It just so happened that for the first time in twenty years (1934 to 1954), I had been asked by Affiliated Films to make a short film that I was to write, direct, photograph and edit myself. Our client -- the cultural television program called Omnibus – wanted reportage on a travelling tent theatre in the Middle West, The Toby and Susie Show. I visited the show, took a lot of still photos and wrote a treatment outlining the structure of the film.

I was to take a “minimum” crew to make this film: an assistant cameraman (Kevin Smith), an electrician (Michael Margolies) and a sound man. I asked Morgan Smith, who had a sound recording studio in Harlem and had been teaching with us at the school, if he would come. Fine. This was no ordinary crew: we had worked together many times before and I could rely on them always to do their level best at any time, day or night.



I flew out to La Plata, Missouri ahead of the crew, who were driving down with the truck and the usual studio equipment. The City Fathers were in a tizzy. Someone from Omnibus had called and told them that my crew included a black man. They had spoken to the only hotel in town, which flatly refused to accommodate a Negro. So the Mayor of La Plata invited Morgan and me to be his personal house-guests for the duration of our stay. Then the wealthiest man in town, who owned a turkey hatchery, also invited us to stay. The only restaurant in town had said, “No problem; he can eat in the kitchen”.



So, we spent half our stay with the Mayor and the other half with the Turkey man. The restaurant let us all eat in peace. On the first night of filming, Toby introduced each member of the crew to the capacity audience of about a thousand. Each received polite applause except for Morgan, who got a standing ovation.

This was to be my final attempt to make a Documentary using classical film industry techniques. We worked very hard using a 35mm Mitchell BNC camera (weighing about 100 pounds with its massive tripod and power supply) that shot in synch with our Reeves 35mm magnetic tape recorder (weighing about 80 pounds with its attendant vacuum tube amplifier – it was said to be “portable!”). I shot a lot of wild, hand-held footage with a new French camera, the Éclair Cameflex, which took four-hundred-foot rolls. Not synch and not very handy but it made less noise than my old Eymo.



Considering the clumsiness of our equipment, by dint of sheer hard work we achieved something near my goal of a creating “a sense of being there”. We made small sequences, including improvised dialog, that gave a sense of what was going on without continually making points. I edited this film myself. Today it seems a little bit stiff and formal but by contemporary standards it was amazingly live. We had the advantage of an event that kept repeating itself night after night. Hence we could get a bit now, some more tomorrow and more the next night. In spite of our elephantine equipment, a trace of spontaneity was retained. Today one would expect that the racist incident would be part of the finished film but we were still chained to antediluvian equipment and the thinking of the past.