The mainstream media will spend ten days losing their ever-loving minds blaming a Sarah Palin campaign map a killer never saw for that killer’s actions, but this news about a confessed terrorist admitting that a clip from Brian De Palma’s “Redacted” “prompted” him to murder two American airmen gets buried at the bottom of a Salt Lake City newspaper article:

Uka gave a teary confession as his Frankfurt state court trial opened in August, saying that the night before the attack he had seen a video on Facebook that purported to show American soldiers raping a teenage Muslim girl. It turned out to be a scene from the 2007 Brian De Palma anti-war film “Redacted,” taken out of context.

Uka told the court the video prompted him to do anything possible to prevent American soldiers from going to Afghanistan. Under German law, the court is still required to hear all evidence in the case, even though Uka has confessed.

The defendant had already killed two U.S. airmen when he turned his pistol on Brewer, a 23-year-old from Gray, Tennessee, who was on the bus waiting with others to be taken to nearby Ramstein Air Base to fly to Afghanistan.

Remember how, during the lead up to the release of the “Passion of the Christ,” the leftist media was on high alert waiting for synagogues and crosses to be burned? And yet, not a word in the national media about how this particular Hollywood film “prompted” the murder of two American servicemen.

Buried. Memory-holed. Never happened. Carry on.  

The Jawa Report has more on the two American heroes who stopped this Tinseltown-inspired Islamist.

These were filmed in 2006 and 2007 with young high school history teachers and combat veterans who served respectively in Belgium (Battle of the Bulge) and in France (D-Day, Normandy Invasion).

This new “career” that started at age eighty-one and has been ongoing for five years, is for the purpose of fulfilling my mission to reach young students with the message of the importance of freedom and the consequences of losing one’s freedom.

I am now seeking funding to distribute these films at no cost, which are in DVD format, primarily into the high schools in California where I live.

Now, a third documentary is planned. It is a film about the Eighth Air Force operations from England on daring daylight raids on German targets. Twenty-six thousand men were killed, more than the Marines in the Pacific.

Stories from survivors of the “Mighty Eighth,” as they were known, will be told. It will also relate experiences from relatives of perished crew-members who were hosted by a Frenchman who did arduous research of crash sites in France. The families visited these sites of loved ones who were killed when they crashed in France.

American Airlines is a participant, but additional funding is needed for a “bare bones budget.” Bare bones because I do not do these films for profit.

***

Recently a film has been made and was screened on National Geographic Channel called Caught by the SS: The Wereth Eleven. It tells the story of eleven black Americans who were brutalized and murdered** during WWII as a consequence of the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium on December 17, 1945.  It is a very worthwhile film, but it was claimed in this film that “their story has never been told.” This is untrue.

The following sets the record straight:

In July 2006, while filming Let Freedom Ring: The Lesson Is Priceless, we told the story of “The Wereth Eleven” as a part of our documentary, I believe for the first time on film. Wereth is a tiny hamlet in Eastern Belgium near the German border. The Wereth Eleven refers to the eleven black American soldiers who were separated from their 333rd Field Artillery unit when overrun by the Germans and fled on foot in freezing cold weather finally taking refuge, at the willingness of the Langer family, in a tiny hamlet farm house sheltering them from the cold and feeding them.

Trina Langer, who was one of ten children, and lived in the home at the time of the capture and brutalized killing of these eleven soldiers, told the entire story to us during filming.  She told to us in the living room of the same home where the soldiers briefly took shelter before being captured and killed by a Nazi SS patrol.

Additionally, Adda Rittkin, who was the president of an organization that raised funds to build a monument in memory of these men, told us how and why this was done. Standing in front of the monument, she was very emotional, recalling the sacrifices of these young black American soldiers. (Adda Rittken passed away in January 2010.)

I bring this to your attention because of the fact that the film states that, “their story has never been told.”

Not only did we tell their story before National Georgraphic, but the parties involved told it without rehearsal or prompting of any kind.

***

**Those bodies of the eleven soldiers were recovered by our company and buried in the temporary Henri Chapelle cemetery in Belgium. After the war, seven of them were reburied in the permanent Henri Chapelle cemetery several hundred yards from the temporary one and four were repatriated back to their families in the U.S.

Bodies of the many American soldiers who were massacred in the Malmedy, Belgium slaughter, after being taken prisoner around the same time as the Wereth Eleven, were also recovered by us and buried in the Henri Chapelle Cemetery in Belgium.

I was just one man of a hundred and twenty five officers and enlisted men of the 607th Graves Registration Company. As a PFC, Private First Class, I and my buddies had the gut wrenching, solemn task of gathering the dead, starting on the Normandy Beach Head at age eighteen, weighing one hundred fifteen pounds… and very immature.

Our company was divided into four platoons, some landing on Omaha Beach on D Day and others on Utah Beach. We gathered the dead every day for eleven months from D-Day until the end of the war in Germany, May 8,1945.

The last cemetery, from which we operated in Eisenach, Germany, was disinterred by us the day after Memorial Day,1945. The war had ended for ALL of us on May 8,1945. For the dead, the true HEROES, it was anti-climatic. I will never forget them! For all too many, the graves bearing Crosses and Stars of David are just THAT. But to me each marker represents a real person, a soldier who gave his life at a young age. A face goes with each Cross or Star of David. A young face.

