John Shearman

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I'll just make the announcement.

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The copyright of this recording is vested in the ACTT History Project.

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John Sherman, documentary film producer, filmmaker, interviewer, Alan Lawson, on the 26th

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of October,

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side one.

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John, when and where were you born?

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I was born on Christmas Eve 19 112

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in a village in Cheshire called West Aston, just outside crew.

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And I was born there because my father was

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an engineer in the great London North Western Railway works in crew, and that was where

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he and my mother lived in this village called West Aston.

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What kind of schooling Did you receive?

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Well, we came to London very soon after the first war,

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because my father's job had moved to London. I was in and so, really in Cheshire, I just went to a sort of kindergarten school. And then when we came to London, I went to a preparatory school in Hampstead called the hall, and then I went to Westminster, and that was the end of my schooling.

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Did you started learning things long after that?

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Did you have any specialized training after school at all, university or something like that? No, I didn't go to university. I did an apprenticeship with what was by this time, the London, Midland and Scottish railway, the LMS, as the sort of general

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dogs body, bit of everything, cleaning locomotives and

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sitting in a control room and that kind of thing. And I wasn't a bit good at it, but that's the nearest to further education that I got to shorthand and typing at Pittman's night school, of course.

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What? Well, what made you to decide to go into the, you know, film business? Oh, like the girl said when she was asked how she got on the game, just lucky. I guess

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you see. What happened was that I got into the advertising department of the LMS railway, which was at this time, run by a wonderful impresario called Loftus Allen, great man and Harry Walt had just made nightmare. And so Loftus Allen said the railway must start making its own films. He had that kind of magic touch. And I was in the advertising department, nominally as a copywriter. I wanted to be a writer, and I was writing copy and

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Lotus Allen, a wonderful man called Bill Bruder Noel, and one or two others, started making films.

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They used

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topical press agency had a camera man and

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a rather good man called Mr. Oliver. We never knew his first name,

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and they had a hand turned eggley. I carried that thing miles, and we started, as I say, making films pretty well. I'm tutored. What date was this? Would this be? Oh, counts on fingers, 3033,

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really. So it was in the talking period.

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It was just in the talking period. Well, yes, was just in the talking period. But we didn't do it. We didn't do anything very much with sick we did commentary, wild effects and that kind of thing. I didn't learn cuts, think until, until I was in the Royal Air Force.

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What actually did you do in in this, in this film unit, and yourself? Pretty well, everything. I wrote,

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script treatment, scripts, commentaries.

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I,

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as I say, carried a tripod occasionally. Bill broad Noel let me direct if it was easy or arduous, like walking five miles along the railway in order to get a shot,

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and went all over the place with this man who had the hand turned Akeley Lockey Oliver St John Locke. His name was and

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then we originally the professionals, the agency that we employed, did the editing and.

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Uh, track making, such as it was. But finally, we decided we could do it better ourselves. And so we installed some pretty primitive cutting equipment, and we had a 35 mill theater

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under our own control, and I learned by doing.

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And you know what? What kind of working day did you have on that?

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Oh, well,

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in the office,

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in the department, office hours, and as many more as you like to put in on location with two or three offers, and never more than that,

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carrying a mute camera,

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usually myself and lock in well

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sunlight, daylight hours, and

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putting up in the cheapest, cheapest hotels or digs or whatever you could find wherever you ended the day, because of railway making, railway films, necessarily involves moving about the country of great deals. Did you have a budget for them?

Unknown Speaker  6:16  
We had an overall budget. What do you mean a departmental function, budget. But I don't remember the individual films being broken down.

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I don't remember

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it never worried me. Anyway,

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you know, how did you progress in that, you know, in the in the LMS Film Unit? What was your you know, professionally, how did you progress from being as it were, a dog's body really a general hand?

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Well, let's see. I was working there for

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four years, just over until the war came along. And by that time,

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these two people, Locke and Oliver had taught me a great deal,

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because I stuck my nose into everything, and I was getting much better at writing, simply because the more you write, the better you get at it. You know at least I think you do and

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then doing

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starting our own editing department.

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I was the one who was keen on editing, and I enjoyed cutting, and sort of took to it, like adapt to water, really. There are lots of funny stories about it, but

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well at this time, Mr. Oliver was teaching me to cut, as I say, because he didn't really want to do it himself, and I was desperately in love with dissolves, mixes. I thought they were very esthetic, and I used to draw them in all over my cutting copies with yellow China graph pencil. And one day, Mr. Oliver is looking at one of my cutting copies. And he said, What are all these yellow lines? John and I said, dissolves. Mr. Oliver mixes, you know. He said, are they? We'll never forget. It's 10 and six a mix. John, 10 and six a mix. So I took it back on the bench and rubbed them out all that made the cuts properly.

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It but that was the kind of kind of learning process, which was so marvelous because it was what's now called hands on.

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And so that went on, as I say, until,

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until the war came along and joined up well before we go, before we go to the war period.

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Did you find, you know, technique was improving as you, as you you know, as the as the years passed by, or did it remain fairly static?

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My impression is that at our budgets, our costs and our sort of film making

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technique remained fairly static.

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We weren't trying anything very advanced. You see,

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we laid a commentary track and did the rest live at Harry Sheridan studio in Ward, Australia. Mrs. Sheridan had a genius for putting a needle down on a 78 record exactly where you wanted it. And

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we, I can remember sessions with a commentator, me killing him, Mrs. Sheridan, swaging in music off her three turntable, 78 reproducer and somebody else making very elementary sound effects, and Harry Sheridan mixing the lot live one.

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Take so that, as I say, that wasn't very sophisticated. And when it came later on, when I learned to lay tracks properly, I found that an enormous change when Wendy, but that was much later on, how much later on? And that was really during the war. Oh, I see. I see.

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Can you remember the cutting room equipment you had at LMS? Oh, yes,

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we had movie earlier,

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a silent standard one.

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I can remember a synchronizer,

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because, as I say, We laid commentary track. Yeah,

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quite definitely. But that was about the only track that we laid. And of course, we're working on,

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we were working on optical sound in time, yes, and most of it was nitrate. I believe that the boss got a little bit anxious about this at times, and said, couldn't we transfer on to

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couldn't we transfer on non flaming, non flam? Thank you, acetate. And we all said it would be terribly expensive. And we are, we are frightfully careful we don't smoke in the cutting.

Unknown Speaker  11:18  
But I don't think, and we had flat rewinds and vertical rewinds and some bins. What about it? Did you there was a track reader? Presumably, you did have a track reader for your optical track.

Unknown Speaker  11:31  
I can't remember. You must I mean, there must have been, yes, there must have been, it must have been obvious. But I think it was on the synchroniser, yes, yes, yes, yes. I don't think the movie overhead had a sound. Here

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it was, I wouldn't be dead sure the synchronizer probably was a law Lee, yes, probably a lawly.

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Now,

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whether Was there much change in the in the cruise, or did it remain fairly constant? I mean, in numbers,

Unknown Speaker  12:01  
I think it remained fairly constant. We did do a couple of things, which involved going into studio. And then, of course, yeah, the thing changed completely. Well. Went what studios there the one in Regents Park that was Andrew buchannans. And also one

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I'm right about that. Is that the one that Marcus Cooper had eventually, I believe it cheers, yes. And we also used a little one up in Islington,

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which had one, one floor,

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tiny, where they shot the original. Whoever it was bringing the J Arthur rank, Goon, oh, yes,

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I remember doing some several days up.

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And then, of course, this really brought us into contact. Brought me into contact with them, with professionals, you know, I mean, we thought we were doing it professionally, where we were getting paid for it, not much, but people were doing proper film making, and of course, I learned a tremendous lot

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from that. What kind of wages were you getting at LMS

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when I married, which was in 30 what was me in a cure 38

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I think it was yes, when I married, which was 1938

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I was getting five pounds, and Liz was getting five pounds, 10 a week as a works chemist,

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we were quite well off. What way did you start with? Element, film,

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unit, 50 Bob, I should think,

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what other what other technicians Did you work with at LMS? Besides, you know the camera man,

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there was a man called Richard Beck who was

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who had a cockroach, Newman, 200 foot, Newman, who was on the staff of the railway. He'd been employed as a stills photographer. He also did some 16 mill he had a 16 millimeter camera. Can't remember what for, and

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Bill was the producer, boss, director, and who else can I remember now by name? There were one or two people who were on the staff of the advertising department,

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a man called Fred Lord, who was a very wonderful stills photographer and who occasionally turned a 16 millimeter camera just didn't really like it.

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And as I say, these two Oliver and Lockheed, who were outside us, who belong to a tropical press agency, a free street photographic agency. They were, they were its films department.

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Then Charles Potter,

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who went on with two British Transport films and was only just for.

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Task, in fact, and his main activity was not production, but

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distribution, because we set up a big railway, wide non theatrical distribution network with

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two or three cinema coaches and

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a railborne vehicle which contained the elements of 35 millimeter projection, which could be set up in any town hall. And I forget how many Charles used to do, but it was something like

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two or three towns a week throughout the winter, but anyway, he can tell you more about that. But so that side of it was developing

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very and being developed very intelligently,

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along with the production side. And the production side was partly public information, but very largely, and this is what developed

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technical training for rare women, particularly permanent way,

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people who could only be got together for any form of training in comparatively small groups.

