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Baillie:
After we moved over the hill from Canyon to Berkeley, we were a small, impoverished, but very alive collective, a few people who put together some equipment that other people could borrow (and that we could use to make our own films). We came up with
The News,
the Canyon Cinema newsreel. It was like in the old days at the movies when they had a feature and a cartoon and a serialand a newsreel. We used outdated, reversal, black-and-white 16mm film. Ernest Callenbach [editor at University of California Press and of
Film Quarterly;
author of
Ectopia
(New York: Bantam Books, 1975)] had a little house in back of his place that we used. We couldn't mix sound at that point, so we made wild sound and used a quarter-inch tape recorder. The news itself would sometimes be the guys laying some pipe somewhere, mundane information, or it might be a totally cinematic piece. When new people came through, we'd tell them, "Don't feel obliged, but if you want to make a newsreel, just make whatever you want to make, and we'll call it "The News."
MacDonald: Termination
[1966], the film about Indians in Laytonville, and
Mr. Hayashi
[1961] were "news items," right?
Baillie:
Yes.
MacDonald: Mr. Hayashi
is like an ad. It gives Mr. Hayashi's hourly rate, a dollar twenty-five an hour.
Baillie:
It had an immediate basis in necessity.
MacDonald:
When I was going through
The Pleasure Dome,
the catalogue for the Swedish show of American experimental film put together by Jonas Mekas and Claes Söderquist for the Modern Museum in Stockholm in 1980, I noticed that your filmography lists several films not included in the Canyon or Film-makers' Cooperative catalogues:
David Lynn's Sculpture
[1961],
Friend Fleeing
[1962],
Everyman
[1962],
The News No. 3
[1962],
Here I Am
[1962],
The Brookfield Recreation Center
[1964], and
Port Chicago Vigil
[1966]. Were those Canyon newsreels?
Baillie:
Mostly. Those are either in my negative archive box in the house here or were part of what I shipped to Jonas to be stored at Anthology.
David Lynn's Sculpture
was one of my first films, a newsreel of David Lynn's big log sculpture, made for the first Canyon Cinema up in Canyon. I was leaving Canyon one day to go on a little trip, so I made a little film for everybody:
Friend Fleeing
. I think
News No. 3
is about the testing of the bomb on one of the South Seas Islands during the early sixties.
Here I Am
was made in the early days for an Oakland school for children with mental disorders of various sorts. It was quite a nice film. I gave them one print, and I made a print for myself. I don't know if I ever got the original reversal back; the San Francisco lab folded. The Brookfield Recreation Center was another school, and I made them a looser, rougher film than
Here I Am. Port Chicago Vigil
was made at a time