We had Germans digging the graves to be disinterred, as we re-identified the remains of American soldiers that were transported back to France, Belgium or Holland where they were again buried in temporary cemeteries, as no American soldier would be left in Germany.

I spent another eight months in Germany, some of that time waiting to see if we would have to go to the Pacific as the war still raged on there. It ended three months later when thankfully, President Truman decided to drop the Atomic bomb which although killing many unfortunate, it saved many thousands of American and Japanese lives if the war had gone on.

In early 2006, I was prompted by a retired general, David Grange, who I met in Belgium a few years earlier and a retired colonel, Paul Herbert, who said to me,”It is up to you WW II veterans to educate people in regard to the war.” “Have you ever thought about taking history teachers with you when traveling to Belgium, as you do?” I gave it thought that day and the following day, I called Dr. John Schmitt, the Assoc. Superintendent of Schools in Torrance, CA.

He had been a principal where my kids went to high school. I said, “John, I am going to do a documentary in Belgium, talking with civilians who lost their freedom during the Nazi occupation.” I want to take there, a young history teacher from each of your four high schools, to experience, first hand, the consequences of losing one’s freedom.” He said, “George, I was a military brat. My father, who was in the Air Corps, and my mother are buried in Arlington Cemetery….come in and see me.” (spouses of military can also be buried in National Cemeteries.)

That started me off on a filmmaking career.

I formed a 501 (c) (3) 100% non-profit organization and created a website: Let Freedom Ring.

Now funds had to be raised, which I personally accomplished.

Along with the four teachers… three females and a male… we went to Belgium. I also took with us two combat veterans who had seen a lot of action, including the Battle Of The Bulge, the greatest land battle the U.S. Army has ever fought. I also served there.

Nothing was rehearsed and with the help of Belgian friends, we started filming.

The documentary was called: “Let Freedom Ring…The Lesson Is Priceless.”

It was my daughter’s first hand at directing along with Michael Wunsch of Outpost Worldwide, Lenexa KS, that filmed and edited the documentary.

My daughter had desired to do a film about FREEDOM as she expressed to me when visiting the Normandy Cemetery in June 1994, on its fiftieth anniversary. It was the first time for me to revisit Europe and that cemetery that we initiated on June 6, 1944. I was not interested in going back. She, her brother and my fiancee…now my wife… urged me to go back which was fifty years later. I am glad that I did. It was like “closure” for me.

My children’s’ mother passed away in 1981 when they were aged eleven and ten, respectively….. I had never spoken much to my late wife about my wartime experiences.

In 2007, a year after doing my first film, I thought why not do another documentary, this time in France where I participated during the Normandy Invasion.

I again personally raised the funds to do another documentary, this time with three combat veterans who landed on D-Day and two high school history teachers…a female and a male, a young female journalist and a male high school student. Again, as with the first documentary, the teachers heard stories from the citizens who lived during the Nazi occupation and heard us veterans’ experiences as well.

That documentary was called: “Let Freedom Ring….Memories Of France.”

These documentaries were done to educate our youth on the sacrifices made by young people, many not much older than they, to stress the importance of FREEDOM and more specifically, the consequences of the LOSS of FREEDOM.

My intention, when funds are available which I am pursuing, is to get these films in DVD format into high schools and hopefully middle schools, eventually. The teachers who were privileged to take part in these films are doing a great job in their respective schools. One of my teachers, Lori Spradlin, has composed a lesson plan that will accompany the DVDs.

Both documentaries have been aired on ninety PBS stations, initially in November 2009, multiple times and again in May 2010, multiple times.

We expect both films will be aired on Military Channel soon, The schedule will be known as soon as a few details are worked out.

Now, I am working on my next film. Those details for another time.

A bientot….til later….as they say in France.

There you could experience a sad moment in history – when East Germany existed (if you could call it an existence).

The museum offers the visitor a typical day in socialism, featuring real artifacts from clothes to coffee. You can sort through closets, walk through a concrete slab living room, fiddle with a lonely pressure cooker on a stove.

Imagine crawling through Sean Penn’s brain.

You can steer an actual Trabant, possibly the worst car ever made. Legend has it, that there was no such thing as a new Trabant. A dead one was just patched back up and sent out on the road. Like Joan Rivers.

And of course, there’s GDR’s first and only attempt at creating a microchip. It cost 100 times more than ours, which was already an antique by then. East German leaders beamed with pride over the prototype, while the actual chip NEVER got made.

The museum is worth the long flight, for it is not simply a wry commentary on life without aspirations, but a salute to capitalism, a salute to us. From every corner of the museum, the displays told the viewer why their economy failed, why nothing worked, and how a desperate people dreamed of western goods.

Who was at fault? The culprits are obvious – but the big one here? Unions. The big lie of socialism: it’s about the worker, when it’s really about power. And the government kept control of the people through the bullying power of unions. In return, for stifling dissent, the unions had their own power. And with it, they did nothing but engage in slothful incompetence. In the end, you had a country with piles of worthless money, and no goods to spend it on.

But what was most strange, was how vastly entertained the museum visitors were by this grim world. They looked at it like a carnival freak show – you know – the two headed rabbit, the bearded lady, the lizard-skinned man, Joy Behar.

I might say that socialism belongs among that menagerie, except those other freaks never killed anyone.

