Interview with Jeff Gibbs
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Transcription
McKiernan Interviews
Interview with: Jeff Gibbs
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: October 2011
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(Start of Interview)
SM (00:00:00):
Testing 123. There you go.
JG (00:00:05):
You are in near Philly?
SM (00:00:05):
Pardon?
JG (00:00:12):
Where are you right now? Near Philly?
SM (00:00:14):
Yeah, Westchester, Pennsylvania.
JG (00:00:17):
Yeah.
SM (00:00:17):
Is where I live. Just a couple more questions and I will get right to the point of how you became a documentary person.
JG (00:00:30):
Okay.
SM (00:00:30):
One question I wanted to ask is, and actually this is just, these are major events from the period of the (19)60s, (19)70s and maybe the (19)80s too. This is just quick responses to when you hear these terms what is your first reaction. When you think of these events during the past 65 years what did they mean to you and possibly to your generation? And it does not have to be long, it is just real fast. The first one is the atomic bomb.
JG (00:01:04):
Just by radiation.
SM (00:01:08):
The Cold War.
JG (00:01:11):
Headache.
SM (00:01:13):
The election of Kennedy, 1960.
JG (00:01:22):
I... Oh.
SM (00:01:29):
Okay.
JG (00:01:31):
Confusion. My mother was a Republican, but I convinced she was Kennedy was a nice guy. I was little.
SM (00:01:42):
How about the assassination of JFK?
JG (00:01:48):
Heart-wrenching. What you mean? Just one word?
SM (00:01:51):
Give you heart-wrenching or just what do you think it meant to you plus the nation?
JG (00:02:01):
Loss of innocence, I think. It was like watching a funeral on television, but it was also a collective sense of we were out together too.
SM (00:02:12):
The Cuban Missile Crisis, I think you have already talked about that a little bit.
JG (00:02:21):
Yeah, just, sorry it was like the moment when you realized it could all actually end.
SM (00:02:29):
The rise of Barry Goldwater, which actually is the beginning of the conservative movement, really.
JG (00:02:47):
Barry Goldwater. That would be a nightmare.
SM (00:02:54):
Gulf of Tonkin, 1964.
JG (00:03:03):
See some of these things I only remember in retrospect because I was not that old, but there was a movie made about it. I remember watching that and think it was just very painful to think to such a small event supposedly led to all that.
SM (00:03:27):
Right. Led to 58,200 plus American dead. God knows, close to 2 million wounded, and the 3 million Vietnamese killed. The Vietnam War itself.
JG (00:03:53):
Apocalypse. Now, can I answer just in a sentence, what you had said earlier that I did not answer?
SM (00:04:03):
Yes.
JG (00:04:04):
Without interrupting you, is that the reason I do not really have an answer is could we have won or lost. We attack small nations as a great empire. We attacked them. It is not a war, called evil, and so how do we win? Do not win that. You win when somebody attacks you, so there is never a chance we could win because we were just decimating people that did not deserve it.
SM (00:04:37):
The year 1968, everything that took place that year.
JG (00:04:44):
Duck and too young to... And that is not an excuse, that is just I remember sitting there (19)68, (19)69 thinking stuff is happening that I cannot go. Too young.
SM (00:05:03):
1970 Kent State and Jackson State.
JG (00:05:06):
Maybe jealous is the word. Some ways were a couple years older. They got the food for $5. I got the food for 50. Go ahead. What were you saying?
SM (00:05:17):
Kent State and Jackson State, 1970, May 4th.
JG (00:05:33):
Soldiers are gunning us down.
SM (00:05:38):
And then I just had a general one here called The Beatles coming to the United States in 1964.
JG (00:05:52):
Realizing I did not understand girls. Girl about them and I was like, "Okay, well they are all right."
SM (00:05:59):
Well, they were screaming for The Beatles.
JG (00:06:03):
Well, at that time, the music was not as what it is.
SM (00:06:09):
Right. Now, you were only one year old or three years old when I had this next one, but Sputnik in 1957, along with Elvis Presley in (19)57. Now obviously you would know what they were all about.
JG (00:06:19):
No, I remember that. See, I was an assigned [inaudible] from the day I was marked, I remember Sputnik. I remember all that getting going. I think it was, I usually all the stereotypical words, but it is true for a reason. It is just wonder.
SM (00:06:44):
I think personally, it played a role in the rise of higher education, and that was already rising from the GI Bill.
JG (00:06:55):
It was in a science fiction, but here is the dilemma. It is that the very, I have been thinking about this a lot. When you were a Roman citizen in Rome before the fall, you would be saying we have democracy at first, we have roads. We have sanitation, we have dust, we have fresh water. We have heated rooms. Charcoal was brought in from a deforested area to heat the rooms, heat the bath. We have culture, statues, theater, spectacle. Rome is a very good thing. How could anybody want Rome to fall? And so in Rome you were not aware of all the things that an empire amassed, and so for me is that we want to think of the empire being the corporation or push or breaking, but it is all of us. It is all of us together. Liberal offense. We make the system. It was actually help us out to compete with Soviets, right?
SM (00:08:12):
Yes.
JG (00:08:13):
They have an environmental movement so they fucked it up. They did not have the discourse that we have had, so they were less effective. Anyways, I do not know how that, but-
SM (00:08:27):
Earth Day 1970. Now obviously it has been celebrated every year since, but if you compare Earth Day 1970 and Earth Day 2010, we are talking 30, well 70. We are almost talking 41, 40 years. What is the difference?
JG (00:08:49):
Take care of them. I was at Earth Day 2010, and I would say Thursday 1970s was soulful. At least 2000.
SM (00:09:10):
What about in 2010, it is less soulful? Still there?
JG (00:09:20):
Yep.
SM (00:09:21):
Okay.
JG (00:09:21):
That was a scam.
SM (00:09:28):
Okay, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980?
JG (00:09:32):
You had is, what is his name? The Avatar director was in... James Cameron is a baby Boomer, right?
SM (00:09:43):
Yes.
JG (00:09:44):
He made the movie Avatar we are supposed to care about the trees and the blue native people?
SM (00:09:48):
Mm-hmm.
JG (00:09:49):
So yes, Earth Day 2010 was dominated by NASA and they were passing out tree seedlings. Passing out tree seedlings is what the company that chopped down all the forests of the world do to make it okay the damage that they did in destroying the planet. James Cameron sponsored the exhibit where they were passing out little tiny baby tree stumps. I cannot think of anything more symbolic of the sellout of the environmental movement than instead of somebody trying to save the forest, here they are passing out the seedlings to the sugar companies want you to pretend to plant, replace forest.
SM (00:10:30):
To replenish and of course, we all know how important the trees are for breathing every day air.
JG (00:10:38):
Maybe you are aware of this, when you cut down a forest, the forest you cut down never returns and planting seedlings, whatever comes up has nothing to do with the forest that was there before. It is like raising the prairie and finding corn and saying, "Hey look, something's growing." Well, it is not what was there before. Let us see, sorry.
SM (00:11:03):
The election of Ronald Reagan.
JG (00:11:11):
All right, you may hit the election of Ronald Reagan?
SM (00:11:15):
Mm-hmm.
JG (00:11:18):
We got the daddy we wanted.
SM (00:11:19):
You got the what?
JG (00:11:24):
The Reagan was the first new age president.
SM (00:11:31):
That is not really good.
JG (00:11:34):
No, that is terrible. You think about the confluence of these things is right in Reagan because, and instead of Carter's message of use last put on a sweater and turned down the heat, sorry to change his minds. If they, all right, never mind. We were going to send our army's resourceful. Reagan gave us the first new age lingo, "We are a shin city on a hill. It is morning in America." He was a new age president.
SM (00:12:10):
He kept saying, "We are back. We are back."
JG (00:12:14):
We are back and secretly we love hearing that. Now we did not like what he did in terms of El Salvador and politically and keep the empire going, but see that is how it always works, is that Cartalita does not like what Tony Soprano does. She is not going to give up the house and the nice things. Carmella, and that is who we are, we are Carmella.
SM (00:12:44):
He supposedly was one of the main reasons that the wall went down. Actually some people think it should have been Gorbachev. The last two of the Gulf War and 9/11, and I think actually in Watergate. Watergate was crucial too.
JG (00:13:09):
The Gulf War. That is when I was ashamed of myself because I too enjoyed watching King after that war and I realized how insidious the joy of empire was. I was enthralled by the senior recovery and it should have been the same.
SM (00:13:30):
And how about 9/11? 10th anniversary coming up.
JG (00:13:34):
Yeah, it is coming up. Missed opportunity. I understand why we are headed.
SM (00:13:42):
And then the other one is Watergate.
JG (00:13:48):
My political education watched it on TV.
SM (00:13:53):
And you already talked about Woodstock and Summer of Love. My last question before I get into really stuff about you, some more stuff on your career is, and I want to mention this too, because I asked you why we lost the war in Vietnam, but how important do you feel these groups were in ending the war? I am just going to read them off and I think they all played a role, but if there is one that you think stands out. College students, Vietnam veterans against the war, the failure of our military to go all out, bad military leadership, weak leadership in Vietnam, including the inability to, you get the ARVN, which is the South Vietnamese army to really do what we did. Congress ended all the funding and then the Paris Peace Courts and the ineptitude of our leaders, including Johnson and the misinformation that was given to him by McNamara and McGeorge Bundy and others. They all played a role here. Is there anyone that you feel played the biggest role?
JG (00:15:02):
Ending the war, you mean or up top winning it or?
SM (00:15:05):
Oh, in the poly groups for ending the war?
JG (00:15:15):
No, I do not think any of those did. I think the Vietnamese, north Vietnamese won. I think they defended, successfully defended their homeland. I am not sure what winning would have looked like. We won against the Native Americans, right?
SM (00:15:32):
Yes, we did.
JG (00:15:32):
Because we killed them all. Between killing and disease, they went down to 300,000. What does it mean for the whole paradigm? I do not know how we could possibly have we won Iraq. I do not think we have won. Have we won in Afghanistan? I do not think it is... We have the wrong paradigm.
SM (00:15:53):
I would agree. Yes.
JG (00:15:55):
And we are the aggressor and these guys are not going to beat us because they were willing to die for the last person does not have a-
SM (00:16:05):
Do you feel that one of the problems we have as a nation is the fact that the Boomer generation of 70 million may be going to their graves like the Civil War generation, not truly healing from the tremendous divisions of divided America during the time they were young and growing up into adulthood. I would talk about the war between Black and white, male and female, gay and straight, the environmental battles and certainly the war in Vietnam. Those who support the war, against it, those who served, those who did not. Do you think we as a nation, Jan Scruggs wrote to book the Vietnam, be it Vietnam War founder and it was called To Heal a Nation. It was geared toward healing the vets and their families and being non-political, but in a sense he hoped it helped a little bit with the healing of the nation too, from the tremendous divisions of those times. Do you feel that we as a nation and as a generation have a problem with the issue of healing?
