'Gimme Shelter,' 'Grey Gardens' Director Albert Maysles Dies at 88
Albert Maysles, who collaborated along with his late brother David in a documentary film career which included the classic 1970 documentary Gimme Shelter, has died.
The director died on Thursday of natural causes, Stacey Farrar, marketing director at the Maysles Center in New York, confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter.
Gimme Shelter stood in stark and more enduring counterpoint to the myth of the documentary Woodstock, a depiction of the glorified free concert whose own dark-side was left out in its pre-conceived, celebratory style.
Their most controversial film, Grey Gardens (1975) was a profile of Jacqueline Onassis’ eccentric aunt who lived in a dilapidated, cat-packed estate in East Hampton. The brothers worked with Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyter on Grey Gardens. Just prior to Gimme Shelter, David and Albert Maysles filmed Salesman (1969), covering six weeks in the lives of four Bible salesmen.
The brothers, who preferred the moniker of filmmaker rather than director, often focused on musical figures. They also made the Monterey Pop, about the celebrated Monterey Pop festival, featuring electrifying performances from Jimmy Hendrix and Janis Joplin. Prior to Gimme Shelter, where they succeeded Haskell Wexler as the production’s directors, the Maysles had shot documentaries on other musical groups and entertainers.
READ MORE: TCM Classic Film Fest: Albert Maysles on Freeing Cameras, Capturing Truths (Video)
During that early period of their career, Charlotte Zwerin joined them, and they collaborated on such “direct cinemas as What’s Happening! - The Beatles in the U.S.A. (CBS), With Love From Truman - a Visit with Truman Capote (NET) and Meet Marlon Brando, which premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1966. For TV in 1968, they made Vladimir Horowitz: The Last Romantic. And the following year, shot Horowitz Plays Mozart for TV.
“People are people. We’re out to discover what is going on behind the scenes and get as close as we can to what is happening,” he said of their cinematic style. They were often emotional reactions to their films. Fans applauded them for the trust they developed with their subjects, allowing them to reveal long repressed feelings or telling insights. Their direct cinema non-style - subject caught by a hand-held camera and a shotgun mike - was in the documentary tradition of such documentarians as Frederick Wiseman.
However, cinema verite “purists,” argued that the Maysles sometimes exploited the content, particularly in regard to the flashback/omniscient editing of Gimme Shelter, where their flashback storytelling had created a dramatic foreboding and “imposed” a narrative on the Stones’ concert tour.
The trailer for Gimme Shelter, which was released in 1970.
Flashbacking from Mick Jagger reviewing their footage, with Altamont’s horrific memory in the recent past, Gimme Shelter punctuated a feeling of dread as the events moved inexorably to the tour’s cataclysmic end. Originally, the “free concert” was planned to happen in the mind-state of San Francisco but logistics soon went askew and it ended up in the Northern California hinterlands, at the Altamont Speedway. Muddled by inadequate planning and the darkness at the fringes of the peace/love zeitgeist, the concert was a ghoulish nightmare with a man getting shot not far from where the Stones performed on stage.
Admittedly, the Maysles straddled a line between artistic license and non-fiction narrative. “Al and Dave often argue that all they’re doing is filming what’s there. The detail is comment: fingers scratching, soft focusing. A filmmaker is always making comments,” Haskell Wexler opined in a Village Voice article on their career. More recently, Maysles shot Lalee’s Kin: A Legacy of Cotton for HBO, a depiction of rural poverty in the Mississippi Delta, which Maysles created with Susan Froemke and Deborah Dickson.
In addition, Maysles had filmed half-hour portraits of filmmakers, including Martin Scorsese, Robert Duvall and Jane Campion.
In recent years, their films have been released on home video, including: Salesman, Grey Gardens, Christo’s Valley Curtain, Running Fence and Islands.
Albert Maysles was born Nov. 26, 1926 in Boston but raised in Brookline Mass. He got a B.A. a Syracuse University and an M.A. at Boston University, where he subsequently taught. During World War II, he was stationed at the U.S. Army’s Headquarters Intelligence School in Oberammergau, Germany.
In the mid-’50s, Maysles traveled to Russia where he made a film on mental health care, psychiatry in Russia (1955). The film was shown on NBC’s Today Show and by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
In 1957, the brothers began working as a team. They traveled from Munich to Moscow by motorcycle and made a film about the Polish student revolution, Youth in Poland, which was televised on NBC. Next, they worked on an experimental TV for Time Inc, with Maysles shooting Primary and Yanqui No!
In 1962, they formed their own company. They made Showman, a portrait of movie magnate Joseph E, Levine, which brought them attention. The film was acclaimed on the festival circuit, but the Maysles later dubbed it an “expensive resume.” They subsequently won a Guggenheim Fellowship in Experimental Film.
