(Everybody’s) Talkin’ About Harry Nilsson

Story by Bill Kopp

In fall 2010 fall the film documentary Who Is Harry Nilsson (And Why is Everybody Talkin’ About Him)? premiered in selected cities. The film came out on DVD around the holidays, with a great deal of bonus material added. I got a chance to have a wide-ranging conversation with John Scheinfeld, the writer/director of the film. Here’s Part One.

Bill Kopp: What initially attracted you to Harry Nilsson’s story?

John Scheinfeld: A few years ago, Lee Blackman, the attorney for Harry’s estate had seen some of my work. He wondered if I’d be interested in doing a documentary. I said, “Well, I know the music, but I don’t really know a lot about his life.” So I went off and did some research. And the more I read about this guy, it struck me that he was an extraordinarily gifted artist…and an extraordinarily complex human being. And to me those elements are the basic for a great film. So I said, “I’ve got to do this.”

It took awhile to get the money together; Lee did that, and he’s the Executive Producer on the film. And then we got started. So it was a combination of loving the music and finding it a very compelling story.

BK: The film features plenty of reminiscences from people who knew and loved Harry. Besides Lee Blackman, were there any of these people who were especially instrumental in helping to get this project off the ground?

JS: The creative concept here was to only talk to people that knew Harry. People who knew him intimately, who were there. People who saw things, experienced things, so that they could speak to his life and career with credibility and legitimacy. I didn’t want to talk to a rock journalist, or a writer, or historian, or cultural commentator. So, once we had the funding, we started to schedule interviews with people.

Whenever I do a film and decide who to interview, I treat it like casting. I want to have a broad range of people, an interesting range of people. I want people who have something to say, so that viewers will, hopefully, be captivated by what they’re talking about. And because this was the first film documentary done about Harry — because the people in his world weren’t receiving requests every couple of weeks to talk about Harry – they were just thrilled to talk about him. So in some ways this was one of the easier booking projects that I’ve had. People loved him so much, they were just thrilled to talk about him.

BK: That’s interesting. I suspect that if you’re talking to someone about a more well-known or well-covered figure, the people might already have ready answers for questions. They would have thought about it and crafted responses. In those situations, as genuine as they might want to be, their answers would be a little bit canned, a little glib.

JS: There was a spontaneous aspect to their responses. And I do my job as a filmmaker – I do my own interviews – to create an environment in which they feel comfortable talking. I don’t mean [dishing] dirt or anything; just an environment where they feel comfortable opening up. And with all of these people, it was easy. Because they had lots to say.

One of the things that struck me was just how much these people loved him. They loved him for what he was; they loved him in spite of the craziness and the self-destructiveness and all of the other things. What they saw in him was a sweet, generous, kind, good friend. And I think that one of the things that I set out to do here was to make a very nuanced, very richly-textured portrait of an artist.

As you see in the film, we don’t run away from the dark side. But nor do we unduly dwell on it. We wanted to show the whole human being. The best compliment I received on this film was from Una Nilsson, his widow. She said to me, “You got him. That’s the Harry I knew.” And presenting the memories of all of these people helped us to do that.

I think also, because of their affection for him, and the way in which they spoke about Harry, it was very emotional. And I think that communicates to the audience.

BK: It was a more human story than (as a documentary viewer) I’m used to seeing. Sure, there were aspects of his personality that were, so to speak, larger than life. But it was a human-scale story.

JS: That very much was my goal. When you have such great people as we had – everyone from Micky Dolenz, who’s so funny, to Jimmy Webb, who’s extraordinarily articulate, to Robin Williams and Brian Wilson, two of the Monty Pythons (Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam), Yoko Ono — all of these people, because they’re all so articulate and so expressive, it gave us so much to work with.

BK: This just occurred to me. In some ways, who he gravitated to as friends…that says something about a person. If you read the list of interviewees, even if you somehow knew who all those people were and didn’t know about Harry, you might say, “Gosh, I’m interested in this guy already.” He couldn’t help but be interesting.

