Back in the late ‘70s, during select screenings around the country of Always for Pleasure, a documentary about New Orleans music and street celebrations, three figures would creep into the movie theater and begin working their way down and up the aisles. It happened at the same time—roughly 15 minutes into the film, just as a gentleman on-screen began slicing onions and garlic and sliding them, along with ham hocks, into an enormous cauldron of bubbling red beans. Suddenly, a distinctively smoky, garlicky scent would fill the air, as if the projected images were powerful enough to emit a fragrance. Close up, it was possible to see through the flickering light that two people were holding heavy pots of just-cooked red beans while a third was frantically fanning the fumes. Then, as soon as the scene changed, the trespassers would abruptly exit, only to be found once again at the movie’s conclusion, waiting in the lobby to ladle out to the audience a taste of Louisiana-style red beans and rice.
One of the pot holders—the lanky, bearded fellow—was the film’s director, Les Blank, and what the crowd was experiencing was what Blank calls Smellaround, his low-tech version of film gimmicks like the theater-vibrating Sensurround. Instead of terrifying people by shaking the movie hall with waves of intense, high-decibel sound, Blank’s gentle intent was to use scent to help trigger the feelings—hunger, anticipation, excitement—of watching a cook prepare a great meal. It evolved from Blank’s habit of keeping his hands busy by serving gumbo during the Q&A sessions that followed Dry Wood, a movie in which the deliciously spicy Cajun stew makes a scene-stealing appearance. Over the years, Blank turned Smellaround into a precision science. Six whole heads of garlic roasting for a half hour in a portable toaster oven, for example, could perfume an entire auditorium showing his witty, ahead-of-its-time celebration of garlic’s many glories, Garlic Is As Good As Ten Mothers (1980).
“It’s the smelling that gets your appetite worked up—it adds another dimension,” says Blank, a shy, soft-spoken man who found that Smellaround also helped him achieve his secret wish to be a bells-and-whistles showman. “I always wanted to be a little bit like P. T. Barnum.”
Now 68, Blank has a canon of over 30 films bearing his name as director as well as an unpredictable medley of other credits (he often also shoots, edits, and produces; occasionally, he can be heard asking a question off-camera in his parched Florida twang). Though a couple of films focus solely on food, most peel back the curtain on ethnically specific worlds—the Cajuns of Louisiana, Norteño musicians on the Texas-Mexico border, Polish-American polka enthusiasts—using cuisine as his backstage pass into each community.
Early in his filmmaking career, Blank noticed how the act of cooking worked emotional magic on people unnerved at having a boom microphone and a bulky 16-millimeter Éclair camera trained on them. The minute he asked a subject to show him how to, say, properly boil a peppery batch of crawfish or fire-grill yards of tripe, they would breathe more easily.
“The rhythms of cooking put people into a more natural state than if they’re just sitting there twiddling their fingers,” says Blank. “If they’re cooking, it’s something they’re used to doing, and they do it with ease. Also it’s a good place to start because anybody can talk about food.” After shooting finished, Blank would typically be expected to try some of the lovingly prepared specialties.
“I like to eat,” he says, adding that it was his daredevil palate that led him to sample a thin strip of battered boot leather that chef Alice Waters and German film director Werner Herzog tried to tenderize in duck fat, herbs, Tabasco, and garlic in Blank’s famous 1979 chronicle of Herzog’s making good on a promise made to fellow director Errol Morris in Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe. “It tasted like acid and all kinds of bottled toxic stuff they used to tan the leather,” says Blank. “It was hideous. I couldn’t get it down.”
Blank’s mother, Daisy Paul Blank, would have had something to say, no doubt, about her son’s choice of snack food. A devotee of health food pioneer Adelle Davis (Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit), she raised Blank in Tampa, Florida, on a steady diet of truck-farm vegetables, fruits, and wheat germ. Because his father’s fortunes rose and fell, meat was sometimes a scarce commodity. “Every now and then we’d have a lamb chop,” says Blank, who noticed so little of what his mom did in the kitchen that his first attempt at bachelor meal making—an unseasoned chicken leg in a dry hot skillet—was a disaster. “The skin was burned and it was raw inside,” says Blank. “I couldn’t figure out where I’d gone wrong.”