—–

Jonah Goldberg put it best: Oh, Dear Lord.

The musical debuted in Germany back in January:

Barack Obama and his dramatic ascent to power has inspired a raft of books and articles. Now a German musical is set to pay an all-singing, all-dancing tribute to the world’s most powerful man. Hope! will soon premiere in Frankfurt.

Wearing a knitted cardigan and crooning into his microphone, Barack Obama paces around the stage, wooing Michelle with a love song. In another number, now clad in a suit, Jimmie Wilson who plays Obama, struts up and down, clasping his mike and leading a euphoric gospel chorus of “Yes We Can.”

No word on whether or not ”Hope!” is still playing or if there have been any updates to the musical with Michelle singing “Life as First Lady is Hell.” Or the somber ballad “We Know We Promised 8%,” the show-stopper “My Negatives Are as High as an Elephant’s Eye,” or the Faustian closing number “Welcome to ObamaCare.”

We’ll keep you updated.

“In any case, it was never intended to kill the Jews.  This was a development which came when the war was at its peak–which cannot be justified and God help us, it made many enemies for us after the war.  The result?  Hardly anyone nowadays thinks of the positive accomplishments brought to Germany and Europe by Hitler.” –Anonymous Munich citizen, 1974 

“I would say that if we were not all guilty of crimes, then we were at least accomplices.” –Ostheer Soldier Roland Kiemig, 1991 

“We cannot and should not be allowed to win this war.” –Oberstleutnant Helmuth Groscurth in  letter to wife after execution of 90 orphaned Jewish children, 1941   

CHAPTER 1 

In the pre-dawn darkness I struggle out of bed with a groan.  When you’ve lived eighty-two years as I have, you learn not to get up too swiftly since one misplaced step could mean a shattered hip.

Once steady on my feet, however, I move with the purpose of a man who’s held command in the past.  I pause at the doorway to my bedroom and glance back through shadows at the sheets that lie in tussled balls.  The bed is empty.  Marina’s been gone for one month yet I still expect to see her form there.  She should be lying on her side, the mound of her hips gently rising and falling with her breathing as if bobbing in a current.

In my robe and slippers, I feel my way down the stairway to the second floor.  As delicate as I try to be, one of the steps creaks under me.  I pause and grit my teeth as if a grimace will somehow muffle the sound.  Dora, my fifty-year-old daughter and only child, stirs in the guest bedroom.  She’s temporarily abandoned her family in Dover to stay with me since her mother was buried. She knows I’m lonely.

She calls to me: “Papa?  Are you okay?” 

“Fine, daughter,” I assure her from the bottom of the stairwell. “Go back to sleep.”

“I’m already up.  If you wait a moment I’ll come down and brew you some tea.”   Although Dora’s mother and I grew up in Germany, and thus never lost the tell-tale “zis” and “zat”, Dora’s a product of London and as such developed a curious continental brogue that can’t be placed with any one country.

“That would be kind,” I say. “If it’s no bother.”

“Of course it’s no bother,” she calls from her closet.  I hear her fumbling through a rack of clothes, scraping the hangers over the metal pole, searching for her robe.

In the shadows I creep away from the banister to a pair of French doors.  A surly November wind howls outside my walls and whips through the streets of Westminster.  This flat leaks like an old vessel and drafts push through the hall.

I nudge open the doors and shuffle into the conservatory, gently closing them behind me.  Two leather couches sandwich a mahogany table which in turn pins a Persian rug to the oak floorboards.  Bookshelves line the far wall.  On the other wall hang photographs from my life.  Frozen snippets from my past. Sometimes I have to turn away from them before the memories build…and when I do I come to face a richly stained grand piano that waits for me in the recess of my bay window.  The Steinway’s been my constant companion this past month.

I see from my window that it promises to be a crisp, clear autumn day.  And as I take in the first hint of pink ribbon peeking over the eastern London sky, I sit down to play.  Closing my eyes, I strain to hear in my mind the Beethoven sonata before my fingertips touch ivory.  Then I lay them gently on the keys preparing to step into the musical world that has sustained me throughout my life.  And I whisper to myself, as I have done every morning for the past sixty years, these words:

“I am not a murderer.”

[Ed. Note: "Hummel's Cross: is available for purchase at Amazon.com.]

The greatest element — that’s a bold claim, considering the hot competition among the movie’s other collaborators. But in hindsight, few would argue that the marvelous sets, vehicles, and spy gadgets of Goldfinger, masterminded by production designer Ken Adam, are any less iconic than Ian Fleming’s novel, Sean Connery’s performance, or John Barry’s musical score.

Production design is a largely unsung art. Both the script and the need for historical accuracy tend to serve as harsh governors on the dreams and fantasies of the people charged with designing a movie’s sets and props. But the Bond films, Adam says, “are done so loosely that the script isn’t the Bible that it is in most films. It changes all the time, and the whole process of writing is like some democratic debating society.”

When Dr. No went into production in 1961, Adam got a mere 14,000 pounds (out of the movie’s total budget of 350,000) with which to design all of the interior sets for this “tongue-in-cheek spectacular,” including the casino in the opening scene, Bond’s apartments, M’s office, and the sprawling, futuristic lair of the villainous doctor himself. He performed his task in England while the rest of the cast and crew were off filming exteriors in Jamaica, and when they returned they were stunned by what they saw:

Adam, originally a German who fled to England with his family before the War, called on his love of German Expressionism to invent outrageous sets that were, as he called them, “theatrical realism. . . exaggerated practicality. . . hyper-reality by design.” Larger-than-life, yes, but still of life, much like Fleming’s novels themselves. “Nobody could foresee the success of Dr. No,” Adams insists. “What happened was like magic, almost.”

