Rereleasing "Shane."

DATE August 16, 2000 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Journalist Naomi Klein discusses the global reach of
multinational corporations, the impact on culture and society and
the protest movement that's resulted
BARBARA BOGAEV, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev, in for Terry Gross.

The national protest movement that has gathered in Los Angeles this week for
the Democratic Convention, first coalesced at the meeting of the World Trade
Organization in Seattle last year. Though the movement has become an umbrella
group for many causes, its initial impetus was to protest the oppressive
impact of global corporations on the lives of workers and the environment.
Canadian journalist Naomi Klein is the author of "No Logo," a book which
examines the corporate policies that are often targeted by the demonstrators.
In "No Logo," Klein looks at the omnipresence of corporate brands and logos
and how they're invading almost every aspect of our lives. She alleges that
corporations have increased their use of contract labor at home and low wage
labor in developing countries to pay for the corporate restructuring branding
requires. Naomi Klein is a syndicated columnist in the Globe & Mail. Her
writing has appeared in such publications as The Village Voice and The New
York Times. The term brand used to mean a logo or a name of a product;
Wonder Bread for instance. Naomi Klein says that branding has evolved into
something else entirely.

Ms. NAOMI KLEIN: The brand used to tell us something about the product.
That was the main purpose that a brand played in the economy, to help us as
consumers distinguish from one product to the next. Now what's happening is
that brands are now sort of free-floating ideas in the culture. And what
companies do is they try to find ideas that are meaningful to us--say a
community, in the case of Starbucks, the idea of sports in the case of Nike,
or the idea of global communication in the case of Microsoft. And then their
job as global brands is to essentially promote that idea. And this is
changing the way companies are organizing themselves, because it's become very
expensive to build a truly powerful brand because to build a truly powerful
brand, what you need to do is you need to build a kind of palatial superstore
and maybe launch a lifestyle magazine to go with it, and you'll try to get
your brand into all kinds of Hollywood movies. And what's happening is that
the cost of producing the traditional products is being kind of off-loaded,
and it's largely being off-loaded into the developing world through a web of
contract factories. And the idea is that it's no longer really worth the
trouble to produce your own products, because what customers buy and value are
these ideas that we're all longing for meaning. And that's part of the reason
why branding is so successful.

BOGAEV: I think that's what's both the insidious part of this story and also
the really brilliant part, that branding didn't come out of nowhere, but is
rather responding to something in culture; that people look to consumer goods
for nourishment, for philosophy, for a lifestyle that they don't find
somewhere else.

Ms. KLEIN: That's absolutely true. And the quintessential branding success
story, it's no longer a success story. But they really pioneered this
corporate model with Nike, and they did it by coming up with an idea, which
was this idea of `Just Do It.' It was more than a slogan, it was a
philosophy, a life philosophy that they sent out there in the '80s. And it
resonated with young people. And I believe it resonated with young people not
because they're stupid and they're drones and they can't think for themselves,
but because Nike was speaking to young people in this language of empowerment,
telling them--giving them a positive message. And they weren't getting that
message, for whatever reason, from their communities, from their families.

The traditional purveyors of meaning and the culture are kind of collapsing
and these corporations are stepping in to fill the gap. But where it becomes
insidious is that there is a betrayal inherent in this equation. Because I
don't believe that Nike truly is selling young people empowerment. What
they're actually selling young people are sneakers, no matter what sort of
transcendent rhetoric they decide to use. So I also believe that branding is
creating its own backlash in a way, by selling us our deepest longings and
then, of course, not delivering, because how could they? And in a sense I
think that it's a very dangerous--it's very dangerous to play with emotions
that run this deep.

BOGAEV: Branding really took off in the '80s, the mid-'80s, and that was also
a time of deregulation and privatization and this global marketing strategy
does take place in the context of political change. What opportunities did
that climate open up for corporations taking the branding path?

Ms. KLEIN: Well, the branding explosion really is, as you say, a convergence
of several major international forces. One of them was simply that free
trade was taking off in the '80s and it was suddenly possible to produce your
goods in these contract factories around the world. It became a lot easier to
contract out the act of manufacturing, and there were all sorts of
deregulatory initiatives--the creation of free trade zones, maquiladoras,
which lifted tariffs and made it easier to import your own product. So on the
one hand, it was made easier. On the other hand, government was pulling
out of the public sector in various ways.