JG (00:17:11):
No, I think we have a problem with the issue of narcissism. The opposite. Who are we to feel sorry for ourselves? Now I knew a World War II aged guy that had escaped. He and his family were taken to the concentration camp and he hid in a bus and was able to sneak out. It is weird the stories you hear, and he snuck back in because he was starving to death outside the concentration camp. He came here and opened up the laundromat, experiment with the disco laundromat and was a very nice guy. That guy has a right to ask the question to be healed from his problems. We have experienced more wealth and abundance privilege than other any ever, ever, ever and that is going away, and we have used it all up. Our responsibility is to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and before we die, to get back to our original values, which were the right ones, which is the military and industrial complex, expanding human population and pollution are means that the human race is soon going to go away because it is over, and we have pretty much blown the opportunity. Now in fairness, nobody else has done it either and in fairness, the very education that we had and the wealth that we had gave us the opportunity as 15-year-old and 25-year-old in the (19)60s to see the truth of what Eisenhower said. We knew that, but we too succumbed to this deduction of the abundance, but we have used the lie that we are sensitive, that we care about the planet. The generation, I cannot tell you the people we are talking about. We are the people that have been in the upper one 10th of 1 percent of humans in terms of our impact on the planet. Our tomatoes come in from Mexico and Israel, our lettuce comes from around the world. Our organic grains for our vegans come from peasants everywhere. Our shoes, our Nike shoes come from slave labor, oil that we fly around the world on to go see the Africans to give them arms comes from Africans that are dying in Black resources because our empire and empires around the world, America, Europe, Japan, Australia, take those resources to ourselves from those people through Shell oil and BP, fly to visit them, their environment decimated by the climate change we caused by burning the fossil fuels and we run around there thinking, "Oh, is not it nice the Black people are kissing our feet or we are building this school for them?" We are the most spoiled generation that is ever been and we have hid behind having good value system just like Christians do, do very narcissistic things. We have a chance, we still have a chance to change that. The only wounds that we have to heal are guilt over using more resources. We have used more resources than will be available for all generations at the human's future.
SM (00:20:53):
Wow. That is one of the best responses I have ever had to that question.
JG (00:20:58):
Well, I have been thinking about this for 10 years and including sitting there having worked on Fahrenheit and the boss was beaten up and having everybody cry for Clinton. I am like, "Why are you crying for Clinton? He opened up free trade to China. He signed the globalization stuff. All this stuff is happening now with the environment being decimated faster and free trade destroying peoples around the world. Clinton brought that in." You do not intend to play the weakest in New York, in Philadelphia and Traverse City and you have a nice party, pretend our wealth came from the magical place. Did not have to do with that. I will shut up, but that is just, I sat there and I am like, "Bush is evil, but you guys we are not getting the evil that is what we are doing as an empire."
SM (00:21:50):
As we are celebrating Dr. King's the opening of his memorial in Washington this week, 28th, and actually people are down there now for activities all week. He believed in the non-violent protest way and he also believed in paying a price for one's beliefs and he also agrees with you and you brought it up before about the willing to stand up and protest, be arrested and so forth for causes you feel that are unjust. Then we had this period in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s where in the anti-war movement or some of the other movements, they became much more confrontational and more violent. Not necessarily trying to kill people, but more violent, whether it be the weatherman, the weather underground. Some people question whether the Black Panthers were violent. I do not think. Some say they were not. And then even at the American Indian movement in (19)73 there was violence there. There was a lot of reasons for this, but there seemed to be a sense of frustration then because things were not happening or they were not being listened to, and for African Americans, Black Panthers was about, well, the only people that are going to protect us are ourselves. What was your thought of that whole change in philosophy from non-violent protests to more violent aspects?
JG (00:23:16):
I think we have a systemic problem as the country is that we are too big and geographically too big, and so in Egypt or in Libya, somewhat reasonable to put yourself on the line. In Egypt certainly it is not a done deal, but they could go home at night or run back home or run to their friends. It is hard to have a revolution, a non-viral revolution when we all come from places that we take six months to walk to, because in a day or a week to drive to.
SM (00:23:57):
Well it is-
JG (00:23:59):
It has been a real problem and what I am getting to is that I think the violence was a mistake, but I think we have a hard time being humans. I think that is what King had was vehement, relentless vehement. I think that is what we lack and that is where it is human nature. I know in some ways I am not blaming us, but we are narcissism. V for vendetta: A Revolution Without Dancing Isn't Worth Having. Well, revolution without... I think we were not clear that we all needed to do what Gandhi had done and sit there and until it changed non-violently.
SM (00:24:49):
One of the things too is that in 1970, I can remember seeing posters or signs from all the other movement groups, the Women's Movement, the certainly Civil Rights Movement and Chicano Movement, Native Americans. They were all there. Nowadays, it seems like all the movements are isolated. Am I wrong in this? They do not work together. They are all isolated in their own, they are more interested in their own issues and not combining issues.
JG (00:25:19):
I have thought about that, but I think you are right, but there was something weird and confusing about that. You are right. There was a protest anti-nuclear there would be everything there. I think it is a little, it was probably exposing an error in our thinking. I will not say it was a mistake because who is deciding? But in an error in our constitution that if you believe what Paul Ehrlich said in Population Bomb or what we were saying about nuclear and stuff. We are talking about the extinction of life on earth and perhaps the demise of the human race. To come and carry signs, however well-intentioned and important cause about social issues, those are relatively unimportant comparison to destroying the whole planet or our complicity in wars that are killing out the people. They are important. You see what I am saying?
SM (00:26:29):
Mm-hmm.
JG (00:26:29):
But my personal, that is why I was so happy in Fahrenheit. We did not really go over aboard with the Patriot Act. It is chilling and crucial evil, but in the end, it is all about us and the special media issue. I want to be free. The larger evil is that we are attacking these nations to try and dominate resources.
SM (00:26:55):
It is interesting that when I talked to a feminist leader and she said, "Steve, we are working together, except you do not see it. It is on legislation that is being proposed in Congress. Various organizations are working together, they are just not protesting in public together." Well, I do not know if that is true or not, but that was a comment. And also Gaylord Nelson, who I did know, founder of Earth Day, who I interviewed before he passed away for this book project and I worked with him on 10 leadership programs down in Washington, so he was a good man. Even he, when you read his statements on Earth Day, one of the things that he was proposing and talking about he does not seem like anybody is talking about anymore, and that is the population boom. That he talked about the fact that if we overpopulate the planet, we are not going to have enough food to feed everyone. Then of course then all the environmental issues come up. I often think of Gaylord because I think even when Earth Day 40 was happening in Wisconsin, there were people there saying they were co-founders of Earth Day. Well, Gaylord Nelson, that was his idea. He was the man that made that happen and he was also-
JG (00:28:10):
He was Republican.
SM (00:28:10):
Huh?
JG (00:28:13):
Was not he a Republican?
SM (00:28:14):
Oh no, he was a Democrat. He was a Lyndon LaRouche democrat, two term governor of Wisconsin and two term senator from Wisconsin, and of course he worked for the Wilderness Society until he died, but did not seem like people were even listening to his thoughts on population. I do not know if you sense that, but I do. All the other issues are being brought up about the environment, but they are not talking enough about overpopulation and that is an issue.
JG (00:28:44):
It is the story of our issues that I was just thinking about how open my thumb and the whole complex issue of humanity in the planet. Humans have two stories. Do we have a story that is scientific and technical and that gets us bows and arrows and gets us started, gets us tabs and cell phones. We also have a story that is cultural and social and comforts us against whether it is the leopard that might eat us or the infinity of outer space that is so huge and we are so small. That is religion or myth or culture. Both those stories go together and that is why right now we are in confusing time because people are not understanding everything is perfectly explained that is going on in the world by the predictions of the (19)60s. I just want to affirm we were very, very ripe, but we got away from it. We let the addiction that is this culture get to us and we cannot blame the corporation because I cannot sit here with the iPad and jet pick up my pocket and then cry about the corporations. It is like who is going to give me that stuff? The Amish? I do not think so. But the story were as a species is the story that we started to get and then we moved away from that and those Paul Lake, Gaylord Nelson, those people were in tune with that story.
SM (00:30:25):
Christopher Lash wrote that book, the Culture of Narcissism in (19)79.
JG (00:30:29):
I remember.
SM (00:30:31):
And that was a big seller, and of course he was basically saying that a lot of the Boomers had gone into becoming yuppies or what he making a lot of money and that kind of stuff in their late twenties and early thirties, but then he was also talking about the next generation too, which I believe is the Generation Xers, which were the sons and daughters of Boomers. In fact, today's colleges, 15 percent of the college students centering this year are from parents who are Boomers and 85 percent are the children of Generation X. Where did that... And I am going to get in your background, but where do these two succeeding generations fall in this guilt? In terms of Generation X, which was a generation that I feel had deep problems with the Boomer generation and they were being reared at the time that Reagan was president and many of them took his way of thinking that we did programs out of the university and the programs we did, two main themes came out of it. Number one Generation X was tired of the nostalgia, the thinking that many of the Boomers had about the going back to those times, they were thinking about their music and rock and roll and the protest and all the times. Those are great times and some of the students were tired of hearing about it from Boomers. Then there were those who envied Boomers because they had no causes like the Boomers had except they did have the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the (19)80s, which was a big one on college campuses, but there was really nothing after the (19)70s, late (19)70s and the (19)80s and the (19)90s, nothing. So gen-
JG (00:32:19):
I told her that.
SM (00:32:21):
Generation X has some responsibility here too and I think part of them, they wanted to make a lot of money early and I do not know if they ever had the concept of helping humanity. Then you got today's millennial students, which I think are fairly comparable in some respects to the Boomers in terms of they want to leave a legacy but they want to leave it later on in life and not, they want to get married, have families in their twenties and thirties, but they do care about the world and they want to leave a legacy, so they do have some of those same traits. I am studied to hire Ed a long time, and so I do not know if your thoughts on where these two succeeding generations fall and the guilt and the problems we face today.
JG (00:33:08):
Sure. Well, and in fairness, reason for invoking guilt is that we do believe we have free will. The earth of the material upon us of the human race is what undoes our efforts to be good is that it is so powerful and productive, that is why it works so well. In fairness to us, we just failed to perceive how deep we were into this game and it was like everybody else, but we had the greatest opportunity because we... I was working with young people right after college in social services, doing social work, doing alcohol and drug treatment, doing therapy, doing retreats, all those things. Then I started working at the university of Maryland. Employment was not like the early (19)80s and no, the mid (19)80s. I noticed something changed profoundly that in the (19)70s for eager for these personal growth activities and they eagerly did them and they revealed very important things. It was just a mind-blowing time with people opening up. Fast-forward to the (19)80s and that feeling gotten worse and worse. I remember going into a social work file. I had been doing teaching group process and social work classes for a long time, but just practicing social work students. I did the same activity that I have been doing for 15 years to share something. What was it like when somebody came home from work and five or six o'clock? If you cannot remember, it was a very piggyback exercise, but you were practicing listening too, so you did not care if somebody was listening. One of them was, what was it like at bath time? Did you have a rubber duck, [inaudible] stove? Did you have the bathtub, whatever? Well, so that was one of these different sharing things. When it came time of the bathtub thing, I remember this woman freaked out the social work file, got up and ran from the room and the discussion went around. It is like, "How dare he asked people to share something like that in a class." Wow. I was in some sort of trouble. Then I had a client who we were doing some visualization, relaxation stuff and he came home from his foster family and they were like, "Oh, you were doing devil worshiping." And I am like, "What the hell is going on out there?" But I do not see this and I do not know if you felt this way, but what we failed to recognize when I came to understand that this somewhat anything goes thing, structured thing that we all had flattened was a mistake. It was a mistake. Definitely it is a clear mistake, and what we failed to perceive is what my speech teacher told me, I was a freshman in college. I came in the speech class and I was like, "Oh, I am going to do all this, blah, blah, blah, blah." And he is like, "Okay, here is what we are going to do. I am going to teach you the right way to do a speech and then you can do it your way, but first thing I am going to teach you the right way. Oh, okay, I am going to teach you the structure first, classical speech, and then you decide how to bury it." We had an incredible education. Everybody I knew, most of the students were taking math, physics, everybody was reading. We had this fantastic structured education and then we arrived at the (19)60s and we are all creative. Now, why did we think that unstructured education and chaos, and we were raised by generation that made us feel good about ourselves by being organized and behaving, and then we rebelled when we were teenagers or in college. We misperceived where we came from. We thought it was because we were special and that had burst the balance of repression. No, we were so creative because we had a damn conservative upbringing and we learned the basic of geography, science, math, English, social studies. That makes any sense. I am rambling, so then we were shocked when this generation that we gave a somewhat much more unstructured upbringing to working pharmacist are not creative.