JS: I think that’s right. Looking at it from my own perspective, one of the ways Harry first got on my radar was because he mattered to people who mattered to me. I was and am a huge fan of the Beatles. And the fact that they paid attention to this guy, that they pronounced to the world that this is an artist worth noticing…

BK: Yes, he was their “favorite group…”

JS: …So I wondered, what was it about Harry as an artist, and as a man, that appealed to these guys? That, to me, was fascinating. And it is part of what we explore in the film.

BK: Did you have the whole thing carefully storyboarded out ahead of time and then you followed that? Or did some parts expand and contract once you started putting them together? What I mean is, were there instances where you sort of though, “Okay, two minutes here on this topic,” and then once you got an interview going, you decided, “This needs more (or less) coverage”?

JS: That’s a really good question, and it speaks to the process of documentary filmmaking. You get a guy like Michael Moore; from my point of view, he decides what he’s going to do, he has an agenda, and he bends everything that he does to support that agenda.

From my standpoint, I don’t start out like that. I know what the general arc of the story is, but the first thing I do is schedule the interviews. I do my research, and I come up with my questions. We talk, and then you see what you get in the interviews. And this is what speaks to my process. I’m all about: Where does the truth lead me? Not: what’s my agenda, what do I think happened.

So once all or most of the interviews are done – and in this case we interviewed something like thirty people – there I sit down and say: what do I have from all of them? I go through all of the transcripts, and I highlight all of the sound bites that interest me to use in the film. Then I put a script together.

And what I mean by a script is not just what a narrator might say. In this film we didn’t have a narrator. By script I mean how we lay out the story. The story arcs, the character arcs, what scene follows what scene…that’s what writing the script is. Then we get to see what moments would be good cinematically.

You see part of that process on the DVD; we wanted to give some real value to people who buy the DVD. Always, in the process of making a film, you’ll start sequences, and for one reason or another – sometimes for time, sometimes because you don’t have all the photographs or film you’d need to illustrate a particular story – you end up abandoning some of those. What we were able to do here was go back and finish them up. And that became the bonus material. We have ninety-plus minutes of bonus material on the DVD; almost like another movie’s worth.

That, too, is part of the process. There was a sequence that killed me to cut, because it’s really funny and interesting. Harry made a career without ever getting onstage to perform a concert. And yet Terry Gilliam and Eric Idle told me a story of a time Harry did get onstage, with them. With Monty Python in New York in 1976. And what happened is such a “Harry” story. It pained me to trim it out of the actual film, but now we have a chance to show that sequence.

Bill Kopp: Watching all the interview clips that hold the film together, I’m impressed at how well they form the narrative and move the story along.

John Scheinfeld: The best way for me to describe it is this: If you go back to a birthday or a holiday when you were a kid, one of your relatives gave you a jigsaw puzzle. You opened up the box, and dumped out hundreds or thousands of pieces. And over a period of time — a week, a month, whatever — you fit the pieces together and they formed a pretty picture. The thing is, in a jigsaw puzzle, those pieces only fit together one way.

What I do, the pieces are sound bites, interviews, photographs, film clips, music. All of those things are the pieces with which I work. But I could fit those pieces together ten different ways. Fifty ways, a hundred ways. And how those pieces are fit together are what makes a film good, bad or ugly.

So if you come out of a theatre, and you say, “I did not like that movie!” then they didn’t fit the pieces together properly, and in a way that resonated with you on some level.

My goal is to put the pieces together in a way that (a) tells a story, (b) does so in a compelling and entertaining way and (c) looks like I spent no time whatsoever putting it together. Because then it has an effortless quality to it. Viewers won’t watch and ask, “Why did they do such-and-such?” They’ll just be into the story. That kind of flow is important to have in any kind of film.

BK: Successful filmmaking is the kind that doesn’t call attention to itself.

JS: Exactly. That’s how I approach an interview, too. I’ve seen a lot of interviewers who like to show how smart they are; they start debating things. When I do an interview, I know their time is precious. I ask the question and then get the heck out of the way and let ‘em talk. For a minute, five minutes; it doesn’t matter.

