Being Terry Sanders

director, producer, writer

By BRENDA HIMELFARB Palisadian-Post Contributor Filmmaker Terry Sanders tells a great story, which is why he has had such a rich and successful career as a documentary filmmaker. His talent lies in the story and the clear, uncluttered way he tells it. This is a formula that turned out to be exceptional’unexpectedly’from the start. Now sitting in his Santa Monica office, he is surrounded by posters of some of his films. Sound bites of a current production being edited can be heard in the background. ‘In 1954 my brother Denis, who was in UCLA’s film school, was getting ready to do his Master’s thesis film,’ begins Sanders who, at the time, was a UCLA undergraduate. ‘We both loved Civil War short stores, so Denis went into the UCLA library to find a story that would work,’ Sanders continues. ‘Because we had no money, we had to go for public domain material, which was anything prior to 1896. Denis finally found a gem of a short story called ‘Pickets,’ about advanced outposts where soldiers were stationed along rivers and roads to scout for anything unusual going on. It was a three-character story and was amazingly cinematic, and it all took place in one afternoon.’ According to Sanders, things could not have been more perfect. Denis wrote a screenplay, based on the story which he called ‘A Time Out of War.’ They found three actors from UCLA along with a location in the Santa Ynez River near Santa Barbara, where if you carefully excluded that which didn’t look like the south, made a perfect antebellum landscape. The film’s whole budget of $2,000 was supposed to be used to buy Kodak film. But instead the brothers shot what was called ‘short ends,’ which were little rolls of film that were discarded from the studios, that they could get for one or two cents a foot. They shot the film in four and a half days in May and spent the entire summer editing. And when it was finished, they sent it to the Venice Film Festival and were shocked when it won first place. The brothers were on a roll. Next, they qualified for an Academy Award in the Two-Reel Short-Film category. ‘It wasn’t a documentary, but a dramatic film,’ explains Sanders. ‘And we had to form our own distribution company, because you couldn’t qualify for an Oscar unless you had a distributor. The film got nominated for an Oscar for Best Dramatic Short Film, and we were stunned.’ Perhaps what shocked the Sanders brothers even more was that they won. It was quite a night. Marlon Brando won Best Actor for ‘On the Waterfront,’ and Rod Steiger and Edmund O’ Brian presented the Sanders brothers with their Oscars. ‘It was pretty exciting,’ recalls Sanders. ‘We found it was like being shot out of a cannon in a way, because it was a lot of success a little too soon.’ Quite a feat for the two brothers who, barely out of high school had filmed their first gig. ‘We had this tiny, little 16 mm camera and we were Hollywood filmmakers,’ laughs Sanders. ‘What we learned from that was how much we didn’t know. Out of that experience, we learned what we had to do.’ After the Oscar win, the two were bombarded with people who wanted them to write screenplays. As it happened, actor Charles Laughton had seen ‘A Time Out of War,’ and was getting ready to do ‘Night of the Hunter,’ which took place along the Ohio River. Terry was hired to direct the second production unit, that shot the river footage, and Denis was hired as the dialect coach. Then Laughton asked the duo to write the screenplay adaptation of Norman Mailer’s ‘The Naked and the Dead.’ They worked on the project for a year. ‘It felt like Laughton never wanted to finish it. It went on and on,’ Sanders says. ‘But ‘Night of the Hunter,’ which is now considered a classic, was not a financial success, at the time, and it crushed Laughton’s spirit. ‘Eventually the film was directed by Raoul Walsh and, although we got sole credit, anonymous writers had taken over and totally changed the script. When we went to see the film nothing made any sense. It was like an ‘out of body’ experience.’ The Sanders brothers decided to become independent filmmakers so they could have control of the material. They made two films. One was an adaptation of ‘Crime and Punishment,’ shot in 12 days in Venice, California which introduced George Hamilton. It was called, ‘Crime and Punishment’USA.’ The other was ‘War Hunt,’ which introduced Robert Redford and was named one of the 10 best films of the year by the National Board of Review. But, at the time, making independent films was not easy and the brothers made a decision to work separately. Sanders, 73, began working on documentaries with producer David Wolper, who was just starting out, and did five documentaries in two years, including, the highly-rated ABC special, ‘The Legend of Marilyn Monroe,’ before starting The Terry Sanders Company. Today the company is known as the American Film Foundation/ Sanders & Mock Productions, which is headed by Sanders and his wife, documentary filmmaker, Freida Lee Mock, whom he married in 1976. The couple lives in Santa Monica Canyon. Over the years, Sanders has made over 60 documentaries and has gathered numerous accolades. He was the producer/director of Emmy nominee, ‘Screenwriters: Word into Image,’ a six-part film series featuring the likes of Neil Simon, William Goldman and Paul Mazursky. Additionally, he produced the Oscar-winning, ‘Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision,’ a portrait of the artist/architect who designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.; ‘Return With Honor,’ about U.S. fighter pilots shot down over North Vietnam, was the winner in the Doubletake Film Festival; and ‘Never Give Up: The 20th Century Odyssey of Herbert Zipper,’ which was also an Oscar nominee. Three years ago Sanders decided to put documentaries on the back burner and concentrate on dramatic films. For his first project, collaborating with George Takei, best known as Mr. Sulu in ‘Star Trek,’ producer Doug Claybourne and mentor on this project, producer Fred Roos, Sanders has chosen, ‘TOKYO ROSE/American Patriot.’ The screenplay, written by Sanders, Pat Fielder and Richard Bluel, is based on the nonfiction book, ‘They Called Her Tokyo Rose,’ by Rex Gunn, who had been a reporter at the trial. TOKYO ROSE is the true story of the feisty, funny patriotic Japanese American girl, Iva Toguri, a UCLA graduate. who, under dangerous circumstances, worked with Allied POWs in Tokyo during WWII to sabotage Japanese propaganda. According to the Project Overview, ‘after the war, ignoring the truth and Iva’s real bravery and heroism, the U.S. government used evidence fabricated by two unscrupulous journalists to prosecute her for treason.’ ‘When I read Gunn’s book,’ says Sanders, ‘it made my blood boil. What happened to Iva Toguri was so outrageous and is so timely for today or any time when a war is on the horizon. When there is fear in the air, people can become scapegoats, people can lose their rights and governments can overreach. Then justice can go out the window. It’s never settled, it’s just there. You can’t underestimate something that makes your blood boil, as that’s what gets you out of bed in the morning; gets you going. Someone said to me, ‘Well, it happened a long time ago.’ But, until injustice is resolved, it’s always timely.’ It’s no surprise that their talented parents have influenced Sanders’ two daughters. Artist Brittany, whose work has been shown at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, makes books including one of watercolors and letterpress based on the Lewis and Clark journals. Just recently, daughter Jessica’s film ‘After Innocence,’ funded by Showtime, was one of 16 documentaries out of 600 entries, accepted for the Sundance Film Festival. The film is about men who had been in prison for 20 years or more, some on death row, who were exonerated with DNA evidence and how they deal with life after being released. ‘My work is fun and self-energizing,’ says Sanders. ‘I feel all the films that I do have a reason for my making them. They’re not copies of something else. They’re on subjects that most people don’t know about. The idea of retiring has no meaning to me.’