A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

when we used to stand out by the naval base when they were shipping napalm to Vietnam. At first I went out there just to film the demonstrators, but then I joined them. People who had sons or brothers in the war would come by and throw stuff at us from their cars or shoot at us. I don't remember too much about that film.

Everyman

I don't know! It's funny to forget my own films! I think there's at least one print of all of those films. Some of them were with Willard Morrison, a friend who loved films and for a time was the manager of the San Francisco Audio Film Center. He moved to Costa Rica, I haven't heard from him. His distribution became Macmillan Films in Mount Vernon, New York.

MacDonald:

How long did you do the filmed newsreel?

Baillie:

Maybe two yearsit gradually merged with/into our personal filmmaking. A little later, Chick [Ernest] Callenbach invented the written and printed

Canyon Cinemanews

. My mother took over the business of it and it grew fast. Chick had his own job, so Chickie Strand and I edited it, and later Paul Tulley and I. We discovered a great logo, the front and back pen drawing of a beautiful guy from a nineteenth-century medicine catalogue: The Exothematic Method of Cure. It was a little kit with platinum tipped needles: you punctured yourself and used the "Olium" that came with the needles. By this

advanced method

you were supposed to be able to rid yourself of "morbid matter." We really loved that; we had the image reproduced and it went on our news. Later, we had it made into stamps, stickers, and it went on the reels of film the Coop distributed.

MacDonald:

When did distribution begin? And who was involved?

Baillie:

First, there was a woman who ran it over in Sausalito, and Bob Nelson ran it for a while. And Bruce Conner, Larry Jordan, Edith Kramer. It took me a long time to back out of it. So much was dependent on the manager.

MacDonald:

When did you get out?

Baillie:

Oh gosh, I guess in the mid or late sixties, when I made

Castro Street

and the other more difficult films. I was at Morningstar, a commune near Santa Rosa. Lou Gottlieb was the owner. He was a Lime-lighter [the Limelighters were a popular folk group during the sixties], a real neat guy who opened up forty acres. A friend named Ramon Sender, a San Francisco composer, moved up there, and a great painter, Wilder Bentley; a lot of people were coming and going. I made my strongest films there. We all lived outdoors in the woods, alone in different spots. I lived with my dog in a homemade canvas tent with a kerosene lamp. We had a building where we ate and took turns cooking. I could not have been directing Canyon Cinema then. It was about this time I met Will Hindle, who was to have quite an influence on me, and Scott Bartlett, another great friend.

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The Exothematic Man: Canyon Cinema's first logo.

MacDonald:

What do you think are your strongest films?

Baillie: Castro Street, All My Life

[1966],

Quixote, Quick Billy,

and even though

Mr. Hayashi

is a very crude film, I love it because of the person

in

it. I like

To Parsifal

. It's a little awkward, but mostly good. And

Mass

. I suppose that's it . . . oh gee, I like

Roslyn Romance

quite a bit, the introduction especially. And

Valentin of the Mountains

[

Valentin de las Sierras

] I like very much.

An odd thing about filmmaking is that you don't practice like a pianist; you make a film every time. So a lot of the films were practice.

MacDonald:

About

On Sundays

. You said something last night that

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reminded me of that film. You said that if your parents hadn't left this house to you, you'd probably be on Skid Row.

Baillie:

Like the guy in

On Sundays,

yes. I met him living in an abandoned car under the Bay Bridge.

MacDonald:

It struck me that there was an interesting prescience in that film: there's this Skid Row guy chasing this young Asian woman . . .

Baillie:

Oh yeah! Just like me and Lorie. [laughter]

MacDonald:

Obviously, you're not homeless, but the thought of that seems to have been in your head a long time.

Baillie:

Well, it hasn't, actually, at least not that I'm aware of. Only in recent years when I came to realize what the result of not following the "American Plan" can be and usually is: you have nothing when you get older, after you've used your energy. All the systems are designed, more and more, to take care of

employees

. I've only been an employee occasionally to earn a little more to go on being an unemployed artist. In the American value scheme, people who are not employed are not holding up their end.

But whatever someone else might see in

On Sundays

must be there for the seeing.

MacDonald: