Nina Runs Off & Joins the Film Industry

00:00 Hi, my name is Liya Liang, and I am interviewing Nina Kleinberg on April 6. And I am in Amherst Maths.

00:09 My name is Nina Kleinberg, and I'm in Florence, Massachusetts.

00:13 So let's start off with what role has education played in your life?

00:19 I think education has played an extraordinarily important part in my life, in that every time there was something new that I wanted to learn or get involved in, I sought out the best educational experience possible. Education was highly valued in my family. Both of my parents had master's degrees and professions, and the understanding when I was growing up, for both me and my sister, was that we would go to high school and we would go to college and that our parents would support us through graduation from college. And then we were on our own. But the expectation was absolutely we would go to college.

01:11 And what were you pursuing in school? What were your dreams at the time?

01:17 Are you asking about my dreams when I went to college? Well, when I started off in college, I was pre med with the goal of becoming an obstetrician gynecologist. I had started observing and attending births when I was a candy striper at the age of 14. And even then, I knew that there was something wrong with the way obstetrics was practiced, and I felt that my best role could be to become an Ob GyN and change that. So that was my entry goal when I started college.

02:00 And what was the moment that changed things? That what was the moment when you decided that you were going to stray from, you were not going to do pre med anymore?

02:12 Very shortly after I got there, I got this sense that in being pre med, I was essentially going to approach the human body as a very sophisticated machine, and that as a physician, I was going to be an extremely sophisticated auto mechanic. And the emphasis was always on the hard sciences and not very much on human interaction. And I just intuitively knew that that was wrong. Plus the timing. I was in college from 1964 to 1968, and sexism was just embedded in our culture. At my college, I was not even allowed to apply for certain jobs. They said, we don't hire women, or probably they said, we don't hire girls. I was not even allowed to walk into the undergraduate library, which was restricted to men. So I felt the sexism. I felt what felt to me like the wrong approach to healthcare. And at the same time, I became enamored of literature and the humanities in general. I was very active in theater, and very shortly, I think somewhere in my sophomore year, I decided I was not going to become a doctor.

04:01 And you ended up in the film industry. So can you talk to me about the moment that you decided or the moment that you fell in love with film?

04:13 Yes, but as a preface, I would say that I ended up majoring in a combined major of history and literature and decided that I would become a teacher. And I applied to and got into an mat program with the goal of becoming a teacher. One day in our class, someone came and gave a lecture on teaching film. And as much as I loved movies, I'd never really thought of them as things that were produced or created. And he talked. He showed the opening five minutes of David Lean's great expectations. I mean, we are talking about something that happened to me in 1968, and yet I remember it as if it were yesterday, where I was sitting, what I saw, and what I felt. He talked about that scene, and then he showed a scene from a television adaptation of great expectations, and he compared them in terms of scripting and camera work and lighting and editing and music. And I have said many times, I think I had the same reaction as someone must feel the first time they inject heroin into their veins. Not that that's something I've ever done, but I was completely enthralled, totally enthralled. I had never thought about the art and the craft of making movies, and I couldn't get enough. I started reading books and going to the movies more, and I got a super eight camera, and I started shooting people doing silly things from different angles and then pasting pieces together to see if I could make a coherent whole out of it. And I was very, very torn because that was not the career path that I was on. Between the summer program, which was part of my mat program, and returning to school in the fall, I went to England, where I met a man who was starring in a television series, and he invited me to come to the set and watch how they shot it. And again, I was just totally hooked with the process. I remember on the plane home, I was flying back from England. I was going to be back in graduate school in a few days. I sobbed so heavily that the flight attendant asked me if I was okay. And by the time I landed, I had decided to drop out of graduate school and become a filmmaker. It was, you know, within the space of a month or two from that first lecture till that decision. It changed my whole life. And I often wonder sometimes what would have happened if I'd missed that lecture. Or I was going in one direction like a pinball, and I hit something. And immediately, almost immediately, I was going in another direction. Education, as you asked before, was very important to me. So I decided that I would go to film school. Well, it's September, it's a little late to start. So I got a series of silly jobs that just paid the rent. And I looked around for what was considered a really good film school, and I applied to the University of Southern California. And miracle of miracles, I was accepted. So in August of 1969, I set off for Los Angeles and began my studies at USC film school.

