Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 22, 1991 TAG: 9102220160
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Chris Gladden
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Kitchell is a filmmaker who went to Hollywood after New York University Film School to pursue the standard dream of becoming a feature director.
That didn't happen, Kitchell said in a phone interview from Berkeley, Calif. So Kitchell turned to his first love - the documentary.
His first documentary idea was a portrait of the volatile University of California campus at Berkeley in the watershed years of campus radical politics.
"It was such a good story," Kitchell, 39, said. "It had to do with my back pages and the forces that formed me. You could see the whole arc of the '60s at Berkeley. We tried to use it as a microcosm of that whole complex time."
Kitchell looked around and realized that no one else had tackled the subject. Ten years later, "Berkeley in the '60s" was completed. The long work has paid off for Kitchell. "Berkeley in the '60s" has been nominated as best documentary in this year's Academy Awards race. It was chosen as best documentary by the National Society of Film Critics and has been playing to wider audiences than most documentaries. "Berkeley in the '60s" opens at Roanoke's Grandin Theatre today.
"We expected half a dozen major cities and a handful of college campuses," Kitchell says. "But it's playing all over. We're pleased that it's not only drawing old hippies and radicals, but kids in colleges today. That gives us hope for the future. Maybe there's hope in this cynical age."
Through 15 main interviews with people involved in various aspects of the protest movement at Berkeley and much gripping news footage from the period, Kitchell traces the evolution of the protest movement. The saga begins with sit-ins during the House of Un-American Activities Committee hearings at the college and extends through the major anti-war marches.
Kitchell wasn't a student at Berkeley but was part of the Bay Area counterculture at the time.
"I was a little hippie kid going to the Filmore and peace marches and hitch-hiking around the country. I didn't graduate high school until 1970," he explains. "I came at this thing as an outsider and an insider."
In various ways, the film has beaten the odds.
Kitchell says he received virtually no federal grants, often the lifeblood of documentaries.
"This is a very grass-roots film," he says. "We raised about a quarter of a million dollars from thousands of people in Berkeley. These were people who made sure their history got told."
Then there was the problem of finding a distributor after the movie was made. Kitchell was turned down all over the place so he decided to distribute it himself.
That same confidence is reflected in his view of the Academy Awards nomination.
"I was expecting a nomination. I worried if we didn't get it, I would be disappointed and embarrassed," he says.
However, Kitchell doesn't think he fully accomplished what he set out to do with the film.
"I was trying to get at the essence of the '60s, which I thought was broader than the political. It was about a broad social transformation and at the same time a personal transformation. I was very much working that ying and yang between political and social change. I never got to the bottom of it."
The subject leaves plenty of room for another documentary but Kitchell says he isn't the one to make it.
"I hope to mount a film to look at people's garbage next. I think it will be fun," Kitchell says.
"I've had it with the '60s. I hope we win the Academy Award, and I can move on to other things. I've been in the '60s for 10 years."
by CNB