SM (00:38:17):
It is interesting.
JG (00:38:21):
All she had to do with the was understand what we were doing wrong was to go back and look. See, we did not want to admit that because we were like the guy that did not want to continue the interview, that did not want to admit there was something good about the business.
SM (00:38:32):
Well, a lot of students did not want to be carbon copies of the multi diversity that Clark Kert talked about in his book and right after the, just before the Free Speech Movement, he talked about that the university was a multi diversity that students come to a university, prepare for a career and this is the way you get to your career and this is the way it is. The students did not want to be carbon copies of what their parents were in the (19)50s. The IBM mentality, which is the husband leaving the front door, kissing his wife, putting his hat on with his suit, walk into the car and having two children by her side and going off to work. They did not want it, so they were really rebelling against the status quo.
JG (00:39:24):
We were well-prepared to decide that having had all the basics covered through a nice conservative education. We all knew math. We all knew how to divide and multiply. We all knew the planets and geography, and so does that make any sense or should we-
SM (00:39:52):
Yeah, and see right now-
JG (00:39:53):
We had prepared us to make more choices, but to then go to a kindergartner, what would you like to do today? What would you like to learn? That is ridiculous. It is not going to... They do not know that they need to do every day for about eight years. Learn a little math and that is the only way you can have advanced math skills is every day do a little bit of work. I was part of that too. I thought, "Yeah, if we only trust the kids, they will puzzle it out." Well no, that was wrong.
SM (00:40:25):
I want to get into your background now. From that point that you were, you have talked about those early years in high school and what you did after high school, then you were in college working for a while. How did you go from college work and student affairs to the rest of your career?
JG (00:40:47):
Yeah, so working on the, well you want me to just... I will just give you the summary of how I got to that. How I actually started the film career was I was working, I had three kids and got divorced and had this blog house in the woods and I was on the Hippy Dream Organic Gardens. We were home birthed. The whole had winded off, fell apart. Do know I had taught college. 21 I wound up having to just work jobs to both support the kids when they were with me and then send her money and to support them when they were with her. It is a nightmare, so I wound up doing just menial social work jobs in a way, because everybody else was getting degrees. Well, I was just working without a degree, so I was really behind the eight-ball. I was working, supervising foster homes and more doing direct [inaudible] like I had done in the (19)70s and for an agency that was getting more and more paperwork. I was always been a writer my whole life. I was trying to break back into writing on the side and written out a book and some articles and publishing some newspaper and stuff, but knew Michael was getting ready to work on Bowling for Columbine. We talked about it a little bit, but I asked if I could tag along with them. When they were filming in Flint, not realizing you could not tag along with the film crew. Again, I had never been around anything as far as movie credentials. I am sitting in Traverse City, and this some message just started and Michael comes on the computer, he is like, "What are you doing?" I am like, "Oh, I have a doctor's appointment. I took the day off." He is like, "Oh, well we are going up to St. Helen where Charlton Heston was born St. Helen, Michigan, about an hour north of Flint, hour and a half. You want to meet us there?" Like, "Sure." "Actually, you see if you can get there ahead of us and see if you can find out where the house he grew up in is." I am like, okay. "Oh, see if you can find out where the bug pole is." All right. "The school where he went to, see if you can find out where that is." Yeah. All right. "Oh, here is a list of some people. If you happen to find out where these people that knew him are, that is great." And it is like one this list of 12 things, "But if you cannot meet us there, that is fine." It is the opening day of hunting season, it is slush on the road. I am like, "Okay, all right. I cannot see what he does and join up with them." So I go from Traverse City through the slush, went into some store, "Does anybody know anything about Charlton Heston?" I did not know how to do this, so somebody said, "Oh, go to the library. There is a Charlton Heston thing there." So I went to the library and the librarian, it turns out later, did ask for money for their most famous citizen to help build the library and he had never given it, but he still has a display so I said, "Michael Moore sent me to Tommy wants all this stuff and I do not know what to do and can you tell me where the stuff is?' So she is like, "Sure." She went and got a township map, put a little mark on the map where all these things were. Right around that time they pull up in this big white van and I run out there and I hand in this map with all this stuff on it. Now if you know anything about producing, if you have a list of things like that, you might spend a lot of time researching that more than 10 minutes. They are like, "Oh, okay." Then Michael said, and again he had not really asked me to help, he just said can you meet us there? Then he says, "Oh that is great. Well, why do not you go up to Oscoda because we are going to be there later and see if you find anybody who knew Eric Carroll. One of the Columbine shoots who lived there for five years." I drove up to Oscoda, it was a couple hours away and nobody would talk. "No, no, we do not want to talk." I went into a gas station there was a guy that booked pretty young, so I said, "Did you know Eric Carroll?" Said, "Well, I did not know him."
SM (00:45:45):
Is he the baseball player?
JG (00:45:47):
Eric Car-
SM (00:45:49):
Eric Carroll.
JG (00:45:49):
Fine shooter.
SM (00:45:50):
Okay.
JG (00:45:52):
One of the kids did the Columbine Massacre was from Oscoda.
SM (00:45:54):
Oh, okay.
JG (00:45:57):
So this kid said, "Well no, I pulled a gun on somebody at school and got kicked out though." So I told Michael, I said, "Well, nobody will talk, but this one kid pulled a gun on somebody and do you want to interview him?" So they are like, "All right, we will come over there later." About 11 o'clock at night, they made it over there, got dinner, the kids get off work, he was working at a gas station. His relief comes on. I asked him, I said, "Did you happen to know Eric Carroll?" He said, "Well, yeah I went to school with him." I said, "Oh, well Michael Moore is coming over here." And so they set up the bowling alley next door, the two boys went over and one is, one is with the bandana you see in the film that sells guns up north and sells in Detroit. The other one was Bomb Boy who sets off bombs in his backyard, and so by the time of those interviews, it was about three in the morning and Michael, so he was riding with me now in my car, we were going to Flint and he is like, "Well, maybe you should stick around with us." I actually drew up my resignation, faxed it in to the social work job, I quit and the next day was leading the film crew around Flint to get there a lot of shots, see with the in Becher. You there in Flint?
SM (00:47:17):
Mm-hmm.
JG (00:47:19):
We filmed the next day. Me never having lead a film crew before, did not know what a DP was, did not know anything, but my heart was into it and I knew what to find differently.
SM (00:47:40):
You then... Yep.
JG (00:47:41):
Well, the bank thing I was involved with, setting that up, the Barber shop gives you bullets. The dog shoot hunter. I am sitting there watching the movie and I am going, "Michigan militia, James Nichols." I am like, "This is interesting. The first fifteens I either found or had something to do with." My first effort ever that is not too bad.
SM (00:48:04):
No.
JG (00:48:06):
Just before the movie was wrapped up, they lost their deal with their composer fell through and Michael knew that I played keyboard. They were like, "Can you come to New York and work on the music a little bit, see what you can come up with? And oh, by the way, we have only got about five days and we have to deliver for cans." All right, so I packed my keyboard in a box. Got my one little keyboard, flew to New York, and I was able to come up with about 15 of the music that they used. Never have not been to New York.
SM (00:48:47):
Wow.
JG (00:48:47):
So-
SM (00:48:57):
Still there? Still there? Hello?
JG (00:49:06):
Hello. I was scoring, doing most of the other score music for the film on five days and checking the sound mix. Tell me if it is too much detail, but I am sitting in the sound mix and everybody else left and I am the composer. I am sitting there, ask the guy, "Well, when was the last time you worked out?" He is like, "Oh, well Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." I am like, "Okay." I say, "Well, can you put a little bit more of this in the surround? And I cannot hear that." It is just this weird thing where I fell into it and everything seemed to work and I wound up being strangely comfortable with every part of it. I was in a technical screening I remember for Fahrenheit and there were 30 people there and they had done something in one line of resolution, was listening to the film and I was the only one that caught it. I do not know why I was so instantly tuned into this stuff except the writing background, the social work background, but like many of us, I do not know if you were, but when I was a kid, we went... Movies is what we did instead of sitting at home.
SM (00:50:26):
Every Saturday morning. Saturday morning was the cartoons normally where I grew up and then the afternoon was all the Cowboys and Indians and Army movies.
JG (00:50:37):
But even when I was into science fiction and I would wait, my dad was gone when I was little and was in the Big Brother program, and I remember how old was I must have been? Nine. My big brother from the Big Brother program said, "Well, what movie do you want to go to?" And I was like, "Doctors Club."
SM (00:51:02):
Yeah, it is interesting. There were a lot of dinosaur movies back then.
JG (00:51:08):
I liked real science fiction, I liked Kubrick first. I did not even realize who he was at that point and then 2001, I waited for that movie was like the second coming and I just-
SM (00:51:22):
Wow. Yeah.
JG (00:51:25):
I was in college. Michael and I took film appreciation courses. We never took film courses, but we would draw scripts in high school from Ann Arbor. We would dive in to Steve Moore movies and foreign films and that is what we did. Movies and music, and you know.
SM (00:51:44):
You have been doing it, how long now? Total of how many years?
JG (00:51:47):
Probably 10 years.
SM (00:51:49):
And you have been involved how many movies?
JG (00:51:55):
Bowling for Columbine was the first and then that turned out okay, so they asked me back to work on Fahrenheit and I was co-producer, the film's composer. In between we worked on Michael's Book, Stupid White Men in Due Place, my Country. Then I did the filming that was Foundation Fortune Workshop and saint. Me and Megan, my hero touring with The Dixie Chicks for a couple weeks. Shot the concert footage for that film in the protest footage, and then I worked on one on Paul Watson and Steve Shepard composer, producer, and then Capitalism.
SM (00:52:39):
Yeah, that was-
JG (00:52:40):
But not so many films, because I am in a weird zone where if somebody was asking me to put my name on a film, a friend of mine in New York could trying to get some money for, I am like, "It sounds good but I cannot really put my name on a film that is not in the zone of these other."
SM (00:53:01):
Yeah, definitely. You are working on, and now you are working on your own film and what is the name of this film?
