The opportunity to present a paper for the ‘Stardom and the Archive’ symposium at the University of Exeter in February 2020 led me on a slightly nostalgic trip back into my past as a researcher. In the late 1990s I was undertaking my MA dissertation at the University of the West of England examining some of Tony Richardson’s films of the 1960s. My then supervisor, Andrew Spicer (now Professor), suggested a trip to the BFI Library in Stephen’s Street, just off Tottenham Court Road, in London. I went with the task of looking-up the press cuttings on Tom Jones (1963) but while there I made a discovery: there was something called a press book on the film. I filled in my pink request slip and saw it disappear down into the cellars of the building via a dumb waiter. A little later some slightly scratchy microfiche appeared. I had discovered for myself a remarkable source. The following year I was back on the first of many trips as part of my doctoral research into male stars in British cinema of the 1960s. Press books were to prove an invaluable tool.
For my paper at Exeter I took the chance to revisit the BFI’s collection of press books, this time using the 1960s career of Albert Finney to give the paper a shape. The Reuben Library at BFI Southbank is a good deal more comfortable than Stephen Street ever was, but I was delighted to find that the press books were still on microfiche and had to be ordered via pink slips from the cellars, once again appearing magically by dumb waiter.
So, for the uninitiated, what is a press book? These are small pamphlets rather than books which were created by film production companies, or by marketing agencies on their behalf, and distributed to cinema managers. The booklet was designed to provide suggestions and resources for the promotion of upcoming releases. For anyone analysing the creation of stars and stardom these pamphlets are particularly interesting as stars loom large in the marketing strategies on display.
The format tends to be repetitive. Examination of the press book for Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), a film I analysed as part of my PhD, gives a good sense of the typical style and content. The cover presents the main poster used for the campaign, in this case an image in which Julie Christie is prominent; a variety of sizes and formats for posters are on offer later in the booklet.
Two pages of potential news stories follow which focus on the stars, the director, and some of the picturesque Dorset locations used for the shoot. The next two pages focus entirely on the film’s four key stars with interviews and background information including potted biographies.
The following page shifts to the director, John Schlesinger, and short pieces on a number of the key technicians such as cinematographer Nicholas Roeg. The next nine pages feature all the various posters and lobby cards available; star images feature heavily here. Finally, there are specific suggestions for exploitation via television and radio, as well as features about Thomas Hardy’s novel and the soundtrack album.
Another press book for the film adds a few more interesting features. One page featured a fashion tie-in with Vogue magazine where Julie Christie models several dresses with a Victorian theme. A further page features reviews from the national press which praise the film. A selection of stills are offered in another section which can be used for the basis of a foyer display; the stars all feature heavily here in images which are close to scenes from the film. Rather more curious is a children’s art competition where a still has been converted into a line drawing – children can colour it in and win free tickets for a screening of their choice. Strangest of all is a full page tie-in with Raleigh bicycles. This seems to be an ongoing arrangement with the manufacturer and includes a number of slightly awkward photos of the film’s stars in period costume posing with bikes.
One use of the press books is to chart the changing star images which develop over a given time period. My case study for the Exeter conference was to look at the press books for three Albert Finney films released across the 1960s. I began with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). Finney’s image at this stage – it was his first leading role, playing Arthur Seaton – appears to be built around his potential status as a working-class rebel, in keeping with the films of the burgeoning New Wave and designed to tap into press interest in the phenomenon of the ‘Angry Young Man’. The poster image used in the press book shows Finney in the stance of a boxer, squaring up to an unseen adversary. On a page entitled ‘Sell the Title and Albert Finney’ this image is reinforced through a number of quotes attributed to the star which emphasise his working-class background as the ‘son of a Manchester bookmaker’. Another page is headed ‘Finney Rockets to Stardom’ and continues this theme in its emphasis on how his rise to fame had started with his education as a ‘Salford Grammar School boy’. Finney becomes representative of the aspirational working-class generation who had benefitted from the 1944 Education Act.
By 1964 the zeitgeist had clearly changed. The press book for Tom Jones is at pains to distance itself from Finney’s earlier image. An interview with Finney is titled ‘I’m no Rebel’ and goes on to quote the star: ‘You felt that Arthur had got bitter early in his life and become defensive. But Tom doesn’t do that. He just behaves. He does whatever is natural for him to do’. This theme is taken up again in another feature headed ‘Actor by Accident’. The shift in Finney’s image from working-class rebel to nascent ‘Swinging London’ icon is reinforced in the film’s main poster which tells us that ‘Tom Jones loves and loves and loves and loves!’. This is accompanied by an image of Finney with half-a-dozen of the film’s female stars sitting at his feet or wrapped around his legs. The angry young man has been replaced by an uninhibited pleasure seeker.
