Burton Gershfield Oral History Transcript

Burton Gershfield Oral History Transcript/Los Angeles Filmforum of 36

ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

MADE POSSIBLE BY SUPPORT FROM PROJECT PARTNERS:

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts

INTERVIEW SUBJECT: Burton Gershfield

Biography: Burton Gershfield was born and raised in Everett, Massachusetts. He initially studied physics at Northeastern before earning a BA in Art History from Boston University. There, he decided that film was the artistic medium that best represented the current times. He went on to study filmmaking at UCLA, where he met Pat O'Neill and was introduced to underground film culture. Inspired by a Buffy Saint-Marie song, he created his student film Now That The Buffalo's Gone, an elegy to the Native American way of life. The dense, optically printed visuals in that film that led to work on the Monkees film, Head. Gershfield was involved in other film and music projects including work on Frank Zappa's 200 Motels and managing bands during the heyday of the hard rock scene on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. He currently lives in Malden, Massachusetts. Filmography: Now That the Buffalo's Gone (16mm, Color, Sound, 00:07:00)


Tape Contents: Tape 1: Pages 3 - 22 Interview date: February 22, 2010 Interviewer: Mark Toscano Cameraperson: Kate Dollenmayer Transcript Reviewer: Burton Gershfield, Anya Gershfield, John Irving Tape 1: Pages 23 - 36 Interview date: February 22, 2010 Interviewer: Mark Toscano Cameraperson: Kate Dollenmayer Transcript Reviewer: Burton Gershfield, Anya Gershfield, John Irving


TAPE 1: BURTON GERSHFIELD

00:00:08 BURTON GERSHFIELD Charles Gershfield. That's Burton, B-U-R-T-O-N, Charles, C-H-A-R-L-E-S, Gershfield, G-E-R-S-H-F-I-E-L-D [Editor’s note: audio drops out on “F-I-E”]. And, it's nice to see you. Hello.

00:01:41 MARK TOSCANO So. Well, we definitely wanted to know a little bit about your background in your early life, where you're from, your upbringing, your youth.

00:01:54 BURTON GERSHFIELD Well, thank you. It would be a pleasure. I actually grew up not too far from here. Right now we're in Malden, Massachusetts, and I grew up in a little town called Everett, which is a couple miles down the road. I had another sibling in my family, my sister, who is a year and a half younger than myself. And we had a mother and father.

00:02:25 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) I had a very middle class childhood. I was born of Jewish Orthodox parents. So, I had a Jewish Orthodox education, or upbringing. And a relatively benign childhood. Nothing exaggerated, or nothing too exaggerated. That's all I should say.

00:03:04 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) My family was very loving, my father was an electrician. He was very hard working. Worked about 18 hours a day [BG: actually 14 hours a day]. My mother took care of us, she was very loving. But it was a lot of energy in the household. A lot of emotionality. A lot of intensity. And so, I lived in a very intense environment in my early youth.

00:03:34 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And let me just check and see if I've included everything. Yeah, and then, if you want me to go on, I can let you know what took place. What happens is, I spent the first 27 years of my life in this area. And then moved to California to attend UCLA [University of California Los Angeles in Westwood-Beverly Hills].

00:04:03 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So the first 27 years of my life were spent here in the Boston area. And I can go into a little bit more detail in terms of what schools I went to and what kind of education I had.


00:04:16 MARK TOSCANO Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

00:04:17 BURTON GERSHFIELD Oh, okay. So I went to the Everett School System, graduated from Everett High, and was accepted at Northeastern as a physics major. I wanted to be a physicist. I studied physics for about a four-year period. Decided because it was a work-study program [BG: it was a five-year work study program], and I worked in the physics area. [BG: I left before graduating in my fourth year because physicists there believed their science was absolute and no belief in God – (Deity).]

00:04:44 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) I had a job as an Electronic Technician in many exciting venues. I worked on the Mercury Space Reentry Capsule at a place called Avco Everett Research Laboratory. We developed the self-ablating material for the nosecone for re-entry.

00:05:08 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And so I had an interesting initial hit from being a physics major. I dropped out. I decided I didn’t like physics. I didn’t like what I saw as what it would be like to be a physicist. And I spent the next two years on my own, but going to Boston University at night, where I studied. I studied, a strange twist, but I studied Art History with a Philosophy Minor, and wound up after going to school nights, and then full-time, I wound up with a degree from Boston University as an Art history Major, with a Philosophy Minor. [BG: I was an Honor student with a 4.0 average in Art History which resulted in a B.A.]

00:06:04 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And, after that, I was trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life [laugh] from this period on. And, I hit upon the idea of wanting to study film, and the place I chose to do that, or wanted to do that, was UCLA.

00:06:31 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So, that meant leaving my environment, which was all I had known up until that point. So, that's my history here in Boston, up until my leaving to go to study at UCLA.

00:06:53 MARK TOSCANO What kind of, if any, exposure to the arts or involvement in the arts did you have during that period?


00:06:59 BURTON GERSHFIELD Oh. During that time, I had a roommate, who was an Architecture Major at MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. And all his classes that he went to that were art-oriented in terms of his getting his degree. I attended a lot of them with him. So I learned a lot about art history, or art, from some of these classes that I attended with him at MIT.

00:07:35 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And that history was always something that fascinated me, and art was something that I thought was an incredible reflection of the time and age of that period. It reflected the culture and the mores and what people were doing at that particular time. And I thought art was extremely important.

00:08:10 MARK TOSCANO Did you have certain artists that you admired greatly?

00:08:13 BURTON GERSHFIELD Surrealistic Artists fascinated me. I loved the Surrealistic Art Movement. That really was maybe my favorite of almost all. Except, I also admired the Renaissance, and Renaissance Art totally fascinated me. I was fascinated by how each art period reflected the major concept of what was taking place during that time period, like the Renaissance and how the art of the Renaissance reflected that period.

00:09:02 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) The Age of Reason, how the art during the Age of Reason reflected that particular time period. So, as I say, I think that my favorite was Surrealism. The concept of creating places, spaces that were fantastic, and new and exciting. Visuals that were not real but stimulated the senses.

00:09:36 MARK TOSCANO Did you get involved in making art at all at this time?

00:09:39 BURTON GERSHFIELD Well, I tried my hand at a number, I took a couple of courses at BU [Boston University], where we were required to do some art projects. And I started to do some things I called sand paintings. I used sand to form figures, and then colored over the sand. But I wanted to create kind of real heavy texture on the canvas. And I worked on masonite, or heavy duty backing. So I did have a number of classes that allowed me to show, or to attempt to become an artist.

00:10:35 MARK TOSCANO And film, you said you turned to, you were interested in that. But what was your interest in film again, during that time?


00:10:43 BURTON GERSHFIELD Well, here's what I came up with. I was a Physicist, so I knew a little bit about technology. And I knew a little bit about how things ran in terms of images. And I felt that film was the medium that best represented the time period that we were living in.

00:11:05 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And if I was going to do any art, rather than just study it, which I decided to do, I decided I didn’t want to just study about art, I wanted to do some art. And I decided that the way that I wanted to do some art was to do some filming. “Film Art.” I wanted to do what I called “Film Art.” I wanted to use film as an artistic medium. And I attacked film from that point of view.

00:11:36 MARK TOSCANO And were you seeing, or had you seen films by other people around that time that inspired you?

