The Greatest Salesman Documentary in the World

Some of my favorite films are documentaries. By documentary, I don't mean propaganda, in which footage depicting real events is spliced together in a misleading way. (Not that there's anything wrong with a good, solidly made exposé: I loved Super Size Me and the less substantiated, but highly entertaining, Kurt and Courtney.)

Nor am I referring to the kind of scripted "reality" that has become prevalent in the last decade, though I will admit to having greatly enjoyed a movie called Sex with Strangers even as I recognized the contrivance of a neat storyline in its tale of five "swingers". (I rewrote the last sentence, which originally included the dubious-sounding phrase, "I enjoyed Sex with Strangers"--a great example of how"factual" material can be manipulated to say something else entirely.)

An example of a great documentary on politics and historic events is the Occult History of the Third Reich series: though I've watched literally hundreds of hours about the Nazis and World War II (okay, I'm a little sick), these three discs stand out above all the rest. But most notable documentaries of the past few decades are concerned not with the grand sweep of things, but rather with portraying a very small, unusual corner of society: for example, skateboarding misfits (Dog Town and Z-Boys, basis for the feature Lords of Dogtown); trash-talking and sometimes truly frightening street hustlers (American Pimp); Texas fundamentalists with a rather twisted take on Halloween (Hell House); or a gaggle of moviegoing geeks (Cinemania).

Add to this list--at the top of this list--the amazing Salesman (1968), about Irish Catholic door-to-door Bible peddlers in Boston and Florida in 1967. If you loved Tin Men, and loved/hated Glengarry Glen Ross (to me, perhaps the most truly terrifying film ever made), then Salesman is one to see. I repeatedly petitioned Netflix to add it to their list, and though they've been pretty responsive about some things, they never acquired this one. So I finally bought it from Amazon, and though it's on the expensive side, it's definitely worth it. Or as the guys in the movie might say (putting on an exaggerated brogue), "How much do you think you'd be able to set aside on a monthly basis for this beautiful bound edition of the sacred texts, Mrs. O'Connor? For the security of knowing that your children are being raised in the traditions of the saints and the sacraments? What if I told you that you could have this peace of mind for just $7.95 a month?"

To anybody who's ever worked in door-to-door or in-home sales, been involved in a multilevel, or otherwise tried to proselytize in some uphill situation, Salesman will elicit many a heartfelt guffaw or frisson or sheer horror. And yet that's only part of the authenticity that makes this film so remarkable. Too many directors today, if given these same materials, would try to carve out a storyline around some boring, shopworn critique of Christianity and capitalism, but filmmakers Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin did something much more difficult. Simply by sticking close to their subjects--including the unforgettable Paul "the Badger" Brennan, who has to have been David Mamet's model for the Jack Lemmon character in Glengarry--they allow the personalities and events to express themselves in a way that speaks to timeless issues of honor, achievement, and sheer survival.

This undoubtedly necessitated the shooting of hundreds and hundreds of hours of footage, just to get the very best stuff--for instance, the scene where an oblivious husband cranks a sickly-sounding string version of "Yesterday" while the Bible dude tries to close his sale with the curler-wearing wife. It was an astonishing scene, precisely because it was the mid-1960s, before the average Joe had discovered irony, postmodernism, or self-reference. In other words, it's a safe bet that these people weren't encouraged to ham it up ala The Osbournes; they were just being themselves, and that was more than entertaining enough.

Though by far the greatest "salesman" I have ever personally known is a woman--my wife Deidre, founder of The Knight Agency--both Salesman and Glengarry Glen Ross are dominated by male figures. (Except perhaps in the background of the restaurant where the characters hang out for half the movie, you don't even see a woman in Glengarry.) In both movies, the role of the male is reduced to the most fundamental demands and expectations placed on him by millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of tradition. In both, men compete with varying degrees of success for key positions at the head of the pack, while an older man is forced to ask himself if he still has what it takes to survive. Without apparent contrivance, the film develops a powerful storyline, and the dialogue that spills from the mouths of Paul and his comrades along the way is better than most writers could ever hope to create.