The final press book I looked at was for Charlie Bubbles (1967), a film reflecting the more uncertain and conflicted nature of the late 1960s. The tone is much less certain in this press book, almost as if the producers and marketers are a somewhat at a loss as to what image of masculinity is now prevalent in British culture. Finney himself is quoted as saying: ‘I find it very upsetting if audiences tend to create an image about a particular artist’ and yet the piece makes clear the autobiographical aspects of the film. It suggests that Finney’s uncertainty, like that of his character, is reflective of the times: ‘There are many real life Charlie Bubbles today’. The rebel and hedonist have apparently gone, replaced by a figure who seems at best ambivalent.
The BFI’s collection of press books is a remarkable, and often highly entertaining, resource for anyone interested in the promotion of films, in the marketing of stardom, and in films as cultural products of their time. Crude they may sometimes be in their reading of the audience but it is precisely this directness of address that makes them a remarkable window on the past, at least in terms of the film-maker’s assumptions about that audience.
Robert Shail is Professor of Film and Director of Research in the Leeds School of Arts at Leeds Beckett University and has published widely on postwar British cinema, stardom, and children’s cinema.
Disclaimer: The IAMHIST Blog is a platform that offers individual scholars the opportunity to present their work and thoughts. They alone are responsible for the content, which does not represent the view of the IAMHIST council or other IAMHIST members.
This blog post is a reflection on the process of archival research I conducted for my book Stanley Kubrick Produces. Specifically, I want to focus on the idea of archival serendipity: how unexpected results and discoveries in the archive can reframe scholarly understanding of historical objects, figures, and events and even debunk prevailing myths. In the course of researching and writing Stanley Kubrick Produces, I wanted to uncover the truth behind a film that Stanley Kubrick was reputed to have been involved with in some capacity: World Assembly of Youth. But in tracking down archival evidence, I did not find what I was looking for, but instead came across an altogether different story. What I discovered was evidence of Kubrick’s own mythmaking and audio-visual material of a film that might have otherwise been forgotten.
What we thought we knew
I begin my story not in an archive, but at a conference. A room full of Kubrick experts, fans, and researchers. It is July 2019. I am part of an international workshop at the University of Leiden titled Life and Legacy, Studying the Films of Stanley Kubrick. Over fifty delegates from across the world are in attendance. And for five days, we debate, deconstruct, and overanalyse the films associated with Stanley Kubrick. It is an invigorating space, one in which we openly and freely debate the filmmaker’s career, wider production contexts, and of course the inevitable ‘meaning’ of the films. But one conversation stands out: on the third day we discuss ‘the unknown’ Kubrick. We deliberate over what we know, sketching it out on laptops, a blackboard, pieces of paper, anything we can find. Every nook and cranny of Kubrick’s life and career is raked over to find the holes in what we think we know.
The conversation turns to the 1950s and mention is made of a film, World Assembly of Youth. No one asks what the film is about. No one asks what Kubrick did on the film. It is taken as a given that he must have, in some way, been involved in the production of this film. No one has even seen the film. A throwaway remark is made about it being some kind of ‘CIA’ sponsored effort after a quick Google search. And then, after much scholarly digression, we move on, with no more made of the conversation.
Throughout the morning’s deliberations, I had largely remained silent. This briefest of mentions of World Assembly of Youth, what amounted to a few minutes at most, resonated for I was deeply involved in writing about the film and undertaking archival research at that point in time. I was in the middle of email discussions for material to be sent across to me that contained, I hoped, a copy of the film. It was in the process of being digitised. And I was excited because, on reflection, I realise that all of us deep down perhaps believed, even hoped, that World Assembly of Youth was some kind of ‘lost’ Kubrick film. It is why I remained silent. I was nervous at the prospect of what I might find in the coming days.
So just why was it that a room full of some of the world’s foremost Kubrick experts included World Assembly of Youth in discussions of Kubrick’s career? What made us so sure that the film was a Kubrick film? It goes back to a biography written by John Baxter in 1997, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography, in which it was claimed that Kubrick had been involved in the production of the film in 1952. Baxter describes the film as being, ‘an early attempt by the US State Department, which sponsored the film, to mobilise college-aged kids to carry out socially worthy projects, an initiative that was to have its pay-off in John Kennedy’s Peace Corps’.[i] Baxter’s discussion of the film is limited, with no reference of his source or of what Kubrick’s role was on the film.