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Because permanent way people in those days worked in gangs of five were five miles apart, you see, and it was very difficult to get them together, to train them at all. And we developed films for this purpose, with 16 millimeter projectors and so forth, and giving tiny little shows of any new development in permanent way practice. That side of it interested me enormously,

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and that was shot on 16 mil, or was it reduced from 30 reduced from 35

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now anything serious that we did, we did on 35

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at all serious. And this, as I say, was a side of it that interested me, and always has explained, ever since, explaining an engineering principle,

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especially civil engineering. My luck has fallen that way

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in terms of pictures and associated words, and it does seem to work for an awful lot of people

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in some way,

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if you do it properly, that's, that's a very, very effective medium, and still is, but it mustn't be superficial. You see, you've got to get it absolutely right. How? Yes. Well, now, how do you how? What is the right approach to that?

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Is there an Is there a right approach? Well, there must be a right approach. But you know, what is that approach? Oh, if I knew that,

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no, well, what do you think? What I'm saying is that the first thing you've got to do is to learn it yourself. Yes, and if you're willing to go into an entirely new subject and say, right, I'm going to learn that this week, and get get the spanner in your hand, or whatever it is, learn to read the drawings and find somebody, a liaison man, who knows the subject and will liaise with you and put up with you being stupid. Once you've got it in your head, then it's only

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getting the camera in the right place and turning it over at the right moment, and cutting it together and writing the words, the ordinary process of film making. But until you've learned it, and some of them are quite big, you know,

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then, then you can't do it. So it's just a combination of those two things, being able to learn the subject quick and rather, possibly rather superficially, and apply the ordinary skills of film making, knowing

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the difference between a long shot and close up, yeah.

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Well,

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really, then, up until the war years, if you like, you were in a very narrow, confined area where you or did you? Did you ever try and break out from that very No, that was

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what I was doing. And doing, learning to do quite well, and I liked the people, and I,

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although we had some contact, because we used to provide facilities for big film making. I was always rather aghast.

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We provided a lot of facilities for Herbert Wilcox for some of the Queen Victoria films. And I was the sort of runner on that between the runner between the railway and the and the Film Unit. And I was tremendously impressed with big film making, but didn't at that time try to get into it,

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not enterprising enough or something.

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Had you become the editor by the.

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This time by the you know, before the war,

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he, I think I was editing the majority of what we did and the

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the agency, as I say, Oliver J Oliver,

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who was telling the story about teaching me not to use mix, he did the rest pretty well. I think Bruton Noel, who was my boss, my immediate boss,

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put his hand to it to a movie earlier occasionally, but he didn't really like it. He really liked directing.

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Did you? Did you? Did you go to any lectures at all?

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I certainly saw the

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great Russian films. I saw jemkin that time.

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But I cannot remember where or when I didn't go. I don't remember going to any lectures about film technique. I read about it, of course,

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I read put off. Can I read Eisenstein

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very early on in my messing about with film. They must have only fairly recently come out,

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but I don't remember formal lectures now.

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So really now we've now, we've come to the come to the war years now, what, what did you what? What did you do during the war? Well,

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I joined up in the Royal Air Force

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fairly early on in the war, not, not immediately, but at Dunkirk time, and I wanted to get into air sea rescue because I'd done a bit of messing about in small boats and that kind of thing, and they were advertising for air sea rescue crew. And so I'm sorry if I'm taking a long time. No, no, no,

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I went to went to a recruiting office and said, You're advertising for air sea rescue.

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I want some of that. And they said, Oh,

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have you ever decarbonized a motor car?

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So I said, Yes, I have, actually, and you can drive. Oh, yes, I can drive.

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Could you strip a back axle down. Well, I guess I could, if you came in the right spanners. And now I stripped back axle down, you know that put it together again. I said, right fitter airframe under training, you right turn,

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you see. And so I became a fitter. I became a

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flat rigger, in fact, under training, and I was trained, and eventually got onto a squadron, and eventually was trained to be something slightly higher up the technicians ladder, and I was sitting on the main plane of my Wellington aircraft that I looked after doing some fabric bashing One fine Day, and the flight sergeant came out of the hangar office, and he shouted up at me. He said, Hey, lofty, you're always going on about films. They want you. And I said, Come on, Chief, it's one of these Navy projectionist jobs. I'm a group one tradesman lac. He said, No, straight up, lofty, you let us put up, put your name in for this, he said, and you'll be a sergeant before you know where you are. And he was dead, right? I was a pilot officer before I knew where I was. You see Derek twist and Teddy Bear were forming the Royal Air Force Film Unit.

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And my wonderful flight Sergeant on 99 squadron put my name in, and

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I went up to her ministry for some interviews, looking like an lac in a rather

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greasy uniform, and

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told them about what I'd done on the LMS, and was able to show them one or two movies that I'd done a lot of work on. And they took me on and put me in the Royal Air Force for a minute, which was just being formed and hoping to stagger him alive

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and so

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well.

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The reason that the Air Ministry, their airships, decided to form a Film Unit was because, in my opinion, Harry watt at Crown had made target for tonight. He'd made that film about the balloon barrage people. Squadron 992

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Jack Holmes was making coastal command,

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and their airships said, Look, all these damn civilians, we've got to have a Film Unit in uniform. You know, there's going to be a lot of secret stuff going on too, and that kind of thing, you see. And so Derek twist and Teddy Bear were told off. Goodness knows where they found them, but they were in uniform already

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to to form a Film Unit. And so they did. They were.

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Recruiting people from who were in the service already, from all over by this simple means of issuing an order saying send in names of possible film technicians. So that's how, in my opinion, the Royal Air Force Film Unit got formed, and it became, of course, an enormous undertaking with crews

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in every theater of war and turning an immense amount of stuff.

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And

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there I was in the middle of it. Where were you based? We were based at pan wood studios in the first instance, no, in the first instance, we were based in Whitehall in a couple of offices in the Air Ministry.

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And

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then,

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as I say, I'd been commissioned. And so had several others, including John bolting

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at approximately the same time, and we had to go on a course to Uxbridge to learn how to be officers,

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and by the time that course was over,

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the unit had moved its base to Pinewood Studios,

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along with of course crown, a civilian Unit and your own unit, the army Film Unit, so that I was actually taken on and put into put into fancy dress

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in the Air Ministry in Whitehall. I remember being duty officer there one night and wondering what the hell would do if a telephone rang so I knew nothing. I was in charge of the Air Ministry. Luckily, nothing happened, but, and then, as I say, they sensed on, of course, I can't remember how long it was, several weeks. And by that time that was over, the move to Pinewood had just taken place.

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Erwin, was this your, I suppose this was your first meeting, if you like, with technicians from the feature film business. Wasn't it pretty well? Yes, pretty well. What was your

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immediate impression of that of them rather?

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Oh, they were the most marvelous people in the world. They knew what they were doing, and they would, they would take instructions from me. I said, I want this and that and the other, and it would happen,

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technicians,

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camera and sound crews. Of course, I had met, yes, certainly, but the the sort of support that a big studio had in those days, people on the rail, chippies, plasterers, goodness knows, who I had no idea about, and the ability to command them and get them in the right place. I'm not using the word command in any military sinners to see that everybody was in the right place at the right moment was something that I admired enormously amongst professional technicians. For a good lighting camera man, to be able to call up which lamps he wanted on the whole rail and on the floor and get it right and see that the work was done by the sparks was a wonderful ability to I'd really opened my eyes. And of course, in the cutting room, there were two or three people

Unknown Speaker  28:28  
by the time the cutting rooms got settled down. Tony Smith, I remember particularly he cut my first picture, who taught me a tremendous lot without particularly knowing that they were teaching me. You know, I think I was putting on good enough front, but,

Unknown Speaker  28:47  
oh, I learned such a lot.

Unknown Speaker  28:49  
Oh, yes, amazing experience.

Unknown Speaker  28:54  
You also, I mean, you see there was, there was John bolting, there was Derek twist, and these people, did they teach you anything? Do you think?

Unknown Speaker  29:05  
I don't think John belching taught me anything.

Unknown Speaker  29:12  
I admire him very much indeed, but we didn't have very much contact.

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Derek

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certainly taught me something. But I wouldn't like to say what it was. It was nothing definable. Teddy bird was my favorite. He was a wonderful,

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gentle, funny,

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sympathetic man, if ever you were in trouble of any kind,

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any kind, from running out of money to

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having lost your way completely in a picture you just went to Teddy and he taught me a kind of

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patient, loving approach to the whole job, which nobody else.

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I was exhibiting at that time,

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but,

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and we, I think we all loved him. And then the person, of course, who I came in contact with after about the first year of the RAF Film Unit,

Unknown Speaker  30:19  
and who remained my great mate was Peter Baileys, oh, yeah, a very brilliant, talented man who could do anything with a piece of celluloid with perforations in it, you know, he could really make it walk and talk, and he taught me a terrific lot. He'd been, now, you were asking about lectures and that sort of thing. He'd been

Unknown Speaker  30:42  
on a polytechnic the Regent HSU poly course as a civilian before he joined up, and

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that was a bit of formal training, which had obviously done him a terrific amount of good. And I learned such a lot from him about writing and about about writing for movies and about editing.

