Catching the Fever

Being that I write for a movie website that usually tends to specialize in talking about the latest theatrical releases and new DVD’s, SIFF gives me a great opportunity to experience a whole slew of pictures I might not otherwise get a chance to see. That is definitely the case with David Hoffman’s documentary The Fever of ’57 which had its World Premiere at the festival just the other night.

The film covers the events surrounding the Russian launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the subsequent American response. What is most remarkable, to me at least, is watching how people so quickly went from happiness to terror in regards to what the Soviets had accomplished. The paranoia gripping the country, paranoia fueled by military and political leaders, leading newspapers and television journalists, so pervasive it almost seemed to color everything people said, thought and did.

On the flip side, to film also offers an intriguing and thought-provoking look at both President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Both me, especially Khrushchev, are talked about and examined in a way I had never seen before, no discussion with my history-buff father or college Political Science class ever dealing with these men in quite the way this picture does.

Normally I wouldn’t take the time to sit down and talk with a director like Hoffman before his documentary has been picked up by a distributor for theatrical distribution. In the case of Fever of ’57, however, I have found I can’t get the darn thing out of my head. So it was with great pleasure I spent some time with him early this morning at the downtown Seattle W Hotel, our brief twenty minute conversation as fascinating and illuminating a chat as any I’ve had in quite some time.

“You know most of the documentaries I’ve made in my life are labors of work,” explains the filmmaker. “I’m a working documentary guy. I’ve made a 135 television documentaries. This is my fifth feature doc, although I haven’t made one of those in 13 years. So, you either get paid by somebody – which is the labor of work – or it is a labor of love. For me, this was a labor of love.”

“I started off making a documentary about Sputnik because I lived through it, remembered it and [thought] it was a good story. Then I uncovered what I thought to be the real story, which was a surprise to me, and once I did I moved it from a documentary to a movie.”

“I was just at D-5 in San Francisco, the great conference sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, and George Lucas spoke there, and he did it just right. His position was about movies. He said, ‘There is art and then there is circus.’ Circus, he said, is YouTube. You put the camera on a tripod and stick it in somebody’s window, you hope you get something and then you call it facts of a documentary.”

“Art, he said, is the truth behind the facts. What does the thing really mean? If you can put that in a powerful movie, almost like Shakespeare, then you’ve got yourself a movie. And, well, that is what happened to me about Sputnik. Uncovered, was the fact that story wasn’t about Sputnik, it was about what happened in America. In a short period of time the radical changes in America make for an unbelievable story.”

“Everybody told me after the premiere [the film] was relative to today. You think about today constantly when you look at this story that happened fifty years ago that involved war and peace. That involved international relations between people who could love us or hate us (and were predisposed to hate us). Our own blunders. The way we dealt with a shock as great as say Pearl Harbor or 9/11.”

“So to sit there and watch a premiere to a movie I had devoted myself to where I had no idea [what] anybody else would think other than me and my cronies who made it, was incredible.”

Speaking of the filmmakers, there weren’t many behind the scenes on this one. “There were only three [of us],” laughs the director. “I don’t think there has been a doc made by fewer people. There was myself, a fantastic editor [John Vincent Barrett] out of Santa Cruz who had never made a feature and 24-year-old producer [EricReid] who had never made a movie but had been my colleague through his college years at UC Santa Cruz.”

“So, the three of us, back up by Paul Dixon who had written the book [Sputnik: The Shock of the Century] that was a best seller and had spent four-and-a-half years doing the journalism so I didn’t have to, made this movie. I could go to [Paul] and say, ‘Wow! Did you find that secret memo?’ ‘Did you find that Russian footage?’ And, once I had that, I elevated the film from a documentary, which I would call the facts as I saw them, to a movie, which I would call the story.”

I ask Hoffman about why he thought people went from being elated by the Sputnik launch to absolutely terrified in such a short amount of time, the paranoia fueling their reactions feeling eerily similar, to me at least, to America’s collective state of consciousness after the 9/11 attacks. “The government leaders,” comments Hoffman, “particularly the opposing party, Democrats, military leaders who had other interests and [media] pundits changed public opinion because the background was already there.”

