Robert Hawk talks with director Rick McKay, whose Broadway: The Golden Age looks back at a theatrical era in New York that is thought by many to no longer exist, except in the memories of those old enough to remember— including the privileged few who lived it and are interviewed by McKay in his award-winning documentary.

46th Street in 1960.

“As a theater-mad teenager from New Jersey, I began going into New York to see shows in the 1950s. After college, I moved to New York City and continued this passionate pursuit, and in the mid-’60s also began working Off-Broadway, beginning as a lowly-paid (i.e., non-union) techie. Eventually I became a union stage manager and went out on “the road.” Having done four shows in a row in San Francisco, I began to meet some of the independent filmmakers who found the Bay Area a particularly supportive environment for alternative artists. Eventually I met Academy Award-winning documentarian Rob Epstein (then 19 years old), and the first film I worked on was Epstein’s The Times of Harvey Milk. Since leaving there, I returned to New York, where I continue to work as an independent film consultant and producer. Everything I learned in the theater I still use in my film work— and I still avidly attend the theater, which for me is like returning to the well and refreshing my sometimes celluloid-weary eyes and brain.

I learned about Rick McKay’s film at a party, where he screened selected excerpts from interviews with an astounding array of theater luminaries— some of whom were in the room. It seemed to whet everyone’s appetite to see more, and there was much more to come— some 300 hours of raw footage! So it was with great anticipation (and relief) that I finally saw one of several “finished” versions of Broadway: The Golden Age at the Savannah Film Festival in October 2003. Needless to say, I eagerly accepted Filmmaker magazine’s invitation to do the following interview with Rick McKay.”— Robert Hawk

Opening June 11, Broadway: The Golden Age will be the first theatrical release of Dada Films, recently founded by MJ Peckos and Bob Myerson.

Director Rick McKay and Carol Channing.

Robert Hawk: I attend a lot of festivals and one thought expressed over and over again [about your film] has been, “I could have watched hours more.” Can you talk a little bit about the genesis of the project, your inspiration, what motivated you to make this film, and also, how much actual footage did you end up with, both your original interviews as well as how much archival footage you had to work with. How did you get it down to under two hours?

Rick McKay: I was a segment producer at City Arts, which is a WNET/PBS arts show that is no longer on. It became Egg, The Arts Show, and went national. They always gave me theater-related stories, because I had been an actor and a singer, and I was a writer, and they put them together and said, “You’ll do the theater pieces.”

But I wanted to do something different, and I was at a July 4^th party for the actress and playwright June Havoc. Her assistant had invited two young girls, and one of them was doing a mural for the Times Square Visitor’s Center, and she said, “ [The mural’s] going to be 40 feet long and 20 feet high and it’s going to have 100 [theater] legends in it. And you should cover it for City Arts.” And I said, “Well, I can’t, the show is on hiatus for the summer, there’s no one even in the office.” But I’m one of those people that— you plant that seed and I thought, oh, I’ll just go and shoot it myself.

Fay Wray

So, I filmed over the summer about 6 or 8 times. But when I pitched it to City Arts they didn’t go for it. They said, “It’s not quite us. If we’re going to do a show on a painter, we want to do someone radical.” So I pursued it on my own, and decided to make a short film to send out to festivals, but I couldn’t get anyone interested in it. A friend of mine, Wendey Stanzler, who edited Roger & Me and Sex and the City, told me, “It’s hard to make a painter fascinating. You need some of the [actual] people from the mural,” which was filled with impressionistic sketches of over 100 people from the theater. “Go ask some of them what it was like.”

And I thought to myself, this is what I always wanted to know anyway. I would do that with old relatives. I’d do that with my next-door neighbor, a hillbilly who had gone on her honeymoon to New York on a bus with her husband. And I used to ask her over and over, “What was it like in New York? Did you see Oklahoma?” She was the only person I knew who ever went to New York.