What a brand needs most, if it's to become powerful, is fresh space to express
its brand meaning. Because being an idea is very amorphous, so once you
decide that you are about the idea of community or the idea of sports or the
idea of rock 'n' roll, what you then have to do is you then have to find
cultural surfaces on which to express that meaning, or else you'll just float
away into nothingness. And it's been very convenient for the branding economy
that at the same time as companies have come to this realization that it's
more profitable to sell an idea than to sell a product, our public schools
have also been starved of public funding. Our community centers have been
starved of public funding. The arts have been starved of funding. So there
was this convergence of a need for new revenue sources in the school system
and the arts. And there was this merger of the public with the brand, where
it seemed like a pretty good deal at the time. `We need a new space to
express our brand meaning, we need new sources of brand meaning, and you need
money, so why don't we help each other out?'

But what has started to happen is that branding has really overwhelmed public
space and public culture to the point of almost eclipsing it. And I think in
some ways we're seeing an incredible metaphor for that this week in Los
Angeles where there's all this activity around the Staples Center, and it's
sort of taken for granted, of course, that we would be having a political
convention inside this corporate branded space. And so we have politics
itself being enclosed, the ultimate public's fear of being closed within the
private corporate logo.

BOGAEV: What are the cultural effects of this; of having Molson concerts, and
Pepsi-sponsored schools and a Staples-sponsored arena?

Ms. KLEIN: Well, I think there are lots of simultaneous effects. But one of
them is that I think a lot of--particularly young people are growing up with
what I describe in the book as global claustrophobia, a sense of everything
being enclosed in some way by branding, whether it's your own body with these
fashions that turn you into a Tommy Hilfiger life-size action figure, or
having your music concerts be a brand extension for Mentos or something like
that. There's a sense of claustrophobia that there's no place left, there's
no uncolonized space. And I think that that is leading to a desire for
release. And we're seeing that desire for release expressed in lots of ways.
I think rave culture is expressing that desire, extreme desire for release. I
think extreme sports expresses that desire for release.

But I also think we're seeing a burgeoning political culture which is about
reclaiming public space from corporations. And we're seeing it around the
world, and I think we're seeing it in Los Angeles this week, where this wave
of activism is--is going after politicians, by going after the corporations
that fund them and trying to turn politics from a corporate gain to a public
gain, and again seize that most public of spaces, politics itself, democracy
itself.

BOGAEV: Now you've investigated many of the free trade zones, or what are
called export processing zones where multinational companies' products are
manufactured now in the global economy. And these are the sweatshops that are
spurring on the protest. Help me understand, first of all, the fallout for
labor as a result of a global-driven economy. Because as I understand it, it
was always cheaper to produce goods in developing countries with cheap labor.
How is the branding economy, or the globalization spurring this on?

Ms. KLEIN: Well, it was always cheaper, but it wasn't always quite so easy.
What globalization, the kind of globe--and I don't want to lump in all
globalization because I think that we have a particular kind of globalization
which is about deregulation. And what it has done is it has created
denationalized states within nations, where goods are being produced basically
in extralegal situations. I mean, what are the maquiladoras, what are the
free trade zones? Well, what they are, they are walled-in industrial parks
where the rules that a country has democratically chosen for itself about how
much taxes corporations should pay and what sort of tariffs they should pay on
import and export--these rules are suspended for this piece of land where
these goods are being produced. So it's all about facilitating this process,
and heaping on incentives.

So, for instance, I spent a lot of time in the free trade zone in the
Philippines, where corporations were given a five-year tax holiday. So
obviously it's much easier to produce your goods when you're not paying any
taxes at all. And then what starts to happen is that countries start
competing against one another and Bangladesh says, `Well, if you're giving
these companies a five-year tax holiday, then we'll give them a 10-year tax
holiday.' So when the global economy is explained to us by cheerleaders of the
system, they say, `Well, these jobs are--yes, they're difficult, but they are
the first stage in development, and they're going to get better.' But what's
actually happening is they're getting worse, because so many countries are
playing this game of setting up these free trade zones, these denationalized
enclaves within their nations where they suspend their own laws--is that we're
seeing this very rapid race to the bottom, where minimum wage is dropping in
many situations, where you have to heap on ever more incentives in order to
compete against your neighbor.