00:11:40 BURTON GERSHFIELD There wasn't that much going on here in Boston at that time. This was the late-'60s, or middle-'60s. Sixty-five or so. As I say, most of my exposure to film was either at films that were being shown at Harvard University or MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. I didn’t have that much exposure to film here in Boston at that particular time. I had very little exposure to film. I just knew that I was attracted to it as a medium. But, very little exposure to what was going on.

00:12:30 MARK TOSCANO And it interested you from a technological standpoint?

00:12:33 BURTON GERSHFIELD Also, yeah, I was fascinated. The fascination for me was how the optic nerve functioned, how images were transferred via the optic nerve to the brain, and how the brain assimilated those images. And, a painting was static. You could look at it for a certain amount of time. But film had a certain rhythm in time, and I really wanted to examine that rhythm in time, how it would kinesthetically affect the body.

00:13:17 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) In other words, I was really interested in how film, the image passing through the optic nerve to the brain could actually affect the body, because it affected me when I saw a film. It affected me in my body. I was fascinated by that. I wanted to explore what that would be like. How to kinesthetically affect the body through motion pictures.

00:13:45 MARK TOSCANO So before you even went to UCLA to study film, did you already have ideas about how that might work?


00:13:51 BURTON GERSHFIELD No, nothing at all. I just knew that that was my orientation. I had no real background in film in terms of knowing anything about the history of film. I was not really exposed to any of the filmmakers that were working during that time. I just knew that I wanted to go to UCLA. UCLA, or Los Angeles seemed like the mecca of exploration of media at that time.

00:14:29 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And it seemed like the focus of energy in this country, the creative focus of energy, to me, was in Southern California. So the concept of going to UCLA and being in that environment is what drove me.

00:14:48 MARK TOSCANO And obviously L.A. and Hollywood is associated with the industry. But were there other things…

00:14:52 BURTON GERSHFIELD Yes. I was fascinated by the industry also. Oh, I should say, there were a couple of films that completely inspired me. And they were actually feature films. One was The Thief of Baghdad, which I thought was an incredibly surrealistic piece.

00:15:15 MARK TOSCANO The silent one or the...

00:15:17 BURTON GERSHFIELD No, the sound one. The sound of Thief of Baghdad I thought was a brilliant piece of work, and thoroughly affected me. And I'm trying to remember, the other was...

00:15:32 MARK TOSCANO And you were 10 years old, and it was at the library down at the theater down in the neighborhood.

00:15:38 BURTON GERSHFIELD But it was a neighborhood...

00:15:39 MARK TOSCANO And then at about 12 years old, you saw Sinbad the Sailor.

00:15:42 BURTON GERSHFIELD Sinbad the Sailor, which had all the Harryhausen [Editor’s note: Ray Harryhausen, an American film producer and special effects creator] effects, and was again, sort of surrealistic to me. It went beyond the normal cultural mores. So, I was fascinated by film effects, in both of these films, in how it affected the story, how it affected me. So those were the early pieces that affected me to want to somehow become involved with film.


00:16:22 MARK TOSCANO Did you have a sense already, before choosing UCLA, that there was something beyond the industry in terms of film, that there was an art and film culture?

00:16:30 BURTON GERSHFIELD No. I knew nothing about the art culture, the film culture that was there. I was fascinated by how to, I really wanted to use film as an art form, rather that try to fit into the industry. But that changed later. I went to use film as an art form, because of my art history background. But of course, I knew that that was the center of film, major film production. And it was where the industry was, and that was also interesting to me to be in that environment.

00:17:19 MARK TOSCANO So, UCLA, so you went there, you were a little older than the other students?

00:17:23 BURTON GERSHFIELD I was a little older than the other students, right. Because I had, by this time, been at Northeastern for four years. I had dropped out maybe for two years [BG: to work], and went back to BU. And during the two years that I dropped out, I studied at night, and then went back to BU full time. So I was maybe seven, eight years into being out of high school. About eight or nine years. [BG: Self-made, no student loans.]

00:17:56 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And then also I should say, before I left to go to UCLA, I got married. I married my first wife. Her name was Carol. And we drove out to UCLA. We drove across country in a little car that her mother gave to us, and had no idea what to expect, or how we were going to support ourselves, or whatever. But we had some major surprises when we got there.

00:18:32 MARK TOSCANO I guess so. So what was it like when you first got there?

00:18:35 BURTON GERSHFIELD Oh, I was overwhelmed. I felt like my life had begun for the first time. I remember, we were driving down Sunset Boulevard, when we first came into town. And it was in February, when it would be the heart of winter here. And the sun was shining. And the trees, the palm trees were blowing in the wind.

00:18:58 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And everyone there seemed to have an energy and a glow, and very different, in fact, I would say, almost antithesis of the culture that I grew up in here in Boston. It seemed to be free, it seemed to be open, it seemed to be really inviting. I loved L.A. from the time I set foot in it. From the first time I set foot in it. I loved the environment and the milieu.


00:19:32 MARK TOSCANO You said you arrived in February. Did you not start school until later?

00:19:35 BURTON GERSHFIELD Yes. I think I started in second semester of school. And when I started at school, that's where I started learning a little bit more about the underground films that were going on, and a little bit about film history. I specifically sought out classes about Film History.

00:20:08 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) I actually wasn’t in any way interested in doing script writing. I knew I didn’t want to do feature films. I didn’t really, that wasn't what interested me. What interested me were what I would call maybe “Cinepoems.” Not film prose, which most major film works were, film prose.

00:20:37 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) I was interested in “film poetry.” I wanted to explore film poetry. And while I was here, after I got to UCLA, I had the great fortune to become exposed to the underground, or the Film Movement. And I can tell you how that happened.

00:21:04 MARK TOSCANO Well, I was just going to say, how did that happen?

00:21:05 BURTON GERSHFIELD That happened in a couple of ways. One is, I met, while I was at UCLA, a man named Pat O'Neill. Pat introduced me to William Moritz. William Moritz had screenings at his home. Pat O'Neill had screenings at his studio in Santa Monica. And the work that Pat was doing overwhelmed me, totally, I don’t know, I just was completely overwhelmed by the work he was doing.

00:21:49 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And I was completely fascinated by the films that Bill Moritz had showed. The whole History of Animation. And all of the special films that he knew about and shared with us just completely overwhelmed me, and made me feel like I had done the right thing.

00:22:18 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So, both Pat O'Neill and William Moritz were two of the major sources of giving me an understanding of the underground film movement. And also, there was a theater on Sunset Boulevard called the Cinematheque 16, which was run by Lewis Teague. And I would attend a lot of early screenings there. And I learned a lot about all the films that were being done there.


00:22:52 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So both at UCLA, but mainly through Pat O'Neill and William Moritz, and then also at the Cinematheque 16, I started to really absorb the film scene that was taking place.

00:23:08 MARK TOSCANO Do you feel like you pretty quickly, I mean, sometimes some people go to a different city for a school. They end up just keeping their activities centered around the school, but it sounds like you were looking in the...

00:23:21 BURTON GERSHFIELD Right. To be honest with you, I learned more from the students at UCLA than from the faculty. I learned more from people, and I can tell you the story of how Pat O'Neill and I met, and how he influenced me further.

00:23:43 MARK TOSCANO Please.

00:23:44 BURTON GERSHFIELD So what happened is, since I had had this Art History background, when I went to UCLA, I had to try to support myself. My wife was working at the Nuclear Physics Library. And she was making a certain amount of money, but I wanted to make some money, so I became a Student Film Teacher [BG: Graduate], I guess it was called. What was it called?

00:24:11 MARK TOSCANO Graduate Teaching Assistant.

