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Joseph P. Kahn, Boston Globe
When he was shooting HALFTIME, his landmark film about five Yale classmates on the cusp of middle age, David Sutherland thought a lot about fate and change. In particular, he though about the arc of a man's life and how fate can bend its trajectory, like a contrail meeting a crosswind. It was a theme the 44-year-old filmmaker kept returning to, not only because it blew through the lives of his subjects, and therefore through his art, but because it had been blowing like a jet stream through his own life as well.
"I don't mean to sound mystical about it," says Sutherland during a recent interview at his Newton home, not far from where he was born and raised. "But fate, or whatever you want to call it, has played a role in almost everything I've done. Making HALFTIME was a very powerful experience in that regard. Looking at those five men-particularly someone like (Dick) Snodgrass, who's managed to pull off three career changes and change his sexual identity -- I kept asking myself, where do I fit in here? What choices have I made and what's been [decided] for me?"
Sutherland combines an intense human connection to his subjects with a stunning technical virtuosity. For instance, when Sutherland was first put in touch with Juanita Buschkoetter of THE FARMER'S WIFE through Interchurch Ministries of Nebraska, he recalls, "I instantly knew this was the person I wanted to film." In spite of their very different lifestyles, David and Nancy Sutherland and the Buschkoetters eventually found a commonality: spouses working side by side to accomplish a shared dream.
HALFTIME, Sutherland's third major film, was completed a year ago May, just in time for the 25th reunion of Yale '63. It debuted there to a packed house and a rousing ovation (Snodgrass told classmates his role in the film was "one of the most formative experiences of my adult life"). Last August, it aired nationally on PBS, where it enthralled a national audience. Two other Sutherland documentaries -- one on artist Paul Cadmus, the other a profile of Boston-born painter Jack Levine -- won scores of international awards before finding a home of PBS, the latter just this past summer.
Scripted as LEVINE was, or spontaneous, like HALFTIME, Sutherland's documentaries seem to drive a drill bit into the human psyche. What spills out is often astounding and almost always exceptional -- like the HALFTIME portrait of Mike Redman, a Vietnam vet and Washington state prosecutor. Listening to Redman describe how his ex-wife left him for another man is like sticking one's thumb in a wall socket.
"David made us all walk point with him," acknowledges Redman. "It was damn hard work, but he got us to do it. And he put it in [the film] without burning any of us, which believe me was not easy."
"David's artistic integrity is honestly fought for and honestly won," adds cinematographer Joseph Seamans, his collaborator on CADMUS and LEVINE. "He may not have taken a conventional career path, but he comes to a project as prepared and focused as any director I've ever seen."
Despite the exposure and the accolades, however, Sutherland takes none of the success for granted. In a sense, he cannot afford to. Too often, it seems, the path he's set out on has swerved abruptly, calling into question his most basic assumptions about life and work. Fascinated, as he puts it, with "people who are out of sync with society," he's chosen to operate on the margins of mainstream film-making. It is a frustrating, often perilous place to ply one's trade, and it infuses his work with a sense of mystery -- one colleague calls it "a distinct otherworldliness" -- seldom encountered in more straightforward documentaries.
"My work is unorthodox," the filmmaker notes, "because I tell stories in elliptical ways. That frightens some people and makes it difficult to package [the work] for television. When I showed LEVINE at the Museum of Fine Arts three years ago, the crowd went nuts. Then somebody asked what I was doing next, and I broke down in tears. Not because of the crowd reaction, but because I honestly wasn't sure I'd make another film."
The watershed in Sutherland's career actually occurred three years before his chance to make HALFTIME: literally a bolt of lightning from the blue. But that's getting a bit ahead of the story. A 1967 graduate of Tufts and a USC film student in '69 and '70 (his cohorts included future star directors John Carpenter and Nick Castle), Sutherland first spent many years at odd jobs in odd places, none connected to making films.
In the early '70s he landed in Denver, selling tires over the phone to Montana farmers. He was good at it, which was not all that surprising: Sutherland's grandfather sold wagon wheels for a living, his father ran a tire and appliance center in East Cambridge, and his uncle, for whom Sutherland worked in Colorado, owned the largest independent tire distributorship in the world. Sutherland also worked on a French-speaking kibbutz in Israel, painted oil rigs in Louisiana, reviewed foreign films in Los Angeles and later moved back to Montana with his wife (and future collaborator) Nancy, where once again he sold tires by phone -- this time to customers in Idaho.
"I had trouble with one of my uncle's managers and got fired." Sutherland recalls. "It really did a number on my self-esteem. There's nothing lower than selling tires anway -- maybe selling aluminum siding, but not much -- and if you don't have your spirit, what do you have?"
Married and supporting their daughter, he moved back to Newton. He and his brother Alec, a Boston College Law graduate, bought their father's tire business. For the next 12 years, during which he produced one film about an East Cambridge diner (DOWN AROUND HERE, made for $600) and another about a relatively obscure artist (PAUL CADMUS: ENFANT TERRIBLE AT 80, for which Malcolm Forbes anted up $5,000 in seed money), he ran the tire business. Long days in the shop segued into long nights at the editing table. By 1984, he figured he'd had enough.