BOGAEV: What were working conditions like in the free trade zone that you
visited in the Philippines, outside of Manila?

Ms. KLEIN: Well, I went to this free trade zone, and it's the largest free
trade zone in the Philippines. It's called the Caveat Export Processing
Zone(ph), because there had just been a very tragic incident where a worker
had died, and all of her colleagues said that she died of overwork. She died
on International Women's Day, actually. And I started researching her
particular case. And what had happened is that, because these factories are
all run by--not by companies like Nike and The Gap, but rather they're run by
subcontractors who take orders from companies like Nike and The Gap and
Reebok, they often get these incredible bottlenecks where they have huge
orders that are due from several different clients all at once, and then
workers will often work 48 hours in a row, and that's what had happened in
this case. And the worker had gotten pneumonia, which is very common inside
the free trade zones because they're very, very hot during the day, and then
at night when workers stay there's a lot of condensation because the
temperature drops. And she got pneumonia, and she'd asked to go to the
doctor, and she had not been given permission because they had this incredible
order that they had to meet. And she eventually collapsed on the job and died
at the hospital.

So--and when I went to this free trade zone, I found that this was not an
exceptional case. And the message that I got from workers over and over
again was, `What happened to that worker could've happened to any of us,
because these are the types of hours we're working, these incredibly intense
schedules.' And many of them are from the countryside and they were drawn to
these factories with promises that they would be able to make enough money to
send home to their families who'd been displaced. And, of course, what they
were finding was just the opposite, that they were making barely enough money
to have two meals a day. So there was an incredible exploitation and there
was also a lot of desire on the part of the workers who I met, that they felt
that consumers who were buying these goods for these exorbitant prices needed
to know the conditions under which their goods were being produced. And I see
these free trade zones, these export processing zones, as sort of the broom
closets of our shiny brand-name economy.

BOGAEV: Naomi Klein is my guest. She writes a nationally syndicated column
which appears in the Globe & Mail. She's the author of "No Logo," a cultural
analysis of global marketing strategies. We'll talk more after a break.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BOGAEV: If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist Naomi Klein. Her
book about the global economy and its cultural fallout is "No Logo."

Now your work has made you something of a spokesperson for the anti-corporate
protest movement. And I think a lot of people's image of the protests were,
of course, shaped by the demonstrations against the World Trade Organization
in Seattle, in which the protesters appeared to have no central organization
or clear agenda. What about this idea of a lack of coherence in the movement,
that it's quite diverse, that the protesters don't have a core philosophy
around which they organize?

Ms. KLEIN: Well, what I've been tracking for the past five years for the
book is a shift in activist tactics essentially. Where we have all these
issues that activists are concerned with--environment issues, labor issues,
and the like. And traditionally the way you achieve political change is you
go after your own government. You go after politicians. But there's been
this kind of global consensus that's emerged, which has said basically, it's
not even worth going after politicians anymore, they're so beholden to
corporate interests; that if you really want to achieve political change, you
have to go after the corporations directly. And what they've found is that
using brand image can be enormously effective. Many of these companies have
made a concerted decision that their product is going to be their brand image,
which leaves them very, very vulnerable to attacks on their brand. So this
has been happening around the world.

I first started noticing it when labor activists in the United States decided
to put the sweatshop issue, which they well knew was not confined to a
particular company like Nike or it wasn't confined to a particular celebrity
like Kathie Lee Gifford, but they also knew that it was very hard to get these
issues into the media, to even get people talking about globalization
critically. So what they started to do is they started latching on to this
celebrity of brands, like Nike, and the celebrity of celebrities, like Kathie
Lee Gifford, who had themselves become brands, to get these issues on the
agenda. Then that started to happen with other issues as well, like
genetically engineered foods. Campaigners in Britain started going after the
supermarkets that sold genetically engineered food products, or brand name
food companies like Nestle. And that also achieved very powerful results.

