"My First Week at Dartmouth"
The Story Behind the New Dartmouth Film, Told by Its Director
IN HOLLYWOOD, there was for years a popular belief that the important conditions of an employment contract could only be found by examining the dots and dashes under a microscope. Unfortunately, a similar but less intentional obscurity applies to the credits of the new college film, My First Week at Dartmouth, in which what appears as a thin black line on the last title card is actually an assortment of letters stating, "This film was made on the campus by members of the college staff, students, alumni and faculty."
For here, in a single sentence, is the most important thing that can be said about the making of the film. From Professors McCallum and Folger and a hundred or more others who appear in it, to my daughter, Joanna, and an equal number who through no fault of their own end up on the cutting room floor, this was indeed a home-made, cooperative effort.
Such things as Bouchard's superb photography, the ingenious use of music by Sternfeld and Terry, the believable, winning performances of Zuckerman and Atherton are obvious on the surface, but what of the Hanover storekeepers, the housewives, the high school students who posed as freshmen (and toted our lighting equipment) in the early days of September when bona fide freshmen were scarce, and what of the freshmen themselves for whom the ordeal of sophomore hazing was doubled by the requirements of our camera?
EVEN A HONEYMOONER HELPS
The list should go on to mention Harry Ungar '48, passing through town on his honeymoon and being roused out of bed on a Sunday morning to record the haunting piano passage which accompanies the so-called blue Sunday sequence; the stationmaster in White River Junction detaining a locomotive to provide a symphony of bells and whistles for our tape recorder; Ives Atherton '24 protecting the flowers in his garden with a blanket when a frost came the night before we intended to photograph them, etc., etc.
All this was cooperation in big letters and there was an obligation to make the film worthy of it. But if this creates the impression of idyllic working conditions it's only because of a disposition to praise before raising the roof on the more grisly details.
Shooting began the day after Labor Day in the Reserve Room of Baker Library. It was completed a month and some 3,000 feet of kodachrome later. This is, even according to Hollywood standards, a long schedule for a 19-minute film, but you may be sure it was not because of my desire to outdo Von Stroheim.
While I think it is possible to mention our finished film and Hollywood standards in the same sentence without blushing, to compare the relative standards of equipment and production method is like discussing your child's wizardry with a Tinker Toy at a board meeting of General Motors.
When you consider that everything from the insert of the maps, through the titles to the last frame of Baker Tower backed by the Glee Club singing "Men of Dartmouth" was conceived and executed in Hanover and that the College possesses no motor-driven camera, no synchronous recording equipment, no studio "set" of any kind, no auxiliary generator for lighting interiors, you can recognize the ingenuity of the technical achievement, regardless of content.
But even with adequate equipment (and a few indispensables were purchased dur- ing production) the major problem would still be the lack of an organization. There is probably enough talent and skill in Hanover but how do you assemble it? In short, there is no movie-making unit on the campus and its absence accounts not only for my gray hairs but for the differ- ence between a week of shooting and a month.
Anyone making a movie lays himself open to bizarre afflictions. You expect to fight a duel with the weather, you expect to have disruptions on location (but nothing like the cavernous excavation for a leaky pipe which decorated the middle of the campus for two weeks), you expect a camera to run out of film at some crucial moment, you are even prepared for actors to break their legs (which ours did not), but ordinarily your sets would be ready without the cameraman and director moving the lights and furniture, the props would be available without an assistant to the Secretary of the College (the willing Bob Allen '45) bicycling downtown to buy them at the last minute, a cast would have been assembled and costumed instead of having to be snatched off the street one by one by an improvised press gang. There would be someone to write down the details and watch out for technical errors and, wonder of wonders, there might even have been simultaneous preparation of a rough cut. You might say we had the best production team that good will and no organization could provide.
(Someone is probably thinking to himself at this moment that organization, after all, costs money. So it does, but then actors usually do, too, and so do electricians and musicians and cutters and the men who pull the dollies and tote the cable and even those who just stand around and ask, "How's it coming?" In Hanover, it's well known that people don't get paid for such things. At least, students do not. They don't get paid for working on the radio station either and yet we found them two weeks before school opened soundproofing and redecorating their studio. Students don't get paid (except, to some extent, in their senior year) for staying up all night reading and writing copy for The Dartmouth, for painting scenery and rehearsing with The Players. They work because they want to and because there is an organization in which they have a say and can take some pride. I happen to have said this before and can't resist the opportunity to say it again with these columns of type at my disposal that the day has come when there should be a student organization—properly supervised which would be to motion pictures what TheDartmouth, WDBS and other student activities are to their respective professional counterparts.)
My First Week at Dartmouth will probably do the job it was meant to do in the recruiting field. Historically speaking, it started in the minds of the Alumni Film Committee and its chairman. Orton Hicks '21. For a while it was annoyingly regarded as "A Guided Tour of the College" and meant to supplement the film DartmouthOutdoors with a picture of the college plant and facilities. Since no creative effort is possible without science these days, we relied on Professor Al Frey's marketing class at Tuck School to poll the then freshmen on what factors had influenced their choice of Dartmouth, a most successful move since, like most polls, it told us what we already wanted to believe.
But as our plans for the film became increasingly complex and ambitious, it was apparent that I was helping to forge my own chains. Barring a contract with some commercial film-maker (and I had taken the lead in opposing this in favor of spending money for our own equipment), how vulnerable for the production job I wasa resident of the Hanover community with an extensive movie background and not really employed (why is it that a writer's time is considered relatively "free" while manufacturers, lawyers and even advertising men who earn their living in formal offices are always presumed to be busy?)!
So I was stuck and I say "stuck" advisedly for it seemed then a thankless job at best. Making a movie about a subject which burns brightly in the affections and memories of so many is indeed precarious. Every alumnus looks at the College with his own pair of rose-colored glasses and would surely be fitted with critical lenses for a movie about it. Woe to him who should alter a single jigger of the potion called the Dartmouth experience!
To my delight and surprise, however, the project was rewarding from beginning to end. So much so that my personal objectives have been somewhat altered toward doing more film work of the same sort. Despite the difficulties mentioned earlier, there was no trace of carping interference but rather full support, enthusiasm, and a clear understanding of what the film was meant to achieve at every stage. Now the alumni body can do its part if it manages to find an audience for it.
The title frame of Dartmouth's latestcolor film
"Dear Mom and Dad:.... doesn't seempossible I've been here a week"
"Tfie College looked awfully impressiveto all of us"
"The whole freshmaji class was in themoving and furnishing business"
"They gave us a talk and took us on atour of the library"
"Activity has picked up since the sopho-mores hit town"
"Later that day I met my faculty ad-viser"
"You get to meet an awful lot of peo-ple .... including the President"
"I had my first class—English I—withProfessor McCallum"
"You feel that you're beginning to shapeyour own future"
ON THE SET: Maurice Rapf '35, script-writer and director of Dartmouth s new movie, as well as the author of this behind-the-scenes article, shown telling some of his youthful actors how to look and act like fresh- men. The above examination scene is being photographed in the Little Theater in Robinson Hall.
