Paris, France July 31, 1972
Marcel Ophuls quit French state-controlled television in 1968 following an abortive 15,000-employee strike for freedom of information. “I knew the censorship situation would become even worse than it was before,” he said. And it appears that he was right.
The man who refused to broadcast Ophuls’s extraordinary four-and-a-half-hour documentary “The Sorrow and the Pity” three years ago was just fired – for being too permissive. In his place, new Prime Minister Pierre Messmer appointed a 52-year-old hard-line Gaullist named Arthur Conte. And Conte’s first official act as director-general of the ORTF was to fire News Director Pierre Desgraupes who, according to the International Herald Tribune, “had been under attack for giving too much prominence to the political opposition and for producing an allegedly pessimistic view of France.”
Concern for the national morale has always dominated the thinking in French broadcasting, and it may become an issue in American public television as well. Justifying a de-emphasis on political documentaries on American public television this year, Hartford Gunn, president of the Public Broadcasting Service, said, “The country is suffering from a surfeit of problems, and I’m not sure we’d be doing anything constructive by simply raising more problems.”
But American public broadcasting has a long way to go before it sinks to the level of the ORTF, as Ophuls’s experiences with French television illustrate. And if Ophuls’s two-and-a-half years at the ORTF add up to a case-study of frustration under government-run communications, his film “The Sorrow and the Pity” nevertheless remains a very special case.
It was censored because it gave the lie to the Gaullist paradigm of a heroic France single-mindedly resisting the German Occupation. What is most significant about the film is not its notoriety, but its integrity – as journalism, as history, as art. Once the film was shown, the question became: How was it ever made?
I spoke with the director, whose gift for irony is impeccable in three languages, one evening late last month in New York. He was in the process of cutting his new documentary “A Sense of Loss,” which is about Northern Ireland and will be released this fall.
“The people who suggested that I make a film about the Irish situation may be surprised and possibly disappointed,” he said. “There is no analogy in my mind between French resistance to Nazism and Irish resistance to the British army. If ‘A Sense of Loss’ works, audiences will ask themselves whether it is worth it that children and men and women get bombed or shot by a sniper or by the British army or by the IRA for what is finally a national dispute. I have tried to find a way to dramatize the consequences of intolerance and sectarianism. Seeing war footage and hearing body counts on the news ultimately blunts the sensibilities, as we have learned. I have experimented with a different approach, and we shall see.”
Ophuls is 44 years old. His father was the late director Max Ophuls, whose films include “La Ronde” and Lola Montes.” The family lived in Frankfurt, Germany, until they left in 1933 because of Hitler. The Ophulses became French citizens and remained in Paris up to the fall of 1941, through the defeat which forms the early part of “The Sorrow and the Pity.”
“Since my father had become a French soldier, and was a Jew, and was politically involved – well, let’s say Dr. Goebbels was looking for him,” Ophuls said.
The family escaped to Spain and then to America, arriving in Southern California a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. While his father made films in Hollywood, Ophuls went to Hollywood High School and Occidental College, and after serving in the American army he returned to France to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. He began his career in the early fifties, working as an assistant director. By the sixties, he was making his own films, and in 1966 he went to work for French television.
Currently, he lives in Hamburg with his wife, who is German.
In the course of the following interview, Ophuls talks about the history and technique of “The Sorrow and the Pity,” his experiences at the ORTF and the BBC, and the education of a filmmaker.
What, really, was your political intention in “The Sorrow and the Pity?”
“The reasons we made the film are exactly the same reasons that French television refused to show it. It’s a debunking, a demystification of an official view of that period of French history, which I believe is not the true one. Let’s say the weights are shifted. The Gaullist government had very serious reasons for wanting to maintain that view of that particular period of history and, I must say, from DeGaulle’s own point of view, I understand. As a journalist or as a director, whatever you want to call it, I’m always shocked by any policy which deliberately suppresses any part of the truth. I think it’s shocking and ultimately I think it’s wrong. But one can understand from DeGaulle’s point of view that he wanted French society to forget about the shame, and in order to do this he was willing to make a gift of his own resistance to the French people. I’m sure that privately he would have agreed with ‘The Sorrow and the Pity.’ I’m certain of this. I know that most of the people around him, like Jacques Chaban-Delmas [the recently ousted Prime Minister], thoroughly agree with the film, but they did not agree that it would be good to tell the French that this version of history is the right one.”
