1 Sherman Alexie and Charles Burnett present A Milestone Films release THE EXILES 1961. USA. Running time: 72 minutes. 35mm. Aspect ratio: 1:1.33. Black and White. Mono. Start Date: January 1958 Completion Date: April 1961 World Premiere: September 1961, Venice Film Festival A Milestone Film release 2008. ©1961 Kent Mackenzie Restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive in cooperation with University of Southern California Moving Image Archive, National Film Preservation Foundation and Milestone. Film Restorationist: Ross Lipman. Cast Yvonne Williams.................................Yvonne Homer Nish........................................Homer Tommy Reynolds...............................Tommy And Rico Rodriguez...................................Rico Clifford Ray Sam................................Cliff Clydean Parker..................................Claudine Mary Donahue....................................Mary With Eddie Sunrise (singer on Hill X) Ned Casey Eugene Pablo Bob Lemoyne Jacinto Valenzuela Jay Robidaux Matthew Pablo Ernest Marden Ann Amiador (waitress at The Ritz) I. J. Walker Sarah Mazy Frankie Red Elk Delos Yellow Eagle Julia Escalanti (Rico’s wife) Gloria Muti Chris Surefoot Louis Irwin Danny Escalanti (boy with skypiece) Arthur Madrull (man being shaved) Sedrick Second Norman St. Pierre Della Escalanti Ted Guardipee Leonard Postock Marilyn Lewis (Yvonne’s friend) Tony Fierro 2 Crew Writer, Producer and Director......................Kent Mackenzie Cinematography.............................................Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman, John Morrill Production.......................................................Ronald Austin, Sam Farnsworth, John Morrill, Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman, Beth Pattrick, Sven Walnum, Paula Powers Additional Photography................................Sven Walnum, Nicholas Clapp and Vilis Lapenieks Archive Photographs.....................................Edward S. Curtis Editing..............................................................Kent Mackenzie, Warren Brown, Thomas Conrad, Erik Daarstad, Thomas Miller, Beth Pattrick Music................................................................Anthony Hilder, The Revels, Robert Hafner, Eddie Sunrise Sound...............................................................Sam Farnsworth Sound Effects Edited by...............................Thomas Conrad Additional Crew Members: Marvin Walowitz Mindaugus Bagdon Ken Nelson James Christensen Lawrence Silberman Charles Smith Ron Honthaner Stanley Follis Stuart Hanisch Judy Bradford David McDougall Ramon Ponce The History of The Exiles Kent Mackenzie first conceived of The Exiles during the making of his short student film Bunker Hill–1956 while a student at the University of Southern California. In March 1956 he read an article by Dorothy Van de Mark in Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Raid on the Reservations” about government attempts to obtain Indian land. Mackenzie traveled to Arizona, visited some of the reservations there, and decided to document an Apache’s relocation to Los Angeles. Mackenzie and his filmmaker friends had grown weary of glossy Hollywood escapist films with pat stories and clear- cut endings. Instead, they were excited by the documentaries of Robert Flaherty, Joris Ivens, Basil Wright, Humphrey Jennings, Georges Rouquier, Sidney Meyers and George Stoney and by the realist fiction films of Jean Renoir, Jean Vigo, Vittorio de Sica, and John Huston. Mackenzie thought that all these great filmmakers shared a common thread — their “concern with physical reality was not for its own sake but to create living and vital images and symbols from recognizable elements of everyday life.” At this time there were many young directors around the world feeling the same way. These “realist” directors like John Cassavetes, Lionel Rogosin and the French New Wave filmmakers took advantage of the new techonological inovations — including lightweight cameras, zoom lenses, highly directional microphones, small battery lights and portable sound equipment — and started a revolution in cinema. Their films challenged established standards of casting, storytelling, cinematography and editing. In July 1957, Mackenzie began to hang around with some of the young Indians in downtown Los Angeles, starting in the bars close to Third and Main Streets. After a couple of months, he broached the subject of making a film that would present a realistic portrayal of Indian life in the community. After hearing his companions concerns about false 3 stereotypes of Indians in films, Mackenzie said he wanted them to help write the script, do their own narration, and be partners in the production. In November 1957, Mackenzie first wrote down his idea of a documentary on the Indians to be titled The Trail of the Thunderbird. Later shortened to just Thunderbird, it was partly a tribute to the Indians’ heritage and partly to the inexpensive fortified wine that they favored. Other