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I quit that job after about a year and went to Stanford's summer film institute for three weeks of intensive filmmaking. I made a couple of short Super-8 films and a 16mm film there and then, through a producer friend, got a job as an assistant cameraman for
Bill Moyers' Journal,
on PBS. Basically all I did was load magazines for the cameraman. The shows weren't very exciting filmically (the Moyers series used a formula that centered on interviews and was heavily narrated), but I learned things and made a living for a year.
After that I applied to MIT's Film Section. MIT didn't have an official graduate program at the time, but Leacock was there, and so was Ed Pincus. Here were these two filmmakers, both doing unscripted, noncommercial documentaries, films that weren't intended to fit into the industry in a particular way. It appealed to me a lot. I ended up in the graduate program the following September.
Students were pretty much on their own. Leacock and Pincus were available, but the curriculum was pretty unstructured. We had access to lightweight portable 16mm rigs. They'd give us these rigs for a month at a time and say, "Get lost. Come back when you've got a film." That was terrific. Apparently it isn't that easy at all schools to have access to equipment for extended periods. For this kind of filmmaking you need to be able to shoot for weeks at a time in order to garner the kind of footage that can be shaped into a movie. By the end of two years I'd shot
Charleen,
which was my first real film.
I'd also shot footage for
Backyard
(which wasn't completed until a good bit later) and for
Space Coast,
which was finished after I officially left MIT. I was paranoid about not having access to camera equipmentnot being able to afford itonce I left MIT, so I tried to stockpile footage for as many films as I couldthinking that somehow I could always wangle access to editing tables later.
MacDonald:
Like several of your later films,
Charleen
seems, in part, a portrait of the South. Is that what you had in mind?
McElwee:
I had originally thought that the film might be even more a portrait of the South, or at least of Charlotte, North Carolina, with Charleen as a witty tour guide. I wasn't at all sure that the film would be an intimate portrait of Charleen herself, though I hoped this would be the case. As it turned out, Charleen enjoyed being filmed and was a natural performer, in the sense that even though it was simply her own life that she was performing, she always performed it with a certain élan that was very "filmable." She enjoyed revealing her life to me and the camera. As a result, much of the Southern detail simply got eclipsed by Charleen herself.
Still, as you suggest, there is a latent portrait of the South in the filmmaybe more a sketch than a portrait. I think the way interactions