00:24:12 BURTON GERSHFIELD A Graduate Teaching Assistant. And, as a Graduate Teaching Assistant, instead of working at the Film School, I gravitated towards the School of Fine Arts.

00:24:27 MARK TOSCANO And the Architectural School.

00:24:28 BURTON GERSHFIELD And the Architecture School [BG: worked both places]. Which I had, again, had known here in Boston, through my roommate, I had known about how architects learn about art and use it in their creative process. So, while I was a teaching student at the school of...

00:24:56 ANJA GERSHFIELD School of Architecture.


00:24:57 BURTON GERSHFIELD School of Fine Arts, I met Pat O'Neill. And Pat was, as I said, invited me. We became friends fairly quickly. I kind of recognized that this was some kind of real genius that I had come across, and really wanted to befriend him. And he was very open to having a friendship. And as I said, he had all these screenings at his studio. But then, he showed me, or taught me, while I was at UCLA, at the Film School… at the School of Fine Arts, he showed me his optical printer and showed me how it worked, and taught me how to use it.

00:25:48 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And that opened up the creative world of filmmaking to me. That exposure of how to manipulate imagery on the optical printer was just like an atomic bomb going off, in my senses. I worked at UCLA in the Art Department, and was assigned to the Head of the Sculpture Department. A man named...

00:26:25 ANJA GERSHFIELD Andrews.

00:26:25 BURTON GERSHFIELD Oliver Andrews. And Oliver was working on doing the sculpture garden at UCLA. UCLA brought a lot of land, brought a lot of sculpture, and was going to create a more beautiful environment, school environment at the Sculpture Garden. And I helped Oliver Andrews in the Sculpture Garden. I worked for about a year on installing all the sculpture.

00:27:01 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So I spent more and more time at the School of Fine Arts, and spent more time with Pat O'Neill. And then, also, I spent a lot more time with the students of the Film Department. There was a thing called the Gypsy Wagon at UCLA. And this was the place where all the students congregated for lunch and during free time, to exchange ideas, to talk about film, to argue, and there were some really fascinating people who were students at that time at UCLA. Amongst them, Jim Morrison, who later became the singer for The Doors. [BG: the world-renowned rock and roll band, THE DOORS] And so...

00:28:03 ANJA GERSHFIELD And your cutting room partner.

00:28:05 BURTON GERSHFIELD And later became my cutting room partner at UCLA during the making of our first film. [BG: during the making of each of our first films we shared space.]

00:28:10 ANJA GERSHFIELD And the Lords Of Light.


00:28:12 BURTON GERSHFIELD And also, gave me, he had written a treaty...

00:28:17 ANJA GERSHFIELD Treatise.

00:28:18 BURTON GERSHFIELD Treatise on the movies, on filmmaking. And it was called...

00:28:24 ANJA GERSHFIELD The Lords - Notes on Vision [1969]

00:28:25 BURTON GERSHFIELD The Lords - Notes on Vision. And he had about 12 copies made up, and gave me one of the 12 copies. Which was really, it was one of my treasures. And it was a brilliant work that still haunts me today. So, again, I think I learned more from the students that I went to school with, who was the film writer...

00:28:57 STEPHANIE SAPIENZA Gene Youngblood?

00:28:58 BURTON GERSHFIELD Well, no, not Gene Youngblood. Well, I was introduced to...

00:29:02 ANJA GERSHFIELD Tell me what you're thinking of.

00:29:03 BURTON GERSHFIELD I'm thinking of, there was a famous...

00:29:10 ANJA GERSHFIELD Say what the topic is.

00:29:10 BURTON GERSHFIELD He was a student at UCLA, and he became a very famous screenwriter. Paul Schrader. Paul Schrader was another example of the students that were there.

00:29:22 ANJA GERSHFIELD Right. Just one of many.

00:29:25 BURTON GERSHFIELD So they were the ones that I was drawn to, and affected me creatively.

00:29:34 MARK TOSCANO How did you find the faculty?


00:29:46 BURTON GERSHFIELD You know something, I did not interface with the faculty that much. I didn’t find the faculty that stimulating or that far out. I learned more from the students than I did from the faculty. So there were no faculty members that mentored me as much as Pat O'Neill. Pat O'Neill became my film mentor. And...

00:30:19 ANJA GERSHFIELD How about Professor Liu?

00:30:21 BURTON GERSHFIELD Oh, then I also worked at the School of Architecture as a Teaching Assistant [BG: Graduate Teaching Assistant]. And while I was there, I was asked by a professor there called Professor Liu, to teach a course at the School of Architecture as a Teaching Assistant [BG: Graduate Teaching Assistant], and the course was entitled “The Use of Film as a… Urban Design Tool.”

00:30:49 ANJA GERSHFIELD “As an Urban Design Tool.”

00:30:52 BURTON GERSHFIELD And, I have a glyph from that particular time.

00:31:02 ANJA GERSHFIELD Can you find it?

00:31:03 BURTON GERSHFIELD Let me see if I can find it here. [technical]

00:31:19 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) I have a piece of paper here, which describes the film course that I taught at The School of Architecture. It's called “Experimental Films the Film Media as a Conceptual Urban Design Tool.” And it was about a 10-week course of study, and I had about 20 students to teach and what I taught them was what I was involved in doing with Pat O'Neill, which was using the optical printer to create imagery, to create spaces, to create rhythms, to create ways to affect the body through the optic nerve.

00:32:15 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And this was a public showing of all the films, and a piece of paper that you can take with, that describes that course. So again, most of my creative work was either at the School of Fine Arts or at the School of Architecture, or through the students that were at UCLA. I didn’t really learn that much from the courses that were taught there.


00:32:57 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) Although the environment was charged, really fully charged. And I learned more and more about underground filmmaking, and absorbed more and more about the filmmaking process.

00:33:13 MARK TOSCANO But yeah, it seems like a lot of the influence came from everywhere but the Film Department. At least the structure of the Film Department.

00:33:20 BURTON GERSHFIELD Pretty much though, yes. That is correct. [technical]

00:33:29 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) Brilliant, brilliant pieces. So, it was an extremely valuable period of learning for me. Because I learned while teaching these students. And they were almost all much older than I was. So it was kind of a strange dynamic. [technical]

00:33:55 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So, another example of people who truly influenced me at UCLA, another fellow student there was Bruce Lane. Bruce Lane and I struck up a relationship, and we were synchronistic in all of our thoughts. And I admired the work that he was doing. I admired talking with him. I was invigorated by my communication with Bruce, and thought that he was a brilliant person. And, he taught me a lot about film also.

00:34:48 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) He seemed to be very knowledgeable about the filmmaking process, and all the technical things that, we both shared a fascination with 3-D filmmaking, because I thought 3-D filmmaking was quite interesting. And we wound up actually doing a piece together outside of UCLA. That'll come in the work part. I’ll just describe some of the work that I did. But we wound up doing a 3-D feature film together, that we worked on as producers and co-producers, called Prison Girls.

00:35:37 ANJA GERSHFIELD In 3-D.

00:35:38 BURTON GERSHFIELD It was in 3-D, and it was really just a terrible, maybe not even “B” film. It was a “C” film. But we had the use of 3-D camera, and we experimented with it, and we had a very interesting time, and the film was actually released, and went to number one in the box office the week it was released [BG: and it grossed $25,000,000]. So, it was an introduction to the real gross part of the film industry for both of us.


00:36:19 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) But the idea of being able to get our hands on a 3-D camera, and use it for production fascinated Bruce and I. And that's why we did that particular piece.