[Maysles Productions has a Web site that includes a list by Albert Maysles of his own professional guidelines as a documentary maker. In pulling up all the links above, most of which go to Netflix listings, I ended up adding about fifty new documentaries to my personal film queue. One that's apparently no longer available, though I saw it about ten years ago, is Chickenhawk, which concerns the North American Man-Boy Love Association or NAMBLA. Apparently the film has been withdrawn from circulation, though I can't imagine how anyone could construe it as treating NAMBLA favorably. ]

As Schwarzenegger said in Terminator 2...

..."I need a vacation"--something often said by parents of small children when they return from what others would call a vacation. Actually, in my case at least I'm just kidding: we had a great time in Florida with our young'uns, and though there were occasional moments of near-havoc, I wouldn't have traded a moment of it.

I wanted to draw attention to content on two other blogs, both of which are linked from mine. First, there's our own Knight Agency blog, where we're offering a special promotion that will be of interest to authors who are attending the Romance Writers of America (RWA) annual convention in Reno later this month. Also, my old friend Harry Joiner , an executive recruiter specializing in Multi-Channel Marketing, has moved his blog to www.MarketingHeadhunter.com. Harry is always witty and insightful, and I greatly enjoy reading his dispatches.

Speaking of business gurus, I think James Surowiecki (I had to check that spelling three times) ought to have a blog. Surowiecki, who writes "The Financial Page" for the New Yorker, is brilliant: until seeing his picture, I would have figured he was a silver-haired old seer, sharing wisdom that dates back to the days of Univacs and switchboards. Other New Yorker talents whose work I never miss are Anthony Lane and Louis Menand.

I sound like somebody who must have spent a lot of time sitting around the pool reading magazines, but in fact the reading material that took the greatest part of my attention was Love: Behind the Scenes on the Pegasus Carousel with the Legendary Rock Group Love by Michael Stuart-Ware. Most people have never heard of Love, but their 1967 album Forever Changes is routinely listed among the all-time greats. Stuart's book is an inside view of L.A.'s Sunset Strip at the height of the 1960s, by the drummer for a band whose members' drug addictions, internal conflicts, and other flaws outweighed their considerable talents. At one time much bigger than the Doors, Love is now known primarily to music enthusiasts; yet a listen to Forever Changes provides a startling reminder of just how good they were. And the revelations in Stuart's book only make their achievement all the more impressive in light of the odds against which it took place.

Our recent televiewing has been all over the map: from the two-DVD set The Elegant Universe, which explores unified field theory, curvature of space-time, string theory, the eleven possible dimensions, and similarly challenging ideas, to the season premiere of The Surreal Life. As conoisseurs of that show for several years now, I'll have to say that their present lineup might be the best yet. And check this out: though Omarosa is part of the show, she's not playing the role of bitch. That job has been assigned to former supermodel Janice Dickinson, who does a suspiciously convincing job with it.

The Scale of the Human within the Framework

The pictures below show current living conditions in China, the closest thing to another superpower in the world today--the country, that is, that would most likely be at the forefront of global affairs if there were no United States. It might be argued, of course, that this would never happen due to China's traditional isolationism, but all of that is changing as China emerges in the role of a massive importer and exporter. Nor does Russia, for all its bluster in military and political terms, possess anything like the economic clout of the People's Republic, a force with the potential to rival the European Union and Japan--only with much greater military power.

