Reaching the End of a Shelf Life
- Alex Beam, Boston Globe

The authorities here at the Great Metropolitan Newspaper have "invited" me to clean out my office. I'll be leaving on sabbatical soon, so I have to be careful what I say. They've promised me something even nicer when I return; dare I hope for a parking lot view?

Decamping has prompted a host of difficult decisions. Should I keep my early years draft of "Above the Fold," the silly movies about Nieman curator Bill Kovach? Of course: I can trade it in for a favor someday. I threw away my copy of Lefthander magazine, with Marcia Clark ("Lefthander of the Year, 1994) on the cover. But I kept the Autograph Collector with First Signer O.J. Hancock on the front. Keep Pulpit Resources, canned sermons for the preachy class? Definitely.

The nice lady from 'GBH sent over the Rumpole videotapes I requested, but they were awful. I pitched them. In fact, I tossed every PBS special ever sent to me, except for those directed by David Sutherland.

From Tire to Tube
Terry Maitland, Boston Business Magazine

Lightning struck. It may have been attracted by World Tire's 170-foot smokestack, an orange brick landmark with a Michelin sign on top that towered above the other businesses on Commercial Avenue, beside the Longfellow Bridge in East Cambridge. But if so, it missed.

The bolt blasted open a corner of the three-story brick building, touching off a tremendous fire at 3:30 on the night of June 29, 1984. Four alarms. Trucks from Cambridge, Somerville, Boston and Brookline rolled to the scene, and firefighters poured on water, to no avail. Morning broke over a gigantic plume of billowing black smoke that took with it hundred of thousands of dollars of underinsured inventory, including $50,000 worth of new Michelin and Dunlop snow tires delivered only two days before. Who thinks to call the insurance man every time a truck backs up to the loading dock?

Another casualty of the fire was a solid 42-year family business.

David Sutherland stood back of the police line and watched his business skip into the morning sky. He and his brother, Biff, had worked the business for 12 years after buying it from their father, Alvin, who founded World Tire ("Down-to-earth prices, top-of-the-world values") in the 1940s. He had been one of the first to import radial tires from England and France; he had a Michelin franchise before Julia Child learned to cook.

The Sutherland boys had grown up in the tire business and arranged a buyout from their father in 1972. They had finished the payout schedule after 11 years and had owned it free and clear for just one year. Alvin still held the real estate and the building -- an old factory -- and leased it back to them; they owned the business itself. They had expanded into alignments and brakes.

Now there was nothing left to own. David's brain felt disjointed and not only because he was 39 and had a family and was standing there going broke at 7 o'clock on a Friday morning.

He had been awake when the call came, sitting up in bed in terrific discomfort. A disc problem in his neck had worsened, and he was scheduled for a CAT scan that very day. The neck brace he wore did little to ease the pain or restore the feeling in his deadened left arm. But he had been taking Demerol, and while that potent painkiller helped with the neck, it also warped the senses, turning the fire scene into a phantasmagoric tableau, made more absurd by the paroxysms of a G-man from the Environmental Protection Agency, who was doing windmills and shrieking in his ear about the oily-water runoff polluting the Charles River.

Adding to the unreality was David's wife, Nancy, standing off a little bit, scarcely able to contain her glee. She practically danced around in circles. "I was 100 percent happy for David," she says. "But he said if I didn't stop laughing people would think I set the fire." Is this a bitter family situation? Her father-in-law choking back tears. Her brother-in-law ruined. Her husband's business wiped out. Her own food supply in serious jeopardy, and she's leading cheers? Is this woman mad?

No, only a devoted wife, helpmate, artist and creative consultant to her husband, who knew instantly that David would now have no alternative but to make films full time.

She had been nudging him in that direction for years, but David was too responsible (and too apprehensive) to take the leap into uncertainty. What if filmmaking was no more than the manifestation of a mid-life crisis?