And now what's happening is that all these individual campaigns are converging
in these mass protests, like what happened in Seattle. So the protests are
very confusing to look at from the outside, because it looks as if there's no
center whatsoever, and I think that's absolutely true. Because this protest
movement, I believe, can be best understood as a physical manifestation of the
Internet, that all these activists have linked up with each other
internationally on the Internet and created these little mini campaigns around
corporations and around issues and have come to the conclusion, through a very
sort of organic cross-pollination process online, that there is this common
agenda, that all of these campaigns are dealing with global deregulation and
increased corporate power. And so they've converged in these sort of
celebratory, sometimes riotous, protests that don't look anything like a mass
protest we've seen before.

So police don't know how to react, they don't know how to control it because
it's very cell-based. There's no central leadership. Journalists don't know
how to write about it because it does look like the '60s. There's no Abbie
Hoffman and, you know, it doesn't--there are very few sort of celebrity
leaders who can put a face to it and make it media friendly. So it is
confusing. But I think that's not a weakness of this movement. I think that
every mass movement of the past has suffered because of its central
organization, because of its celebrity-based leadership. Sometimes you suffer
simply because your leadership gets shot; sometimes you suffer because your
leadership is corrupt. But this movement is so organic and so much like the
Internet that, like the Internet itself, it's almost impossible to control it.
It just keeps spreading all over the world.

BOGAEV: How effective is it, though? And I'm thinking the one part of the
equation that's missing is that, yes, there's a criticism of globalization, or
a certain vision of no-holds-barred free trade. There's the idea that trade
must be regulated or linked to democratic reform and labor reform or
environment protections. But the ties don't exist between these protesters
that we see in Seattle and Philadelphia, and now in Los Angeles, and a larger
labor movement.

Ms. KLEIN: Well, you're absolutely right. And what this activism doesn't
have is a plan about how to take power, how to take this criticism--because
all movements begin with the criticism, but how to take that criticism and
turn it into a practical alternative plan. Part of it is that it's so very
vast. I mean, we understand how to act on a national scale. But what this is
about is a kind of activism that has emerged precisely to be as transnational
as capital itself. It's an anti-corporate movement that is responding to
the globalization of capital and the deregulation of capital. And so it is
itself attempting to be as international as the monetary flows.

Now how do you organize across national borders into something coherent and
something that could get serious about putting your critique into action and
taking power? And I think we're at the very early stages of trying to figure
that out. Some of that is actually starting to happen around the conventions.
For instance, yes, there will be people yelling and screaming in the streets
and trying to get their voices heard that way, but then there's also these
parallel shadow conventions, which are an attempt to mirror the process of a
political convention, the process of developing a political agenda with the
issues that have just fallen off the agenda. The organizers of the shadow
convention believe that it's because these issues all in some way threaten
corporate profits, whether it's challenging the privatization of the prison
system or demanding campaign finance reform or looking seriously at the
growing gap between rich and poor. So they're developing a parallel political
structure which is getting serious about power, which is, you know, the early
stages of possibly creating another party, I don't know. And then you have
Ralph Nader's leadership bid, which is also part of this movement, I believe.
So I wouldn't write it off yet, but it definitely has its challenges.

BOGAEV: Naomi Klein, is the author of "No Logo." We'll continue our
conversation in the second half of our show.

I'm Barbara Bogaev, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BOGAEV: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev.

Let's continue now with our interview with Naomi Klein. She's the author of
"No Logo," a look at the corporate marketing strategy of branding and its
cultural and political implications. She describes the protest movement,
which grew out of the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle and
has continued up until this week's Democratic National Convention in Los
Angeles, as an anti-branding backlash. I asked her if she feels this new
movement's strategies and techniques are effective.

Ms. KLEIN: There are few tracts of protests, a few forms of protests
happening. And I think the Shadow Conventions are an important development in
that area where you have the protests on the streets but then you also have
some people getting very serious about power inside. So I think that that's
learning from some of the weaknesses of previous mass demonstrations.

And I also think that the use of branding, which I call in the book the brand
boomerang effect, has proven enormously effective in the sense, you know, that
this type of activism hasn't even really been on the public radar for a year
yet and people are already to write it off. And I think it's far too soon for
that. We've seen, for instance, how the anti-sweatshop activism has
companies like Nike on the run, has extracted some incredible reforms from
universities where universities have drafted codes of conduct for the types of
working conditions that are acceptable to them for the production of their
athletic gear, for instance. So there have been real victories.

