A Director Prepares

Take a look at the document linked above the photograph below, which details one of Alexander ‘Sandy’ Mackendrick’s incomplete projects. Designed to be used at CalArts and as a commercially available teaching tool, Mackendrick started work on A Director Prepares, ‘a series of six one-hour instructional video-tapes concerning Film-making,’ in the mid-1980s. After talking with his former students and colleagues, and having viewed much of the unedited footage myself, I suspect one reason Mackendrick abandoned the project was simple: he just didn’t think it worked, that it lacked coherence as an educational exercise. (Mackendrick also realized, though perhaps wasn’t so willing to admit to everyone concerned, that by this time, in his early seventies, he just wasn’t physically up to the task.)

Mackendrick wasn’t the author of this promotional document (evident for no other reason than the fact that his name is spelt throughout as ‘MacKendrick’), even though the ideas it contains are all his, and it uses (pages 6, 7 and 8), extracts from his handouts written for students in the film/video department at the California Institute of the Arts. It gives a good summary of his reasons not just why such an audio-visual project was important to him, but why he chose never to edit his many years worth of notes into a book. As he is quoted on page 1: “It has become obvious to me after twenty years as a film-educator that the only way to teach film is with film. It is simply not possible to discuss film satisfactorily in a literary or verbal medium. The language of the medium can only be appreciated in its own medium: the moving picture with sound.”

We needn’t feel overly disappointed with the fact that A Directors Prepares was never completed, as every substantive issue discussed in this promotional document turns up, in one form or another, in Mackendrick’s book On Film-Making and in Mackendrick on Film (or, more typically, both). Specifically, the three-day workshop explores the ideas behind ‘The Invisible Imaginary Observer’ (page 7), Scheherazade (page 9), ‘Anticipation Mingled with Uncertainty’ (page 9), a silent version of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire (page 9), ‘postcarding’ (page 10), ‘Where Do You Put the Camera?’ (page 11), ‘Working With Actors’ (page 12), ‘reaction coverage’ (page 13) and the ‘Cult of the Director’ (page 15). Material that was to make up the “two handbooks to accompany the series” (page 3), and the essay ‘A Technique for Having Ideas’ (page 10), can be found in On Film-Making.

Mackendrick’s idea (page 2) that “One of the best places for the director to learn his craft is, surprisingly, in the editing room” is explored through the use of (page 1) “unedited footage from the film” Mackendrick planned to make during the series which would put into practice his theoretical ideas. Such a film was, indeed, produced during the early Eighties (extracts of which are screened during the workshop). The Terrorists, filmed entirely at CalArts (and which, strictly speaking, is Mackendrick’s final film), tells the story of students attempting to stop a bomb exploding on campus. While a finished version of this short exists (described on page 2 as “a simple chase film”), its real value was as an editing exercise. Confronted with a written script and a multitude of shots, students would attempt to piece the narrative together in the editing room.

As former student John Sorensen says in Mackendrick on Film, “This is purely hypothetical on my part since I didn’t cut the piece together, but it would not surprise me if he booby-trapped some things. If he was trying to make us learn how badly we needed full coverage, it wouldn’t amaze me if he didn’t shoot full coverage on one or two scenes so we could curse him and ask, ‘Why did you not give me the shot I need?’” Another student, Dan Selakovich, picks up the story: “So I edited it, and I thought, ‘This doesn’t work that well. I’m editing a Sandy Mackendrick film. What am I doing wrong?’ I went to Sandy and said, ‘I edited the film you made for the directing class.’ He said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘To be honest I think it’s missing some shots. We could use some…’ And he said, ‘Close-ups?’ and pulled a reel of close-ups from his desk that he’d purposely held back from students, so they could discover on their own what was missing. Later I realized, when I became a professional editor, that directors didn’t have missing shots sitting on the shelf like Sandy did. They just didn’t exist.” The exercise is identical to the one devised years previously by ACE (American Cinema Editors), in which raw unedited footage of various shots that make up a scene from the popular American television show Gunsmoke was supplied to film schools. A vast number of cutting opportunities (for example a slow, ponderous version versus a fast, quick-edited variation, or one that emphasizes one character’s point of view over another) is possible with such material.

While the idea of Mackendrick in conversation with Alec Guinness and Douglas Slocombe (his cameraman on The Man in the White Suit and other films) is positively mouth-watering (see page 2), no such interviews were ever filmed. However, my own recordings made with Slocombe and other individuals mentioned through this document appear, carefully edited, in Mackendrick on Film. I have sought out, in archives, basements, attics and garages across the United States, fragments of A Director Prepares (usually on U-matic tapes, which have held up well over the years) and will present, on day three of the seminar, a selection of this material.

And in case you’re wondering, the “nasty old limerick” Mackendrick talks about on page 16, which is explained in section 6 of Mackendrick on Film, goes as follows:

There was a young hooker from Khartoum
Who took a nancy boy up to her room.
They stayed up all night, debating the right,
Of who should do what with which and to whom.