JG (00:53:12):
Planet of the Human.
SM (00:53:13):
Wow. When do you hope to be done?
JG (00:53:18):
As soon as possible. This year, by the end of the year.
SM (00:53:26):
It is good.
JG (00:53:26):
About to do the last round of filming, but it is all connected. Well, some days somebody will have to do, my client has not done it yet. Maybe he will do it, but the inside, sorry, how films were made, but quite a great the teams of people to work with together and great journey. We had the sound mixers from Skywalker Ranch.
SM (00:53:58):
Wow.
JG (00:53:59):
Take a break from, in fact, when we were mixing Fahrenheit, we had to pack up all the drives. Sound mix was a huge deal and the end of the film is the most complex part of all. We had to pack up the drives and pack up everybody and fly off to San Francisco and then get in cars and drive up into the Skywalker Ranch because they had to start to mix to Polar Express and we were bumping into that schedule, so they had to do Polar Express by day and Fahrenheit by night for a couple of days.
SM (00:54:39):
Wow. Well, when you look at your life's journey, then from growing up in Michigan and a very poor family, but a very rich family because in terms of pride in your background and so forth, the experiences you have gone through throughout your life, leading up to being a movie producer, director, you name it. A lot of messages in your movies and a lot of messages that probably people do not want to hear but need to hear.
JG (00:55:16):
Is the place where you grew up still intact?
SM (00:55:19):
Pardon?
JG (00:55:20):
Is the place where you grew up still intact?
SM (00:55:23):
Oh yeah. Cortland, New York. I grew up in Cortland. I do not know if you have ever heard of it.
JG (00:55:30):
Oh.
SM (00:55:30):
Yeah, I grew up in Cortland. I lived there until 1959 and then my dad transferred and then we moved down toward Binghamton, New York. We lived in a small community called Lyle, which I went to Whitney Point High School and it was a small school. I was looking forward to going to Cortland High, which was a big school, but my dad transferred. He was Prudential Insurance. I went, that is my background. Cortland is an interesting story too, because in the 1950s, Cortland was a very successful community and they had a college there because State and Rever Cortland, which was a teacher's college, but a lot of businesses, the downtown was very successful. Brockway Trucks was from there, and then around late around 1960 Brockway left and a lot of businesses left and it really went downhill. It is recuperated quite a bit to this day, but that begets because the college is so big. College is about 14, 15,000 students. That is where the Jets practice now in the summer. They did not this year and brings about four to 7 million dollars in income. Just time there, but it is not the same. Nothing's just been the same since it was in the 1950s.
JG (00:57:02):
I think it is different about Michael grew up on the edge of all this, he imagined it, but I think for me, Bowling for Columbine, that is where that exact place that you see is where I grew up and I cried the first 30 times. We watched all the way through. Every time we would reach out somebody we had watched it through and I could not stop crying at the end.
SM (00:57:27):
How have you been-
JG (00:57:31):
I think the foundation that is different is when you come from a place is risen and fallen and it is basically been destroyed. You understand that it is not a given that the world that we live in, can you? And I think people do not, because we move away from the places that are falling apart and we do not really feel in our guts. We know in our heads population thing and all this stuff that I think the interest between Michael and I, most people is when you come from Flint, Detroit, some part of you knows, you know this deep in your bones all things can change and go away.
SM (00:58:20):
Yeah. Well it is interesting because even though when I moved from starting seventh grade in this new community, I never considered it my community. My best years were my elementary school years and my college years. I never could adjust really to the changes that took place because Cortland was a much bigger place than being in Whitney Point in that area. We had a nice home and everything, had a good job, but we had some tough times too throughout the time. It was part of America, you have your ups and downs and how you deal with roadblocks and life and everything. I have always seen, when my parents were alive, I would always drive with them back to 10 Hamlin Street, which is where I grew up, the home my parents bought in 1946 after my dad came home from the war and they renovated it and then all of a sudden, we moved. On that street, Hamlin Street is still the same as it was back in the 1950s. It is families raising kids and most of the community has gone downhill, but that street has stayed almost and the houses, actually, the people live in the house now were the children of the people that bought the house from my parents. When I drove up a couple years ago, I was in front of the house, I never stopped, but they were painting it and I thought they might have moved. I said, "Is this house for sale?" And they said, the lady came out and said, "Who are you?" Said, "I am Steven McKiernan and I grew up here." And he says, "Ah, you are one of the three kids that grew up in this house." "Well, do you know me?" And I said, "Yeah, my parents bought the house from your parents." And I noticed downstairs in the cellar, somebody had written it, we had a bathroom downstairs. Somebody had written in the cellar, Steven McKiernan, Christine McKiernan and James McKiernan, and that was me. I wrote it when I was going to the bathroom one time. She said, "We never painted over it because it always reminded us of the children that were in this house before we came here." And she said, "And I got to tell you something else." She took me upstairs and they were renovating the upstairs area because her father was ill and needed a place, but he said, "I and my sister grew up in this room and we knew this was you and Jim's room." I could not believe it. Here she was revealing this. 30 some years later, it is just so I am very pleased with that they have taken care of the house, but I have always gone back to Cortland when I visit my sister in Binghamton because it brings back great memories of my childhood. I loved it in Cortland, so anyway.
JG (01:00:55):
Whatever, much has to be evil to adjust to these social things, but not the baby with the best mother, but that continuous upbringing where you stand a chance to have a teacher that your parents had and that I could walk to school and require people around the corner store where we got our bread and candy and meat. They live two doors down and their daughter babysit us, and that connected community-
SM (01:01:29):
Is no more.
JG (01:01:31):
Is the foundation of and stable education with great stable teachers. That is what allowed us to be so amazing as young people, and we misunderstood and thought that it was us tossing off the oppression that made us so creative. No, it was the gift that we were given.
SM (01:01:52):
That is very good.
JG (01:01:56):
And Steven that gift still means that we have a responsibility to understand the story we are in. Maybe the thing I will close with if you want is to-
SM (01:02:06):
No, you want to keep... You can go ahead.
JG (01:02:10):
I will just say one thing. Woodstock, the part of Woodstock, and I am using this as a metaphor as much as the actual attempt.
SM (01:02:26):
You got your answer on healing should be, it is going to be a very important part of your interview. That was a great response.
JG (01:02:35):
Well, one of the things I have learned is you feel good about yourself through doing good things and good work, and not because I am a specialty. We have gotten too far with the... Are you still-
SM (01:02:58):
Yeah, I am taping. I am back.
JG (01:03:01):
The thing that I wanted to be clear about is that, and this is what my movie will be about as soon I can get it done, is that we almost had it right, but we were confused because we wanted to live simply, we want to toss out the military industrial complex and we want to grow our own food and have home birth and travel again many of us. That was the correct vision for how humans should be living. What we failed to understand is that we are in a mess. It has got to take many generations to get back to the point where humans can live simply like that. Our mission though is to hold that in mind, not for ourselves, for seven to 10 generations from now. When we have got our population under control, people can be living in harmony with nature again. We have that vision, and that is my hope we can return to that before we die. That clarity, humans have to get back and down to the planet, and it was not for us, or it is not even for these children now, someday if there are survivors who would be living like people at Woodstock, except very simply and maybe with a little technology. I think there is a lot of hope in what was talked then. It is just we did not understand that our whole doing of that was contained in those years too. The partying and the narcissism.
SM (01:04:38):
You write your movie, I cannot wait for it. If it comes to Philly, I hope you come there for the premiere, because at the Ritz Theater, they do a lot of premieres there and they have actually producers that come and talk. They had one last week for a movie that I went to, and I hope that the Boomer generation is reaching 65 and maybe they need to reflect more. If you are talking 13,500 a day turning 65 for the next, God, 19 years, or excuse me, 15 years, that is a lot of people. If they can be talking and asking these same questions, conservatives, liberals, independence, no matter where they stand politically, they still got one fourth of their life still ahead of them. Many are going to have to continue to work because unfortunately we are living in a tough economy, but that does not mean they cannot work on some of these issues. And certainly those that, I hope they change retirement because retirement really is not retirement anymore. I hope it is not just about rich people moving to Florida and Arizona and taking six trips a year around the world. I know I cannot do that and most of the people I know cannot do that, but that is the dream that you see on TV, but in reality, this same generation that we were talking about that had such promise in your words, still is alive, still has a chance to do something to help correct what you are talking about.
JG (01:06:15):
What happened, understanding that my, if I could afford a dream house somewhere and to cruise around the world in my senior years. You know what? When we were 18, did not we know that that meant that somebody else was not having the resources to even be comfortable? We have got to get back into balance and take control again, and I think we could do that.
SM (01:06:42):
Any final thoughts you have on anything like the final thought on the legacy of this generation called Boomer? Do not forget too, that one thing I have found through this project is the Boomers are between 1946 and (19)64, but those Boomers in the first 10 years are much closer to a lot of the older members of what I call the silent generation. Those born between (19)40 and (19)45. Many of them were mentors and role models and leaders of the Anti-War Movement and all kinds of movements. And Richie Havens told me, he said, "When you talk about the spirit of the (19)60s, I may not be a Boomer within the terms of that sociologists and higher ed people label them, but I am a Boomer in spirit." So I have learned, and even Todd Gitlin told me that he cannot stand generational terms, he cannot stand the word Boomer generation, the greatest generation, Generation X, millennials. He cannot stand all that because he said we need to be more reflective of the times we live in and the events that shaped our lives and we do not have to be put into a nutshell, and so in some respects-
JG (01:07:58):
Yeah, I do not-
SM (01:07:59):
In some respects the people that were born safe from (19)38 to (19)45, or even closer to those Boomers of who were born between (19)46 and say (19)56 than those within the generation who were born in the first 10 years in the second 10 years.
JG (01:08:24):
If we were to talk for a while, my perspective is so different than so many people. The reason we kept this versions of the (19)50s is that we were the first generation that had the material wealth. Some are our dudes instead of our elders. It is not because the (19)50s were so horrible that we rebelled it. It is because we lived in such luxury that we had the privilege to rebel it.
SM (01:08:40):
We had the time to do it too.
JG (01:08:42):
The time to do it. You could live on very, very little in (19)66 to (19)97.
SM (01:08:47):
Right. Well, I do not have any anymore questions unless you want to add one? Any final thoughts?
JG (01:08:56):
Yeah, no, I think you are right. You understand how much the gift the (19)60s was from those that mentor did and thought things like what you got for you.
SM (01:09:13):
Oh yes.
JG (01:09:13):
Take care and we will-
SM (01:09:14):
Yeah. What I will need from you, Jeff, I am going to need two pictures-
(End of Interview)
Interview with: Jeff Gibbs
Interviewed by: Stephen McKiernan
Transcriber: REV
Date of interview: October 2011
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Start of Interview)
SM (00:00:00):
Testing 123. There you go.
JG (00:00:05):
You are in near Philly?
SM (00:00:05):
Pardon?
JG (00:00:12):
Where are you right now? Near Philly?
SM (00:00:14):
Yeah, Westchester, Pennsylvania.
JG (00:00:17):
Yeah.
SM (00:00:17):
Is where I live. Just a couple more questions and I will get right to the point of how you became a documentary person.
