Chapter 16
Susan Kim

Susan Kim is a prolific writer of books, plays, dramatic and documentary films, and children’s television. For the stage, she wrote the adaptation of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, as well as numerous one-act plays that have been performed at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and elsewhere, and also published. A five-time Emmy Award nominee, her television writing includes more than two dozen children’s series. Her documentary credits include Paving the Way (1997), a 60-minute film for PBS for which she won the Writers Guild Award; The Meaning of Food (2005), a three-hour series for PBS; and the feature-length Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust (2007), which explores the 60-year relationship between the U.S. movie industry and the horrors of Nazi Germany.

At the time of this interview, Susan Kim and Elissa Stein had recently published the nonfiction book Flow: The Cultural Story of Menstruation (St. Martin’s Press, 2009), and she and Laurence Klavan had completed two graphic novels, City of Spies and Brain Camp, both of which were published by First Second Books in 2010. Since then, she and Klavan completed a young adult trilogy, Wasteland (2013); with director Daniel Anker, she wrote the feature documentary Icebound (2012); and she was the head writer for the new Scholastic children’s television series Astroblast.

Susan serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Goddard College, which is where we met in 2008, as advisor and student.

The film I particularly want to talk to you about is Imaginary Witness, which you wrote (as co-producer), and Daniel Anker directed and produced, along with Ellin Baumel. How did this project come about?

It was back in 2001, and AMC, American Movie Classics, had a commissioned series, Hollywood and the Blank, Hollywood and Blank. So it was Hollywood and Islam, Hollywood and Vietnam. . . . How does the commercial narrative machine of Hollywood tackle complex geopolitical, historical subjects? And they approached Danny Anker to do Hollywood and the Holocaust. AMC’s budgets were quite small, and I think their expectations were very much for it to be a clip show. The schedule was really tight. The budget was very small. And from what we saw of what they were doing, it was what you would expect.

I met with Danny right after 9/11, maybe two or three weeks after, and you could still smell the smoke, even in Danny’s apartment near Lincoln Center. We spent half of the conversation talking about the attack, and it was sort of clear to us that—part of it was just pure emotion—this was much bigger than just a clip show, and we don’t want to do a clip show. We spent a lot of time talking about, “What are the fictional movies about 9/11 going to be like?” We just immediately started thinking about [the film] in very alive and current terms, as opposed to, say, historical terms. And I think that alone made it seem very, very urgent. From the beginning, the conversation became about: “How is this a current story? What are the issues we’re dealing with today? This is not just some dusty subject that happened in the 1940s. This is actually something that has relevance.”

All of us were in agreement that we didn’t want to do it “trash and cash,” one of those quick-and-dirty money jobs. We wanted to do it carefully. And Danny became this incredible warrior of this film, because it was extremely difficult. We had a lot of conflict with AMC, because the schedule was crazy. He started raising outside money, and we just slowed down, because we all thought, okay, this needs a lot of research. We did a ton of reading, all the books and articles we could find, and a ton of screening. And we discussed and argued and screened together for the longest time before we actually started digitizing footage and talking about interviews. Also, we had a fantastic researcher in D.C., Julie Stein, who was pulling material from the Library of Congress and National Archives and feeding it to us.

One of the things that comes through in the film is a very clear evolution, a transformation of the relationship between Hollywood and the Holocaust over this 60-year period. Is that something you discovered through this research?

Absolutely. It was a very cumulative thing. Early on, I drafted a really bad, really preliminary kind of shooting draft. And it was just sort of trying out different structures. For a very long time, we thought the movie moguls’ trip to visit the camps in postwar Germany was going to be the wrap-around story. That was one of our earliest structures. When Bruce Shaw, the editor, came on and he started digitizing and laying out the roughest bones, we all kept saying, “We don’t want to do chronological. We want to do something more clever.” We wanted to impose a sort of a brilliant structure. But the more we started filling in the chronology—I think it was understanding that the chronology was not just a simple schematic device, but that there was extraordinary complexity within the chronology. That if you take it from 1933 until 2001, it followed a psychological arc in terms of the survivor community. There was a business relationship arc, certainly, between Hollywood and Germany in the ’30s and ’40s. Things like Israel and identity politics in the ’60s and ’70s. All these things started playing more and more of a part that we could not have anticipated. The miniseries Roots was really important in terms of laying the groundwork for the miniseries Holocaust.

It took a very long time. We were sort of reading and transcribing and interviewing. There has been some good, interesting literature. Annette Insdorf has written Indelible Shadows. Judith Doneson—she was going to be our advisor, and then she died fairly early on in our preproduction—wrote a book called The Holocaust in American Film. And there’s a wonderful book Celluloid Soldiers [Michael Birdwell], which took a look at Warner Bros. and the run-ins they had with conservatives in Congress about interventionism versus isolationism. So it was cumulative. It was sort of like a gesso, just layer after layer after layer, and going back and finding out more and more things.