"I was turning 40 and having a hard time with that," Sutherland admits. "Plus, I felt challenged to do another film. Before CADMUS, people had told me that any film about an artist that didn't use a narrator or interviewer was bound to be boring. When it turned out well -- it won 23 international awards -- they said, 'Well, you had a good cameraman. Cadmus himself was interesting. Let's see you do it again.' That's all I needed to hear to get my juices flowing."
"I was both intrigued and skeptical," says Seamans. "From what I'd heard, David was either completely out of it or right on the money. He certainly wasn't aligned with any school of documentary film-making in Boston. David was an outsider, like me. He also had this incredible enthusiasm, and a way of cutting straight to the heart of an idea."
Among the Sutherland touches that most intrigues Seamans was the visions to frame a documentary film -- storyboard it, really -- index card by index card, each scene reduced to its thematic essentials.
"He's also an excellent businessman," Seamans observes. "In some ways, running a tire business may have better prepared him to make documentary films than any film school could have."
After CADMUS, many old WPA-era artists approached Sutherland about doing a film. One was Jack Levine, whom he began sketching on tape. This time, Sutherland was determined not to proceed until he had enough money to do the film as meticulously as he wanted to do. An application to the National Endowment for the Humanities earned him a grant worth $180,000, with $30,000 more in matching funds: pretty good money, as Sutherland says, for a guy without a master's degree in fine arts who happened to be working in a tire store.
Meanwhile, the store was under eminent domain and facing the prospect of relocation. Sutherland told his brother that he wanted out of the business within a year. With its sale, he reasoned, he'd have enough of a financial cushion to devote himself to film-making full time.
A few months later -- call it fate or whatever -- came the event that severed him from his past as cleanly as a table saw splits a two-by-four.
Early in the morning of June 29, 1984, Sutherland was awakened with the news that the store was on fire. When he arrived, his father was standing there in tears, his life's work going up in smoke. Witnesses reported a bolt of lightning had struck the warehouse roof, setting thousands of tires ablaze. The store burned for two days. Adding insult to injury, a sedan suddenly pulled up to the curbside and disgorged three men in suits. They were EPA agents -- extremely displeased EPA agents -- who promised to slap a lawsuit on the Sutherland brothers for polluting the Charles River.
The suit was settled at some cost to Sutherland's nest egg. In fact, the nest egg disappeared.
"Financially, it was a disaster," Sutherland says, "We paid everything off eventually, but 12 years of hard work went with it. The only good thing was, it removed my guilt over leaving the business. What I still don't know to this day, though, is: Would I have really left if the store hadn't burned down? I don't know. I'll probably never know."
Would he have continued making films in any event?
"Oh absolutely," he answers with a smile. "Nancy was a constant source of inspiration. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and find her whispering in my ear -- programming me, actually -- telling me I could do it."
JACK LEVINE: FEAST OF PURE REASON opened at the MFA in April 1986. Rave reviews quickly led to film-festival honors. Still, Sutherland went a whole year without work -- until HALFTIME came along. Skeptical about the project initially -- executive producer David Keller (Yale '63) had never made a film before, had lost his first producer, and seemed, in Sutherland's view, "a little flaky" -- the producer-director plunged in with both feet. In all, he shot some 100 hours of tape, much of it, say the participants, as good as any that made the final cut.
"You could make three HALFTIME's from David's outtakes," swears Redman. "He took Keller's concept and rode it right over the red line. In the process -- and I do not say this lightly -- he immortalized us."
HALFTIME easily ranks as one of the best TV documentaries of the late '80s. It looks like no other film, sounds like no other film, and is faithful to its premise as few films ever can be. Women have marveled at how candidly these men talk about their most intimate emotions. Men have saluted their courage to let it all hang out and wondered, inevitably, if they could do the same.
David Sutherland mostly wonders what it all adds up to. "I've never thought before about one of my films having this kind of impact on my subjects' lives," he confesses. "Not like THE THIN BLUE LINE, I mean, which saved a man from jail. But their whole attitude toward life. We've stayed in touch, so I know what they've been through. And seeing the reaction at the Yale reunion was amazing. I doubt I'll go to my 25th at Tufts -- it would have to be anticlimactic."
Since HALFTIME, Sutherland has been working on a shoot-for-hire project ("Not my normal gig," he says) and trying to develop his first director's role on a feature film. He thinks he has the right piece of property: a BODY HEAD- type story, titled THE LAST OF PARADISE, on which he and Nancy are collaborating with Boston-based screenwriter Chris Keane. Keane, who wrote THE HUNTER, Steve McQueen's final movie, is certainly enthusiastic.
"David and Nancy have a different kind of vision than I do," says Keane, "but that's one of the joys of collaboration. I can say right now that I'm producer of this project than any other film I've done. Both of them are extremely bright, inventive, hardworking people."
Asked if he's leery about approaching Hollywood with an ex-tire salesman in tow, Keane answers: not for a New York minute.
"Because David went from rubber to celluloid?" he laughs. "Look at what he's already accomplished. All those years David kept rolling those tires out the door, he was rolling his dreams right along with them."
