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Feb 17, 2009 Morgan Dews By Chris Tinkham

When Morgan Dews’ grandmother Allis died in 2001, the New York writer/filmmaker inherited a wealth of her personal photos and 201 of her 8mm home movies, shot primarily by her during the 1950s and ’60s. Although Dews initially had hoped to make a short film from the footage, the images eventually composed the visual content for Dews’ first feature-length film, the lyrical yet unsettling documentary Must Read After My Death. A year after Allis’ death, Dews’ uncle Bruce found audio letters that she and her second husband Charley (Dews’ grandfather) had recorded on a Dictaphone. They were a way to correspond with each other and their four children—Anne (Dews’ mother), Chuck, Bruce and Douglas—when Charley’s work took him to Australia for 16 months out of the year. Though Dews grew up close to Allis, she refrained from speaking about Charley for the 31 years following his mysterious death in 1969. Through the Dictaphone recordings, Dews not only heard his grandfather’s voice for the first time but also discovered surprising intimacies of Charley’s relationship with Allis.

Two years after the Dictaphone findings, uncle Bruce’s ex-wife tipped off Dews to a file of tape transcripts and notes that Allis labeled “Must Read After My Death.” The tapes, self-recorded by Allis, are candid audio diaries from an increasingly distraught mother taking account of her psychiatric sessions with a Dr. Lenn, her constrictive role as mid-’60s housewife and hostess, her struggles with Charley’s alcohol-induced anger and the potentially damaging effects that the tempestuous home environment was having on their children. The home movie images, which are mostly of the family on holiday or sharing playful moments at home, are typically innocent. But slowed down optically and coupled with Allis’ recordings, an eerily compelling story begins to unfold before becoming sadder and more tragic. Paul Hogan of Frances complements the narrative with a quiet score that’s both misty and ominous.

Under the Radar spoke with Morgan Dews by phone, a week before the New York theatrical release of his film.Must Read After My Death can be purchased for streaming, through Gigantic Digital, in cities where it is not screening.

www.giganticdigital.com
www.mustreadaftermydeath.com

Based on your interaction with audiences on the festival circuit, what seem to be the most common misconceptions about your film?

I’m always shocked at how well the audiences seem to get everything. I really love going to the screenings, because, it’s a strange thing, but in doing the Q&As, I’ve learned a lot about myself that I didn’t necessarily know when I made [the film]. I tried to keep [the film] very open-ended in a lot of ways and just present the dramatic elements as they were, and leave a lot of details there that were just part of the reality, and not worry so much about what all of those things meant. So, it’s really very gratifying to show it to audiences, because, with their own experience, they’re able to bring new things to the film and also explain things that might not have been so clear to me, because of the insight they might have.

I guess the only misconception, and I think it’s part of the way the film was made, is that everybody seems to think that my mother left the house at 16, and it was just an ellipsis. Actually, she left for college at 18. She just ran away for the weekend with a boyfriend at 16. That’s kind of the only thing that happened like that, but there are lots of points where things are not explained, that I just wasn’t interested in making sure that—factually, chronologically—everything was super clear. But I was much more interested in providing a strong emotional experience that was a really true experience and, I guess like Herzog says, not trying to be a factual accountant but trying to present a greater reality.

I’m thinking you must have had a lot of questions for your uncles and mom while making this film, so how involved were they in piecing together the story you were trying to tell?

Yeah. As you can imagine, a lot of this information was new to me, and I had no context for it. So, yes, I talked to pretty much everybody in the family every week. I would call them for about the two-and-a-half years I was working on it, just for guidance or just to say, “What does this mean? What are they talking about? Who is this person?” ‘Cause a lot of those things weren’t clear to me, and I think part of the process of making this film, and maybe of making films in general, is that as you’re doing it, you’re figuring out what it’s about. And they were really helpful in that sense; they helped me figure it out.

The other thing is, my family was kind of reticent to give me carte blanche to do this film, so when I started making it, I kind of said, “Well, I’m gonna need you guys to sign releases.” And they said, “Well, we’re not going to do that. But, you make your film, and if we like it, we’ll let you use it. That’s fine.” So, I was also interested in feeling them out about things and just making sure we were all on the same page. I was pretty much in close contact.

How common or how rare was it for someone from your grandmother’s era to record and archive personal recordings?

