Woody Allen

So I just watched the Woody Allen Documentary and man is it a good one. I think that my taste in movies comes from my dad. He's the one that started me on a healthy diet of Woody Allen and Mel Brooks when I was young. I think this documentary is proof making something worth watching sometimes is as simple as having a great subject.

Happy 4th!

I'm not the type to way flags just for the sake of waving flags. I have a natural aversion to store bought patriotism, but there are things that I believe should always be heralded. One of those things is the sacrifice young men and women chose to make to keep the rest of us safe. Thank you for your protection, so that the rest of us might enjoy our freedom.

John Ford The Documentarian

Most people know at least one John Ford movie.  Even if you don't know that you know a John Ford movie you do. He's the director of classic westerns like The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Stagecoach, and other classics like The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, and my dad's favorite The Quiet Man. During World War II though, John Ford helped the United States Navy complete a series of short documentaries about the war.  Perhaps the most famous one is "The Battle of Midway", which I've included below. Watch it. Its very good. The New York Times said: "For 18 tingling and harshly realistic minutes the spectator is plunged into the front line amid the thunder of exploding bombs, the angry whine of fighter planes locked in combat and the relentless bark of anti-aircraft guns  aboard surface vessels."

Research

So there was a problem when I decided to make this movie.  I had never thought about how to make a documentary before. Most of my work was music videos.  I knew how to make rappers from Tampa and Atlanta look cool, but I had no idea what was the history and ideology of making documentaries.  Luckily, I have UCF's Lisa Mills as a faculty advisor. She's an award winning filmmaker and big thinker on the subject of what is documentary filmmaking? This is a link to her latest movie...
https://vimeo.com/27645118
She pointed me in the direction of some research that over the next weeks and months I read...and read...and read...until I felt like a had a pretty good handle on things.   Other people must have felt that way too, because they asked me to teach a class on the history of documentary film production. Forgive me if some of the things I post in the future are alittle to film theory and not enough specifically related to the movie.  Please comment, or send me an email, if you'd like to know why I posted something or if the connection isn't clear, I'll be happy to explain further,  and honestly it does me the huge favor of helping me see when I need to crystalize my information.

In the beginning...

I don't know how many of you are interested in this, but its part of the movie so I thought I would include it.  When I got into grad school I was hell bent on proving that I could make a micro-budget comicbook movie based on a comic that I was working on with a friend. A great many people said that it was crazy, so I decided to move on to another idea.  I took about two weeks just thinking and trying to come up with something else. Nothing seemed as interesting to me as investigating the idea of what heros are, and why we treat them the way we do, which a comicbook movie is the perfect vehicle to use to explore that question. My mom pushed me pretty hard to come to the dinner that they were having for the ship that my dad was on when he was in the Navy, the USS Randolph.  So I asked my friend and cinematographer Brian Macaione to go with me for the day to St. Augustine and see what there was to see.  That day we recorded about 6 hours of footage.  I was deeply moved by the stories that were shared with us, and I was completely engrossed by what I heard. Sometime on the long ride back, I realized that this movie about the men of the USS Randolph could be what I had always intended the comicbook movie to be. These were actual heros.  People that had won the war in the pacific and been a breathing part of history. To me that is who they are, but to themselves and to each other, they are a much more humble thing. And that lack of hubris, is what I believe makes their story so interesting.

Another Sad Statistic:

With in the next 6 years we expect to lose 90% of our Vietnam War era veterans.*

*this statistic comes from the same study conducted by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2008.

Sad statistic:

Within the next five years we are expected to lose 98% of our surviving World War II veterans.*

According to a study conducted by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2008

The Plan

So here is the idea.

I am going to go a road trip with my dad.  We going to visit the places that were important to him, when he was in the Navy: Great Lakes Bootcamp in Chicago, Scranton where he grew up, Old Bridge where he lived when he was in high school, Brooklyn where the Randolph often came into port, and a few more places that I will reveal as we go along.  To further understand the experiences of my dad, I will include interviews with many of the other surviving alumni of the Randolph.  I hope that in treating the history of the ship and the movie in this way, we will gleem a unique perspective on being aboard an aircraft carrier in the United States Navy.

Happy Father's Day

Thanks Dad...for everything.

And thank you to all the servicemen apart from their children today.

Me talking about me

Hey Everyone,

Here is a little interview I did, talking about some of the stuff I'm working on.  We talked about comic books, teaching, and this doc.  Please give it a listen if you have a couple minutes. I'm somewhere around the middle.  Thanks to Alan Mehanna, for putting this all together.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/fun-games-ramblings-from-108/id519945568

We will now resume your regularly scheduled updates

Hello Everyone,

Sorry, its been so long since by last post.  I have been producing a movie called The Tailor's Apprentice.  The experience has been something challenging and rewarding a way that I can't really put into words.  Unfortunately though, it has taken up almost every moment of my time.  We shot for a week in Philadelphia, and then the last two weeks here in Orlando.  As the movie wraps, I find myself in the enviable position of being able start work on a movie as personal as Blivits! is.
Over the next few weeks, I will be posting more and more stuff.  Some of it will be how you can help make this movie a reality and some of it will be entertaining.  Thank you for sticking around and continuing to read about this adventure.

Why I Need To Make This Movie

“From their experiences or from the recorded experience of others, men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.”

Aldous Huxley

My dad believes that he never really had that good of a relationship with his dad.  I was six when my grandfather died, but I still remember vividly my father being upset with himself for not saying better how much he loved his father.  He hit a cabinet door, I still have yet to figure out what the cabinet did to deserve it.  I have to remind myself of that sometimes because the relationship I have with my father would be hard to improve on.  My parents have told me that they made a choice, to at times forego wealth or career success in favor of building and maintaining a relationship with me.  Even that seems hard for me to believe. 

My interest in history comes from my father’s life.  I believe that is where most of our interest in history comes from.  We are told stories about things that we were not there to witness and it inspires us to learn more.  My dad lived through history.  He was aboard the aircraft carrier the USS Randolph during the Cuban Missile Crisis and when President Kennedy was murdered.  To him, nothing much happened during these moments of international tension. As John W. Gardner puts it, “history never looks like history when you are living through it.”

I was fortunate enough to be invited to the reunion of all the surviving alumni of the USS Randolph, where I video taped a few of the sailor’s stories.  I was moved by how humble they were after what I believe are true acts of heroism.  I wanted to share their story with everyone I could, and that I had to hear everything they wanted to say.  A few months later I found a disturbing statistic that confirmed the importance of telling this story: according to a study by the Department of Veterans Affairs conducted in 2008, within the next four and half years we will lose 98% of all the surviving World War II era veterans, and 90% of all Vietnam era veterans in the next six years.

I realized that my dad’s story is an example of how to learn from the past.  After a series of aneurysms has hindered his memories, my dad’s past has become an example of how fleeting is the chance we get to learn from our mistakes.  

The challenge of history is to become real, and I believe that putting faces to the stories that we have heard before would go a long way to communicating history in a new way. 

I decided that if this movie is about the Randolph, we should start by looking at CV 15, the USS Randolph.

This is her, circa 1953.

Hello and Welcome

My name is Charles Sutter and I am the writer and director of Blivits! A documentary about the men who served on the USS Randolph, and one of those men specifically, my dad.  Over the next 18 months or so I will posting stories and pictures and videos from my movie here on this blog. Also, because this film is being made in conjunction with the University of Central Florida's Film MFA program will be including some thoughts that I have about the state of documentaries in the modern age.

I sincerely thank you for your interest and support, and hope you check back regularly.

Charles