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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

he was doing a book on Puerto Ricans in America, in New York. Someone told him to come see me, and he never left us. I opened the doors of the hospital so he could shoot workers on the job, but then he became available to us. One day he said, “Moe, I just bought a 16- millimeter camera and I'm interested in film.”

I said, “Great. If you're interested in film, we'll make a film.” So I called Johnny Schultz again, who had made the '59 film, and we talked with Don. We plotted out a film that would be for new members, to show all of these new members how you move around the union. It was an internal film to show how the union worked, to show the various departments, the stewards, the benefit fund, the credit union, the hiring hall. You would move around and do it in such a way, the social-cultural programs. So I knew the schedule of events that were taking place. All we did was shoot. Johnny and Don would come and they would shoot the Theater 1199, they would shoot this, they'd shoot that. It was a schedule. We didn't know what was going to happen with it. Then we would check off, “We didn't do this yet. We have to do this. We didn't do this yet. We've got to do this.” And so we had accumulated a lot of footage and we still had no idea what the film was going to be like, except that it was running into the time that we ought to make a film again. So Johnny said that he would give up--he was still at CBS at the time.

SIDE 2

Foner:

Johnny was getting married and he said he was going to go abroad on his honeymoon, and he was going to leave, I think, sometime in the summer. He said that he would be willing to take a month off, quit a month before, without pay, if we would rent a room, one of these places where they have a Movieola, where he could edit the film. You go through all the stuff and put it into some coherent form. We said, “Fine.” He worked on it.

Then we decided that there should be a narrator, and we started to work on a narration. Johnny Randolph was the narrator. We also brought in workers to be interviewed and used those interviews as part of the narration of the overlay of the film. When it was finished, we looked at it and we were very moved by it. I remember we were looking for music, for the theme, and Johnny and I went around on 42nd Street. At that time all along Times Square these open-air music shops, where out in the street with the record jackets. We went flipping around to see what we could use. We needed some Hispanic music for the dance. We had a section at the dance, a union dance.





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