Okay, we're life. Hi, this is William Ramsey. Welcome to William Ramsey investigates on today's show of a very special guest. His name is Michael Kaplan's last name is spelled cap la n and he's just finished an excellent documentary which I watched yesterday. The title of the documentary is All in the Movie and it will be out in two days October first, twenty twenty one. People go check that out. But mister Kaplan is an independent film director, producer, and teacher.
The film before this was titled A Magical Vision, which is a feature length documentary that spotlights Eugene Berger, a magician and greu of the magical arts, and it has been shown in festivals from Chicago to Indian won an audience award at the Spirit Enlightened Film Festival. He's also directed Stones from the Soil, documentary about his father that showed on National PBS in two thousand and five. He's an associate professor in the Cinema, Art and Science Department
at Columbia College in Chicago. And this movie, the background really is Chicago. It's almost part of the story. Is this interesting part of the city that Algren wrote about and lived in. But director Michael Kaplan can talk more about that. So, Michael Kaplan, are you there.
Yes, I am good to talk to you.
William Good. Great to have you. Delighted that you agreed to the interview. Really an interesting topic. Can you talk a little bit about your background? And yeah, you became interested in the subject of Algren and what led you to start the production on this documentary.
Well, I've been making films and videos for probably about twenty five years now, and over the last twenty years I really focused on documentaries. And you mentioned two of my previous documentaries, and I was really in the midst of finishing up my previous documentary about Eugene Berger, the Magician, when I met the photographer Archhay at a gallery opening in Chicago, and Art at that time was a young, spry eighty seven years old, and Art was a real trip.
He was a real character, originally from Brooklyn and a little short fire plug of a guy who had traveled all over the world taking pictures of everybody from presidents to movie stars. But what I knew him as was the photographer of Nelson Algren. Growing up in Chicago, Nelson Algren was just someone that you knew about who wrote about the people at the bottom of the social spectrum. And if you had seen a photograph of Algren, you had seen Archase work because he was pretty much the
dominant photographer of Algren. And so when I met him, I just said, well, mister Shay, I've always loved your work about Nelson Algren. And he said, what do you do? I told him, and he said, well, you should. You should do a documentary about Nelson Algren. And I was kind of shocked that no one had at that point.
And something I always tell my students is be careful what you say yes to because I said yes, and then you know, many years later, we finally ended up with this documentary about Nelson Algren.
And for people who may not know, can you just give a brief background of Nelson Algren and kind of what led him to writing and kind of what he wrote about.
Well. Nelson Algren was born in Detroit but grew up in Chicago. His family moved when he was at a pretty young age, and he grew up something also I did not know on the about two blocks away from where I live on the northwest side of Chicago, and his father was working class, he was a car mechanic, and all Grinn grew up thinking that he would be
a journalist. That's what he wanted to do. So he went to the University of Illinois in Chicago and he was in the midst of getting his degree to be a journalist when the depression hit, and that really, for him and for a lot of people, just changed everything about his life. He ended up going on the road, taking you know, kind of bumming around the country, ended up in Texas, ended up getting arrested for stealing a typewriter while he was in Texas. And when he came
back to Chicago, he had already started writing. And simultaneously the WPA had been formed, and one of the programs they had was it basically supported writers and other artists to communicate what was going on around the country to
the rest of the country. There's actually a really great book that just came out about that program because it really changed the lives of so many people, people like Richard Wright and Studs Turkle and Algren was one of those people, and so was at that point in the late thirties early forties that he started writing about the people who society had left behind the people who were the addicts, the drunks, the sex workers, the people that you know, didn't really get a second look from society.
So that was really what put him into that path of writing about that part of society.
Right, So he kind of saw the other side that maybe not as many people thought were as glamorous, but he seemed to really mix with those people as well.
Would you agree with that, Oh, my gosh.
Yeah.
He lived in the neighborhood wicker Park, which is now a totally kind of gentrified, very nice area, but at the time it was kind of a slum and he lived there in a little one room apartment. He had to go to the y m c A To take a shower, you know. I mean he was living really small and the people he wrote about were the people on his street. So he was really he had a commitment to that telling those stories and telling him from close up, not just from afar.
And he was kind of that sensibility he got. He got pinched for stealing a typewriter in Texas. He was interested in selling stuff on the black market while he was in the ward World War two, so he kind of seemed a little scrapy, like he was one of those people, you know, just trying to get by the people that he wrote about. Really, can you talk about how he kind of made it in the literary world, what his book was, and how he kind of made his mark.
Well, he had written several books. He had written a novel somewhere, Someone in Boots, which he later just kind of left off his list. He he kind of disavowed it. But then he went on to really the first novel a note was called Never Come Morning, and it was in the early forties, and it was really set during in that that world that I've been talking about, the world around him and of the people who were the dispossessed.
After that, he wrote a collection of short stories called The Neon Wilderness, which just its name, you know, kind of tells you so much about what the big cities were becoming in the US after World War Two. This this place, you know of of kind of glamour, but you know, also a place where there were lots of people who were not getting the benefit of what was starting to happen in the US. And it was really sorry, go ahead, no.
I was just gonna say. He was very sensitive to kind of the class situation where there was definitely an under dispossessed. Yeah, people who were definitely he says, I think the back of the of the billboard, the people who lived behind the bill.
Right, correct. Correct. And it was after that that he wrote what most people consider is Magnus Opus, which was a Man with a Golden Arm, which later got made into a movie with Frank Sinatra and a Man with a Golden Arm was, you know, a sprawling, five six hundred page novel that really dug into this one character, Frankie Machine, who had come out of World War Two and was a morphine addict. He was also a drummer, a jazz drummer, and he was also a dealer of cards.
He was a poker dealer, and so the idea of the Man with the Golden Arm had a kind of a two sided meaning because it was about someone who was an addict but also someone who who played poker,
and that really catapulted him into the mainstream. The book won the first National Book Award, which was in nineteen fifty Eleanor Roosevelt awarded it to him, and he was he was, all of a sudden he had something close to a bestseller and that really made him for a while, not for as long as you might think, made him kind of a household name, someone that people knew and would read and book clubs and was someone that was discussed, you know, in the press.
And he was also kind of suppressed. Some people thought he was a little bit too over the edge, right, Like I think there was something the Polish Roman Catholic Legion complained about his writing things like that, and he wrote about Polish people, which I think is interesting too.
Yeah, I mean a lot of the neighborhood that he lived in was Polish immigrants and the yes, the Roman Catholic Church, the Polish Catholic I forgot community. They wrote up against him. There were a lot of pushback later on when he wrote Chicago's City on the Make, which was kind of this love and hate letter to Chicago, he got lots of pushback from the tourist industry. People felt like he made Chicago look like not a really nice place, and so he he definitely was always kind
of fighting, you know, the power. And then later on and it's not in the movie, but he the FBI actually kept a file on him and made it difficult for him to travel for a while because he could not get a passport, so he was he ran into a lot of roadblocks.
Right, and so he had this kind of underground thing. But he also because he came from there, you know, like there's a couple of people who were marked in your film that his ear for their cadence, of their talk, in the way that the locals in Chicago talked like he had it down like that was part of his realism or his authenticity, right.
Right, it was. It was very much you know, you know, he wrote from the conversations that he had with the people in the bars on the street. You know, these were first hand accounts. In many ways, it was kind of a predecessor to you know, the modern journalism, that kind of the new journalism that came out in the sixties with Hunter Thompson and Tom Wolfe. Where he was
he was in the story. He wasn't a character in the story, but he was in the story in that this was something that he wrote from hundreds of hours of being in this community and talking to people and getting the stories. So when he wrote about the people, he was not a tourist, as we say, coming in and just kind of spending a couple of weeks and you know, getting all this research and then going home.
You know he did, you know he this was his life, you know, twenty four hours a day, three sixty five days a week, right.
And he lived that. I think some one of the persons in your film quoted he wasn't a voyeur. He was among his people, horse betting, gambling, drinking, you know, kind of living kind of a beat, beat writer's type of life in Chicago. And it is interesting in the film you have all these people from Chicago commenting on
Algren and what a cultural influence he was. So you have Billy Corgan, William Freakin, the director of Invasion of the Body Statues, I can't remember his name right now, but like really interesting characters who talked about him from their perspective.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, oh yeah, absolutely, no, he you know, he definitely was part of that you know community. Rich I'm not Richard Kaufman, Philip Kaufman as the director you're thinking of. Yeah, I mean I ran into people who knew him when they were young, like Freaking and Kaufman actually, you know, knew him and spent time with him and did things with him when they were young growing up in Chicago in the sixties. But you know,
the people who knew him knew about his commitment. And yes, he also liked to have a good time.
You know.
He wasn't like the kind of prototypical beat writer in that he didn't feel like he had to become a drug user, you know, in order to write about addicts. But he's certainly you know, he lived that life of playing poker and hanging in the bars, and you know, he liked the box and he liked to go see boxing matches. He he would go to the horse, you know, the to the racing track. He you know, he definitely he knew how to have a good time, that was
for sure. But it wasn't about you know, just getting wasted, you know, like you know Hunter Thompson, where he would feel like he'd have to take twenty drugs before he could write about anything. You know, Algren was he was he was a mix of a journalist and a fiction because he would take the journalistic research and then write fiction about it.
Right, And you do mention like Hunter s Thompson quoted from A Walk on the wild Side, really complimented Algren. I thought that was a really interesting segment you had. But also he uh kind of mixed with some high end literary figures. Can you talk about his relationship ship to Simone de Beauvoirs so I mean really notable.
Yeah, well he could, he could. He could also mingle with the you know, the the glitterati. He could, you know, go to Lake Shore Drive and hang out with the you know, the rich people who loved to hear, you know,
this esteemed man who had won these awards. And it was through knowing some of those people that Simone de beauvois was told by a friend of hers to call up Nelson Algren when she came to Chicago, and they you know, she did, and they immediately became lovers and had this extended, five six year long love affair which really lasted for the rest of Algren's life. But the most intimate part, the most intense part, was those five
six years. And yes, he when he got to go to Paris, he hung out with all of the you know, literati in the Left Bank, and he could do that, you know, but that was not where he wanted to be. He wanted to go and hang out and have a few drinks and then he wanted to go back to where he was living, you know, and it's just kind of you know, little little flat with you know, his books stacked up and newspapers and stuff on the walls, and you know, just really it was not what he
was yearning for. You know, he was not going back to the suburbs or going you know, back to Hyde Park and just you know, living the middle class lifestyle. He lived the life that he wrote about.
Right, So he didn't seem to be really attracted to that kind of cultural elite of Bouvois and Sartra and all these other characters. But it was interesting that he thought that. I think he stayed in the book. She was his intellectual equal. So somebody externally you would see walking down the street didn't look like maybe a college professor, but obviously super intelligent guy and really kind of a character, and he kind of did. He was really a dedicated writer.
I mean, my impression was he was a very dedicated writer who didn't maintain his relate. He had been in and out of relationships frequently and kind of bounced around. Did you think that his writing career prevented him from having long term relationships?
Well, He's got a really famous quote, which is, if you want to be a successful writer, be a bachelor. You know, he really felt like he didn't want something that would weigh him down. So he got married, then got divorced, then married the same woman again later on in divorce, then married someone else in divorced. He was never married for more than about two years. You know. Ironically, it was really de Bouvois, which was to him his one true love, and he would have married her. I
don't know if it would have worked. I don't think it would have, but uh, you know, he uh, he was not someone who wanted to get weighed down except for Debouvois, and that was you know, one of the great kind of sadnesses for him is that they could never reconcile their different lifestyles, and.
She was kind of like a lot. It seemed like it was a love triangle too. There other things involved pulling her away, but that was his only disappointment. He had kind of had some success in Hollywood, at least with his writing, But can you explain what his impressions were with how his works were made into films.
Well, it's it's an old story, you know that the writers almost never liked the books that get made from their work. And he he he was a stubborn guy, you know. So when he went out to work with Otto Preminger on Man with the Goal and Arm, he he they you know, they came to blows very quickly and he left after about a week and a half,
you know, because they could just not work together. And he he got it paid, you know what by today the equivalent was, you know, not a terrible amount of money, but given you know what could have happened if he had really had a good negotiator, a good agent. He kind of got screwed. And that happened also with his uh, the second book that got made into a film, Walk on the wild Side. So he you know, he he
wanted to be known. He liked being known as a writer, but also there was a part of him that resisted it. He didn't want the you know, the glamour because he was really worried that he would lose his connection to the subject matter that he wanted to write about. You know. You know, Russell Banks has this great quote that you know, the amazing novelist Russell Banks knew Algrin when he was very young and Russell Banks said, you know, we we we all worshiped that that bitch goddess fame, you know,
but then we also kind of push her away. And all was really kind of the embodiment of that, you know that he just he didn't want to you know, just have NonStop parties and uh, you know, literary events. He wanted to be able to return back to the source right.
And also interesting aspect of his characters, he didn't seem to take himself too seriously, like maybe an author thinks of himself as very profound, but he seems to really have kind of a funny aspect to him and everybody, like people mentioned in the movie, this is like one of the funniest people they've ever met.