JG (00:00:30):
Okay.
SM (00:00:30):
One question I wanted to ask is, and actually this is just, these are major events from the period of the (19)60s, (19)70s and maybe the (19)80s too. This is just quick responses to when you hear these terms what is your first reaction. When you think of these events during the past 65 years what did they mean to you and possibly to your generation? And it does not have to be long, it is just real fast. The first one is the atomic bomb.
JG (00:01:04):
Just by radiation.
SM (00:01:08):
The Cold War.
JG (00:01:11):
Headache.
SM (00:01:13):
The election of Kennedy, 1960.
JG (00:01:22):
I... Oh.
SM (00:01:29):
Okay.
JG (00:01:31):
Confusion. My mother was a Republican, but I convinced she was Kennedy was a nice guy. I was little.
SM (00:01:42):
How about the assassination of JFK?
JG (00:01:48):
Heart-wrenching. What you mean? Just one word?
SM (00:01:51):
Give you heart-wrenching or just what do you think it meant to you plus the nation?
JG (00:02:01):
Loss of innocence, I think. It was like watching a funeral on television, but it was also a collective sense of we were out together too.
SM (00:02:12):
The Cuban Missile Crisis, I think you have already talked about that a little bit.
JG (00:02:21):
Yeah, just, sorry it was like the moment when you realized it could all actually end.
SM (00:02:29):
The rise of Barry Goldwater, which actually is the beginning of the conservative movement, really.
JG (00:02:47):
Barry Goldwater. That would be a nightmare.
SM (00:02:54):
Gulf of Tonkin, 1964.
JG (00:03:03):
See some of these things I only remember in retrospect because I was not that old, but there was a movie made about it. I remember watching that and think it was just very painful to think to such a small event supposedly led to all that.
SM (00:03:27):
Right. Led to 58,200 plus American dead. God knows, close to 2 million wounded, and the 3 million Vietnamese killed. The Vietnam War itself.
JG (00:03:53):
Apocalypse. Now, can I answer just in a sentence, what you had said earlier that I did not answer?
SM (00:04:03):
Yes.
JG (00:04:04):
Without interrupting you, is that the reason I do not really have an answer is could we have won or lost. We attack small nations as a great empire. We attacked them. It is not a war, called evil, and so how do we win? Do not win that. You win when somebody attacks you, so there is never a chance we could win because we were just decimating people that did not deserve it.
SM (00:04:37):
The year 1968, everything that took place that year.
JG (00:04:44):
Duck and too young to... And that is not an excuse, that is just I remember sitting there (19)68, (19)69 thinking stuff is happening that I cannot go. Too young.
SM (00:05:03):
1970 Kent State and Jackson State.
JG (00:05:06):
Maybe jealous is the word. Some ways were a couple years older. They got the food for $5. I got the food for 50. Go ahead. What were you saying?
SM (00:05:17):
Kent State and Jackson State, 1970, May 4th.
JG (00:05:33):
Soldiers are gunning us down.
SM (00:05:38):
And then I just had a general one here called The Beatles coming to the United States in 1964.
JG (00:05:52):
Realizing I did not understand girls. Girl about them and I was like, "Okay, well they are all right."
SM (00:05:59):
Well, they were screaming for The Beatles.
JG (00:06:03):
Well, at that time, the music was not as what it is.
SM (00:06:09):
Right. Now, you were only one year old or three years old when I had this next one, but Sputnik in 1957, along with Elvis Presley in (19)57. Now obviously you would know what they were all about.
JG (00:06:19):
No, I remember that. See, I was an assigned [inaudible] from the day I was marked, I remember Sputnik. I remember all that getting going. I think it was, I usually all the stereotypical words, but it is true for a reason. It is just wonder.
SM (00:06:44):
I think personally, it played a role in the rise of higher education, and that was already rising from the GI Bill.
JG (00:06:55):
It was in a science fiction, but here is the dilemma. It is that the very, I have been thinking about this a lot. When you were a Roman citizen in Rome before the fall, you would be saying we have democracy at first, we have roads. We have sanitation, we have dust, we have fresh water. We have heated rooms. Charcoal was brought in from a deforested area to heat the rooms, heat the bath. We have culture, statues, theater, spectacle. Rome is a very good thing. How could anybody want Rome to fall? And so in Rome you were not aware of all the things that an empire amassed, and so for me is that we want to think of the empire being the corporation or push or breaking, but it is all of us. It is all of us together. Liberal offense. We make the system. It was actually help us out to compete with Soviets, right?
SM (00:08:12):
Yes.
JG (00:08:13):
They have an environmental movement so they fucked it up. They did not have the discourse that we have had, so they were less effective. Anyways, I do not know how that, but-
SM (00:08:27):
Earth Day 1970. Now obviously it has been celebrated every year since, but if you compare Earth Day 1970 and Earth Day 2010, we are talking 30, well 70. We are almost talking 41, 40 years. What is the difference?
JG (00:08:49):
Take care of them. I was at Earth Day 2010, and I would say Thursday 1970s was soulful. At least 2000.
SM (00:09:10):
What about in 2010, it is less soulful? Still there?
JG (00:09:20):
Yep.
SM (00:09:21):
Okay.
JG (00:09:21):
That was a scam.
SM (00:09:28):
Okay, the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980?
JG (00:09:32):
You had is, what is his name? The Avatar director was in... James Cameron is a baby Boomer, right?
SM (00:09:43):
Yes.
JG (00:09:44):
He made the movie Avatar we are supposed to care about the trees and the blue native people?
SM (00:09:48):
Mm-hmm.
JG (00:09:49):
So yes, Earth Day 2010 was dominated by NASA and they were passing out tree seedlings. Passing out tree seedlings is what the company that chopped down all the forests of the world do to make it okay the damage that they did in destroying the planet. James Cameron sponsored the exhibit where they were passing out little tiny baby tree stumps. I cannot think of anything more symbolic of the sellout of the environmental movement than instead of somebody trying to save the forest, here they are passing out the seedlings to the sugar companies want you to pretend to plant, replace forest.
SM (00:10:30):
To replenish and of course, we all know how important the trees are for breathing every day air.
JG (00:10:38):
Maybe you are aware of this, when you cut down a forest, the forest you cut down never returns and planting seedlings, whatever comes up has nothing to do with the forest that was there before. It is like raising the prairie and finding corn and saying, "Hey look, something's growing." Well, it is not what was there before. Let us see, sorry.
SM (00:11:03):
The election of Ronald Reagan.
JG (00:11:11):
All right, you may hit the election of Ronald Reagan?
SM (00:11:15):
Mm-hmm.
JG (00:11:18):
We got the daddy we wanted.
SM (00:11:19):
You got the what?
JG (00:11:24):
The Reagan was the first new age president.
SM (00:11:31):
That is not really good.
JG (00:11:34):
No, that is terrible. You think about the confluence of these things is right in Reagan because, and instead of Carter's message of use last put on a sweater and turned down the heat, sorry to change his minds. If they, all right, never mind. We were going to send our army's resourceful. Reagan gave us the first new age lingo, "We are a shin city on a hill. It is morning in America." He was a new age president.
SM (00:12:10):
He kept saying, "We are back. We are back."
JG (00:12:14):
We are back and secretly we love hearing that. Now we did not like what he did in terms of El Salvador and politically and keep the empire going, but see that is how it always works, is that Cartalita does not like what Tony Soprano does. She is not going to give up the house and the nice things. Carmella, and that is who we are, we are Carmella.
SM (00:12:44):
He supposedly was one of the main reasons that the wall went down. Actually some people think it should have been Gorbachev. The last two of the Gulf War and 9/11, and I think actually in Watergate. Watergate was crucial too.
JG (00:13:09):
The Gulf War. That is when I was ashamed of myself because I too enjoyed watching King after that war and I realized how insidious the joy of empire was. I was enthralled by the senior recovery and it should have been the same.
SM (00:13:30):
And how about 9/11? 10th anniversary coming up.
JG (00:13:34):
Yeah, it is coming up. Missed opportunity. I understand why we are headed.
SM (00:13:42):
And then the other one is Watergate.
JG (00:13:48):
My political education watched it on TV.
SM (00:13:53):
And you already talked about Woodstock and Summer of Love. My last question before I get into really stuff about you, some more stuff on your career is, and I want to mention this too, because I asked you why we lost the war in Vietnam, but how important do you feel these groups were in ending the war? I am just going to read them off and I think they all played a role, but if there is one that you think stands out. College students, Vietnam veterans against the war, the failure of our military to go all out, bad military leadership, weak leadership in Vietnam, including the inability to, you get the ARVN, which is the South Vietnamese army to really do what we did. Congress ended all the funding and then the Paris Peace Courts and the ineptitude of our leaders, including Johnson and the misinformation that was given to him by McNamara and McGeorge Bundy and others. They all played a role here. Is there anyone that you feel played the biggest role?
JG (00:15:02):
Ending the war, you mean or up top winning it or?
SM (00:15:05):
Oh, in the poly groups for ending the war?
JG (00:15:15):
No, I do not think any of those did. I think the Vietnamese, north Vietnamese won. I think they defended, successfully defended their homeland. I am not sure what winning would have looked like. We won against the Native Americans, right?
SM (00:15:32):
Yes, we did.
JG (00:15:32):
Because we killed them all. Between killing and disease, they went down to 300,000. What does it mean for the whole paradigm? I do not know how we could possibly have we won Iraq. I do not think we have won. Have we won in Afghanistan? I do not think it is... We have the wrong paradigm.
SM (00:15:53):
I would agree. Yes.
JG (00:15:55):
And we are the aggressor and these guys are not going to beat us because they were willing to die for the last person does not have a-
SM (00:16:05):
Do you feel that one of the problems we have as a nation is the fact that the Boomer generation of 70 million may be going to their graves like the Civil War generation, not truly healing from the tremendous divisions of divided America during the time they were young and growing up into adulthood. I would talk about the war between Black and white, male and female, gay and straight, the environmental battles and certainly the war in Vietnam. Those who support the war, against it, those who served, those who did not. Do you think we as a nation, Jan Scruggs wrote to book the Vietnam, be it Vietnam War founder and it was called To Heal a Nation. It was geared toward healing the vets and their families and being non-political, but in a sense he hoped it helped a little bit with the healing of the nation too, from the tremendous divisions of those times. Do you feel that we as a nation and as a generation have a problem with the issue of healing?
