Mr. Documentary

The three largest producers of documentary films for television are NBC, CBS and David Wolper. At 34, Wolper is the youngest, and often the most vigorous, of the three. His offices on Hollywood's Sunset Strip have grown in the past 42 months from a five-man luck-it shop to a 200-employee corporation with bright white neo-Palladian faqade and 40 cutting rooms--some of which are already crammed with the 8,000,000 ft. of film that Wolper is condensing into The Making of the President 1960, a two-part version of Teddy White's admiring chronicle of the luck of John F. Kennedy.

The secret of all these capital gains is not something magically creative in David Wolper's particular genius, but rather a thoroughgoing capacity for careful research and intelligent selection that has resulted in some of the better moments of television. Excellent fiction may be the highest matter that TV can offer, but so much TV fiction is so blatantly phony that a crisply edited set of authentic film clips about anything from a war to a horse race somehow seems stunningly original.

Dusty Films. Wolper's recent Dday, for example, was a one-hour compilation of film material made by cameramen on both sides. It contained shots of awful immediacy. A soldier comes out of the breakers onto Omaha Beach. He is hit by a bullet, sits down slowly with his legs apart, like a child about to build a castle of sand, then falls backwards to die. An other shot showed Ike sitting on the running board of an old car in North Africa, chomping on a sandwich, while Franklin Roosevelt sat on the seat above him, also eating a sandwich. Both men were talking with their mouths full. It was the day that Roosevelt told Eisenhower that he would be the supreme commander of the Allied invasion of Normandy. Dozens of rare moments like those were assembled in a dramatic pattern and cemented with a well-written narrative.

Wolper chronicles great men in a widely syndicated TV program called Biography and unusual occupations in another excellent series called The Story of (a jockey, an artist, etc.). For contemporary subjects, he likes to use natural light and hand-held cameras in a simple and highly mobile technique. When hunting film clips, he will go to any amount of trouble to find the rare touches that make his documentaries distinctive. His award-winning Hollywood: The Golden Years contained dusty Swedish films of young Greta Garbo doing movie-house commercials for a Stockholm bakery.

Instant Leaders. Wolper entered show business soon after World War II, when--a light-year or so ahead of anyone else--he and a few partners saw the gold pile that could be made by acquiring rights to old motion pictures and selling them to TV. He was largely responsible for the late shows, late late shows, and late late late shows in dozens of cities.

In 1959 he ran into a friend who had 6,000 ft. of Russian documentary film dealing with the Soviet space program.

Space was just getting boffo. TV at the time was reeking with quiz scandals, and Wolper decided that the respectable public-affairs bit held the treasuries of the future. He made his celebrated Race for Space, but the networks refused to show it, saying that they would never broadcast a public-affairs show over which they had not had total production control. So Wolper sold the program to 110 stations around the country, gaining as much exposure as he could have gotten on any network, plus major stories in the papers about the wretched treatment he was getting from ABC, CBS and NBC. As a result, "everybody wanted to see what the hell was being withheld," he says.

The Good Life. The son of a Manhattan real estate man, Wolper now lives quietly and richly in the canyoned subtropics of Los Angeles' Bel Air. where real estate is so expensive that a single sunbather can cover $2,000 worth of land.

He is a shrewd, ambitious, high-speed operator who somehow manages to be a popular fellow nonetheless. He plays softball with Pancho Gonzales and the sons of Bing Crosby. He is probably the only regular at the craps tables of Las Vegas who goes off in the daytime to water-ski on nearby Lake Mead above Hoover Dam, and his go-go dynamism stops dead when the Dodgers are playing in Chavez Ravine. He takes off for the ball park.

A public-spirited, selfless, dedicated producer of worthy documentaries could hardly ask for more.

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