Besides, extricating oneself from a family business was a very delicate matter. David had brought up the subject casually with Biff a couple of times, but nothing had been resolved. It hadn't even really been discussed. "I'm not sure I ever could have left," David says. "I didn't have the courage or the knowledge or the confidence." But now an act of God had decided the issue with startling finality.

It would take 36 hours to extinguish the fire and weeks to deal with the mountain of rubble. The only thing left standing was the giant smokestack with the Michelin sign on the cap and the black W-O-R-L-D T-I-R-E lettering down the face. Thirteen employees were put out of work. World Tire was entirely a retail business; at the time of the fire, the business was carrying less that $1,000 on accounts receivable. Ahead lay a year of arguing with insurance adjusters, who grudgingly wrote the big check the following June, paying off creditors (every one of whom received full reimbursement) and liquidating the business.

The partners were wiped out. They actually took a loss. "You figure you put 12 years into a building up a business, and you have some equity," says David. But in this case, the figuring was wrong.

Biff, a lawyer, who had quit his practice to join his older brother in the tire business, handled most of the details. Married to a lobsterman's daughter from Monhegan Island, Maine, he closed out the books and moved to Camden, where he and his wife opened a gift and antiques shop called Star Bird on Main Street. Now, three years later, the shop is doing great, and he loves the business, thank you very much.

The week after the fire, David had a rescheduled CAT scan at the Newton-Wellesley Hospital, which showed that the disc was inflamed but not otherwise deteriorated. Gradually, the problem resolved itself, and the neck collar went into the closet. He resumed jogging, mainly on the soft quarter-mile track at Newton North High School. He also resumed work on his current project, a film portrait of a painter Jack Levine, the social realist born in Boston, and he went after it full tilt.

"I was scared as hell about money," he says. "I had gotten used to regular money at the store. But I was getting a chance to do something I loved."

Now, nearly four years (including one year of idleness), two films and a sheaf of critical praise later, that love has brought David Sutherland, 42, to the verge of great success. A film called HALFTIME, a study of male mid-life transition based on the lives of five graduates of the Yale Class of 1963, will premiere at the 25th reunion of the class in the first week of June. It will air nationally this fall in a 90-minute public television special.

HALFTIME rips the lid off the notion that men have no feelings, or at least that they keep those feelings bottled up. The list of subjects that arise reads like the tables of contents from a psychology test and a business guide crossed with a survival manual. It is an interview film that includes sex, of course, and homosexuality and marriage and family or absence of same, self-esteem and self-delusion, work and being fired from family businesses and other jobs. There is a murder plot and wartime service and masculine playthings such as sports cars and a Rolls Royce. There is humor and irony and pathos and not a few tears.

HALFTIME is a sensational film about the truth of not one man's life, but of five. It ought to earn Sutherland what passes for bestsellerdom in the world of documentary; viewers and acclaim and stacks of favorable clips that result in steady work and, once again, regular money.

At the time of that fire, David Sutherland had made exactly one notable film, on which he had risked -- and duly lost -- his shirt, but had picked up 10 national awards and a handful of other citations and, in the process, forged himself a career.

The saga of making the film, PAUL CADMUS: ENFANT TERRIBLE AT 80, a 60-minute documentary about a once-controversial painter who had slipped into obscurity, is a story whose outlines are familiar to anyone who has ever watched a creative endeavor pulled off on a shoestring by someone working part time out of his basement. It involves fits and starts, perseverance, laboring to keep a crew together and a subject interested over three and a half years and perhaps the most important element of making a film -- continually grubbing for money from foundations and sponsors.

Ultimately, Sutherland went into a $25,000 hole (on a budget of $70,000) to bring the film to the screen in 1984. Several years later, he calculates, his Cadmus film is still a loss, although he recouped much of his investment through screenings and video sales. Even now, the meter continues to tick, because of occasional insurance charges and storage costs.

The money, of course, is completely secondary. "A businessman would say I did the right thing to give myself a career," he says. "An accountant would say I should be committed."