titles later included The Night is a Friend, A Long Way Home and Go Ahead On, Man before the team settled on The Exiles in 1960. Rather than telling the story of the relocation of Indians from the reservation, Mackenzie decided that the film would focus on the people already living in Los Angeles’s Bunker Hill area. He chose this neighborhood because he was already familiar with it and because the city was threatening to take it over for commercial development. From the Bunker Hill residents he had befriended, Mackenzie chose Yvonne Williams, Homer Nish and Tommy Reynolds as his main characters. With their help, Mackenzie worked and reworked a script based on their own experiences. The cast was interviewed and these recordings were later used on the soundtrack to convey the characters’ inner thoughts as voice-over monologues. As participants in the production, the cast and crew were promised back-end money after the film was released. Personal letters from his files indicate that Mackenzie was almost obsessive about fulfilling his promises to them. In later years he hired a private detective to find some of the investors and cast in order to pay them their share of the royalties. In making The Exiles, Mackenzie wrote, “I tried very hard not to be attracted by the strangeness of the environment as opposed to my own, and to avoid the ‘romance of poverty.’ I had seen many of the so-called ‘ash-can’ documentaries in which the squalor and horror of poverty were emphasized to the exclusion of all else, and I hoped that I wouldn’t superimpose any such illusions on these people. I wanted to show their own point of view in the film if I could.” Mackenzie and cinematographers Erik Darstaad and John Morrill considered The Exiles to be a documentary because it was based on scenes that had happened in the Indians’ own lives. Seen today, the film needs to be evaluated in the context of late 1950s filmmaking. The standards for what constitutes a documentary have changed over time. Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926), the first film ever labeled a “documentary,” featured staged and re-shot scenes. Later on, during the 1960s, the cinema verité movement emphasized capturing the actual moment without editorializing or editing. In more recent years, techniques of re-enactment and dramatization have become popular again. For Mackenzie it was important that the scenes in The Exiles were scripted and rehearsed in a free and collaborative manner. He also always pointed out that all film is subjective by nature. And watching the reactions of the cast when they first saw the film, Mackenzie reported, was exactly like paging through a family album: Here was an old acquaintance! Didn’t her hair look great? Do you remember that friend’s old apartment? The shooting of The Exiles began in January 1958 and the first trial composite print was privately screened in April 1961. Premiering in the Venice and San Francisco Film Festivals that year, the film received acclaim from many critics. In May 1961, responding to audience reactions, the filmmakers added a short historical prologue featuring Edward S. Curtis’s early photographs of American Indians. However, distributors labeled the film as “too difficult.” The Exiles remained on the festival circuit for several years including the 1964 innaugural New York Film Festival. That same year distributor Pathe Contemporary acquired the film, but rather than bear the expense of a theatrical run, Pathe created a 16mm negative and offered the film only on the nontheatrical market. By the late 1970s, The Exiles was shown mostly on poor quality video for occassional classroom screenings. Sadly, Kent Mackenzie died in 1980, largely forgotten by the film world. It was Thom Andersen’s compilation documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself which kicked off the rediscovery of this lost masterwork. Andersen contacted the daughters of Mackenzie to receive permission to use footage to illustrate the lost neighborhood of Bunker Hill. When Cindi Rowell, then director of acquisitions at Milestone saw the documentary, the company began to inquire about acquiring the film. However, it appeared that the only existing print of The Exiles was a 35mm print that the director had donated to USC’s Cinema Archive. Also on a closer inspection, 4 there seemed to be dozens of “interior” songs played throughout the film would require expensive music clearances. So the idea of distributing this wonderful film was reluctantly shelved. Two years later, Milestone received a phone call saying that when cinematographer John Morrill inspected the materials at USC he had discovered both the original negative and the fine grain interpositive for the film. Co-DP Erik Daarstad then called to explain that music rights were not a problem because all the many songs were created by the same composer, Norman Knowles, and performed by his group The Revels. As “works for hire” they were written and perfomed expressly for the film. The Revels’ other famous appearance