JG (00:17:11):
No, I think we have a problem with the issue of narcissism. The opposite. Who are we to feel sorry for ourselves? Now I knew a World War II aged guy that had escaped. He and his family were taken to the concentration camp and he hid in a bus and was able to sneak out. It is weird the stories you hear, and he snuck back in because he was starving to death outside the concentration camp. He came here and opened up the laundromat, experiment with the disco laundromat and was a very nice guy. That guy has a right to ask the question to be healed from his problems. We have experienced more wealth and abundance privilege than other any ever, ever, ever and that is going away, and we have used it all up. Our responsibility is to stop feeling sorry for ourselves and before we die, to get back to our original values, which were the right ones, which is the military and industrial complex, expanding human population and pollution are means that the human race is soon going to go away because it is over, and we have pretty much blown the opportunity. Now in fairness, nobody else has done it either and in fairness, the very education that we had and the wealth that we had gave us the opportunity as 15-year-old and 25-year-old in the (19)60s to see the truth of what Eisenhower said. We knew that, but we too succumbed to this deduction of the abundance, but we have used the lie that we are sensitive, that we care about the planet. The generation, I cannot tell you the people we are talking about. We are the people that have been in the upper one 10th of 1 percent of humans in terms of our impact on the planet. Our tomatoes come in from Mexico and Israel, our lettuce comes from around the world. Our organic grains for our vegans come from peasants everywhere. Our shoes, our Nike shoes come from slave labor, oil that we fly around the world on to go see the Africans to give them arms comes from Africans that are dying in Black resources because our empire and empires around the world, America, Europe, Japan, Australia, take those resources to ourselves from those people through Shell oil and BP, fly to visit them, their environment decimated by the climate change we caused by burning the fossil fuels and we run around there thinking, "Oh, is not it nice the Black people are kissing our feet or we are building this school for them?" We are the most spoiled generation that is ever been and we have hid behind having good value system just like Christians do, do very narcissistic things. We have a chance, we still have a chance to change that. The only wounds that we have to heal are guilt over using more resources. We have used more resources than will be available for all generations at the human's future.
SM (00:20:53):
Wow. That is one of the best responses I have ever had to that question.
JG (00:20:58):
Well, I have been thinking about this for 10 years and including sitting there having worked on Fahrenheit and the boss was beaten up and having everybody cry for Clinton. I am like, "Why are you crying for Clinton? He opened up free trade to China. He signed the globalization stuff. All this stuff is happening now with the environment being decimated faster and free trade destroying peoples around the world. Clinton brought that in." You do not intend to play the weakest in New York, in Philadelphia and Traverse City and you have a nice party, pretend our wealth came from the magical place. Did not have to do with that. I will shut up, but that is just, I sat there and I am like, "Bush is evil, but you guys we are not getting the evil that is what we are doing as an empire."
SM (00:21:50):
As we are celebrating Dr. King's the opening of his memorial in Washington this week, 28th, and actually people are down there now for activities all week. He believed in the non-violent protest way and he also believed in paying a price for one's beliefs and he also agrees with you and you brought it up before about the willing to stand up and protest, be arrested and so forth for causes you feel that are unjust. Then we had this period in the late (19)60s and early (19)70s where in the anti-war movement or some of the other movements, they became much more confrontational and more violent. Not necessarily trying to kill people, but more violent, whether it be the weatherman, the weather underground. Some people question whether the Black Panthers were violent. I do not think. Some say they were not. And then even at the American Indian movement in (19)73 there was violence there. There was a lot of reasons for this, but there seemed to be a sense of frustration then because things were not happening or they were not being listened to, and for African Americans, Black Panthers was about, well, the only people that are going to protect us are ourselves. What was your thought of that whole change in philosophy from non-violent protests to more violent aspects?
JG (00:23:16):
I think we have a systemic problem as the country is that we are too big and geographically too big, and so in Egypt or in Libya, somewhat reasonable to put yourself on the line. In Egypt certainly it is not a done deal, but they could go home at night or run back home or run to their friends. It is hard to have a revolution, a non-viral revolution when we all come from places that we take six months to walk to, because in a day or a week to drive to.
SM (00:23:57):
Well it is-
JG (00:23:59):
It has been a real problem and what I am getting to is that I think the violence was a mistake, but I think we have a hard time being humans. I think that is what King had was vehement, relentless vehement. I think that is what we lack and that is where it is human nature. I know in some ways I am not blaming us, but we are narcissism. V for vendetta: A Revolution Without Dancing Isn't Worth Having. Well, revolution without... I think we were not clear that we all needed to do what Gandhi had done and sit there and until it changed non-violently.
SM (00:24:49):
One of the things too is that in 1970, I can remember seeing posters or signs from all the other movement groups, the Women's Movement, the certainly Civil Rights Movement and Chicano Movement, Native Americans. They were all there. Nowadays, it seems like all the movements are isolated. Am I wrong in this? They do not work together. They are all isolated in their own, they are more interested in their own issues and not combining issues.
JG (00:25:19):
I have thought about that, but I think you are right, but there was something weird and confusing about that. You are right. There was a protest anti-nuclear there would be everything there. I think it is a little, it was probably exposing an error in our thinking. I will not say it was a mistake because who is deciding? But in an error in our constitution that if you believe what Paul Ehrlich said in Population Bomb or what we were saying about nuclear and stuff. We are talking about the extinction of life on earth and perhaps the demise of the human race. To come and carry signs, however well-intentioned and important cause about social issues, those are relatively unimportant comparison to destroying the whole planet or our complicity in wars that are killing out the people. They are important. You see what I am saying?
SM (00:26:29):
Mm-hmm.
JG (00:26:29):
But my personal, that is why I was so happy in Fahrenheit. We did not really go over aboard with the Patriot Act. It is chilling and crucial evil, but in the end, it is all about us and the special media issue. I want to be free. The larger evil is that we are attacking these nations to try and dominate resources.
SM (00:26:55):
It is interesting that when I talked to a feminist leader and she said, "Steve, we are working together, except you do not see it. It is on legislation that is being proposed in Congress. Various organizations are working together, they are just not protesting in public together." Well, I do not know if that is true or not, but that was a comment. And also Gaylord Nelson, who I did know, founder of Earth Day, who I interviewed before he passed away for this book project and I worked with him on 10 leadership programs down in Washington, so he was a good man. Even he, when you read his statements on Earth Day, one of the things that he was proposing and talking about he does not seem like anybody is talking about anymore, and that is the population boom. That he talked about the fact that if we overpopulate the planet, we are not going to have enough food to feed everyone. Then of course then all the environmental issues come up. I often think of Gaylord because I think even when Earth Day 40 was happening in Wisconsin, there were people there saying they were co-founders of Earth Day. Well, Gaylord Nelson, that was his idea. He was the man that made that happen and he was also-
JG (00:28:10):
He was Republican.
SM (00:28:10):
Huh?
JG (00:28:13):
Was not he a Republican?
SM (00:28:14):
Oh no, he was a Democrat. He was a Lyndon LaRouche democrat, two term governor of Wisconsin and two term senator from Wisconsin, and of course he worked for the Wilderness Society until he died, but did not seem like people were even listening to his thoughts on population. I do not know if you sense that, but I do. All the other issues are being brought up about the environment, but they are not talking enough about overpopulation and that is an issue.
JG (00:28:44):
It is the story of our issues that I was just thinking about how open my thumb and the whole complex issue of humanity in the planet. Humans have two stories. Do we have a story that is scientific and technical and that gets us bows and arrows and gets us started, gets us tabs and cell phones. We also have a story that is cultural and social and comforts us against whether it is the leopard that might eat us or the infinity of outer space that is so huge and we are so small. That is religion or myth or culture. Both those stories go together and that is why right now we are in confusing time because people are not understanding everything is perfectly explained that is going on in the world by the predictions of the (19)60s. I just want to affirm we were very, very ripe, but we got away from it. We let the addiction that is this culture get to us and we cannot blame the corporation because I cannot sit here with the iPad and jet pick up my pocket and then cry about the corporations. It is like who is going to give me that stuff? The Amish? I do not think so. But the story were as a species is the story that we started to get and then we moved away from that and those Paul Lake, Gaylord Nelson, those people were in tune with that story.
SM (00:30:25):
Christopher Lash wrote that book, the Culture of Narcissism in (19)79.
JG (00:30:29):
I remember.
SM (00:30:31):
And that was a big seller, and of course he was basically saying that a lot of the Boomers had gone into becoming yuppies or what he making a lot of money and that kind of stuff in their late twenties and early thirties, but then he was also talking about the next generation too, which I believe is the Generation Xers, which were the sons and daughters of Boomers. In fact, today's colleges, 15 percent of the college students centering this year are from parents who are Boomers and 85 percent are the children of Generation X. Where did that... And I am going to get in your background, but where do these two succeeding generations fall in this guilt? In terms of Generation X, which was a generation that I feel had deep problems with the Boomer generation and they were being reared at the time that Reagan was president and many of them took his way of thinking that we did programs out of the university and the programs we did, two main themes came out of it. Number one Generation X was tired of the nostalgia, the thinking that many of the Boomers had about the going back to those times, they were thinking about their music and rock and roll and the protest and all the times. Those are great times and some of the students were tired of hearing about it from Boomers. Then there were those who envied Boomers because they had no causes like the Boomers had except they did have the Anti-Apartheid Movement in the (19)80s, which was a big one on college campuses, but there was really nothing after the (19)70s, late (19)70s and the (19)80s and the (19)90s, nothing. So gen-
JG (00:32:19):
I told her that.
SM (00:32:21):
Generation X has some responsibility here too and I think part of them, they wanted to make a lot of money early and I do not know if they ever had the concept of helping humanity. Then you got today's millennial students, which I think are fairly comparable in some respects to the Boomers in terms of they want to leave a legacy but they want to leave it later on in life and not, they want to get married, have families in their twenties and thirties, but they do care about the world and they want to leave a legacy, so they do have some of those same traits. I am studied to hire Ed a long time, and so I do not know if your thoughts on where these two succeeding generations fall and the guilt and the problems we face today.
JG (00:33:08):
Sure. Well, and in fairness, reason for invoking guilt is that we do believe we have free will. The earth of the material upon us of the human race is what undoes our efforts to be good is that it is so powerful and productive, that is why it works so well. In fairness to us, we just failed to perceive how deep we were into this game and it was like everybody else, but we had the greatest opportunity because we... I was working with young people right after college in social services, doing social work, doing alcohol and drug treatment, doing therapy, doing retreats, all those things. Then I started working at the university of Maryland. Employment was not like the early (19)80s and no, the mid (19)80s. I noticed something changed profoundly that in the (19)70s for eager for these personal growth activities and they eagerly did them and they revealed very important things. It was just a mind-blowing time with people opening up. Fast-forward to the (19)80s and that feeling gotten worse and worse. I remember going into a social work file. I had been doing teaching group process and social work classes for a long time, but just practicing social work students. I did the same activity that I have been doing for 15 years to share something. What was it like when somebody came home from work and five or six o'clock? If you cannot remember, it was a very piggyback exercise, but you were practicing listening too, so you did not care if somebody was listening. One of them was, what was it like at bath time? Did you have a rubber duck, [inaudible] stove? Did you have the bathtub, whatever? Well, so that was one of these different sharing things. When it came time of the bathtub thing, I remember this woman freaked out the social work file, got up and ran from the room and the discussion went around. It is like, "How dare he asked people to share something like that in a class." Wow. I was in some sort of trouble. Then I had a client who we were doing some visualization, relaxation stuff and he came home from his foster family and they were like, "Oh, you were doing devil worshiping." And I am like, "What the hell is going on out there?" But I do not see this and I do not know if you felt this way, but what we failed to recognize when I came to understand that this somewhat anything goes thing, structured thing that we all had flattened was a mistake. It was a mistake. Definitely it is a clear mistake, and what we failed to perceive is what my speech teacher told me, I was a freshman in college. I came in the speech class and I was like, "Oh, I am going to do all this, blah, blah, blah, blah." And he is like, "Okay, here is what we are going to do. I am going to teach you the right way to do a speech and then you can do it your way, but first thing I am going to teach you the right way. Oh, okay, I am going to teach you the structure first, classical speech, and then you decide how to bury it." We had an incredible education. Everybody I knew, most of the students were taking math, physics, everybody was reading. We had this fantastic structured education and then we arrived at the (19)60s and we are all creative. Now, why did we think that unstructured education and chaos, and we were raised by generation that made us feel good about ourselves by being organized and behaving, and then we rebelled when we were teenagers or in college. We misperceived where we came from. We thought it was because we were special and that had burst the balance of repression. No, we were so creative because we had a damn conservative upbringing and we learned the basic of geography, science, math, English, social studies. That makes any sense. I am rambling, so then we were shocked when this generation that we gave a somewhat much more unstructured upbringing to working pharmacist are not creative.