08:54 What did your parents think about you just packing your bags and just leaving home and heading to Los Angeles?

09:00 Well, they were not happy about my moving that far away. Obviously. They lived in Philadelphia, and none of us in the family had ever been further west than Pittsburgh. But they were not surprised that I had dropped out of graduate school. That didn't surprise them at all. And after they got over their shock, within a week or two, my mother was taking clippings out of the paper about people who made movies and mailings them to me. Obviously, this is before email and stuff like that. So one of the things they said was, if this is what you want, this is wonderful, but we can't pay for your tuition. I had inherited a small amount of money from my grandfather, and that's how I got started with my tuition. But they very quickly were on board because they could see how excited I was.

10:05 And what was your experience like working and studying film in LA?

10:11 Going to film school was probably one of the two most exciting educational experiences I ever had. Everybody there lived, talked, breathed film. And I was inspired by my fellow students, who knew so much more than I did about film history, about film craft. I really. I remember my first film project. I got comments back from the professors with things like, don't forget to focus the camera. Consider using a tripod. You know, really basic stuff. I knew nothing, but I was totally, totally enraptured with the process of filmmaking, with seeing as many movies as I could remember. These are the days before videotape, before VCR's, before dvd's. The only way to see a movie would be to go to a movie theater or hope that it would come on television. But at USC film school, they had very deep connections with the film studios, and they could go to the film studios and borrow beautiful 35 millimeter prints of any film in the vaults and show them. So my first semester, somebody decided to run a western series. So on Saturday, you would see four John Ford films, and then on Sunday, you'd see four more John Ford films. And then the next week it would be four Howard Hawkes films. And after that, I mean, it was. You had access to, you know, american films in a way that just wasn't possible. Now it's. Anybody can see any film whenever they want, and it would be as if you decided to be a writer and you'd never read any great books or you just read a few. It was important, as part of my film education that we be schooled in what had come before. And who were the great directors, writers, cinematographers, editors, people who had perfected this craft over the previous 70, 80 years. And it was just thrilling. It was all we thought about. It was all we talked about. It was all we did.

13:11 And just to circle back to, like, the sexism that you experienced at Harvard, did you also experience that in film school as well? Was it like, to, like, the same degree, or was it just a little. Was it a little different?

13:25 I don't think I experienced a huge amount of sexism in film school, although I do remember I could ask anything I wanted about editing, directing. I remember one day, though, they showed some footage that had been shot by one of the students that was just beautifully lit, very, very complex, gorgeous lighting. And I remember saying to the instructor, how did he get that effect? And the instructor saying to me, you don't need to know that. You know, it was his subtle way of saying, I wasn't going to be a cinematographer, and I wasn't going to be a gaffer. The people who do the lighting, so why bother learning that stuff? And indeed, there were no women at that time. There were no women in the cinematographers union. There were no women gaffers. There were almost no women directors. I don't think I can name five directors, women directors my age, working in the. In Hollywood. By Hollywood, I mean the american film industry. There were some people doing documentaries, but it was so in that sense, it was somewhat limited. When I got out of film school and started working in the industry, then, of course, you know, Harvey Weinstein's were a dime a dozen. I mean, I don't think anyone was quite as bad as he was, but. But there was just, you know, the same amount of sexism you saw just about everywhere in the late sixties and early seventies. I mean, the. The women's movement really took off in the seventies. It got started in the mid sixties, but it. Attitudes changed slowly.

15:28 And did you end up finishing film school?

15:31 I did not. I only had enough money for three semesters. And two things happened. Well, one, I ran out of money, but the other was that I realized that to work in the film industry, you didn't need a degree. You only needed a degree if you wanted to be faculty. No one cared where you went to college. No one cared if you graduated from grammar school. They only cared could you do the job. And that was a huge liberation from all the academic pressures of growing up in an eastern intellectual environment. And so for me, that was a huge liberation as well. Did that answer your question?