in cinema occurs in Pulp Fiction. Their song Comanche plays over the Bruce Willis’s samurai scene. Norman Knowles writes “I remember recording It's Party Time for the movie. Kent screened the scene with a projector, showing the clip on the wall. The piano playing [by Tommy] on the table at the bar was made up on the spot. I think we also did Revellion for the movie. Comanche was written for the movie and cut out.” Although the original negative and fine-grain (interpositive) existed for the film, it was decided that a theatrical distribution of the film could put the materials at risk. So Milestone, in cooperation with USC’s film archivist Valarie Schwan, brought the film to the UCLA Film & Television Archive. There, preservationist Ross Lipman (responsible for the restoration of Killer of Sheep as well as films by John Sayles, Kenneth Anger and John Cassavetes) spent many months creating preservation materials and making sure that the new prints would sparkle. John Morrill assisted on the approval of the new prints. The Restoration By UCLA Film & Television Archive Restorationist Ross Lipman The Exiles began as one of those rare, charmed restoration projects where the work appeared as if it would almost unfold by itself. Despite its low-budget origins and the self-professed inexperience of young co-cinematographers John Morrill and Erik Daarstad (along with Robert Kaufman), The Exiles proved to have extremely high production values for a film of its kind. The cinematography — particularly the night location work in Bunker Hill, which one would think most likely to be problematic — was by and large excellent. And save for a few exceptions (such as some scratches in the Hill X scene), the original negative was in excellent shape. Then the work began. At first all went well. The initial answer print glistened, apart from a few easily correctible printing problems. Walt Rose and his timing staff at Fotokem did a tremendous job on the picture grading, and John Morrill was thrilled to see the new replication of his work on screen in 35mm after so many years. Even the soundtrack, often the most challenging aspect in an independent film restoration, was in good shape. Due to the great difficulties of recording field sync at that time, most of The Exiles was post-synced, so the dialogue was all perfectly audible. Dubbing was in fact done to a guide track that was recorded during the shoot, so most of the dialogue actually matched what was originally said by the cast – even if the dubbing sessions had a distinctly “studio” sound that was out-of-keeping with the “verité’- like visuals. It was determined that the dubbing’s “loose” sync was an integral part of the film’s making, and so the original post-sync was largely left as it was, whether in sync or out. I’m indebted to John Polito of Audio Mechanics for his usual excellence in our sound restoration work, which included the removal of pops and clicks resulting from accumulated dust, dirt, and abrasions to the original track, and remastering the mono mix to a nearly identical “wide-range mono” simulation within the Dolby SR Lt/Rt format, which is commonly stereo. It was only after completion of the “normal” preservation work that the problems kicked in. When Kent McKenzie re- edited the film to add the prologue for the 1962 release, the negative was cut into the extremely non-standard form of sequential (rather than parallel) 35mm A-B-C rolls. No pre-made printing leaders exist for this format, and so I modified standard A-B leaders to conform the re-recorded soundtrack to The Exiles odd format. However, when I did the modifications, the picture negative was already at the lab! I had to go on blind faith that the original A-B-C rolls at least conformed to standard A-B practice. No such luck. For those readers who don’t happen to have a professional 5 background in 1950s/60s-era film post-production techniques, that means the restored film came back out of sync. Back to the drawing board—and substantially more hours of labor in reconforming the negative. After several weeks we were back on track again (pardon the pun); the film now conformed to the original “loose sync.” However a new problem arose. Because current laboratory black-and-white printing systems are set up for the dynamic range of modern soundtracks, our decision to use Dolby SR noise reduction came back to haunt us. Dolby “wide-range mono” tracks are somewhat common for color restorations, but not black-and-white. The great majority of black-and-white restorations up to the present moment have had standard mono tracks. And although I had successfully done several black-and-white wide-range mono shows before, The Exiles presented new problems. At certain points the sound drops to extremely low levels, causing the SR Noise reduction to have trouble accurate reading the noise floor - a problem compounded in viewing prints by the resolution of the B&W printing stock. I’m indebted to the Technical Academy Award - winning Shawn Jones of NT Audio for in essence, re-engineering