And I interviewed two or three of the people depicted in the mural— and as I cut them into the piece they started to overwhelm the film. Unfortunately for the painter, but it led to something much bigger: I think I filmed 140 people, and I did 300 hours of interviews.

And, of course, I had not originally planned to film so many people. Ken Burns’s Jazz series was 17 hours, and he interviewed 76 people. So it’s common sense, if you need 14 hours to do 76 people, then for a 2-hour film, you better not do too many, you know. But it started becoming a mission.

I was always hearing someone else is doing this film. Someone else is always doing it. And often, it was from a demo that I had that I’d shown when looking for money; someone else would take that and make something out of it. I won’t name names, but one TV distribution company said they could sell it and then claimed they couldn’t, but then the company made their own 50-minute version with almost the same names, which came and went because they did no press, they didn’t push it.

Elizabeth Ashley

Everyone kept telling me to quit; someone else is doing it, you took too long. PBS said they would help me, but they didn’t want me to use old people. They said, “Our demographic is dying, we need young people!” And they actually showed me a program about a doo-wop festival, and they said, “This is the stuff we want, where we can sell things on TV to raise money. You know, you get some of these people and sit down and pitch it, you write it and use young people to tell the history.” And I sat there thinking to myself, I’m more alone now than I was before the meeting, because I was at WNET and I had held out that hope that they’d see the value of this. And also, the original cut of the film had 30 young people at the end all talking about where theater is going. And I realized that that was another movie. And I cut them out little by little until Alec Baldwin was the last one I left in, because I thought he’s the closest to that era, in terms of charisma—

Hawk: And now he’s on Broadway.

McKay: Exactly.

Hawk: What span of time are we talking about— from let’s say first interview to locking picture and sending it out to festivals?

McKay: I think the first interview was a few days after 4^th of July, 1998. Five years later I locked picture and sent it out to festivals. For someone like me— I became a filmmaker at 40, after years of being a writer/performer— it’s an enormous amount of your life. But in the world we live in today, I suppose it’s not unusual: every film in a festival these days seems to have taken 10 years [laughs].

Hawk: How did you finance the film?

McKay: Initially, after being rejected by PBS, Jane Klain [from the Museum of TV and Radio], who later became an associate producer on the film, recommended that I approach the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) for funding, because someone she knew who had done a film about theater had got $500,000 from them. But the NEH said they couldn’t help me because I had to have a contract guaranteeing that the film was going to be on TV— and it couldn’t be cable or pay TV. And I had to have a board of historians as advisors… and I thought, by the time I met all their requirements I would be making the piece that PBS wanted to make, and will make, and is making. You know, they’re making a 6-part Ken Burns-type mini-series called Broadway: The American Musical.

Alec Baldwin

So, I decided instead to do backers auditions— which is a technique I really haven’t heard about other filmmakers using that much, but which I learned about the same way I learned to put a Murphy bed in my bedroom and make it into a production space from Betty Garrett talking about it in my film— from Hal Prince, when he talks about John Raitt doing backers’ auditions in Edie Adams’s apartment…

So, I approached Jamie deRoy, who I had worked with before, and she agreed to throw a party at her apartment. And she loved stars, so I invited Fay Wray, Celeste Holm, Farley Granger, Patricia Morison and Elizabeth Ashley— who each appear in the film— and, now that I think of it, you were there at the first one. So, as you know, I’d just stand up, tell folks what the film is going to be, and ask if they’d like to give $1,000 to have their name on the film. And we did a number of those get-togethers to raise money.

And, much like that, I used out-of-town previews— which of course I knew from old movies like Bandwagon. But, I thought, do they still exist today? So, I decided to use festivals as out-of-town previews [to refine the film]. And our first festival was Palm Beach.

Hawk: Just last year?

McKay: Yes. And exactly a year later, tomorrow, I’m going back to Palm Beach. They’re bringing back Broadway: the Golden Age as their big hit from last year.

Hawk: Did you change the film after screening it in festivals?

