(The following dialogue with Bob Maurice, producer of the Woodstock film, is an edited version of a long interview taped last week at the Marriott.)

MAURICE: What we tried to do was to pass on the experience of Woodstock, really try to create an environment in the theater which would make people forget that they were in a theater and [which would] really give them as much as possible the same experience as actually having been at Woodstock. And that’s, of course, quite cunning because that’s much more effective than propaganda. We’re passing something on. It really is dissemination in the exact meaning of that word. I wouldn’t call it propaganda because we’ve left out our point of view. We haven’t interpreted Woodstock.

There was organization in the filming, there was structure. But I think that there was nothing organized about Woodstock. It really was an historical accident, not a proselytizing event. It wasn’t a peace march, and it wasn’t a demonstration, and it wasn’t in any sense an “example.” It wasn’t consciously done. There was no prior intent or motivation on the part of anyone who went up to Woodstock to create Woodstock. I think Woodstock is the one of the few instances in which all of the rhetoric of the past 10 years or so has been fulfilled. So that for once instead of talking about what was desired or demonstrating in favor of a position, we simply just went ahead and did it. Because precisely what was going on there was that everyone had already accomplished everything that the rhetoric was about. Woodstock in a sense is “after the Revolution”-that’s what it will be like, after everything has changed. You know, it’s senseless to indulge in more rhetoric so all that you can do about something like that is just pass it on. Do I make myself clear?

BIRD: I think so. I just have a hard time reconciling that with my experience at Woodstock. It is true that feeling you are talking about, but I couldn’t help but think-perhaps you felt it too-that the helicopters circling over that crowd—the same type of helicopters that three months earlier had been clumping tear gas on Berkeley, or dropping marines in Vietnam. You are trying to say that people didn’t feel this. The fact that people were getting busted right outside by the New York State Police, people were being stopped with searchlights and shotguns-it happened to us as we were leaving.

MAURICE: Every review that I’ve read objected to our point of view and criticized us for adopting a view which they see and object to. The interesting thing is that none of the reviewers agree on what our point of view is. What’s really going on is that each reviewer is merely seeing his own tendencies in the film and then accusing us of it. Everyone sees a point of view in the film. Well, there really isn’t. If a point of view film had been made of Woodstock, it would have been incredible. It would have had martialed so much material towards one end that you would have a very directional film. And now you don’t. One critic said the film wasn’t “organized,” and what he means by that is that it doesn’t make a single point, it doesn’t begin with a point and then illustrate or support it. Well, reality isn’t like that. Woodstock wasn’t like that.

I guess the core of Woodstock was three or four days. We shot those three days just about in their entirety, and we were up there about a month beforehand shooting all the preparations and the townspeople and we stayed afterward and shot the cleaning up. Well, that 120 hours we made a three-hour film. So a lot of stuff was left out. Well, you can’t accuse me of having left out 117 hours of film on purpose.

And the mud has not been left out by any means. The Army thing is not left out, but you don’t have to devote a half-hour to make a point. You can make a point in a 10-minute shot. If the person who is watching is intelligent, he will see it. There’s a shot in that film of an Army helicopter landing. You know, a Army helicopter lands with machine guns sticking out the front. You know the army was there. I know the police were there because I had to deal with them also. What you don’t know is that the F.B.I, was there; I had entanglements with them. It’s true that it was potentially a massive bust, and a very unpleasant thing, and the latent paranoia was quite strong. It did work out. Holy Christ! Think of all of the dope that was at Woodstock and how few arrests there were— and they were all outside the place. It’s true that there is nothing in the film that shows police arresting people, and I think that the reason for that is that none of the 18 cameramen/ directors witnessed any such event. I think the only time that happened was when people were leaving and it was all over. But what we saw was cops who were turning on. New York City cops who were wearing those red Woodstock shirts, and I know the ones I saw were in the backstage -area, and you know they’re potentially friendly anyway because New Yorkers are so emotional and hysterical. By Friday they were joking and by Saturday the very, very pleasant atmosphere had gotten to them and they were turning on and enjoying it very much.

BIRD: I think you ‘re trying not to see, but I think you do see a really close connection between Berkeley, the garbage strike in Atlanta, the 21 Panthers in jail in New York, the fact that this film which is a film about 500,000 people and 20 entertainers, and what 40 people saw in their experience is now being sold to these same people for $3.50 a ticket. And at the same time many of these people who contributed so much to the film in some part through dope they used are in jail or need bail money. Do you see any relation between the film and the needs of the people in it? The fact that they need bail money? People in Atlanta need bail money. Are any places in the country doing benefits with Woodstock?

MAURICE: No.

