Bright Leaves (2003) Ross McElwee.
The Godfather (1972) Francis Ford Coppola.

The other night on DVD I watched Bright Leaves (2003, Ross McElwee). In this documentary, the director employs the techniques and ideas of cinema to provocate meaning about family, history, local color and mortality. Using narration and a panoply of footage, Ross McElwee traces his ancestry’s forgotten and maligned role in the American tobacco industry.

When the movie ended, I flicked through the basic cable channels, and found the last hour of The Godfather on the ingratiatingly cut-rate WLNY Channel 10/55.  The movie was severely edited for television: no blood spewed from Moe Green’s eyeglasses; Sonny’s death scene on the causeway curtailed; Apollonia’s bella calzones not shown, etc.  No matter the clumsy abridgments, The Godfather is a difficult movie, once on, to turn off. Like in Bright Leaves, Francis Ford Coppola employs the techniques and ideas of cinema to meditate upon family, history, local color and mortality.

Both movies involve fallen patriarchs.  In Bright Leaves, John Harvey McElwee – the director’s ancestor – “made a fortune in tobacco, but then somehow lost it all to his rival, James B. Duke.”  Ross McElwee’s great-grandfather is described as “the originator of the Durham Bull brand of smoking tobacco,” but “his trusted foreman for many years confessed on his deathbed that he had stolen the McElwee formula and sold it to the Dukes.”  John Harvey died bankrupt after years of failed litigation, while the Duke family became “sort of the Southern Rockefellers.”  Ross McElwee makes his movie as a vindication of his great-grandfather’s legacy, as a flawed, cheated and beloved progenitor.

In the lore of The Godfather, Don Vito Corleone was the most powerful boss of the five families.  Says Don Barzini, “He had all the judges and politicians in his pocket.” But Don Vito is shot by rivals; his youngest son is driven into exile, the oldest is slayed, and the Families are out to destroy the Corleones, both from within (the mole Tessio like McElwee’s “trusted foreman” who sold the family tobacco formula) and without (the hit on Sonny and car-bomb in Sicily not unlike the sabotage and vandalism by the Duke family depicted against John Harvey McElwee’s business).  Son Michael Corleone takes over for Don Vito, murders all the family’s enemies, and becomes Godfather, to initiate another generation of power and influence.
As mobsters, the Corleones make their fortune in gambling, prostitution, theft and murder.  The McElwee’s former fortune was built on tobacco.  McElwee narrates that “neither Duke nor McElwee could know, of course that Bright Leaf tobacco would soon kill many times more people than did all the battles of the civil war that they had just survived.”

Bright Leaves takes place in the small towns of North Carolina, a certain region of the southern, rural United States.  The Corleones trace their roots to Sicily, regions which are southern, pastoral, peasant, pre-modern and traditional.  Before Micheal can move the family into the future, he must spend time experiencing the region from where he descended.  Ross McElwee, at the beginning of his movie, tells of a recurring dream, standing in a field surrounded by heat-emanating, prehistoric-sized plants, and feeling:

“strangely comforted by these leaves… My wife then said she thought my dream might be about missing the South… that no matter how long I lived in the cold crowded North, I would always be a Southerner, that the South was in my blood, and in fact that lately, I’d been looking a little anemic – maybe in need of a transfusion – my periodic transfusion of Southerness. So I decided to head home for a while, back down South.”

Besides the parallels in subject matter, each filmmaker attempts to memorialize both themselves and their subject by using their own family as participants in the melodrama.  This device, whether directly or indirectly, is a personological intimation of history and art. The audience is not deliberately made aware that Coppola uses his own daughter, Sofia, as the grandchild of Don Vito. Sofia, a baby, is baptized in the final assassination montage, as two christenings of “godfather” are bestowed Michael Corleone.

Coppola was hired to adapt a popular novel about a novel American subject.  Coppola turns The Godfather tale into his own. Carmine Coppola, his father, conducted and arranged the score.  Moviegoers are like Pavlov’s dogs when The Godfather theme plays, whether on a TV commercial or by a Polish subway accordionist.

