DEBORAH SHAFFER ON THE WOBBLIES

The director discusses how The Wobblies came to be, and what it takes to have a career as a documentary filmmaker.

The Wobblies is a documentary about the I.W.W.—the Industrial Workers of the World—the first labor union in the U.S. We sat down with the Director, Deborah Shaffer, to discuss how The Wobblies came to be, and what it takes to have a career as a documentary filmmaker. Shaffer’s films include To Be Heard, Witness to War: Dr. Charlie Clements, Queen of Hearts: Audrey Flack, and she is currently co-producing My Underground Mother.

So what was the moment in your life where you realized, “I want to be a filmmaker?”

I never aspired, when I was much younger, when I was studying, to be a filmmaker. When I was in school, it wasn't particularly something people did, going to film school, especially to make documentaries. I did, randomly, take an 8mm film production class.

I was at a small girl’s college in New England, and there was another college nearby that was offering an evening class. I don't remember anything about that class or it influencing me, but there was this seed of something.I really got into film through activism. In the late 60s, early 70s, I became an active participant in the anti-war movement. But, I wasn't so comfortable being a real, out-front rabble-rouser myself, and I met a group of people who were making political films. They were members of a group called NEWSREEL, which still exists. I fell in with the NEWSREEL people, and I was just amazed by the power of their documentaries. We formed our own little group, in Ann Arbor, of NEWSREEL. We had a collective, and we all moved into a house together. We went out every night and showed films at labor unions, at high schools, at churches, just against the walls of buildings. There would always be a discussion afterwards, and it was a very exciting time.

The films had such power to motivate people: to talk, to take action. Often, there would be a march right after; the film would end, and we would march somewhere. Somebody at NEWSREEL started teaching me how to do little things, and it turns out that I loved the craft of filmmaking as much as I loved what films could do. Little by little, I started learning more about making the films. I ended up drifting to New York. I had finished college, and I didn't really know what I was going to do; I came to New York, like everybody. I had a friend who was living here, and I was able to live in her apartment with her, on the Lower East Side. She was going to art school, and I was trying to figure out what to do. I couldn't get a job. I tried and tried and tried. I couldn't get a job in publishing. I ended up just hanging around at the NEWSREEL office, and they didn't really want new members. They said, “We're not taking them.” But, they finally felt sorry for me. I was hanging around so much, and because I knew how to do things, like run the rewinds and clean the prints–it was all 16mm–they took pity on me and let me join the group. That was my film school. I remember going out to cover a Young Lords demonstration with three or four of us; somebody was shooting, and, at some point, they handed me the camera and said, “Here, you shoot." I said, “What? Me?” Mostly though, at that time, I gravitated towards doing sound. I did a lot of sound recording. It was separate: separate camera and sound.

Eventually, I gravitated towards editing. I really, really loved film editing. I loved cutting and pasting and figuring out: Where's the story in here? How do you put the pieces together? How do you get from A to B to C? How do you build an arc? I just put all the pieces of the puzzle together. That's still one of my most favorite parts of filmmaking, figuring it out: taking real life and shaping it into a kind of story that reflects reality and has meaning.

Through your persistence of filmmaking, was there ever a moment you thought you were going to make a living with this?

When I was in the NEWSREEL collective, which I was a member of for maybe two years, in New York, I guess you could call it making a living. Well, I did have some outside work to earn money. I was a temp. I would get these calls from a Wall Street company, an agency where I was registered, and they say, “Go to this company,” and I would go there, and for a day I would basically do data entry or typing. It was crummy work, but it paid hourly, and I made enough money to pay my rent. I didn't need very much money then. Later, I became an Assistant, and I started synching dailies for money. Somehow, somebody offered me the opportunity in an editing room. I worked the overnight shift on some massive documentaries for public television. I worked the overnight shift. I did a couple of different jobs like that and assistant-edited here and there. I realized that I loved editing, and I was debating whether I should figure out a career, wondering,” Maybe I should go to school in public health?” That was a big era in my mid-twenties when I was debating whether I should go into public health or to stick with film. I realized I really loved filmmaking, and that I could make a living as an Editor or, initially, as an Assistant Editor. And that's what I did for many, many years. I worked on tons of projects at CBS Television. It paid very well. It was a union job; they paid hourly and there was always overtime and golden time. I was able to make a lot of money editing. I worked about half the year as an editor, and about half the year I worked on my own projects.I was able to support my filmmaking habit by editing. The films, themselves, were supported by grants, always. The grants were rarely enough to pay a salary. Every now and then. I was lucky enough, though: I have had a partner since my early twenties, a partner who actually was very supportive of the work I did. And there were times I was supportive of his work. He was also in freelance, in a different field. There were times when he supported both of us, and there were times when I supported both of us. That was a while before we had a child, but this became something we had to work out: how to raise a daughter, take care of a family, and have enough income to both pursue our work.

That is great. I appreciate your candid response. I think that a lot of people don't give an honest answer as to how much other work one has to do while at the same time one is pursuing one’s passion.

