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John Yau (Rail): Would you talk about a movie you shot during the filming of Cool Hand Luke, but you only just finished?

Bruce Conner: It was in 1967. They were shooting a scene in Cool Hand Luke on a country road, California flatland, very much like the Southern environment where the story was supposed to take place. Dennis Hopper invited me to visit the set. He also asked the producer and the director if I could shoot some film of their location production on that day using my regular 8mm movie camera. They said fine and thought it would be worthwhile and fun, so that is what I did. I didn’t know exactly what I would confront except that they were supposed to have scenes of prisoners working on surfacing a road. I decided to shoot the film and edit it entirely inside the camera, so I would have to discover an opening shot. The film had two and a half minute running time if it was running at sound speed of twenty-four frames per second, I would try to find a concluding shot that hopefully would sum up everything. It was also an exercise in poverty filmmaking. Regular 8mm was being phased out and Super8 was being phased in. The equipment I had was therefore less expensive than anything else, and it fit my budget. I believe this production cost about three dollars, both for the film and processing. As I was riding to the location in a truck with one of the people working on the production itself, the first shot I took was of the sound truck. Then the camera zooms up to the distance where there are people moving behind some bushes, obviously on a road. I made the film about the environment around the actors and mostly off-camera, all the gaffers and camera people. It was a very active shoot because, as they were laying sand onto the black oiled road, they had to keep moving as the road became covered with sand. There were people making false smoke to simulate hot tar. I did a lot of single framing, particularly towards the beginning of the film, because I was able to get a Bolex regular 8 projector that would run at five frames per second and it was my intention to run it at that speed. Instead of being two and a half minutes long, it would be about fifteen minutes.

Rail: Can you say more about the film?

Conner: Well about two years ago, Patrick Gleeson, who has done soundtracks for some of my other films, more so than anybody else, said he wanted to do one more film and asked if I had any footage or finished film that could be the basis for him doing a soundtrack. I didn’t know that I had anything except a lot of unfinished film footage and I mentioned this particular film in 8mm. The film had been enlarged to 16mm years ago when the original footage went into the collection of the MoMA film archives. This was fortunate because regular 8 is so obsolete that nobody can print it anymore. We took that material and Patrick began composing and performing the music for the film. He decided it should be slower than five frames per second. So we did some trickery with digital equipment and got it down to three frames per second. Now it is twenty-two minutes long, and its got stereo sound, the benefit of working in digital. That is the way it will be seen. It won’t be on film.

Rail: In 1984, Peter Selz said you were about to finish a feature-length documentary about a gospel quartet called the Soul Stirrers?

Conner: It was called By and By.

Rail: What happened with that?

Conner: Well, in the last few weeks, I was nominated for a film and video fellowship with a program for media arts. They have $35,000 to give to about fifteen people and they have 120 nominees. I am applying to make a short film from the By and By footage. There is an enormous amount of paper that I need to fill out describing a sample excerpt, and how I would edit the footage that I have. Some of the footage is archival from the National Archives that will accompany music sung by R.H. Harris in the 1940s. He would be featured in this latter day version of By and By. Originally it was intended to be a feature length film, but it broke down because someone owned the arrangements for the Soul Stirrers’ songs—not the words or the songs—and they wanted so much money that we couldn’t afford it. Then my health became poor and it didn’t seem likely that I would be able to edit a feature length film. I closed the production and gave all the footage to the Film Arts Foundation since it helped raise money for the non-profit venture. Now Henry Rosenthal, who was co-producing with me in 1984, has the material and he hasn’t been able to raise any more money since he took it over ten years ago. So I chose to apply for a fellowship to try to at least make a film of a small segment of this production. There is a song the Soul Stirrers recorded in the forties called “His Eye is on the Sparrow.” I plan on editing it the way I did Valse Triste, using the existing music. I am proposing that it would be a 16mm film perhaps with a prologue of a few minutes. This song would be part of a version no longer than thirty minutes. The entire edit would focus on Harris, performing the first original Soul Stirrer singing style that he perfected that later was developed when Sam Cooke replaced him as the group’s lead singer. I would select music that would not be expensive for the film rights. I need to eliminate an enormous amount of footage that we shot of the reunion of the Soul Stirrers. That shoot had four cameras, stereo sound, and all the rest of it; I am dumping all that in order to do it economically.

Rail: In a 1967 issue of ArtForum, there is a piece by Thomas Garver called, “Bruce Conner makes a Sandwich.” It documents the making of a sandwich that includes bacon, Swiss cheese, banana, lettuce, bread, Miracle Whip, peanut butter, and butter. What was the genesis of that piece?

Conner: ArtNews had a regular series, with pieces like “Jean Dubuffet Makes a Painting.” It included the artist’s signature and photographs documenting the product being produced. As I saw it, it was a product being produced because the camera was there, and, when somebody is observing the performer’s action, that always alters things. I decided it would be interesting to submit an article to ArtNews about Bruce Conner making a peanut butter sandwich, peanut butter being one of my favorite foods and main standbys during periods of economic distress. I also decided that it should be compulsively and precisely detailed.

Rail: Yes, as in “Jean Conner, the artist’s wife is wearing sandals, black slacks, a flowered print blouse in blue, green, and white, and grey rimmed glasses,” and your son Robert is wearing “red tennis shoes, white socks, red corduroy trousers, a blue and white t-shirt.”

Conner: I asked Tom Garver to come to my apartment and take photographs as I built this sculpture and also while I ate it, which I didn’t tell him I was going to do. I set up a tape machine to record the entire process so we could time every action exactly to the second so that, in the article when it says the time is 11:35 and 10 seconds a certain action is happening. By timing the tape after the fact, it was possible to do that as precisely as possible. I then wrote the entire article. I wrote about building the sandwich and then about eating it. I asked Thomas to put his name on it because I knew ArtNews would not print it if it did not have an established, professional voyeur commenting and presenting the event. He said fine. However, he would not put his name to me eating the sandwich, which took place precisely at noon.

Rail: I wondered what happened to it.

Conner: It was easily consumed by the primary audience, but Thomas said it was obscene for an artist to eat his own artwork.

Rail: You once talked about a food show, which you described as including big sandwiches, and that it opened and closed in two hours.