It was gumbo that got his complete attention. He was in a suburb of Houston one night in 1969 listening to live music at a dance hall that catered to the town’s population of Cajuns who’d migrated from Louisiana to find work on the offshore oil platforms. “Normally, I’m very afraid of people,” says Blank, who overcame his personal hesitation enough to compliment the band’s leader at closing time. “He invited me and my girlfriend home to have a chicken gumbo dinner,” recalls Blank. “He went through every step of making the gumbo, describing what he was doing and why. He did it with a great deal of affection and gusto.”
Blank’s entry into filmmaking was almost by default. His previous exploits could have passed for a colorful montage from a 1930s adventure movie: He played football, studied trumpet, shipped out on a Norwegian freighter, wrote poetry in San Francisco during the Beat years, and was on his way to pilot training at naval flight school when he changed his mind at the last minute. He financed part of his first film, a 1968 short about the early love-ins—God Respects Us When We Work But Loves Us When We Dance—through a two-year stint of writing, editing, and directing industrial and promotional movies for products like Shakey’s pizza and Smucker’s jam. He found the industrials soul crushing. “I always wanted to be creative, to communicate to people, to round up my various abilities and put them into something that’s going to be lasting,” says Blank. “The industrial films were like a slap in the face.”
As a young man, in fact, he wanted to become a surgeon (Blank’s older brother, Richard, was a heart and lung specialist), but his dream was scrapped forever when he flunked chemistry while attending Tulane University, in New Orleans. “Without chemistry, you can’t go to medical school or go very far in any of the life sciences,” says Blank, who has a way of compressing most pivotal pieces of his life—his three failed marriages, how he ended up in the Ph.D. film program at the University of Southern California in the early ’60s—into a sentence and a shrug. But if you ask him about the first time he ever went to a Cajun dance hall, he’ll devote 20 minutes to recounting every aspect of his college-era experience, from the girlfriend he brought to the way the club’s wooden floor heaved up and down under the weight of a hundred customers dancing the two-step. “No one spoke any English and the waiters wore revolvers. It was very crowded, very hot,” he says, wrapping up the anecdote by vividly recalling the temperature of the beer. “It came in these little bottles and was extremely cold,” he says, with a sound in his voice like he can still feel the glass, moisture-beaded and superchilled, in his grip. “You couldn’t find any beer that was as cold as they got it.”
In each of Blank’s mostly narratorless documentaries, tiny vibrant details like these pile one on top of another. His films are soft and meandering in structure, and you get a sense that he doesn’t preplan them (“I think that would take the life out of it,” he confirms). Instead, he shows up with his shoestring crew, turns on the equipment, and proceeds to fade into the woodwork. The finished movie doesn’t have to feel finely wrought—it just has to feel. “He has the perfect sense of when to pick up the camera and when the situation is ripe for filming,” says Herzog. “It’s very misleading to see him as someone who is brooding and not speaking much—he’s very much alive inside. But he’s not monosyllabic, he’s zero-syllabic.” Every conversation about Blank’s technique eventually gets around to examining his trademark silences. “Les is like Mount Rushmore,” says producer-director Vikram Jayanti, who produced Blank’s journey into the Serbian-American music scene, Ziveli! Medicine for the Heart, and collaborated on the quirky European travelogue Innocents Abroad. “He just sits there like a rock; it’s quite wonderful. I think it makes him invisible. After a while people just go back to what they were doing.”
For me, just to get into Blank’s home involved enduring a period of those silences. Though we’d prearranged via telephone to meet, he never responded to a string of messages I left on his office voice mail hoping to confirm our appointment. For all I knew on the morning I arrived at the door of Blank’s woodsy house in the Berkeley hills, I was the only one there. I knocked, waited five minutes, then knocked and waited some more. It was during my last-ditch flurry of pounding that the front door finally swung open. There stood Blank, tall, bearded and dressed in a brand-new pair of blue jeans, a loose-fitting short-sleeved print shirt and a black baseball cap emblazoned with a Slow Food insignia pulled low on his forehead. He led me through a cookbook-lined kitchen and out to a back deck. Just a few days earlier, Blank had returned from the Slow Food On Film DOC festival in Bra, Italy. He’d entered Yum, Yum, Yum!, one of the six films he’s made about the lifestyle of southwest Louisiana.