Unknown Speaker  31:07  
He was an absolutely super person,

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and as I said, We remained great mates up right up until his death. We did a lot of things together.

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Can you talk about any of the things that you did in the in the RAF Film Unit?

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Oh, yes, sure.

Unknown Speaker  31:29  
As soon as I was joined and coursed and officially blessed, you know, Derek put me with a man called Hugh Gray who was a feature writer and told us off to investigate and make a film about maintenance command, which is the part of the Royal Air Force that does all the supply of anything from a toothbrush to a complete aircraft. And of course, at this time, various

Unknown Speaker  32:02  
overseas adventures were being prepared, and so Ukraine and I toured maintenance command under the best possible auspices, and saw a lot of

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their work, and kept looking at each other, saying, look, there isn't a movie in this. You know, it doesn't actually move. But

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finally,

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we managed to write a treatment which patinson Scott liked, and then Hugh gray rather left me to do, to do the script and to direct it, and it was not a good film, but at least it got finished and I put in, because I was ambitious, I put in quite a lot of studio stuff. And so I was learning my way about the stages whilst I was directing this, this thing, you see, it was called the big pack, and it culminates in,

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it culminates in the arrival of all the logistics the stores for what turned out to be the North African

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adventure, the North African invasion,

Unknown Speaker  33:09  
because we made it culminate like that, because we knew what was going to happen, more or less. And so I directed that Jean Tony Smith cut it, and I had quite a lot to do with the cutting of it. And in fact, when the film was in real trouble, Peter Bayless gave me one day of taking it to bits and finding out what was making it work and what wasn't making it work. And so that was that. That was the first big, big thing I'd ever done. It was quite a long film,

Unknown Speaker  33:42  
and it got quite a good distribution. It got theatrical distribution, you know, in those days,

Unknown Speaker  33:50  
and but it wasn't a good film, let's face that. And then

Unknown Speaker  33:56  
I got put in charge. Oh, no wait. Then some stuff came back from the unit, which had just arrived in Italy in Naples, and they sent back some stuff of Naples and Peter and I knocked together a little film called Naples is a battlefield, which is one of the best things I've ever been associated with. I saw it again quite recently, and it's pretty good,

Unknown Speaker  34:24  
and it says something which isn't about airplanes. It says something about war and occupation and that kind of thing. And it's not a bad little film at all. And Peter and I did that almost secretly,

Unknown Speaker  34:40  
because by this time, I had been put in charge of looking after and classifying and so forth, all the stuff that was coming back from the overseas units. I was working with Jerry Norman,

Unknown Speaker  34:54  
who was Bruce and Daniel. No, of course, amongst others on this.

Unknown Speaker  35:00  
And as I say, this stuff came back from Naples, and we said, look, there's a film in this. And we made it in a hell of a hurry, and practically nobody knew we were making it. But anyway, then

Unknown Speaker  35:16  
what did I do after that? Oh, then Derek twist, for some reason, totally unknown to history, had got in cahoots with the petroleum warfare department, and there were two then extremely secret things going on called Pluto and Fido. Pluto. Pluto was pipelines under the ocean, and Fido was fog intensive dispersal of pipelines under the ocean was very, very important,

Unknown Speaker  35:45  
and when the Normandy invasion came and done subsequent events, there wouldn't have been any fuel for the vehicles without Pluto and Derek twist was in charge of all the film recording of this, and it was pretty bloody secret at the time, and it was coming through my cutting room. I had weeks and weeks and weeks with a military policeman outside the door day and night. And you know those the bell and howl foot joiners chops off two sprocket holes. I had to put all the two hole cuts into an envelope and take them out the back lot and burn them and sign a certificate to say that I'd burnt them, because there could have been information on them, and there could, indeed, because the films were being made up with titles. You said, there wasn't time to put sound track on.

Unknown Speaker  36:33  
And so that was a bit of something. And then gradually, gradually, the

Unknown Speaker  36:40  
nom, the invasion overlord began taking shape, and

Unknown Speaker  36:47  
number four unit was being formed to go on it. And I was by this time, second in command of that under Derek twist, they pushed me up to being a flight left tenant.

Unknown Speaker  37:01  
And so then I was really rushing around doing administration, getting equipment and vehicles and teaching people to drive, and,

Unknown Speaker  37:11  
you know, how to put up a tent, and all that boy scouting stuff. And so that took up a bit of time. And then, as I say, we all gradually went to Normandy, and I

Unknown Speaker  37:23  
was muddling about with half a dozen others. Chris chalice was there, Alfred Hicks was there,

Unknown Speaker  37:32  
Peter was there. Peter Paris was there. All through the Bucha fighting and right up to

Unknown Speaker  37:41  
right up we ended up in hind hoe,

Unknown Speaker  37:46  
and then,

Unknown Speaker  37:50  
then I got transferred to Italy. And how did that happen? Arthur Taylor had been in command of the unit that ended up in Italy, having been in North Africa, went to Italy, and Arthur Taylor was in command of that, and he got rather ill and had to be brought home. And so I was promoted from being seconded command of number four unit to being in command of the unit that was in Italy. But it was a bit of a forgotten, bit of a forgotten front, really. And so I ended the war

Unknown Speaker  38:22  
up in Austria,

Unknown Speaker  38:24  
and eventually got my people home and got the equipment home and got myself home and got demobilized. So that was roughly what I was doing.

Unknown Speaker  38:34  
You did ask yes, oh yes, no, that's fine. That's fine.

Unknown Speaker  38:39  
So really finished more or less up as an administrator then in very much more Yes, because

Unknown Speaker  38:46  
it was very largely at that time, shooting of opportunity, you said, and the job was to get get a crew into the right place where it was going to happen, yeah, which meant finding out what was going to happen, just as if anybody knew.

Unknown Speaker  39:03  
So I finished. So that was really an administrative job pretty close. Yes,

Unknown Speaker  39:10  
you didn't go out to the Far East. No, no,

Unknown Speaker  39:13  
I didn't.

Unknown Speaker  39:16  
After, at the end of, after the, you know, after the war years, did you find it difficult to get started again, or was it, once again, it's a stroke of luck,

Unknown Speaker  39:28  
and once again, it's down to Peter bectus.

Unknown Speaker  39:33  
It's due to Peter bectus because he'd been he'd worked

Unknown Speaker  39:38  
before the war at Shell, at the shell Film Unit, which was the great technical Film Unit, and it had been diverted onto

Unknown Speaker  39:49  
naval work during the war, what remained of the unit,

Unknown Speaker  39:54  
and was just coming back into its proper civilian status, which.

Unknown Speaker  40:00  
Yes, show and Peter had worked there, and they'd asked him to come back, and he didn't want to, and he tipped me off

Unknown Speaker  40:09  
to go and see Alex Volkoff, Charles Sylvester, and one or two people. And

Unknown Speaker  40:16  
again,

Unknown Speaker  40:18  
I don't know what I've done to deserve this, but they took me on,

Unknown Speaker  40:24  
and I did 1234,

Unknown Speaker  40:28  
I did four films with them, and was very happy with them too, writing, directing, cutting, the shell unit. Tradition was that a director and an assistant were appointed to a subject, and they investigated it, wrote a treatment, wrote script, got script vetted. Shot, it collected a unit. And, I mean, we're being properly crewed by these days,

Unknown Speaker  40:53  
collected a unit. Shot, it took it in the cutting rooms,

Unknown Speaker  40:59  
wrote the commentary, if it was a commentated film, whatever laid tracks, put in the opticals, I never had me

Unknown Speaker  41:07  
did, and you did everything. You went right through, from the from the subject to the grading, copy, you know, the first show copy. It was a marvelous training, marvelous experience. You expected to be able to do it? I mean, never. Nobody came and helped much. And we were very fortunate in Shell, because we had an extremely good technical animation unit man called Frank rodker. Oh, yeah, he'd been trained as a draftsman, engineering draft

Unknown Speaker  41:39  
and he'd

Unknown Speaker  41:41  
pretty well built his own rostrum camera. I forget what he got in it as a camera, but he built the rostrum himself and made it walk and talk. And he he could draw. He could do technical drawing, simplifying

Unknown Speaker  41:58  
a difficult subject, aerodynamics, for instance, until it was crystal clear and and very pretty to look at, and just to work alongside him to say, Look, friend, this is what I'm trying to get at and see him get it clear. Was, was an enormous piece of education you have, and that that was a very, very happy three, four years I was there, and we did,

Unknown Speaker  42:24  
I did two very technical films about

Unknown Speaker  42:29  
a fuel, fuel injection method for Rolls Royce Aero Engines,

Unknown Speaker  42:35  
which never took on because just about this time Rolls Royce gave up making reciprocating engines, and started making turbines, you see. And this was a fuel injection system for reciprocating engines. But it was very, very interesting to do, and was a good example, in fact, what I think I was talking about ages ago, about learning a subject very quickly, and then getting the camera in the right place, and my camera man on this

Unknown Speaker  43:04  
was Stan Rodwell, very famous in this world that I'm talking about.

Unknown Speaker  43:11  
Can I tell you a roddies story? He won't mind. Well, let us stop. Turn over.

