By Mike Sula
A few weeks later a videotape arrived in the mail. “I was just told that this guy was interested in getting my opinion of this film his dad made,” says Spitz. He popped the tape in his VCR and found himself watching a soundless 28-minute color film. Titled Navaho Boy and set in a gorgeous desert landscape, it appeared at first to be an ethnographic documentary about a family of Native Americans–not actors–going about their daily business: weaving, brushing their hair, preparing food. Despite its still brilliant color, Spitz suspected the movie was old.
Bill Kennedy, a 58-year-old lifelong Chicago suburbanite, owes his consuming interest in the American west to his father. Robert Kennedy was an entrepreneur and aspiring filmmaker whose own fascination began after he retired from his auto repair business in the late 40s and enrolled in the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California. Bill Kennedy was a young boy at the time, but he remembers that shortly after his father graduated in the early 50s, he hired his teacher, a filmmaker named Rex Fleming, and the two headed for the reservation to work on the film Spitz had seen, Navaho Boy: The Monument Valley Story. Over the next 13 years Robert Kennedy made commercials and educational films, but Navaho Boy was special. As a successful businessman, Kennedy was often asked to speak to schools and chambers of commerce. He would show the film and narrate while the projector ran, explaining the ceremony and the lifestyle of the Navajos.
“I said the film had a lot of beautiful qualities but more than anything the people in it are comfortable on camera,” says Spitz. “They look like they’ve done this before. If any of them are still alive you might have a real interesting documentary.” At the time he didn’t put much stock in McGrew’s letter. “When I read that I thought it was nuts,” he says. “What’s a ‘Happy Cly’? I was totally skeptical of the whole thing and I just dismissed it.”
Spitz went on to Berkeley, where he played football, but he left school during his junior year. “I knew I wanted to get involved in film. I just wasn’t sure which area of the business I wanted to be in.” Back in LA he spent a lot of time at a health club where one of his regular racquetball partners was game-show impresario Chuck Barris, celebrated host of The Gong Show. “The joke between my brother and best friend and I was that we could play Chuck Barris whenever we wanted because he was always looking for exercise, but we would never lose because he was so awful. He would hustle his ass off and we would just kill him.”
“All the people I met in Hollywood that I admired were always much older and they all came from Brooklyn or Chicago. They had real experiences and something of a foundation. They had a grounding and real relationships and I couldn’t see any of that taking place in Hollywood. It just seemed too phony. It seemed like if you’re going to work in the studio system you’re going to be living in a walled city. And the walls are there to keep people out. I really wanted to have a real life and experiences with all kinds of people. I wanted to look into the gritty realities of urban life. So I applied to graduate schools because I wanted to get out of there.”
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He enrolled at the U. of C. and started on his research. After two years, his old friend Barris coughed up a grant of $10,000 and Spitz found other funders as well. Six months later he turned out a half-hour documentary on Roosevelt that aired on Channel Seven and won a local Emmy. His next project profiled nonprofit housing organizations, and after that came From the Bottom Up, about “people trying to improve the blighted areas they live in,” says Spitz. “I wanted to make another film about people who felt like they were starting something that was really important. I met people like that; they themselves were really interesting and they told great stories. It’s that kind of people’s history that comes from the bottom up that’s really valuable, that you can’t find in books. That project really set me on a course. It opened up all kinds of doors and I wound up doing more of these stories about this kind of activism.” He also began working for his subjects, making promotional videos. “When you have a story to tell and need a way to tell it to funders and others who can get involved, that’s basically what I’ve been doing.”