There have been victories around genetic engineering, calls for labeling
across Europe and victories in that way as well. So the question really to me
is whether all these very focused campaigns can verge into an alternative
vision for what globalization should look like. And I think it's too soon to
decide whether that can happen.

BOGAEV: You do write about one popular technique of some protest groups,
which is called culture jamming. And that, as I understand it--or as I've
seen it, is kind of a parodying or turning the advertising hype against
itself. Could you give us some examples of how groups are doing that?

Ms. KLEIN: Well, there's actually a magazine in Canada called Adbusters
that's solely devoted to parodying advertising. There's some really good
ones. There's ones that parody Tommy Hilfiger ads where they sort of dress up
sheep in Tommy Hilfiger clothing. There's some really good parodies of the
Think Different campaign from Apple. I've seen actually imagines from Seattle
of protesters clashing with riot police and the caption is, `Think really
different.' So it's just kind of turning the knob just a little bit and
changing the--sort of flipping the meaning of an advertising campaign against
itself so that it carries an unintended message.

But I believe that culture jamming is part of a move by--not all young people
by any means, but by a growing group of young people to reclaim their minds
and reclaim their schools and their spaces and their bodies from marketing.
And this occurs in a cultural backdrop where we've come to fetishize wealth
creation above all else. It was interesting. George Bush said--he said
something interesting last week. He said that the Republican Party was gonna
be about prosperity with purpose. And what was that purpose? It was keeping
America prosperous; the idea that money is an end in itself, that money is the
message. And I think there's a growing dissatisfaction with that.

You know, looking at what's going on in pop culture, like with "Who Wants to
be a Millionaire" and "Survivor" and in rap music where young people are
confronted with this idea that music is not about artistic expression, but
it's about having wealth and it's about being able to buy a Mercedes and drink
champaign on a yacht like Bill Gates--I mean, the fetishization of wealth has
reach truly absurd proportions.

And so one of the things that I feel really hopeful about is that you have
this generation, who a lot of people have written off as being so branded that
they couldn't possibly have a political bone in their body. These are the
kids who grew up with commercials in their classrooms, who are supposed to
aspire to nothing more than to be a dot-com millionaire by the time they're
18. And they're saying to the politicians, you know, `We do want space that
isn't colonized by corporations.'

BOGAEV: Naomi Klein, thank you so much for talking today on FRESH AIR.

Ms. KLEIN: It's great to be here.

BOGAEV: Naomi Klein's book is "No Logo."

Coming up, we remember the Western classic "Shane." It's just been reissued
on DVD. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: George Stevens Jr. discusses the movie "Shane" which
is now out in DVD with restored color and sound
BARBARA BOGAEV, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Barbara Bogaev.

According to director Sam Peckinpah, the 1952 classic "Shane" was the best
Western ever made. He said it changed violence in Westerns forever. The
movie, directed by George Stevens, won an Academy Award for best
cinematography in 1953. It's now out in DVD with restored color and sound and
a commentary track by the director's son, George Stevens Jr., talking with the
associate director of the movie, Ivan Moffat.

The film follows the adventure of a lone gunman, Shane, played by Alan Ladd,
as he turns in his six-shooter to help out the Starrett family, homesteaders
in the Wyoming wilderness, who are embroiled in a confrontation with a gang of
local land barons. Although Shane tries to leave his violent past behind him,
he comes to the aid of the homesteaders and picks up his guns once again. By
the end of the film, Shane rides off into the sunset a lone rider once again.

(Soundbite of "Shane")

Mr. ALAN LADD (Shane): I gotta be going on.

BRANDON DE WILDE (Jody Starrett): Why, Shane?

Mr. LADD: Man has to be what he is, Jody. I can't break the mold. I tried
it. It didn't work for me.

DE WILDE: We want you, Shane.

Mr. LADD: Jody, there's no living with the killing. There's no going back
for more. Right or wrong, it's a brand of sticks. There's no going back.
Now you run on home to your mother and tell her everything's all right and
there aren't any more guns in the valley.

