Unfortunately, the brothers were unable to capitalize on their nonfiction feature about the famous quartet after completing the film in 1964. Maysles explains, "Even though Columbia Pictures offered us a million dollars for the film, we weren't allowed to show it in movie theaters because we couldn't get a release from the Beatles. The band had a project on their schedule called A Hard Day's Night which they were about to make, and United Artists didn't want another film to eclipse theirs, especially since theirs would be a fictional replica of ours." A shorter version of What's Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A. did have one run on CBS, but only with the proviso that actress Carol Burnett, whose own show's ratings were lagging, narrate the picture.
This would not be the last of Maysles' films to be withheld from audiences. One of his most famous works, Salesman, a portrait of four door-to-door bible salesmen, languished for 25 years before it was aired on the PBS television program POV. Maysles observes, "It's particularly ironic that Salesman aired on POV, because we've always stressed that only by distancing oneself from a 'point of view' do you remain open to discovering the unanticipated."
Maysles himself had worked as a salesman during high school to pay his tuition through college, peddling Fuller brushes and then encyclopedias door-to-door. "On my first time out, I got so nervous after I knocked on the door that I couldn't remember my sales pitch. But the woman who let me in must have sympathized, because she bought a set of encyclopedias. Later, I came to realize that one of the most important aspects of filmmaking is liking, believing, and trusting in people. Making documentaries is such an odd thing; what you're doing, in a way, is just a surface phenomenon, because you're filming only what can appear before you and yet, what you're thinking is so important. As Albert Fzent-Gyorgi put it, 'Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.'
"The process of discovery is an exciting adventure which becomes even more intense because you're recording your experience at the same time," he adds. "The experience is really of the other person you're filming, so you're also performing a service for them and for your audience, who may for the first time in their lives feel precisely what it's like to be a coal miner, a daughter, a salesman, a dying person, to be loved or hated. It's limitless."
Maysles credits much of his filmmaking success to his brother, David. "We couldn't have made all of those films without each other," he says. "There was no sibling rivalry because we weren't in competitive roles. We worked as a filming team, with me behind the camera. David also took control of postproduction, and we both found stories and made decisions. But above all, we held ourselves subservient to our subjects and the quality of our films."
In describing this symbiotic relationship, Maysles again recalls the motorcycle trip that the brothers took through Eastern Europe in 1957. "We were on back roads traveling an exhausting 200 to 300 miles a day, driving in turns. When one of us got tired, he'd move to the rear seat and rest his head on the shoulder of the driver and put his arms around the driver's waist. The driver then steered with one hand on the handlebar and the other clasping his brother's hands tightly together so that if he dozed, he wouldn't fall off. That's the image I have of how we worked together."
The siblings found their parents to be key inspirations. Albert explains, "My mother was a schoolteacher who took steps to better her life even as an immigrant child; she found a philanthropist, a Mrs. Storrow, whose dream was to inspire immigrant children, many of Jewish and Italian parents. She had a house by the ocean where the children would come to study music and art, and get exposure to a side of life they'd otherwise never have known.
"My father was a postal clerk, which is not a glamorous career, but he symbolized the greatness of the common man. Because of him, we usually chose to explore the lives of ordinary people instead of celebrities, which is exactly what we did in Salesman. Paul, the main subject in that film, turned out to be a lot like my father. They both had characters that touched the heart and soul.
The intensely personal direction that Maysles' films take "can seem strange to some people," he admits, "because secrets are revealed that wouldn't normally be disclosed. The more revealing and personal a film is, the more open you are to the charge of being intrusive. But according to those who know, such as health-care experts, it's healthier to disclose things than to keep secrets. A well-made documentary film serves the purpose of helping people disclose things they hold inside as opposed to the tasteless displays on a Geraldo-type of show, which I deplore.
"I can see the courage and the payoff on those occasions when people let loose their troubles, take a chance and expose their vulnerabilities. It's the talent and the responsibility of the filmmaker to discern an act of courage from an act of foolishness."
When Maysles was a child, he spent as much time at the Brookline, Massachusetts library as he did in his homemade darkroom. He remembers, "I'll never forget the day I found a book called Architects of Ideas: Great Theories of Mankind, which included Copernicus, Marx, Freud and Einstein. The introduction asked the question 'What is the purpose of life?' As an answer, the piece described the flight of a bird, which comes up over the horizon. You observe it, it's beautiful, then it flies away and disappears over the horizon to where, no one knows."
When David Maysles died in 1987, Albert spoke at his memorial service, and he recalled that description of life as symbolized in the flight of the bird. "When we all walked out of the chapel in South Hampton, a very strange thing happened. Just at that moment, an enormous flight of birds crossed the sky."
Coincidences have not governed Maysles' life, but enough have cropped up to astound him. "As Edie Bouvier in Grey Gardens says, 'Everything is time and place,' and I've been lucky to be at the right place at the right time." As an example, he revisits the moment when he and his brother met Pennebaker, who in turn introduced them to Richard Leacock and Bob Drew, with whom Albert launched his career: "I suppose I've been fortunate enough to be better served by chance than control, by reality more than fiction, by a confidence in life whichever way it goes."