What happens very often — as you know — very often someone will say something that you maybe hadn’t figured on. And to be able to say, “Forget my list of questions; tell me about that” is a great thing. And in Who is Harry Nilsson and in my previous film The U.S. vs. John Lennon, that happened all the time.

BK: The list of contributing appearances is long and pretty exhaustive. Other than people who have passed on, like John Lennon, Keith Moon and Harry himself, you seem to have included anyone who’d come to mind when thinking of Harry. Were there people whom you wanted to include but that didn’t appear for one or another reason?

JS: Yes. Ringo.

You sort of feel like he’s in the film, because he is [via archival clips]. But we were not able to get a sit-down interview with him. That said, he and his people were very, very helpful to us providing audiovisual material, name-and-likeness, and giving us permission to use as much as we wanted from that great movie Son of Dracula. That had sat in Ringo’s vault since 1974. But he said, “Sure. Go ahead.”

Where the interview process came into it, we tried four different ways to get him, and what came back to us each time was that it was just too emotional for him. He doesn’t like talking in public about three people: John, George Harrison, and Harry. And so at the end of the day, we felt that we had to be very respectful of that.

But he was great in so many other ways. And with everybody else it was easy: “Yeah, we’d love to do that.” So we pretty much got everybody we wanted.

BK: I was ten when Son of Dracula came out in theatres. So my memories aren’t super-vivid. But for one reason or another – mostly likely Ringo’s involvement – I actually paid to see the film.

JS: So you’re the one! [laughs] Not many people saw it.

BK: That, as I understand, is something precious few people can claim, having seen the movie.

JS: Where did you see it?

BK: Atlanta, Georgia.

JS: That’s what I was going to guess. Because it only screened in three places. They did a big opening in Atlanta; Harry was there, Ringo was there. There are a couple of photographs from it in the film. Then they showed it in New York and London, and Ringo said, “That’s it.” And it never had a proper theatrical run. So you saw a very rare thing.

BK: It must have screened for a few days, because Harry and Ringo were not there when I saw it. Over the years, I’ve mentioned this to a few people, and gotten blank stares. Nobody’s heard of it: “There’s no such movie like that!”

In a lot of ways Son of Dracula seemed like a tangent in Harry’s career, more of an excuse to hang out with pals – like the Pussy Cats album with John — than to create some sort of enduring art. Is that your impression of the project or do you think there was more at work?

JS: I think it was that Ringo had an idea, Harry thought that would be fun – fun being the operative word – and they did it. Ringo found the money; I don’t know where the money really came from. There nominally was a director on it, but I think it was a bit of…hmm. Micky Dolenz talks about it; there was a lot of partying going on.

I don’t think Harry had any desire to be an actor; I don’t think that was in his skill set. Ringo, on the other hand, has proven that he has some talent as an actor.

BK: Ringo had done the Marc Bolan film project [Born to Boogie]; that was probably only about a year or so before this.

JS: Like Pussy Cats – and I think you’re right about that — sometimes when you’re a success as an artist or performer, something will come along where you get to work with the people that you love. And I think Son of Dracula was one of those projects.

BK: One of the things I saw in the film and was surprised and thrilled to see – was the Smothers Brothers talking on-the-record about the infamous Troubador incident.

JS: It is an incident in Harry’s and John’s life that keeps getting written about all the time. It seems to have become one of the more scandalous moments in rock history. So I thought it was important to take a look at what really happened that night. For example, there are a number of accounts I’ve read that actually confuse two nights and two incidents; it all sort of becomes one. It also says a lot about what was going on with Harry and John at that time. There was a lot of craziness going on. But again, I wanted to go where the truth took me.

So, May Pang, who was John’s girlfriend at the time: she was there. Van Dyke Parks: he was there. But better than that [laughs] let’s get the guys who were onstage getting heckled! And what’s so fascinating to me about that, is that it’s thirty-something years later, and Dick is still pissed about what they did that night! And Tommy – partly because Harry and John were his friends – he can look back on it and say, “Well, that was those guys.” Would he have chosen a different outcome for the evening? Yeah.