Has Malraux commented on the film?
“His daughter, Florence, is an old friend of mine. When she talked to her father he had apparently seen a short exerpt and was not too happy with it. But she liked the film and told him to go and see it again.”
You intercut a series of remarkably candid interviews with segments and newsreels of the period which suggest that while some Frenchmen were, indeed, heroic in their resistance, others collaborated enthusiastically and still others remained as uninvolved as was humanly, or inhumanly, possible. Are you satisfied that you have presented an honest picture? Will you talk about the filming and editing technique you used?
“We did about 50 interviews and used about 40 of them. Obviously if you are going to make a documentary film centered about one family, the way Flaherty did in ‘The Man of Aran’ you can go and spend six months with the people, and then you can get them to act out their own lives – you don’t need interviews. Although by and large the interview technique is, I think, the most honest, because it gives people the freedom to react the way they wish and to tell you what they wish to tell you. You don’t put them into a situation which you have preconceived. You don’t make them act things which you think are part of their lives. If you want to do that, why not use actors?
“I meet someone for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour while we’re setting up the lights the way we do for a television news interview. Then I keep at it, shooting for – oh, Mendes-France, for instance, there’s 40 minutes of him in the film and the actual interview lasted seven hours. I think that in two or three hours you can develop a rapport with people and get them to talk, especially since you do have some reason for going to see them. You don’t go to see them without knowing anything about them. You must do your homework.
“The most interesting question has to do with the editing. It’s also the one that’s almost impossible to give an answer to. That’s the whole secret of the formula. It’s the game you play for, the jackpot that you try to get – coming up with a film that has beginning, a middle, and an end, a film which seems to tell a story and seems to have bridges from one scene to the next, and do all of this without ever doing a script. It’s a strenuous game, strenuous on the nervous system because obviously the crew, the people involved, must hang on to you for dear life.
“Obviously, you can’t go flying around like a bee from flower to flower without any preconceived notion at all, because then you wind up with 50 hours of rushes that just simply were never tied into each other. That’s always a big danger anyway. You have to know the facts, historical and political, which are easy to obtain because a lot of books have been written and there are archives and films. This is what you do during the preparation, and then you get your own slant, your own ideological and political slant, your own opinions of the subject you’re doing the film about.
“In ‘The Sorrow and the Pity,’ the very first problem confronting me was that I was going to make a film about the Occupation and the Resistance. That’s 50 million people. How do you grasp it? Then I had the very obvious idea, which is not a very creative idea at all, of centering on one town, and which, incidentally, we haven’t strictly adhered to. It was at least something to hang on to. No more than that. I think a couple of months of discussions went on (while we were still with French TV) about which would be the most shootable town. We chose Clermont-Ferand. Once you have that then the next thing is to find who had an interesting or particularly relevant story that is connected with Clermont. And this is how Mendes-France comes into it, or Dennis Rake, the homosexual English spy who was so brave. Or the German, Hoffman. They had all been in Clermont. When you’ve done your homework, then scripting in your head should start, but not too much because otherwise you start taking life out of the film instead of putting life in.
“Finally, you must, when interviewing and editing, be willing to allow the facts to contradict any of your preconceptions. Otherwise you’re a bad reporter and your film will be a deadborn child. This is what happens very frequently, especially in political films which usually suffer from the fact that the man who’s doing it wants to prove too much.
“I am very grateful to ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’ for adding to my own personal character. I think I was much more intolerant before I made the film than I was coming out of it. I think it taught me a lot about tolerance.”
“One nice thing about this method of filming is that the film takes over. After a while all you have to do is sit there, nod, listen and ask questions that don’t disturb the other man’s train of thought. Most modern non-fiction filmmakers detest the interview technique. It is almost the opposite of Cinema Verite. The great prejudice against it is usually that it is not visual, that it is talk and therefore not so graphic. But I think it’s very visual indeed to look at a man’s face, to see the flicker in his eyes when he decides he doesn’t quite want to hear the truth. Sometimes you can see it in the way he fidgets with a napkin, or the paper, or the way he takes a photo out of his pocket. I think that this idea that you have to show people in action rather than people talking about themselves is an old-fashioned one, and it also has to do with the fact that most documentary filmmakers are frustrated fiction film directors. They haven’t done films with actors and action and therefore they think they must get film direction into the documentary. This may be one of the reasons that I may have hit upon this method of filmmaking in a more relaxed manner and without prejudice – I’ve already made fiction films, and I hope I’ll make some again because I’m not that enthusiastic about documentaries anyway. They usually bore me.”
