In February 1968, Bestor Cram, a 22-year-old U.S. Marine who had recently graduated from Denison with a degree in economics, shipped out to Vietnam, where he would spend the next 13 months serving as a platoon leader in an engineer battalion. The son of a politically active mother who had marched from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., with Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1965 and a moderate Republican father who had served as an Army officer during World War II, Cram ‘67 left the States without strong feelings one way or the other about America’s role in Vietnam. His experiences there, however, proved transformative. Soon after returning to the States in March 1969, while still a Marine, he filed a claim as a conscientious objector, thereby coming out publicly as a fully radicalized dissenter.
Cram has been dissenting from–or at least carefully scrutinizing–the status quo ever since. Today, as the 63-year-old founder and head of Northern Light Productions, he is both a successful businessman and a serious filmmaker. Since 1982, Cram and his team have produced several award-winning productions, including documentaries featured on HBO, PBS, and the Discovery Channel. They’ve explored issues related to America’s farm crisis in the 1980s, transsexuality, the repercussions of the Vietnam War, and many other compelling, sometimes controversial subjects.
Northern Light also produces history pieces for museums and visitors’ centers including the National Park Service and the Smithsonian.
Last year, Cram put the finishing touches on Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, a documentary he directed and, along with Cash biographer Michael Streissguth, co-produced. The DVD of the film was released in November as part of a Columbia/Legacy CD box set celebrating the 40th anniversary of Cash’s now-legendary appearance at California’s notorious Folsom Prison. Those concerts, performed on January 13, 1968, provided the material for Cash’s career-reviving album–titled, like the box set and the DVD, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison–and made the singer something of a hero to America’s young and emerging counterculture.
On a bitter cold morning in January at the Northern Light Productions headquarters, located on the second floor of a redbrick building in the Allston section of Boston, Cram sat in his comfortable, cluttered office and discussed how and why one dissenting voice came to produce a documentary about, arguably, the most important day in the life of a fabled American icon.
How did the Johnny Cash film come about?
I had made a film called The Special, that tells the story of “The Orange Blossom Special,” this bluegrass anthem. In that film, we take Johnny Cash to task, actually, because Johnny Cash turned it into a harmonica song. It’s a fiddle tune. Fiddlers had been using this song to astound people with their virtuosity.
So, in 2005, I got invited to a thing called the “Cash Bash,” which is an annual gathering of Cash fans. They’d heard of this film, said, “C’mon down. It’ll be great.” While I was there, Michael Streissguth gave me a copy of his book Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison. He said, “Look at this. Give me a call.”
At Northern Light Productions in Boston, Bestor Cram and his team of filmmakers take on controversial subjects, including explorations of the Vietnam War, transexuality, and the life of a murderer-turned-poet. Since 1982, the company has produced more than 100 films, some of which have appeared on HBO, PBS, and the Discovery Channel.
So you read the book …
I did. And I recognized immediately that there was a really fascinating movie in here. Did it present another opportunity to make a film about music? Yes. But the music alone wasn’t going to hold my interest. I’m more interested in Cash as an interpreter, as an actor, as a voice, than I am in him as a musician. And I was interested in the stories of the prisoners–people whose lives had been transformed by Johnny Cash going to Folsom–and by Cash himself becoming a spokesperson for the prison-reform movement.
Also, Johnny Cash recorded at Folsom in 1968, and if there’s been one thing that I’ve continuously done in my life, it has been to try to understand what happened during the year that I was away. I left for Vietnam in 1968 and came back in 1969. The country that I left, the United States, was a different country when I came back. I was a different man, yes. That was understood, and I recognized that. But I also recognized that everything had changed. The political landscape had changed, the culture had changed.
In a single year?
In a single year, it felt like everything was different. And I think we still look back on ‘68 as a sort of watershed year, in which so much upheaval took place. And quite a bit of my work has been focused, not so much specifically on 1968, but on things that happened because of what took place during that year. In ‘68, different quarters of the world competed to see who could shout loudest about what they were opposed to and what they were going to change. There was an understanding that, at this youthful moment, we had the power to make the world different. There was a lot of idealism.
You mentioned that you returned from Vietnam a changed man. How so?
I was more politically astute. I was probably pretty naïve before I left for Vietnam. I think I had yet to open up my mind and eyes to actually see things in a way that was different from the way in which my government was presenting them to me.