Speaker 1  0:00  
On John Sherman's side, too. You were saying something about stenro Bull. Oh yes,

Speaker 2  0:06  
my rod is story. The first film that I did at Shell. In fact, it was two films, Part One and Part Two was entirely about a Rolls Royce, reciprocating Aero engine, fuel injection system. And I learned it and wrote it and scripted it pretty carefully and got the facilities laid on at Rolls Royce Derby, the facilities consisting of a large, empty workshop, one Rolls Royce engine and two fitters, and this whole thing was at my disposal, and that was the set. That was what the film was going to be about. And we drove down with the equipment Roddy and my assistant, and Roddy assistant to Derby one day reported at Rolls Royces, where we had a rather snooty commissioner who got on the phone to our liaison man Iver lusty said, Oh, Mr. Lusty, sir, there are some photographic individuals who say they have an appointment with you. This was Rolls Royce style, you see. So we felt suitably diminished, but Roddy hadn't been speaking to me. We'd never worked together before. We'd just been lumped together to get on with this. And we checked in at a hotel in Derby, and I made sure that he got a bottle of bass with his early morning call next morning, which had been tipped off about. And we got down to the location and lamps had arrived, and we made sure there was some juice and this and that and the other and rod. He hadn't said a word to me, and he looked at this airplane engine. I introduced the two fitters who I knew, and he spoke to me almost for the first time. He said, John, I think we're going to be all right on this job. You indicate the area. We'll do the best. And on that basis, we made two, as I say, highly technical films, which were much admired in highly technical film making circles. I had at least two good reviews, and they were beautiful. They were clear as crystal, marvelously photographed on the basis of me indicating the area of Rodney doing the rest. And then shell had begun a whole series of films called how an air of playing flies about the elements of aerodynamics. And I was, well, I did know a bit about it, because during my time as a as a flight rigger and a fitter in the real, real Royal Air Force, before the Film Unit, I had learnt a good deal about this. And Sam Napier Bell had made the first of this series of films, monochrome films, which was called lift, and the rest of the series had five or six other titles, like drag, balance, controls, can't remember all of them. And Bill Mason, Lionel Cowell and John Sherman were assigned to complete the series, and in a bit of a hurry, because it had been dragging about. And so we got together, and we decided what we wanted. What we mainly wanted was a lot of diagrams from Frank rudka and a lot of flying facilities from the Royal Air Force which shell could command. And we went on a big three director location with all the flying facilities, with Oxfords as target aircraft, and a big Lancaster with holes cut in the side as a camera aircraft and shot all the air to air and ground to air, stuff that we wanted, and we kept having more quarrels. As Bill would say, Who shots that? Lan would say, it's mine. And I would say, No, it isn't. I scripted it. And so forth, which emerged through an Air Force, but we knew pretty well what we were doing. And said beadle was the chief camera man on that. But it was a curious exercise in division of responsibility. One director would do five or six, five or six things, and another one would do one thing and the other one would be rave thinking or whatever. But they came together, and they were standard instructional material in I can't remember how many nations, but certainly 20 countries this, these six or seven films were i. For something like 18 years, and then Derek Armstrong remade how an airplane flies in color with some few modern things that had been discovered since. But he didn't change the format very much, and so they were in of the genre, you know, a very important series. Now awfully proud to have worked on, lovely to work on. And again, it's this trick of learning, learning a subject quick and getting camera in the right position. As I keep saying, what?

Unknown Speaker  5:41  
How long did you stay at Stahl?

Speaker 2  5:45  
I was at Shell between three and four years then, then, when did you where'd you go? And then I went. By this time, I'd become great friends with Rob Nielsen Baxter, and he and his wife Kay Marder and Tubby Englander, Cynthia Whitby had started a firm called Basic films, and they were mainly depending on Ministry of Information, which was by that time, had Become Central Office of Information work and some other commercial work from from people who were firms, big firms, who were just beginning to see that they could use films in a kind of productive way for their work. And Rod, anyway, started basic films and shell weren't quite sure, honestly, what they wanted to do with me next. And I wasn't quite sure either. And so I quit shell and went to basic films and had two, three very happy years there, and made one rather good film, again, highly technical, but not on an engineering subject and quite a lot of arguments.

Unknown Speaker  7:06  
What was this film? Ah,

Speaker 2  7:08  
this was the film which won a scientific film prize at the Venice Festival, which was not as glamorous then as it is now. And Caroline legern, writing about the festival in her film criticism column and about the poor standard of the British entries, said, somehow we always win the liver Fluke prize. This film was liver Fluke Fluke in Great Britain, which was made for the Ministry of Agriculture and is about a particularly unpleasant parasite of sheep. And it kept winning prizes for that kind of but we always win the love fruit prize was, was a real bit of good Caroline Lester, and I've always thought

Speaker 1  8:11  
and you were directing that. Did you you didn't edit? Did you there? I

Speaker 2  8:16  
did anything on that? I took the Triple Crown, written, directed and edited on the credit Yes, I did, and I really did it too, yes, yes, because that, as I was saying, it was the shell tradition. Yes, you did. You went right through on that side. You didn't do the camera work and you didn't do the sound work, but writing, directing and cutting was the show training and tradition, and we carried that right on to basic, and indeed to transport films when it was first founded.

Speaker 1  8:48  
Then, then after basic. Where did you go

Speaker 2  8:52  
after basic? Edgar, hams. This is we've now got to 1949, I I think I don't know how much to do, so much in a comparatively short period, but still, I did. Ed Goran stick had been asked to form a film unit for the newly nationalized surface transport, industries, railways, canals, roads. What have you got? And was given a lot of power and a lot of budget and told to get on with it. And he, very extraordinarily to me, asked me if I would like to come as his assistant producer. Well, it wasn't an awful one. Turned down basic films were rather on hard times, and were quite glad to get my salary off their books. And so I went to Edgar. I think I was the second person that he recruited from outside. He'd had some people who. He'd inherited some people from the pre war railway companies who had re joined as railway men, Charles Potter as an administrator, David Watkin, who'd been on the Southern Railway Film Unit, and a couple of others, and he recruited me and Ian Ferguson as production manager. We were the first people who joined British Transport films, which became an enormous undertaking. And I was I didn't know what quite what an assistant producer did, but I said, Yes, sir, yes, sir. Three bags full. So tell me what you want to do, and I'll do it if I can. And I looked after most of the instructional film making. And I also looked after what was then a fairly newly developing visual aids, filmstrip and sound, sound commentaries and that kind of thing on stills, and I looked after that in a paternal sort of fashion. Fortunately, we got a couple of very, very good people from the old railway companies who knew perfectly well how to do that, so I didn't have to do a lot. And then Edgar thought that I was kicking my heels a bit, and gave me a film to direct. He said, would I? Would I like to stop being an assistant producer for one film and go and direct it? And I'm not ashamed of that one either. I may tell you it was called train time, and it was almost the last film, last three wheeler that was made in the entirely steam days of railways, and it was about how the whole railway system, every train that moved, was was controlled. So the center was the Chief Operating manager British Railways, an old, old friend of mine called Stanley Park House, wonderful man, great character. I put him in the middle of this and gradually spread the network out to the smallest local train in the middle of Campbell, and was still being watched and monitored. You see, that was the plot of the film and it came out. I've seen that again fairly recently, and I'm not ashamed of it. It's a bit long, and it talks a bit too much, but that's writer's twitch. You know, you always write too much, and that I did. And then I went back for quite a bit to being the Assistant Producer at British Transport films. And then we get stage, whatever it is when I went out to the Middle East, that's where we need to take short breath.

Speaker 2  13:07  
But before I go on about what I tried to do in the Middle East, one very important thing that grew from basic and grew enormously and important at British Transport films, Under ansteys guidance, was the application of original music to our films, and the composers who came to British Transport films and wrote original works for the movies were Legion, and that whole side of the film, films that we made there grew in importance and in subtlety, and we all learnt how to work with a composer, and composers learnt how to work with us. Not all composers like being tied down to the half foot or the frame in length, but if they can do it, it's a wonderful thing to do. And the list of composers who worked for British Transport films in the 25 years is enormous and very, very important. And two of the films that I looked after when I was being the Assistant Producer were about canals. They were called, there go the boats and inland waterways. Rod Baxter directed both of them, and Edward Williams, who has remained a very great friend, did the scores for those two. And this was where I suddenly realized how important a score could be, an original score. I. And it's a it's a loveliest moment in a director or a producer, time when he goes to the music session and he knows there's nothing he can do about it, he sits back in a comfy arm chair, and somebody else is going to do it, and you hear for the very first time these notes being played. Magic. Great moment. After all the passle and bother and hard work that you've done, whatever you are on the film the music session is a great, great moment. And this, of course, stems from, no less, a great documentary film, The nightmare Harry Watts film, which had a score by Brit who didn't know what he was doing, but he made it work marvelously. And that is a kind of continuing tradition in my kind of documentary, our kind of documentary, which is of great importance, but then going on with my own work, Film Center, well,

Speaker 1  16:12  
just before you go on there, just before you go on with That about Film Center, again, on music. Did you expect the composed to play you over a piece on the piano before the recording session? Or did you go into it really with a completely as it were, open here and hear it for the first time? Oh,

Speaker 2  16:34  
bit of both. Bit of both. Edward Williams, I remember on train time when I'd asked him to do the score, and I knew that he was working very hard, but we'd been out drinking one evening fairly close to the recording session, and he said, come back to my flat. He had a flat in Soho at the time. He lost the key, and we had to climb in through a window, and he sat down at the piano, and he played me the theme of the train time music, and it said, and I said, we'll be all right for Tuesday, will we? But, you know, we've got quite a lot of music. Oh yes, we'll be all right for Tuesday. I've got one of the best copyists, and I've got Marcus Dobbs. That was the only time I can remember hearing anything of the music at all. It wasn't a great deal.