I was certainly not bored by “The Sorrow and the Pity,” and it lasted four-and-a-half hours.
“The fact that I’m very impatient and bored with documentaries may account for your not being bored when you see the final product, because I correct with my own boredom certain things that other people perhaps would not. What you so often get in documentaries is this aggressive notion of, ‘We are giving you the truth because we are filming real people in the street and working in the fields.’ The documentary school of the peasant woman with the black shawl against a heavy clouded sky. There’s always this very pretentious notion that you’d better sit still and see because we’re not showing you Spencer Tracy or Jean Gabin, we’re showing you the real thing so you’d better be patient. I don’t see why that should be any reason to be patient, just because it’s the real peasant instead of Jean Gabin. So I have the tendency in the editing room of treating the real peasant as though I had Jean Gabin.
“I did not intend ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’ to last four-and-a-half hours. I hope I’m not the type of filmmaker who’s arrogant enough to say, ‘You’d better sit still for all that time.’ Personally, I don’t think I would ever go and see a four-and-a-half-hour documentary film, especially after confessing to you I don’t like documentaries, no matter how many articles I read or reviews urging me to go and see it. The reason it’s that long is only because the distributors in France and America and the BBC, when they put it on British TV, felt that breaking it up into two parts, as was done on German television, had more drawbacks than advantages. Very down-to-earth ones. People might not come back for the second part. But this was completely out of my hands.
“What, then, was not out of my hands was that I worked on the first version, which was 15 hours long, and that was pretty interesting. The original rushes were 50 hours long and you just work down from there. Then I came to a point where I didn’t want to condense it any more because I would have taken things out which I think really belong.”
How long did you work on it, all told, and how much did it cost?
“It took about a year to make, and cost about $125,000.
“This kind of film can be made cheaply. If one could only convince the industry that you can get your money back, that it’s a profitable enterprise…. We used a very small crew – a cameraman, an assistant cameraman, a sound engineer, a chauffeur who was also an electrician. I had an assistant, too, because I’m getting old.”
Can you go back to the beginning, and recap how the film began in your mind – and how it finally managed to get shown?
“The idea came while I was still working for French television. My production unit had done a three-and-a-half-hour documentary, broadcast on two different evenings, about the Munich Agreement, and it was very successful. After that, we thought we would go on to deal with the Occupation. But then came the 1968 strike, and we were out on our ears. I went to work for German television, and about six months later I started the film.
“‘The Sorrow and the Pity’ was shown in Germany in the fall of 1969, and got fantastic reviews, and then we tried to sell it to the ORTF. Papers and magazines in Paris ran leading articles saying this was a film that must be shown, that if ever French television had a duty to perform, this was it. But the ORTF refused even to consider it. The director-general who was just fired, Jean-Jacques De Bresson, argued that it was a ‘German’ film, which of course was ridiculous. I am a Frenchman, even if I’m a naturalized one.
“When it seemed we had come to a stalemate, the producers lost interest, and I asked them to show it to some film critics like Truffaut, who is a friend of mine, thinking maybe we could bring it out as a motion picture. Truffaut was very influential in contacting a few important people in Paris, and eventually Louis Malle, the director, who has a small distribution firm and owns a couple of small movie theaters on the Left Bank, agreed to book it. Malle said, ‘Look, if you can get it past the censors – and I don’t have to spend any money on it, because it probably won’t go very far – and if we can show just the 16 mm. version, we’ll run it for a few weeks and see how it does.
“We squeezed it past the censors by a trick. It wasn’t a conscious trick, but it just happened that they got the reels mixed up, so when the censorship board saw the film, they saw it out of continuity, and it seemed very incoherent and boring, especially for four-and-a-half hours. So they thought, ‘Well, what harm can it do? Nobody will go to see it anyway,’ and they gave a neutral report on it. The matter then went up to the Minister of Culture, the man who succeeded Malraux, a centrist. I was in Hamburg at the time, but I suggested to my representative that she remind the Minister of Culture that during the ORTF strike, when he was a journalist, he had written in ‘Le Monde’ an article against censorship and for freedom of information, and I quoted the clipping, which I had saved for some reason. She took notes on it over the phone, and the next day she reminded him – a form of blackmail, I suppose. And he said, ‘Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Absolutely, and I still feel the same way.’ And that’s how we got past censorship.