That career seemed like a remote possibility in the years after left Tufts University and enrolled at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema-Television, which he left in 1969 before finishing a master of fine arts degree. His specialty was directing, and certain of his classmates, like John (STARMAN and HALLOWEEN) Carpenter, began to stake out their careers in the film capital.

But Sutherland hated Southern California, and he took to the road, and if the next segment of his life were a film, it might be called, "Volkswagening in America." He pointed his gray VW bug toward San Francisco and San Francisco State University, where he planned to finish his degree. But shortly after he arrived, the riots broke out that turned SF State president S.I. Hayakawa into a national figure when he stood down the students, closed the campus and suppressed the turmoil.

So Sutherland drifted east with stars in his eyes and the indecision of a hippie in his heart. He stopped off in Denver, where, for his livelihood, he fell back on basics; the tire business. He landed a job selling tires over the phone to dealers and, meanwhile, tried out a variety of experiences. He did some parachute jumping and rodeo riding (on Brahma bulls, never staying aboard for long). A friend of his was dating a stripper, and he hung out in the seedier quarters of Denver.

He combined some of these elements, notably tires, striptease and rodeo, into a semiautographical screenplay called "Jobbin," which he optioned to a New York film agency, although nothing ever came of it. After a year, he packed the bug and returned to Boston. One snowy night, he flipped over the Volkswagen in Chestnut Hill and pronounced it dead after more than 100,000 miles.

Then it was onto Paris, which he knew from having spent his junior year at Tufts there, and he worked with a film editor named Jerome La-Perrousaz. From France, he journeyed to Israel and a six-month stint overseeing the turkey house on a French-speaking kibbutz. His vagabondage seemed to have no end when he obtained seaman's papers. Before shipping out, however, he took a few days' vacation in Elat, the resort town at the tip of Israel on the shores of the Red Sea.

He was fixing to hitchhike back to Jerusalem, but a series of events converged. He had his money stolen, he developed pleurisy, and he ended up wandering in the desert, not for 40 days, of course, but long enough for it to frighten the wanderlust out of him. He finally followed a road that seemed to go nowhere, but actually led to an Israeli army camp. He stumbled through the welcome gates, recovered his health and later made his way to civilization.

Returning to Boston in 1971, he looked up Nancy Taylor of Newton, a model he had met in a doctor's waiting room a couple of years earlier and kept in contact with. Soon after, they decided to marry, and David adopted Nancy's seven-year-old daughter, Lee, from an earlier marriage.

There was, it seemed just a bit more wanderlust left to be burned out of Sutherland, and the newlyweds acquired a used Mercury Cougar and drove to Montana with Lee.

What was in Big Sky Country? What else? The tire business; he always came back to the tire business. An uncle had a successful operation in Great Falls, and David went to work for him, selling over the phone. Sutherland had Idaho as his territory, and each day he would call all over the state, prospecting for business, while Nancy sat beside his desk, looking up the customers' credit reports in Dun and Bradstreet's.

Six months later, they moved to another of his uncle's shops in Fresno, Calif. Sutherland was making a good living selling tires -- he was the company's number-one salesman -- but he was still a hippie at heart. He didn't own a white shirt and couldn't imagine where to buy one. His hair hung fashionably long, and one day he even bought a short-haired wig -- the kind the National Guardsmen used to wear on duty weekends -- when his uncle was coming on inspection. He frequently found himself in the kinds on conflicts with his uncle and the local branch manager that often arose in those days. "They wanted to break my spirit," is how he explains it now.

They didn't succeed in breaking his spirit, but they did the next best thing: they sacked him. "I was fired by someone I liked," he says, "I was embarrassed. It's humiliating. And I always remembered that whenever I had to fire somebody in my own business."

Within days, the Sutherlands had the Cougar packed and they dead-headed east, crossing the country in four days. "I had my tail between my legs," Sutherland recalls. He didn't stop running until they reached Boston and the security of the World Tire business, which he and his brother bought a couple of years later when their father retired.

