John Klawitter shares his remembrance of working on films with Dad and visiting Ray and Charles Eames:
Mac and Charles and Ray and Glen and Me
By John Klawitter
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It was early spring of 1969 when I picked up world-famous artist-reporter Franklin McMahon, Sr. from his hotel near LAX and drove him in the family VW beetle the short way over to Charles Eames office in Venice. I was a young non-union writer/producer/director at the time, working as a sub-rosa filmmaker for Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. I was less than a year removed from my copywriter job in the Midwest to Los Angeles, and Franklin – passing through Los Angeles on his way from somewhere else in the world – wanted to show Eames a copy of “World Cities”, the documentary short he and I had created a year or so before, and Did I want to drive him over to show our film to Eames?, which, of course, I did.
For several years before this, back in Chicago, I’d been moonlighting from my job as a copywriter on Kellogg’s cereals and Nestles’ Chocolate Bars, working non-stop nights and weekends to create documentaries with Franklin. This was frowned on by my boss, a sharp-tongued creative director at the Leo Burnett Ad Agency, who told me I was to eat, sleep and defecate only Corn Flakes, and my moonlighting escapades ended abruptly when I got fired after Franklin and I won a Chicago Emmy for our political documentary ”Scene Politic”. I guess I deserved my fate: Looking back, the cover name “Jack Klawitter” wasn’t very effective, and it’s hard to stay underground once you win an EMMY. But sometimes one thing leads to another, and so here we were, sunroof open on the Beetle, chugging through the bright Southern California sunlight over to Venice to see Charles Eames, the very person who had designed a chair so famous his name was on it.
“901”, Eames’ place was called for short. The 901 building on Washington Boulevard. It had once been an automobile dealership; Charles and his wife and partner Ray had converted it into their place of business. Guests came in from the street to a showroom with glass roof panels, a pleasant indoor-outdoor space cluttered with a fortune in comfortable Eames chairs and forested with big ficus trees. Make your way through the greenery and you were cheerfully greeted and led to the much larger room where once cars for sale had been housed. Charles and Ray had seen the potential and turned this giant warehouse room into a fairyland of film production scenarios and carefully stacked historical artifacts. At that time, they were working on Toy Boats, the third of their toy series of documentary shorts (Toy Tops, and Toy Trains being the first two). They had dozens of rare, one-of-a-kind, little toy boats on loan from the Smithsonian. These ‘Toy’ films were lighthearted looks into a children’s world of fantasy and wonder, and while purporting to explain the difference between a ‘toy’ and a ‘model’ were actually a whimsical filmic dip into the beauty of such worlds.
Franklin’s informal meetings with Eames (and later my own when I was, among other things, the trailermaker at Disney Studios) were informally ritualistic; we would bring along our latest documentary or film short and Charles and Ray – or Glen Fleck, who was their ‘house’ producer and jack-of-all-trades – would run it on their 16 mm projector and we would talk about it. And then, time permitting, Eames would run one of their films. I remember Charles talking about his legendary “Powers of Ten”, how he thought the film said everything it needed to in black and white, although everybody seemed to be clamoring for color these days.
For our meeting, Charles had Glen Fleck, his producer, thread up “World Cities”, and it ran without anybody saying much of anything. Franklin – ‘Mac’, as his friends called him – had gotten the idea for “World Cities” from what he’d observed on his most recent travels around the globe. He had noticed what he thought might be a world-wide movement, particularly in underdeveloped countries in Africa and India and the Mideast, a movement of the populations from farms and rural farm areas to more compacted urban areas. This he saw as important on several levels, and history would prove – continues to prove – him right.
Eames nodded a time or two as the film ran to its end. “World’s getting filled up,” he said. “You know, we were in India for three months, back ten years ago, went all over the country. Even then, what we saw everywhere was a really big number of people. At least, it seemed like that to me.”
Mac nodded, “The world’s getting filled up.”
Eames looked off into the distance, thinking back on his time in India. “What had to strike you about that country: Not particularly that it was crowded, but there were so many different cultures! India is like a hundred countries stuck tight together in one, everybody getting along…sort of.”
“The English had a lot to do with that,” Franklin said.
“Yes. And for sure Alexander the Great, before the Brits.”
They were quiet for a while, Eames looking in the direction of a Pachinko game hanging on the wall. Franklin and I had been here before; I knew it had removable little wooden logs that were toned so when you shot a ball it played a little song as the ball bounced down from peg to peg to finally rest at the bottom. Anybody could change the pegs, but you didn’t want to: some of the greatest musical geniuses of the past decades had composed little jingles on that game. Move the little wooden pegs around and you might lose forever a Gershwin original show tune.
