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painting and of film art was so wide that I couldn't help openly challenging it. Anality makes the art world survive: the guy who's anal retentive and wants to have a better art collection than the next guy. You can get anal about paintings, but how can you get anal about film? It's an endless run that you can keep printing and reprinting.
MacDonald:
What led to
Pat's Birthday
[1962], the live-action film you made with Claes Oldenburg?
Breer:
After I did that film, I seriously debated going into live-action filmmaking. But I didn't think I could deal with production, especially with getting the money. I had four kids. And I didn't want to quit working on film until I had the money. I guess the thing that bothered me most was having to get involved with other people on an artistic level. With Oldenburg there was no problem because we were on the same wavelength.
Actually, before
Pat's Birthday,
I shot a live-action film that became a segment on the first installment of
David Brinkley's Journal
. I had moved into a little house in Palisades that had been owned by this TV producer, Ted Yates. When Maya Deren's Creative Film Foundation awards were announced in the
New York Times,
and he saw my name, he decided to look me up [Breer won the Award of Distinction for
Inner and Outer Space
from the Creative Film Foundation in 1961; in 1957 he had won a Special Citation for
Recreation
]. He looked at some films and signed me up to edit some footage that was part of a gangster film he was doing with Ben Hecht. I forget how that project fizzled, but anyhow, he got himself hired to produce
David Brinkley's Journal,
a spin-off from
The Huntley/Brinkley Report
. I told him about the massive kinetic art show in Stockholm, which had been put together by Pontus Hulten, who at that time was director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. I was taking part in that show, and I guess he thought it would be an interesting subject. He hired me as a coproducer. It was a hurry-up job, and suddenly I found myself in Stockholm in the middle of the museum with a five-person crew who didn't speak Englishall these people waiting for me to say the fatal words: "Lights, camera, action!" I didn't know how to say them in English, much less in Swedish, but I shot the filmor rather my cameraman shot it on a new Arriflex which, we found out a month later, he couldn't focus. The stuff was developed in New York, and it wasn't until I got back here that I realized that most of this guy's footage couldn't be used. Fortunately, I'd taken my Bolex and shot a lot of footage. That became the backbone of a fifteen-minute
Brinkley Journal
segment. I hired Mimi Arshum, a friend of Sasha Hammid's, and a good editor, because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. She helped me put together a tentative assemblage, which we took to Washington. As soon as Brinkley started watching, he said, "Where's the