00:36:31 MARK TOSCANO It was while you were still students?

00:36:33 BURTON GERSHFIELD We were still students at UCLA, yes. And we just did it in our spare time, and we received very little money for it. And the film wound up grossing a great deal of money and made a lot of money for this. It was an older Jewish gentleman who was the Executive Producer. I can't remember his name. But he was very, very typical of the kind of Arkoff type of exploitation people [BG: Samuel Z. Arkoff, Film Company name was Nicholson and Arkoff, released through American International Pictures]. But again, I said, we cut our teeth on using the 3-D film camera during that process.

00:37:21 MARK TOSCANO And Bruce was also at UCLA?

00:37:23 BURTON GERSHFIELD Bruce was also a student at UCLA, and wound up being one of the people whose film won the award to be [placed] in the Student Film Show at UCLA. Maybe I should talk about the Student Film Show.

00:37:45 MARK TOSCANO Yeah, well, maybe, I guess we didn't even talk about your films yet. So, we should definitely talk about that. Like, I mean, the main film I know is Now That The Buffalo's Gone, but was there other work you were doing that led up to that?

00:37:59 BURTON GERSHFIELD Yes. Actually there was. Just before, or while making that film, I was fascinated by this man named Frank Zappa. I thought he was really quite an interesting character. Counterculture, doing a lot of very interesting work in music. And sought him out, and went out to see him. And while I was hanging out with Frank, met another person named Peter Mays.

00:38:37 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And Peter Mays and I started working with Frank on a series of films. And one of those films was Uncle Meat's Burnt Weeny Sandwich, which Peter and I both worked on. I don’t know if we got credit for it...

00:38:55 ANJA GERSHFIELD You didn’t.


00:38:56 BURTON GERSHFIELD Because Frank was a strange guy to work with. He basically was very open and absorbing a lot of information, and was fascinated with film, but never really paid very much, or took almost all the credit for what took place. But the film went on to win an award at the Montreal Film Festival in Montreal. And Peter and I solidified our friendship during that time, and we became best buddies.

00:39:29 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And Peter again was a wealth of information for me, in terms of my learning about the underground film, and also inspired me by his approach, the intellectual approach that he had to filmmaking. The use of color, the use of form, color and form to affect the body. So, Peter and I became fast friends. Good friends.

00:40:05 MARK TOSCANO And were you seeing some of Peter's films he was...

00:40:07 BURTON GERSHFIELD I was seeing some of the films that he was shooting, and was very, very, I admired the work that he was doing, also. So, Bruce Lane, Peter Mays...

00:40:24 ANJA GERSHFIELD Pat O'Neill.

00:40:24 BURTON GERSHFIELD Pat O'Neill were maybe the three mainstays of my informative, and also Bill Moritz, were people who gave me more information, and I absorbed more information from them than I did from all the professors that I studied with at UCLA.

00:40:48 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) But we were at UCLA. We were required to do a student film. And, I had a faculty member assigned to me to oversee my work, and I decided to do a film about the [BG: Native] American Indians [BG: All American Tribes]. [technical]

00:41:32 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) While at UCLA, and meeting all these wonderful people, and I heard a song by Buffy Sainte-Marie. She was an Indian folk singer. And she sang a song called, “My Country 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying.” And it was an elegy [BG: lyrical elegy about genocide of Native American Indians and their brother buffalo], it was about the genocide of the American Indian. And the film affected the...

00:42:03 ANJA GERSHFIELD And their buffalo brothers.


00:42:04 BURTON GERSHFIELD And their buffalo brothers. The song affected me so much that I decided if I could do something in film that would have this same impact that the song had on me, if I could accomplish something like that, that would be a kind of a worthwhile thing to do. So, that's what I chose to do as my film project at UCLA. I titled my film after one of the lines in the song. One of the lines are, “Now the buffalo's gone” [BG: “Now that the buffalo’s gone”].

00:42:51 ANJA GERSHFIELD With permission.

00:42:52 BURTON GERSHFIELD And, I actually met her and got her permission to use that as the title for my film. I went to one of the “Be-Ins” with her and with a man named Doug Weston, who was the owner of the Troubadour Café. And she was singing at the Troubadour. And I went down, I met Doug, he introduced me to her. We went to this Be-In and spent the entire day together, at this Be-In at Griffith Park.

00:43:24 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And, then I started out collecting, and working with Pat O'Neill in the optical printer, and generating imagery that I wanted to use for the film. I generated a huge amount of imagery. In fact, some of the images I used… I'm sorry, Lewis Teague asked me, they were doing, we were going to do a show at the Cinematheque called Ghost Dance.

00:44:03 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And I supplied a lot of the imagery for that show that I did. It was an experimental type thing that he wanted to do. So, I had all this imagery and didn’t know how to put it together. I was stumped.

00:44:27 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And I ran into another person who influenced me at UCLA, who was a fellow student. And his name was David Lebrun. And David came in and looked at all of my film, and heard the song-- I played the song for him. And he said, “I got an idea on what to do. Couldn’t we work together on this?” He wanted to work on my film. I was very honored.

00:44:57 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And he came up with a brilliant structure for how to use the images. He basically, we edited it together, but he was basically the editor on the film, and structured it so that it was a solid piece, and did what I wanted to evoke that same feeling that the song evoked for me.


00:45:27 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) But, the film would never have been created without David's help. So, Pat O'Neill was my mentor, but David Lebrun was the midwife to the birth of my film.

00:45:57 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) The film I had to screen for my Faculty Member, a man named Floyd Crosby [BG: Floyd Crosby, was teaching for a short time at UCLA. He was, by trade, a renowned Cinematographer. Professor/ Cinematographer Crosby was also the father of David Crosby, of the fames rock and roll band Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.] -- and Floyd said that he was going to flunk me for the course, because the film made him sick when he saw it. And, I was elated because that's exactly what I wanted to happen.

00:46:27 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) I wanted kinesthetically to make people feel in their bodies through what they saw, how I felt about the genocide of the American Indian. And, he said, I'll give you two weeks to come up with another film, or I'm going to flunk you for the course.

00:46:49 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And I stood pat, and I said, no, I appreciate your offer, but this is what I'm going to submit. And the process that we went through when you submitted your student film was that it was screened before the entire faculty, and it was screened before the entire film student body.

00:47:14 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So, the film was screened, and was very controversial, talked about quite a bit between the faculty and the student body, and somehow was pronounced to be something worthwhile. And so I felt vindicated for standing my ground and not giving in to Floyd. Floyd's reaction to the film was exactly what I wanted. And I knew I had something that was interesting, or that was what I wanted to accomplish.

00:47:58 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So, the film was accepted into the student film show. There was going to be a student screening. It was the 10th Annual Student Film Screening at UCLA. And I have...

00:48:15 ANJA GERSHFIELD Called Changes.

00:48:16 BURTON GERSHFIELD Called Changes. Oh, my. And I have a copy of the... [technical]

00:48:23 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) The Film Show was shown at UCLA. [technical]


00:48:45 ANJA GERSHFIELD And then the Changes Program.

00:48:47 BURTON GERSHFIELD And the Changes Program was shown at Royce Hall at UCLA. And of course you can see that the reviews that came out about the film, both in the underground press and the over ground press were very impressive. Bruce Lane's film got a lot of reviews, beautiful reviews. My film for some reason, struck a cord, and just sent waves through the community.