“So – that was several years ago – the film then went into this very small Left Bank theater, and I came to Paris to work on the print. At 10 o’clock the morning of the opening, there were four people in the theater, two of them bums who were sleeping, and the usherettes were staging a revolt because they were afraid of not getting their tips.
“But after the first showing we went out into the street and it was black with people who were waiting to get in. It stayed that way for several months, after which, because they were refusing 500 people a day, they moved it to a big theater on the Champs Elysees and it was very successful. It is still playing in Paris.”
How much money did you make from it, if I may ask?
“Not very much. I was paid, on salary, only when I was working on the film. As a matter of fact, I am currently suing the producers.”
How did the film get to the BBC? Were they afraid of the controversy at all?
“Actually, I went to see the BBC program controller to sell something completely different, but he asked to see ‘The Sorrow and the Pity’ so I arranged a screening. I think he was not sure at all whether he should put it on the air, since it so happened that he had been, for many years, the BBC correspondent in Paris and many of his best friends were French journalists at the ORTF. But once the BBC decided to buy it, there was a fantastic effort to promote it, and they stood behind it all the way. They have been absolutely terrific. They subsidized the English version, which I supervised for them, and through that we were able to show it at the New York Film Festival, and that’s how we convinced an American distributor to take it.
“Not everybody’s happy with the English version, incidentally. A lot of people say that my method of having the translation done by people who act out the part to a certain extent is bothersome. John Simon said this. But, the alternatives are very limited. I did not see any possibility of having four-and-a-half hours of accented translation, so it was really a choice of no accents at all, or all French accents, or both. For reasons of variety, I decided that it would be good to have both, and it then was a question of who was to get an accent and who not. It seemed to me that an English voice on Mendes-France fitted very well because he is an intellectual, and the sort of things he talks about are sophisticated. But to put an English voice, or even an American voice, on the Grave brothers, for example, who are farmers, would have seemed wrong, wouldn’t it? So while I think that Simon’s point is perfectly valid, I would like to know what else I could have done?”
How would you compare working for the ORTF with working for the BBC?
“I was only at the BBC for a short time, and in a rather privileged position – working on the English version of my film. They are going to be my next employers, however, along with NET in America and German television. All three organizations will be co-producers of a film about France after the war. Your question is quite justified, though. Some years ago I had a long talk with the English director Peter Watkins, who did ‘The War Game,’ and Watkins maintained there was no significant difference. However, he hasn’t worked for the ORTF so…the grass is always greener and all that. In creative freedom one always likes to feel that the other fellow has it made.
“That being said, I will tell you: I was at the ORTF for two-and-a-half years, and I think that short of Franco’s Spain, the ORTF is about as far as you can get, at least in a so-called democracy, in censorship, government supervision, monopoly, and brutalization of public opinion.
“Let me tell you an anecdote. During the strike, everybody was talking about revolution, revolution – Marxist revolution, Leninist revolution, all kinds af revolution. The speakers on the platform, like all typical French intellectuals, were competing to see who could go farthest to the left. But then one day a very good French documentary maker, an older man, got on the platform, went up to the mike, and said very softly: ‘All I hear for the last two weeks is revolution. I don’t know. As far as I’m concerned, I’m on strike against French television, and I don’t know what is so revolutionary about that – about asking for French television, and for the French televiewer, what the BBC has had since 1927. That is, independence. Financial independence from the government and structural independence from the government.’
“Our strike platform at the time, which I had co-written, asked essentially for those things.”
But didn’t you and your colleagues at the ORTF find ways to get around the bureaucrats, at least some of the time? You are obviously resourceful people.
“Sure. When you have journalists, directors, writers, professional producers on one side and on the other side you have government administrators who will be delegated to this job for a few years and then go into the diplomatic service or something – you have an advantage. These administrators were not professionals. You could always tell them, ‘Well, yes, I’d like to oblige you. I’d like to cut this particular part of the interview, but you know there’s already sound over it and music and we’re supposed to go on the air tonight and we can’t do it.’ Since they couldn’t show you how to do it, they usually thought, ‘Well, I’ve done my job,’ and so they went off on weekends.
