Picture of the Week # 321 "Working the Pipe Line" Valdes, Alaska 1975 Signed & Stamped
In 1975 I went to Alaska to produce & direct a motion picture titled "Pipe Dreams". It was to star Gladys Knight the singing star without her brother & cousins the Pips. It was a serious film about the making of the pipe line and the corruption, kickbacks and hazards to the environment. But due to circumstances completely out of my control, as I was "ONLY" the co-writer, producer and director, I was at the mercy of the executive Producer who also starred in the film and was married to Gladys and it was he who signed the checks. Somewhere along the line a six week shooting schedule was downsized to 3 and the film became a nightmare. No one was paid. The film was taken away from my editor Irving Lerner, who happened to have edited, Twelve Angry Men and Spartacus. No lightweight by any stretch of the imagination. The exec producer felt that as a white he Jew he didn't understand the "Black experience" and took the film to Detroit where it was completed. I did not see the film till it was premiered in Atlanta in a black theater. There were 5 or 6 of us who were white. Gladys's lawyers, myself, the woman I lived with and co-wrote the script, Leigh Chapman and a couple of distributors. It received mixed reviews, but the reason I am telling you this is that I saw an Academy Award nominated film titled "Salt of the Earth" about Sebastaio Salgado the great Brazilian photographer. I was so impressed by his iconic images that i decided to try my hand at B&W of workers and the likely place was my pictures from the Pipe Line. I do not mean to compare myself or my work to Salgado, but to use his work as an inspiration.
