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The Legend of Pauline Kael Challenged

As you made note, Pauline Kael is gone (MM #45, Vol. 9). Along with your piece on her in your latest issue, there have been many obituaries elsewhere, all also in high praise of her.

My experience with Ms. Kael is quite different and not atypical. Apparently Ms. Kael, so desperate to appear clever (and The New Yorker and the press so impressed with her eloquence), the public never got to know that very much of her brilliance relied on faked-up forgeries.

Please read her review of Gimme Shelter and my response to it. Then ask how did she get away with it? At the time, just after the article came out in 1970, my brother and I had a meeting with Mr. Shawn, the "saintly" editor of The New Yorker, and presented him with our written response to her article.

He should have fired her on the spot. Instead, he let stand all of what he knew to be false: no letter to the editor, no corrections, no retractions.

Someone should check it out: the many other filmmakers who, like us, can tell you the damning falsities that made fascinating reading and assured her of a brilliant professional career only because the public never got word of her gravely deceitful character assassinations. It behooves documentarians especially to distinguish fact from fiction.

Her falsifications struck a low blow at the very essentials of our integrity.

? Albert Maysles, Maysles Films, Inc., New York, NY

[The following is an excerpt from the makers of Gimme Shelter to the editors of The New Yorker, 1970]

The directors would like to point out the following errors in Pauline Kael's review of Gimme Shelter, a film about the Rolling Stones tour of the United States which ended with a free concert at Altamont, where a young, black man was stabbed to death by a member of the Hell's Angels.

Miss Kael seems to be implying that we, as filmmakers, are responsible for the events we film by suggesting that we set them up or helped to stage them. In referring to our previous film, Salesman, Miss Kael says "the Maysles brothers recruited Paul Brennan, who was in the roof-and-siding business, to play a Bible salesman." Paul Brennan had been selling Bibles for eight years prior to the making of our film and was selling Bibles when we met him. No actors were used in Salesman. The men were asked to simply go on doing what they normally did while we filmed.

This misstatement of fact is used in a paragraph which associates us with a number of other filmmakers who Miss Kael implies filmed staged events in such a way that they would appear to be a documentary. At the top of the list is Leni Riefenstahl, who was hired by Hitler to film the Nazi Party Rally at Nuremberg in 1934. These filmmakers may or may not have manufactured events for the cinema. We did not.

Miss Kael further implies that the makers of Gimme Shelter are responsible for what happened at Altamont (presumably the killing). She does not make the direct statement that the filmmakers arranged the events at Altamont, but she discusses the film in the following ways: "when facts are manufactured for the cinema," "if events are created to be photographed," "arranging events to be caught," "it doesn't look so fraudulent if a director excites people to commit violent acts on camera." She goes on to suggest that the filmmakers were involved in producing the concert and consequently involved in hiring the Hell's Angels as security guards.

The facts are: We were involved in producing a film of the Rolling Stones' tour of the United States, not in producing concerts. To the best of our knowledge, the free concert was produced by Rock Scully, Sam Cutler and Mike Lang with the help of the people from the Grateful Dead organization and many volunteers from the San Francisco area.

We did not produce the event. It's our understanding that the Rolling Stones agreed to play for nothing and to pay some of the costs of production. The above mentioned producers of the concert said they did not hire the Angels. The Angels told the filmmakers that they were not hired. Since we could not establish that they were hired, we did not say so in the film.

Miss Kael calls the film a whitewash of the Stones and a cinema verit? sham. If that is the case, then how can it also be the film which provides the grounds for Miss Kael's discussion of the deeply ambiguous nature of the Stones' appeal? All the evidence she uses in her analysis of their disturbing relationship to their audience is evidence supplied by the film, by the structure of the film which tries to render in its maximum complexity the very problems of Jagger's double self, of his insolent appeal and the fury it can and in fact does provoke, and even the pathos of his final powerlessness. These are the filmmakers' insights and Miss Kael serves them up as if they were her own discovery. Rather than giving the audience what it wants to believe, the film forces the audience to see things as they are.

We don't know where Miss Kael got her facts. We do know that her researcher phoned Paul Brennan, one of the Bible salesmen, and told him that The New Yorker was interested in doing an article about him. He made it quite clear to her that he was a Bible salesman and not a roof-and-siding salesman when we made the film about him. Aside from his own statement, this could easily have been checked out by contacting his employers, the Mid-American Bible Company. Miss Kael's researcher also contacted Porter Bibb (who is identified in the review as the producer of Salesman when in fact he had nothing to do with producing Salesman) and asked him how much the Maysles had made on Gimme Shelter. When Mr. Bibb suggested that she call the Maysles, she replied that she didn't think the Maysles would want to talk to her.

We don't know why she would feel that way since she had called and we had talked to her. She asked us if the free concert had been staged and lighted to be photographed and we told her that it had not. In her review, Miss Kael states that "the free concert was staged and lighted to be photographed."

In fact, the filmmakers were not consulted and had no control over the staging or the lighting at Altamont. All of the cameramen will verify that the lighting was poor and totally unpredictable.

These errors are crucial to her argument that Gimme Shelter is a cinema verit? sham and a whitewash of the Rolling Stones. Miss Kael's argument is not supported by the facts. It can only be supported by her errors.