And then of course the interviews, as you know, inform the direction of your research. All that material got transcribed. I would start sticking pieces of transcript into my drafts while the editor was also starting to do his assemblies. We would all get together, and he would show us what he had assembled, and I would distribute my script, and then we would argue about it, and then Bruce would occasionally take some of what I’d written and try to make it work. And then we would say, “What are we missing? Do we need another interview here?” A lot of times, the interview subjects would mention resources that we didn’t know about or hadn’t heard about. So we would then go back into research, or we would get more films in, or we would research another person to interview.

I think you have 21 people that you interview on screen. How did you go about selecting them?

There are the obvious people, there are the clever people you interview toward the end to stitch together, there are the people who make the points you want them to make, and then there’s sort of the marquee people. You weigh all these different things. Annette Insdorf was someone we obviously wanted. Even though I would say her angle tends to be a bit more European than American, she could certainly speak about it with great authority. So she was one of those “we’ve got to have.” We very much pursued Elie Wiesel, and came very close to getting him, but he was ill, I don’t believe he was in the country, and we didn’t. That was a big disappointment. But Thane Rosenbaum’s a colleague of Wiesel’s, and Danny had heard him speak, and we knew that he would make Wiesel’s argument: that it was commercializing the Holocaust to film it, and that there’s an ethical quandary involved and something obscene about fictionalizing it.

Obviously someone like Steven Spielberg was a big “get.” Rod Steiger, in terms of content, he said something very actor-y, but it’s really effective. Same thing with Fritz Weaver. He was in Holocaust; he played the patriarch in the family Weiss. They’re not necessarily adding heavy academic or historical substance, but they’re certainly adding the Hollywood flavor, which was also part of the film.

Neal Gabler was one of the last people we interviewed. He screened the film, and we said, “We need you to pull together some things.” They really were advisors, all of these people. They came in and screened the film several times, talked to us at great length: “Well, you made that point; you could make this point.” And we really let these people talk on camera, which was a luxury that AMC would not have allowed us to do on the original budget and schedule. I think Neal Gabler said that he’s used to being interviewed for two hours for a documentary and then seeing an 11-second bite go by and that’s it. That was a real pleasure about working on this film.

The team used documentary footage to convey the history itself, and the Hollywood footage only to convey the Hollywood approach to the history. Was it difficult to make that work?

I really can’t speak highly enough about our editor, Bruce Shaw. Bruce is very creative and thoughtful. And of course later, the whole concept of using documentary to inform us on screen becomes a thematic point.

Such as?

Certainly with, say, Sophie’s Choice and the use of survivor testimony to inform the detail and the verisimilitude on screen. Certainly with Shoah, and the detail Spielberg used in Schindler’s List. That was very much based on testimony from survivors.

But just visually speaking, it was a lot of back and forth and playing with things. Often it would be the three of us—Danny, Bruce, and me—sitting in the edit room. And I would be writing, and Danny would be researching something online, and Bruce would be editing. And occasionally one of us would say, “Hey, take a look at this,” or “Stop, stop, stop. Can we use this?” And it was just a lot of arguing. It was kind of fractious, like the pervasive smell of Chinese food and burritos and a lot of yelling, because it was very delicate.

Because Imaginary Witness contains both, it’s interesting to compare the raw power of actual Holocaust footage with the different kind of power that comes from fictionalized accounts.

I think you say that as a filmmaker and filmgoer, with more of an understanding of what’s involved. I’ve seen the film many times, and I’m always intrigued to see people sobbing at Sophie’s Choice, the scene where she has to choose between her children. I’m very dry-eyed at that point. But I am [continually] blown away by the reunion moment from This Is Your Life [a reality program that aired between 1952 and 1963], when Hanna Kohner [a survivor] is reunited with her brother. To me, the difference between Hollywood emotion and real emotion, documentary emotion, is just so vividly different.

One of our big decisions, something we went back and forth on, was whether or not to use actual atrocity footage. There’s a very brief glimpse of a skeleton in an oven. It was from the section on Judgment at Nuremberg and that film’s use of documentary footage. I personally thought it was obscene; I thought that we couldn’t use it. But there’s a sequence in the documentary where the newsreel footage is finally brought back to Hollywood for the first time. And we just have details of a film projector running, and a voice-over describing what it was like to watch it. We don’t actually show the footage.

It’s interesting that as the decades pass, the Hollywood dramatizations became increasingly graphic.

Yes. You can see Dan Curtis doing his incredibly graphic War and Remembrance, where you have piles and piles of skeletons. And then you have the Einsatzgruppen shooting all these naked people; they’re tumbling into a ditch and it’s extremely graphic. I think it does have a teachable value for people who don’t understand the scope of it. But again, to me, knowing the production history a little bit, I know those are all extras from a nudist colony. You can tell these are plastic skeletons. You can see the show business to it; I think I can. But at the same time, I see the value of it. You need to use strong tools to tell a story.