Baxter’s claims seemed to be further substantiated, however, by contemporary reports in the press. A. H. Weiler published a column in the New York Times in June 1952 that summarised Kubrick’s filmmaking activities. I have highlighted in bold the relevant section concerning World Assembly of Youth:
PRODUCER: Proof that a producer-director need not be a man weighed down by years is here in the person of Stanley Kubrick, a New Yorker who is 23 and is currently negotiating for the release of “Shape of Fear,” his first feature and the fourth film he has turned out thus far. The picture, a study of four soldiers trapped behind enemy lines, developed from a story by Howard Sackler, a 22-year old friend of Kubrick’s, was made on location in California’s San Gabriel Mountains with Frank Silvera, Steve Coit, Ken Harp, Irwin Mazursky and Virginia Leith, professionals whose names obviously have not been in lights. The youthful producer-director, whose credits already include “The Day of the Fight” and “Flying Padre”, short subjects released by R.K.O., and a short on World Assembly of Youth, made for the State Department, has “a few stories he would like to film.” But his approach to the future seems to be both realistic and wise. “There’s no point in talking about my next picture,” he said, “until we see how ‘Shape of Fear’ does both critically and financially.”[ii]
Weiler’s column only mentions Kubrick’s work on World Assembly of Youth in passing. But importantly, the column seemed to validate what John Baxter had claimed. That Kubrick had worked on another short film, one that was not officially included in his filmography. What this limited evidence seemed to indicate was that there was another Kubrick film out there, somewhere, waiting to be found.
What we didn’t know
With Stanley Kubrick Produces, my aim was to situate Kubrick’s career within wider industrial and production contexts and to do so through archival research. This meant undertaking extensive research at archives around the world: the Stanley Kubrick Archive at the University of the Arts London, the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research in Madison, Wisconsin, the University of Liverpool, the British Library, the British Film Institute, Lambeth Palace Archives, The National Archives, and others besides. Yet, none of these archives contained any information whatsoever about World Assembly of Youth. The only evidence I could find was the fleeting mention by Baxter and a news report in the New York Times. My determination to uncover the secrets of World Assembly of Youth, perhaps to even find a copy of the film, looked to be hopeless.
That is until by sheer chance I noticed details of the film in an archival catalogue at the American Heritage Center (AHC), University of Wyoming. A brief aside to quickly tell you about this archive – after all, this is IAMHIST and archives are what we live for. The AHC is one of the largest non-government archives in the world, with over 90,000 cubic feet of archival material. If you want to find something about American history, chances are you will find something, however small, in the AHC. Its film and media archival collection is vast, with the AHC priding itself on being one of only a few institutions that took seriously the work of preserving the heritage and history of the film and media industries in the 1960s and 1970s.[iii]
I had been consulting the AHC because it houses the Richard De Rochemont papers. De Rochemont was an American film producer, most noted for his work on the March of Time newsreel series. He was also prominent in the early career of Kubrick; Kubrick had initially pitched his first short film, Day of the Fight (1951), for inclusion in De Rochemont’s March of Time series. De Rochemont rejected the film, but took a keen interest in Kubrick’s career, becoming something of a mentor and giving him opportunities to work on television series such as Mr. Lincoln (1952-53).
The Richard De Rochemont Papers are expansive, containing 216 boxes. As the archive catalogue states, the papers are made up of, ‘manuscripts and articles, scripts, research files, and other documents relating to projects produced by and associated with De Rochemont.’[iv] There is material in relation to March of Time and to De Rochemont’s production companies, such as Vavin. The papers also include a large amount of audio-visual material.
I had consulted the Richard De Rochemont papers early on in my research, but I was very specific, consulting personal papers and files relating to the project Mr. Lincoln. Then in spring 2019, I returned to the Richard De Rochemont papers archival catalogue to simply browse. Catalogue browsing is what I do at times, for no purpose other than to familiarise myself with a collection. It’s part of a wider process of archival serendipity that I now embed within my approach to archives generally. Rather than setting out with a hypothesis that I need to prove, I follow the archival evidence down unexpected paths and foreground its material realities: the absences, gaps, coincidences, and unexplained items. In perhaps one of the most poetic accounts of archival serendipity, historian Michael Hoeflich describes it as follows:
We [scholars] set out upon uncharted paths in libraries and archives, never really knowing what we will find. Scientists construct vast and complex experiments in the hopes of proving an hypothesis. But too many brilliant hunches have turned out to be nothing more than signposts on the road to dead ends. It is the lucky scholar or scientist who, setting out with a goal in mind for his or her research, achieves that goal quickly and directly. […] But serendipity and its relations do not come uninvited to the scholar’s table. Rather, serendipity visits those scholars and researchers who set out with open minds and the flexibility of plan that allows them both to recognize the fortuitous discovery and to pursue it to its logical end.[v]
Hoeflich insists upon the need for mental flexibility in the use of archives. By this, he means the need for archival researchers to prepare for unexpected paths that take them away from their planned research. It does not mean that the planned research must be given up, but it does mean being ready to take detailed notes of new findings and ideas that are of, ‘potential worth.’[vi] The process of ‘aimless’ catalogue browsing can aid in this endeavour. It certainly has done for me over the years. And it certainly did in the case of World Assembly of Youth.