Made in 1990, it’s classic Les Blank fare: In 31 unwasted minutes, we meet Cajun musicians Marc Savoy and “Queen Ida” Guillory and New Orleans chef Paul Prudhomme and receive folksy but graceful tutorials in seafood crêpes, dirty rice, frogs’ legs, okra étouffée with shrimp, and candied yams. As with at least a half dozen other Blank films I’ve seen, there’s a lesson in sausage making, following the procedure from the grinding and spicing of the stuffing to the crazy quick ballooning of slippery casings as they fill with extruded meat. The last image is a moment Blank obviously thinks is an easy laugh, but it’s also more than that. “It’s an essential part of people’s foodways,” says Blank when I ask him why an almost identical record of this process shows up in so many of his films. “The Polish would be lost without Polish sausage. In Louisiana, you can’t be a Cajun if you don’t eat boudin.”
Currently, Blank has footage for four films shot on digital video, including one which follows a tea importer through China as he searches for the perfect leaf. But Blank doesn’t have the funds to edit any of them. “It always has been difficult for him, apparently harder right now,” says Herzog, adding that he considers Blank “a national treasure.” “He’s the one who shows us many of the margins of American societies. He deserves much better.”
These days, Blank spends much of his time making public appearances at Les Blank mini-retrospectives at universities, film festivals, and repertory houses around the globe. Showing old films is no replacement for having the financing for new ones, but it is confirmation of a different sort of dream.
“I always wanted my movies to be timeless, to be watched forever,” says Blank. “It looks like that might happen.”
The man Behind the mcdocumentary
One of the side pleasures of watching a Les Blank film is spotting his trademark Hitchcock-like cameo, a fleeting on-screen glimpse of the director as a face in the crowd. (Or, in case of The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, as a reflection in the fabled singer’s sunglasses.)
But food documentarian Morgan Spurlock took a different approach, casting himself as the front-and-center subject of his film, Super Size Me. In it, Spurlock, a talkative 6' 2" 33-year-old with a drooping Joe Namath mustache, spends 30 days subsisting on a no-exercise, three-meals-a-day, McDonald’s-only diet. By the time the final credits roll, the Big Macs, Chicken McNuggets, and 42-ounce sodas have taken their toll: Spurlock has gained 24.5 pounds, his cholesterol is up 65 points, and he’s beset by chest pains, dizzying mood swings, heart palpitations, and sexual lethargy.
In 98 minutes, Super Size Me effectively links the world’s largest restaurant chain with America’s current obesity epidemic. Was that a preplanned goal? “For me, the film isn’t just about McDonald’s—it’s about our whole culture and the way we live and eat and the influence of the company,” says Spurlock, adding that he chose to target McDonald’s because it’s so “iconic,” but just as well could have concentrated on Taco Bell or Wendy’s.
Scraped together for a reported $65,000, Super Size Me at one point cracked the top ten weekend box office list and by early July had grossed an impressive $10 million. There are Spurlock victories, however, that are less easily quantifiable. Back in March, McDonald’s announced plans to introduce healthier menu items and vanquish the Super Size option by the end of 2004. (Representatives of McDonald’s steadfastly insist that plans for the phaseout predated the film’s release.)
Born and raised in West Virginia, Spurlock, a former stand-up comic and music-video director, grew up eating typical American meat-and-potatoes fare, and he is unapologetic about his love of Quarter Pounders and french fries. It wasn’t until 2000, when Spurlock met his girlfriend, Alexandra Jamieson—whose job description, professional vegan chef, is a punch line in itself in Super Size Me—that he discovered fresh produce. “I’d never eaten an artichoke until I got with Alex,” says Spurlock, who, thanks in part to Jamieson’s customized detox program, has returned to his original 185 pounds. “I was like, ‘What’s that they’re eating? An art-ta-what? I thought those came in little jars.’”
In sharp contrast to Blank’s languid directorial style, Spurlock prefers quick cuts and zippy graphics and a witty, unceasing narration. Even their examples of inspirational food moments in film couldn’t be more different. (Blank cites a walrus-blubber eating scene in the 1922 silent classic Nanook of the North; Spurlock selects the 1971 candy-gorging fantasy Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.)
What the two have in common, though, is a desire to take moviegoers on a memorable ride. Despite the poor reaction of test audiences to footage of Spurlock losing his McLunch and of an overweight man undergoing gastrointestinal surgery, he refused to excise them. “My whole thing was, ‘You know what? You’re going on a journey with me,’” says Spurlock. “I want you to be a part of that the whole time.”