With such a wealth of material to choose from—60 years of Hollywood moviemaking, plus all the documentary material and interviews—how did you decide what to leave out?

Ultimately—and this is something getting back to dramatic writing— you want everything to serve the story. There are times when something is really fascinating, but it sort of spirals off into [another] direction. For example, when I think of films that I wish we could have included, there was a screwball comedy called Once upon a Honeymoon [1942, with Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers], where the couple accidentally go into a concentration camp because they’re mistaken as Jews. And it’s done as a wacky comedy. I really wish we could have used that. There was a really good film with Kirk Douglas called The Juggler [1953]. But you get these clips, you screen the film really carefully, and it doesn’t support the structure of the act. Perhaps there’s a larger point you’re trying to make, and it does not support or challenge it in a way that moves the argument forward.

Documentary film, although I think any good film or any piece of art, frankly—the greatest work is ultimately interactive because it causes you to think and argue, and it doesn’t necessarily give you a sealed package. I think anything good has complexity to it. But at the same time, you should be telling a story; you should have a point of view. And it’s always that delicate balance about: “Are we sealing this too hermetically? Is there no air in this beat? Are we giving this moment the complexity that it needs, and the detail and the ambiguity it may demand? Or is it just amorphous?” And that’s a really difficult thing. It’s like: “Is this contributing to the ultimate shape?” There should be a sense of cohesion and vision, or point of view, in the finished piece, whether it’s a marble sculpture, a documentary film, a play, a nonfiction book, or a magazine article.

Imaginary Witness looks very critically at its subject. With a film like this, how do you avoid it somehow coming across as a celebration?

The most important thing that we were trying to do in Imaginary Witness was pose larger questions. If you do that, by definition, you’re not going in a celebratory direction. Celebration implies catharsis, closure, finality, that something has been won. And I think the themes that we were trying to explore are ones that are still active and alive, even when applied to other atrocities and other things that Hollywood attempts, on occasion, to grapple with.

You’ve described Imaginary Witness as coming together very organically, and at the same time, it’s built on a three-act structure. To me it sort of illustrates a basic point about structure, which is that it’s a tool for understanding and shaping the film that exists, as opposed to a formula imposed from without.

And it’s funny because “structure” itself sounds so rigid. It sounds like everything has to fit to a T-square. But of course that’s not true. Beautiful structure is like anything. Every great thing has its own structure that works, and it’s not necessarily something you can apply to every film, but it makes sense within that film. So you’re right. You can look at something and say—for example, with me when I’m working on a documentary, I will write something that to me makes great sense on paper; it’s beautifully structured on paper, and we start putting it together, and it’s so boring! It doesn’t work. So then you start ripping it apart and asking those questions about: “Do we subvert the structure? Do we play with the chronology? Do we shift the perspective so we’re not looking at it from this point of view, we’re looking from that point of view? Have we misidentified the central event? Is that not the real point of this? Is there something else going on subtextually that we have not been aware of, and that is slowly starting to emerge?” Anybody who understands structure can argue this a lot of different ways. You can give the same raw footage to 10 different filmmakers and they can come up with 10 terrific films that are quite different, which is something that always fascinated me.

You’ve written a lot of television for children, some of it nonfiction, or at least with documentary elements. Do you approach storytelling differently when you’re writing for young audiences?

I’ve written a lot of Reading Rainbows, [which] is a magazine format but often has documentary elements. And I also wrote and produced several episodes of Really Wild Animals, a natural history series for children that was produced by National Geographic for CBS. It’s a little different because you can’t assume that the attention span is there to follow these long, twisting threads over the course of a half hour. You’re not necessarily going to have the same kind of setup and payoff, and stories cross-cutting the central story. With children, I tend to be much more modular; more basically educational. Like: “These are the different layers of a rain forest; these are the animals that live in the—.” You basically say what the structure is going to be, and then you take them through it. And obviously the bells and whistles are a little more vibrant with kids: humor, animation, songs, jokes. Also, comparative visuals if you’re working with young kids. Film editing is hard enough for a very young child to follow, because sudden visual juxtapositions are confusing.

You and Laurence Klavan have two graphic novels coming out this year, both written for middle school children. They’re fiction, but one, for example, is inspired by a real-life story, the discovery of a Nazi spy ring in New York City. For documentary filmmakers whose work is sometimes compared to creative nonfiction, or nonfiction novels, the graphic novel seems like another creative model—certainly as we saw with Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, an animated documentary memoir.