More to the point — and this is very important to me when I’m making a documentary film – my goal is to find the most rare and most appropriate audiovisual material available to tell the story. So in this case, not just generic shots of the Smothers Brothers, John and Harry. I found — after some looking — actual photographs taken at the Troubador that night.

BK: There’s a particular iconic shot, the one of Harry and John being thrown out. I’ve seen that one over and over again. And you didn’t use it.

JS: I try not to use the photos that everyone’s seen. I prefer to dig a little deeper. In Who is Harry Nilsson we have all kinds of rare photos and footage. We were granted generously by Sony access to their vault, so we have lots of photos of Harry in the studio, shots that have never been seen before. We have home movies from Micky Dolenz and Chip Douglas, and the family had material. All of this combines with the great story to really keep the audience engaged.

Harry did precious little television, so I needed all of it to illustrate things, to show him in performance. And there’s a clip in the film from Playboy After Dark.

BK: I recognized the set. Because I have bootlegs of a lot of those Playboy After Dark performances.

JS: Yeah. Hef’s always smoking a pipe, and Norm Crosby seems to always be there.

Anyway, I called up Playboy Enterprises, and explained who we are and what we’re doing. I said that we wanted to license the performances. And I dealt with this woman with a real attitude. She said, “Even if we would license you this material, it’s gonna cost you $12,000-$13,000 a minute. And you can’t afford that. So you may as well forget it.”

And I’m the wrong person to say that to. When I’m making a film, I can be…nice, but I can be relentless. I am also known in my circle for writing very passionate letters. So I wrote a Very Passionate Letter to Mr. Hefner, who I did not know. We Fedex’d it to the mansion.

About three days later we got a call from his number two person out here. “Hef got your letter. He thought Harry was a great artist. He loves his music. You can have whatever you want. No charge.”

John Scheinfeld: That’s very much the spirit that Harry Nilsson created. Even to the point that you see with his two record producers, Rick Gerard and Richard Perry. They loved the Harry that they knew back then. They are very proud of the work they did together. And they are both very unhappy with the way their working relationships ended. And it would have been very easy for them both to say, “John, I don’t want to do an interview.” To their credit, they came on camera, shared their memories, and we’re all better off for it.

You see the pain in both of them; Harry could be difficult. He could be impossible. He could do cruel things. But that was part of having a balanced portrait of this particular artist.

Bill Kopp: It’s a nuanced portrait. If it had been full of uncritical, effusive praise, I would have been bored. And it wouldn’t have rung true, because nobody’s perfect.

JS: With all of the interviews, you didn’t see anybody being all sweetness and light. They would tell you what they admired about Harry, and then they’d tell you some story where Harry was crazy.

The thing about Harry, he didn’t do many interviews…

BK: He wouldn’t have been much help anyway!

JS: Right! I found interviews where he’d tell the same story four different ways. And you never could get at the truth. I think a lot of people are that way. Stories are spun or embellished, or you tell them in a way that makes you look better. And that is part of the challenge of being a documentary filmmaker: to get all of the voices together and then figure out where the truth is.

BK: That’s what’s good about your interviews. These stories aren’t calcified, aren’t blown out of proportion by having been told over and over again.

JS: Sometimes you catch them not-quite-prepared to answer a question. One case was with Jimmy Webb. We were talking about the Pussy Cats sessions, when Harry was talking about having blood on the microphone. He had lost his voice. Jimmy thought about it, and remembered his reaction at the time. And then he couldn’t talk about it anymore. Too emotional. That was a very human moment.

And there was another one. I don’t think he would have anticipated the question, which was, “When was the last time you saw Harry?” And then he told this beautiful story about them being in the car. So it was all right there on the surface emotionally, because, as you say, they had not answered these questions ten times before. And they didn’t know what we were going to ask. Because I never submit questions in advance.

