Page 94
From Mekas's
The Brig
(1964).
MacDonald:
Did you assume that people who saw the film would not know the play?
Mekas:
No. Some of the people who later saw the film had seen the play. Some people who were not familiar with the play were actually fooled by the ''amateur" style. They thought that the United States army had permitted me to go into a real brig and make the film. This was the case with some Italian newspapers.
MacDonald:
The credits say that you shot the film and Adolfas edited it. How much was edited out? Was the play just an hour long?
Mekas:
The editing involved was technical work. When I would run out of film and grab another camera, the actors would stop and overlap a little bit. I liked the film with the overlaps, and actually the first screening included them. The Living Theater liked it that way too. But David and Barbara Stone, who were at that point beginning to get involved in distribution, agreed to distribute it, and for distribution's sake, we decided to eliminate the overlappings. My brother took care of this. He had just come back from Chicago, where he did the editing and salvaging of
Goldstein
. Also, though I shot the sound on film, I had a separate tape recorder running independently, for safety's sake. We decided to intensify the sound in certain places by merging the two soundtracks. My brother did that. Also, one camera was always slowing down towards