Speaker 1  17:29  
Now you go to say something about Film Center.

Speaker 2  17:33  
Oh, well, yes, I was Film Center. Had invented a need for films to be made for oil companies in the Middle East. And Arthur Elton had persuaded the Iraq petroleum company, as it was then, which was a very powerful Oil Company indeed, at that time that they needed films to be made, and he and Sinclair Road and vygot Film Center asked me if I would go out and form a Unit in Iraq, taking with me other technicians pretty well to be selected by me, not entirely and with three briefs. One to train Iraqi film technicians in our tradition of technical and documentary film making. Two, to make films which would explain to the people of Iraq what the oil company was doing in their territory, and that it was not really taking away the black gold because it was putting back money into national development. And three, to make the necessary technical training films which the oil company wanted to train its engineers, technicians, drilling crews, geologists, whatever you like. And would I care to do this? So I had a long session with Edgar Anstey and said, What do you think about all this? And explained it all to him, and he said, Yes, you've got to go. I don't want to lose it from that sort of thing, but you ought to do it. John, so I did. And though I says It just shouldn't, we formed a complete Film Unit in Baghdad with myself, Peter Kelly, Phil law, Tim Wilson, four expatriates, very strong support from Film Center in London. And in fall of. Five years, we made 20 films of various kinds, possibly more, on all those purposes that I was saying about, and we trained a completely viable unit of Iraqi technicians in all disciplines, camera, sound editing, directing, writing, and left them at the end of that time with a viable Film Unit. Unfortunately, they had a lot of revolutions, but only a couple of years ago from now, that's so about 1982 three, I met one of our trainees, the brightest of them in London, and he told me that every one of these Iraqis that we'd trained were still employed somewhere in the world, in the film or television business. I'm really proud of that. And he got a wonderful job. They made some movies

Unknown Speaker  20:56  
too. Did you have a lab out there or?

Speaker 2  21:01  
No, we didn't have a lab. We sent everything back as rushes and received it again as as print. It was all processed in London, and, in fact, a good deal of the final sound stages were done in London. We laid tracks, but we didn't have a proper dubbing facility out there at that did you have a recording facility out there? Yes, we did, mainly on quarter inch tape, because Baghdad radio had two of those huge old EMI machines, and we did quite a lot on those, and we had our own no they were not Narcos, but the equivalent slip tape. And you and we transferred in London from slip tape to optical and had it flown out and laid optical tracks full out. But we didn't actually mix in Baghdad. There wasn't the facility. Wasn't there just now, yes, Mr. Scott, destroyed in the stupid war.

Speaker 1  22:10  
Did you ever make any TV have you made any TV commercials at all? Ever? I myself? No, never. Never. Now, when you first started working in documentaries, how would you define the word documentary? Then,

Unknown Speaker  22:35  
oh, strictly Grayson's definition, which is creative treatment of I've lost it. What is it? Creative treatment of reality?

Unknown Speaker  22:49  
Have you changed your mind about that?

Speaker 2  22:55  
I think that times have moved on, and people have seen very different things to do with factual film making. I prefer basil rights, name for it all. Factual film making. People have seen quite different things to do, and it's grown and developed, and some in ways that I like, some in ways that I don't particularly like. But I wouldn't expect it to stay what I call pure, because that would be really terribly, terribly dull and repetitious by now. It's got got to go on changing and adventuring and so forth. And of course, the stark truth is that documentary has migrated from film to TV almost entirely, and television does what television using film as a shooting medium, of course, does wonderful things. It also does some fairly lousy, lousy things. But I saw a series quite recently called the flight of the Condor, which would knock your eye out and in the purest documentary style, too. It was shot on film, sure, but its distribution, its use have been as a television, and its intention was, was for television, I'm quite sure. And so that kind of thing is a natural and good development with far more technical facilities, far more flexibility and so on. But some of this essentially very, very practical sales stuff, I don't really, I wouldn't really like to be mixed up in particular. Currently, but goodness, that's only me.

Speaker 1  25:04  
Now. There's what now, some meanings of some rather majority of statements, like nuts and bolts and, you know, technical, impersonal and gee whiz, what do they mean to

Speaker 2  25:17  
you? I was aiming the major part of my work, really. I once said in an intemperate moment that I was apparently the one person in the documentary film industry who didn't say, I want to make films about people. I said, I want to make films about things. Everybody else was saying, I want to make films about people. They all have feature ambitions. I didn't have these. And I must say that I found immense satisfaction in making films which were not primarily concerned with the development of character or the art of the Act, which were primarily concerned with process, which was pejoratively always called nuts and bolts. Nuts and Bolts films. I loved making those, and when they got on a really grand scale, we did several films in Iraq about the building of the great dams which were going to irrigate huge areas of desert and which were going to save devastating floods. And when you get a really big civil engineering job like that, it's thrilling to work out how to make a coherent film about it, stretching over several years, and I came back to this kind of thing when, when I got back to England and was looking after the official film records of the building of the Victoria line, tube railway, no less, which was the biggest civil engineering job of tunneling character since the middle 19th century at this time, and that was absolutely fascinating. And there weren't any real characters in it, you know, there wasn't a Mr. Pickwick of the Victoria line at all, but to work out the civil engineering and how to make it work on movie, how to make it understandable and interesting, was fascinating. And I love that kind

Speaker 1  27:39  
of thing. So really, when you a lot of people don't. So when you came back from the Middle East, you, you then went, went back to transport, did you then? Yes,

Speaker 2  27:49  
I did this spell in Baghdad, as I say, which I regard as being rather a success, except they started having too many revolutions, and the, you know, nationalizing oil companies and that kind of thing. And so it wasn't viable any longer. And then I did a short time, three years in Iran, Persia, and that was a rather bum job. The oil companies there had been persuaded that they might need some films, and I was posted there as films advisor to the oil companies. Well, they didn't really want any films. They got two perfectly competent Persian film makers, very well established and very talented people who were absolutely capable of making any films that the oil companies wanted, and absolutely nobody wanted any advice. So it was a bum job. But we had a nice time, because it's a fascinating country, and I wrote a book about it, and Liz, my wife did some marvelous photography in the country, and so we quite enjoyed it. Except nobody likes doing a bum job for three years. And then then I came back and was at Film Center, Film Center international as it had become in London, and did two or three rather odd jobby things for them, and one of which I'm not ashamed of, but it's never been seen because it was taking mickey out of a building that Chel had just put up in London, which had been a lot of material shot on I never knew what to do with the material, and so I made, with a lot of help from my friends, what I still believe is a very funny film about this building, and it is taking the piss out of it completely. And yet it's serious film. You see, shell have never had the face to show it. They paid, and then luck? Well, luckily for me, not luckily for anybody else. Stuart mccallist, great editor, who'd been working at British Transport films for many years, died very prematurely, and he was producing. Ballista, not only cutting he was producing at BT F and Edgar Anstey asked me if I'd like to rejoin as a producer. And Film Center were not sorry to see the back of me. I was a bit of an expense, and I wasn't doing anything terribly useful. And so that fell out very, very fortunately for me, and I rejoined British Transport films and did did some lovely jobs there, as I say, this big Victoria line thing that went on and on and on. I think we made seven films, four major television programs. Can't remember what else, but a lot of stuff, and that was fascinating to do. And then the other film that I did in this time, produced in this time, was about the reconstruction of the Britannia bridge across the manor strait after it had got burnt down. It was Robert Stevenson's famous bridge, and somebody set light to it. And so it had to be reconstructed in not a very elegant way, but was reconstructed. And we did a whole record film about this work, which is called Britannia, a bridge, which I'm also not ashamed of at all. But it's again, it's the kind of thing. It's the film about things more than about people, which fascinates me and has fascinated me so much.

Speaker 1  32:00  
Yes, carry on. How long did you stay at transport?

Speaker 2  32:05  
Well, the second spell I was there. Oh goodness. Counts on fingers again, I came back from Tehran in 62 62 and stayed at transport this spell for 11 years, 11 years, 60 to 7272 then what? That's as near accurate as I can get.

Unknown Speaker  32:35  
Then, what do you do?

Speaker 2  32:38  
Then I retired from railway service, as it was then, and did some writing, did some treatments for people. Anybody asked me to do anything, I did it if I could. But that was really, that's really the end of story. That

Speaker 1  32:59  
was the end of your film career. Yeah. Now let's, let's go back a bit to, you know, to kind of, what should we say the the theoretical side of documentaries. Grierson has been called the founder of the British documentary film movement. Would you agree with that statement?