“There was a whole trick about some of these news-magazine shows that we had, trying not to be ready too early so the big boys would not have time to talk about it. Say, for instance, we were supposed to go on the air Tuesday. We’d try to have it not finished before Saturday, because on Saturday the gentlemen were going out to the country on weekends.
“If you worry about getting caught, if you start thinking about your own future, then, of course, you are immediately vulnerable to self-censorship. Not everybody does that. And besides, there are benefits to be reaped from not thinking about your immediate future – you then perhaps get a reputation as a franc-tireur, someone who takes risks, which also has advantages professionally.
“For example, during a strike at Citroen, a manager had, like General Patton, slapped the face of a striker and created an incident. The government didn’t want us to publicize this. But we did, and were written about as a result. Another example is a thing I did on neo-Nazis in Germany. It was in the year when the neo-Nazi party was gaining votes in the Bavarian elections. I did an interview with Willy Brandt’s son, who at the time was one of the radical students, and who had made a German film where he played a young boy during the Second World War. At one point he did a dance on the wreck of a submarine, wearing a bathing suit and the Iron Cross. I had used this clip from the film, which had been shown all over Germany, and the French Foreign Ministry objected to this because Willy Brandt was the German Foreign Minister and they did not want French TV to show his son in a ridiculous position, or bringing an anti-German message. I argued, but in that case the upshot was we had to take out the best shot, although we got to leave in another.”
How did you find yourself involved in the ORTF strike of 1968, and what were the circumstances that led up to it?
“The students gave the example when they went down into the streets and had a confrontation with the police. What happened was that all of a sudden the journalists and the people working on French TV were confronted with the evidence of their own lack of freedom in a very complete way, because the French government had imposed a blackout on all news concerning the student movement so that you had a very strange situation of people in Paris leaning out of their windows and seeing the barricades and the riots between the police and the students and then turning on the TV news and seeing DeGaulle’s official journey, I think at the time it was in Roumania.” [I have since learned that many Parisians were, during those days, listening to complete strike coverage…on Radio Netherlands. JN]
“Our own production unit was particularly in the middle of things because it so happened that weeks prior to these events, before the blackout, we had gone out to Nanterre to cover the very beginning of the student uprisings. So we were right in the middle of filming around Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the student movement when it snowballed and when it hit Paris. We just kept filming and then came the moment when we were working in the cutting room to get this onto the monthly news-magazine show. The director-general refused at first to put it on, and then all the television journalists said we will not go on the air unless that particular film is shown. That’s what started the strike.
“Then for 48 hours the government had to give ground. At that time they were already very shaky. DeGaulle had gone off to Baden-Baden in a helicopter and nobody knew if the government was going to stay through the crisis. So we put on this film that we had made. I had done the Night of the Barricades myself, and some colleagues of mine had done the other things, and there were interviews with Cohn-Bendit. It was put on the air and was a big national event for two hours and everybody watched it. Then the lid went on again. And so we went on strike.
“The strike lasted for six weeks, involving 15,000 people, and it was a really great experience because we were not striking for wages or for any kind of social security. We were striking – all of us, including secretaries and script girls and assistants and technicians – for freedom of information. But during that strike Pompidou got re-elected and we were disavowed by French public opinion, so we lost.”
And if you had won…?
“It’s really a financial matter, you see. You can have freedom in public television if the taxes for that television go directly to the broadcasting operation, the way what you pay for the use of public utilities goes directly to those utilities. But in France the television tax money goes to the government, and they pass it along with strings attached. The big excuse is that it takes more than direct taxes to finance French public television; and that the government must control the dispensation. This is untrue. You could, if you had to, simply augment the tax money that went directly to broadcasting.” [There are also a limited number of commercials on French television, of course, tightly controlled by the government. But perhaps not tightly enough. Recent payola-type scandals at the ORTF reportedly reached the highest levels of the administration. JN]
What became of your fellow strikers?