There’s a good example of going where the truth takes you. As a Beatles fan, I had grown up with the mythology that Yoko was the dragon lady that broke up the band. And that’s not true: John was really looking for a way out. But when we started out on The U.S. vs. John Lennon, I don’t think I knew the depth — the significance — of the love affair between the two of them. We were thinking we were going elsewhere with that story, but the more time we spent with Yoko and other people in their world, the more it became so clear that the love affair had to be an important part of that film.

BK: As far as Harry’s recordings go, I imagine you did some research there as well, and found some previously unearthed gems. The film from those Gordon Jenkins sessions…I didn’t even know that existed!

JS: It never aired in this country. And the BBC special In Concert aired once over there, and that was it. The superfans knew about this before; I didn’t. Because Nilsson Schmillson was so successful, when they went into the studio for the followup album –what came Son of Schmillson – RCA asked Richard Perry and Harry, “What can we do for you?” So they decided it would be fun to pay for a documentary crew to come in and shoot them making that album. And the irony is that it was somewhat like a Let it Be situation; instead of the making of an album, you got the deterioration of an artist and his relationship with his producer.

The cameras were there a lot during the making of the album. It was never finished; there was a rough cut made some time in the 70s. We learned that the rough footage was in a salt mine in Pennsylvania! Sony was quite helpful; we got about ten minutes of raw film that was transferred. So a lot of the studio stuff — with Harry and Richard and Ringo, and a young Peter Frampton, and Klaus Voormann and Ray Cooper – came from the film that was shot for this aborted documentary.

I’ll put this one to you: there’s one extraordinary photo in this film that speaks to Beatles fans. I found this photo and said, “This has to be in the movie.” Do you know the photo I’m talking about? It’s a Polaroid, shot at the beach house in Santa Monica…

BK: Yes! With Paul McCartney!

JS: Right. It’s a photo with Harry, Paul and John, and who is John talking to but Linda McCartney. And this, at a time when the prevailing knowledge was, “Oh, they’re not speaking.” So not only were they talking, they were hanging out with each other. And with Harry. He had the ability to bring all these people together.

BK: When I saw it, I wondered if it was from around the time when Paul showed up at the studio where John was, and Paul played drums. Stevie Wonder was there, Jesse Ed Davis…

JS: That’s all around this same time. The bootleg of it was called A Toot and a Snore.

BK: I have it.

JS: And “snore” is appropriate. It’s not very good.

BK: You listen to it once, and then you put it on the shelf.

JS: The media has a tendency to want to tell stories in a very simple way, to make everything black and white. Life is just not like that. So just as Yoko wasn’t the dragon lady, so true is it that John and Paul did talk to each other.

And that is one of the things that I’m very proud of about Who is Harry Nilsson: we have really textured storytelling that gets to the truth, but in an entertaining way.

BK: Beyond a fond appreciation for Harry the man and the artist, what would you like the “takeaway” for the viewer to be?

JS: The takeaway should be this: Here’s a guy – kind of a hip artist – who’s been under the radar because his career wasn’t all that long in the scheme of things; he died young. He missed the internet age in which his work could have spread everywhere. This is an artist worth knowing. This is an artist who created an extraordinary body of work that ought to be known to more people.

I was doing a lecture on documentary filmmaking, at an east coast college. One of the questions was, “What are you working on now?” I told them about Who is Harry Nilsson. And I don’t know about you, but I’d never been in a room where a hundred people were staring at me as if to say, “What are you talking about?” The name meant nothing to them.

So I said, “He did the theme song to this wonderful movie, a song called ‘Everybody’s Talkin’.” And a few heads nodded. And then I said, “And he did this goofy little song that was a hit in the 70s called ‘Coconut.’” And more heads nodded. And I told them about this great animated film The Point. More nods. I mentioned a few more hits, and got a few more nods. And when I told them, “And he wrote ‘One is the Loneliest Number,’” almost everyone said they knew that.

And I said, “See? You know the music, but you don’t know the man.” And we hope to remedy that with the film Who is Harry Nilsson.

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