16:21 Yeah. And so what were your main projects?

16:29 I got started, as most people do, being an assistant. So I was an assistant editor. I was an assistant director. I was a production assistant. I got my first full editing job working at Encyclopedia Britannica films. And I worked with one particular director with whom I worked very well. He and I are still great friends today, and we made a lot of films for Encyclopedia Britannica together. The first film we did together was a film called newspaper story. He and his crew went to the Los Angeles Times and shot about 20 hours of footage of everything from the people who deliver the papers to the people who write, the editors, the people who go out on assignments, the printing presses, every part of what it takes to put a newspaper together. And I remember he gave me this 20 hours of footage for a less than half an hour movie and said, I know there's a film in here. Can you find it? I still remember that, and I did, and it just fulfilled all of my needs to be creative and get good at my craft. Remember, these are the days when you're really dealing with film. You're dealing with strips of celluloid that hang in linen Binsheendhouse, and you are marking them up with a white marker, and you are splicing them with a little guillotine and putting them together with tape. And you're editing the sound separately and working on a machine called a moviola. You'd have to look that up on Google now to see what that looks like. It's very different from the way films are made today. And I loved it because I've always enjoyed working with both my brain and my hands. All of the jobs that I've had have included hand skills. So it was. I don't think I ever could have done a desk job or been an academic. I think that would not have fulfilled my needs to be creative and also to work with my hands. So those were my first jobs. I worked on a few feature films, but it was very hard to get into the unions. And the big features were all union projects. There was, and still is a union called IATSI, which is all the people who work behind the scenes. And then, of course, there were the guilds, the writers Guild, the Actors Guild, the Cinematographers Guild, the editors Guild, and getting into the guilds, you really had to. It was a combination of luck and skill. And right around the time I left the film industry was when people of my generation from film school were just starting to get into the unions and the guilds. But that didn't happen while I was working in the industry, which was in the seventies.

19:57 Did you. Were any of your classmates, anyone that became famous?

20:01 Yes. Now you're asking me to drop names.

20:06 Maybe you won't have to disclose your identity.

20:10 My first awareness of people who went on to be famous. I remember the film school at USC is now in a huge, multi, multi million dollar complex. But when we were going, I'm not sure if this is a paw per or not, it was in a courtyard that used to be the stables. So there was a courtyard in the middle, and all the classrooms were around the courtyard. And I remember standing in the courtyard one day, and there was a guy checking some camera equipment out of the equipment room. And someone said, how come he gets to be here? I thought he graduated. And that person was George Lucas, who had been at film school, I think, a year or two before me. And he would bring his films to the school to show them to the students before they went on the screen. So his first film, which he adapted from a student film called THX, I remember him coming and showing it to the students. And then he did a wonderful film called American Graffiti. I remember seeing that in the screening room at USC I shared. We had this one large room that had many, many moviolas, where all the students were editing their films. And I remember sitting next to John Carpenter, who was having trouble keeping his footage in sync. I still remember this. John, of course, went on to be a world famous and world renowned director. He directed movies like Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape from New York. And you've probably seen or heard of a lot of his movies. I could drop a whole lot of other names, but what's the point? It was my generation of film enthusiasts. People in my generation were people like Francis Ford Coppola, who had gone to UCLA Film School, and George Lucas, who went to my film school, and Steven Spielberg, who didn't go to film school. But I think was still part of this generation of. Of young people who maybe the first generation, who got excited because of their. Everything that they had seen when they were growing up and you can see the effects of movies from the forties and fifties and sixties on this generation of filmmakers and what they chose to. To create.

23:13 So well. Me and you both know that you didn't end up being a film director in pursuing midwifery. So why did you leave LA? Why did you leave the film?