Two years later Adam arrived on the set of his second Bond film, Goldfinger, with a budget many times that of his previous effort. His first task this time out was designing the new car Bond was to use. He settled on the Aston Martin DB5 because, “It was sort of the most prestigious British sports car at the time. We couldn’t have used a Ferrari or something like that, you know.”

An admitted “sports-car freak,” Adam went nuts pimping out Bond’s ride with its now-legendary array of special options, using the rationale that “all the gimmickry and gadgets were just what I would have wanted in my own car.” The entire crew was encouraged to submit their own ideas for upgrades, and by the time he was finished he had spent 25,000 pounds — almost double the total production design budget of Dr. No — on the Aston Martin alone. As it happened the vehicle was only on screen for thirteen minutes, but Adam’s conception of it was so wildly inventive and fun that it became the most famous car in movie history.

The sets for Goldfinger were no less well imagined. Everyone has their own fave: the gorgeous apartment where Bond wakes to find his lover covered in gold paint, the vast Bank of England dining hall — bad brandy, good cigars — where Bond gets the details of his mission, the cavernous laser room where our intrepid hero nearly becomes special agent castratum, the plush confines of the Lockheed jet where Bond meets Pussy Galore and outfoxes the clever peep-holes used by the lovely Mei-Lei.

Everything in the film drips with the opulence, style, and color for which the Bond series is known — all of it spawned from the mind of Ken Adam, and laid out in drawings inspired by his life experiences and unique visual sense. “No design is worth doing if you just reproduce reality,” he stresses. “I don’t believe you can get a sense of reality by copying. I think you can get that better by not copying. But you must always be honest. You mustn’t do things just to create chi-chi effects. You must have a reason.”

Take Auric Goldfinger’s breathtaking Kentucky country estate, with its stables and Playboy Mansion-like diversions. Adam remembers that

We called the set where he keeps the harnesses and tack the rumpus room. . . I knew this rumpus room had to convert into a gas chamber, so all the walls were designed to close. Even the big stainless steel fireplace came down so that no fresh air could get in. It was pretty horrifying, actually.

And at the same time the other moving objects, like the billiard table, had a practical purpose by turning round and becoming the briefing model of the raid on Fort Knox. The rotating bar was a little gratuitous, but once I’d started I thought, “I might as well!” So it turned from a rather harmless-looking, luxurious tack room into a combined War Room and gas chamber.

Check out the finished set in the following clip, and as each shot reveals new architectural glories and wonders, keep in mind that this isn’t some real-life room rented from a billionaire’s mansion, it’s a movie set, built from scratch and designed from the ground up by Ken Adam:

Theatergoers in 1964 were dazzled by these ingenious sets, and almost a half-century later they have yet to lose their ability to inspire awe.

This elaborate design came from a deeper place in Adam’s psyche than may at first be apparent. He lived most of his life in England, but he was born Klaus Hugo Adam in 1921 Berlin, emigrating to the UK only when the rise of Hitler threatened his family’s safety. During the war he became the only German-born pilot in the Royal Air Force, serving his adopted country with distinction against the country he was originally from. Twenty years later, during the making of Goldfinger, he still hadn’t got past the dichotomy of his upbringing. “Remember it was the 1960s,” says Adam:

The Second World War was still very much in everybody’s minds. . . I had to keep in mind that all the gangsters are going to be finally poisoned by gas, you see. . . .

When the Germans now write about me, it’s not that they say, “he was affected by the sadistic ideas of the period,” but I grew up with some of these things. So knowingly or not knowingly, I tried to show some of those impressions, my early impressions, in my designs. . . it’s mixing this kind of playful fantasy with the ultimate horror.

Given Adam’s background and influences, it’s not going too far to posit that Goldfinger’s luxurious abode, so wondrous and modern yet laced with a sinister aspect, beggars comparisons to places like The Berghof, Hitler’s “eagle’s nest” hideaway in the Bavarian Alps, where profoundly evil men enjoyed the very best wine, women and song as they poured over intricate maps, scale-models and globes while plotting the assembly-line domination and destruction of whole populations. And the fiendishly clever bit of mechanized death that lies at the heart of Goldfinger’s “rumpus room,” with every avenue of escape clipped off like the tickings of a well-designed watch, evokes painful memories of the meticulously engineered real-life abattoirs of the Holocaust.

“In hindsight,” Adam says, “I think Goldfinger was maybe the best example of a Bond film that I designed, where the settings accentuate the dramatic message of the film. I had a completely free hand.”

The Cold War was a constant presence in the work of Adam throughout the Sixties, not only in the Bond series but in films such as Dr. Strangelove (1964 — where he designed the memorable War Room for Stanley Kubrick, foregoing the chance to work on From Russia, With Love to take the job), as well as more realistic spy films like The Ipcress File (1965) and Funeral in Berlin (1966), both starring Michael Caine. But perhaps his single greatest Cold War set, the one that veers the furthest into cinematic outrageousness while remaining utterly convincing, was the interior of the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox as depicted at the end of Goldfinger.