As I browsed the catalogue of the Richard De Rochemont papers, scrolling through the hundreds of rows of metadata, I happened to notice the following entry buried within the series ‘Projects 1935-1982’:
World Assembly of Youth scripts, 1952 Box 163
I had not expected to see such an item in the catalogue. I was excited and, spurred on by this serendipitous encounter, I began to search more precisely. There was another entry, buried within ‘Sub-series 4: Information and Other, 1952-1972, undated’:
“World Assembly of Youth” (b&w), undated Box 9
And there was one final entry, with the series ‘Photographs, circa 1916-1969, undated’, aligned with material from the March of Time collection:
March of Time – World Assembly of Youth, Ithaca, New York, 1951 Box 200
After facing a virtual research dead end, I was suddenly confronted with three separate boxes of potential archival evidence. More than that, one of the items was possibly the World Assembly of Youth film itself. I immediately began the process of contacting archival staff to arrange for duplications of the material. I also requested further information about the archival film footage. After several weeks of emails, one of the archival staff had managed to locate the film and view it. He emailed me his findings:
I had a chance to go into the cold vault to examine the motion-picture film that you requested more information for. It is black and white. It does have a soundtrack (I don’t know if there is actual audio, but there is a track for audio.) It appears to be about 30 minutes in length. The film is titled World Assembly of Youth. The next screen is: A Report on the First Triennial General Assembly of WAY, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. The third credit screen is: Filmed in Conjunction with Young Adult Council U.S. Assembly of World Assembly of Youth. The next screen is: Produced by News of the Day. Then the film starts. The first scene appears to be of an airport tower.[vii]
Perhaps not the most enthralling of descriptions, but still this email furthered my excitement. After further discussions, it was agreed that the film could be digitised and sent across to me. I received that file, along with digital duplications of the other archival material, as I was leaving the University of Leiden Kubrick conference in summer 2019.
The material I received consisted of fifty-three black and white production photographs, a fifty-three-page script, a thirteen-page spot sheet document, and a digitised copy of the film. I have embedded the latter into this blog post for anyone that is curious to watch it.
Figure 1: The opening title of World Assembly of Youth
Now, I will be honest, I genuinely thought in the days leading up to receiving these documents that I had located a ‘lost’ Kubrick film. As such, the first thing I did upon receiving the documents was to watch the film. And as I watched the film, I became increasingly bored, baffled, and disappointed: what on earth was this film, I thought to myself. Obviously, it was a thirty-three-minute-long informational documentary about the first international meeting of the organisation the World Assembly of Youth at Cornell University in 1951. But a lost Kubrick film? As the film came to an end, I gradually started to suspect that everything I thought I knew about the film was in fact wrong. Kubrick’s name was absent from the credits. If he had been involved in the production, surely his name would have been included?
I hoped the surrounding archival documentation would provide a clue as to Kubrick’s involvement in the production. The script contained several pages of credits, but once again Kubrick’s name was absent. He had not produced the film. He had not directed it. He had not operated the camera. Nor the sound. Nor was he present in any of the production stills, some of which were images of the crew.
My disappointment turned to deflation as it dawned on me: World Assembly of Youth was not a ‘lost’ Kubrick film after all.
What we now know and what it tells us
In the days after first viewing World Assembly of Youth, I slowly came to the realisation that my serendipitous encounter had revealed an altogether different history to the one I had expected, and in fact arguably told me much, much more than I had intended to find out.
The fact that Kubrick was not involved in the production in any obvious way did not mean it did not reveal something about the history of Stanley Kubrick. It may well be that Kubrick was involved in the production, say as a stills photographer: the name of the photographer is not detailed in the available archival evidence and we can therefore speculate that it is Kubrick taking the pictures. He was, after all, a photographer by-trade up to 1950, working for Look magazine. Of course, it might also have been someone else that had taken the photographs.
Could Kubrick have been involved in an alternative, as of yet undiscovered production about the World Assembly of Youth? What I have not discussed in this blog post is the history of the organisation, of its connections to the U.S. State Department, or the fact that there were other productions, including radio productions, produced during this time period. Was Kubrick involved in those? I suspect it is highly unlikely. This film is located in the Richard De Rochemont papers with dates that correspond to a period in which Kubrick was closely affiliated to De Rochemont. If Kubrick was involved in any film about the World Assembly of Youth, the chances are that it was this one.
Perhaps more interesting is the way Kubrick clearly used the film, whatever his tangential connection, as a means of self-promotion. If we return to the column in the New York Times quoted above, the likelihood is that Kubrick had supplied the journalist, A. H. Weiler, with written copy. This is something he had done before when promoting Day of the Fight and his planned production of Fear and Desire. Kubrick also talked up his role in the production of Mr. Lincoln to the press. He was not averse to self-promotion or brand management, but made it a central tenet of his producing personality from the very beginning of his career.