23:28 Why did I leave the film industry? There were a lot of reasons. I was very successful in getting editing jobs. A lot of the people I knew, you would go work on a film somewhere and then you'd have a month with no job and you'd collect unemployment insurance until you got hired. There were no salaried positions as filmmakers. You freelanced from project to project. I almost never collected unemployment. I had pretty steady projects. But again, one project to the next, and you never knew when the next project would come. So part of me kept thinking, I don't want to get up and look for work. I want to get up and go to work. Boy, was I wrong about that. But anyhow, I remember thinking that. I remember thinking, as a woman, I will never get out of the editing room. And I mean, there are some fabulous, fabulous women editors of my generation, or a little older, Verna Fields and Thelma Schoonmaker, and women who just were brilliant at what they did. I did not want to live my life in a dark room by myself, except when the director came in to see what was going on, playing with pieces of celluloid. I had gone into filmmaking thinking I would change the world. I would, you know, make films that would go out and influence people. And I began to realize, even if I make those films, I'll never see the people who are being influenced. It'll be the films that'll be out there doing it. But I will be stuck in the editing room. Plus, I felt the need to expand my life. Everybody I knew was in the film industry. And every party you went to, all they talked about. And I really needed to expand. It wasn't that I lost my love of filmmaking. I mean, as you know, I still make movies, I give lectures about movies. But I needed to get out of the industry. And it took me a long time to figure out what was next. And I thought about going back to medical school. I mean, I was still just in my early thirties. Actually, I might have been my late twenties, not sure, but I still felt that I did not like the approach to healthcare that I was seeing back then. And it was still a pretty sexist work environment. And one day again, I'm like a pinball going in one direction, and boom, I'm on another. Someone started talking about a friend of hers who was a nurse midwife. And the more I learned about it, the more I realized that I could practice obstetrics and interact with women and change their lives on my own terms. And after seriously considering what would it mean to leave this career that I had actually built up a reputation for, I just said, I need to move on. I think everyone was shocked. My film friends were shocked. My parents were shocked. I was shocked. But my heart was leading me in another direction. And I looked around, and again, I said, all right, where's the best place to learn this? And I found a wonderful program at Yale University where if you had a bachelor's degree in anything in three years, you got the equivalent of a degree in nursing and then a master's degree in midwifery. And I applied, and I got in. I moved back east. But I never lost my connection with the wonderful people I knew from my decade in Los Angeles. I still have very dear friends who I know from the film industry, many of whom left for similar reasons, very few of whom actually stayed.

28:30 So just to, like, wrap things up, you touched upon this a little bit, but how do you still stay connected for your love of film?

28:39 Oh, many ways. First of all, I watch a ton of movies.

28:43 What's your favorite film? If you were to recommend someone, one film, what would it be?

28:53 It would depend on who I was recommending it to. I mean, you know, to say, oh, my favorite film is Casablanca. Well, when I chose to start lecturing about film, I chose Casablanca only because I knew that if I was going to lecture about it, I would have to be looking at it over and over and over again and examining the editing and the lighting and the scripting and the this and the that. What other movie could I bear to look at more than once? So I guess it's Casablanca. But there's so many. I mean, it's like saying, what's your favorite book? Just because it's your favorite book doesn't mean you haven't loved and enjoyed hundreds of other books. But I've thought more about that movie and its construction and its history, and I've lectured more about that movie than maybe any other film. But what happened was when I moved to western Massachusetts for the midwifery job that I actually did for over 30 years, I suddenly realized that it was very hard to go to the movies with my friends because we weren't seeing the same movie and we didn't have a common language. I remember going to one movie, and I walked out and said, oh, my God. Do you realize that movie had eight cuts? To which one of them replied, what's a cut? So it became clear to me that I needed. I wanted to share what I knew about filmmaking. And that's when I developed my first film, talk, which I just did for my friends. I called it film school in 90 minutes, where I just talked about how movies got put together and the difference between a pan and a dolly and a crane and a tilt and a two shot and a close up and an over the shoulder and an establishing shot and what a script looks like. I mean, I went through the process of making movies, so I've never lost that love. But I went to another job that had a lot of hand skills that used my brain and my heart and my hands and allowed me to do what I'd always wanted to do since I was 14, which was to change women's lives. Bye. Giving them the health care I thought they deserved. Plus, I had human interaction, which I did not have as a film editor. So many reasons. But I never, ever lost my love of movies. I love them to this day.