McKay: The version Palm Springs screened a year ago bears little relation to the film I finished. It would be interesting, if this film ever has the life that I hope it will have, to compare the original version with the one that is finally being released theatrically— because there are 35 people in the original who are not in the final film, and there are at least 20 that I added. Structurally it’s the same: it’s in a chapter format. But it doesn’t deal with the same things and it doesn’t come to the same conclusions.

Martin Landau

I was so sneaky once that I put “1 hour and 58 minutes” on the side of a tape I sent to a festival. But when they watched it, they called me and said, “We want your film but it isn’t 1 hour and 58 minutes, it’s well over 2 hours.” And I said, “Well, actually, there are some extras.” And they said, “We’re concerned because we slotted it in a 2-hour time slot.” And I said, “I’ll do a little trimming.” And I’d actually have to trim 11 minutes to meet the time I said I’d meet!

I was often still editing until the night before a festival screening, and I’d simply have another Beta SP dub made and when I’d get to the festival I’d say, “The print you’ve got has a glitch on it, I need to switch it out.” And it was a completely different film, even from the version I sent two weeks before, not to mention the one two months before that. And then each festival I went to, I would do that.

Eventually, I would try to find festivals that let us project directly from DV Cam. I have two portable DV Cams, so I would just take one along in my bag. Then I didn’t have to pay $300 to transfer to Beta SP.

Every festival that the film screened at, it was a slightly different movie— sometimes greatly different. One festival we went to, the film came in at 95 minutes, and I thought, that’s so tight. But about 3/4 of the way through the movie, I realized that there were whole chapters I’d never put in for that version [laughs], and I was like, oh, they won’t notice. And we still won the Audience Award, but I felt so guilty, I felt like getting up in front of the audience and saying, “By the way, 10 minutes were left out of the movie.”

Hawk: Have you now locked the film for good?

McKay: Yes— 35mm, that’s the key, you can’t play with that.

Hawk: What running time is the theatrical version?

McKay: 111 minutes. I think it’s only a minute different from what you saw, but I cut out one chapter, and added the new one with Ben Gazzara and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Once I found footage from that production, I couldn’t not use it. Ben said I shouldn’t bother looking, because it was never filmed. But I said I had seen someone who looks like him in footage at a stock company, and he said, “Impossible.” So we did the interview, and when I sent it to him, he called me the day he got it and he said, “I’m in tears, I don’t believe it.”

Hawk: With all the editing, and all the years of putting stuff in and taking it out, when you had to bite the bullet for this 35mm theatrical print, are there things that you could single out that you had to lose? In the business it’s called “killing your babies”— and documentarians, particularly, almost always are working with much more footage than they can possibly use. So are there any babies that you had to “kill” that you want to talk about, and are there plans to include that footage on the DVD?

McKay: When I had to “kill my babies,” so to speak, it was those three syllables— DVD— that got me through. Because in TV, when you “kill your babies,” you are flushing them down the toilet. But with your film, especially if you get theatrical, you keep saying to yourself, “I’ll put it on the DVD— it’ll make it easier if I have to lose this.”

Maureen Stapleton

One story I hated losing was June Havoc’s story of getting the job in Pal Joey. She was Gypsy Rose Lee’s little sister and she had a lot of trouble getting work, partly because, you know, her sister was a famous stripper, and she wasn’t taken terribly seriously. And also, she just struggled. And she told a very touching story about the day she’d pooled money together with some friends to do an agent showcase at 11:00 at night, and when it was all over and the agents had left, and nothing had happened, one guy sauntered down the aisle and said, “Can you dance and sing some more? I’d like you to come over to the theater across the street and see somebody.” And everyone was like, “No, she can’t go.” He said, “I’m a special agent, don’t worry.” And he walked her across the street [to another theater]. Someone there asked her, “Do you know Tea for Two?” and she said, “I don’t know all the words.” And Richard Rodgers played Tea for Two for her and threw her the words. And when she finished, [director] George Abbott said, “That was lovely, you’ll hear from us, thank you.” And, as she said in the interview: “I went home, I climbed the stairs of my sixth floor walk-up, I sat in my bathtub in the kitchen, and I started to cry because I had heard ‘You’ll hear from us’ so many times before… But then the phone rang and I almost electrocuted myself when I answered it in the bathtub, and they said ‘Mr. Abbott’s office wants to see you at 10:00 tomorrow morning.’” And she almost cried on camera.