Kubrick was building a myth about his prowess and abilities in order to advance his career at a time when he still had little prospects of making it in the film industry. There was no reason for A. H. Weiler to report on Kubrick’s activities other than if Kubrick had supplied the journalist with the story in the first place. As such, the sources that have been used to associate the World Assembly of Youth with Kubrick are unreliable.
The Kubrick myth, however, one propagated by Kubrick himself, still dominates. Yet, by conducting detailed, empirical research, it is possible to begin deconstructing this myth to get at wider truths of who Kubrick was and how his career developed. Of course, sometimes fortuity in the archives is what is needed to be able to break down some of these myths.
There is one final point I want to make about this serendipitous archival encounter. My attempts to discover a ‘lost’ Kubrick film failed, but in the process I succeeded in finding out something else: a forgotten history, if you will, of a film that might have otherwise remained sealed in the AHC Cold Storage. There is a much more detailed story to tell about World Assembly of Youth, particularly its connections with the CIA: that is for another blog post.
There is perhaps also a wider issue here of the failed, or ‘bad’ film histories, that prevail within our profession. By this I mean that archives are filled with such overlooked and forgotten artefacts like World Assembly of Youth, a whole hidden history of films that are not digitised and not accessible to film historians. One of the reasons this is the case is because of the way in which cultural value is ascribed to archives and archival objects. Typically, it is those films and filmmakers that are ‘established’ and the most popular that receive overinvested scholarly investigation. The result of this, however, is the neglect of other histories.
I for one was too focused on Stanley Kubrick and on the film canon, in the process overlooking and even overshadowing forgotten or banal archival objects if they did not serve the wider history of Kubrick’s career. What archival serendipity led to, however, was a realisation that the archive can deconstruct Kubrick and bring to light other histories of film and media that are just as important, even when it is a film as seemingly banal as World Assembly of Youth. And that has been for me the key lesson I have learned in archival research over the past two to three years: that as an archival researcher you have to be prepared to focus on the material realities of the archive, not on the archive as a means of reinforcing existing myths. It is a point more eloquently put by Nancy Lusignan Schultz:
Serendipity, however, requires that the mind be prepared in two special ways: with the flexibility to set aside the object of a quest, and with the wisdom to recognize that a collateral discovery may be equally important.[viii]
So, that is my story, how I failed to discover a lost Stanley Kubrick film, but instead found something altogether unexpected but just as important. And now that I have talked about this film for several thousand words, you might just find yourself wanting to watch World Assembly of Youth or even to read more about. The film is embedded as a YouTube video below, uploaded with the permission of the American Heritage Center. You can read more about the history of the film in Stanley Kubrick Produces, while David Maunders provides a comprehensive of the World Assembly of Youth organisation in his article, ‘Controlling Youth for Democracy: The United States Youth Council and the World Assembly of Youth’ (2003).[ix]
World Assembly of Youth, Richard de Rochemont Papers, American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
Produced by News of the Day for World Assembly of Youth, Richard De Rochemont.
Directors: D. Corbit Curtis and Richard Millett
Producer: Richard De Rochemont
Camera: George Stoetzel and George Hinners, with Rody Green, Leo Rossi, and T. Rickman
Sound: Anthony Girolami, with Fred Fenton and Abe Landau
Chief Electrician: Alfred Shaw Editors: Lawrence Sherman, Gene Milford, and Robert Collison
Assistant Directors: H. O. Keith Ayling, Robert Daly, Sam Locke
The film received the approval of the Department of State on February 15, 1952.
[ix] David Maunders, ‘Controlling Youth for Democracy: The United States Youth Council and the World Assembly of Youth.’ Commonwealth Youth and Development, vol. 1, no. 2 (2003), 22-51.
James Fenwick is a senior lecturer in media and communications at Sheffield Hallam University. He is the author of Stanley Kubrick Produces (2020), editor of Understanding Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (2018), and co-editor of Shadow Cinema: The Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films (2020). He has written numerous journal articles and book chapters about the life and work of Stanley Kubrick that aim to deconstruct the auteur myth that surrounds him by focusing on the material, social and cultural conditions of production of those films with which he is associated. This includes the forthcoming article, ‘Problems with Kubrick: Reframing Stanley Kubrick Through Archival Research’ (2021) for the New Review of Film and Television Studies.
Disclaimer: The IAMHIST Blog is a platform that offers individual scholars the opportunity to present their work and thoughts. They alone are responsible for the content, which does not represent the view of the IAMHIST council or other IAMHIST members.