David Sutherland wouldn't quarrel with the old saw that behind every successful man stands a woman (usually with her knee in his back, pushing him out the door). While David toiled responsibly at the tire trade and bought a house in Newton and provided for his family (including a son, Morgan, now 13), his wife knew he longed to be involved in films. One day, Nancy marched him to Wolf & Smith, a one-time Central Square, Cambridge, camera store not far from World Tire, and laid down $80 for a used Super-8 movie camera. Take this and play with it, she said. And he did.

His first efforts were somewhat amateurish, but they showed talent.

Sutherland had an affinity for shooting what he calls, "people out of sync with society," which he had, no doubt, long believed himself to be. He got ordinary people -- characters like the operator and habitues of the Kichenetter Diner on Binney Street, an old East Cambridge railroad car diner with a Real Paper "Best of Boston 1976" award tacked to the wall -- to talk to his camera with a surprising absence of self-consciousness.

He developed a style of having people speak about themselves and their lives without the intercession of an on-camera interviewer or narrator, a style he would later refine to an art form.

Filming at the diner turned into an obsession, and Sutherland rolled his camera there after work two or three days a week for a couple of years.

"When he started bringing the diner stuff home, I realized just how gifted he was. I urged him right then to sell everything and do it," says Nancy, who believes he would have done just that if he did not have the responsibility of a family.

Sutherland turned that mountain of footage into a 30-minute documentary called DOWN AROUND HERE, a touching portrait of proprietor-entertainer Russ Young, an elderly immigrant from New Brunswick more comfortable in the 1930s than the 1970s, and the workmen and old-timers who frequented his establishment. The film is entirely without so-called production values, such as sophisticated sound or music. The microphone often intrudes into the frame. But the camera is very patient, resting on people long enough for the viewer to take their measure. The film ends with the portly, white-haired Young breaking down in tears as the diner, boarded up and mounted on a carriage, is pulled away by horses. The horses put R.I.P. to an era, but behind the camera, the life of a filmmaker had begun.

DOWN AROUND HERE aired on KQED , the PBS station in San Francisco, in 1978, and, in 1979, on WCVB in Boston, then at the height of its hunger for local programming. Sutherland also showed it at the Bridgeport, Conn., Museum of Art and Industry, at a mixed-media show organized by his sister, Jane, an accomplished painter and member of the Silvermine Guild Arts Center in New Canaan. That screening provided a critical link in Sutherland's progress.

At the Bridgeport Museum, Sutherland met a 76-year-old artist Paul Cadmus, a resident of nearby Weston, who was taken with film, especially its no-narrator technique. Cadmus, a satirist (and satyrist) who first worked under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration and whose erotic and homoerotic art had touched off scandals in the 1930s, had the idea he'd like to tell his own story and enlisted Sutherland to give it a try. He agreed and shot some test footage, which was just okay, and then did some more, which was better, and the project was on.

Gradually, as the pair worked together, Sutherland introduced an innovation that became another trademark. He shot interviews, or as he calls them "sketches," and transcribed the dialogue. From those transcripts, he fashioned a screenplay -- using the subject's own words -- and then actually directed the subject through the script. The result was a slightly awkward (considering that the subject was not an actor practiced at delivering lines), but very focused, retelling of a person's story with none of the haltingness or digressions that might characterize a documentary done in interview format. With Cadmus, the technique worked exceedingly well.

What transpired with less success was obtaining funding to do a film by an unknown filmmaker on a not-currently hot artist whose work was only then being mounted in a large retrospective show (originating in Oxford, Ohio). Sutherland found, asking around, that in the opinion of most foundations, the only artist fit for a film was a dead artist, whose work a curator could discuss on camera and thus "bring to life." An artist not yet in need of resurrection was of considerably less interest. A grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities was turned down. Another potential source of funding was people who owned Cadmus' art.

One such Cadmus collector was publisher/philanthropist Malcolm Forbes -- the ultimate capitalist tool. Sutherland pestered the curator of Forbes' art collection, who had informed him that Forbes did not grant money for films. But Sutherland persisted and, one day, when he telephoned, he apparently reached a receptionist filling in for someone either out sick or on vacation, and that person fortuitously penciled him onto Forbes' calendar.