Do you mean the economic part of it? One of the pieces of advice I always give my students in film school is to learn a craft. “I know you want to be a director, but I think it's very important to have a skill by which you can support yourself.” I once heard Fred Wiseman speak when I was teaching at NYU; Wiseman was addressing a group of documentary students, and somebody asked a question: “How do you support yourself as a documentary filmmaker? How can you?” And he said, “Marry rich,” which was half a joke. It is an expensive profession to choose.

I wouldn't advise people to marry rich. I mean, sure, if you can. But, you need a side gig; you need a way to support yourself. Though, the field is changing a lot. Right now, a lot of documentarians are making more commercial documentaries, which pay. The big streamers are hiring documentarians to make series. That pays well, if you're lucky enough to get one of those. Many of the top documentarians are doing that now.

What is The Wobblies about?

I was no longer working at NEWSREEL, but somebody I had known when I was in NEWSREEL, Stew Bird, co-wrote a play called “The US vs. William D. Haywood, et al.”, which is about the Wobblies. I, somehow, saw a notice about this play, and he was performing it at the Hudson Guild Theater, a theater owned and run by a labor union in Chelsea.I knew about the Wobblies themselves because somebody when I was at NEWSREEL, had given me a book called Mill Town. It's a small picture book about the strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, and it tells the story of the IWW. The book had been published in the 1950s and was banned for being a communist book. I was shocked by that, and I was shocked that I had never heard of the IWW. I'd never heard of this strike in Lawrence. It was a major textile strike in New England. It's where the phrase “Bread and Roses” came from. Women played a major role in the strike, and they came up with this slogan, “We want bread and roses too,” which is just one of the most beautiful slogans anybody has ever come up with. So, when I saw that somebody I knew had co-written a play about the IWW, I went to the play, and it was a wonderful play. That night, there were a couple of old Wobblies, who lived in the area and had come to the play; they were all hanging around afterwards, very enthusiastic. One of the authors of the play was Stew Bird, who had been in Detroit when I was in Ann Arbor, and I knew him when he was making another film. We had never worked together, but I looked at him that night, and I said, “Stew, somebody needs to do a film about these people.” They were very elderly at the time. The IWW were really an unknown quantity, and here were these living people who weren't going to be around for much longer. I had to work to convince them that it was a good idea. We just started interviewing the people who had come that night. Stew had met several old IWW people in the process of writing the film, and we kept going with them. We recruited a camera person named Judy Arrow–one of the first, prominent women cinematographers–who sadly passed away. She had a small grant to do a film that she wasn't going to do, and she said, “Let's all throw that in, let's use it.” We used her small grant to do our first handful of interviews and created a fundraising reel that we could show people to raise money. And that was it: we were off to the races. We ended up recruiting former members of the IWW all over the United States. We were fortunate enough and we worked hard, and we got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which is a significant production grant. It enabled us to do the film and to travel the entire United States the following summer, to film all the former IWW members. Then the film premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1979, which was–looking back on it–amazing. Then the film was released in theaters all around the country. This was before there was the Internet. There was no virtual release. You could only see it in theaters.

How did your background in activism play a role in how you came to The Wobblies?

Definitely! My role in activism has played a role in everything I've done, my entire life. Inspired by the most important politically influential era of the late 60s and early 70s, initially, I was drawn to the student movement, because of the war in Vietnam. That was the big thing for people of my generation. The men my age were being drafted. Then, the second wave of the Women's Movement came up, right around 1969. I remember reading an essay written by Robin Morgan, called "Goodbye to All That,” and it was one of those moments where the scales fell from my eyes, and I thought “Oh! I see what's going on here.”The article is about how women were second class in all these movements. When I first started in NEWSREEL, we still weren't the filmmakers, for the most part. The women were the office organizers and the bookkeepers and the coffee makers and the girlfriends. The organization was still very much male-dominated; although, there were some powerful women in the organization. They had a big influence on me. The thing that the Women's Movement injected into my life, into the life of many other people like me, is the idea that our personal problems are also political problems. That stopped this separation between what goes on in the-world-out-there of activism and what goes on in the-world-in-here of your private life. I brought that with me when I started The Wobblies in 1977. I left NEWSREEL in the early seventies, and I formed a filmmaking company with several other women who had been in the organization. We were called Pandora Films, and I believe we were one of the first groups of women who were making films, documentary films, independently. I know in New York City, there were a handful of others, the women who later formed a group called New Day Films, and then there were Emily Rothschild and Julia Reichert, who were making films out in Ohio.

I understand it has been added to the Library of Congress. Very exciting.

