Aiyana Elliott Documents Her Father, Ramblin' Jack

Aiyana Elliott

I'm a resident of Seattle, WA, which, thanks to Paul Allen's EMP museum, is the current epicenter of the VH1-ification of rock history and the Epcot Center-ismification of popular culture. As such, I am doubly pleased to encounter a music-based documentary film that's dynamic, emotionally compelling and interesting visually. It's easily the best film Kris Kristofferson has ever been in. I spoke with Aiyana Elliott recently.

When did you first become aware that your father was something more than an ordinary father, that he was this infamous musician?

Well, I was born on the road, so when I was a week old I went to see my dad perform. And when I was two weeks old I went to Nashville to join him in the recording studio. So I was always aware of what he did and that it was different from what other people did, the people in the audience. But I think it was the Rolling Thunder Review that really brought it all home. It was a wonderful tour Dylan put together in 1975, where everyone brought along their kids. Bob's daughter Anna taught me how to make a worm out of a wrinkled straw sleeve. I taught her how to blow the sleeve across the bar. We spent a lot of time in bars.

A lot of the film is trying to plainly present your father's musical importance, to redress the image of him as just "the link between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan."

Yeah, it's tough, because I think that's really followed him around his whole life. He can't do an interview without being asked about Bob and Woody and he's so much more than that.

What do you think is the most important thing he learned from Woody Guthrie?

There's no question that there's a lot of Woody Guthrie in Jack Elliott, but I'm not so sure it was all learned. Neither cared a fig for self-promotion or commercial success. Both are unpredictable and unmanageable and brutally honest. Both are inept family men and gifted sketch artists. I think Jack saw in Woody someone who was both like him and like what he wanted to be. There was a tremendous amount of admiration there. Woody sounds like an incredible man. I wish I'd met him. But I suppose I kind of have, through Jack?he does Woody Guthrie better than Woody Guthrie. Wavy Gravy calls Jack the Lee Strasberg of the Lone Prairie [a version of a method folk singer]. I love that!

Nowadays every movie has at least one accompanying CD, but the soundtrack you and Dick Dahl [the film's cowriter and coproducer and singer in the band Stratotanker] compiled for Fantasy is a cool odds-and-ends document of R.J. in and of itself. And was it tough to do any of it because your dad hates record labels?

His mistrust of people in the record business is so great that when Dick and I were producing the record, it extended to us. In the end we devised a way to structure the record deal that made him very happy. All the people who contributed material were very generous. Another wonderful addition to the soundtrack is "Take Me Home," the duet Jack performed with Johnny Cash on The Johnny Cash Show. Johnny wrote the song especially for Jack, but Jack was having trouble remembering it all and improvised parts. I think they sound great together. The recording of Jack playing with Woody Guthrie was an amazing find. No one hasd ever heard a recording of them together before; it's beautiful.

The film began as a class project?

When I was in film school at NYU I had to do a profile on someone for a video class and my dad happened to be playing a gig in the area that week. So Tyler Brodie and I went to the gig and shot this piece. When it was done, I got a lot of encouragement from the kids at NYU to do a feature film on Jack. Later Tyler Brodie established Plantain Films, which financed the movie.

I read that your dad has a lifelong distaste for cameras. How did he react to his daughter and a crew following him around with a camera?

Badly. He was kicking and screaming every step of the way. He still is. A lot of people have tried to make documentaries on my father, D.A. Pennebaker among them. He's an impossible subject, a wild horse refusing to be saddled; I just stuck it out.

How did you get so many different media?digital video, Super 8, still pictures and 16 mm?to come together, and how do you edit 150 hours of footage?

I started out shooting Hi8, but that was pretty unstable, so I switched to 16 mm. But that didn't work because a roll of film is 12 minutes long and my dad's stories are usually about 19 minutes long. By then, they had developed digital video, which saved our butts. Then I wanted to shoot Super 8 to correspond with the old home movies I was finding. There was just so much footage. I shot over 100 hours and then I kept uncovering other footage, too. I hadn't even seen the home movies with me and my mom until we were about four months into editing. Yeah, it was arduous.

Obviously the film addresses your relationship with your father; I'm curious as to what your own editing process was like?if there was a need to establish boundaries, if some stuff was too painful to deal with.

I did not want to make a personal film. I was trying to be as objective as I could. I was researching the evolution of folk music in America and trying to contextualize my dad's work. And then we shot this interview with my mom. It was just me and Dick [Dahl] sitting on my mom's front porch across the street from La Laguna de Santa Maria del Oro?where she lived in Mexico?and she was just very open, talking to us as she would to her daughter, about what it was like for me growing up as a kid with Jack on the road, telling us things I didn't even remember. [Co-editor] David Baum took one look at that interview and it changed the whole direction of the film. Getting that personal was very painful. But I wanted the story to resonate with people on an emotional level, to bring the history to life.

How did you handle it?

I had three nervous breakdowns.

What are the most interesting things you learned about your father while making this film?

Every time I talk to him he tells me some amazing new tale. Today he told me a story about how when he was in college he rode his bicycle all the way from Brooklyn, NY, to Westport, CT, not having trained or anything, just on a whim, to visit his friend Dad Forbes. When he got there he ate a big plate of spaghetti and meatballs and then threw up. That night he had to share a bed with Dad Forbes, whose feet stank. That was 50 years ago. He remembers everything and he's done everything. He is an amazing repository of American history. My film just barely scratches the surface. Someone should be following him around with a tape recorder, because the most fantastic things are spilling out of him. He is an American treasure, if a grumpy one.

Was it difficult to get Jack to stay on a certain subject?

A Herculean task, beyond my abilities. When Jack is telling a story in the film we frequently cut away. In almost every place where we cut, we have extracted a 20- to 40-minute tangent. They don't call him Ramblin' because he travels.

On the film's website you say that you're trying to present "the kind of experiences a lot of people of my generation had growing up in the 1970's, the children of parents who were trying to escape their roots."

I grew up in California, an only child with eccentric parents who provided little structure or tradition. I think a lot of people who moved to California in the 60s were trying to forge a new life, but our case was extreme. My parents were fugitives from their past. My dad ran away to become a cowboy and my mom to become an Indian. She's spent the past 15 years living in Mexico apprenticing to be a shaman with the Huichole Indians. My name is American Indian. I didn't know any of my parents' relatives; and now that I do, I know why. They were protecting me. But as a kid all I wanted was a normal family. I wanted it so bad. I still do.

The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack runs Aug. 16-29 at Film Forum, 209 W. Houston St. (betw. 6th Ave. & Varick St.), 727-8110.