Nicholas J. Cull, University of Southern California (USC)
15 July 2019
[print-me]
The IAMHIST Blog to date has considered issues around study in specific archives and particular kinds of media evidence. This post concerns a different kind of evidence which I’ve found to be simultaneously the most rewarding even as it is also the most fragile and fallible: oral sources. This post is not offered as a how-to manual but rather as a frank other-view of my experience, allowing me to reflect on my own practice and share some of the things I’ve learned since first including the method in my research work in 1985. I do not restrict myself to oral sources. My research in media history has used oral sources together with written archives and the usual audio visual materials of our field as part of a multifaceted approach.
For me, as I expect for most people, oral sources were my first source. As a child I was drawn to history through long conversations about the past with my parents and grandparents which often revealed a fascinating divergence from the received wisdom of mainstream media. At secondary school I did a short media history project on the social history of cinema going in the locality where I grew up, mixing material from documents with interviews. As an undergraduate in International History at University of Leeds it seemed logical to use a similar approach for my bachelor’s dissertation, which examined the career of Lord Halifax as the Churchill government’s wartime ambassador to Washington DC. My undergraduate supervisor – diplomatic historian David Dilks – was a particular enthusiast for the value and ‘fun’ of engaging directly with survivors of Whitehall. I started by comparing Who’s Who and the old diplomatic list and mailing the remaining diplomats from the embassy, forty years on from their service. To my surprise found a number of people still alive and both willing and able to speak about their services. The experience was wholly positive. I found the cross generational dynamic between a much older person and a young scholar to be a natural once which was conducive not only to a frank recollection and helpful direction but also to further study. My interviewees always recommended further people or further written sources to help. Memorable witnesses at this stage included the great philosopher (and wartime opinion analyst) Sir Isaiah Berlin and the retired head of the British Foreign Office, Lord Inchyra. That experience established oral sources as part of my standard way of operating. It was central to my PhD thesis, first book, and all subsequent projects. Over the years I’ve done interviews with a rich galaxy of sources including diplomats, filmmakers, journalists, politicians, soldiers and spies, in the US, UK, Canada, South Africa and points between to build up a picture of what would now be called public diplomacy in action.
Even when the center of gravity of a project is archival I have learned that it is worth pursuing contact with survivors of the period or events. The different kinds of sources support each other. The archives direct me to interesting people and some of my most helpful written sources were obtained as a result of interviews. Every now and again an interviewee pulled out a dusty old suitcase and produced their late husband’s diary or a sheaf of photographs; regularly an interviewee alluded to a newspaper story, film or other source they considered influential and worth examining. The process of repeating my ideas about the story in question and running them multiple survivors becomes an almost imperceptible process of honing and polishing, with each idea becoming like a pebble rubbed smooth through circulation in wave upon wave, hour upon hour of conversation.
I found that it is important not to prejudge who will be useful and who will not. One of my most important witnesses for my PhD work was Janet Murrow, widow of the legendary CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow who was introduced to me by the veteran BBC broadcaster Leonard Miall. Some historians would have considered her perspective on media coverage of the London Blitz to be a low priority but not only did she offer a unique view of journalists’ living conditions during the Blitz, and the day to day stresses of that time, she proved to be a person of undiminished authority within the network of surviving Murrow-era journalists who was happy to allow me to use her name in writing to some half dozen of her husband’s colleagues including such legends in their own right as Walter Cronkite, who all proved happy to help too. I owe her much.
In the process of integrating oral sources into my work I have certainly had to learn the limits of oral testimony. It was of greatest value not as a substitute for written or audio visual sources but as a supplement to it. It provided an added dimension: adding color to a picture or perhaps flesh to a skeleton. When researching a workplace like the British Information Services office in New York or the National Film Board of Canada it certainly helped to have insight into the relationships within that environment. Who was hated; who was loved; what morale was (or recalled as being) at a particular moment or during the creation of a particular media text. It was always especially fascinating to learn of the humdrum realities behind a choice in a propaganda documentary that I’d assumed to be aesthetic or artistic. Sometimes the United States Information Agency (USIA) shot a documentary film in black and white because they didn’t have a budget for color.
I discovered sometimes the oral source up-turned the meaning of a document or audio-visual text. I was fascinated, for example, by a story I’d seen in the March of Time newsreel about an apparently anti-war organization launched in 1936 by Princeton University students called ‘Veterans of Future Wars’. When based on campus as a visiting fellow in 1989 I managed to track down a founder member, but his account of the organization was not what I expected. I had understood that the group members were motivated by pacifism, ironically demanding war bonuses while they were still alive to enjoy them. His account – in contrast — emphasized the way in which the group was not so much protesting the next war from a position of its future victims as much as mocking the survivors of the former war (who had in 1935 demanded early payment of the promised war bonus scheduled for 1945) as representatives of a privileged elite who were stuck with the bill. The student’s salute was an ‘itchy palm’ outstretched in the direction of DC appealing for taxpayer money. Even more cynically the prompt for creating the movement was not simply a prank or satire but to create a story on campus so that the stringer for the New York Times could earn a few extra bucks after a slow semester. The same newsreel clip – and student politics in the ‘ivy league’ — suddenly looked very different.