Now look at these pictures and think about what they might tell us concerning the view of humanity under the Chinese state--or indeed under any of the governments that have ruled that great land for the past three thousand years. There is a certain almost whimsical quality, for those of us with an eye for the grotesque, in the way that these photographs present human living spaces as pure geometric shape and color. Replicated over and over, these images might make a good backdrop for a dystopian future world as depicted in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

But this is not pure geometry, pure image; this is where people live. Can you, as a westerner, imagine life as an ant with two legs and a conscience--an ant potentially capable of solving complex mathematical problems or writing music, but an ant nevertheless? Probably you can't; I don't really think I can. In America, we know about regimentation and blandness in the form of cookie-cutter strip malls and one-size-fits-all servings of pablum through the popular culture, but honestly, is anything we know even remotely as dehumanizing as this?

As for the poverty depicted in some of the middle pictures, ones that look like scenes from the New York City slums of the 1880s but projected many decades into the future, do we know anything like this? I'm always amused when an American, in response to a discussion of poverty overseas, gets almost defensive and says, "We have poverty here, too!" Yeah, I've seen it: I've been to the projects, I've been to rural Mississippi, I've been to the forgotten places on the West Virginia-Kentucky line, and I still say that we don't know anything about how poor people really live.

And yet the poverty in other parts of the world--in many cases far, far worse even than we see in these pictures, the poverty of people who live in corrugated tin shacks without running water or electricity, of people whose children are unclothed, of people who don't have enough to eat--is nothing compared to the much greater evil depicted in these scenes: dehumanization. Let's face it, folks, our western idea that each human being is unique and important is a minority view in the world.

The mentality of the pigs who set off those bombs on the London Underground yesterday may represent an extreme, but it's a lot closer to the world norm than our own liberal western view. Yes, it's true that the Ohio National Guard fired on and killed four demonstrators at Kent State in 1970, and that the CIA probably has conducted all kinds of ghastly experiments with LSD and other chemicals, and that governments in this country have acted with unconscionable brutality against minorities. But if you think that the cruelty people have known here is even on the same scale with the cruelty people have experienced elsewhere, then you are dangerously ignorant.

And sadly, there are many people who don't simply think this country is as bad as others, they claim it's much worse: the likes of Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois have made whole careers on such fantasies, and yet deep down I suspect they all know the truth. All of us do; but sometimes it's easier to go along with the comforting myth that George Bush (or, if you like, Bill Clinton) represents the summit of human evil. Sometimes it's necessary to look beyond our little world here and its problems, and see how the rest of the world treats itself. You don't have to think about the Holocaust or the murders carried out by the Koran-thumping modern descendants of the Nazis. All you have to do is look at these photographs, and imagine what it must be like to be treated as an ant with two legs and a brain capable of higher reasoning.

(Many thanks to Nino Spahic , an architect who works with my brother, for providing these incredible pictures. The views expressed here, of course, are entirely my own.)

Two Great Americans

In honor of Independence Day, I'd like to salute two gentlemen who proved that it's possible to be cool and love America. Sadly, because both were self-destructive figures, they have long since gone on.

The first of these was Jack Kerouac,

who, despite his association with the Beat movement--many of whose members disdained America--was an unabashed patriot. Kerouac had nothing but contempt for flag-burners, and one of the many points of contention at his infamous meeting with Ken Kesey (depicted in Tom Wolfe's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test) was the fact that one of Kesey's Merry Pranksters had draped an American flag ingloriously over a chair. Kerouac quietly folded the flag and handed it to Kesey.


I've done enough research to confirm what I said about Kerouac's patriotism, but on this next one I'm on more shaky ground. This was something I once heard, but for which I've not found any corroboration; anyway, it's a great story. Supposedly, when Jimi Hendrix
played "The Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock, he received a chorus of boos because at that time (even more so than now) nothing could be more un-hip than even appearing to celebrate America. Whether or not it's true that Hendrix played his inspired version of the national anthem against such strong popular opposition, there's no denying the fact that he was sending a strong message with his choice of "The Star-Spangled Banner" for that particular performance. While the America of Jimi Hendrix might have been different from the America of the "Establishment" in those times, it seems to me that with his funked-out, heavy-metal version of the anthem, he was saying that this country belongs to everyone who loves it and the freedom which is its basis.