00:49:26 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And I got calls from the industry about working, doing work with people in the industry because of the film. And the film then went to the National Student Film Show Awards, and it won first place in experimental film for that period. [technical]

00:50:08 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) Anyway, the film, yeah, go ahead...

00:50:10 MARK TOSCANO I was going to say, so, did the Changes Program travel?

00:50:14 BURTON GERSHFIELD No. Changes Program did not travel. It was at a specific time at UCLA. I think it was maybe two or three weekends in a row, and did not leave UCLA at all. But, something else, I mean, something else happened for the film. One is that Robert Pike at Creative Film Society [CFS] wanted to distribute the film, which I gave him the rights to do.

00:50:53 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And, a friend of mine, I'm going to get into this in just a moment, named Reg Childs, another student at UCLA while I was there, started a film company called Genesis Films, which were packages of student films, that were distributed to universities throughout the country. But I'll talk about that later. But that was another way it was distributed.

00:51:23 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) I'm not sure if the National Student Film, I don’t think they distributed the film anyway. The National Film Society. [BG: I don’t know if the Changes Program was distributed nationally.]

00:51:34 MARK TOSCANO But it did tour in the Genesis?

00:51:35 BURTON GERSHFIELD It did, oh yes. It did tour in the Genesis package. Absolutely. And, I have a whole history with Reg Childs, that if you want, I can talk about. Is that it, Anja?


00:51:56 ANJA GERSHFIELD Yes.

00:51:56 BURTON GERSHFIELD Is that the Reg Childs?

00:51:58 ANJA GERSHFIELD Yeah.

00:51:58 BURTON GERSHFIELD Okay. Why don’t you give it to me? Well, actually, I haven't finished on my film yet.

00:52:04 MARK TOSCANO Okay, we'll keep talking about it. [BG: See more of Reg Childs later in interview.]

00:52:05 BURTON GERSHFIELD Yeah, I'd like to finish. So, in any way, there was a whirlwind around the film. And it stirred up a lot of controversy, and I got a lot of calls from Hollywood. One call I got was from Universal Pictures. [BG: At Universal, Ed White, Head of Editoral Services, introduced me to Huggins.] Roy Huggins was a producer there. [BG: It was a one-time special on Grand-Prix (en francois) Grande Prix Racins – not to be confused with W. Roy Huggins’ TV series.]

00:52:38 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And he asked me to come and help him as an associate to do special effects on certain film programs that he was doing. So, that came up. And I worked at Universal for about, I don’t know, six months to a year, because of the film and because of the notoriety that it caused.

00:53:07 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) Then a second thing that happened was Bob Rafelson of “The Monkees” was introduced to the film by, I forget the man's name. He was a reviewer [BG: critical reviewer]. He took Bob Rafelson down to see the film. And I was immediately invited up to the offices where Head was being done, the Monkees film. [laugh]


00:53:39 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) It was the strangest thing because Jack Nicholson was the writer of Head, and Bob Rafelson, they had already shot the film, but there were a number of sequences in the film that they wanted to do special effects. And, so I immediately contacted, after being interviewed by them and them saying they wanted me to come and work, and add to the film, work on the film, I immediately contacted Bruce Lane, because Bruce and I had been working on some concepts, visual concepts that we wanted to try out, but we needed a real nice printer to work on.

00:54:24 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And this would give us the ability to work out some of the concepts that we were banning about between ourselves. So Bruce came to work with me on Head. And that was a great experience. I really enjoyed that. Bob Rafelson was a very colorful character. Jack Nicholson became a friend.

00:54:52 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And of course they went on to, during that time, they were doing Easy Rider. So, I went to the first screening when Dennis Hopper presented his 16-millimeter version that they had shot of Easy Rider, and to Bert Schneider, so that he could get some backing. And they went ahead and re-shot the entire film, most of it.

00:55:18 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) They kept one small scene in the cemetery in 16-millimeter. But they re-shot the entire film in 35 [mm]. So it was a pretty exciting time. It was a time that I had an interface with the actual film industry. It was the “Major Leagues.” [laugh]

00:55:47 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) You know, but I was bored, pretty much, because what I was being asked to do, and Bruce and I were asked to do was to put frosting on someone else's cake. And that was the end result of it. We had a chance to do the film, and it was the lowest grossing film in Columbia Pictures history. [laugh]

00:56:24 ANJA GERSHFIELD However, a cult classic.

00:56:25 BURTON GERSHFIELD But it then became a cult classic. And people are still reviewing it and looking at it to this day. My son actually has a copy of it. My son has a copy of Head, that he got so he could share what I had done in it. So, anyway, let me think. Oh, let me, I guess... [technical]

00:56:56 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) Anyway, the film generated a lot of industry interest. And so I suddenly was thrown into the bowels of the film industry, the actual, the industry itself.


00:57:23 ANJA GERSHFIELD And television.

00:57:24 BURTON GERSHFIELD And television, with Roy Huggins at Universal. And it wasn't that exciting to me. It was pretty boring stuff in the end. And it didn’t excite me as much as the things that I was learning and doing with Peter Mays, with Pat, with Bruce, and so forth.

00:58:01 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So, that's about all I can say about that. I think that's maybe the end of that chapter, and I was going to segue into Genesis Films. So, should we maybe take a break, and then segue into my relationship with Genesis Films and what happened there? Because I became an employee of Genesis Films.

end of tape 1


TAPE 2: BURTON GERSHFIELD

00:00:08 BURTON GERSHFIELD ...the film, after it ran on Changes, well, there was a gentleman at UCLA, named Reg Childs, another student. And he went to Filmways, a major film company at the time, and they decided to fund a company, which he called Genesis Films. And Genesis Films was going to take student films from around the country, and package them, and show them to colleges and universities around the country.

00:00:49 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) That was its concept, original concept, in what they wanted to do. So that was a wonderful way for student films to be seen in venues. I got called by Reg to come and work with him. And I became the director of project development at Genesis Films. At that time, I worked with Pat O'Neill. Pat O'Neill and I were working there. Pat was more on a casual basis. I worked there kind of full-time in a sense.

00:01:44 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) But one of the things that we worked together on making a, where is it? Oh, oh yes, here it is. We worked on making a poster for the series. There was “Genesis One,” that was “Genesis One.” “Genesis Two,” “Genesis Three,” “Genesis Four,” et cetera. So, Pat and I worked on generating the paper content, I don’t know what you call that.

00:02:23 STEPHANIE SAPIENZA Printed material?

00:02:24 BURTON GERSHFIELD All the printed material. And we also did an Introduction to the Package. That's for you, by the way.

00:02:33 MARK TOSCANO Okay, thanks.

00:02:34 BURTON GERSHFIELD We also did an introduction called “Genesis One,” and it was a very offbeat, crazy title. And we worked on that together, Pat and I.

00:02:53 MARK TOSCANO Was this the intro sequence?

00:02:55 BURTON GERSHFIELD The intro sequence. Absolutely.


00:02:56 MARK TOSCANO I have a copy of that from Pat.

00:02:58 BURTON GERSHFIELD Oh, you have a copy of that. Of “Genesis One” or Two or Three?

00:03:02 MARK TOSCANO One.

00:03:03 BURTON GERSHFIELD “Genesis One,” good. So that was the first one that we did together. And, later on, Pat and I and one other person, Neon Park, were called together by Reg, to form a company within Genesis Films called Illuminator. And Illuminator would be charged with doing all the work, all the graphic material, and all the film introduction work for Genesis Films. We also did other projects outside of Genesis Films, one of which was called...

00:03:58 ANJA GERSHFIELD “The Unexplained.”