Yeah, he he definitely could. He he was not afraid to be a clown. You know, he would he would be any any any nice clothes that he got he had gotten from goodwill, you know, I mean, he was
he was a guy. You know, he would wear a rope for a belt, you know, to a really nice kind of she Shi event, just because it was kind of his way of you know, stickin his thumb in the eyes of you know, the people who were a little bit more elite, so, uh, you know, he he did not want to, you know, embrace that life, and uh he kind of, you know, stayed away from it. And now I've forgotten the question that you asked.
I was just saying that it was just an like for somebody who was a serious saw to himself as a writer. Oh what One aspect of his character was that he was kind of like he was. I think you said he went to improvs and joked around.
Absolutely, he would, he would hang out with He'd go to Second City and hang out there. He he was a kind of a goof and his writing could be comic too. It was really serious, but something like Walk on the wild Side is kind of a you know, there's there's kind of a goofy protagonist who doesn't you know, really get what it is that he doesn't get, you know,
is kind of oblivious. He thinks that he's someone who's really kind of on top of every thing, but doesn't understand that he really has no clue what's going on. So he could write comedy. Something he wrote a lot more into the sixties were more kind of comic little pieces and as just a person to hang out with He could definitely just be very very funny. So it was not about just you know, I'm doing this, this is serious and you know, don't interrupt my serious work.
He recognized that you had to be able to laugh sometimes even at yourself.
And he kind of some of his I mean you say in the film that some of his films, i mean books became sold as pull fiction. Where do you think Algrin's work deserves to be sitting in kind of current literary perspective?
Oh, it's it's got to be kind. I mean, the reason we made this and spend so much time on it is because it should be part of you know, just the American you know, the standard of American literature. It should be you know, taught in any kind of
a survey course of American literature. His work really embodied what America was like in the mid twentieth century and his, uh, his work is admired and respected by so many people, other writers, other artists who understood that not just what he wrote about the but the way he wrote about it. He had a style that was unique, that was something
that he worked hard on. And he was he was a craftsman, you know, he he cared about the way in which he wrote, and so you know, people like Hemingway said he was second only to Faulkner, William Faulkner as an American writer, and so he should just be part of the cannon of American writing.
And one of the things that he didn't have that many writers do is this skill of self promotion, whether they wear fancy clothes or they are going on circuits or hobnobbing with people. He didn't seem to. He seemed to be the opposite. Can you talk about how how that sensibility affected his appreciation of his work.
Well, it was a problem. You know, he wasn't in the Internet age. But the reality is, you know, it's always been about promotion, you know, I mean, from f Scott Smitzgerald, you know, to Hemingway. These were people that got known because of kind of their persona. And even you know, amongst Algren's contemporaries, people like Norman Mahler and Saul Bellow had a way of kind of presenting themselves in a way that felt comfortable to the people who
you know, wanted to celebrate them. And he he just thought, you know that that was not part of his job. He felt like his job was to write. He didn't feel like his job was to promote himself. He would go he'd go on TV, he'd go on a radio show and talk about his work if he was invited, but he was not out there kind of hobnobbing in order to maximize his visibility. He didn't felt that the work should cut should, you know, speak for itself, and
that that's that's a problem. That's a problem today. You know, we see that in you know, the Internet age, that if you're not out there, you know, doing the social media thing, then uh, it can hurt you because people may not find you.
Absolutely. I mean I can speak to that from experience. It's so important. And now some of these other writers doing that, their almost skill was in self promotion than actually writing. You know, but you see how persona has helped all of these authors sell books. Hunter S. Thompson, Tough Guy, Hill's Angels, all that stuff.
Oh my god, yeah, I mean yeah, he was certainly great at that. Thompson, you know, he put himself out there, is like the crazy guy who would do anything.
Absolutely, and so when you went about kind of compile, I mean, the pictures are fantastic. There's all kinds of pictures of him with studstorical, all these other characters from Chicago. What was it like kind of would did you get a lot of assistance from Shay or how did you find all of the footage in photography? Do you mind talking about that?
No, not at all. So, like I said, what started this whole process was meeting Art Shay, and I knew that if I couldn't get access to his work, that there would be no way to make a good Nelson Algren movie. And a huge portion of the still black and white photos that we include in the movie, our archas work not just of Algrin, but of you know what life in the street and in the poorer areas
of the city were like. We did find a huge amount of other photos and some video as well, mostly through the Algren archive, which we spent many, many days, long days going through, finding lots of letters back and forth between different people and Algrin writing to people and
them writing back. You know, I wish if there's something I would, you know, have loved to have had different about the movie, it would have been more film footage, you know, That's the one thing we did not have could not find a lot of but we did find some nice footage of him, and that was really where most of it came from, was from our time at the Algren Archive.