I hated cutting that. And I hated cutting out a whole chapter of Marian Seldes talking about the first time she saw Katherine Cornell. And I cut a section from the film dealing with everyone’s first job: Liz Ashley learning four chords and working as a singer in a folk bar down in Greenwich Village in the ’50s. Perfectly dreadful.

Hawk: In an interview that I read with you, you said that you did not want to separate out musicals, even though PBS is doing their own series on Broadway musicals. Was your intention to give equal weight to musicals and drama?

McKay: Actually, I didn’t try to give them equal weight, but I also didn’t separate them— even though I did notice that one of the knockoffs of my film only focused on dramatic productions, and I soon realized why. Because of the licensing. It’s much cheaper not to have to clear music rights. Of course PBS can do the musicals because ASCAP and BMI have a deal with PBS where they get things for a token fee.

Perhaps naively, I didn’t know when I started this film I would need to pay so much for music rights. And it’s outrageous. I knew enough to make the film but didn’t know enough to know it was impossible to do something like this theatrically with 20 songs, all with different composers and licensing and things like that. And the archival footage— everything is more expensive if you want to have a theatrical release.

Hawk: Were you always committed to structuring the film in a more personal way?

Laurette Taylor

McKay: When it was clear PBS was going to do a big-budget series, that gave me permission to do something more personal. Having worked in the PBS format before, I didn’t want to draw an arc of the history of the century and split it up into six sections and cover eras and know that it had to be textbook accurate and then get a portentous voice to do the voice-over and tie it together. Because what you really do in TV is write it first and then you get folks to say what you need them to say. And that’s the way we always worked at City Arts.

With this film, I realized I could do what I always wanted to do. I thought, I’m just going to keep asking these questions and let the film dictate where it goes rather than shoehorn it into a preconceived structure. Like the Russian proverb, “The work will teach you,” the work has taught me how to do it. Now the work will tell me the end of the film and where the film is going.

And I would never have anticipated when I began that I’d now be trying to sell a movie that has large sections devoted to Laurette Taylor, Kim Stanley and Gretchen Wyler, who no one even knows today. I never even heard of them.

Hawk: [laughs]

Patricia Neal

McKay: As I edited, I began to think, this is insane: Gretchen Wyler can’t take up this much time in the film because she was not even one of the top players. But twice in the film she gets cheers and applause, even at a press screening in New York last month, when she says about Sardi’s, “I can’t go back 20 years later and have them expect to remember me, so I make my friends tell them who I was. I can’t not get the best table!” And when she gets the table, the whole audience cheers. Who would have guessed? I suppose she represents that part in all of us that doesn’t want to be forgotten. She’s the blue-collar star, the working star who never became a household name, but she had her name over the title in a number of roles that she replaced people in.

Most people think of Helen Hayes as the first lady of American theater, but no one I interviewed ever said “Watching Helen Hayes changed my life.” Everyone loved Helen Hayes because she was so dear and so good at what she did, but she wasn’t a performer who changed lives. Consistently, among the 100 or so people I interviewed, it was Kim Stanley or Laurette Taylor. And so, that became my passion: I thought, if nothing else happens, people will remember who Laurette Taylor was. Or Kim Stanley— who people cried talking about.

And as I diverged more and more from the conventional path a TV documentary would take, I’d think, Well, now you’ve done it— you’ve gone this far out on a limb, you might as well stay out there or you’re going to end up with a compromise.