00:03:59 BURTON GERSHFIELD “The Unexplained.”

00:04:02 ANJA GERSHFIELD It's right there on your paper.

00:04:03 BURTON GERSHFIELD I have it. “The Unexplained” was a television show that dealt with the fascinating exploration of the outer edges of man's knowledge. Our special guest was Arthur C. Clark, and we did all the special effects for that particular show, and it was produced by Lee Mendelson. He was a famous producer. He did all the Snoopy Cartoon Specials for television.

00:04:37 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So, here's a little piece about Illuminator. Illuminator was a special effects and optical design division of Genesis Films. And that's a little blurb about that. So there was the three of us, Pat O'Neill, Neon Park, and myself, in this division.

00:05:09 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) But, I think what happened is Pat O'Neill and Neon Park seemed to have a lot more, they got along better than I did. I was kind of the third man out. So they went on, and I eventually left the company. They carried on without me. They formed a very tight working, and I was in a sense kind of the third man out, on that.


00:05:54 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) But it was a very exciting time to work with Pat O'Neill, and to work with Neon, and to do all the work that we did in relationship to Genesis Films. Now, as the other hat that I wore at Genesis Films, which was the Director of Project Development, I had a crazy concept about introducing Frank Zappa to the head of Filmways, the mother company of Genesis Films. And so, I kind of engineered that through Reg Childs. I introduced Martin Ransohoff to Frank Zappa.

00:06:40 ANJA GERSHFIELD Martin Ransohoff.

00:06:43 BURTON GERSHFIELD And that was the instigation that turned out “200 Motels.” Martin Ransohoff decided to fund the project. And that created the “200 Motels” project. So, all of a sudden, everything went back to Frank again, as a creative being. Let me say, some of the other people that I worked with at Genesis Films were the man who did One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Ken Kesey. [AG: Burton translated video into film or vice-versa – the first time this was done.]

00:07:27 ANJA GERSHFIELD Ken Kesey.

00:07:29 BURTON GERSHFIELD Yes. So, Ken Kesey wanted me to come up to his farm and work there to put together all the film that he had generated on his trips time, when they were on the bus, on Further. And, anyway, all this film was laying in the corner of the barn that he lived in, up in Eugene, Oregon. And it was almost impossible to work because everybody was taking acid and so on all the time. Nitrous oxide, everybody... [technical] [BG: and there was cow dung on the celluloid].

00:08:19 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So, I think I worked for Reg under that capacity for about two years. And so, we had an interesting time between Pat O'Neill, with Neon Park and myself working for Reg Childs at Genesis Films. Genesis Films was a great organization. And I think that's about all I have to say about that.

00:08:46 MARK TOSCANO Did you end up doing anything with the Kesey material there?

00:08:49 BURTON GERSHFIELD No. To be honest with you, things got to the point where it was unworkable to do any work with it. People were too, it was too crazy a scene. I spent about three months up there, tried to organize it, and it was non-functional. It was like a non-functional moment. Ken was quite a special character, and was not an easy person to work with. So, nothing came of that, I'm afraid. I apologize.


00:09:25 MARK TOSCANO So, around this time, were there other commercial projects you got involved with? I mean, I'm thinking before 200 Motels came into it. Were there other projects you were... [AG: Burton is credited on 200 Motels as the second to last name on the credits.]

00:09:36 BURTON GERSHFIELD Hold on, let me stop for a second. There were a number of people that I worked with. One was a man named Alf Young. He was a British artist who came to town and wanted to do a number of projects, film projects. He had the financing to do them, and we were going to do a book by a Frenchman named Boris Vian, named Mood Indigo [BG: with a Duke Ellington sound score.] We bought the rights to it, and we were trying to produce it.

00:10:26 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) Also, there was an original piece that Alf wrote, called “Black Dick and Bet.” And so those were the two major projects that we worked on. And we had offices at PBS Productions. Where it was the company that eventually did Five Easy Pieces and Easy Rider.

00:10:53 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So, we worked on these projects for a couple months. Another man came over from England named Mike Meyers. He joined us, and then I had a very intense, emotional thing happen to me. I had a divorce from my first wife. And that took me out of the project.

00:11:19 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) It was a very intense moment, I couldn't concentrate, and I decided not to be a burden, and left the project. Another project that I worked on was a film called The Cathode Monster [The Cathode Ray Monster ].

00:11:43 ANYA Cathode Ray.

00:11:44 BURTON GERSHFIELD Cathode Ray Monster. It was a film that I was attempting to produce. We got pre-production money to do it. But I was doing that with a man named Ed Pressman. Ed had a company, Pressman Productions. We had pre-production money for that. We went into pre-production. It was a concept about a spaceship landing in Nevada, and then invading a closed system television system that was surrounding one of the Bunny Ranches there.


00:12:34 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And, these space creatures would take people into the television sets, and finally we worked on that for about six months, and that fell apart. I had very bad luck within the Hollywood industry. I think I was more of a creative type than I was a businessman, and I didn’t conduct business as well as I should have or could have.

00:13:12 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) Another project I worked on, [takes drink] pardon me, was with a man named Sepp Donahower. We did a project called FM TV. It was a precursor of MTV. We secured a television channel in Los Angeles called Channel 22. They were a business channel. And we did a 24-hour music video program. We ran it for a couple of weeks, we tried to get the funding for it.

00:13:58 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) Canada Dry was interested in funding it. The jeans company on Melrose [Avenue, Los Angeles] was potentially involved. Anyway, the funding never came around. People thought that the concept was too crazy, and we let it go. Maybe, I think maybe within about four years, MTV came along. And it happened, but we did this project way before then, and we weren't able to get it going.

00:14:42 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) It was conceptually right, but we couldn’t finance it properly. Couldn't get the financing together. Those are some of the other projects that I worked on during this time period.

00:15:02 MARK TOSCANO Did you want to talk in more detail about the 200 Motels? Or, did you want to say that, in the video to film aspect?

00:15:12 BURTON GERSHFIELD Well, that was a part of the film that fascinated me the most, shooting the film on video, and being able to generate effects on video. I think that was the most fascinating thing about it. But the fact that it just got done, the meeting that took place, I was at the meeting that took place between Martin Ransohoff and Frank Zappa.

00:15:40 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And that in itself was quite an interesting and colorful moment. Because I don’t know if you know Martin Ransohoff, but he was a fairly short, balding man, and wore Bermuda shorts, and was the antithesis of Frank. So it was amazing to see the two of them actually get along and agree to do this project.


00:16:14 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) But, I just got a lot of satisfaction from putting them together and seeing the project take place. That was somehow what I began doing in Hollywood, was becoming an interface, or a linkage between trying to get financing for projects. And I didn’t do very well at it. I wasn't very good. So, not much happened. Even though I had a lot of things on the burner. [AG: An acupuncturist call Burton a person who linked spiritual world with material world. God-given true talent + $$$ = a creative, meaningful or fantasy process provided and integrated = Einstein’s Theory of Relativity E=MC2 = The dream and the reality are one!]

00:16:59 MARK TOSCANO I don’t want to jump around too much, but I realize one thing we were kind of interested to talk to you about is the house…

00:17:08 BURTON GERSHFIELD Oh yes.

00:17:09 INTERVIEWER Pat O'Neill was the first one to tell me about that house, saying, you know, somebody should make a movie about that house.