So The Wobblies was released in 1979 and had a really solid distribution. We were able to sell it internationally on television. It was never on television in the U.S., unfortunately. That could still change. But, we sold it well internationally, and then it went to an educational distributor. Then, after a certain time, it went to another one, and eventually it fell out of distribution. In 2003, I applied for a grant from the New York Women in Film and Television Film Preservation Fund to restore the film. I worked as part of a program, restoring films made by women. We did the film preservation in 2004, and we showed the film at Lincoln Center, again, a few times. It was great, and the film was being distributed on DVD. In 2018, somebody from the New York Women in Film and Television Preservation Committee arranged a screening of The Wobblies at Union Docks in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I showed up for the screening with my partner, Stu Bird, and there were only about 40 of us there. It was a small screening. We hadn't seen the film in many years, at that time, and I think we were shocked that night by how relevant the film seemed to the problems that the country was facing then, especially issues of immigration, gender discrimination, and labor issues. It really was shocking. It didn't seem as much like a history film as much as a most relevant set of circumstances for today's world. We looked at each other that night and said, “We really should get this film out again.” That led to two things: one was the effort to further preserve it and make a digital version of it; and the other, was the campaign to get it included in the National Film Registry, which is in the Library of Congress. We campaigned hard to make that happen. You have to get the public to vote for you. Anybody can vote. We campaigned hard among our friends and colleagues. We also got a lot of scholars and film critics, people who had used the film over the years, and people who had shown the film to write letters on our behalf to the Library of Congress to support the nomination. It succeeded! This was the second time we had campaigned, but we campaigned much harder the second time and more thoroughly. We are very, very proud of that film. At the same time we were working on the idea of doing a 4K restoration. After we did the original film restoration, I donated the negatives to the Museum of Modern Art. I went to them and said, “I'd like to borrow back my negatives; I want to raise money to do a digital4K restoration.” They said, “We'll do it.” The rerelease of The Wobblies just happened in May of 2022. We have relaunched, and, in a way, it saddens me that the film is still so relevant. The film is almost more relevant now than when we made it, in 1979. Conditions in this country have changed so much for working people. We released The Wobblies in ‘79, right before Reagan was elected, when something like 17% of the labor force in the United States belonged to unions. Now it's less than 10%. Reagan set about to destroy labor unions. One of the first thing she did as president was to go after the air traffic controllers when they went on strike, firing them all and breaking the union. A combination of economic factors in this country–the decline of heavy manufacturing, the job flight overseas–has all contributed to breaking the back of labor unions, the back of the working people, so that people no longer have the kinds of decent industrial jobs they had 20, 30, or 40 years ago, where they could earn a decent salary, retire with a pension, and support a family on one salary. The issues are still, unfortunately, very much with us and have yet to be solved.I look forward to a day when The Wobblies really is a piece of history, when it's quaint, when we can look back and say, “Oh, wasn't it too bad how people lived then?”

On that historical note, I remember at the Metrograph screening for The Wobblies, you were mentioning the use of voice over in documentaries–a style that Ken Burns is often credited for–and how you and your team were the pioneer women who may have started that . . .

One of the challenges we faced in doing The Wobblies was that the leaders of the organization were all long dead, so we couldn't interview them, but we felt it was important to include them. I mean, we were doing a people's history. We were doing a ground-up, oral history kind of film, yet we couldn't ignore the leadership entirely. Because my partner, Stu, had written that play, it was like this idea of dramatic readings was somehow in the air. And we hit upon the idea of having actors read some of the statements of the people who we couldn't actually interview: the words of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn or Big Bill Haywood or even some of the people who were in opposition to the IWW, you know, Rockefeller, John Astor and all these capitalists who were against the IWW. Now, it seems so commonplace. We are all used to having dramatic readings in documentaries, but I don't believe it had been done before that. I can't think of a single example that had been done before that.I'm fond of pointing out to people that this was ten years before The Civil War came out, which is Ken Burns best film. He had made other films before that, but that's the series that really put him on the map, with all the beautiful voiceover readings and music. But, we did it before that with The Wobblies. We used actors, and we used things like music, cartoons, and art. At the time, historical documentaries were still kind of like a classroom, while people were making, already by the early sixties, interesting and fantastic cinema verité current documentaries: Maysles and Leacock, and Penne baker, and those guys. There were things like Salesman and Gray Gardens, and other vibrant cinema verité films. However, we were in the very forefront of the movement, with The Wobblies for changing the nature of historical documentaries.

Wonderful! Finally, I would love to know if you have any advice for young fans, who are coming up and want to pursue a career in either documentary or filmmaking in general?

I can tell you the most important quality I think you need to be a documentary filmmaker is persistence. You have to want to do it so badly that you can't not do it, and you can’t take no for an answer. You just have to keep at it, and keep at it, and keep at it and keep at it. I tell people, if you're going to ask a question, to ask people to do something for you, try to ask in such a way that doesn’t make it a yes or no question. Always try to leave the door open. Always leave a crack open and so you can go back from another angle and try to find another way in. Making documentaries is a labor of love: you have to be in love with your subject; you have to be in love with the work. One of the things that I personally love about it, is that it's a collaborative art form. I'm not a solo artist. I'm not. I could never be a painter or a poet. I could never sit in a room by myself for hours, and hours, and hours and try to solve problems. I love the collaborative nature of filmmaking; you figure it out with somebody. I work very, very closely with my DP's, with my editors. My editor on the last film, Queen of Hearts: Audrey Flack, she started as the editor and she became my co-director. It's that's a wonderful award of filmmaking is the kind of collaboration that exists.▮