BIRD: Is anything that is being taken out of the experience at Woodstock being returned to the people, other than the reliving of that experience?

MAURICE: Well, I don’t own the film. Warner Bros. does. Warner is engaged in putting film into theaters so that it can make money, and the theater owners show the film so that it can make money, and that is exactly the same situation that applies to the records of the artists who played at the festival. They make records to make money, etc.

BIRD: It seems a more direct utilization of the people at Woodstock than of the film itself.

MAURICE: Exactly. It seems that way, but it’s not. I really disagree with your phrasing that something’s “taken out” of Woodstock. Nothing was taken out of Woodstock. Nothing was physically taken. No one suffered a loss. No one experienced an inner emptiness or a physical alienation as a result of the making of our film. If anything, what we’ve done is the reverse. It’s a giving into—so you have to pay for it, right? You have to pay to get into the theater to see the film, but you’ve got to contrast that with getting in to see it for nothing—that’s impossible. $700,000 is a lot of money. I don’t have it, you know. I’ve got about $10,000. Warner Brothers is not a benevolent organization; it’s a business. It’s not interested in Rock festivals per se. It’s not interested in you or in me, or in anything —it’s a business, it’s got stockholders. And I was quite willing to make a deal with Warner Bros. because I wanted to make a film, and because I felt that it was important, it was important to me personally, and I also felt that if the film existed, and people saw it, even if they had to pay that that was better than its not existing and no one seeing it. Well, Warners put up the $700,000 because they’re—as you know, all of the studios are going broke, they don’t really have much money to play with either so they put the money up because they hoped to make more money. That applies to everyone.

Now about the other thing, the people who are in jail for dope busts, I agree. It’s one of the things that I feel very, very strongly about. I think it would be a very good thing if part of the money of this film were used to get some of those people out of some of those 30- year sentences. But there isn’t anything I can do about that. I mean, I’ve already done a lot in making the film. But my talents and energies, like everyone else’s, are limited. I can’t go on from that to, you know, a whole other kind of activity. I thought it was very important to make the film. It’s an honest film.

BIRD: I think it’s fairly obvious by now, considering the tremendous success of Easy Rider, that what you have turned over to Warners is one of the very few types of films that is going to make money now.

MAURICE: That’s bullshit.

BIRD: What happens after Woodstock, after Easy Rider? What is the next film going to be about?

MAURICE: But I’m a film-maker-I don’t give two hoots about Warners. If Warners goes out of business, that’s their problem.

WARNER BROTHERS: He doesn’t work for Warner Brothers.

MAURICE: The points are these: Warner Brothers did not make the film. They didn’t have anything to do with it. I made it, with my company. But Warners is in the business-of distributing films—they’re a distribution company. So, they pay for the cost of the making of this film and in exchange they can distribute the film. That’s fine with me. Because all I want is to be able to make a big movie about something I’m interested in, exactly the way I wanna make it. Which I got. Now what happens at Warner Brothers from here on in is of no interest to me. And I don’t work for Warner Brothers.

I’m very much of an outlaw anyway. I had to do incredible things to finish that film in, you know, my way. I must tell you that Warners did not want me to make the film which you will now see, they wanted something quite different. I wanted to make the film I wanted to make, and I did just horrible, horrible things to them, to beat them down, and intimidate them, and just generally scare the shit out of them. Because, I wanted to win.. .And I threatened to destroy the film, you know, unless they completely stayed out of it. fl I’m blacklisted at this point. But it doesn’t mean anything at this point to me, because all of our enjoyment comes from doing things outside the system which is also where our power comes from.. .The fact is that nobody else could have made that film but us.

I mean literally—nobody else could have done it.  It was just too insane, and required a kind of adaptiveness and flexibility and tirelessness. Wadleigh, the guy who directed it, is incredible.

BIRD: Before W., China would have been the place where you would hear of 500,000 people in one place. It’s shocking for Americans to think of that many people in one place, especially for that long. And when you make a film about that, you almost have to relate to what those people do after that film. It’s entirely different from making a film about just a few people. It doesn’t let you go when you get involved with that many people.

MAURICE: I think the thing that’s bothering you is this thing of “co-opting,” which happens all the time

BIRD: I don’t think you can co-opt what happened at Woodstock.

MAURICE: You’d have to be pretty slick to do it. Because one of the things that Woodstock was, by definition, was a rejection of exactly that, a rejection of ultimate values. Again, it was not a proselytizing situation. People were not saying. This IS the thing to do; this IS the way to live at all. What they were saying was just for three days we’re not going to tell anyone else what to do and we don’t want anybody to tell us what to do. We simply want to enjoy ourselves. You can’t co-opt. Because it’s not there. It’s like trying to hold sand between your fingers. If it had been a radicalizing, a proselytizing event, if it had had intellectual content, one could co-opt that position and say, “I approve of this position.” Like Johnson did. And they could say well, great, I approve of this, too. But there was no position taken at Woodstock.

