In 1970, Pennebaker invited me to film the original cast recording of Sondheim’s new Broadway musical, Company. The entire cast and orchestra assembled in a recording studio. We started shooting at 9 AM Sunday and went on until 7:30 AM Monday! Pennebaker came back and shot the last song a couple of days later, but what a day that was! I don’t think I have ever had such a fabulous day’s shooting. There were three of us with cameras and we were each working with a sound recordist to catch sound that was not intended for the master track. I was with my son Robert. Pennebaker, Jim Desmond and I had been filming together for ten years so we knew each other’s quirks. I had not seen the show and no one told us what to shoot. We just had a ball. A dimwit from Public Broadcasting, one of the sponsors, kept coming up to me and saying, “Ricky! What’s going on? No one has a plan. No one knows what they’re doing! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? This is ridiculous!” So I told him to get lost. I was told that years later, after the film became an acknowledged classic, this same guy said: “God, were those guys lucky! They had no idea what they were doing…“ Filming is fun! You use your eyes and your ears and your nose and you edit as you shoot.

No rules!