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News That's Fit To Film: A Conversation with Samuel Fuller
From: American Film Institute
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EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
One of the most colorful, prolific writer-directors, Samuel Fuller first developed his keen sense of story as a newspaperman. At 17, he took charge of the events section of The New York Journal--the youngest reporter ever to hold such a position.
Fuller (right) dabbled in movies as early as 1938, but really broke through in 1949 when he  directed I Shot Jesse James. He gained a reputation for making inexpensive genre films quickly, especially westerns and gangster pictures, and the range of his work shows a startling flexibility.
His films also offer a robust visual style many would later copy--for an expert use of deep-focus cinematography (see Underworld) and an early, potent use of hand-held, or subjective, cinematography to enhance point of view (see, especially, The Naked Kiss). So compelling a figure, Fuller himself became the subject of a recent documentary, The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera (1996).
In an article written for AFI in 1975, Fuller urges screenwriters to use headlines as fodder for screenplays. Below he describes his instant, long-standing love for reporting. |
 eaned on Park Row, teamed with reporter Rhea Gore (John Huston's mother) on my first double-suicide, I made the eventual transition from newspaperman to filmmaker. |
Page One and the screen are bedmates. Working in the morgue and shooting a movie trigger constant visions. A headline has the impact of a headshot, pulp and raw stock fight linage and footage--a news lead is the opening of a film. |
Reporter and film director spill blood on the same emotional battlefield of what is fit to print and what is fit to film. The thou cannot and thou must not pendulum swings from black-and-white facts to Technicolor fancies. The newspaper "real" and movie "imaginary" share bloodstained scissors, glue, proofs, cement, splicer and work print, giving birth to the battle cry of rewrite, remake, retake and redub. |
Peddling the Worcester Telegram, The Boston Post and The Boston American in Worcester was my first contact with newspapers. I went to New York at 11 and peddled papers at 12 at the 125th Street Ferry. In those days newsboys bought papers from the Circulation Department. A love affair started with the New York Evening Journal, 238 William Street, off Park Row, a column away from the Bowery, across from the Newsboys' Home sponsored by Al Smith. |
One-eyed, half-deaf Tom Foley, foreman of the Journal's Press Room, opened up Wonderland, showed me presses in action, Linotypes singing in composing and, finally, gold itself: The City Room on the seventh floor. |
The shouts of "Copy, boy!" with young men in late teens running, making "books," shooting copy through pneumatic tubes was electrifying. The hell with peddling newspapers. Working on one became an obsession. |
"Lie," Managing Editor Joseph V. Mulcahy said. "Tell 'em you're 14 to get working papers. Then I'll put you on as a copy boy." |
Running copy on the Journal led to reporting. Reporting on dailies, weeklies and bi-weeklies throughout the country slowly structured a stockpile of characters, events and conflicting emotions without thought of making a film. |
My first brush with Hollywood was when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's offer of $5,000--to fictionalize a solution to my bylined, unsolved double-murder--was spurned because the City of New York offered $25,000 for a factual solution naming names. The murders are still unsolved. The corpses were wealthy, white-bearded, miserly octogenarian Edward Ridley and his male secretary. |
My lead was "Who killed Santa Claus?" because Ridley loved foreclosing mortgages on Christmas. No regret turning down that $5,000. One day "Who killed Santa Claus?" will be my film contribution of a case of murder that defies solution yet maintains suspense to the empty end. |
The question, "Where do you get ideas for films?" isn't hard to answer: |
- Covering an execution of a man who hacked his family to death with a meat cleaver on a Hudson River barge who kept saying he was sorry if he hurt them.
- Listening to a leaper's sex problem on a 30-foot ledge before he squashed a luckless passerby like a gnat.
- Extracting the identity of a blonde nude with paresis mounting a water hydrant singing the "Star Spangled Banner" because her name was Frances Key.
- Watching reporters refuse to help swing the tail of Lindy's plane at Teterboro Airfield in Jersey because they resented his reply to all their questions with, "Is there anything else you want to ask?"
- Breaking Jeanne Eagles' death by discovering her corpse in Campbell's Funeral Parlor.
- Posing for a Graphic composite of French flyers Nungesseer and Coli in their wrecked plane in the ill-fated Atlantic hop only to baffle my mother, who just couldn't understand if the photographer was that close why the flyers weren't saved.
- Accompanying a rookie copy from the 24th Precinct on a routine complaint to stumble over a slain body in a subterranean office.
- Successfully interviewing J.P. Morgan only to watch my copy destroyed by the City Editor because he knew J.P. never granted interviews.
- Getting hired, fired and rehired by the great Gene Fowler in the span of five hours while assigned to an Admiral's speech that erupted miles away in a Bowery bum's brutal murder near Lum Fong's restaurant in Chinatown.
- Phoning blow-by-blow from a Harlem cigar store during a race riot.
- Using Sunday editions as bed sheets and blankets riding the rods with depression-displaced persons.
- Taking footbaths with hoboes in troughs of condemned milk.
- Sketching whores in San Francisco while covering the General Strike as soldiers shot strikers in front of the Ferry Building.
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Every newspaperman has a Hellbox to draw from. Every newspaperman is a potential filmmaker. All he or she has to do is to transfer real emotion to reel emotion and sprinkle with imagination. |
All the news that was unfit to print--all the scenes that were unfit to shoot--would make one hell of a film. It would have facts, legitimate characters, humor, shock and action. It would entertain and reveal. It would have the language of newspaper type spoken with flesh. It would show the passion of the printed word take on instant intimacy on film. It would go beyond the Bible, the newspaper, the stage. It would make words jump to life in shocking close-ups. |
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