“I’d seen the vault of the Bank of England,” says Adam, “and you know gold is so heavy, so it’s never stacked more than two foot or two-foot-six high. . . I’m sure the inside of Fort Knox is very dull, with low vaults and a few trolleys traveling around.” But of course, for a Bond movie dull simply won’t do. “The public wanted to see gold!” Adam thought, and so he gave it to them using all of the sumptuous splendor he could muster. “If you go to the biggest gold depository in the world you expect to see gold towering up to the heavens. . . I wanted to build a cathedral of gold, almost forty foot high — completely impractical.”

Adam was aided by the fact that, due to stringent security, virtually no one among the public knew what the interior of the Depository looked like. There were no pictures floating around, no descriptions of any kind:

Remember, the President of the United States wasn’t allowed inside. And I was really rather pleased about that. Because it gave me the opportunity to design it the way I thought it should be designed, with gold stacked up to forty feet in height. I also liked the concept of putting the gold behind bars, you know, spectators being on the other side. I liked playing around with that. . . a surreality, which in fact is accepted by the audience as reality.

The final result of his designs inspired veneration in audiences. Film scholar Christopher Frayling, a keen follower of Adam’s career, recalls his first viewing of Goldfinger back in 1964: “The audience erupted with applause — even at a matinée — when Oddjob got his comeuppance by being electrocuted. . . I’d never known a cinema audience to spontaneously applaud like that. But there was something about the way in which the sequence worked; it satisfied everybody.”

The towers of gold, the impregnable bars, the futuristic elevators, Oddjob’s deadly bowler hat, the bomb threatening to make the bullion holdings of the United States radioactive — all of these things were designed by Adam and the rest of Goldfinger’s art department out of whole cloth, following Adam’s crucial decision to go whole-hog and make the Bond series not a humdrum copy of reality but the stuff of which cinematic dreams are made of.

Adam likes telling an apocryphal story “from reliable sources” about how the newly inaugurated Ronald Reagan, upon entering the White House for the first time, demanded to see the War Room from Dr. Strangelove and was dejected when his handlers informed the “amiable dunce” that none in fact existed outside of the film. Liberals have perpetuated the story ad nauseam ever since (usually prefacing it by such well-worn phrasings as “it was said that. . . ,” “I’ve heard that. . . ,” “According to many sources. . . ”) because it fits neatly into their fantasy view of conservatives in general and Reagan in particular. But, although they won’t admit it, many of those same people were themselves taken in by the glittering interior of Fort Knox in Goldfinger. “Everyone is now convinced Fort Knox looks like that,” Adam says, “As a film designer you can create a reality which is more acceptable to the public than the actual thing. . . United Artists got so many letters saying, how were we allowed in when the president wasn’t allowed, and so on. So I consider that a successful design.”

The late critic David Sylvester went much further than that, calling Adam’s sets “probably the most amazing and enthralling pieces of fantastic architecture in the history of talking pictures.” Millions of viewers around the world — from Presidents on down to the poorest kid at the cheapest matinée — would agree.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our pleasure cruise of Goldfinger with a study of the best critical volume written about Bond, wherein a conservative writer defended 007 in the wake of a widespread academic and media backlash against the series.

Previous posts in the series “Ian Fleming, Sean Connery, and Goldfinger”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Three books about Ken Adam. Production design is rarely given full-book treatments, even as other aspects of filmmaking are immortalized in hundreds of volumes of criticism and analysis. The work of two-time Academy Award-winner Ken Adam, however, is featured in no less than three major retrospective editions: Moonraker, Strangelove, and Other Celluloid Dreams: The Visionary Art of Ken Adam by Ken Adam and David Sylvester, Ken Adam: The Art of Production Design by Christopher Frayling, and Ken Adam Designs the Movies: James Bond and Beyond by Adam and Frayling. All are meaty, colorful books filled with drawings and photos illustrating the intricate and inspired work that went into the design of such Bond films as Dr. No, Goldfinger, You Only Live Twice, Diamonds Are Forever, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Moonraker, not to mention Dr. Strangelove and the dozens of other movies he worked on throughout his career.

Ken Adam (production designer). This 150-page oral history transcript is housed at the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library, and can be accessed and read by any interested scholar in the Los Angeles area. The interviews contained in the transcript were conducted in 2002 by Jennifer Peterson.

Article on Ken Adam in frieze magazine. Frieze bills itself as “the leading magazine of contemporary art and culture.” This piece by Dan Fox, published in Issue 51 for March-April 2000 and now reprinted on the web, is notable for its expert analysis of the artistry underlining Adam’s designs and drawings.

Christopher Frayling discussions with Ken Adam. These candid interviews took place in 2008. The sound on the videos could be a lot better, but if you persevere you will hear some interesting stories about Adam’s work on Dr. No, Dr. Strangelove, Goldfinger, and production design in general.

Ken Adam, designer — Cold War Modern. Here’s an Adam excerpt from a much longer documentary, with more interview material about his life and career.