McElwee intersperses his movie with home movie clips of his son, as a tot and a teen, correlating the boy with the complex, founding genealogy of the McElwee family:

“When I am on the road, shooting, I sometimes imagine my son, years from now, when I’m no longer around, looking at what I’ve filmed. I can almost feel him looking back at me from some distant point in the future… through these
images and reflections, through the film I’ll leave behind…”

Bright Leaves opens with McElwee discovering a 1950 Hollywood movie called Bright Leaf, where Gary Cooper plays Brant Royle, a Reconstruction-era tobacco farmer who returns to North Carolina to avenge the family business.  McElwee finds an uncanny likeness between Brant Royle’s struggle against arch-nemesis Major Singleton for claim to the tobacco fortune and the rivalry of his own ancestor and the Dukes.  As Ross tells Vlada Petric, a maniacal Eastern European film theorist, Bright Leaf has “become a kind of an example of a fiction film becoming a documentary, a kind of home movie for me.”  The movie serves as the eponym, typology and parallel fiction of Ross McElwee’s movie.

The assemblage of footage – archived, staged or impromptu – is combined to manifest new vision. Depicting archival images of his father, McElwee is elegaic: “As time goes by, my father is beginning to seem less and less real to me in these images. Almost a fictional character. I want so much to reverse this shift, the way in which the reality of him is slipping away. Having this footage doesn’t help very much – or, at least, not as much as I thought it would.”

The Godfather movies are operatic interpretations of the history of immigrants to America in the early twentieth century, and the brute and delicate opportunity and prejudice encountered by these families.  Brant Royal, in Bright Leaf, is likewise an unreal amalgamation of an American archetype, refigurized in Bright Leaves by Ross McElwee. The movies are fictions unwoven by film and history into an archival reality.

The following post will not incite any action that might change the law, but is testimony to what the law antagonizes.

On May 19, 2010, Mayor Mike Bloomberg signed a noise pollution bill. The target of the bill is the noise made by doubledecker bus sightseeing lecturers, a/k/a tour guides. According to Councilwoman Christine Quinn, of Greenwich Village, District 3, and Gale Brewer, District 6, the Upper West Side, who presented the bill, the tour guides are too loud and disturb residents.  By 2015, all doubledecker buses are required to install headsets which the passengers may opt to wear and listen to the tour, or don’t wear, and miss the tour.

The city is multi-schizoid, wracked by megalomania both fabulous and sickening, and its citizens find themselves acting likewise, knowingly or not. Mayor Bloomberg prides himself on the major spike in tourism to NYC since taking office right after 9/11. Tourism is among the top three biggest industries in NYC, along with real estate and fake handbags – two industries which have also been victims of Hizzoner, in the rise of property taxes and the crackdown by the Mayor’s anti-counterfeiting task force.  Gray Line’s Downtown Loop drops off passengers at Canal Street hungry for haggled-down $20 Guccis and Louis Vs; and when the tour guides speak to passengers of the West Village as an inordinately pricey area, the rents go up.

During his term, the Mayor’s prevalent attitude has been to malign Gray Line, the biggest tour bus company but perhaps not for long.   As in the TV show Lost, which takes place on an island, Jacob is the candidate to protect the island, who then becomes Jack, who then becomes Hurley.  Big Apple tours fell before Gray Line, who may fall to City Sites; the merging of these two companies is akin to Jacob’s brother being thrown into the cave of light and emerging furiously as the smoke monster.  The company union, TWU Local 225, is the group who survived the crash of flight 815.  No doubt ex-tour guide Jimmy Napoli is Sawyer.

To put the headset on the ears of the tourist is to take the microphone out of the tour guide’s hand.  An experienced evaluation might argue that roughly 6 out of every 10 tourists to NYC buy a double-decker bus ticket from Gray Line, which is the company hit hardest by the headset law, because of the number of buses which must be retooled, and the number of employees who will be unable to retool.  In Gray Line’s 2005 company promo DVD, former president Tom Lewis sits on a doubledecker at Battery Park while Sinatra’s “New York, New York” queues the soundtrack, and sums up the company philosophy: “It’s all about Entertainment.”  The people want to be informed, goofed on, or shocked, and if they don’t want to listen to the guide, they hop off.

