Subsequently, I was interviewed in the Webster-Kirkwood Times: http://www.websterkirkwoodtimes.com/Articles-Features-c-2016-02-18-197725.114137-sub-16-In-Webster-Groves.html
and on The Carney Show, KTRS Radio: http://www.ktrs.com/16-in-
"16" BEHIND THE SCENE ~
How a community was leveled in sixty minutes
Fifty years ago during the autumn of 1965, CBS News sent a team to Webster Groves High School, where I was a senior, to begin filming a documentary titled “16 in Webster Groves.”
 |
| Webster Groves High School |
The result wasn’t pretty. Did they find, as they expected, unrest? Questioning? Insurrection? Mass demonstrations on behalf of civil rights? A desire to overturn the comfy status quo and run Back to the Earth? No. The students were portrayed, largely, as status-conscious, complacent, shallow, blinkered, casually racist and materialistic airheads, aside from a few awakening souls featured at the film’s conclusion. If the students looked pathetic, their parents looked appalling: dismissive, blowhard fathers, cipher mothers -- except for the one at the dinner table -- oblivious to any possibility of idealism, hopes, dreams, or aspirations, such as they were, on the part of their offspring.
The ensuing roar echoed from Webster Groves to CBS offices in New York City. Unfair! Biased! Shameless manipulation! Willful omission of anything or anyone suggesting intellect, kindness, social awareness or embrace of a wider world view.
Fully expecting this response, the CBS crew came back to Webster Groves during the night that “16 in Webster Groves” aired nationally -- February 25, 1966 -- to film Websterites watching the program, and to record their reactions in a follow-up, “Webster Groves Revisited.” The second show aired about a month later. .
 |
| 16 in Webster Groves, CBS News, 1966. Arthur Barron, producer. Charles Kuralt, narrator. |
Webster Groves still talks about “16.” It has had unfortunate staying power. Nationally, the film was a staple in sociology curriculum for decades. It is still shown in documentary and filmmaking college courses. I got my own early indicator of its ubiquity six months after the airing, as I sat in a freshman orientation session at my college, some 300 miles from St. Louis. We were asked, one by one, to state the name of our high school. When I gave my answer, Tom H of Louisville, Kentucky, said “Webster Groves? That place in the TV show? Bleccchhh! ”
No use countering that I wasn’t even in the demographic: 17 at the time of filming, and a resident of Rock Hill, a considerably more modest adjoining suburb. Clearly there would be no escaping the stigma.
I thought about all this last night while making notes for my next blog post, “Don’t Shoot the Piano Player.” It will include an oblique mention of the “16“ debacle, and the weird way in which I played a tiny part. But I had never Googled the film. What would I find?
First I found the film itself, unavailable for years, but now online with its companion piece, “Webster Groves Revisited,” in blurry print.
To see it, click here.
I then found some information on the filmmaker, Arthur Barron, and a little about cinema history. I’m passing it along now for the diversion of such followers who lived through “16“ right along with me, as well as for others who might have some time on their hands and want to see how a community could be laid waste in just 60 minutes (including commercials).
Who was Arthur Barron?
 |
| Arthur S. Barron, Columbia Daily Spectator, February 1968 |
Arthur Barron, Ph.D., (1929-2000) was born in Boston. He held bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tulane University, and a doctorate in sociology from Columbia University. As a filmmaker, he would produce varied documentaries: a look at factory workers and their managers, portraits of Johnny Cash and Rita Hayworth, children’s programming for ABC and NET (one of these won him an Emmy). He made a noted cinema verite film called “Birth and Death." He ventured into feature films, and his “Jeremy" (1973, starring Robby Benson) took the award for Best First Work at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1968 he left CBS, formed his own company, Verite Productions, and simultaneously became director of the Columbia University film department.
In 1965, Barron was an employee of CBS News. He was not, however, a journalist, and was disinclined to follow one of the profession’s basic tenets: present a fair and balanced picture, giving voice to all sides of an issue. Hence CBS occasionally ordered him to change or delete program segments they deemed unjournalistic. Earlier in 1965, he had been severely censored by his superiors when they saw the first cut of his film ”The Berkeley Rebels.”
“For networks the truth has to be recorded, not shaped,” Barron later said in an interview with author Alan Rosenthal (The New Documentary in Action, University of California Press,1972) . “The newsman is a kind of unfeeling, objective, analytic recorder and capturer of reality; he’s not a person who shapes and intensifies reality to evoke a particular response." But to shape and intensify is exactly what Barron wanted to do.
Ron Simon, a curator for the Paley Center for Media, knew Barron in his later life. In a 2011 interview with Thom Powers, artistic director for Stranger Than Fiction, a weekly documentary film series held at IFC Center in Greenwich Village Simon recalled: “ [Barron] wanted to bring a new sensibility to the documentary. He saw himself as part novelist, a little bit of a poet, and was trying to make a statement in this film....He wanted to give his own viewpoint of what was happening in American society.” (To read the interview, see 16 In Webster-Groves)
That’s where Barron was when CBS assigned him a piece about teenagers, which would eventually evolve into “16." But if Barron wanted to avoid being muzzled after the Berkeley Rebels disappointment, he had to base his presentation on fact. So he approached the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and worked with them to develop a 36-page questionnaire, which was then administered to 16-year-olds at Webster Groves High School. Their anonymous answers yielded statistics, which in the eyes of network brass constituted facts...which meant Barron was good to go under the banner of CBS News. “The MacGuffin in this film,” says Simon, “is that sociological questionnaire.”