My interviews have tended to follow a fairly lose format. A lot of work is done in the letter requesting the interview. This letter (or in recent years email) should succinctly communicate the nature of the project, one’s home institution and clearly reference either the person who suggested contacting them or the mechanism by which you obtained their name. It is a little creepy for a recipient to be guessing how you came to contact them or what your purpose might be.
My next stage is then to prepare by reading or viewing as much as I can about the interviewee so I am familiar at a minimum with any memoir they might have written, with their artistic output or with major interviews about the subject. This helps me to ensure that I am informed and am steering the interviewee to fresh territory rather than just dropping a coin in the slot to hear a much rehearsed story told one more time. It can be a nerve-racking process. I have a recurring nightmare in which I realize I forgot that Sir Winston Churchill was still alive and am due to meet him without having prepared properly. I wake in a cold sweat from that one! If something comes up which you don’t understand or recognize, perhaps a technical term or a name, it is fine to stop or double back to that point to clarify. It can help the interviewee to match their account to your understanding of the event or the place or process in which they were involved. I am a great believer in the power of a follow up request for detail to help the interviewee unlock further levels of recollection. I once asked the deputy director of USIA what he was eating for breakfast when a journalist friend leaked news to him of the up-coming Bay of Pigs invasion. I wish I’d asked the African-American public diplomat John Twitty exact which spirituals he’d sung in Nigeria when an audience demanded a musical prelude to his planned lecture on the Apollo space program.
I have found that it is helpful to agree at the outset how long the interview will be, so I don’t feel compelled to hurry towards a soundbite to justify the train fare. I also think it helps to establish whether or not you hope to quote the person, which is to say, are they ‘on the record,’ ‘on background’ or on ‘deep background’. If ‘on the record’ everything can be quoted, if ‘on background’ the substance can be quoted but not attributed and on ‘deep background’ neither quoted or attributed but it can be acted on in looking for further sources. A good off the record tip can guide future research and sometimes be proven by archive material without any mention of the help that go the scholar to that point.
My first step is always to explain exactly what my project is as succinctly as possible. If someone has agreed to be interviewed they generally want to help you and explaining the nature of your interest will promote efficient communication and avoid a practiced or generic response. I find it helpful to have a skeleton script of what I want to know, sometimes asking about broad issues like turning points, sometimes specific people, places or events. Like many interviewers I sometimes find that it helps to ask about something commonplace, like a work place or location rather than jumping in with a big historical conundrum or controversy.
Some of my interlocutors have been more comfortable talking over food. A number have smoked throughout our conversation. Trust me – if the likes of Pik Botha asks you if you mind if they smoke, the answer is ‘feel free…’ Drinks have most often come at the end and are doubtless a seal on the feeling of ‘being on the same page’ with the events in question.
My style as an interviewer is to create a space for testimony rather than badger my interlocutors. I would ask ‘help me understand how…’ rather than ‘how can you justify…’ An interviewer dealing with controversial matters like crime or prejudice will have to come to their own position on allowing their own judgement to be known. For my part I have looked for areas of shared experience or outlook to build rapport with a subject early on and held back issues likely to be divisive or controversial till later in the interview lest they prematurely end things. I have found it useful to guide witnesses away from stories that they have told a hundred times before. Interviewing Alger Hiss, convicted of perjury for denying that he spied for the Soviet Union, I got very interesting material by asking him his opinion on cases OTHER than his own. I began that conversation by saying quite honestly I was convinced of his innocence, but by the end of our talk he had told me enough to convince me that that if he hadn’t actually spied for Moscow he certainly believed that that would be the morally justifiable course to take. I have found it rare that interviewees ask me point blank what I think of an incident or personality to which they were connected and have never felt it wise or necessary to lie. That said, I have sometimes chosen my words carefully. When an old anti-Communist witch-hunter asked me point blank what I thought about Senator Joseph McCarthy I thought it wise to answer tactfully that anti-Communism was too important an issue to be trusted to a person like that.
When I began interviewing in 1985 an early witness asked me not to bring a recording device and so I for some years I only took notes in long-hand, pausing and drawing attention to my writing from time to time to confirm a thought or statement. I’ve found that the best interviews develop as a kind of co-creation where the interviewer is checking back that they have understood correctly, sometimes agreeing at that moment what a final quote or sound bite might be. I would type up an account of the interview at the end of each day, which extra impressions about manner or environment or exact words used were fresh in my mind. From 1995 or so I would bring a tape recorder to all interviews with senior figures. Now I bring a digital recorder to everything. I never use only a recorder just in case the device fails. I have never attempted to film an interview as I think this adds another level of concern or self-consciousness for the interviewee. I have found that sometimes in mid-interview a subject might ask me to turn off the recorder for a particularly sensitive part of the interview or conversely ask me to stop taking notes. I am happy to oblige. Strangely perhaps, I have never been asked to cease both.