I came back with an entirely different view about what the war in Vietnam was, compared to what I had been taught by the military. When I went into the military, I was still uncertain as to what I thought the war was about. When I came back, I was quite certain. There was an education that took place over a 13-month period in Vietnam. A young soldier became a wiser man. I also came back radicalized to the point that it was time to make statements, to not go unheard. It wasn’t so much a political conversion as it was a new recognition of what it was to be patriotic in your country. I acquired the ability to be a dissenter and to be patriotic at the same time.
Are you satisfied with what you’ve learned about 1968?
I think I’m finding that it’s more fascinating than I had understood. And Johnny Cash is a perfect case in point. In 1968, Johnny Cash, a country singer, becomes an icon in an emerging FM world. This is a time in which psychedelic music, and the San Francisco sound, and so many counterparts to our culture, are marching through. Johnny Cash doesn’t seem to be the right fit. And yet he’s probably endured better than anybody.
What strikes you as especially noteworthy about his decision to play at Folsom Prison?
Cash understood that, as an artist, he had to place himself in an environment where his artistry could be most evident. By being in front of a group of prisoners, he was wonderfully exposed and very vulnerable. He was also the supreme self-manager. He knew he needed to do something that was going to put life back into his career, which was not going well at that point. I don’t think he knew Folsom was going to be as important as it was. So he did what artists do, which is to find a place where the best of them comes out.
To your knowledge, had anyone played prisons before?
Well, other than Cash himself, the only other musician of that caliber who had played prisons was Sammy Davis, Jr. Of course, B.B. King played prisons after Cash. He played in San Quentin, and he recorded a great album at the Cook County Jail. But Johnny Cash was, by far, the most important personality who was going to any prison.
How do you think Cash’s appearance at Folsom and other prisons affected the prisoners there?
It gave them a moment of escape from the routine of their lives. And because it was Johnny Cash, it gave them a big moment of escape.
In 1968, Johnny Cash played his most famous show at Folsom Prison. The unique venue was a move to revive a floundering career, but it was also his attempt to bring attention to prison reform.
Do you think Cash offered something more than escapism?
Yeah, he gave prisoners a sense that the outside world actually cared about them.
In your documentary, there’s a great quote from Cash’s daughter, Rosanne. Speaking about her dad, she says, “Paradoxically, given what the subject matter and the material of Folsom was, that was the moment that he came into the light.” It’s a compelling notion, the idea of the “man in black” stepping into the light.
Anybody who was in the presence of Johnny Cash, whether he was in a room or on a stage, noticed that he occupied the space in a manner that was greater than most normal human beings. There’s a physical presence, but there’s something else that radiated from him. He knew that.
What can someone get from watching this film? What’s its value?
First, you find that Johnny Cash is a much more fascinating person than just a singer of country songs. There’s actually quite a bit of depth to this individual. He’s a thinking man, an intellectual. He has his own capacity for empathy that transcends just what country music is about. I mean, I don’t necessarily embrace country music as being the most empathetic of artistic expressions. It’s great storytelling, but Johnny Cash brings a degree of empathy that makes you say, “Wait a second, there’s a soul, there’s a heart, there’s a person that’s a part of this story.” He embodies the story. So you discover the profound depth of Cash’s artistry.
You mentioned earlier that Cash became a spokesman for prison reform. Your film deals with that period of his life. Do you think that’s a subject that has contemporary relevance?
Absolutely. The conditions in which people live within prisons end up being conditions that reduce the humanity of an individual, as opposed to reconstructing or rebuilding or supporting the humanity of an individual. If we think that we’re going to have people come out of prison being the folks that we want to have in society, we need to make prisons way more reflective of what we think our society is supposed to be, as opposed to being cages and, essentially, chambers of horror.
There came a point in the documentary when both Cash’s manager, Lou Robin, and Cash’s daughter, Rosanne, said that Cash eventually tired of not only playing in prisons but of working on prison-reform issues as well.