Barron claims to have been surprised by the results. He took them to the National Opinion Research Center. "They were amazed and horrified,” Barron tells Rosenthal. “[They saw] robotized children, dupes of the values which produced their parents and an American capitalist, middle class, bureaucratic society. Children who were perfectly designed replacement parts for suburban, placid America.”
Well before the study was conducted, Barron had approached the Webster Groves principal and school board for permission to make the film. He tells Rosenthal that he sold school officials on the idea by explaining that mass media had not so far portrayed teenagers accurately, and that CBS wanted to correct that. Barron admits he “wasn’t totally honest” when approaching the school board. “There was, as in so many films, a certain amount of conning and manipulating involved....I agree that I never said to the community or CBS that what we would find was a highly materialistic community whose individuality was crushed, and whose values were absolutely deplorable, but then those were things I didn’t know myself at the time.”
Why didn’t he seek out a broader cross-section of interviewees? “It’s not my job as a filmmaker to be an encyclopedia. I’m not omniscient. “ He goes on to say that he was out to capture the essential truth about a community, “and I wanted to do that in the strongest, most cinematic, most devastating way possible. I feel that the parents (shown) are the perfect embodiment of the dominant value system of that society, and that was my justification.”
Ron Simon told his interviewer that while manipulation was involved, Barron was honest about it. It appears, though, that Barron’s “honesty” came out only when the program was aired. Though Barron told CBS about the survey results early on, it does not appear that he revealed them or his filmmaking intentions to anyone in Webster Groves.
“Webster Groves Revisited” is the sequel to “16," released about one month after “16“ hit the airwaves. It’s commonly said that the sequel was filmed because of the uproar generated by “16.” Produced and aired out of a sense of fair play, to give Websterites a chance to vent. Charles Kuralt implies it in his narration. Barron says so in his interview with Alan Rosenthal, claiming it was not his idea but CBS forced him to make the sequel.
I don’t see how that could be the case. I believe Barron planned all along to “revisit”, knowing that his first program would provoke an outcry (“a howl of rage,” as he later described it). Otherwise, why would his crew have been on hand to record the subjects of the film watching themselves? The Ron Simon interview suggests that doing so pushes the two films into the realm of cinema verite, as we see the camera that records it all, and the (unseen) director watching the interviewees watch themselves.
Fool me once...
As I mentioned earlier, I had a tiny role in the production. One day during that autumn of 1965, Barron and his associates visited our a cappella choir rehearsal to get an idea of what they might want to film. We pulled out every blockbuster in our repertoire, plus a lightweight little Broadway show ditty, “This Is a Great Country” (Irving Berlin, Mr. President, 1962). To my surprise, this is the number they chose to film. As it happened, I was piano accompanist for “Great Country."
 | |
| "Our land is great, our land is great, our land is great, our land is great" |
Starting at 29:30 you see our choir director leading the group. Then the camera briefly pans the singers. But as the musical audio continues, the video switches from the choir to a montage of scenes. First we see a roast turkey, borne aloft straight from the oven by triumphant home ec students. Next, they’re baking pies. (Not apple, surprisingly.) Sprinklers play across a huge residential lawn. A girl practices her golf swing. Same girl, now part of a golf foursome strolling the country club grounds. Close-ups: lawn jockey, whiteface; lawn jockey, blackface. Gracious white two-story house, tasteful front entrance flanked by in-scale pillars. And the finale: a close-up of the rose window atop a local church door, before the camera pulls back to show the congregation spilling forth onto the streets of Webster Groves. Open the doors, see all the people, song ends, cut to commercial.
Thus is “Great Country” rewritten, Barron style, as a hymn to the Middle Class American dream.
I’m not sure at what point I saw Barron’s intention in that sequence. But even in 1966, five years shy of my journalism degree, I knew something was off in his film. I felt that Barron had got a few things right (years later I would write an essay titled "I Was a Teenage Normie"), but via dishonest tactics. I’ve come to feel that the film is like a kaleidoscope: you can look inside, searching for a definitive stance, the one right way to assess Barron’s work -- fair, foul, truth, sham? -- but you never come to an end. The images and your opinions shift with every twist of the barrel.
My 50th high school reunion takes place next year, along with the 50th anniversary of “16 in Webster Groves.” If it’s like previous anniversary years, oceans of ink, forests of paper and billions of bytes will reconstruct yet again every nuance of Arthur Barron’s oeuvre. It could be interesting to invite Ron Simon of the Paley Center to speak to the community, share insights into Barron and his approach to “16,” moderate a panel discussion with audience feedback.
Oh, wait. Film criticism? Cinema verite? That might be a tad too intellectual for insular, myopic Webster Groves. No.... we’d rather just forget the whole thing.
As if we ever could, or would.
#######
Next: Don’t Shoot the Piano Player
######
This is a great country, a great country
So let's shout it clear and loud
Take a look in your history book
And you'll see why we should be proud.
Hats off to America
The home of the free and the brave
If this is flag waving, flag waving
Do you know of a better flag to wave?
Irving Berlin, 1962, Mr. President
