BEFORE: It makes sense that the voice of Walter Cronkite appeared in the last two films - Cronkite was the most well-known TV reporter/anchorman in the country for a good number of years, some thought of him as the most trusted man on TV, I know that my grandmother sure did. She wouldn't consider herself informed about the day's events until she heard what Cronkite had to say about them. Now that I'm in documentary month, slightly different rules apply, and I have to rely on archive footage of famous people, or at least influential ones, or people that appear in a lot of news footage, to get from one film to the next. Using U.S. Presidents as links is going to come up a lot over the next month - but tonight it's Walter Cronkite. After hearing his comments on the Apollo 11 mission (twice) and also Watergate, tonight we'll hear what he had to say about this mass shooting from a few years before.
I met Walter Cronkite once, because my first wife was working for his son's production company, and they were preparing a multi-episode series about famous news events, as seen through the famous newsman's eyes. So before the first episode there was some kind of special party, not really a wrap party I think, but some evening event that I got to go to, and I got to shake his hand. Man, I really wondered what my grandmother would have said if she knew I got to meet her favorite CBS anchor. During production I got to stay a couple nights in Cronkite's vacation home, too (Walter wasn't there at the time) - we had to drive up to Martha's Vineyard to pick up some of his cherished artifacts, like the helmet he wore during the Korean War, and the little model of the lunar lander that he used to demonstrate the spaceflight procedures to the TV audience. I think he saved a lot of stuff, and those were important props for the documentary series. I remember watching the baseball playoffs on Cronkite's TV, and thinking the Indians would win it all that year, only that was the year without a World Series, must have been 1994.
Since Walter Cronkite is the only name I recognize in the credits, I've had to place this one between two other films he appears in - otherwise I wouldn't be able to watch this one this year.
THE PLOT: Animation, testimony and archival footage combine to relate the events of August 1, 1966 when a gunman opened fire from the University of Texas clock tower, killing 16 people.
AFTER: From Mission Control in Houston I'm moving west across Texas to Austin, and three years back in time to 1966. I visited Austin last year on that same BBQ Crawl as Houston, so I've got a good idea about how far it is from one place to the other.
I also remember my boss writing about this film for HIS blog, and thinking that it sounded intriguing. An animated documentary? Now, last weekend I watched a horror film for Father's Day, so my genre-mixing is kind of reaching a new level anyway. But a documentary with animated sequences in it creates a bit of a conundrum for me. Like, I was always taught that in the documentary form, it was very bad to mess with reality, events should be portrayed as accurately as possible, and if you had to recreate the depiction of real events with actors, that needed to be pointed out.
Now, I understand WHY this was necessary here - obviously on the day in question during this 96-minute shooting, it's not like there were a lot of people walking around with film or video cameras. People didn't have camera phones back then, or any portable phones, for that matter. Phone BOOTHS were the height of technology, and they weren't mobile at all. Eventually someone came to the scene with a 16mm or Super 8 camera, and that's how we have the footage that we have. So how can a filmmaker depict the things that happened, without much (or any) footage of it? Enter animation - but this is a particular kind of animation, called rotoscoping. People (or perhaps now computers) draw over (or based on) real film footage, which again, for this situation, didn't exist. SO they must have filmed actors recreating the actions of real people, and that to me is a big no-no for a documentary.
I guess someone felt that if they animated over the footage from the dramatic recreations, that would give it sort of an unreal quality, and critics and audience members would be less likely to pick up on the fact that these actions were staged, and therefore less likely to cry foul. What's worse, though, is also using those same actors as interview subjects, so that there could be animated segments that recreate the testimony of the witnesses that were there. This is very, very dangerous, because an actor can say the same words that the eyewitnesses did, but it's too easy for an actor to over-dramatize, or add an inflection that wasn't there before, and that can change the tone or even the meaning of what was said.
It looks great, for the most part, but the animation company had a real big problem with animating people running, which is sort of animation 101. (Trust me, I've been to film school, took animation for two years, and I've worked in that field for the last 25 years.) Once you design a character, the next thing you do is decide what it looks like in a walk- or run-cycle. The way that people are shown running here, and it comes up frequently, their feet tend to slide across the floor, and the thing about running is that it only works if your foot on the ground stays in one place. So in the most dramatic moments here, people's feet are sliding as if they're on a slippery surface, or sort of reverse moon-walking, and that's not only impossible, it's very distracting.
I first noticed something was up as soon as they had some testimony from a kid who was delivering papers on a bicycle in the area - wait, this took place in 1966, so why am I hearing a kid''s voice, he should be all grown up now, he should be an old man even! OK, I figured, maybe they're just using real audio from interviews conducted at that time, only the sound was just too good. With any recordings from 1966, you'd expect some wear or some imperfect tones, or the sound would be faint or all scratchy or something. But no, they used an actor who's young NOW to record the voice of the kid THEN, and that's where I start to have a problem. Like, what else that I'm being shown isn't really real?
About 2/3 of the way through the picture, they start using real footage of the people being interviewed, and therefore it's a sharp jump, because those people suddenly age over 40 years. That's confusing at the very least, I mean, I've gotten used to the way these people looked in younger, animated form, and now I have to figure out who's who all over again. Wait, was this old dude the guy with the glasses, or was he the friend of the guy with the glasses?
Of course, I'm using the technical details to sort of dance around the subject matter here, but talking about any mass shooting is a controversial subject these days - even if we all agree that mass shootings are bad, there are too many differing opinions about how to stop them, and some say you can't without interfering with average citizens' 2nd Amendment rights. Well, how about some other solutions, then? Any common ground here, like working to keep guns out of the hands of people with mental problems? Guns that have fingerprint detectors that only will work for approved owners or law enforcement officials? A very high tax on bullets, or getting rid of bullets altogether? (I kind of like that one, because it's technically not "gun control", it's "bullet control", very sneaky.)
I don't know if this was the first or most prominent mass shooting, but it certainly seems like one of the most stereotypical. It's like the "madman in a high clock tower" can be traced back here, or something. And of course now I have to wonder if our modern lives would be any different if people had taken more direct steps to curb crazy people's access to weapons after this 1966 incident. But they didn't, and they still won't, so what the heck would it take?
Mr. Cronkite himself blamed all of society for these events, quoting "a strange pandering to violence, a disrespect for life, fostered in part by governments which, in pursuit of the doctrine of self-defense, teach their youth to kill and maim." He makes a good point, in that the gunman, Charles Whitman, was an ex-Marine with a sharpshooter's badge. Yep, our government taught him how to do what he did. For that matter, Lee Harvey Oswald was also an ex-Marine. Maybe we should start there - not everyone in the armed forces needs to know how to shoot a gun, after all. The military needs supply personnel, office workers, laborers - plenty of people who don't need this part of "basic" training. Plus, don't drones and smart bombs do most of the killing these days? Also, how many shooters do we need, and shouldn't the military do some kind of psych check to see if maybe some people shouldn't be taught how to operate weapons? Or is that not even a concern?
Also starring Monty Muir, Violett Beane, Cole Bee Wilson, Aldo Ordoñez, Blair Jackson, Vicky Illk, Chris Doubek, Seamus Bolivar-Ochoa, Louie Arnette, Josephine McAdam, Reece Everett Ryan, John Fitch, Jeremy Brown, Karen Davidson, Anthony Martinez, Timothy Lucas, Cole Bresnahan, and interview/archive footage of Neal Spelce, Claire Wilson James, Aleck Hernandez Jr., Houston McCoy, Allen Crum, John "Artly" Fox, Ramiro Martinez, Lee Zamora,
RATING: 4 out of 10 bullet fragments
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