Sutherland transferred some of the Cadmus footage from Super-8 film to video, and brought it with him when he and Nancy presented themselves at Forbes' Fifth Avenue building in New York. The $500 that the transfer cost may have been Sutherland's wisest investment.

While waiting for Forbes to appear, he and Nancy were left to browse through some of his collection, including some of the famous Faberge eggs, which duly impressed them. When they finally met with Forbes, who viewed the tape on his VCR, he was sufficiently impressed to pledge $5,000 in seed money to the film.

Sutherland was dazed. Riding down on the elevator, he said to Nancy, "Am I dreaming? Or did Malcolm Forbes just say he'd give me $5,000?" She assured him it was true, and a couple of weeks later, the promised sum arrived.

With a check from Malcolm Forbes to wave around, Sutherland and his film suddenly had legitimacy. He obtained a $30,000 grant from the Sara Roby Foundation, whose namesake was also a Cadmus collector. Forbes later kicked in a second $5,000, and Sutherland had a budget, which he augmented with $25,000 in borrowed money.

PAUL CADMUS: ENFANT TERRIBLE AT 80 had its premiere at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in spring 1984, and the momentum began to build. Michael Blowen called the film "excellent" in the pages of the Boston Globe, and the Herald's Carrie Rickey pronounced it a "first-rate documentary," giving it three stars. The museum's film coordinator, Deac Rossell, especially appreciated the no-narrator technique, which he called "a way to give the artist (Cadmus) the center stage without either avoiding the filmmaker's responsibility of containing and controlling the material or imposing an extraneous vision that dominates the subject. That is a very hard balance to strike."

The Cadmus film was shown at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, at New York's Museum of Modern Art and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It garnered various awards at festivals in Houston, Chicago, Florida, Athens, Greece, England, Canada and elsewhere.

But all the festival viewers in the world could hardly fill one corner of the vast theater available in TV-land, and the objective was to get the film on public television.

Here, Sutherland had no luck peddling the film for a couple of years, principally because, in subject matter and technique, it fit no established format. Then Connecticut Public Television agreed to air it in spring 1986, and Channel 13 in New York picked up the feed. This resulted in an extremely favorable notice by John J. O'Connor, television critic of The New York Times, who called the Cadmus portrait "remarkably compelling," a judgement that put Sutherland -- and Cadmus -- squarely in the big time. All of a sudden, obscure artist Paul Cadmus was being asked for autographs on the streets of New York.

By the time he got the boost from The Times, Sutherland had been filmmaking full time for two years and was ready with a second film, JACK LEVINE: FEAST OF PURE REASON. The success of the Cadmus film had brought a stream of like proposals to Sutherland's door. He settled on Cadmus' friend, Jack Levine, the Boston-born social realist painter, who, though a New York resident for 40 years, still considered himself a Bostonian. Like Cadmus, Levine had gotten his start under the New Deal Works Progress Administration.

This production had few of the start-problems of the earlier one, including an absence of money.

Sutherland and Levine together wrote a grant proposal to the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the NEH came up with $130,000 outright, offering an additional $50,000 if the filmmaker could raise matching funds. This Sutherland did, raising the extra amount from Boston and New York foundations and arts councils, and he eventually compiled a total of $295,000 in foundation awards.

The capital from NEH was announced on March 1, 1984, a day of rejoicing in the Sutherland household. Funds were to be released in the fall. In June, however, the disastrous fire struck World Tire, and Sutherland was suddenly left without job and income. He faced the dilemma of choosing between finding another paying job ("who wants a 40-year-old tire salesman?") and continuing to work part time on the film; or devoting all of his energy to the film and earning a modest living on grant money that would arrive a few months hence.

The Sutherlands already lived frugally with a goodly portion of their discretionary income going into their films. Their roomy Newton Colonial, bought for $71,000 in the early 1970s -- ancient times Boston real estate standards -- cost them almost nothing monthly.