Herzog was in Munich, Eisner in Paris, and their mutual friends implored the thirty-two-year-old director to fly to France post-haste so that he might say his goodbyes while there was still time. But Herzog would have none of it. “This must not be,” he remembered thinking. “German cinema could not do without her now. We would not permit her death.” And so, suddenly afire with what he once called in another context “the fervor and woe of pilgrims and prayers and hopes,” Herzog made a momentous decision: he would set out from his apartment in Munich and walk the five-hundred miles to Paris “in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot.”

Days stretched into weeks as he trod alone through the winter sleet, sometimes breaking into barns or empty cottages to survive the cold nights and taking only a single detour, “to the town of Troyes, because I wanted to walk into the cathedral there.” Finally he arrived exhausted at Eisner’s Paris apartments to find her “still tired and marked by her illness,” but recovering against all odds. She would live nine more years, until at last, “when she was nearly blind, could not walk or read or go out to see films,” she called Herzog back to Paris and told him, “Werner, there is still this spell cast over me that I am not allowed to die. I am tired of life. It would be a good time for me now.” Herzog recalls that, “Jokingly I said, ‘OK, Lotte, I hereby take the spell away,” and three weeks later Lotte Eisner died.

The life of Werner Herzog is filled with such stories — tales of deep spiritualism that continually invite a resolutely non-dogmatic but nevertheless palpably Christian interpretation. The Left habitually ignores this, preferring to revel in their shallow image of Herzog as a reckless, half-mad darling of the godless art-house circuit, a sort of Colonel Kurtz with a camera. The truth is that he’s more akin to a Bavarian Flannery O’Connor, deeply devout and honest even while telling stories featuring characters who are anything but. Like the monks and prophets of old, Herzog is that rare man who implicitly trusts his own soul-stirring religious impulses and allows them to take him where they may. Viewed with this in mind, his fascination with stories of chaos and darkness — stories like Grizzly Man — become not celebrations of madness, but a sane and noble search for God in a fallen world.

The man who would one day become fascinated with the story of Timothy Treadwell seemed to attract dark Fate from the very beginning: days after his birth in Munich in 1942, an Allied bomb fell on the neighbor’s house, the shockwave shattering windows and spraying his cradle with glass. Divorce ensured his father was largely absent from his life, but his mother moved the family to the country and kept Herzog and his two brothers fed and clothed by smuggling essentials over the border from Austria. He grew affectionately close to both mother and brothers during an idyllic childhood played out amongst the ruins and poverty of postwar Bavaria:

I did not know what a banana was until I was twelve and I did not make my first telephone call until I was seventeen. Our house had no water-flushed toilet, in fact no running water at all. We had no mattresses; my mother would stuff dried ferns into a linen bag, and in winter it was so cold I would wake up in the morning to find a layer of ice on my blanket from frozen breath. But it was wonderful to grow up like that. We had to invent our own toys, we were full of imagination. . . kids in the cities took over whole bombed-out blocks and would declare the remnants of buildings their own to play in where great adventures were acted out. . . It was anarchy in the best sense of the word. There were no ruling fathers around and no rules to follow.

From an early age, Herzog was a child of solitude and daydreams. “I was very much a loner. . . I would lie back on the floor with a book and read for hours no matter how much talking and activity was going on. Often I would read all day long, and when I finished, I would look up to discover that everyone else had left hours ago.” When he was eleven, a traveling projectionist came to his rural school and screened a pair of 16mm films for the kids. The magic and illusion of the medium captivated the quiet boy. “From the moment I could think independently I knew I was going to make films. I never had a choice about becoming a director.”

At fourteen, in a sudden titanic burst of religious passion, Herzog converted to Catholicism, immersing himself in the intricacies of the Holy Mass and the Catechism. Over time he was increasingly unable to reconcile the dogma with the reality of life around him, and he eventually fell out of the Church. Yet his films have never escaped this early, quixotic preoccupation with God, creation, and the meaning of existence. “To this day,” he says, “there seems to be something of a distant religious echo in some of my work. . . I am good with religious subjects and feel I understand them.”

Culture was the other great force shaping his early life and thought. He yearned for Germany to return to the “the bosom of the civilized world” after the privations its people suffered first at the hands of the Nazis and then of the country-splitting Communists. “I had the increasingly strong feeling that Germany was an extremely godforsaken country,” he remembers. “What, I asked myself, was actually holding it together? What was capable of binding the country together again until it was reunited in the distant future? I felt that the only things we Germans were held together by were our culture and language, and for this reason I truly felt that it was only the poets who could hold Germany together.”

As a young teen he wrote several movie scripts and “submitted various proposals to producers and TV stations,” but when he took a meeting with a producer at seventeen and got laughed out of the room with, “Aha! The kindergarten is trying to make films nowadays!”, he realized that if he was going to be a director, he would have to make it happen himself. He immediately established “Werner Herzog Filmproduktion,” and for the next fifteen years ran his entire moviemaking business out of a one-bedroom apartment in Munich, armed with a camera stolen from the local university. “There was no clear division between private life and work,” he says.

Instead of a living room we had an editing room, and I would sleep there too. I had no secretary, no one to help me with taxes, bookkeeping, contracts, screenplay writing, organization. I did absolutely everything myself; it was an article of faith, a matter of simple human decency to do the dirty work as long as I could. . . It dawned on me that organization and commitment were the only things that finished films, not money.

An article of faith. . . A matter of simple human decency. Critics who fancy Herzog as a postmodern Euro-artiste far too hip and cool to give credence to such notions understand very little about the man or his passions.