Speaker 2  33:23  
Oh yes, I no doubt about that. He was and he was immensely influential. But of course, it wasn't the beginning of factual film making in Britain at all. A great deep stuff was done before then, but somehow, the ideal of documentary, and particularly of the application of films to the public service, came from Grierson and the people who immediately surrounded him, notably hands, but also Stuart leg, Arthur Elton and spread worldwide, largely by griersons activities. I mean, he took the whole idea to Canada. He and inspired the idea in Australia, though it never took root quite so well there, the Canadian National Film Board has done immensely important work over a very long time. Griersons genius was to conjure money and support out of the highest regions of government or of industry. Yes. So in that sense, yes, but you've only got to look at Rachel Lowe's book, and you'll see that there was an immense amount of factual film making going on before griss ever heard of the stuff.

Speaker 1  34:48  
Were you influenced by Grissom or Kev or, you know, or Fauci Well, I was

Speaker 2  34:56  
influenced by Grissom to the extent that he was my employer for some time, hardly. Ever saw him. But when I was employed by Film Center, Grayson was the was the boss of Film Center. I can't remember exactly his dates when he was but he was the foremost person there. He when I saw him, I found him a very difficult person. He was a great inspirer. He made people work better than they knew how to how to work. But CAV, of course, I had Cavalcante I admired hugely. I didn't know him very well. I only met him in person when he was getting on a bit and he wasn't quite as compost, but I knew what he'd been doing and how he had influenced so many people, especially in the in the department of creative the area of creative use of sound. So I admired him tremendously. Elton taught me a tremendous lot because he was into the same thing that I've been talking about with reference to myself, the understanding of engineering, the history of it, how it grows to be what it is now, what the engineering background is. And this was his forte, both at Shell and at Film Center. And this was what we carried over, I think, into several parts of the world. So that he was an enormous influence on me, and of course, Flaherty, again, admiration. I loved his work, and especially Louisiana story. But this poetic quality and this strangeness that he brought to his films I admired without particularly wanting to emulate again. I didn't meet him until pretty late. It was after Louisiana story, and he came to London and brought, I think he rather smuggle in copy of very little known at the time, called the land, which was about the Dust Bowl. And he showed that to a group of us, and then we went out drinking a flat. He was telling stories, and that was the first time I met him properly. And he was the person that you just fell over for, you know, but I don't say that he influenced my film making. Louisiana story was just before we were going out to the Middle East, and we knew we'd got to make films about drilling rigs, oil rigs, you know? And we saw Louisiana story and said, Well, what the hell? What are we going to do? Can't beat that. Got to do something different.

Unknown Speaker  38:01  
What about Paul Ruther? Anything to do with him at all? I never

Speaker 2  38:05  
worked for him. I knew him socially. I didn't work for him. And I don't really know a lot about his work. I know quite a lot about what he wrote, but about his filmmaking, I know very, very little. It's a great gap in my education

Speaker 1  38:27  
now, then going back again, still, you know, into the right, back into the past. What does the you know? What does Empire Film Market? Empire marketing, broad

Speaker 2  38:38  
film Europe? Well, now let's get the order right. Stephen sir. Stephen talents, one of the great impresarios of this world was the head of the Empire marketing film, the head of the Empire Marketing Board, and Grierson persuaded him, or he persuaded Grierson, that films should be used in promoting the Empire and the produce of the empire. And this was the beginning of the Grierson documentary basil Wright's song of Ceylon was made under those auspices, and the Empire Marketing Board died the death, as was to be expected, Stephen talents was transferred to the General Post Office and took with him Grierson and the foundation of the General Post Office Film Unit, which made nightmare amongst 120 other films and became When the war came, the war broke up, broke out, the GPO Film Unit became the nucleus of crowds. On the official civilian Film Unit, and it was going it was a going concern. Before the service film units were were going concerns.

Speaker 1  40:10  
Well, we know about the LMS Film Unit. We now know about the shell Film Unit. We know about transport because of what you've been saying now. What about the national coal boards Film Unit? Do you know anything about that

Speaker 2  40:26  
national coward? I have a number of friends who worked there, and they did some very distinguished, very specialized work. Their main concern was safety in mines. And Donald Alexander, who I think was the first producer when national cohort Film Unit was formed, was concerned with using any means in our world, films, strips, ghost, circuit television, the lot for promoting in all kinds of ways, safety in minds. And he did some very, very imaginative work, rather away from ordinary, accepted film making. And that slightly fell, by the wayside after Donald Alexander left and went to academic work. And the main work of the unit, I believe, was producing a film, a series of films, on current events in the mining world, called mining review, which had very big cinema distribution in the coal fields all over the nation, but they still made quite a lot of this safety in mines work. But I think it got rather narrower than it was at the beginning. It wasn't quite so adventurous in the new media, because it could have been, but some very, very good people worked there, Freddie Gammage on who was formerly, who was GPO Film Unit on the camera side, particularly Jerry Bryant. Kitty Marshall was producing there, and they had some very talented people, but I don't know, as I say, I know them much more socially than I know about their work. What about

Speaker 1  42:33  
the What about BP Film Unit? Did they had a small unit? Didn't they?

Speaker 2  42:41  
BP? Did they actually have a, have a unit? I thought they always commissioned. They commissioned. Did they That's my belief, that I wouldn't swear to it. But they were, of course, very good commissioners, and they had very imaginative needs for films. They made very, very important films over environmental particularly, they were able to take a look at, take a much longer look at what the oil industry was doing to the world than anybody else could. But I think they always commissioned their films from outside units. Now

Speaker 1  43:13  
you've talked about, you've talked about film center. Now, what about realist? You

Speaker 2  43:23  
uh, blank. I had no contact with them whatsoever. That was two. Was realist Rother. That's right, yes, I think it was. That was Paul Rosa, yes. Who else did I know there? You know, we all knew each other in the past, but we didn't. I had no contact with their work at all. And

Speaker 1  43:42  
what about worldwide? Did you ever any contact with worldwide at all? Oh well,

Speaker 2  43:47  
yes. I knew Jim a car very well indeed, and they did some extremely good things. And they were just around the corner from us when I was at Basic. They were just across across the square on one street up, so to speak. And I think they were the most important of the independent, struggling, coming up, finding work anywhere you could possibly find it, units, because they had a they set a very high standard of work. I think they were very, very important units and lasted for hell a long time. Still, well, lasted for a long time. We're still going

Speaker 1  44:22  
very well. Been in a different kind of different kind of field. What about film Producers Guild? Did you ever have any again?

Speaker 2  44:31  
I didn't have very much contact with them. I knew several people there, but but knew them socially, and they were very serious people, I think, and very commercially conscious. My feeling is that they that, if it is true, that units like. A basic realist worldwide had ideals. I don't think the guild had any ideals, but they turned out very good work. I mean, it was all sharp and properly exposed. The cats were in the right place. But not, perhaps not idealists.

Unknown Speaker  45:21  
Let's stop there. Let's stop there.

Speaker 1  0:00  
You wanted to correct something. You said, Yes. You asked me what Grayson's documentary Grayson's definition of documentary was? Your

Unknown Speaker  0:09  
understanding was and

Speaker 1  0:12  
yes, and I said my understanding was Grayson's definition. And what he said was, documentary is the creative treatment of actuality, not the creative treatment of reality, which was what I fly. And at first, Grierson didn't necessarily see it as a film thing at all. He thought that it could be writing, theater, painting, anything could be documentary. But gradually, gradually it became almost exclusively applied to film. That was what I wanted to add to that, having thought

Speaker 2  0:47  
they're fine. Now, continuing, you know these, perhaps recollections, Harrison Batchelor,

Speaker 1  0:57  
Harrison Batchelor, their reputation, of course, grew enormously in the field of very imaginative and creative animation. John Hallas and joy Batchelor are most talented people, and joy Batchelor is a drawing artist. She can really draw like most people can't. She's a lovely person, and she can't understand why everybody can't draw just like her. When she was teaching at the London International Film School, she used to come and see me occasionally and get very crass. They send me people who can't draw. I can't understand this job. I can look you only have to take a pencil and paper. And John, she could, of course. And the interesting thing I think about Harrison Bachelor is that their films became more and more socially and politically aware and conscious and useful, and have gone on doing so. And some of the work that John Halles is doing joy isn't doing a great deal of work now, but some of the work John Halles is doing is, I believe, of historic and worldwide significance. Trouble is isn't getting seen a great deal, and people say that it's over intellectual. But I don't know. I don't feel this at all myself and but he has built that unit's reputation and ability and skill and talent, up and up and up over so many years, 40 more than 40 years, he has employed all sorts of good people, some of whom liked him and Some of whom didn't. But nobody will deny that the standard of animation work is of world caliber. And I don't mean the Walt Disney Studios either. When I say world caliber, it is, it is quite different from that. And of course, works on much less of a factory system than the Walt Disney Studios. So now I have great admiration for the for the work of Alice and bachelor, and it does depend on two individuals. Of course, they employed good people. They employed good rostrum cameramen. They employed good in between us, colorists and so forth. But it's almost more than I can think of except coward Flaherty. Just two people. You can put all this wonderful work down to, I think, a very interesting crowd.

