Tuesday, March 3, 1998
Backstage on Broadway
FILM D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus have documented
celebrities’ private
personas for years. Their newest project? Carol Burnett’s return
to the Great White Way.
By Louise Chu
Daily Bruin Contributor
Between them, they have worked with Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin,
Depeche Mode and Soul Asylum. They have made films starring Jane
Fonda, Bill Clinton and most recently Carol Burnett. But you
probably don’t know much about D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus
because they are involved in an often overlooked genre of
filmmaking: documentaries.
Sitting in the conference room of the Courtyard Marriott,
Pennebaker dressed modestly in a wool sport coat and Hegedus in a
simple beige pantsuit, the husband-and-wife filmmaking team say
that they don’t do make documentaries for the fame or money. They
do it for the thrill of capturing the essence of human drama.
"I think that documentary film is a way at getting at whatever
that is – the knowledge – that the fiction can never get at by its
very nature," Pennebaker says.
Later he adds, "What interests us is that when actors go into a
movie, which has a script, the responsibility for both the director
and the actor is to the script. When we film people, of course, we
don’t have any scripts. We never begin with a script, we don’t know
how to write scripts, we couldn’t read them if we could write them
– it’s just not what we know how to do."
Pennebaker and Hegedus’s most recent film is "Moon Over
Broadway," a documentary following Carol Burnett’s return to
Broadway in the play "Moon Over Buffalo" after 30 years of
television. Not only have they done critically acclaimed
documentaries such as the 1993 Academy Award nominated "The War
Room" about the Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, they
have also ventured into directing rock videos for performers, such
as Suzanne Vega and Soul Asylum. However, documentaries are their
first love.
"(Directing rock videos) is fun to do, if you like the band,"
Pennebaker comments. "It’s frustrating if it’s going to be done to
playback (lip-syncing), for me anyway. You’re not making use of
what the performer does best, which is perform. They’re a limited
kind of fulfillment for us."
Before joining with Hegedus in 1976, Pennebaker worked on a
number of films about musicians, including "Monterey Pop," which
documented the festival that launched the careers of Jimi Hendrix
and Janis Joplin, and he has always been fascinated with
musicians.
For their latest project, Pennebaker and Hegedus chose to enter
the enigmatic world of the backstage of Broadway, which was met
with great resistance largely because of the high price of gaining
"behind-the-scenes" access, and it was money that they didn’t have.
Hegedus explained that most attempts at shooting the Broadway
backstage usually result in "some massive TV special."
They eventually gained access with the help of the production
company for the theater, 101 Productions, who wanted to see a film
made about Broadway. Even once they entered this world, they
realized that they were still not going to be met with much
cooperation.
"It was very restrictive," Pennebaker admits. "We weren’t
allowed to turn on any lights or have them bring in any extra
lights, we couldn’t plug into a socket, so it was a difficult
situation to film in."
They found the restrictions relatively easy to conform to
because of their already unobtrusive style of filmmaking. In the
early ’60s, Pennebaker and his former colleagues helped establish
and define "direct cinema," a style which revolutionized
documentary filmmaking that rejected the practice of voice-over
narration in favor of recording real people and events as they
happened, with as little "direction" from the filmmaker as
possible.
This style is still the trademark of Pennebaker and Hegedus.
Often it was simply the two of them on the film crew, Hegedus using
a tape recorder that "looks like a small pocketbook" and Pennebaker
using a camera "like the kind you take to a picnic." They knew
their sacrifices would pay off in a film that promised much drama
and emotion.
"Here’s a woman coming in," Pennebaker says. "She hasn’t been on
Broadway for 30 years, and she’s coming in from television. She’s
the queen of television, and she’s coming in to this tight group of
people who all say, ‘Television?’ So she’s going to take them on,
and she’s kind of the wild creature, and they’re the group that’s
mastered their art and they’re very jealous of that art. And so you
think, ‘God, there’s got to be drama there.’"
Hegedus adds, "It’s usually more easy to make a story that
follows one or two people, but we realized that it wasn’t going to
be just Carol Burnett and (her co-star) Philip Bosco, or Carol and
the director (Tom Moore). The story was going to revolve around the
writer (Ken Ludwig), it was going to revolve around these
producers, and you had to go through all these threads to get to
what was going on in this place."
The product of their five months of filming offers a revealing
look at, not only Broadway, but also Carol Burnett. Pennebaker and
Hegedus were extremely interested in making a film about the life
of a public figure away from the television camera and stage.
"I think that’s why we like to do our films about (celebrities).
A lot of the times, we just see them in their public role," Hegedus
explains. "What we’re really doing is giving everybody a peek
behind the curtain at what these people are like. Everybody knows
Carol because she’s a television legend, but very few people get to
see how Carol reacts when people ask her to act a different way, or
how she is in her dressing room …"
"How she is when she’s nervous," Pennebaker continues for her.
"You’re so used to Carol Burnett completely on top of everything.
But to see when she’s nervous because she’s not sure that she’s
going to remember the exact way a line goes. In Broadway, in a
play, if the line is a certain way, that is the way you deliver it.
If you don’t, everybody’s very upset. And that’s the thing she
wasn’t used to."
The filmmaking duo believe that this film is a testament to
Burnett’s professionalism and determination, something that the
mainstream audience may not know about the comedic actress.
"During this whole process, because the play had not been
written for a female star, the play had to be constantly rewritten
throughout the rehearsal process, so every day she was given a
stack of changes in the play. She dealt with it as a total
professional. It was incredible to be around her, whereas the
frustration and anxiety that you could see on her face was very
high."
"Moon Over Broadway’s" revealing look at the many complex
relationships behind the scenes in the making of the play proved
rather overwhelming for the cast and crew who viewed it after its
completion.
"Ludwig found it very difficult to have a film where (it was)
exposed that the producers were going to bring in a jokewriter to
correct the show," Hegedus admits. "They never did bring in a
jokewriter, but just that doubt and (to) have that open to the
world is just very hard for him. And same thing for Carol. I don’t
think she realized that they were questioning her ability to
perform the play in the way that it was written, before she saw the
film.
Hegedus adds, "All of them just said that this is what they felt
it was like to do a Broadway play, and it was very accurate, and
even though it exposed a lot of anxieties over the process, that
this was what it was about."
Despite the small budgets and limited distributions, Pennebaker
and Hegedus hope that the appeal of Carol Burnett and "Moon Over
Broadway" will help bring documentary films more into the
mainstream consciousness. They strongly believe that this genre
allows the excitement of realism that fictional films may lack.
They discussed this in the contrast between "The War Room" and
"Primary Colors," an upcoming fictional film starring John Travolta
about a sex scandal-riddled presidential campaign.
"I’m still really enamored with the drama and intensity that you
find in a real-life story," Hegedus says. "There’s nothing as
exciting as watching the real people electing the real president.
And as exciting as ‘Primary Colors’ is going to be, I think they
were all very excited when (the actors) saw who the real people
were in ‘The War Room’ because I know they all rented it and
watched it, the people they were all going to impersonate."
FILM: "Moon Over Broadway" opens Friday at the Music Hall
Theater in Beverly Hills.
AELIA KHAN/Daily Bruin
(Above) Moviemakers Chris Hegedus (left) and D.A. Pennebaker
discuss their documentary, "Moon Over Broadway." (Far right) Carol
Burnett performs the lead role in "Moon Over Buffalo." "Moon over
Broadway" captures Burnett behind the scenes of the play, and her
return to Broadway after 30 years of work in television.
photos courtesy of Pennebaker Associates
Carol Burnett rehearses a scene with co-star Philip Bosco.