s a question of who is a student in “these or related fields.” I think that sometimes the film was able to be screened in journalism schools because the argument was made that journalists were within the class.
INTERVIEWED BY JESSE PEARSON
TO BE CONTINUED:
THE FOLLIES OF DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
See all articles by this contributor Anonymous, on Oct 8, 2008 wrote:
Is this the whole interview?
Does anyone know how Wiseman can get people so used to the camera in 4 to 6 weeks that they forget its there and do what they would normally do. I’m talking in relation to Titcut follies and scenes like the ’force feeding’ incident. If somebody knows or has a source that could supply me with an anwswer, could you please post it up here. | | |
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