From the beginning, Herzog determined that he would only work using 35mm “feature film” stock, the only format with enough breadth and depth to capture the transcendent imagery coursing through his fertile, cosmic mind. He raised the money to do this by taking odd jobs and winning small monetary prizes at film festivals for his shorts and scripts. Somehow, attending film school and “learning” how to make a movie never entered his consciousness. “I just felt it would be better to make a film than go to film school,” he says. “It is not technicians that film schools should be producing, but people with a real agitation of mind. People with spirit, with a burning flame within them.”

Sensing instinctively that Germany was too small a backdrop for his filmic visions, Herzog developed the notion that traveling, and specifically walking long distances on foot, carried with it a profound spiritual quality. “The volume and depth and intensity of the world is something that only those on foot will ever experience,” he thought, and so he began to travel whenever possible, not as a tourist but as an adventurer in the classic sense, treading fearlessly wherever his heart and soul led.

He learned English while on scholarship in Great Britain, then went to Greece, Crete, and Egypt, eventually journeying along the Nile into Sudan. At twenty-two he accepted a scholarship that brought him to the U.S., a country whose self-reliant, God-fearing, Blind Side citizenry impressed him deeply. After spending time in the States he made his way down to Mexico, where he learned Spanish and worked as a two-bit border smuggler and rodeo rider. (He was so terrible at the latter job that the Mexicans nicknamed him “El Alamein,” after one of the greatest German defeats of WWII). “My time down there was quite banal and partially miserable too,” Herzog admits, but “it was ‘pura vida,’ as the Mexicans say, ‘pure life’. . . I thank God on my knees that after America I did not go straight back to Germany.”

The later career of Herzog is now the stuff of legend. He shot film in the Sahara, the Ivory Coast, Uganda, Cameroon, the Congo, and the Canary Islands, surviving African rainstorms, sandstorms, civil war, prisons, rat-bites, malaria, and blood parasites. Herzog’s early pictures were not particularly popular in Germany, and so he embarked on a conscious attempt to achieve international success with an English-speaking film. Aguirre, The Wrath of God (1972) was a tragic, haunting, delirious conquistador adventure tale set in the deepest jungles of South America, and in addition to making Herzog a name to remember among foreign audiences, it began his fruitful yet often infuriating partnership with the gifted (and genuinely half-mad) actor Klaus Kinski.

A seminal figure in what was called the German New Wave, Herzog became known for fiction films and documentaries featuring “ruined people in ruined places” — strange protagonists poised far out on the razor’s edge of life. “I never look for stories to tell,” he says, “rather they assail me.” Cinematic ideas often come to Herzog in feverish daydreams fraught with meaning, though he can’t begin to explain why or to what purpose. “What constitutes poetry, depth, vision and illumination in cinema I can’t name,” he once said. “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”

To discover and share these epochal moments of humanity, to tease them out of ordinary reality and onto a movie screen, to illuminate the faded fingerprints of God found on even the strangest and most forsaken parts of his creation — that is the mission of Werner Herzog.

One experiences, maybe only five or six times during a lifetime, the incredible feeling that illuminates and enlightens your own existence. It might happen while reading a text, listening to a piece of music, watching a film or looking at a painting. And sometimes — even if centuries are being bridged — you find a brother and instantly know that you are no longer alone. . .

If I find one person who walks out of a cinema of 300 people after watching one of my films and does not feel alone anymore, then I have achieved everything I have set out to achieve.

Conservative movie lovers have in Herzog a filmmaker who is neither a pretentious “artist” (a word he despises) nor a reckless madman, but a solid, sane craftsman who’s spent a lifetime painfully painting a bizarre Sistine Chapel filled with passionate and transcendent images that remind us of what it means to be human.

Of course, being a director who respects the fiery “agitation of mind” which lies at the heart of religious faith brings him into inevitable conflict with the lemmings of collectivism, atheism, and political correctness who dominate not only modern Hollywood but the Arts in general. Unlike many of us conservatives, though, the non-political and non-dogmatic Herzog has never shirked from a fight with that insidious worldview.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers: Werner Herzog’s defiant stands against the ideological bullies of the Left, and how those experiences prepared him to take on the multi-faceted story of Grizzly Man.

Previous posts in the series “Werner Herzog, Timothy Treadwell, and Grizzly Man“

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Herzog on Herzog by Paul Cronin: A fascinating, book-length interview with the master director that goes into depth about his films, life, philosophy, and craft. There’s no better single book on Herzog than this.

On Walking In Ice by Werner Herzog: Herzog’s account of his epic long walk from Munich to Paris in 1974 to visit the dying Lotte Eisner, told through the diary he kept during the trip. Often drifting into prose poetry and what I called above “feverish daydreams,” it offers a strange and wonderful peek into the mind of a lonely pilgrim filled with “fervor, woe, prayers, and hopes.”

Herzog video interview with Charlie Rose: filmed a year ago during his press tour for his new book of diaries Conquest of the Useless: Reflections on the Making of ‘Fitzcarraldo’, this is a potent twenty-minute introduction to Herzog’s personality.

Herzog audio interview with Elvis Mitchell: Herzog talks to the former New York Times film critic about his life and career, with an especial focus on his newest film Bad Lieutenant: Port of New Orleans (2009) starring Nicholas Cage. Contains some discussion of Timothy Treadwell and Grizzly Man.