his optical camera set-up to minimize the problem—no easy task. The result is a sound that is nearly identical to the original, and due to the benefits of the SR encoding, one that will not duplicate the old prints’ bad habit of getting rapidly noisier after each screening." Lastly, I’d like to thank our funders, the National Film Preservation Foundation for their vision and support of this project, and Milestone Films, for having their characteristic courage and passion in releasing it. We all join in our thanks to our collaborators Valerie Schwan and the USC Moving Image Archive, Erik Daarstad, John Morrill, and the Mackenzie sisters, Diane and Kiki, for their invaluable aid in our attempts to preserve Kent Mackenzie’s brilliant work on The Exiles. Synopsis (From the original press kit) The Exiles is the story of one wild but typical night in the lives of three young American Indians who have left their reservations to live in downtown Los Angeles. It presents the lifestyles and actions of these people that are “not true of all Indians of the time … but typical of many.” Starting at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon, Yvonne, a young, pregnant Apache, wanders around the shops of Grand Central Food market in downtown Bunker Hill, LA, as she gazes through glass windows that provide the barrier between her mundane existence and the unattainable. The film follows Yvonne, her husband Homer (Hualapi), and Tommy, a Mexican who lives with them, through fourteen hours of their everyday life. With the fall of night comes the drinking, card-playing, picking up girls, fighting and dancing of the boys, that is juxtaposed against Yvonne’s lonely, uneventful existence. These two scenarios sum up the confused lives of a group that is part of a new generation caught between opposing forces — the past versus modern day living. Yvonne trudges up the hill from the market to a two-room tenement apartment where she lives with Homer, Tommy and four of their Indian friends. After she cooks supper for them, the boys drop her off at a double-feature movie, and then go to The Ritz, a large bar on Main Street frequented by Indians from all over the area. There they meet friends from many different Indian nations, drink, laugh, and play the jukebox. Homer leaves to go to a poker game with an Apache named Rico. The two journey off together, buy a big jug from Royal Liquor, stop by Rico’s house to get some “bread,” and then stumble through the streets to the poker game. Meanwhile, Tommy and a Choctaw friend pick up two Indian girls and take off for a spree of wild drinking and driving through the downtown streets and tunnels of Bunker Hill. Bored, Homer soon leaves the poker game and returns to the bars on Main Street. Restless and fed-up with everything he sees around him, he picks a fight, which erupts into a bar-wide brawl. 6 Yvonne, meanwhile, leaves the movie theater and wanders slowly though the streets, window-shopping and musing about her life in Los Angeles, which she sees as better than life on the reservation. But her reflection in the glass evokes the hopelessness and despair she expresses: “I wanted to get married in a church and be blessed to have a nice house and I wanted two little girls and two boys... I used to pray everynight before I went to bed and ask for something that I wanted, and I never got it... so I just gave up.” She roams through the streets accompanied by these thoughts until finally she arrives at the apartment of a girlfriend. At 2 am the bars close; hundreds of Indians pour out onto Main Street, and many of them take off for a windswept hill overlooking the city center. The loud engines and loud horns that barrel up the hill are soon drowned out by the drumming, singing and dancing to old Indian chants that is reminiscent of the group’s life on the reservation. Instead of the stars above them, the night is lit by the lights of Los Angeles spread for miles beneath them. Homer explains, “Indians like to get together where they’re not gonna be bothered or watched or nothing like that. Want to get out there and just be free…nobody watchin’ every move you make.” The night goes on into the early hours of morning — singing, dancing, and fighting. At dawn, the Indians return to the city below. It is 6 am; the bars re-open to soon be filled again. Homer, Tommy and some girls careen into the alley and noisily stagger toward their apartment. Yvonne, sleeping at her girlfriend’s, is awakened and looks out of the window silently watching them weave into the distance. This is the story of The Exiles. There has been no change. There will be no change. Today will soon become another night. Background Kent Mackenzie on The Exiles: “The Exiles is an “anti-theatrical” and “anti-social-documentary” film. It was conceived, not necessarily in protest against those two forms of film usage, but rather in search for a true and different format which would reveal the complex problems of the Indians in the city. Instead of leading an audience through an orderly