10 Things I Learned: Town Bloody Hall
In memory of D. A. Pennebaker (1925–2019)
1.
The great documentary filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker was motivated to shoot by curiosity. He loved music and friendship, and he had an understanding that everything he filmed recorded histories both personal and cultural: Robert Kennedy and Sammy Davis Jr. singing “Jingle Bells” to New York City schoolchildren (Jingle Bells); Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour, his last as an acoustic artist (Dont Look Back); and Otis Redding at the Monterey International Pop Festival in 1967, six months before his tragic death (Monterey Pop). When his friend Norman Mailer asked him to film the “Dialogue on Women’s Liberation,” a debate at New York City’s Town Hall theater to be moderated by Mailer, Pennebaker was determined to make it happen.
2.
Pennebaker and his fellow camera operators (Jim Desmond and Mark Woodcock) eventually filmed the event—which took place on April 30, 1971—without official permits. This accounts in large part for the rough form of the footage, which sat on the shelf at Pennebaker’s office until he showed it to Chris Hegedus in 1976. At that point, Pennebaker had recently hired Hegedus to edit miscellaneous material that he and his collaborators had accumulated. As soon as she saw the Town Hall footage, she knew that a film had to be made with it. At a 2004 screening of Town Bloody Hall at New York’s National Arts Club, Pennebaker described the film as a “triumph of content over aesthetics.”
4.
Mailer had hoped to debate Kate Millett, whose Sexual Politics (1970) investigated the subjugation of women in literature and art by male artists (Mailer included). When Millett refused to take part, Broughton scrambled to find other female critics to face off against Mailer.
7.
Much was made of the onstage chemistry between Greer and Mailer. In her book We Must March My Darlings: A Critical Decade (1977), literary doyenne Diana Trilling—also a participant in the Town Hall event—maintained that Greer “consented to be on the panel [because] she wished to meet Mailer, and go to bed with him.” In an interview also on our edition, Greer acknowledges the attraction between her and Mailer but notes that she was simply not interested in sleeping with him. She also confirms that the enmity between her and Trilling never ended.
8.
Jill Johnston, a leader of the lesbian separatist movement, publicly came out in 1971 in a column in the Village Voice, where she was a dance critic. Her book Lesbian Nation (1973) encouraged women to identify themselves as lesbians and argued that lesbians were essential to the feminist movement. She was also well known for her performative persona. Once, bored at a poolside press conference given by Friedan, she stripped off her top and took a swim.
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