00:17:16 BURTON GERSHFIELD Oh, it was quite an amazing, I'd like to tell you about it. It was the most that, Peter Mays, myself, Bruce Lane, a man named Terry Forgette [AG: Travelling newsman filmmaker, once Janis Joplin’s boyfriend, lived in San Francisco on an antique train], and another man named Jeff Perkins. Jeff Perkins was one of the people that worked for Lewis Teague, and had just come back from New York. He was Yoko Ono's boyfriend, before she met John Lennon. So, he was one of the members of the household. But everyone in the...

00:17:58 MARK TOSCANO Where was the house?

00:17:59 BURTON GERSHFIELD The house was on Queens Road, and right in the heart of Hollywood. I don’t know if you know, Queens Road runs right up into the hills, and we were right on the first level there. It was a mansion. We all contributed to living there. And we were able to secure this beautiful old mansion.

00:18:26 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And, everybody was involved in doing something quite creative at that time. And we also used the place, used the physical environment for shooting. Laurie Lewis, who was another student at UCLA came up and shot a big portion of his film there. It was a party scene, and we used the entire house in order to shoot it.


00:19:17 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) At that time, Terry Forgette, who [whom] I shared a bathroom with in the house, he was going out with Janis Joplin at the time. So Janis was coming by the house quite a bit. Bruce Lane was shooting his opus, Albion Moonlight, and he had his actor, his main actor, who was a midget, a young man named Larry Smith, actually, I think his last name was Smith.

00:19:52 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And Larry lived in Bruce's room underneath his card table, and would wake us up at night, smashing dishes in the kitchen because nobody would leave dishes near where he could reach them. So he was quite a character to be around.

00:20:14 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So, Bruce was actually shooting quite a bit of his film there and preparing it. I don’t know if you know Albion Moonlight by Kenneth Patchen.

00:20:22 MARK TOSCANO Yeah.

00:20:22 BURTON GERSHFIELD It's a great piece and that was the work that he was really dedicated to trying to bring into the world. Peter Mays was shooting there, shooting his films there. So it was a very creative time. It was a time where everybody was interfacing, and we all lived together in a very, it was like a creative venue.

00:20:58 MARK TOSCANO Shooting on the buildings?

00:20:59 BURTON GERSHFIELD Oh, and one of the things that we used to do was set up projectors on the rim of the outside of the porch, and we shot film onto the buildings, on Sunset Boulevard, so that you could see them, as you rode up and down the street. So we did a little bit of Guerrilla Theater out of the household also.

00:21:25 MARK TOSCANO What years was that?

00:21:27 BURTON GERSHFIELD What years? That's a good question. I can't remember

00:21:31 MARK TOSCANO Was it while you were at UCLA?

00:21:33 BURTON GERSHFIELD No. I was out of UCLA. I was actually, at that time, just starting work on Head, I believe. So it was probably later than my, I had already left UCLA.


00:21:50 INTERVIEWER So around '68, maybe?

00:21:51 BURTON GERSHFIELD Somewhere in that area, '68, '69. Yes. It was just a time when it became a center for all kinds of film activity, and was a very creative moment and a very interesting time.

00:22:21 INTERVIEWER So, again, not meaning to jump around too much, but I did also want to ask you, and this is a larger topic too, but maybe starting with Now that the Buffalo's Gone, you talked about having interest in the kinesthetic properties of cinema, and the way that seeing and hearing something can affect the body and affect the mind.

00:22:42 BURTON GERSHFIELD Affect the body. Yes. Yes.

00:22:46 INTERVIEWER And how did you approach that in Now that the Buffalo's Gone?

00:22:50 BURTON GERSHFIELD Well, what I did was, I investigated in the rhythms that the optic nerve sends impulses back to the brain. And if you see the film, you'll notice that there are times that the rhythms of the colors and the images are in a certain sequence, that they actually affect the body through the optic nerve, going into the brain. There are pulses that are used in the film to generate that experience.

00:23:38 INTERVIEWER How about the choices of colors?

00:23:41 BURTON GERSHFIELD Choices of colors were kind of random. I just, as I said, I generated thousands of feet of film in the optical printer, and the ones that appealed to me and to David Lebrun were the ones that we used. I just generated the footage and used it after, looked at it after. [technical]

00:24:30 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) We were, I believe talking about the house on Queens Road. And one of the things I left out, and that's very valuable, is that Peter Mays, one of the things that he was doing at the house, he had set up in the basement, and he was working with a man named Jon Greene, and others, on a Light Show, called “The Single Wing Turquoise Bird”.

00:24:59 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And I happened to be close to and friends with a man named John Van Hamersveld. I'm not sure if you know John Van Hamersveld at all?


00:25:10 INTERVIEWER No, I don’t know him.

00:25:11 BURTON GERSHFIELD But he did the poster for Endless Summer. He was a graphic designer. Some of this is his work. He had a company with Sepp Donahauer called The Pinnacle. And at the Shrine Auditorium, they did all kinds of concerts. And he would design all the print material. Here's some of his work.

00:25:42 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And I introduced Peter to John, and that resulted in “The Single Wing Turquoise Bird” being the Light Show for that whole series of concerts. They did them with everyone, for The Who, with Jimi Hendrix, with Chuck Berry. I mean, they were the premiere music producing company at the time.

00:26:18 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So, let me think. Here's one last one on John Van Hamersveld. Another poster for their work. His work. So, John and I became friends, and he introduced me to a man named Norman Seeff. And Norman Seeff was a very famous photographer. Music, rock and roll photographer.

00:26:48 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And, Norman and I did an album cover for Ike and Tina Turner that Norman did like an origami opening for the cover. And I did all the special effects [BG: extra-ordinary lost in passage of time, first of a kind] for all the shots that he had taken with Ike and Tina Turner. And that album cover won Album Cover of the Year for the year that it came out.

00:27:14 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) It was a very special piece, and, so I'm just going to run down a couple of other things that I was involved with, that Anya reminded me of. One is that I worked with David Carradine on Dr. Strange. We were going to try to produce Dr. Strange, this is before all the comic things happened. But we were going to try to do Dr. Strange as a film, and we did a lot of work together on that. Then we just continued.

00:27:55 BURTON GERSHFIELD Well, then there's a film here called Jimi Plays Berkeley. There was a live concert, taken of Jimi Hendrix, playing at Berkeley on May, 1970. This was when it was very controversial, when Jimi was being attacked by the Black Panthers and so forth. So, I met Jimi's manager, and told him this concert should be filmed, and put together him with some people who filmed, made this come together.


00:28:33 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So, this is one of the premiere pieces on Jimi [Anja Gershfield’s note: Burton’s idea solely]. I don’t think very many people have seen it, but it's a very beautiful piece that was done on Jimi. And basically what I became is kind of like a linker of people who had ideas, or I had an idea, and I would try to get someone to fund it and so forth, and so this is another piece that I was involved in.

00:29:00 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) Then, another attempt in Hollywood. Because this is all Hollywood orientation-type things. But Peter Mays and I attempted to buy the rights to The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1980) [a mockumentary film about the British punk rock band Sex Pistols]. It was the Sex Pistols' film that was released in England, but never got released in America, as a theater piece. And we put a lot of time and energy into trying to acquire the rights to that. It never happened. Like almost everything I did.

00:29:42 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) I spent a year and a half in London. And while I was there, I met with and worked with Peter Townsend. And Peter wanted to do one of his pieces, Tommy, as a Rock Opera. So, I worked with him during the time I was there, trying to develop that into a film. It was taken, changed, and later done, of course, and released.

00:30:10 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And so that was another piece that I was involved with while I was in London. Then, I worked with a man named James Brooks. And James Brooks was a producer, producing at that time, a film called, it was a pilot for a film series, called The Class Of '55.

