Ellsberg and the Empress

By Michael Fox

When Prince Charles and Camilla visited San Francisco in 2005, one of their most publicized outings was an hour-long stop at the Empress Hotel. The building had been converted just a year earlier into a residence hotel for homeless people, and was the pride of the city’s Direct Access to Housing program. As soon as the royals and the TV crews left the Tenderloin, of course, the spotlight drifted off the Empress. So much the better for esteemed S.F. documentary makers Allie Light and Irving Saraf, who subsequently began filming a portion of the hotel’s 90 residents.

“We went into it with a lot of naivete,” Light recalls, a surprising admission for veteran filmmakers whose subjects have included mental illness (Dialogues with Madwomen) and convicted killers (Blind Spot: Murder by Women). “I believed entirely what we were told,” by the residents, Light says, “how happy they were to have a place to live, and how much they were trying to get their life together. [One tenant named] Jeffrey is very verbal and clear about who he is and was. And then we see him out on the street selling a voucher from his therapist. They reveal themselves.”

“I think that all but three of our main subjects are drug addicts,” says Saraf, a note of sadness in his voice. “They say they are recovering but they’re not. They are trying, but it’s not an easy thing to give up.” The duo envisioned Empress Hotel as a social-issue piece when they started shooting, but it’s likely that character development will trump any agenda. Their extensive body of work—highlighted by In the Shadow of the Stars, the 1992 Academy Award winner for Best Documentary Feature—is distinguished by an empathy for people as much as a passion for causes.

Light and Saraf expect to finish Empress Hotel next month, then begin submitting to festivals. Per their usual modus operandi, they don’t have a TV deal in place. “We make films we like, and then we send them to the world on spec,” Saraf explains with a rueful chuckle. The doc does include a brief appearance by our local royalty, but it seems a bit of a long shot that Mayor Newsom’s visage will fuel a bidding war.

Goldsmith & Ehrlich: Saluting the ultimate whistleblower

In the first-rate 1975 political thriller Three Days of the Condor, Robert Redford played an unassuming CIA desk jockey who transforms himself into an action hero to thwart a government conspiracy. Any resemblance to Daniel Ellsberg, the Defense Dept. analyst who had leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971, was coincidental, exaggerated and fully grokked by audiences at the time.

East Bay filmmakers Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith each had the idea of an Ellsberg documentary and approached the topic independently before joining forces. Given their resumes—Ehrlich’s The Good War and Those Who Refused to Fight It saluted the principled courage of conscientious objectors during World War II while Goldsmith’s Oscar-nominated Tell the Truth and Run: George Seldes and the American Press profiled an uncompromising journalist who’d retch in disgust at today’s cadre of pundits, sycophants and stooges—their mutual attraction to the buttoned-down hero is no surprise.

Ehrlich was on vacation—yes, even filmmakers in the throes of a project are allowed a summer holiday—so we got the lowdown on* The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers* from Goldsmith. “Ellsberg worked in the bowels,” Goldsmith recounts. “He helped McNamara plan bombing strategy in Vietnam. He was one of the architects; he was not an insignificant player. How does one get from that point to risking life in prison and excommunication from his circle of colleagues by leaking a top-secret document that he knew could land him in prison?”

The manuscript in question was a 47-volume history of the U.S.’s political and military entanglement in Vietnam, including a host of illegal and quasi-legal activities that had been kept secret from the American people. Its publication drove public mistrust of the government to a new low, and eroded much of the remaining support for the Vietnam War.

“Ellsberg uses the phrase ‘imperial presidency,’’ Goldsmith says. “[Nixon] was acting like a king, and Lyndon Johnson before him. They felt like they were entirely justified to operate in secrecy. If you had to narrow down the essential political issue of the Pentagon Papers leak, it’s national security versus the people’s right to know. Clearly, in 2008, these are issues in our country we’re debating on a daily basis. That’s not going to change with the election.”

The filmmakers interviewed Ellsberg, who has lived in the East Bay for several years, on three occasions with more to come. (“He’s a very verbose gentleman,” Goldsmith says.) They’re also taping some 20 other players in the drama, from the people who helped Ellsberg photocopy all those thousands of pages to Hedrick Smith, one of the two reporters who wrote the original Times stories. Ehrlich and Goldsmith are eyeing a spring 2009 completion date, which will coincide with the beginning of the post-Bush era and, we’ll wager, a national discussion of executive power, national security and American democracy.

topics: bay area, documentary film institute, independent film, political film

08.06.2008