SM (00:38:17):
It is interesting.
JG (00:38:21):
All she had to do with the was understand what we were doing wrong was to go back and look. See, we did not want to admit that because we were like the guy that did not want to continue the interview, that did not want to admit there was something good about the business.
SM (00:38:32):
Well, a lot of students did not want to be carbon copies of the multi diversity that Clark Kert talked about in his book and right after the, just before the Free Speech Movement, he talked about that the university was a multi diversity that students come to a university, prepare for a career and this is the way you get to your career and this is the way it is. The students did not want to be carbon copies of what their parents were in the (19)50s. The IBM mentality, which is the husband leaving the front door, kissing his wife, putting his hat on with his suit, walk into the car and having two children by her side and going off to work. They did not want it, so they were really rebelling against the status quo.
JG (00:39:24):
We were well-prepared to decide that having had all the basics covered through a nice conservative education. We all knew math. We all knew how to divide and multiply. We all knew the planets and geography, and so does that make any sense or should we-
SM (00:39:52):
Yeah, and see right now-
JG (00:39:53):
We had prepared us to make more choices, but to then go to a kindergartner, what would you like to do today? What would you like to learn? That is ridiculous. It is not going to... They do not know that they need to do every day for about eight years. Learn a little math and that is the only way you can have advanced math skills is every day do a little bit of work. I was part of that too. I thought, "Yeah, if we only trust the kids, they will puzzle it out." Well no, that was wrong.
SM (00:40:25):
I want to get into your background now. From that point that you were, you have talked about those early years in high school and what you did after high school, then you were in college working for a while. How did you go from college work and student affairs to the rest of your career?
JG (00:40:47):
Yeah, so working on the, well you want me to just... I will just give you the summary of how I got to that. How I actually started the film career was I was working, I had three kids and got divorced and had this blog house in the woods and I was on the Hippy Dream Organic Gardens. We were home birthed. The whole had winded off, fell apart. Do know I had taught college. 21 I wound up having to just work jobs to both support the kids when they were with me and then send her money and to support them when they were with her. It is a nightmare, so I wound up doing just menial social work jobs in a way, because everybody else was getting degrees. Well, I was just working without a degree, so I was really behind the eight-ball. I was working, supervising foster homes and more doing direct [inaudible] like I had done in the (19)70s and for an agency that was getting more and more paperwork. I was always been a writer my whole life. I was trying to break back into writing on the side and written out a book and some articles and publishing some newspaper and stuff, but knew Michael was getting ready to work on Bowling for Columbine. We talked about it a little bit, but I asked if I could tag along with them. When they were filming in Flint, not realizing you could not tag along with the film crew. Again, I had never been around anything as far as movie credentials. I am sitting in Traverse City, and this some message just started and Michael comes on the computer, he is like, "What are you doing?" I am like, "Oh, I have a doctor's appointment. I took the day off." He is like, "Oh, well we are going up to St. Helen where Charlton Heston was born St. Helen, Michigan, about an hour north of Flint, hour and a half. You want to meet us there?" Like, "Sure." "Actually, you see if you can get there ahead of us and see if you can find out where the house he grew up in is." I am like, okay. "Oh, see if you can find out where the bug pole is." All right. "The school where he went to, see if you can find out where that is." Yeah. All right. "Oh, here is a list of some people. If you happen to find out where these people that knew him are, that is great." And it is like one this list of 12 things, "But if you cannot meet us there, that is fine." It is the opening day of hunting season, it is slush on the road. I am like, "Okay, all right. I cannot see what he does and join up with them." So I go from Traverse City through the slush, went into some store, "Does anybody know anything about Charlton Heston?" I did not know how to do this, so somebody said, "Oh, go to the library. There is a Charlton Heston thing there." So I went to the library and the librarian, it turns out later, did ask for money for their most famous citizen to help build the library and he had never given it, but he still has a display so I said, "Michael Moore sent me to Tommy wants all this stuff and I do not know what to do and can you tell me where the stuff is?' So she is like, "Sure." She went and got a township map, put a little mark on the map where all these things were. Right around that time they pull up in this big white van and I run out there and I hand in this map with all this stuff on it. Now if you know anything about producing, if you have a list of things like that, you might spend a lot of time researching that more than 10 minutes. They are like, "Oh, okay." Then Michael said, and again he had not really asked me to help, he just said can you meet us there? Then he says, "Oh that is great. Well, why do not you go up to Oscoda because we are going to be there later and see if you find anybody who knew Eric Carroll. One of the Columbine shoots who lived there for five years." I drove up to Oscoda, it was a couple hours away and nobody would talk. "No, no, we do not want to talk." I went into a gas station there was a guy that booked pretty young, so I said, "Did you know Eric Carroll?" Said, "Well, I did not know him."
SM (00:45:45):
Is he the baseball player?
JG (00:45:47):
Eric Car-
SM (00:45:49):
Eric Carroll.
JG (00:45:49):
Fine shooter.
SM (00:45:50):
Okay.
JG (00:45:52):
One of the kids did the Columbine Massacre was from Oscoda.
SM (00:45:54):
Oh, okay.
JG (00:45:57):
So this kid said, "Well no, I pulled a gun on somebody at school and got kicked out though." So I told Michael, I said, "Well, nobody will talk, but this one kid pulled a gun on somebody and do you want to interview him?" So they are like, "All right, we will come over there later." About 11 o'clock at night, they made it over there, got dinner, the kids get off work, he was working at a gas station. His relief comes on. I asked him, I said, "Did you happen to know Eric Carroll?" He said, "Well, yeah I went to school with him." I said, "Oh, well Michael Moore is coming over here." And so they set up the bowling alley next door, the two boys went over and one is, one is with the bandana you see in the film that sells guns up north and sells in Detroit. The other one was Bomb Boy who sets off bombs in his backyard, and so by the time of those interviews, it was about three in the morning and Michael, so he was riding with me now in my car, we were going to Flint and he is like, "Well, maybe you should stick around with us." I actually drew up my resignation, faxed it in to the social work job, I quit and the next day was leading the film crew around Flint to get there a lot of shots, see with the in Becher. You there in Flint?
SM (00:47:17):
Mm-hmm.
JG (00:47:19):
We filmed the next day. Me never having lead a film crew before, did not know what a DP was, did not know anything, but my heart was into it and I knew what to find differently.
SM (00:47:40):
You then... Yep.
JG (00:47:41):
Well, the bank thing I was involved with, setting that up, the Barber shop gives you bullets. The dog shoot hunter. I am sitting there watching the movie and I am going, "Michigan militia, James Nichols." I am like, "This is interesting. The first fifteens I either found or had something to do with." My first effort ever that is not too bad.
SM (00:48:04):
No.
JG (00:48:06):
Just before the movie was wrapped up, they lost their deal with their composer fell through and Michael knew that I played keyboard. They were like, "Can you come to New York and work on the music a little bit, see what you can come up with? And oh, by the way, we have only got about five days and we have to deliver for cans." All right, so I packed my keyboard in a box. Got my one little keyboard, flew to New York, and I was able to come up with about 15 of the music that they used. Never have not been to New York.
SM (00:48:47):
Wow.
JG (00:48:47):
So-
SM (00:48:57):
Still there? Still there? Hello?
JG (00:49:06):
Hello. I was scoring, doing most of the other score music for the film on five days and checking the sound mix. Tell me if it is too much detail, but I am sitting in the sound mix and everybody else left and I am the composer. I am sitting there, ask the guy, "Well, when was the last time you worked out?" He is like, "Oh, well Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon." I am like, "Okay." I say, "Well, can you put a little bit more of this in the surround? And I cannot hear that." It is just this weird thing where I fell into it and everything seemed to work and I wound up being strangely comfortable with every part of it. I was in a technical screening I remember for Fahrenheit and there were 30 people there and they had done something in one line of resolution, was listening to the film and I was the only one that caught it. I do not know why I was so instantly tuned into this stuff except the writing background, the social work background, but like many of us, I do not know if you were, but when I was a kid, we went... Movies is what we did instead of sitting at home.
SM (00:50:26):
Every Saturday morning. Saturday morning was the cartoons normally where I grew up and then the afternoon was all the Cowboys and Indians and Army movies.
JG (00:50:37):
But even when I was into science fiction and I would wait, my dad was gone when I was little and was in the Big Brother program, and I remember how old was I must have been? Nine. My big brother from the Big Brother program said, "Well, what movie do you want to go to?" And I was like, "Doctors Club."
SM (00:51:02):
Yeah, it is interesting. There were a lot of dinosaur movies back then.
JG (00:51:08):
I liked real science fiction, I liked Kubrick first. I did not even realize who he was at that point and then 2001, I waited for that movie was like the second coming and I just-
SM (00:51:22):
Wow. Yeah.
JG (00:51:25):
I was in college. Michael and I took film appreciation courses. We never took film courses, but we would draw scripts in high school from Ann Arbor. We would dive in to Steve Moore movies and foreign films and that is what we did. Movies and music, and you know.
SM (00:51:44):
You have been doing it, how long now? Total of how many years?
JG (00:51:47):
Probably 10 years.
SM (00:51:49):
And you have been involved how many movies?
JG (00:51:55):
Bowling for Columbine was the first and then that turned out okay, so they asked me back to work on Fahrenheit and I was co-producer, the film's composer. In between we worked on Michael's Book, Stupid White Men in Due Place, my Country. Then I did the filming that was Foundation Fortune Workshop and saint. Me and Megan, my hero touring with The Dixie Chicks for a couple weeks. Shot the concert footage for that film in the protest footage, and then I worked on one on Paul Watson and Steve Shepard composer, producer, and then Capitalism.
SM (00:52:39):
Yeah, that was-
JG (00:52:40):
But not so many films, because I am in a weird zone where if somebody was asking me to put my name on a film, a friend of mine in New York could trying to get some money for, I am like, "It sounds good but I cannot really put my name on a film that is not in the zone of these other."
SM (00:53:01):
Yeah, definitely. You are working on, and now you are working on your own film and what is the name of this film?
JG (00:53:12):
Planet of the Human.
SM (00:53:13):
Wow. When do you hope to be done?
JG (00:53:18):
As soon as possible. This year, by the end of the year.
SM (00:53:26):
It is good.
JG (00:53:26):
About to do the last round of filming, but it is all connected. Well, some days somebody will have to do, my client has not done it yet. Maybe he will do it, but the inside, sorry, how films were made, but quite a great the teams of people to work with together and great journey. We had the sound mixers from Skywalker Ranch.