00:30:34 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) It never got done, again. [laugh] All these things that never got done. But he went on to become the executive producer of The Simpsons, James L. Brooks. So, I worked with him on that. Then I bought the rights to Lord of Light, a science-fiction classic by Roger Zelazny, and I worked on putting that together, as a film project.


00:31:06 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And, let me think. Then, Anya wants me to mention this. My wife wants me to mention this, but I worked for a couple years, managing an all-girl rock and roll band called Hardly Dangerous. [AG: An all-girl rock n’ roll band, Hardly Dangerous was a take off on Harley Davidson. They had a catalog of all original melody and lyrics. They were gifted, young, beautiful musicians, and no one has ever forward to compete. Queen’s Manager Roy Thomas Baker wanted them, but Burton after showcasing them they wanted only Burton to produce and manage them.] And they were all kind of part of the scene that was hovering around, I'm sorry. I'm going to ask my wife. What was the group? Anyway, the group that did...

00:31:48 ANYA GERSHFIELD Guns N' Roses.

00:31:50 BURTON GERSHFIELD Guns N' Roses. They were all a part of this Guns N' Roses scenario that was taking place in L.A. [AG: on the Sunset Strip]. They were very good.

00:32:00 BURTON GERSHFIELD We worked for a couple of years trying to get them a deal, which never happened. But that was a very interesting piece that I spent time on. So those were some of the extracurricular activities. So that's all I'm going to mention to you.

00:32:18 ANYA GERSHFIELD What about Selznick?

00:32:19 BURTON GERSHFIELD Oh, I'm sorry. One last thing. [technical]

00:32:24 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) I want to mention, in terms of work projects that I did to try to become part of the Hollywood scene, but in my own way. I worked with a man named Danny Selznick [BG: Daniel, a/k/a Danny]. Danny Selznick was David O' Selznick's son, and also Louis B. Mayer's grandson. So he was Hollywood royalty. He was very well-respected. He was a producer at Universal. And we took on a project called Maxagasm, which was originally commissioned by The Rolling Stones' singer.

00:33:09 ANJA GERSHFIELD Mick Jagger.


00:33:09 BURTON GERSHFIELD Mick Jagger. It was originally commissioned by Mick Jagger, and it was known in Hollywood as a piece that everybody wanted to do, but nobody could figure out how to do it. We thought we could figure it out, and we failed also. But, I worked with Danny on that for a good amount of time. I put a lot of money of my own money that I had at that time. I happened to be feeling a little bit wealthy.

00:33:37 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So I spent a lot of my money on that, and I spent a lot of my money on the all-girls rock n’ roll group too. So, quite a bit of what I tried to do in Hollywood was finance my own projects, until someone else could step in and take over. And that somehow never happened. So, I was not very successful as a businessman. I was more successful as an artist.

00:34:05 INTERVIEWER It sounds like an important thing that you wanted to try to do was to do things your own way, independently enough, you know, while still working in the industry. And, I mean, does that show off that it is a company town in some ways? It's kind of hard…

00:34:21 BURTON GERSHFIELD It is a company town. And it's the film business. It's the business of filmmaking [AG: Burton calls it Show Business, a/k/a or d/b/a “The Business of Show”]. It is not oriented towards artistic endeavors, which is what I tried to inject into the industry. That was the attempt, was to bring some artistic integrity to the process, when I really, all along, it was a business proposition only and mainly.

00:35:05 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So, there wasn't a desire to do, or to promote artistic and new or different ventures, on the main part. There were some moments, as we've seen in the last few years. In fact, this one film that just came out is quite interesting, Avatar. You know, it uses 3-D and all computer effects.

00:35:37 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) It's kind of a groundbreaking piece for Hollywood, but, it had to be done by someone who had that amount of clout. It takes a lot of clout and it takes a lot of positioning in order to really do something viable in the film business. No, I learned that it was a business and it wasn't set up for artistic purposes. And it was disappointing.

00:36:10 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) But I've tried to play the game, and I've failed at it. I've tried to play the game linking money, and what I considered to be viable pieces, but never, I lost the game. That's about it.


00:36:31 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) Well, and then I wanted to tell you more, if I could about Pinnacle, I talked about the fact that the Light Show was done by Peter Mays and his group. And I always supported them. I think they're actually having some work done in the year 2012. They're doing a retrospective, or a big show somewhere around.

00:37:02 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) But, Pinnacle was a great experience, and did a lot of really good work in exposing the cream of the crop of the musical energy that was happening. It was similar to what Bill Graham was doing in San Francisco. I think that's about it for the moment.

00:37:33 MARK TOSCANO How involved did you get with “The Single Wing Turquoise Bird”.

00:37:36 BURTON GERSHFIELD I was a peripheral, sort of peripherally involved with that. It was mainly Peter Mays, a man named Jon Greene, he did most of the liquid part of the show. I supplied a lot of film imagery. Because a lot of the film that I had generated for Now that the Buffalo's Gone was stroboscopic, and fit the music.

00:38:10 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) In other words, when the music played, it synchronized with the music. It would do that, automatically, almost. So, I supplied them with footage. I promoted them, I linked them with John Van Hamersveld and with Pinnacle, so that they would have a setting to work out of, and they did brilliant work.

00:38:35 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) They did really great work. There was another man named Jeff Perkins, who was involved with them. Jeff was from the Cinematheque [in Los Angeles on Sunset Blvd.]. And also lived at the house on Queens Road.

00:38:52 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) But that was some of the attempts that I tried to do in Hollywood, to try to turn it around or to try to make it a more artistic community. And it's not easy to do. It's a very difficult position to take. So I gave up doing my own work in order to try to accomplish that. And maybe I made some wrong choices in doing that, but those are the choices that I made.

00:39:29 INTERVIEWER The thing I know best of your commercial work is the stuff in Head. And that's a film I've seen a few times, for the many years, I've known it, you know, and liked it. It's a pretty great movie, I think.


00:39:40 BURTON GERSHFIELD Yeah, it's a very unusual piece. I mean, the Monkees were at the lowest point in their flight at that moment when the film was released, so it had a very bad release. But it certainly has a lot of integrity now. The visuals that we did, that Bruce and I did, Bruce had some incredible ideas.

00:40:11 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) I mean, the amount of footage that we got into the film was miniscule. Maybe about five percent of the work that we generated got into the film. But, Bruce came up with some brilliant ideas. And I was just extremely pleased with working with him. I consider Bruce a genius. I think he's another person who I learned a lot from. Including Peter Mays and including Pat O'Neill [BG: and David Lebrun].

00:40:49 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) And certainly as an inspiration, Bill Moritz was in a way the person who inspired everyone. He was such a promoter of brilliant works, and he infiltrated the whole underground Hollywood movement. And it became an inspiration for many people.

00:41:26 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So, Bill was a really magical creature. A very, very, certainly affected me a great deal. A lot of the works that he showed inspired me to include them in what I did in Buffalo. So, he played a very important role in my...

00:41:55 BURTON GERSHFIELD (CONTINUED) So as I said, I think I learned a lot more from these people that I hung out with and a lot more from the students than I did, but being at UCLA at that particular time was a very, very exciting moment. The kind of energy, the kind of filmmaking that was going on, and the personnel, the people that were all gathered there, really were very inspiring. It was a great time. A very, very important time in the filmmaking process that took place in Hollywood.

end of tape 2

Burton Gershfield Oral History Transcript

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