“Think about it. The whole 1950’s was the first time we had to deal with the possibility of national extinction. Prior to that, there was no way to take us apart. There was no way to remove us from the planet. Hydrogen Bombs, an enemy that said they were going to bury us (although that isn’t what they ended up meaning it sure was what it sounded like to us at the time), Fallout Shelters, communists under beds, [Russians] opening up plants that had secrets in them, we believed that we could become extinct.”

“Eisenhower, the President at the time, had to deal with that. So that was the underlying tone, and then this beautiful thing happened, so gorgeous, and people cried. Millions upon millions of people just stood outside with their parents. Whole communities, my community in my hometown of Levitown, long Island, everybody was standing out in front of the house looking up.”

“And then to be told that [Sputnik] wasn’t the issue floating up there, but the rocket that put it there which could carry a bomb that could kill us in every city, it’s like 9/11. I remember that the big news, on national television, on 9/10 was sharks in Florida. And my wife always said, ‘What happened to the sharks in Florida on 9/12? They’re gone.’ And the same thing happened with Sputnik.”

You really get a sense of Hoffman’s passion sitting there with him. He’s animated, full of energy and life, his face breaking into a cavalcade of smiles the deeper we get into the conversation. I tell him I find it ironic that we currently live in the age where the Democrats are seen to be in the right by so many Americans right now, while the Republicans who led us into war are, by and large, held in just the opposite opinion; quite a contrast to the state of affairs just a half century ago.

“What I concluded and what I show,” states the director, “is that it is all about politics. Not exclusively, but if a politician can knock the other guy out with an opinion most of us believe than they are going to do that, and certainly most of us believe the Iraq War is wrong and not getting us anywhere and the bad guys are the guys that put us there and are trying to keep us there, it’s the same thing. If the other guy can hit you, and in this case most Americans agree, that’s [what happens].”

“I’m not saying that this makes the issue wrong, but the motivation might not be so pure. It could be about gaining political power, and that was certainly the case then. I saw thousands and thousands of feet of film, and I didn’t see a single foot of film where the Democrats supported the idea some of this might be a little hysterical, this ‘Missile Gap.’ The threat was never real.”

“And Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev’s son, said his father was very happy when America was afraid because it meant they wouldn’t be attacked. But, in fact, they didn’t have anything. They didn’t have the thousands of missiles, the thousands of weapons. They didn’t have anything. It was a myth.”

It is this view of the former Russian Premier, the villain in so many history classes, documentaries and Cold War stories, where Hoffman takes his biggest gamble and forces people to rethink their opinions of the man. “Military guys,” says the filmmaker, “say to me, ‘This guy killed thousands of people. Hw can you make him anything other than a Hitler?’”

“I don’t know about the thousands of people, but let’s assume it is true. He still had an enormously powerful military, more powerful in the government than even the American military was with Eisenhower. Both [governments] led by men their militaries felt were their leaders. Eisenhower was a military man. Khrushchev was a military man. And then both split with their militaries during their administrations, meaning they learned. They evolved.”

“They always said presidents would learn. I haven’t experienced that with George W. Bush or with Bill Clinton. I didn’t see that with them. Certainly Kennedy changed in his time. Certainly Eisenhower and Khrushchev changed during their times when they realized, apparently, the true threat to the world and that their economies would explode if all they did was build weapons. They backed away. They changed. So, this guy may have been one rough Russian, but he changed.”

The documentarian may have nice things to say about the former Russian Premier within the context of what his film covers, but his real praise is saved for the man many affectionately called Ike. “As I did my movie,” smiles Hoffman, “I came to the conclusion [Eisenhower] deserves my movie and more. He was the son of a Quaker, he was a staunch anti-war advocate speaking out about the growth of the military way before anyone else. This guy came into office saying I don’t want a single weapon we don’t need; I don’t believe there should be an arms race. Then he comes across this guy Khrushchev whom he meets as President.”

“And these two guys are kids of farmers, they are blue collar people, they had been through the greatest war in the history of the world, both of them. Eisenhower, as we know, led Allied forces, but nobody really realizes responsible for the defense of Stalingrad. Millions of Russians died. So, neither of these two guys liked war and each felt it was a huge waste of money.”