The Sutherlands decided to plunge ahead with films. If this is a mid-life crisis, let's go for the ride.

The grant money, when it came, enabled Sutherland to take a salary and give one to his wife and co-writer, delighted to be working full time again beside her husband.

A talented artist who paints whimsical and erotic, almost satirical, paintings in fine lines, Nancy Sutherland has mounted various local exhibits and sold out a 1981 show at Bloomingdale's.

The couple hired Tess Cederholm, curator of fine arts at the Boston Public Library and now the library's director of development, as executive producer (she proved instrumental in fund-raising), and Mavis Lyons Smull, an experienced, award-winning editor with a long string of public television projects to her credit. Joe Seamans, the cameraman who had shot the Cadmus film, was hired again for Levine. The Sutherlands drew money for 10 of the 12 months it took to produce the film, forgoing pay the last two months when lab fees cost more than anticipated.

JACK LEVINE: FEAST OF PURE REASON (named after his most famous painting) premiered in spring 1986 at the Museum of Fine Arts and immediately began to rack up acclaim. Newspapers gave it their maximum number of stars -- four in the Herald, five in the Rochester, N.Y., paper -- and the Herald's Nat Segaloff included it in his 10 best of 1986, alongside such successful commercial features as HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, THE COLOR OF MONEY, and BLUE VELVET. The Levine film outdrew PLATOON at the Berlin Film Festival. Hollywood's Academy Foundation selected it for a special screening as one of the outstanding documentaries of the year, although it was not finally nominated for Academy Award. It ultimately captured 23 national and international awards, perhaps the most prestigious being the Blue Ribbon from the American Film Festival.

David Sutherland had it made. Or so he thought. But while the Cadmus film was airing in New York, and the Levine film was piling up critical praise, his telephone had quite inexplicably developed a malfunction: it simply didn't ring, at least not with any film offers. Sutherland was learning a significant lesson of the artistic world, no less true of the business world, which is that success does not automatically, nor immediately, breed success. He tried to keep things going. He had developed a certain on-the-job expertise in New Deal art, for example, and he wrote a grant proposal for 13-part film series on WPA painters. It was turned down.

Sutherland endured a year of enforced idleness that ended in spring 1987 with a call from a man named David Keller. A member of Yale's Class of 1963, the Los Angeles resident had been touched up by the class chairman for a donation to the 25-year gift, a request to which Keller demured. He had a contribution in mind more interesting than money. "How about I put the class on television?" he said.

Keller's idea, unformed though it was, was to do some kind of a "Big Chill" documentary on the Class of '63. But although he lived in Tinseltown, Keller was distinctly unqualified to put a movie together.

After leaving Yale, Keller had made money on Wall Street, lots of money, in banking -- commercial, international and investment banking. In the recession of 1973, brought on by the oil embargo, however, he left Wall Street, packed his wife and two sons, then aged 3 and 4, aboard a 76-foot Sparkman & Stephens ketch and embarked on a sail around the world. But after a year and a half, and a lazy sail from Panama to Hawaii to Fiji, they came back across the Pacific and docked in San Diego. "After you have done it for 18 months, the idea of sailing around the world doesn't seem that great," he says.

The Kellers eventually moved up to Los Angeles, where David began to invest in small companies, putting in enough money to become a director, with the objective of turning the companies around. He also wrote some screenplays, de rigueur if you live near Hollywood. None was ever filmed, but he received enough encouragement from industry people not to abandon the sideline.

He took his "Big Chill" idea to Daniel J. Levinson, the Yale professor of psychology who had written the best-selling 1978 book The Seasons of a Man's Life, which had traced men's progression through early adulthood, the settling down period and mid-life transition. Together, they concluded that members of the Class of '63, approaching their 46th or 47th years, would be ripe for an examination of mid-life crisis, the men might even be voluble on the subject.