BIRD: In San Francisco, demonstrations are being held against this film…

MAURICE: And in Los Angeles.

BIRD: What these people seem to feel is that well, you said that nothing was taken out of Woodstock. Yet whatever it was that was done with the experience of Woodstock is being sold at a very high price. Do you lay all of the value of the film to the people who made it? Or do you see the people who made it as rather disseminators? Or go-betweens? The techniques that you use, the way that the people who made this film have been able to bring out what happened at Woodstock are extremely powerful techniques. Warner Brothers doesn’t understand them. You talked before about the use of power and how you fucked Warner Brothers. Certainly you can look at this film-as-a tremendous type of power. The economic returns from it are still completely in the hands of Warner Brothers.

MAURICE: I happen to be one of those who believes that all reality is tainted, and that it is impossible to do anything which is not, in some way, either in the act or in its implications, tainted. It’s impossible to design, or do, something which is entirely good. Because I really feel that OUR definitions of good and evil are exactly that. They are imposed, we really want them to be imposed on a reality that defies that, which doesn’t by nature really very clearly fall into good and evil. And the consequence of that, at least for me as a human being, is that I am incapable of doing anything which I am sure is clearly good and only good and not in any way evil. I’m sure that everything that I do is potentially in its implications in its eventualities in . some way is going to not be to someone else’s advantage or negative in some other way, which I don’t even know about. The only way in which you can avoid doing evil is by doing nothing. By absolutely avoiding action.

I’m convinced that contemporary radical politics is purely Christian. It’s one of the manifestations of Western Christianity. And it’s that dichotomy of good versus evil, essentially a Christian one, and it’s idealistic, and it’s the belief that you really can separate out a principle of evil and a principle of good and call one God and the other the Devil and eliminate one and have a purely good structure of reality. Well, I don’t think that’s possible. And it’s exactly that that is the basis of Communism. You know. Communism defines a specific social order as the good, and the other thing as the evil, and it very naively believes that you can separate them out physically. But you cannot cut it with a knife. People are too complicated for that. What we’re doing in this conversation you may feel is very very good. It may be very bad for me! You know, in some way that you’re not aware of. Vice versa. I gave that up a long time ago. I’m incapable of doing something which is not open to reproach, which isn’t screwed up in some way. You’re looking for, you’re asking too much of me. You really are. If I had done all the things which are ancillary, which surround the making of the film itself, I wouldn’t have had any time left to make the film.

WARNER BROTHERS: I hate to interrupt you…

BIRD: I agree with you that there is a problem with the radical movement in the U.S., but we should narrow that down and say the white radical movement. But I think the problem is the opposite of what you are talking about. To distinguish between evil and good is a luxury. To be able to think about an absolute good and an absolute evil—And the place you have to look for more real politics and less rhetorical polemics is TV Black people. You ‘re just indulging yourself in all this talk about good and evil.

MAURICE: But what’s wrong with bloodless revolutions?

BIRD: I wasn’t even discussing that. It’s the use of power—that film is a very powerful thing, /understand quite well that Warner Brothers can distribute it quite easily and make money off of it, that’s not the point. The point is that none of that money is coming back to people, not the fact that Warner Brothers is making money off it. God knows a lot of people are making money a hell of a lot worse ways than that, but that’s not the point. The point is that NONE of that money is coming back.

MAURICE: I wouldn’t use the phrase “coming back,” because the money doesn’t belong.. .the money didn’t come from the places you want to send it back to. When you buy gas, the money comes from you, when you buy food, it comes from you, when longhairs, dopers and Blacks buy fountain pens and tires and all of that, it comes from them. You could just as well speak about sending that money back, too. I think there’s a failure in logic that makes you want to say, Woodstock’s different, it belongs to the people. That’s bullshit! I reject that personally. It doesn’t belong to the people—1 made it. Insofar as I made it, it belongs to me. Beyond that, I would very much like to see everybody be able to go see Woodstock for nothing, but that’s only because I’d very much like everybody to be able to see all movies for free.. .But I can’t really answer what you’re saying, and I can’t assume the guilt, either. You’re trying to say that I’m…

WARNER BROTHERS: Bob, excuse me…

MAURICE: Oh well, okay.

WARNER BROTHERS: We’re on a real tight schedule. I’m sorry, do you mind?