“So, when they came across each other, that is the story of my movie and I didn’t know it. And neither did anybody else. It’s not in anyone’s book. In anyone else’s movie. It wasn’t even in this movie until Sergei said during an interview, which is in my film, that his dad got together with Ike and he said, ‘My military is pushing me,’ to which Khrushchev replied, ‘My commandants are pushing me, too.’ So, Eisenhower turns to Khrushchev and says, ‘Well, maybe we have a private agreement we don’t listen to them?’”

“And that’s unbelievable. So I checked it out. Sergei had said he had heard it from his dad, and David Eisenhower, Ike’s son, confirmed yes it was [true]. And that’s a major piece of American history right there. What does it teach you? To me, at least, it teaches you that you have to talk to your enemy, if the enemy is sane, and in this case the enemy was.”

“Who knows what would have happened if you would have had a guy in Russia who really did feel if only a third of the world was left [alive] and it was all communist that would be okay? Who knows what would have happened. These two guys deserve honor and I give them honor in my movie.”

Watching the film, one can’t help but come away wondering to themselves, especially in a current state of affairs, if conversation really is the best weapon of them all. “I think that is the message of the movie,” states Hoffman emphatically. “If Aunt Millie is telling her relative why to go see the movie, she’ll say because it is a first-rate story, it’s a true story, nobody knows it and it changes our perspective on the President when we’re dealing with similar issues that involve risk, danger, national extinction and nuclear weapons.”

“Just this past week AOL did a poll of its members after Russia announced they had a missile we couldn’t defend against, and 62-percent of Americans were ‘extremely worried.’ It’s just like [1957]. Back then, the Gallop Poll showed 70-percent of Americans believed nuclear war was likely and that three-quarters of the population would die. That isn’t just a minor thing. That’s a major thing.”

But The Fever of ’57 isn’t all gloom, doom and paranoia. Hoffman brings things full circle, the wonder and awe expressed on the faces of people taking in the glory of Sputnik for the first time returned as the birth of NASA and civilian stewardship of space is announced. “This is real interesting,” says the director. “Add to our current state of affairs that 30-some million Americans practiced going underground in a national drill, with school kids, policemen, people leaving their workplace, add all that. Then factor in Fallout Shelters being built around the country (and the national news covering that).”

“Compare those thing to 9/11, to the current threat that we’re going get attacked again. Just this week you had a scare at Kennedy Airport. Add all that and, just like then, you have a lot of American’s really convinced.”

“Was there a positive outcome [after ‘57]? Yes, and that’s the [lesson] of the movie. And we haven’t had that positive outcome from 9/11. It didn’t happen. Our leadership never gave us a way and, if they did, we didn’t take it.”

“But out of Sputnik came NASA as a civilian agency, blocking the military from nuclear weapons and weapons in space. Out of that came the largest education program America ever confronted where we were going to turn our system around and beat the Russians [with our brains], which we did, we built a much better educational structure. Out of this came the internet and the whole idea of miniaturization going to cell phones going to GPS mapping going to photography. All of this coming out of Sputnik.”

“If you think of the 1960’s, you have the democratization of our society where gays, the handicapped, minority groups, Native Americans, all became part of society as a direct result of this explosive period. You had the Mercury Program. The Apollo Program. All of this. It’s thrilling. It’s so thrilling, when we announced we were going to go back to the moon it was your generation, two or three generations down, that still feels [excitement]. It was your generation that said we want that.”

“And what is the direct result of 9/11? Nothing. Just paranoia.”

In the end, Hoffman can’t help but recollect about his own remarkable career as a director and were this particular feature sits in his filmography. “All my movies have been about the social experience of America, not the underlying secrets nobody knew,” he mused. “When I made Making Sense of the ‘60’s for PBS, when I made Moon Shot for Turner, they were about people’s experiences. This film, The Fever of ‘57, what I found was an experience I didn’t know Americans had. It was deep. It was profound. It changed the country and it led to so much.”

“It is the only moment in humankind that you could look up and see something that Man had put there. The second moon. It was the only moment and that’s pretty neat. This was the first object, the first time you could look up and we were there. That is very profound.”

Our talk continued for a few minutes more, weaving this way and that concerning topics both then and now. In the end, the most remarkable thing for me is that I have been given the chance to see Hoffman’s film and to be granted the opportunity to sit and discuss it with him. My only wish now, after writing about it, is that more audiences, not just those at SIFF, will get the same opportunity.