I do actually know somebody whose father was in the state department and was serving abroad in Vietnam, and he has a great collection from the late-’60s and early ’70s of tapes that his father sent back to his mother and to the family. It might be more common than we think, because I think she started doing this at the suggestion of one of her psychiatrists. And later my mom told me that there was a blind study they did with three groups, and they said to one group, “You’re gonna tell all your problems to this tape recording, and then we’re gonna give it to a shrink, and he’s gonna listen to it.” And the other group, they said, “You’re gonna talk to the tape recorder and we’re gonna give it to somebody to listen to.” And the third group, they said, “You’re gonna talk to the tape recorder, and nobody’s gonna listen to it.” And it turned out that all of those people felt that they had been helped by this experience of being able to talk things out with a tape recorder. I would be surprised if Dr. Lenn or any of the other doctors actually listened to these tape recordings, but I bet there are a lot of older shrinks that might have boxes and boxes of stuff like that. I think the only thing is that Allis made a copy for herself, as she did with a lot of her correspondence. My great grandfather would send letters and save carbon copies of stuff that he wrote on the typewriter. So, I have no idea. I just knew that when I found out about these tapes, that this was a pretty important first-hand historical document of one woman’s life.

I’m curious how thorough your grandmother’s logging and labeling was, because I was wondering if you were able to listen to the materials chronologically?

I would just pull a tape out, because the tape boxes weren’t labeled at all, or they were mislabeled or, you know, stuff was scratched out. I got all the tapes at the Thanksgiving after Allis died, and I didn’t have time to actually record them all at standard speed, so I put these reel-to-reels on fast and recorded them into my computer, and then I stretched them out later to normal speed, which probably is not the most advisable capture technique. But I just had the week to do it, and there were so many hours; there are like 50 hours of tape. So I was constantly changing reels and putting them on. And then when I got home, I just had some random stuff that was on the box, and I numbered all the boxes, and then I started transcribing them. Once I was finished, then I could look at it all and say, “Oh, OK, here’s the chronology.” But it was a very random way to get into that, because I had no way of knowing which tape was supposed to go first.

She would start a tape and say, “August 13, 1962, Allis recording.” So they were all pretty easy to put together. All of them are like that. Charlie, on the Dictaphone records, also put a time label on there, ‘cause he was used to doing it for business, dictating letters for secretaries. They had a better filing system than I did.

Were there wild goose chases for material that was logged but nowhere to be found?

When I first started working on this project, when I first started listening to the tapes when I got back to my house, I had a dream where Allis appeared at the foot of my bed and told me to call Patty, who is a friend of hers who worked as a part-time secretary for her for like 20 years. It was a really weird dream, because I woke up looking at the space where she had been, and it was like the same room. It was not like a dream where things are dreamlike, but it was very real, and I was very scared. So I didn’t actually get in touch with Patty until I was e-mailing somebody, and you know how it has that auto-complete? Well, I realized two years later that I actually had her e-mail address. So I just wrote her this letter. I said, “I’m working on this film. It’s turning out to be about those dark times in the ’60s when they sent Bruce to the mental institution. I found all these tapes and all these films, and I had this weird dream, and I was afraid, but now that I’ve got you, do you have anything that I should know about? Do you have any more tapes or any more films or something I can use that relates to this period?” And she wrote me this really beautiful letter back: “It’s great to hear from you…that sounds really great…that sounds like something your grandmother would be really interested in you doing.” Which is, of course, something I wasn’t very sure about at all. And then she said, “No, I haven’t got any tapes or any films. In fact, the only thing I can think about is her ‘Must Read After My Death’ file.” And I wrote her back, “What is that? Where would that be. Is that in her filing cabinets? What’s happened to that?” And she said, “Oh, your mother or your uncles have that. That was the file that they got when she died. She wanted them to read that.” [laughs] And I said, “Really?”

So, I got on the phone with my mom, and I’m like, “Uh, you know I’ve been working on this film for like two years. [laughs] I call you every week. I keep asking you if there’s anything else you can help me with. What’s the deal? What’s the deal with this file?” They were all very cagey about it. They were like, “Oh, I don’t mind, but…” My mom said, “I don’t think your uncles would want you to read that.” And, of course, my uncles said the same thing. They’re like, “Oh, it’s fine with me, but I don’t know if your mom wants you to see that.” So, we went around a little bit. And then I finally got it. And I read through it, and it’s just kind of an appalling series of documents, ‘cause it’s not only all the tapes, but it’s also a lot of almost surveillance notes of things that went on in the house, her reports on fights. And it really gave me a sense that, in a way, this file was her case against Charley. And it’s something that I wanted to suggest in the film a little bit but not push too far because the audio material was just so much more compelling. So I did a lot of experiments with showing fragments of text, or fragments of these documents on screen, and I just never found anything that I liked. I tried really hard; I saw a lot of things. You know, there are some great text sequences in The U.S. vs. John Lennon, but the more I did it, the more I thought, “Why do this if I already have these tapes?” In the end, I just showed that material to suggest that she was very interested in people knowing about this afterward, at least her family, and obviously very after-the-fact obsessed with this material. But it never made much more sense in the film, and it was too late to help me do the transcriptions, because I had already done all that.

