Original subtitles

We had all agreed

that bringing over this new KEM, the KEM editing machine

from Frankfurt, Germany,

was an absolutely essential ingredient to the whole thing .

Yeah , that enabled the multiple images to be cut effectively

so you could preview them without going to an optical stage,

which none of us could afford to do.

At the time, we didn 't have that much money,

and it was a lot of money for me to lay out.

I think it was 1 5 grand

-or something like that. -Yeah , 1 5 grand .

In those days, $ 1 5, 000 was a great deal of money.

And I was really interested, intellectually, in multiple image work,

and also trying to figure out how to beat the bank,

how to do it simply and effectively and economically.

So I'd read about this company that had designed

this three-headed monster.

Three, I mean, you could put up

three images and one soundtrack, or two soundtracks and two images.

It was just a breakthrough for us, particularly for me

in the documentary footage,

it meant I could buzz through large quantities of footage.

I could have three images up all the time

and be looking for ways to intercut things.

It struck me as just a magnificent machine,

so we particularly went to the factory,

and we got the very first one that came to America.

-And . . . -I'm gonna tell that little story,

because it's really hilarious.

Francis was building , in San Francisco, American Zoetrope.

He had all of his dubbing machines in San Francisco at Zoetrope,

but he did not have any of the editing machines.

Peter Wolfert, at KEM in Frankfurt,

had said that one of his machines was going to land at J FK

on a pallet, you know, like tomorrow morning .

And I got on the phone with Francis

and said , "We would like to rent your KEM machine,

"because we understand it's in New York,

"and we're doing this film called Woodstock, and blah , blah , blah ."

And he said , "No, you can't possibly."

I said , "Francis, Francis ! " And I begged , begged .

We all begged Francis to let us have this one.

And we worked out a rental agreement,

and we got Peter Wolfert to send Francis a second one

almost immediately thereafter.

But the very first one that Francis wanted and was expecting

landed in our editing place.

WADLEIGH: But that machine was an absolute godsend.

They were everything we thought they were.

It was super German engineering .

They really worked ,

they were wonderfully, wonderfully thought out.

It was a wonderful machine, quiet, beautifully designed ,

and that's what I was working on,

originally, when we were cutting the Aretha Franklin footage

that inspired the idea of multiple images.

Then I aggressively went after multiple image ideas in film

to increase this kind of point of view potential .

Michael was showing me things as we went along .

One day, he said to me, "Fred , I'd like to do split-screen ."

And I said , "Mike, I hate split-screen .

"If there's anything I hate, it's split-screen ."

I said it usually never works.

He said , "Well , let me show you this, okay?"

And he showed me two 1 6mm cameras together, right,

and he showed me the section that he'd edited with them.

And it blew me away. It really got me so excited .

We were approached at the end of J uly of 1 969

by David and Al Maysles and Porter Bibb, their producer,

who had heard that we had this technique,

and we brought them into a screening room ,

and in the screening room , which was, maybe, 20 feet by 20 feet,

there were three projectors, Graflex projectors,

on three projector stands,

a three-image, two-track film

that was about 15 minutes in length.

Certainly, some of that footage proved to us

that if you had a great performer, and a great set of circumstances,

that this would add not just a gimmick,

but a real , new kind of way of perceiving events

and performances that enhanced it.

And this occurred , like, every time that we invited new people in .

We had so revolutionized Hollywood by importing

the first flatbed editing tables that they had ever seen .