I have found that using the same skeleton structure of questions with multiple witnesses can bring interesting results, allowing directly comparative answers that can clearly point up the ways in which individual perspective is subjective and memory is partial. I’ve found asking witnesses to identify a turning point in a historical process to be an especially fertile avenue. It can be fascinating to note the informal methods used to fix a date in a stream of recollections: ‘that would be around the time that X happened’ or ‘soon after Y happened.’ In fact, the use of a particular event in fixing the date has served as an excellent indicator of the salience of the event, which is of its own value.
Thinking about media history specifically I’ve found it helpful to speak to technicians ‘in the trenches’ as well as star ‘auteurs’. Documentary film makers and radio journalists have proven especially helpful in part because they haven’t had the same exposure to scholars as fiction film makers or TV journalists. Interviews with fiction film makers have been some of the most jaded and least revealing. They have been asked it all before. It is, however, an amazing experience to ask a question of an artist which is wholly new and unexpected to them and which triggers a moment of self-revelation or a new insight on their part. Sometimes showing a filmmaker one of the documents you’ve found can be a revelation to them. The great American government filmmaker Bruce Herschensohn was stunned when I showed him a letter Jackie Kennedy had written in the days following her husband’s murder in which she mentioned that she and the President’s father had viewed Herschensohn’s films in order to feel close to JFK once more. It seemed all the more appropriate that Herschensohn had been commissioned by USIA to create the president’s official obituary film.
My dealings with sources are not always limited to an hour. The experience of sharing an interest in a historical moment or experience can be powerful and some witnesses have initiated multiple visits and many conversations and become genuine friends. To be honest, I have sometimes been criticized for becoming too friendly with my sources. The criticism has some merit. One can easily take on the prejudice or institutional perspective of ones sources, written or oral, even without realizing it. When working on the history of Voice of America radio I was introduced to a succession of veterans of the service who styled themselves the ROMEOs (an acronym for Retired Old Men Eating Out). I found an easy rapport with them and knew my interest in their careers provided a welcome external validation. In this process I missed the extent to which the network was essentially masculine and skewed my account of VOA away from a female experience. This was a significant omission given that the Voice was cited in a massive anti-discrimination class action law suit called the Hartman case. My ultimate take-away from this is that a researcher must consider how exhilarating the process of being passed from one interviewee to another can skew perspective, and maybe seek additional witnesses as a corrective. Yet the most carefully constructed interview program can be skewed. Ultimately we will always need others to identify our biases for us and the corrective may not come from a supervisor or a peer reviewer but from a critic of the published text. Ouch. Despite the danger of human contact skewing the work, I feel that can happen with any set of sources. As with the stock market it pays to have a diverse portfolio! I have found my emphasis on oral work has helped me to remain aware of the subjective nature of my research and the way in which scholars are, like the oral sources, mortal prisoners of a flow of time. Knowing that my sources will not last forever has at some points given my work an urgency that an exclusively archive-based project would not have had. Needless to say the eventual loss of witnesses is a sad reality of the work – some deaths have been considerable blows — but one feels a sense of pride when one was part of their leaving something more of their story behind.
If you are going to bring oral sources into your work it is important to check your institution’s ground rules. Some regard oral sources as a form of ‘human subject’ work and require formal preparations and legal disclaimers for participants. Others have no formal requirements. It is important to ensure you are in compliance. Some publishers – including one of my own, Palgrave – will only allow an oral source to be quoted if they have a waiver signed by that source. This can cause problems if the source has died since the interview, which is not uncommon when one is interviewing people because of their historical value who necessarily are much nearer their end than their beginning. In one case I was able to get round the problem only by using the quote in a blog post and then citing the blog as my source rather than the interview.
One final rule I have is always to make a point of writing to thank my interlocutors. It helps for them to know that their time has been appreciated and I would hate to think that my neglect closed them off as a source for future historians.
Nicholas J. Cull is a Professor in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. He is president of IAMHIST. His archive-based study of Meader’s First Family and the White House reaction appeared as ‘No Laughing Matter: Vaughn Meader, the Kennedy Administration and Presidential Impersonation on the radio’ The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 17, No. 3, August 1997, pp. 383-400
Disclaimer: The IAMHIST Blog is a platform that offers individual scholars the opportunity to present their work and thoughts. They alone are responsible for the content, which does not represent the view of the IAMHIST council or other IAMHIST members.