(End of soundbite)

BOGAEV: George Stevens was one of the leading directors of his era. His
films include "The Diary of Anne Frank," "A Place in the Sun" and "Giant."
George Stevens Jr. started working with his father on films when he was 17.
He went on to become the founder and director of the American Film Institute,
where he produced documentaries, awards galas including the Kennedy Center
Honors and was behind the restoration of many film classics, including his
father's works. Stevens also produced and directed a documentary about his
father's life, "George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey." Stevens had read
Jack Schaefer's novel "Shane" as a young teen-ager. I asked him if he was the
person who introduced his father to the story.

Mr. GEORGE STEVENS Jr. (Founder, American Film Institute): I believe I was.
I was working with him that summer. It was my first job really. And I had
two jobs. One was to, quote, "break down Theodore Dreiser's an "American
Tragedy," listing all the incidents and scenes and characters because my
father was preparing to work on the script of the movie based on that novel
that became "A Place in the Sun" with Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor
and Shelley Winters. And the other part of my job was to read material that
came from the studio, Paramount, books and scripts. And there were a lot of,
what I remember as a 17-year-old, what I disdainfully called love stories.
They didn't interest me. But I did read Jack Schaefer's small novel.

And the next night I went in my father's bedroom and he was in bed, and I
said, you know, `This is a really good story.' I said, `I think you ought to
read it.' And he said, `Tell me the story.' And so I remember pacing around
his bedroom, trying to tell him the story of Shane. And, of course, I told it
as a 17-year-old would see it and he added levels and dimensions that made it
into a quite extraordinary film.

BOGAEV: What do you think he saw in the movie? And I'm thinking that your
father made "Shane" after coming home from World War II.

Mr. STEVENS: Yeah, he talked about coming home from war. He'd been away for
three and a half, four years, and his combat motion picture unit--they'd been
at D-Day and the liberation of Paris and the liberation of the concentration
camp at Dachau. And he's seen a lot of combat. And he came home and had seen
one movie in four years. And he started going and looking at pictures. And
he saw Westerns and he said they were using six guns like they were guitars.
You know, they'd shoot at people and they'd fall down and they'd get up again
and start shooting. And one thing he wanted to do in this film was to show
the power of a single bullet and what it does to the human form. And that, of
course, was done so memorably in the scene in front of the saloon where Jack
Palance shoots the little Southerner played by Elisha Cook Jr.

BOGAEV: Well, when people get shot in Westerns, I notice they usually fell
forward before "Shane." They'd kind of fall on their face. And in that scene
and in the two other scenes--there are only three scenes in which people get
shot in "Shane"--people fall background really violently. It's such a
different effect. That must have been a big break with tradition. Did your
father use any kind of trick, technique to make people fall so fast backwards?

Mr. STEVENS: Well, I remember the day that scene was shot. It was meant to
be shot on a Saturday and the street wasn't wet enough. So we called off
shooting and my father had them water the street all night--that little street
in front of that, you know, town with buildings only on one side. And they
buried a mattress in this muddy street, and they put a harness around Elisha
Cook's chest and connected it to a wire and had three strong prop men or grips
holding the handles on the wire. And when he was shot, they pulled him and he
snapped back and fell into the mud.

BOGAEV: Did you father also experiment with the sound of gunshots?

Mr. STEVENS: Yes. He, you know, had them shooting guns in trash barrels,
you know, to give the sound a kind of veracity that a gun can have. I mean,
today it sounds quaint really to think back today where the Dolby sound and
sounds are so exaggerated and, you know, it's so deafening to go to a movie
theater and watch the previews, but then this was a real enhancement of the
sound. And to use it only occasionally, it had such an impact when it was the
first gunshot you heard in the film--actually the second. There's a little
scene where Shane is teaching Jody, the little boy, how to shoot, but very
little gun play. But when it comes, it's very dramatic.

BOGAEV: The Wyoming landscape in the movie is so pervasive. It's almost as
if it's a character in the film. I'm curious how conscious your father was in
the cinematography and setting shots up that those Wyoming mountains would
have such presence in every shot possible.

Mr. STEVENS: I remember when we flew up to scout locations. And we'd drive
out in station wagons and Dad would walk along, you know, the hills and in the
valley in front of those Teton Mountains until he found just the right place.
And part of it was that there was two trees on a hill that kind of became a
signature that every time horses came through those trees and down the hill,
you immediately knew you were headed for town. And then the town was built on
the street in front of the Tetons. And he used long photo-length lenses to
photograph much of "Shane," including the scenes of the actors in just normal
scenes, not in landscape scenes, that had the effect of pulling those three
Teton peaks up closer and it gave them that looming presence over the scenes
that were taking place in front of it.