SM (00:53:58):
Wow.
JG (00:53:59):
Take a break from, in fact, when we were mixing Fahrenheit, we had to pack up all the drives. Sound mix was a huge deal and the end of the film is the most complex part of all. We had to pack up the drives and pack up everybody and fly off to San Francisco and then get in cars and drive up into the Skywalker Ranch because they had to start to mix to Polar Express and we were bumping into that schedule, so they had to do Polar Express by day and Fahrenheit by night for a couple of days.
SM (00:54:39):
Wow. Well, when you look at your life's journey, then from growing up in Michigan and a very poor family, but a very rich family because in terms of pride in your background and so forth, the experiences you have gone through throughout your life, leading up to being a movie producer, director, you name it. A lot of messages in your movies and a lot of messages that probably people do not want to hear but need to hear.
JG (00:55:16):
Is the place where you grew up still intact?
SM (00:55:19):
Pardon?
JG (00:55:20):
Is the place where you grew up still intact?
SM (00:55:23):
Oh yeah. Cortland, New York. I grew up in Cortland. I do not know if you have ever heard of it.
JG (00:55:30):
Oh.
SM (00:55:30):
Yeah, I grew up in Cortland. I lived there until 1959 and then my dad transferred and then we moved down toward Binghamton, New York. We lived in a small community called Lyle, which I went to Whitney Point High School and it was a small school. I was looking forward to going to Cortland High, which was a big school, but my dad transferred. He was Prudential Insurance. I went, that is my background. Cortland is an interesting story too, because in the 1950s, Cortland was a very successful community and they had a college there because State and Rever Cortland, which was a teacher's college, but a lot of businesses, the downtown was very successful. Brockway Trucks was from there, and then around late around 1960 Brockway left and a lot of businesses left and it really went downhill. It is recuperated quite a bit to this day, but that begets because the college is so big. College is about 14, 15,000 students. That is where the Jets practice now in the summer. They did not this year and brings about four to 7 million dollars in income. Just time there, but it is not the same. Nothing's just been the same since it was in the 1950s.
JG (00:57:02):
I think it is different about Michael grew up on the edge of all this, he imagined it, but I think for me, Bowling for Columbine, that is where that exact place that you see is where I grew up and I cried the first 30 times. We watched all the way through. Every time we would reach out somebody we had watched it through and I could not stop crying at the end.
SM (00:57:27):
How have you been-
JG (00:57:31):
I think the foundation that is different is when you come from a place is risen and fallen and it is basically been destroyed. You understand that it is not a given that the world that we live in, can you? And I think people do not, because we move away from the places that are falling apart and we do not really feel in our guts. We know in our heads population thing and all this stuff that I think the interest between Michael and I, most people is when you come from Flint, Detroit, some part of you knows, you know this deep in your bones all things can change and go away.
SM (00:58:20):
Yeah. Well it is interesting because even though when I moved from starting seventh grade in this new community, I never considered it my community. My best years were my elementary school years and my college years. I never could adjust really to the changes that took place because Cortland was a much bigger place than being in Whitney Point in that area. We had a nice home and everything, had a good job, but we had some tough times too throughout the time. It was part of America, you have your ups and downs and how you deal with roadblocks and life and everything. I have always seen, when my parents were alive, I would always drive with them back to 10 Hamlin Street, which is where I grew up, the home my parents bought in 1946 after my dad came home from the war and they renovated it and then all of a sudden, we moved. On that street, Hamlin Street is still the same as it was back in the 1950s. It is families raising kids and most of the community has gone downhill, but that street has stayed almost and the houses, actually, the people live in the house now were the children of the people that bought the house from my parents. When I drove up a couple years ago, I was in front of the house, I never stopped, but they were painting it and I thought they might have moved. I said, "Is this house for sale?" And they said, the lady came out and said, "Who are you?" Said, "I am Steven McKiernan and I grew up here." And he says, "Ah, you are one of the three kids that grew up in this house." "Well, do you know me?" And I said, "Yeah, my parents bought the house from your parents." And I noticed downstairs in the cellar, somebody had written it, we had a bathroom downstairs. Somebody had written in the cellar, Steven McKiernan, Christine McKiernan and James McKiernan, and that was me. I wrote it when I was going to the bathroom one time. She said, "We never painted over it because it always reminded us of the children that were in this house before we came here." And she said, "And I got to tell you something else." She took me upstairs and they were renovating the upstairs area because her father was ill and needed a place, but he said, "I and my sister grew up in this room and we knew this was you and Jim's room." I could not believe it. Here she was revealing this. 30 some years later, it is just so I am very pleased with that they have taken care of the house, but I have always gone back to Cortland when I visit my sister in Binghamton because it brings back great memories of my childhood. I loved it in Cortland, so anyway.
JG (01:00:55):
Whatever, much has to be evil to adjust to these social things, but not the baby with the best mother, but that continuous upbringing where you stand a chance to have a teacher that your parents had and that I could walk to school and require people around the corner store where we got our bread and candy and meat. They live two doors down and their daughter babysit us, and that connected community-
SM (01:01:29):
Is no more.
JG (01:01:31):
Is the foundation of and stable education with great stable teachers. That is what allowed us to be so amazing as young people, and we misunderstood and thought that it was us tossing off the oppression that made us so creative. No, it was the gift that we were given.
SM (01:01:52):
That is very good.
JG (01:01:56):
And Steven that gift still means that we have a responsibility to understand the story we are in. Maybe the thing I will close with if you want is to-
SM (01:02:06):
No, you want to keep... You can go ahead.
JG (01:02:10):
I will just say one thing. Woodstock, the part of Woodstock, and I am using this as a metaphor as much as the actual attempt.
SM (01:02:26):
You got your answer on healing should be, it is going to be a very important part of your interview. That was a great response.
JG (01:02:35):
Well, one of the things I have learned is you feel good about yourself through doing good things and good work, and not because I am a specialty. We have gotten too far with the... Are you still-
SM (01:02:58):
Yeah, I am taping. I am back.
JG (01:03:01):
The thing that I wanted to be clear about is that, and this is what my movie will be about as soon I can get it done, is that we almost had it right, but we were confused because we wanted to live simply, we want to toss out the military industrial complex and we want to grow our own food and have home birth and travel again many of us. That was the correct vision for how humans should be living. What we failed to understand is that we are in a mess. It has got to take many generations to get back to the point where humans can live simply like that. Our mission though is to hold that in mind, not for ourselves, for seven to 10 generations from now. When we have got our population under control, people can be living in harmony with nature again. We have that vision, and that is my hope we can return to that before we die. That clarity, humans have to get back and down to the planet, and it was not for us, or it is not even for these children now, someday if there are survivors who would be living like people at Woodstock, except very simply and maybe with a little technology. I think there is a lot of hope in what was talked then. It is just we did not understand that our whole doing of that was contained in those years too. The partying and the narcissism.
SM (01:04:38):
You write your movie, I cannot wait for it. If it comes to Philly, I hope you come there for the premiere, because at the Ritz Theater, they do a lot of premieres there and they have actually producers that come and talk. They had one last week for a movie that I went to, and I hope that the Boomer generation is reaching 65 and maybe they need to reflect more. If you are talking 13,500 a day turning 65 for the next, God, 19 years, or excuse me, 15 years, that is a lot of people. If they can be talking and asking these same questions, conservatives, liberals, independence, no matter where they stand politically, they still got one fourth of their life still ahead of them. Many are going to have to continue to work because unfortunately we are living in a tough economy, but that does not mean they cannot work on some of these issues. And certainly those that, I hope they change retirement because retirement really is not retirement anymore. I hope it is not just about rich people moving to Florida and Arizona and taking six trips a year around the world. I know I cannot do that and most of the people I know cannot do that, but that is the dream that you see on TV, but in reality, this same generation that we were talking about that had such promise in your words, still is alive, still has a chance to do something to help correct what you are talking about.
JG (01:06:15):
What happened, understanding that my, if I could afford a dream house somewhere and to cruise around the world in my senior years. You know what? When we were 18, did not we know that that meant that somebody else was not having the resources to even be comfortable? We have got to get back into balance and take control again, and I think we could do that.
SM (01:06:42):
Any final thoughts you have on anything like the final thought on the legacy of this generation called Boomer? Do not forget too, that one thing I have found through this project is the Boomers are between 1946 and (19)64, but those Boomers in the first 10 years are much closer to a lot of the older members of what I call the silent generation. Those born between (19)40 and (19)45. Many of them were mentors and role models and leaders of the Anti-War Movement and all kinds of movements. And Richie Havens told me, he said, "When you talk about the spirit of the (19)60s, I may not be a Boomer within the terms of that sociologists and higher ed people label them, but I am a Boomer in spirit." So I have learned, and even Todd Gitlin told me that he cannot stand generational terms, he cannot stand the word Boomer generation, the greatest generation, Generation X, millennials. He cannot stand all that because he said we need to be more reflective of the times we live in and the events that shaped our lives and we do not have to be put into a nutshell, and so in some respects-
JG (01:07:58):
Yeah, I do not-
SM (01:07:59):
In some respects the people that were born safe from (19)38 to (19)45, or even closer to those Boomers of who were born between (19)46 and say (19)56 than those within the generation who were born in the first 10 years in the second 10 years.
JG (01:08:24):
If we were to talk for a while, my perspective is so different than so many people. The reason we kept this versions of the (19)50s is that we were the first generation that had the material wealth. Some are our dudes instead of our elders. It is not because the (19)50s were so horrible that we rebelled it. It is because we lived in such luxury that we had the privilege to rebel it.
SM (01:08:40):
We had the time to do it too.
JG (01:08:42):
The time to do it. You could live on very, very little in (19)66 to (19)97.
SM (01:08:47):
Right. Well, I do not have any anymore questions unless you want to add one? Any final thoughts?
JG (01:08:56):
Yeah, no, I think you are right. You understand how much the gift the (19)60s was from those that mentor did and thought things like what you got for you.
SM (01:09:13):
Oh yes.
JG (01:09:13):
Take care and we will-
SM (01:09:14):
Yeah. What I will need from you, Jeff, I am going to need two pictures-
(End of Interview)
Date of Interview
October 2011
Interviewer
Stephen McKiernan
Interviewee
Jeff Gibbs
Biographical Text
Jeff Gibbs, born in Flint, Michigan, is a filmmaker, composer, scorer, film producer, and director. Gibbs has lived in Michigan all his life. He worked with Michael Moore on Bowling for Columbine, and Fahrenheit 9/11. Gibbs released his own film, Planet of The Humans with the executive producer, Michael Moore in 2020. Gibbs' full length documentary is about the environmental movement’s battle against climate change and how some favored solutions come with their own set of problems.
Duration
1:09:19
Language
English
Digital Publisher
Binghamton University Libraries
Digital Format
audio/mp4
Material Type
Sound
Interview Format
Audio
Rights Statement
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Keywords
1960s; Cold War; Boomers; John F. Kennedy; Vietnam War; Anti-war movement; Protests; Ronald Reagan; Michael Moore; School shooting.
Files
Citation
“Interview with Jeff Gibbs,” Digital Collections, accessed May 20, 2024, https://omeka.binghamton.edu/omeka/items/show/1907.