Some of the most successful and effective graphic novels are [grounded in] nonfiction. A lot of them are memoir. I’m thinking of Palestine by Joe Sacco, and Persepolis obviously has documentary elements, but it’s still a memoir. And Stitches, Epileptic, A Drifting Life . . . They’re so strongly drawn and so heightened, it’s interesting for documentary filmmakers to take a look at them. They’re like storyboards; they’re so visual.

What do you say to filmmakers or dramatists who resist the notion of story as being contrived?

I’m always intrigued by people who don’t have a taste for it. I have a student this semester who was attacking narrative, attacking theater as being fundamentally conservative. “Why do we have to read the stupid Poetics? I am sick of plot. I am tired of character. Why can’t we explode them?” She said that all other art forms have transformed radically since, say, the ancient Greeks. She said you cannot look at painting today and say that it’s at all based on the same precepts of, say, a Renaissance painting, even though of course they’re using the same tools—color and composition and subjects and brush stroke. The rules have been completely exploded, and it’s fine. She said, “Why can’t drama have the same revolution? When people bend theater”— someone like Richard Foreman or Lee Breuer and Mabou Mines—“it always gets ghettoized.”

My argument is, that while much of The Poetics is not germane because we live in a different era, there is something about the power of tragedy to effect catharsis. Drama is a really effective form, a really ancient form, and a powerful one. One of the first things children do is play act. They respond to fairy tales—the good guy, the bad guy, the antagonist, the ending—really strongly. The unconscious mind attempts to make narrative every night when we sleep. If we are very bothered, we will have dreams that are rife with subtext and symbolism and thematic development and conflict and strong emotion. I think that’s just the way we as humans are neurologically and culturally structured. So I think there is something inherent in the dramatic form that’s really powerful. And I think that’s why, as storytellers, as people who want to make documentary or write plays, it behooves us to understand the potential of that structure.

I was thinking about Hands on a Hard Body yesterday, and I was thinking I don’t particularly like marathons or dance-a-thons or endurance things. I would not last holding on to a truck for 48 hours. But that movie has stayed with me. The story actually was very simple: You had a very clear sense of character; there was a real beginning, a real dramatic action, and a real ending. And a surprising person wins, and people flame out. And even though, going into it, I wouldn’t have necessarily thought that was an exciting story, I was really captured by it.

Spellbound is another example of a film like that. I’m going to spend 90 minutes watching kids spell?

Exactly, exactly. Or Man on Wire. These films where you’re thinking, “Okay, I could see watching that for 20 minutes.” And then 90 minutes later you’re sobbing or applauding or jumping back because you want to see something again.

So how would you explain how that’s done?

I think part of it is, if you love the story—if you really are emotionally and intellectually compelled by the story—then you start finding the complexity and the nuance. It’s all specificity and stakes. Whether you’re writing dramatic fiction or doing something that’s nonfiction, the more specific you are—and if the specifics serve the dramatic action, and it’s a good story to begin with—that, by definition, puts you ahead of nine-tenths of the pack.

People don’t want to see a statement. They want to see action. And action is a fight; it’s people fighting for what they want, and you don’t know who’s going to win. This is why people watch sports. For example, Man on Wire. We know that Philippe Petit is going to successfully walk across the World Trade towers, but if you break that into the separate battles of his achieving that, you don’t know how each thing is going to turn out. And each step is full of surprises. You don’t spoon-feed the information to the audience. You let it develop, so that there is suspense: Is he going to get up the stairs or not? Is the guard going to wake up or not?

How would you articulate that in terms of Imaginary Witness?

That there are real setbacks. Each act has different things going on that are very high stakes. Certainly during the 1940s itself, you could argue that thousands and thousands of Jews were being killed every day in the concentration camps, and was the United States going to do anything? Unless you’re a historian or you’ve read a lot about the period, you don’t necessarily know what’s going to happen.

I think a lot of it has to do with narration; it’s a heavily narrated film. I can understand why a lot of documentary filmmakers veer away from narration, because I think at its worst, it is what I’m talking about, a filmmaker spoon-feeding the audience. In an ideal world, it’s merely giving you just enough to keep you up to speed with what’s going on in the film. It should not stand apart from the film. It should not be imposed on the film. It really should be part of the film. And we phrased each of our acts as a question. For example, the question of, “What was going to happen to the tales of the survivors?” People were dead. Germany was trying to rebuild. Liberal voices in the Hollywood Jewish left wing were being silenced because of HUAC [the House UnAmerican Activities Committee]. So you pose those questions, and you don’t answer them until you earn the answer.

Sources and Notes

Imaginary Witness is currently (2015) available on hulu, www.hulu.com/watch/532445. Susan Kim’s Amazon.com author page is at www.amazon.com/Susan-Kim/e/B002MA0V78. The segment of Hanna Bloch Kohner on This Is Your Life (aired May 27, 1953) can be viewed online at the Internet Archive, www.archive.org; the segment is at www.archive.org/details/this_is_your_life_hanna_bloch_kohner.