BOGAEV: I love Jack Palance in this film, just brilliant casting. He was a
New York stage actor then. Had he even been out West before showing up to
shoot "Shane"?

Mr. STEVENS: You know, I don't know if he'd been out West. He was in a very
good film called "Panic in the Streets," that Elia Kazan directed. And Kazan,
obviously, had seen Palance in the theater. But when he came out to work on
this film, Jack Palance was then a rather mysterious man, and he had these
extraordinary dark looks. And even on days when he wasn't called to work,
Jack would be out on the set. And he'd be doing two things. One, he'd be
getting on and off his horse--the horse he'd been given to use in the film.
And he would be standing and drawing his pistol out of his holster. And day
by day, he would do that. And after a couple months, the Western experts that
we had, the cowboys out there said his fast draw was in a league with the
best. And he brought to it such--he worked hard on the role and brought to it
such a menace that I think it's really an extraordinary performance. And it
showed signs that he was going to be an important actor in the future.

BOGAEV: You said he was a mysterious man. Is that how you felt about him
when you met him?

Mr. STEVENS: Well, he was. He was big and, you know, unusual looking. But
as you got to know him, he was, you know--and as we've seen later, like the
Billy Crystal movie and other things, he's a man with a wonderful sense of
humor. But I think he was into that role. I think that he's a method actor.
And he was out there night and day living as a gunfighter.

BOGAEV: Let's talk about the costumes. How strict was your father about
period detail in "Shane," in just all areas of the film?

Mr. STEVENS: He wrote a memo to the crew, particularly to the production
designers, the costumers--he didn't really like the word costumes. He used to
call it clothing, because he thought costumes kind of led people to be
elaborate. And he said that if somebody came from another planet and landed
on the set, that we'd like them to feel that this was Wyoming in 1879. And I
remember Van Heflin had a shirt that he'd worn in another film where he played
Jim Bridger, a Western figure, and he wanted to wear this shirt. And he
brought it in and showed it to Dad. And Dad looked at the label and it said
Abercrombie & Fitch. And it was a very contemporary-looking shirt. And if
you look at "Shane"--and incidentally the restored print that is used to make
this DVD, you know, the color and texture are back--the clothes are worn. The
people didn't go to the store every day, and they wore clothes till they wore
out. And I think it gives a great sense of reality to what life was like for
the homesteaders out in Wyoming in that time.

BOGAEV: My guest is George Stevens Jr. He's the founder of the American Film
Institute and the son of the late director George Stevens, whose movies
include "I Remember Mama," "A Place in the Sun," "Giant," and "Shane."
"Shane" has just been released on DVD. The DVD version includes commentary
from George Stevens Jr., who worked with his father on the film.

Let's take break, and then we'll talk some more. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

BOGAEV: We've back with George Stevens Jr. He's the founder of the American
Film Institute. His father was the director of such movies as "Giant," "A
Place in the Sun," and the Western classic "Shane." "Shane" is just out on
DVD.

I'd like to talk about the restoration of "Shane." But first you should
probably explain that "Shane" was shot with something called a three strip
Technicolor process, which was new way back when in the '50s. What did that
process involve and involve for the shooting?

Mr. STEVENS: The three strip Technicolor process relied upon huge cameras.
You know, they were big cameras so that three strips of film could run through
them parallel at the same time. And then you had to put the sound blimps so
the noisy camera didn't interfere with the dialogue. And so there were these
large cameras. And when you think of the fight scenes in "Shane" and all of
those--you know, in the saloon with so many small cuts that this was not as it
is today, a cinematographer with a camera on his shoulder grabbing little
pieces of film. Each one was moving this big camera around and setting it put
and lighting it. Again, the film speed was much slower today, so it needed
more light.

But the result was that with the three strips of film going through the
camera, representing the different colors, they were later combined to make
the color film. Later on, Eastman developed a process which is used today, a
single strip process for color film, but this was in the days of the three
strip Technicolor. And most people feel that nothing has matched the quality
and the wonderful resolution of color that the Technicolor process had.