And just one last question, I mean, what do you think Algren's perception of himself after he had written his eleven books many articles the Atlantic? How do you think that? I mean, do you? I mean I got a sense that he might have left Chicago moved east out of kind of a bitterness or emptiness for not being appreciated. Would you agree with that.
He became very bitter near the end of his life, and it's really unfortunate. He felt like he was no longer appreciated in Chicago, and he took this opportunity to go out east and write about the Hurricane Carter murder case and kind of settled ultimately in sag Harbor on Long Island, and kind of at that point was embraced late to the party, mind you, but he was embraced
by the the literary elite out east. People like Kurt Vonnegut, Salmon Rushdie all became really supportive and uh fans of Algrin. But yeah, he really he really felt like ultimately he was no longer appreciated in his in his own city, that people had gone on to people like Saul Bellow who wrote about the middle class, you know, and that Algrin's perspective was not you know, was not welcome. And so yeah, he he kind of he kind of said, uh, you know, screw all this, I'm moving on.
Right, and seg Harbor was kind of like a literary on Clive, Right.
There were other writers, Yeah, yeah, yeah, there were there were a ton of people out there like Vonnegut, and he he had several years of just living you know, on the ocean and feeling like, yeah, the life, you know, life has worked out pretty well for me.
You know. So it kind of you know, had somewhat of a happy ending, you know, in that he was appreciated near the end of his life, and just before the end of his life he had gotten what had always been denied to him, which was membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and which was kind of the embodiment of you know, being accepted by the
mainstream literary community. And then he you know, had a heart attack and died before he could even you know, go to the occasion to get to be celebrated and be fedted. So it was kind of this bittersweet ending to his life.
Almost is like he he lived kind of a life like the characters he wrote about in a way, you know, like that was a reflection of him in the way his life kind of worked out where. I mean, this movie comes out in two days. Where's the best place for people to watch it? All?
We are getting a small theatrical run. It's going to be opening in Los Angeles on October first, playing at multiple Lemley Theaters and if you're not in LA, so first, if you are in LA, please come out support independent
documentary work. It would be great. I'm going to be out there on Saturday night, October second to introduce it and do a Q and A. But if you're not in LA or can't get to the movies in the theater, it's going to be available streaming through several of several Chicago based theaters like the Gene Siskel Film Theater and the Music Box Theater, and they'll have it available streaming kind of in the what we call the virtual theatrical mode.
And then next year, you know, the goal is to get it out onto one of the streamers like a Netflix or a Hulu, you know, depending on how things go. But right now, you know, so starting October fifteenth, it'll be available through those two theaters, the Gene Cisco Theater and the Music Box Theater.
Great. So then supporting independent means is so important too, you know, you encourage and encourages the furtherance of the creation of films like this. So, oh my gosh. Yeah. And so the website that I'm showing on YouTube for people are watching YouTube is all grin Themovie, all one word dot com, allgrenthmovie dot com. And is that website the best place to contact you if people want to reach out to you, Michael.
Absolutely, absolutely. And then you can also see we've got the usual you know social media, Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and those are all available you know, through algrenthemovie dot com. And that would be the best way to contact us. You know, you can send us an email and we we love to hear about it because you know, we are kind of dedicated to spreading the word of Nelson Algren.
Great. Is there anything you'd like to add before we wrap it up or before I wrap it up?
Well, I think one of the things that is so striking to me about you know, the life we live today in the in the United States is the names and the places and maybe the ethnic groups have changed, but the reality is the world that Algren wrote about back in the forties and fifties is still here in America.
And you know, we're we're hoping that this wakes people up, who the people who may want to address those stories, because there are still those stories to tell, and those are really important to tell those stories about the people who are not who are living on the wrong side of the billboard, as Algren said, you know, who don't have a Chevy in their garage, you know, and two kids in a white pick of fence. Lots of people who are still waiting for the American dream to happen.
And that's something that we hope Algren inspires people to do, is to investigate and take a look at the America that is still not a place for you know, that has not gotten everybody on board.
Right, That's so true. Again, the title of the documentary is Algrin the movie and the guest today is the director Michael Kaplan c ap l A N. And again, the website is algrindemovie dot com so you can go check it out there, and its release is October second or October one in LA. Then out of two spots, I'll try to put these in the show notes to two spots in the Chicago Cisco Theater. And then good luck with just further distribution of your film. Thanks for so much for your time.
All right, thanks a lot.
Well, all right, take care, okay,