They mailed out a lengthy questionnaire to the 800 class members for whom the alumni office has addresses (out of about 1000 graduates) and received 500 replies. Sure enough, the respondents waxed loquacious on the on the bumps and turns of their lives. The personal information they supplied made Keller and Levinson realize they were dealing not with a class reunion picture, but with a sociological phenomenon against a historical backdrop. A key question -- "Would you be willing to talk about this on national television?" -- received 200 affirmatives.

Everyone in public television Keller talked to thought the idea a good one, and he plunged ahead. He raised some seed money from corporations, including Citicorp and McKinsey & Co., but mainly he pushed the $400,000 project forward on borrowed money (and is still hoping for one large corporate sponsor before September's air date). He tried to identify any class member who was a filmmaker, but there was only one, and he had prior commitments.

A year ago, Keller was still without a filmmaker when he talked to Connecticut Public Television, a natural "presenting station," considering the tie-in with New Haven's Yale. The people there screened movies by five filmmakers for him, among them Sutherland's Cadmus and Levine pictures.

Keller was knocked out. He called Sutherland immediately and drove up to Newton.

It was a match forged in Hartford, but it might as well have been made in heaven. "David was instantly connected," Keller says. "He seemed to be at a point of his life where he was questioning these same things. It was the greatest thing that happened that the first fellow couldn't do it."

So David Sutherland was working again, and he assembled the old crew: himself as director, his wife Nancy, as creative consultant, Joe Seamans as cameraman. Mavis Lyons Smull as editor. The list of subjects was winnowed to five, who were chosen as much for their insights and the course of their lives, as for their geographic diversity. Steve Sohmer is a Hollywood producer and novelist (Favorite Son) , Mike Redman a former prosecuting attorney from Olympia, Wash., Bob Knight runs a bank in Alliance, Neb., Geoff Noyes, from Oneida, N.Y., runs a small computer business. Dick Snodgrass is a therapist in Washington.

HALFTIME is divided into three distinct parts. Sutherland and his crew visits each of them in their homes for no-narrator interviews, although, in this case, he did no scripting. Then the men return to New Haven for one-on-one interviews with psychologist Levinson, whose questions are heard off-camera. Finally, the five, none of whom knew each other, journey again to Yale for a round-table discussion with Levinson as moderator.

The Class of 1963 was the last "straight" class. One thousand white boys went off to Yale at the end of the 1950s, and shortly after they graduated, the assassination of John F. Kennedy robbed their generation and their social class of its innocence. The upheavals of civil rights, war, more assassination, the sexual revolution, feminism and political crisis ensued, followed by the "Deal Decade" of the 1980s. The men in the film, suffice it for now to say, have been through some changes, and some of them have fared better than others. The film doesn't draw any broad generational conclusions. Rather it focuses, intensely and intimately, on these five men.

Everyone involved is excited about the film, and David Keller is enthralled with David Sutherland. "We have a very special relationship," Keller says from his West Coast home. "I'm as fond of him as anyone I've ever met. He has the healthiest ego I've seen in a long time. He knows he's a good artist, but he doesn't let that stand in the way of having a fruitful discussion with people who have something to offer."

Sutherland also works too hard, in Keller's opinion, but then there is a deadline to be met. At the end of last year, with more than 100 hours of filming concluded, the basement of Sutherland's roomy house was a hive of frenetic activity. Mavis Smull drove down from Portsmouth, N.H., everyday to reduce the footage by a factor of 50. David and Nancy put in 16-hour days to finish the 90-minute rough cut by January, the necessary date if the finished product is to be ready for the Class of '63 reunion in June.

David Sutherland has been through his own passages in the last few years, and perhaps none covered as much psychological ground as the one that carried him from tire salesman to acclaimed filmmaker. But like an artist, the change was one he envisioned.

"When I was 35, and working on the diner film," he says, "I woke up one morning and could see clearly what I was going to do." He could see what he was going to do, but not how. All it required was talent, hard work and positioning, and a shock of terrible energy that came from a fortuitous stroke of lightning.

• Interview with Joseph Kahn
• Artist Makes Films about Artists