Hawk: Have you given any thought to making the hundreds of unedited interviews you did available to researchers?

McKay: I definitely have thought about it and one thing that inspired me was Lincoln Center—

Hawk: The Library for the Performing Arts.

McKay: Yes. But the thing with Lincoln Center is, you have to prove that you’re a scholar or an actor playing the role to be able to access the archives. And I always thought the one part of the equation that makes the theater interesting is the audience. But the audience is never allowed to see this material. So I would like it to go to someplace where real people can go.

Shirley MacLaine

When I was a kid in Indiana, in Beach Grove, I’d skip school and ride my bicycle downtown to the library, where I’d read old copies of the New York Times. I’d study them and dream of moving to New York. And I always thought, I’d like my whole collection to go to a library where a kid could go and find out what it was like. Because it could influence the future of theater and film for them to see how people worked before. But now libraries can’t even stay open…

Someday I would like to take all of my footage and make a series. I always thought it would be nice to make an Actor’s Studio-type show of half-hour-long profiles. Only without the unctuous host— which would make it 22 minutes.

Hawk: [laughs]

McKay: It could also be made available over the Internet; as long as it could not be licensed or used in another project, I’d love for it to be accessible to everyone.

Hawk: Because it’s an invaluable legacy… I want to end with a more philosophical question: What is a Golden Age? As Barbara Cook, who’s now on stage performing in her one-woman show, Barbara Cook’s Broadway, says, “I wish I knew at the time I was living in a golden era, I would have had more fun.”

Personally, I feel that A Chorus Line is a demarcation line in many ways. It marked the death of the star-driven musical— and there are a couple of exceptions on Broadway right now, but on the whole, A Chorus Line kind of democratized the musical. Let’s not even get into Andrew Lloyd Webber and all of these ponderous musicals where, even though Michael Crawford is a star, Phantom of the Opera has gone on for years and years and years without him.

McKay: Or any name.

Hawk: And we have these institutions, Miss Saigon, Les Miz, Cats. Betty Buckley was the nominal star of Cats, but Cats survived for many years without her.

Do you think the star-driven musical, as we knew it, is over? And if so, is it because of Andrew Lloyd Webber, A Chorus Line, and director/choreographers who became stars— like Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Michael Bennett and Tommy Tune?

On Broadway today, there are only two star-driven musicals as far as I’m concerned, one is The Boy From Oz, with Hugh Jackman, who is a real star. And Bernadette Peters in the umpteenth revival of Gypsy. But other than that, you can pretty much put anybody in a show; the show’s the star.

McKay: Well, it’s intentional. I said to Cameron Mackintosh, who’s on the DVD, “There are no stars in the shows anymore, and if you’re not creating stars, there are no future stars standing in the wings to be inspired by them.” And Cameron Mackintosh looked at me and said, “Hey, I’m the luckiest guy in the world; this is the way it should be. I’ve had five of the biggest hits in the history of musical theater, and not one of them depended on a star.”

There are no stars because producers consciously try not to create them any more. And I think you’re right about A Chorus Line starting that. And it’s funny you bring this up because I intended it to be in the film but the topic became too big: When I was still in high school I didn’t think, I really love this medium that’s now passé. I thought musical theater was still revolutionary. Company and Follies both seemed revolutionary at the time.

Times Square circa 1948

Hawk: And they’re both ensembles.

McKay: Exactly. No stars.

Hawk: You don’t need a star anymore. You have show-stopping numbers. Elaine Stritch is a very interesting example of someone who stopped the show, in Company—

McKay: — In spite of the show.

Hawk: But she was easily replaced, and yet, when she did her recent one-woman show, Elaine Stritch At Liberty, I went back to see it several times because it made me feel the way I felt so often when I was growing up and going to the theater.

McKay: That’s a good point. And you know, those girls have had to almost single-handedly rewrite history to keep a career going. When you look at the three survivors from that era— Barbara Cook, Elaine Stritch and Chita Rivera— none of them was a name above the title [earlier in their careers].

