Encouraged by his sudden success as a documentary filmmaker, Maysles stopped teaching and spent another summer on a trip with his brother, traveling by motorcycle from Munich to Moscow. During their travels, they happened upon a student revolution in Poland, which they filmed. The footage later aired on NBC, accompanied by Chet Huntley's narration.
Maysles' nascent career took a crucial turn when he met documentarian D.A. Pennebaker, whose work would eventually include the 1965 Bob Dylan portrait Don't Look Back and the seminal concert chronicle Monterey Pop. When David Maysles showed Pennebaker Psychiatry in Russia, the latter deemed it the best first film he'd ever seen. Pennebaker then introduced the elder Maysles brother to Bob Drew and Richard Leacock, who were about to push the envelope of documentary filmmaking with a distinctly American twist on the French "cinema verité" style.
The American approach "made you feel you were really there, as an observer behind the scenes," says Maysles, who prefers the term "direct cinema" when referring to his work with his brother. "Unlike the French version, nothing was staged. More than ever, viewers could feel what it was like to be in the shoes of the subjects."
Together, Leacock, Drew, Maysles and Pennebaker made the film Primary, an insightful look at the 1959 Democratic primary campaign between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. The film was Maysles' first sync-sound collaboration, and the filmmaker remembers a particular shot of John and Jackie Kennedy as they entered an auditorium and walked down an aisle through a crowd: "I stayed right with them. Pennebaker handed me a wide-angle lens, which was very daring back then, and I kept the camera over the back of John Kennedy's head as I followed him." The wide angle allowed Maysles to capture the crowds looking up at Kennedy as he moved through them. "I couldn't see what I was shooting, but I knew that the camera was seeing what Kennedy was experiencing."
Documentary filmmaking was forever changed after Drew and his fellow filmmakers received a grant from Time-Life to design a battery-operated double-system sync camera that did not require an umbilical cable link-up to the sound recorder. "For the first time, we were using sync-sound cameras portably," says Maysles. "The basic idea was really revolutionary, because we could suddenly get so much closer to reality without imposing on it. The new camera was created from parts of several existing models; it was part Auricon, and the tape recorder was a Perfectone. The speed of both the camera and sound recorder was governed independently by a highly accurate electronic tuning-fork mechanism in each device.
"Zoom lenses also allowed us a lot of flexibility, so we could be near or far without moving around and distracting people," he continues. "Suddenly, the camera became a servant to reality rather than a device used to manipulate it. Scenes filmed as they evolved could be as dramatic as in a preconceived film, but more compelling and engaging. Things that pass as totally credible in a documentary, because they are real, would seem all too implausible in a concocted, scripted feature film."
One of the Maysles' most commercial films was What's Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. (later retitled The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit). Albert didn't even know who the Beatles were when he got a call from Granada Television in England informing him that the Fab Four would be arriving at New York's Idlewild (later JFK) Airport in a few hours. Fortunately, his brother David did, so when the Maysles were asked if they would make a film of the band's arrival in America, the answer was a quick "Yes." They were soon rushing to the airport to film the band coming off the plane. Maysles, reports, "We stayed with them night and day, so we were able to capture exactly what they were going through in the thick of it, something that would have been impossible in a planned scene for a film."
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