BOGAEV: Now when you worked on the restoration of the picture--I know you've
produced documentaries about your father. You certainly thought long and hard
about your father and his techniques. Were there any surprises or new angles
or new insights into his technique that you noticed?

Mr. STEVENS: I'll tell you one thing. You have to be careful when your
preserving a film because the technology is so good now--you can do so much
with sound, you can do much with color. Fortunately, "Shane" is a picture
that's been part of my life since it was made and I know what it looks like,
and I know what it's supposed to sound like. I worry about technicians 'cause
there was one stage when the technicians had done some sound work. They'd
cleaned up the sound, sonically cleaned the sound, and they took life out of
it. They took the sound of the creek that's gurgling in the background out.
So people who take on the responsibility of preserving films have to remember
that their job is to try and restore the film as close to what the original
filmmaker produced, not to get little ideas of their own and say, `Oh, I'm
going to make it better or different.'

BOGAEV: My guest is George Stevens Jr. He's the son of the great, late
director George Stevens, director of such films as "I Remember Mama," "A Place
in the Sun," "Giant" and "Shane." "Shane" is just out on DVD. George Stevens
Jr. has a commentary on the new DVD restored version and worked on the
restoration.

After you worked with your father on "Shane," on "Giant," on a number of his
films, on "The Diary of Anne Frank," you worked in television in your own
right. You worked for Jack Webb for awhile on "Dragnet." Now how cool is
that? What did you do?

Mr. STEVENS: That was great. I'd just gotten out of the Air Force--I'd been
a motion picture officer in the Air Force--and I needed a job. And I was
fortunate to get a job with Jack Webb, who then was making the hottest show on
television, "Dragnet," in which he starred as Sergeant Joe Friday. And I
worked with Jack on another series he did called "Pete Kelly's Blues" and two
movies that he made. And Jack was at the other end of the spectrum from my
father in his approach to his work. They both did fine work. But Jack
was--Dad shot a lot of film, shot a lot of angles, took his time. Jack was
Mr. Efficiency. He even used TelePrompTers. He and Ben Alexander, the other
character, would do so skillfully they'd have them stuck in the sets and
they'd shoot 10 pages of dialogue in three hours. So it was a wonderful
learning experience for me to work with Jack.

BOGAEV: Was that seductive for you then to see this other end of the
spectrum?

Mr. STEVENS: It was. It was. I always was more drawn to my father's way of
doing it, but I learned and it enabled me to, you know, direct "Alfred
Hitchcock Presents" and "Peter Gunn" and the shows that I directed with an
efficiency that I wouldn't have learned from my father in the latter stages of
his career.

BOGAEV: You founded the American Film Institute in 1967. Was the initial
mission of the institute to restore and preserve film?

Mr. STEVENS: It was. It really had several. One was film education and
training, the preservation of films and the exhibition of films. And at the
time we started it, half the films that had been made since the beginning of
film in the United States were lost, missing or had been destroyed. And it
was a huge job to try and rescue these missing films. And then we were
thinking about the films of the teens and the '20s and the '30s. What never
occurred to me was that while we were doing that work, that what were then
quite recent films like "Shane" and "A Place in the Sun" were deteriorating in
the studio library. And I find out later on that here I am restoring the
films of my father's that never occurred to me would be in danger. But the
AFI effort at film preservation and restoration I think was a very significant
act because it wasn't that the AFI did it all, but the AFI was able to
energize and give focus to the other museums and archives who were willing to
do the work and were doing good work.

BOGAEV: George Stevens Jr., thanks so much for taking the time to talk with
us today.

Mr. STEVENS: Well, I enjoyed it. It was a great pleasure.

BOGAEV: George Stevens Jr. is the founder of the American Film Institute.
He provides commentary on the new DVD reissue of his father's 1952 Western
"Shane."

(Soundbite of "Shane")

(Soundbite of music; door shutting)

DE WILDE: Pa's got things for you to do. And Mother wants you. I know she
does. Shane!

(Soundbite of music)

DE WILDE: Shane! Come back!

(Closing credits)

BOGAEV: For Terry Gross, I'm Barbara Bogaev.
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