Olympic Visions Of Eight

David Wolper is perhaps the best-known producer of documentaries in this country. He has been responsible for more than 400 of them—the result of his most formidable gift, which is not so much film making as his ability to sell ideas to others. He is an unprepossessing figure (his subordinates refer to him as "The Green Olive," because they think he rather resembles one), but when he begins to outline a project his voice becomes as keen and excited as a child's, his vision absorbs him, he rises up and down on his toes and he seems to expand before one's eyes.

In 1971 the then 43-year-old producer came up with the notion of photographing the 1972 Olympic Games through the camera lenses of a number of famous movie directors, giving each free rein to shoot a 10- to 12-minute minifilm on whatever aspect of the Games intrigued them. Wolper would then have the segments collected and spliced together into a feature film. Furthermore, he reasoned, why not select the directors from different countries so that the completed offering would be a filmic Olympiad in itself?

Wolper called Willi Daume, the president of the XXth Olympics, and described his project. Daume was fascinated. A few of his committeemen were upset at the idea of the film being awarded to a non-German since it is customary that the parent country provide its own film maker for the official Olympic documentary. However, Daume continued to support Wolper's presentation, realizing that classic film reportage, however personal, would not differ enough from daily television coverage to compete for worldwide attention. There had to be another approach.

The resulting film, called Visions of Eight, coordinated by producer Stan Margulies, has already appeared at the Cannes Film Festival and is to be released this week in theaters across the country. The contributing directors are Milos Forman from Czechoslovakia, Kon Ichikawa from Japan, Claude Lelouch from France, Juri Ozerov from the Soviet Union, Arthur Penn from the U.S.A., John Schlesinger from England, Mai Zetterling from Sweden and Michael Pfleghar from Germany. Originally, there were 10 film makers, but Italy's Franco Zeffirelli (Romeo and Juliet) dropped out because of his objections to Rhodesia being expelled from the Games, and Ousman Sembene of Senegal, a self-taught novelist and film maker (Mandabi), got bogged down in his project, the fortunes of the Senegalese basketball team, and never completed his film. Federico Fellini, Italy's noted director (La Dolce Vita), was interested in the project at its conception and toyed with the idea of doing a segment on a small girl lost in the Olympic Village, reporting an afternoon of the Games as seen through her eyes, but other commitments kept him from Munich.

David Wolper gave his eight directors complete freedom to do what they wanted, a concession that must have given him pause on occasion. If Milos Forman had ever divulged his original idea for his vision, Wolper would have collapsed. Forman's intent was to find a symbol on which to focus his camera in which would be concentrated all the intensity, the years of training, the dedication, brought down to a single moment of commitment in the Olympics. And what did he pick? An expert rifleman's trigger finger. His plan was to spend the 12 minutes of his film on the slow squeeze of this finger; the process would be seen in close-up, filling the screen, with perhaps an occasional shift to a glimpse of the rifleman's eye squinting at some distant target.

Eventually, Forman discarded the idea as lacking in "dramatic values," and he began concentrating on finding an event in which the athlete did not utilize an object such as a rifle or a discus or a shot. "When athletes rely on a prop, like a pole or something to hold on to," he explained, "the object seems to suck up their emotion, to drain it from their face." He thought he might choose the high jump. "In that event the man is alone, suspended in midair—even his feet are not running—and his face shows his emotion."

Then, after seeing the German track and field championships a few months before the Olympics, he changed his mind yet again. "I sat enthralled by the decathlon—that two-day set of exertions climaxed by the 1,500-meter run. Such pain, such heroic efforts to overcome the limits of human physics."

Forman is a director known for his humor and gentle ironies (Taking Off, The Loves of a Blonde) and his vision of the Olympics is often puckish and startling, full of tricks and personal conceits. He is successful with an amalgam of music (both beer-hall and symphonic) as a supporting structure for the events of the decathlon—a device that in less skillful hands could be cloying and cute. His camera is a fine spy. It dwells on the officials and referees in their green blazers carrying their fold-up chairs and marching across the field in close-order formation. "They seemed like such drones," Forman explained. "Most of them are former athletes and it is sad to see how they have gone from being athletes to functionaries."

Arthur Penn, far-famed for his Bonnie and Clyde, also gave the producer fits. Originally, Penn hoped to film the saga of the American flyweight boxer Bobby Lee Hunter, who was being allowed out of jail to try out for the Olympic squad and was an odds-on favorite to land himself a position. Penn filmed nearly four hours on Hunter—his background, his grandfather's funeral, his life in prison. The sociological aspects of Hunter's life were of far more interest to Penn than his boxing career. In fact, Penn's intention was to limit the Olympic footage to just the one key punch that would decide the issue between Hunter and his opponent, using the Olympics, whatever the outcome, as a sort of dramatic punctuation to finish off a turbulent chapter in the athlete's life.

To Penn's despair (and presumably to David Wolper's relief, considering Penn's idea of using just a few seconds from Munich), the Hunter segment could not be resolved since the fighter lost a preliminary bout in the Olympic Trials and never made the team.