Once you discovered those files, you became more confident that this is something she might have wanted you to do?

Yeah. I think more than anything, it was very helpful that Patty thought that it was something that she would want me to do. But also, there’s a lot of stuff in the tapes about her ambition to leave something behind, in a way. In these tapes she talked a lot about wanting to do a historical novel about her family, or something she could be proud of. Even in the film, that kind of comes out, that she was very angry at being relegated to this menial position as a housewife with no ability to be out in the world, really a second-class citizen, sort of an entertainer, a ceremonial person. And it drove her nuts. I don’t think I would like it much either. In that sense, between the file, Patty, and my realization of her ambitions, in many ways this film is like a collaboration with her, because she was so meticulous about culling the material and preparing it. In a way—even though I never knew about [the file], and I wouldn’t go so far as to say she would have wanted to have a film made about it, and certainly not during her lifetime—I’m pretty confident that she would be OK with it posthumously.

For people who have seen films such as Tarnation and Capturing the Friedmans, your film might trigger some associations. But I was curious if there were any older films that might have had some influence on your approach to your film.

I spent a lot of time watching a lot of films. I really love film. I was looking through my notes to figure out some ancillary material for the DVDs, and I discovered this thing where I had actually made a breakdown of Grizzly Man [laughs], just to see how that film was approached structurally, and when I think about it now, I didn’t actually use it, because that’s a much more loose, fluid, temporal structure, I think. But it was interesting for me to look at, “How did that film get made, also out of a box of tapes?” And I did try a lot to make a nonlinear narrative out of it; it just was too complicated, and it would have required too many extra cues of information, which is something I was really trying to avoid at all costs. I basically said, “I’ll tell the story that’s in this box, so that I can avoid having to explain other stories that I might know but that these voices are not telling.” So the idea of changing the structure would have made me spend much more attention to letting people know when and where they are, which, because there are no synch-sound visuals, is also pretty tricky. When I started working on this film, every time a film like Tarnation or Capturing the Friedmans [came out], anything that had to do with this kind of archival approach, I ran off to see it, but I found that actually it was kind of a strange thing because I had already set up my ground rules and worked out my idea. I was always angry that they were less helpful than I had hoped they would be. [laughs] I always came out of the theater going, “Whah! I would never do that.” Even though they’re really fine films, I was so disappointed that there was nothing I could use for my film in them.

Other than the music, titles/subtitles, was any modern content added to the footage and soundtrack?

I did at one point try to get my mom to talk about her childhood on camera, and it was just too different from the rest of the material, so I quickly turned away from that idea and said, “I don’t need to do this.” Also, at the beginning, I had a very different concept. I thought I was also going to have to explain the ‘50s, so I got a lot of archival advertising footage, like folders, strip ads. There’s so much in the pop culture that was so laden with misogyny, and very explicit about these ideas of traditional housewives, and marriage, and kids, and these great student films about what to do dating, and “Will he like you if you let him go too far?” But more and more, I realized that that wasn’t so much important and what I had to do was concentrate on this one story and get so specifically into that that it became kind of universal. So there were definitely a lot of changes ongoing. And I did actually film about 30 seconds that wound up in the film of the Institute for Living, ‘cause I had no footage of that mental institution or anything like that, so I drove up to Hartford, and you can actually go on the grounds because they have a park with 30 or 40 rare species of trees. I just walked around outside and shot some stuff. In the end, I probably didn’t need to do that, but it was kind of helpful for me to walk around there and get a feel for it.

How did Paul Hogan become involved in the project?