Speaker 2  3:50  
You mentioned just then International Film School. Did you ever teach that the

Speaker 1  3:55  
London International Film School? I've lectured there occasionally, and I was on the Board of Governors for some three, four years. Just after I retired, I was invited to come on the Board of Governors, and because I had lots of friends there, I didn't teach there regularly, but, but I let I lectured on and off when I was asked to and went to board of governors meetings, and was rather influential. I think, I hope in set in them setting up a television department, which is still a controversial subject,

Speaker 2  4:30  
right? Coming back again, did you have anything to do with films in Scotland at all?

Speaker 1  4:35  
I know for South Hardy, personally, I'm socially. No, I didn't. Well, let's try

Speaker 2  4:44  
now, the MOI, would you like to comment on that? The moi and its function and its usefulness or not, or what went wrong? Or didn't it go wrong? It. Well,

Speaker 1  5:03  
it was a very typical British wartime scramble up when it started. It was created in a great hurry as a ministry and at the very beginning of the war, from all one can learn about it, it was doing a great deal more harm than good in the general field of propaganda, information, etc, etc, etc. And then its films division gradually got itself sorted out. And although we in the service film units, didn't have all that much direct contact with it, being at Pinewood, of course, cheek by jowl with Crown, we really had a lot of contact. And several of the films that that I worked on during the war went out through moi distribution purposes, and then it got, in my opinion, over weighty, bureaucratic and was demoted, I think quite correctly, to being an office, Central Office of Information, and then an awful period of jealousy and bureaucratic squabbling set in when every every ministry and department so forth, saying, why have we got to go to these people to make our films? And so this was, of course, I'm talking about after the war. It became very, very dicey, and did a great deal of harm. This squabbling did a great deal of harm to the independent units, because nobody quite knew who was commissioning films or who could say what the budget was, and the good people on the whole, Dennis Forman, Philip Macke, had the sense to get out and go into greener pastures, but they were great loss to the small, struggling units who were setting up at the time I'm talking about, I'm talking about the Late, the very late 40s, because they didn't quite know where the work was coming from or where the money was coming from, and the commercial industrial sector hadn't really developed in the way that developed now.

Speaker 2  7:36  
So really I mean that also what that is when the MOI really became the CEO, but the yes, the Yes, I see now, of all of all those names I've mentioned, which do you think perhaps was the most influential as far as you're concerned As a documentary filmmaker? Which, which yes

Speaker 1  8:02  
and to rapid rapidly followed by Elton. By far, people have had a real influence on me myself. John Sherman as a filmmaker, not talking about train,

Speaker 2  8:14  
no, no, no, no. Now you know, I'm quoting actually from something you wrote, documentary newsletter, stated World War Two produced a unique fusion of feature and documentary school shown in the work of the Navy, Army and Air Force units. What do you think about that?

Speaker 1  8:37  
Oh, I think it was true. I don't think it was very long lasting, but I wrote this in an article in documentary newsletter almost immediately after seeing a film called journey together, which was a Royal Air Force Film Unit production completed either at the very end of the war or just after the war finished. Directed by John belting, and it was a, it was a very, very well made film of a feature sort of character with actors coming up, actors like Dickie Attenborough, for instance, playing playing parts in it, and very carefully written dialog and that kind of thing, but completely authentic ambience, atmosphere you see real airplanes and that sort of thing. And that was that prompted me to write this piece in documentary newsletter. And I do seriously still believe that the time at Pinewood was a unique jumbling together of feature people, documentary for people, technical film makers like Arthur Taylor, who the. Talked to each other and drank together and looked at each other's work and so forth. And I'm quite sure that that those years have influenced a lot of people in a way of making films which is not the traditional 1930s feature or the traditional 1930s documentaries and and this has this fusion, whatever it is, has moved very strongly into into television work. The the only new factor is the ubiquitous presenter, which I don't really like, but the two worlds, which were very separate in the 1930s in my opinion, so many people met and talked to each other at Pinewood during those years, And there was, I'm quite sure, a lasting effect. I fantastic on everybody.

Speaker 2  11:06  
Now, it's been said that there was the the there was an international spread of the documentary movement from Great Britain. Would you agree with that?

Speaker 1  11:17  
Oh yes, undoubtedly. Grayson went to camp. Canada. And the Canadian National Film Board, I've said already, is of lasting importance, all their work. Stanley halls went to set up in Australia, and Jim Beveridge did a lot of work in India, all on these same hounding ideas. It's a shorthand to say they were the grist.

Unknown Speaker  11:50  
It's a convenient Jim Beveridge in India, Jack Holmes in Egypt, John Sherman in Iraq, which I talked about, there was an operation in the Lebanon for a time, wasn't very productive.

Speaker 2  12:14  
Well, there's that unra. You mean the UNRRA? One or do you mean another? No,

Speaker 1  12:18  
no, this was a film center International. I'm Josh speaker, yes, of course, the the honorar, Alex Shaw's business, wasn't it hugely important, and crossing all the frontiers, usually with no custom. And so and these were people who had in some sense, been steeped in the shorthand, again, Brison documentary tradition, and believed in quite a lot of it, you know. And tried to say to people who hadn't had this particular idealism, tried to say, well, look this, this is going to work for you. Just it works for us. This is how you do it. This is how you have to think. Of course, it changes. But no, no, you can. It'd be lovely to get an atlas and draw, draw red spots, wherever, wherever this went. It went quite wide. Yes.

Speaker 2  13:20  
Now then, do you remember the work of Humphrey Jennings very

Unknown Speaker  13:25  
well indeed, yes. Do

Speaker 2  13:27  
you think he, he had a lasting effect at all on the industrial

Unknown Speaker  13:35  
This is terribly difficult. Or was it he was a brilliant art artist, poet, Imagineer. He was, in my opinion, not a film technician. He was not a technician, I emphasize that, but he was a creator, and when he was working with three or four people who I could name, then wonderful films came out. Who were they? Well, particularly Stuart McAllister. What? In fact, I would only name Stuart McAllister now

Speaker 1  14:27  
a Stuart Humphrey film, and there were, how many, four of them altogether, family portrait, daryth Timothy. I think Stuart cut fires. I'm not sure. I won't have to look it up, but Humphrey and Stuart McAllister together turned out marvelous films. And which was doing, which you can never be quite sure. The ideas were Humphreys, but the discipline, the technique, the craft, was Max i. He got the cuts in the right place and made Humphrey do it properly. I could go on about this, but I won't, because I but I admire his work, and he's tremendous loss too. And it's interesting that he had such a personality that in many circles, many critical circles. Now, if you say documentary, they say, Oh yes, Alfred Jennings don't say Harry. What funny?

Unknown Speaker  15:28  
Yes, I can understand that. I think, yes, I

Speaker 1  15:30  
can understand Yeah, but of course, he was a wider man. As I say, his painting is, his surrealist painting is very, very good indeed. It's outstandingly good. And he painted a great deal his huge anthology of the literature of the Industrial Revolution, pandemonium, which has only just recently been published, was a labor of love, and it's it shows such an insight into history. I'm not talking about Humphrey as a filmmaker now, I'm talking about him as a as a very complete man. You see a very, very, very talented man in many diverse directions.

Speaker 2  16:15  
Now, in your opinion, is real life location, as opposed to studio ones better. What do you think? Or do they both have their places.

Speaker 1  16:29  
They have their places. All the interiors of the post office train on Harry rocks nightmare were shot in studio. It was built set and they had, they had to coach the crew to sway as if the train was moving, because they didn't have a set on rockers or anything like that. And nobody who doesn't know that would say that it was an odd shot on the on the train. But a lot of the work that I did, I built sets which I wouldn't dream of had them built. I mean, wouldn't dream of building now, a complete railway control room of the old steam days was a built set. It was enormous. I wouldn't I was shooting sink in Mr. Across. I was shooting sing dialog. I wouldn't build that now, I'd go into a control room and do it because equipment has got smaller and neater, and cranes and dollies and so forth are much more flexible. Sound, of course, is no problem. You see, I'm talking of the days when it was optical sound. We had a sound truck, you know, you know what I'm talking about. And so I think I built, or asked to have built, far too many sets. I wouldn't do that now. I'd much rather go into the real place. And also, of course, there was a convention you see that if you're shooting sing dialog, you didn't have extraneous noises. If you wanted extraneous noises, then you laid them on a separate track and dump them in. You know, they all had to be on purpose. But nowadays, everybody takes it for granted if you're doing dialog, factual dialog, in a place, then the noises that are going on, provided they don't drown the dialog out, perfectly acceptable. So all that sorted. Look, I mean, the coming of sound on tape is much more revolutionary than anything else I can think of immediately sound has developed. Do

Speaker 2  18:35  
you think, you know, do you think think sound was a blessing or a curse, or has it got its uses?

Speaker 1  18:45  
I think it's a bit of a curse as it leads it leads you into trouble and sin and writing down instead of taking down what happens. And it has also led to my pet hate the presenter in so that things are not films. They're programs being presented by somebody. And this is a stylistic development which I deplore and hope will go away in a great world.