Luckily, the press office for this soon-to-be classic has assembled a slick little YouTube video highlighting all of the big moments of the show.  Believe it or not, this video is meant to inspire you to buy a ticket.

Great, terrific, perfect…  um…  a couple things.

First of all, Does Shepard Fairey know you’ve stolen his logo for your set design?  (I guess it’s ok since he stole it from someone else.)

Also, did I really just see an opening number framing America under Bush in 2008 as “Chaos”?  Chaos??  Are you sure that isn’t meant as clever foreshadowing?

And how about those lyrics for “Chaos”:

Round and round
Upside-down
Inside-out
There’s no doubt.
We’re in Chaos!
Here come the hounds of Hell, Chaos!
As far as I can tell, Chaos!

From the show’s web site:

In no way does HOPE show Obama as a saint, but it grants us a view behind the scenes of his cometlike rise and also tells from the personal ups and downs of a man who has worked his way up from a social worker in Chicago to the most powerful man in the world, simply by using his power of persuasion.

In a stirring and modern musical production, HOPE shows the amazing history of the development of a new societal movement to a new generation.

The HOPE production team and its performers do not take up any political stance. We do not express a political opinion in our own name. The presentation of the public opinions and feelings in the musical follows the general interpretation of the current events like they prevail in the media and the society.

As easy as it would be to slam them on this, I actually pity their lack of self awareness.  Remember: this is the same nation who convinced themselves that the Third Reich was just a natural response to the Treaty of Versailles and not an atrocious attempt at world domination fueled by hateful paranoia…  If they can rationalize that, they can pretend their play is not political hagiography.

I also noticed an interesting bit of casting.  The roles of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin are played by the same woman (only major characters in the piece double-cast in this fashion).  Is this a subtle bit of subtext from the director?  Maybe the message is, “All those white women who stood in the way of Obama being President look alike to me.”

So, it appears that producers in Germany think there is a market for hip-hop hagiography.  Maybe there is, for now.  But, as President Obama’s policies continue to drag down the world’s economy and send mixed messages to our international partners regarding the Islamic terrorist threat, the next big Obama musical might be a lot less “Jesus Christ Superstar” and a lot more “Wicked.”

Stone’s scripts for Midnight Express and Scarface blew our collective minds with staggering violence and raw language.  Then he directed Platoon – an awesome film if you dig sophomore-level meditations on the duality of good and evil leavened with gunfire.  JFK came along and demonstrated that Kennedy was murdered not by the commie misfit who actually did it, but a conspiracy made up of big business, the government, the military, the Trilateral Commission, the Knights Templar, Prince Olaf of South Ruritania, and everyone else on Earth except Lee Harvey Oswald and JFK himself – or was he in on it too?  After that, Stone was ready to completely abandon the constraints imposed by concepts like “story,” “characters” and “coherence.”  Natural Born Killers was the result, the perfect Oliver Stone film – all controversy, great visuals, and nothing that made anything remotely like sense.

For Stone, it’s still about shock, but he hasn’t inspired any awe in years.  So, to even approach this series, called Secret History, as a serious effort to convey anything like a coherent idea is to miss the point.  This show and his nakedly calculated attempt to incite a backlash are nothing but a waning artist’s sad attempt to seize the limelight one last time.  And he has a back-up plan – his next movie is a cash-the-check sequel to the venerable Wall Street.  I guess greed really is good – at least when Stone’s the one being greedy.

Does Stone really believe that Hitler somehow lacks “context,” or that “American corporations were involved [with the Nazis], from GM through IBM”?  Sure, to the extent he believes in anything besides gobbling pharmaceuticals and ginning up publicity, but make no mistake:  His Secret History will be neither.  It will not be “history” in the sense of relating what actually transpired in the past.  Nor is its tired leftist wisdom on how America was somehow to blame for the rise of the Nazis – as it is to blame for all evil throughout the ages – a “secret.”  If you can’t wait to get a dose of it, just check out the Daily Kos comments or join the other half-dozen lonely lefty shut-ins who actually saw Howard Zinn’s recent celebrity-filled trash America fest.

The real Secret History that Stone won’t disclose involves the identity of the Americans who actually thought the Nazis had quite a lot to offer with their collectivist, anti-capitalist vision, their refusal to let things like democracy stop their agenda, and their fondness for eugenics.  Here’s a hint:  It starts with a “P” and ends with a “rogressives.”

So I would not be at all surprised if the Secret History ends up showing that Third Reich silver lining we short-sighted conservatives always seem to overlook.  I expect the show will remind me of being stationed in Stuttgart in the late-Eighties/early-nineties and hitting the volksfestswith my Army buddies.  There’d be a bunch of Germans at the long tables eating pretzels and pounding away on the Schaweben Brau and after the seventh or eighth stein-full they’d lean in to me, bleary-eyed, fingers wagging, and in slurred English say, “You know, you Americans don’t understand Hitler.  He vas not all bad…”  It was then that I understood why my ancestors left Deutschland.

But it’s not constructive to simply criticize, so for Mr. Stone’s benefit here is some help with the proper context for the poor, misunderstood Adolph Hitler: 

Auschwitz. 

Treblinka. 

Dachau. 

There’s your context, Ollie.  You’re welcome.