“You liked it?” Mac asked. “India?”
“Loved it,” Charles said, shaking his head as if he still couldn’t quite believe he’d been lucky enough to go there and experience all the things he had. “Fascinating. Unique. Visually so rich, things culturally new to me, excitement everywhere to see. We were there for three months. Went all over the country. So much tradition, and the history! Of course, unique in their approach, just how they see things. I learned so much! There are ways of thinking, marvels there that are hard for us to imagine. Things hopefully not ever to be lost as we all go crashing pell-mell into the future.”
Glen Fleck was rewinding Mac’s reel. He frowned and shook his head. He didn’t say anything. That wasn’t usual for him; Glen had a contentious mind of his own that sparkled with ideas that were like firecrackers going off. But he didn’t say anything and Eames was in another world, remembering, “When you’re there as a Westerner – as Ray and I were – so many new images assault you, everywhere you go. I mean, it’s not just the design – it’s everything! I’ll tell you, right now I’m remembering just one of a thousand of things that stood out, that still stand out as I look back: There was a ceremony of some sort in our honor. Our party – caravan, really – was way off in the wilds somewhere, maybe the northwest, more desert, primitive, not a place you think of when you think classic India. These people were the descendants of an ancient tribe and they made their own homemade brew, maybe fermented corn, and they passed it around, everybody take a sip and pass it on. Tribal, close, friendly. And we’re there, welcome guests. We’re outdoors, you know. There is a big fire, very smoky, and lots of the people gathered around in robes, like a biblical event, everybody standing around, and there’s a fellow on the other side of the fire and he has this rope and somehow it gets stiff and goes up in the air to nowhere and then another fellow unexpectedly jumps right through the fire and climbs the rope through the flames and smoke and I swear to God that man disappears! I mean, he just goes up there somewhere into thin air and he’s gone!”
“Wow,” I said. “Wish I’d seen that.”
Mac smiled and shook his head, I guess not knowing what to say, and Charles excused himself and went off to sign for a new FedEx shipment of something that was on loan from the Smithsonian.
After that, Mac and I were just sitting there, waiting for Glen to give us back the 16mm copy of “World Cities” that he was carefully rewinding from the projector.
“I was there, you know,” Glen said. “When the guy climbed the rope. We all were. Charles, Ray and me. With the representatives from the Indian government.”
“And did he really disappear?” I said.
“Oh, yeah. At least I think he did. I’m not sure we ever could agree for sure on that one. I mean, there was smoke stinging your eyes and the loud drums going on and the food was pretty bad, pass around the bowls and eat it with your fingers.”
“That must have been something different.” I was trying to be polite and to hide how jealous I felt. I’d have loved to have been there, to see that fellow jump through fire and climb a rope to disappear into the sky.
“Worst experience of my life,” Glen said. “Bugs everywhere, I got eaten alive. And that home-made booze? Awful, muddy, horrible, tasted like vomit. Made me want to throw up.”
“But the guy disappeared…” I said.
“Probably some gimmick,” Glen said. “I was so sick from the corn mash, to this day, I really don’t know.”
I drove Mac back to his hotel next to LAX. He’d be catching his flight back to Chicago that afternoon. He gave me a gift of a couple of sketches he’d drawn for “The Navajos Water The Desert” an educational documentary I had written and was producing for Hanna Barbera. Franklin McMahon, Sr. was like that; he’d heard I was doing the film and so he went out to New Mexico on his own to have a look for himself, and yes, the Navajos really were drilling water wells all over their reservation to bring up the ground water and grow some crops, and, Hey, Jack, here’s some sketches, if you can use them if they work for you.
“What do you think about the guy who disappeared up the rope?” I said.
Mac had the patience of a saint and he hadn’t said anything about Eames’ story, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been thinking about it, or that he just let things go. He grinned and gave me that cunning fox look of his, “Here’s my take-away, Jack: Two intelligent and decent fellows from our supposedly advanced Western Civilization are in the same place at the same time for the same happening.”
“Don’t forget, Ray was there, too.”
“Yes, this is true, but we haven’t heard from her. Charles and Glen, we know they are there at the same time and they see the same exact thing, and yet they come away with totally different feelings of what actually happened.” His smile faded a little, “And we think of ourselves as sentient beings, Jack. Now that makes you worry a little bit about who we are, you know, deep down – and where we’re all going, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah. Now that you mention it,” I said.