sequence of problems-decisions-action and solution on the part of the characters, we sought to photograph the infinite details surrounding these people, to let them speak for themselves, and to let the fragments mount up. Then, instead of supplying a resolution, we hoped that somewhere in the showing, the picture would become, to the viewer, a revelation of a condition about which he will either do something, or not — whichever his own reaction dictates.” Pre Production: Getting to Know his Subject (From the original 1961 press kit) In July 1957, with encouragement from Charles A. Palmer, president of Parthenon Pictures and his employer at the time, Kent Mackenzie took an extended leave to visit the San Carlos Indian Reservation near Gobe, Arizona. The object: to research a film on the state of the American Indian today — his rights, problems, etc. There he learned that the problems confronting the Reservations (feeding, housing and educating a growing Indian population on ever- depleting resources) were, in themselves, creating and even more urgent and spectacular problem; namely, what is happening to the younger generation of Indians who were gravitating to the big cities? Since the end of World War II, Kent found that more and more of the young people had moved to the cities, looking for job opportunities, better housing conditions, and a new way of life. How were they making out in that new environment so alien to their historic, desert culture? The city, not the Reservation, then became the place to probe for the story of The Exiles. The variety and complexities of their problems seemed to grow with each interview. By then Mackenzie was launched on an extensive research job which was to take months, and which ultimately brought him in touch, either by personal interview, correspondence, or published material, with all of the following: The United States Bureau of Indian Affairs; The Friends Service Committee (a Quaker organization which is active in Indian 7 problems); The Los Angeles Indian Center (operated by Indians for the betterment of their relocated tribes people); various ministers who either were working, or had worked in parishes and congregations in Indian country; a number of Social Groups who expressed concern over the treatment of Indians; and with professors of Anthropology at both the University of Arizona and the University of California at Los Angeles. Finally, Kent found his story (at least one story) in the downtown bars near Third and Main Streets, Los Angeles. “The Exiles,” he hastily admits, “does not propose to reveal the total problem. There are many young Indians who, through their own efforts or the help of the Indian Bureau Relocation Office, have done quite well in the city. There are others who have done worse, getting involved with dope, prostitution, and crimes of violence. My picture does not touch on either of these extremes, but focuses on just one segment of the Indian population which does exist and is a part of the total problem.” Playing Themselves (From the original 1961 press kit) On Main Street, Kent met Homer, Cliff and Tommy (Hualapi, Choctaw, and Mexican), all leading a rather loose, dissolute life in an environment that seemed to exist only for the moment. Sometimes they worked — in machine shops, printing plants, or tending bar — most of the time they “just knocked around.” Whoever could come up with the money paid the rent, and they all ate and slept at the same place. If the money ran out, they moved some place else; and the move included, of course, the young Apache girl, Yvonne, who was pregnant at the time. Among the hangers-on is Tommy, a Mexican-Indian, Valentino-type who sometimes tends bar, most of the time just “makes out” with various girls, or anybody who “has the loot, or bread”. Other featured members of the cast are Marilyn, a Pima, who offers her bed to Yvonne to give her some escape from the riotous Friday night party which portends to end in Yvonne’s apartment; Claudine, of Irish/Pueblo stock, whom Tommy picks up at the Ritz Bar for a wild ride through a downtown tunnel which culminates at the all-night soiree on top of Hill X; and Mary, a Pima/Maricopa, the stolid one, who starts out with the merry-makers, pays for the gas for their wide ride and winds up stranded in the rest-room of a filling station. Then there is Homer’s friend Rico, a Jicarilla Apache, who stakes Homer in a losing poker game. All of these people, some of whom were recruited on the spur of the moment during the shooting (but who, like the others, gave long hours over a period of months to the post-shooting recording sessions for The Exiles) play themselves in the picture. Just as there was no intent on the part of Mackenzie or his cameramen to exploit these young Indians, neither was there a sense of exploitation among the cast. Mackenzie spent long hours making friends and earning the confidence of these Indians who finally agreed to re-enact a segment of their lives for this picture. Their trust did not come easily. As Kent stated