“Oh, most of them are working again on French TV. Yes, there was a wave of firings, but this is rather a complicated matter. There are very few contracts on French TV. It’s a Machiavellian thing – you can only fire someone you have hired and it is much better politically not to fire but simply to cease employment. And the way around that is not to have steady contracts. So that only certain ‘personalities,’ the news presentators, have actual contracts. The producers, the directors, the writers, people like myself, never had contracts. We worked on a weekly basis, or on a show basis, so when employment ceased it was very simple. You had no program to work for. The only actual firings that took place were the news presentators, the Walter Cronkites, because they were so-called statute employees, they had a life contract with TV and they got fired but re-hired later when the heat was off. That was the famous 250 or so journalists who were taken off the public payroll.
“As for me, I quit. It was easy for me because I speak German and English as well as French. And during the strike, when I saw that we were losing, I had left France for two weeks and secured my next job, gotten a contract with German TV. I would certainly not say that my colleagues, who were not in that position, are in any way to blame. When you have a monopoly in a country, that’s your only means of expression. Either you work for that monopoly…or you don’t work.”
How does one become a director? Did your father help you along the way?
“When my father found out I left the Sorbonne, he was furious because he did not think film was a career for a serious man, and I agreed. He was always defensive about being in it himself. There are many more serious and honorable important things to do in life. Our only excuse is that because the Ophulses have this unsentimental and unromantic attitude toward show business, we separate ourselves from the bullshit. Anyway, he was very dissatisfied and he never wanted to use me in one of his pictures until years later when I became an experienced assistant director. He always said, ‘You make your mistakes with the other guys, not with me.’ He never made a phone call or anything to help me. On the contrary, whenever other directors would say to him, ‘I hear your son is an assistant director. Is he worth anything? Should I take him?’ he would say, ‘Don’t. No. He doesn’t know anything.’ He was a tough man.
“So I did about 14 or 15 pictures as an assistant. I think I was a very bad assistant, it was a very dull job. I worked for a couple of people that I thought were interesting, from whom I learned something – one of them was John Huston. This was in the early fifties. And then my father finally took me as the low man on the totem pole in ‘Lola Montes.’ I was one of the assistants, and I must say this was a treat. I learned much in that film and enjoyed myself…in spite of the fact that it was a tragic film, tragic for my father. He died a year later and I think that ‘Lola Montes’ had a lot to do with his death. It just completely wore him out.
“After that, I suddenly found myself on a dead-end street because anything connected with the name Ophuls or ‘Lola Montes’ was out. I couldn’t get another job. Since I had met a girl during the filming of ‘Lola Montes,’ a German girl, and had married her, I needed work. I took contracts with German radio in Baden-Baden, and started to direct radio plays, mostly. I did that for three years. Then I was fed up, so I went back to Paris without a job and with a family.
“By that time the new wave had broken and people I had met before, like Chabrol and especially Truffaut, were suddenly the toasts of the town. Truffaut helped me. He had me meet Jeanne Moreau. That was the time when producers thought, foolishly, that anybody who was young was better than the old directors and anybody who wanted to make a first film had more of a commercial chance than somebody who had already made a film. That’s how I eventually made ‘Banana Peel, with Moreau and Belmondo. After that I made a few other films I’d rather not talk about. I had to do them to keep the pot boiling, and to make money. It was a mistake, that’s all.
“Two or three years later, I was again without a job. I met a girl at a party who said, ‘Why don’t you work for French television?’ I said I didn’t want to work for French television because I don’t think it’s a good outfit to work for politically. She said, ‘Yes, but 15,000 people work there. There must be some people that you would like to work with.’ I said that as a matter of fact there was something on the second network, a couple of people who are doing good work. She arranged a meeting with them, and that’s how I got into French television.
“My first job was to do these 15- or 20-minute stories which were just straight reportage, and I was the only director. But working with journalists, I found that their job was much more interesting than the job I was doing. After a while, I said why can’t I do both – why can’t I ask questions as well as direct. This was a very relaxed crew, and they let me go ahead.
“I wasn’t well paid, and I was in conflict with the administrators all the time, but that was part of the sport. I think in some ways that was the nicest period of my life.”
Received in New York on August 7, 1972
©1972 Jack Nessel
Jack Nessel is an Alicia Patterson Foundation award winner on leave from NEW YORK Magazine. This article may be published with credit to Mr. Nessel, NEW YORK Magazine, and the Alicia Patterson Foundation.