Speaker 2  19:19  
What do you what do you what do you think about the use of color, as opposed to the good old monochrome? I

Speaker 1  19:26  
love working in monochrome, and I think from practically everybody's point of view, from the light and camera man's point of view, particularly, it's much more subtle, flexible and direct. And the coming of universal color has, in my view, flattened everything out to a, I'm not going to say mediocrity, but to an acceptable medium of it's properly exposed. But it's also very flat and somehow uninteresting. Whereas monochrome, properly lit, properly controlled, is never flat and always interesting, interesting, but

Unknown Speaker  20:18  
it's lost its subtlety. Really,

Speaker 1  20:19  
it's lost subtlety. And well, as cameramen of my day, and I'm sure you will agree with this, used to say it's not lit, it's illuminated. And that's a difference, which I think is important. But I mean, it's here, isn't it? It's come, oh yes, there's no doubt about it, and it may develop. I mean, you do see wonderful things in color, mainly in commercials where very, very imaginative use of color effects which are wonderful, but a bit Noel, somehow they're not, they're not about to anything. Oh, I say this, but I do, and I do feel that I wanted to tell you about my rich city oil company and color after we'd been working in Baghdad for about two and a half three years in monochrome. And as I told you, part of our brief was to train Iraqi technicians and my rich city oil company said, in future, all your films will be in color. And I said, over my dead body, I can't train camera men in color. It's too easy. They've got to be trained in monochrome then can start using color. But they were a very rich city oil company, and so they said all your films were in color. And I said, Okay, we're processing in London. I will have 100% color rushes flown to Baghdad. I said, of course, what else would you expect? Very rich city oil company?

Speaker 2  21:59  
Now, let's branch off onto another line. ACTT, yes, when did you first get involved with act or did you get involved with ACTT, which one? Oh,

Speaker 1  22:15  
I was I was involved. I joined act. And it was during the war, when we were at Pinewood, I hadn't been a member before, because, as I've explained, I wasn't really I was only on the fringe of the proper industry then. And I remember, I think it was very nice camel man called galley Hatchard, who came to me in Pinewood when I'd been there a week or two, and said, We think that you ought to join the union. I said, praise be. Somebody suggested it and joined and got a card, and straight away, and there wasn't any King's regulations about it either. I've learned since that a member of the serving forces is forbidden to join a trades. That's correct. It didn't seem to stop a lot of lot of people at Brian put in doing so. So that's when I joined. I didn't do any serious Act work until immediately, until I was a civilian again, and then I used to go to the Annual General Meeting, as it was then at Beaver Hall, garlic Hill. And gradually became interested, found out what was going on, what people were talking about what was concerning them. And quite slowly, got elected to things like the old shorts and dogs committee. And one way and another. I did quite a lot of committee setting and found it enormously interesting, but I never got high up in in ACTT act as it was there, yes, and went on doing this pretty well throughout the rest of my life, except, except, of course, when I was abroad, when I was just, which was quite a large slice come to count up 10 years. Well, I couldn't do any Trades Union work then, but every time I came back to London on leave, I used to give Bess bond lunch and make sure my sub was up to date and that kind of thing. Did

Speaker 3  24:28  
you do any recruiting at all, wherever?

Speaker 1  24:33  
Well, at transport films, yes, yes. We had a very strong shop there. Kitty Marshall was the first job steward, and then various people were and we made absolutely sure that people who were joining, young and new, and there were so half them got recruited, yes. So in that sense, I did this

Speaker 2  24:58  
recruiting, you know. You do? Do you think that, you know there is a future for ACTT and the film medium, in the film medium, well and the film medium? I mean, the

Speaker 1  25:16  
two, there's absolutely got to be a future for ACTT. I mean, without that, collapse, chaos, disaster will set in within five years. There's got to be a union, there's got to be a strong union, there's got to be a clear minded union. And that sometimes worries me, the film medium, you mean, as opposed to electronic? Yes, yes, I very much hope so I like the stuff, and I meet a lot of I meet several people who began their lives in television, who long for more chance to use film. And I think that the electronic camera, etc, etc, etc, has got a long way to go before it replaces the sprocketed photographic motion picture medium. And I very much hope I'm right.

Speaker 2  26:21  
Do you think that ACTT has played a useful role in shaping the industry?

Speaker 1  26:28  
Oh, immensely useful. Yes, of course I do. Immensely useful. It is, apart from its direct Trades Union purposes, negotiating with employers, making sure about conditions. It has provided a forum, meeting ground for technicians, which has existed nowhere else for such a long time. I don't think that act has been perfect, of course, I don't, but tremendously important role in the industry would have an absolute chaos without it. And I'm going back to Ken Gordon and George Elvin today. Yes.

Speaker 2  27:14  
Now we'll, we'll go away from act now. Now, which of all the films that you've worked on do you reckon has given you the most pleasure and satisfaction, or are there two of them,

Speaker 1  27:33  
the films that I've directly worked on, I very much enjoyed. Oh, dear. They rather a lot, really. I enjoyed the how an airplane flies series, which, as I say, was shared with Bill Mason and Lionel Cowell. But I enjoyed the work on that very, very much indeed. I very much enjoyed train time, which was the one that I told you, Ed grants did, let me off, let me off the chain and let me direct. And I must say, it came out lovely Ron Craig and photographed it. And there isn't a snap in it that you'd throw away. It's beautifully photographed. And we really found some lovely steam trains all over the country. And it was great fun to do because we were doing sort of one shot days, you know, travel 50 miles, organize something, get a shot. Say, right, that's it for today. We're off tomorrow at six o'clock. And so that was a lovely sort of mini saga to do. I enjoyed train time very, very much, and it's come out nice. The Victoria line work, there was much less. My own work was immensely interesting. And the people I was working with, Bob privet, who directed most of it, my almost oldest friend in the industry, Rod Baxter, who scripted and wrote a great deal of that series, were positive delight to work with. And so I got a lot of satisfaction out of that, really, one move away from hands on film making and so on and so on, but, but I've so much enjoyed it. I've had so much out of it. I wouldn't change with the Pope, which,

Unknown Speaker  29:33  
which one's perhaps giving you the most heartaches.

Speaker 1  29:38  
Oh dear. There was something dreadful we did at Film Center for one of the oil companies, which was called all in a lifetime. And it was somebody's mad idea that you could make a film which showed that the whole petroleum industry had been. Gun and grown up to be a world force in the lifetime of one elderly man. I can't remember how many people had written it. It was at least seven. And I may have said already, Alan that I am the rescue job man. When a films in real deep talk. They say send for sure. This one was a bastard. They even sacked me off it. Don't ask about Golden lifetime. That was the one that I really hated. God, it was bad. One of the ones where you could see it getting worse. You said, every time you did something to it, it was a dis improvement.

Speaker 2  30:49  
Do you think that documentary filmmakers have a future?

Speaker 1  30:55  
Documentary filmmakers? Oh, sure, as I say, I much prefer what basil Wright called factual film making this, the documentary, in curious ways, is a wax fruit under a glass dome. You know, yes, it was wonderful while it was happening. But if you talk about factual filmmaking, of it and and we'll get there, oh yes, a lot of it will be displayed on television rather than on the big screen. That's life. There you are. Bill, I won't go on about flight of flight of the Condor, which had everything. Yes,

Speaker 2  31:37  
Bill. Bill Mason described documentary, now, really is screen journalism? Would you agree with that? Oh, that's

Speaker 1  31:47  
an interesting thought. Yes, I would, with certain brilliant exceptions, screen journalism, and I say also screen salesmanship.

Speaker 2  32:04  
Yes, I don't mean commercials, but

Speaker 1  32:07  
the purpose built, I will sell you my pair of shoes, or I will sell you my firm, but that's not wax fruit.

Speaker 2  32:16  
No, no, no, no. Well now you know the perhaps the final month, if you could start your career all over again, would you want to do anything different?

Speaker 1  32:31  
If I could be a very, very successful, serious novelist, that's about the only thing I can think of, and I know perfectly well that I couldn't otherwise. No, give me what I've done.

Speaker 2  32:43  
Lovely. Now, the thing that you wanted to do was you wanted to put some dates in, didn't you?

Unknown Speaker  32:50  
Oh, yes. Give me a pause for a moment. Ellen,

Speaker 2  32:58  
now, John, I know, you know, we'd like to have some dates so we can get the records straight. Let's, let's have some dates. Now, when did you you started with the LMS film units. Now,

Speaker 1  33:10  
I started with the LMS film units in 1934 and I went on with them until 39 when I joined the Royal Air Force. And I don't believe the years get a little bit mixed up, but say LMS Film Unit 34 to 39 the Royal Air Force Film Unit after I'd been serving as an airman. 42 to 45 then I went straight to shell in 45 and was there till, I think it must have been the end of 47 basic films with Rod Nielsen Baxter, 47 to 49 Edgar Anstey formed British Transport films in 49 and I was the second person he recruited. And I was there until the very end of 51 or probably the beginning of 52 then I joined Film Center and went to Iraq to set up a Film Unit for them for the oil company there in 52 and was there till 58 which was the revolution, first revolution. Then I was posted to Iran, the next door country, and was there in this rather bum job as films advisor. From 58 to 62 came back, still employed by Film Center to London and did a few months in 1962 there and re joined British Transport films of Ernst, his request in 1962 and stayed there. I. That must be 1963 and stayed there till 74 which was just after Ansty retired, and then I retired, and then I went in for literary pursuits. So that's a rough date scale, and I wouldn't guarantee any of them till a month, but that's near enough. I think

Unknown Speaker  35:22  
Thank you. John, very much. Thank.