While we were out last weekend, we were listening to Bob Edwards' weekend program and caught a wonderful interview with Izzy Bleckman. For more than 25 years, Izzy was Charles Kuralt's cameraman, and he provided the pictures for Kuralt's signature On the Road series. As Kuralt crafted the words and told the stories, Bleckman captured the scenes, first on film and then on videotape. Together with the labors of their soundman, they told stories that demonstrated that in this country of ours, the common man was actually quite uncommon.
As we listened to the interview, at several points we heard extended clips from some of the pieces. What is at first jarring, and then refreshing, was the way these stories were told. Nothing about them bashed you over the head with the emotion or the moment. Nope, these stories were allowed to unfold, and the viewer was seen as intelligent enough to get it. There were no fancy musical underlays; instead, the sound in the story was allowed to work, to get inside your mind, to add to the punch of the story. (I hate to say it, but some of the drops Edwards featured used sound so effectively, it made me think Kuralt's pieces would work almost as well as radio stories. The way those stories were put together was so beautiful. Understanding when to use silence is as important as understanding when to use sound.)
Bleckman also told another story that speaks of the gulf between yesterday's storytelling and today's. I'm paraphrasing it, but it pretty much went like this: They were out and about, en route to another story, when they passed a home festooned in all these yellow ribbons. They went back to find out. Turned out the family was getting ready to welcome a son back home from service in Vietnam. They set up and spent the afternoon filming the preparations, the family waiting with such sweet anticipation for its son to return home. After a while, Kuralt told the crew to pack up. The son hadn't returned home yet, but Kuralt said, "Let's go." Kuralt understood the universal meaning of the story, and knew it was a story that had a thousand counterparts across the country...and gave the audience credit for understanding. (Think a story like that would end that way now? Nope...it seems it can't be a story without sappy music playing underneath, and close-ups of crying relatives.)
Some of the On the Road segments are now available as a DVD collection. (Kuralt also told many stories of his On the Road adventures in his wonderful memoir A Life on the Road.) Here's hoping there are many more of these segments to come for home viewing. It's storytelling the way it used to be done, and I believe modern storytellers could learn a lot from them.
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