Hawk: Is the theater at a point where it can’t possibly be what it was?

McKay: Well, I think the world is supposed to change. If it didn’t, we’d still be doing only Gilbert and Sullivan musicals. Rodgers and Hammerstein, Rodgers and Hart, Gershwin, Berlin— none of them would have gotten their day, they wouldn’t have had a chance. So I think it’s supposed to change. And I also think Golden Ages aren’t supposed to last either. I think it was the confluence of the stars in the sky and the ones who were working, and the world we lived in— the innocence, the sophistication— the combination of the two, that made that era happen.

I think that producers today are to be applauded because, against the odds, they’ve kept live theater going. But they have done it purely from a business standpoint— adapting a Billy Joel or an ABBA songbook, using a collection of music that everyone already knows, or a book that’s already familiar from movies, that’s family-friendly.

And you don’t have to worry about stars because stars have gone to TV and Hollywood. There’s no longer that feeling that it’s looked down upon to go to Hollywood, it’s looked at as eccentric to want to work on stage. Alec Baldwin told me young actors, when they don’t have anything after the movie they’re in with him, will ask, “ What am I going to do?” And he’ll say, “Why don’t you do a play for a while, do a workshop.” And they’ll say, “Oh, yeah, uh huh, well yeah.” But they have no interest in doing it. So I don’t think that’s coming back. But I also don’t think it’s necessarily bad.

The thing I think is unfortunate is that those people who dedicated their lives to theater were not properly documented. They’re forgotten. That’s why I made this film.

You simply can’t get a taste of what the Golden Age was like today. I don’t think you can walk into many Broadway theaters and see a live show unmiked anymore. Barbara Cook sang “Glitter and Be Gay” eight times a week in Candide. I don’t think we’ll ever see those standards again. A soprano is not expected to hit a high note eight shows a week—the high notes are sometimes pre-recorded— because there’s no reason for a singer to train to fill a 1,500-seat theater the way John Raitt did. He was an Olympic athlete, as was Gwen Verdon. And today, it would be silly to train for something that you’ll never use. It’d be like someone training for an Olympic event that has been discontinued a generation before.

Remember Ethel Merman— you almost couldn’t move the camera far enough back to capture her in a movie, because she was so much bigger than life. But her gift, to be able to fill a theater with that magic… Or Gwen Verdon, who said she could whisper and 1,500 people would lean in in silence to listen. Now, there is no silence. I took my niece and nephew to see Beauty and the Beast, and there was a dull roar through the whole show of shuffling, noise, programs, grumbling, talking amongst yourselves, because it’s so miked, there’s no reason to be quiet.

When I interviewed Carol Burnett for this movie, she said, “You ask everybody, I noticed in your interviews, if they knew they were in a Golden Age.” And I politely said, “Yeah.” And she goes, “But did you ever think that someday you might be sitting with a young filmmaker who’ll ask you, ‘Did you know when you made this movie you were in the Golden Age of digital filmmaking? Because I watched how you built this tripod, and you have a monitor built in and you have a remote control duct-taped to it so you can shoot the whole interview, never taking your eyes off of them, and still run the camera…”

And I thought about that as I drove away, and I actually got tears in my eyes. I realized, as hard as this is, I could not have made this film 10 years ago. No one could have without a whole crew—which would have meant union, which would have meant you could never interview 140 people. It would have been like the TV series Biography, where you do the few interviews you can do in the week you’ve got. And I thought, who knows, maybe this is the Golden Age of digital filmmaking. So, I’d better have some fun! [laughs].

Link: http://www.broadwaythemovie.com

Robert Hawk is an independent film consultant and producer whose credits include Trick, Slaughter Rule, Chasing Amy, My Architect, Laramie Project, Celluloid Closet and the upcoming Ballets Russes. www.filmhawk.com