He’s on the label, Gigantic Records, and Gigantic offered to release the film. And I had a really amazing musician do a score before this, but we didn’t really communicate well. I picked some music that he had done, that I really liked, that maybe was not so appropriate and kind of sent him down a different direction. It was really hard to talk to him; we had a tough collaboration. So, I got a score that I really loved but created this cement barrier between the spectator and the voices of the characters, ’cause it was just too thick. So, when I came to Gigantic, they said, “Wow, we don’t really like the score.” And I said, “Well, nobody likes the score.” [laughs] I had been eight months on the festival tour arguing with audiences about the score and going, “But I like it.” I remember, when it premiered in Amsterdam at IDFA [International Documentary Film Festival], people said that to me. And I said, “Well, OK, can I have a show of hands? How many people hated the score?” And half the audience raised their hands. And then I said, “OK, and how many people loved the score?” And 10 people raised their hands! And I was like, “Well, I’m with you guys, so the rest of you guys, forget it!” [laughs]
It was really a year later when I got to Gigantic, I had had that conversation 20 times with audiences, and I came to realize that it was easier for me to love that score because I already knew the dialogue by heart. So, when Gigantic said, “Look, we can afford a new score. We know you might feel like you’re stuck with this one, but we can afford a new one,” I said, “Well, great, but I’m kind of burnt by this story, because we didn’t collaborate very well. Is there somebody you would recommend?” And I had actually just been to see Frances, Paul Hogan’s band, play at the Mercury Lounge, and I just loved them. They did this amazing show, and they had this perfect neo-folk sound. And the whole time through, my family and everybody’s been saying to me—‘cause my score was an electronic score—look, this is a story about the ‘60s. You should use music that sounds a little bit like the ‘60s or that has some kind of reference to that. Both of my uncles are folk musicians; they kind of got their start in that café folk music scene in the ‘60s. So, when they suggested that Paul do it, I was just like, “Oh, that makes so much sense!” And then I had the most beautiful experience with him, because he would compose something, and I would go, “Oh wow, that’s great, but it’s way too happy for here.” And he would be able to fine-tune it in a narrative sense. And I hadn’t had that experience before. Basically, the other experience, the guy was like, “Well, we can’t really talk about it. This is what I want to do.” And because I really loved his work, I was just like, “Well, OK, I understand that. You’re an artist, whatever.” But, in the end, it was really fantastic to be working with somebody who also put the story first, which is what I missed the first time around. So, we did this really great—it didn’t take him too long, maybe two months, a month-and-a-half—thing with the score where he would constantly be sending me new versions online, and I would be listening to it, and we would send e-mails and talk on the phone. And it was fabulous, ’cause I could say, “This is perfect, but is there some way to de-tune something toward the end to kind of imply a little bit of storm clouds?” And he would just be like, “Of course, yes. Let’s do that.”

I can imagine that this project might have been emotionally exhausting for you. Were you able to pace yourself and remove yourself from it at times, or was it more of an obsessive experience?

There was a definite attempt, not to play it out in the film, but, for me to get to the roots of some of my personal issues and make it like a cathartic experience. ‘Cause I got engaged before I started working on the film, and I got married after I finished it. And it seems to me that it was very necessary for me to go through and figure out why my family had these problems. I tried to keep distance, but I remember editing those fight scenes at home for a month with headphones on, like eight or 10 hours a day, and just be so sick of it and unable to face another minute of people I know screaming at each other in the distant past. There was like a month when I was doing editing and re-editing certain scenes, where it was really hard. And I think, maybe it was especially hard for me, but I don’t think anybody would have had a great time with that. I would get in fights with my wife just because I’d been fighting all day. But I tried what I could to decompress in a reasonable way. And, you know, when you’re editing, sometimes you need to take time off and leave it alone for a week, or take on a different section, ’cause after a while it all kind of blends together and you lose your perspective completely. Which, I think, is why directors work with editors, because then you can keep your overall vision of the film separated from, you know, “Does this cut need another half second?” So, it was kind of a dance for me to keep myself fluctuating between these two scales, and one is working on scenes as an editor, and one was working on the whole film as a director, and then the other was like suffering through all this stuff that was my family.

What do you hope audiences will take from your film?

I don’t have a good answer for that, really. I always concentrated on it being a story, and the story was already defined for me by what was in these tapes. And I knew it was a powerful archive. But, what I might have wanted to say took a backseat to what these characters were saying, so I never really had a strong pretension about— Hmm, I wonder if that’s really true. [laughs] I think it’s true that I never had a really strong pretension about what I wanted to say, but maybe that’s not true. Now that I think about it, there were probably a lot of ulterior motives going on. But I don’t ever remember having a vision, except to say, “Wow, don’t let this happen to you.”

I’ve read that your next project is an autobiographical road movie. Where are you in development with that?

I’m pretty far, which is to say that I’m gonna make it out of material that I already have, mostly. I have a rough idea of what the story is, but I haven’t started editing. I want to put together a reasonable project and go to production companies and see if I can get somebody to co-produce it, so that I can pay another editor or myself while I’m editing. So, it’s not very far along, but a little bit like this film, once you have all the material, it’s pretty far along; it’s just, you’re doing it backwards. So, I’m developing after shooting, if that makes any sense.

Is it a documentary?

No, I don’t think it is. I think it’s gonna be an autobiographical novel. I’m gonna make it out of footage of my friends, me and our girlfriends. And I’m just gonna probably change the names and change all the circumstances, like you can, in editing. You can really change quite a bit and make it fictional. The idea is that it’s gonna be a comedy-road movie, with a little bit of pathos in it, but mostly concentrating on love and friendship and fun, which is what I think I need after this film.