“It’s good for tourism, it’s good for tour guides, it’s good for our great city,” says Ms. Brewer, spouting the old applesauce.  The residents of the West Village and Upper West Side pay extravagantly to live in these neighborhoods because of luxury cache, and as a result harbor the belief they are entitled to the comfort zone of urban quietude.  These are stupendously commercial districts, yet at the same time seeming very tucked away and secluded – an example of the classic illusions of Manhattan island.  The whine of the residents is no less resounding than the schpiel of the passing tour bus PA.  These residents, by living in New York, are essentially paying not to live in New York. The areas are hot, historic, busy and innovatively crafted, and will be of the neighborhoods on the routes of tour buses. Sadly, the Upper West Side and the Village have some of the City’s most roistering bohemian history, now reduced to namby brownstoners whose favorites cafes and restaurants must, above all, be cute.  New Yorkers are given the opportunity to make direct complaints about the tour guide on the city’s website.  Such warped activism is also behind the signs put up in city cross-streets threatening $350. fines for horn-honkers. Admittedly, some tour guides communicate less substance of information than a truck honking its horn, but both noises are indigenous to New York City living, and to tell the tour guide to shaddup is to tell New York City to shaddup.

When movies, TV series or talk shows use a tour bus for their background or foreground, it is most often a Gray Line bus.  A red doubledecker Gray Line bus impels the material capture of a New York moment.  Even if a different company is used, one will still refer to the bus as Gray Line, the way “Kleenex” is colloquial for anything one uses to blow your nose.  In I Am Legend, a Gray Line bus is seen all banged up at the bottom of the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; in the finale episode of The Sopranos, a Gray Line bus roars through Little Italy, where the tour guide can be expressly heard commenting on the shrinkage of the Italian community and growth of the Chinese; Tyra Banks often employs the Gray Line bus for her chic and tacky purposes; Woody Allen used Gray Line in Whatever Works, where the Southern visitors to NYC ride the tour bus [a notorious incident occurred between Woody and the actual Gray Line tour guide during the chartering of this bus for filming, the guide apparently badgered Woody so badly that Woody kicked him off set - it generated a bit of internecine gossip in the tour guide lounge at 777 Eighth Ave].

In the New York Post last month, “residents” of Little Italy griped about the tour buses.  This is comparable to Eskimos bitching to Sarah Palin about how cold it is in the Arctic.  These discomfited downtowners might be better off stuffing their ears with a ravioli.

The heyday of tour guide work up top the bus was 2004-2007, just as G.W. Bush began to lose steam as a result of mid-term elections, the Katrina aftermath, and general apathy toward the war in Iraq.  But the people visiting NYC were ablaze with the brimstone of faultless, gorging times.  The Old Broadway fed the need for fantasy, the Armed Forced Recruiting Center as flush with neon as the electric Chevrolet billboard on the Times Tower.  Soon the Gray Line buses were posted over the downstairs windows with advertising, for the new Indiana Jones movie and Will and Grace and vacations to China.  In the heyday, tips were magnanimous, but the tour guides still exaggerated what they made on back-to-back Uptown Loops.  Today, the lines of ticketed passengers can still wrap around Broadway for an hour, but only because new management has scaled back the number of buses out on the road to pick them up.

The seed of the headset bill was planted when the persnickety West Village first banned Gray Line buses from the Times Squaresque Bleeker Street, between Seventh Avenue and LaGuardia, which was the old route (still used by City Sites).  When the tour was redirected east onto Greenwich Ave from Seventh to Sixth, noise complaints for the district jumped from 1,945 in 2005, the heyday, to 2,708 complaints in 2008, the Obama campaign and bailout times.  Presumably, a percentage of these calls to 311 were provoked by orotund Gray Line tour guides.  In the same period, individual designated landmarks in the area went up from 53 to 64.  Under the gun from Ms. Quinn, Gray Line invented a new rule, forbidding tour guides to talk on the mic along this sacrosanct block.

For Gray Line management, the headset law is an aid to Twin America, manager of both Gray Line and City Sites, not too unlike The Wall Street Journal sharing its writers with The New York Post.  It is the ultimate design of management to break the union, fire all the tour guides, and have a recorded voice give the tour. The Yankees organization would do the same thing with its players if they could get away with it.  The bill won’t hurt the city as much as the proposed cut to the Library budget.  And for a brief moment – perhaps the span of time between the East Village and United Nations stops on the Downtown Loop – the tour guides of Gray Line had the Mayor’s ear at City Hall.  The Mayor postponed signing until the next day, the ringing in his ears shrill and present but soon fizzed out, like any passenger on the bus.

Postscript
Your author is studying for a Masters in Library and Information Science at Queens College. Last class, a summer intensive session on Archives and Manuscripts, the prof. intimated that “history doesn’t exist.” Of course not – it’s the tour guide’s job to invent it.