Yes, Lou Robin said that Johnny grew very dissatisfied with what was happening with the prison-reform movement. And historically, if you look at the prisonreform movement, it ends at the same time that Cash’s star really starts to fade, in the latter part of the ’70s. We move into much more of a law-and-order world, where law-and-order candidates are getting elected. The liberal ideas that were hatched in the ’60s, andhad become a reality in the ’70s, are no longer popular. And there’s the beginning of an organized political movement to combat this at a very effective level. We saw this later, for instance, in the Willie Horton ad that was developed to derail Michael Dukakis’s run at the presidency. That ad appealed to a national conscience at a national level, and its message was: “Wait a second, these liberals are just not right for us. We’re gonna have rapists and killers and all sorts of folks in our society that we don’t want to have.” Which is not what Cash was about at all. Cash was much more about recognizing that, “Wait a second, you gotta make the prison a place where it’s not a training ground for prisoners to become better criminals.” And he was also about decriminalizing marijuana use and things like that, where we were just throwing all sorts of non-criminal people into a criminal atmosphere.
Anyway, in 1978, I think, Cash goes to Huntsville, Alabama, and he has a pretty rough experience.
In what regard?
The prisoners aren’t into him. They don’t think what he’s doing is cool. By this time, he’s sort of become Mr. Patriotic. He’s a flagwaver. His newer music isn’t so interesting, and he’s not connecting to a younger generation like he did in ‘68. So he gets stuff thrown at him, and he’s booed. And he thinks, “I don’t need to do this anymore.” He didn’t feel safe.
No doubt they were dangerous environments.I wonder why he ever wanted to play prisons at all.
Mike Streissguth would probably say the reason Cash did it was that he identified more closely with marginalized people. He identified with downtrodden, hard-on-their-luck folks. He identified with Native Americans as marginalized individuals and as a disenfranchised group of people. And I think he felt the same way about prisoners.
Also, you have to believe what Merle Haggard says in the film. Merle and Johnny Cash knew one another, and there was a lot of mutual respect between them. Merle says, “Johnny Cash knew he could’ve been there. The way he lived his life, had things gone differently, he might’ve been someone there.” So in some respects this was a comfortable place. This was a place where he was easily able to be himself.
A Life in Pictures
Since 1982, Bestor Cram has produced more than 100 documentaries. Here he talks about the five closest to his heart.
Scarred Justice: The Orangeburg Massacre 1968
(2009)–On February 8, 1968, eight seconds of police gunfire left three young men dead and at least 28 wounded on the campus of South Carolina State College in Orangeburg, S.C. This was one of the most important events of the civil rights era, and almost no one knows about it. As a documentary filmmaker, part of my job is to shed light on incidents that haven’t been fully considered; to raise questions that will contribute to the discussion of accountability. It might even help ensure that this kind of tragedy never happens again.
Unfinished Symphony: Democracy and Dissent
(2001)–This project examines a local conflict that reverberated nationally. The film documents a 1971 Vietnam Veterans Against the War rally that retraced the ride of Paul Revere from Concord to Boston and culminated in a huge demonstration on the Common. Probably my most personal film, it ended up premiering at Sundance. I edited it to Henryk Górecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” which transformed the film into a lyrical essay documenting citizen soldiers at the doorstep to Walden Pond, where Henry David Thoreau wrote “Civil Disobedience.”
Killer Poet
(2008)–This one tells the story of Norman Porter, a convicted double murderer from Massachusetts who served 25 years in prison before escaping to Chicago. There he spent the next two decades living as a poet/intellectual under an assumed name. Today, Porter is back in a maximum-security penitentiary and will likely die behind bars. As soon as I learned about this story, I was struck by nagging questions about punishment and rehabilitation that I wanted to explore.
You Don’t Know Dick
(1996)–Simply put, this is a thought-provoking documentary on gender identity. It provides honest portraits of six men who once were women. Each has lived within a body he didn’t accept, and each has tried to adapt to social expectations he couldn’t fulfill. All have embarked upon an enormous and transfiguring struggle to recover their dignity and an identity once denied to them. It is not just a film about sex and surgical procedures; it’s about knowing who we are, and what we must go through to become that person.
There But For The Grace…
(1993)–Just as quickly as the Farm Crisis became a nightly news story in the mid-’80s, it disappeared from the front pages of America’s newspapers. So, over a five-year period–from 1986 to 1990–I set out to chronicle the lives of four farm families in Minnesota and Iowa. Their triumphs and sorrows reflected a time on the plains of our nation’s heartland when an economic bonanza turned into a crushing financial blow. As an independent filmmaker, I found myself relating to these family farmers who were courageously holding on to lifestyles that satisfied them, yet challenged their fundamental beliefs in what it is to be a proud American.