in an interview with Film Quarterly in the spring of 1962, “They accepted me. I wasn’t an outsider. After I wrote the script, I came down and told them what I wanted to do. I introduced the crew to them every time we came down here . We had to work it so it wasn’t like working, or they wouldn’t have done it. They’re really not interested in money. It was more important that we’d promised them a party”. Each of the members of the crew — the cameramen, the production men, and the sound men had to be introduced separately to the prospective cast. To prepare the cast for the time when the lights and the camera would be bearing down on them, Kent took a sound-recorder and a microphone into the bars and into their apartments, pre-enacted scenes and played back their recorded voices and statements for their approval. At no time, Kent assured his Indian friends, were they to voice anything or do anything that was not natural to their actual living situation. The shooting script was written with the cooperation of the cast, and the Indians themselves improvised their own dialogue. The Exiles would then, when it reached the screen, accurately reflect the 14-hour period in the lives of these young people, from a Friday afternoon until dawn Saturday morning. 8 The Production: Low-Budget Charm (From the original 1961 press kit) The Exiles is no “candid-camera” peak or sneak look at a sordid or pathetic situation. The film was lighted, directed and photographed by a group of young Hollywood filmmakers — Mackenzie’s college mates from the Cinema Department of the University of Southern California, fellow employees, and friends holding down a variety of day-to- day jobs in the motion picture industry. Shooting was launched on January 4, 1958 on a budget of $539 — Mackenzie’s total savings. Cameras, sound recording equipment, and film was either borrowed or purchased at an absolute minimum cash outlay. Much of the picture was shot on “short ends,” the leftovers of 1,000-foot rolls (varying from 100 to 300 feet of stock) discarded by major film producers. In the end, nearly 55,000 feet of stock was exposed, to be edited into approximately 7,000 feet of finished negative. Until the picture entered its final phase of editing, sound mixing, and printing, no single investment exceeded $2,000. Some contributions were as little as $300. Early the first year, when shooting had been halted for lack of funds, a young man named Warren Brown, then on furlough from the Army, happened to watch some of the un-cut silent footage of the picture. Warren (who became Mackenzie’s brother-in-law) offered Kent $2,000, his total life savings, as production money to keep the picture going. This money was gratefully accepted, and the Main Street bar sequences were shot. In order to assure full attendance of the cast and the extras at the long nights of shooting, unit-manager-sound-man Sam Farnsworth instituted a system whereby marked poker chips were doled out to the habitués of the bar, each chip redeemable for a bottle of beer. With this incentive, the background extras who stayed until the legal closing time of 2:00 am remained within camera range for all the bar sequences at a cost which ran from $40 to $60 a night Sequence by sequence, the production ran out of money. In 1959, Mackenzie received a $1,200 scholarship from the Screen Directors’ Guild of America, given through the University of Southern California, towards the completion of the film and the writing of an academic thesis about its production. Other sources ranged from Kent’s barber who advanced $1,250, to crewmembers, to society matrons in Pasadena and Brentwood, one of whom put off the purchase of a new car, and instead invested $2,000 to see the picture get ahead. Equipment (From the original 1961 press kit) The principal camera used on the production was a 35mm Arriflex adapted for sound use by the rental of a synchronized motor and a “blimp.” After the first weekend of shooting with the blimp, it was decided that its rental cost was too much of a drain on the fast-dwindling budget. As a result, almost all the subsequent shooting was done with a “wild” camera, and sound taken, on appropriate occasions, for use as a cue track. A Magnecorder, using (cid:3)-inch tape, and a Magnasync recorder, using 16mm sprocketed magnetic sound film, were borrowed for nearly all of the sound work. These two machines were heavily relied on for the post-shooting recording and transferring of the dialogue and narration. Nearly all the sound was re-recorded and dubbed for the picture. This includes the improvised dialogue excerpted from many night-long sessions with the Indian cast, plus the narration, which was done as a “stream of conscious” commentary by the three principal characters. All the voices that are heard in The Exiles are those of the Indians themselves, either in looped-dialogue or voice-over-picture narration … General Film Laboratories in Hollywood agreed to a deferred payment plan for the processing and reduction workprint necessary for the job. 9