TAYLOR CAMP - Frequently Asked Questions
1. How did Taylor Camp get started?
2. Did you live at Taylor Camp?
3. What compelled you to make such an extensive photo collection?
4. How did the idea for a film come about? What inspired you to make the film?
5. After 30 years how did you track down the former Taylor Camp residents that appear in the film?
6. How long did it take to make the film?
7. What was the budget?
8. How did you get the rights to the music?
9. Why does a DVD cost $30?
10. Who cares about a bunch of hippies anyway?
11. Why isn't there a narrator? Where is the story arc?
12. How did the three of you come together as a team?
1. How did Taylor Camp get started?
John Wehrheim: Taylor Camp started in the spring of 1969 when Howard Taylor (brother of actress Elizabeth) bailed out a rag-tag band of young mainlanders jailed for vagrancy. Some were highly educated refugees from the violent Vietnam War protests, race riots, and student uprisings in Berkeley.
Alarming the locals with their long hair and colorful clothing, the original group of thirteen men, women and children were arrested for vagrancy and sentenced to ninety days hard labor when they overstayed their camping permits.
Concerned by the Kauai government’s treatment of these young people and discovering the State’s plan to condemn the property he purchased to build his family’s home, Howard Taylor invited the group to pitch their tents on his beachfront land—thus enacting a subtle revenge on the government and unwittingly setting off in-migrating waves of hippies, surfers, draft dodgers and troubled Vietnam vets to the end of the road on Kauai's North Shore.
By the next summer not one of the original campers remained. The new people abandoned tent living for more permanent and comfortable tree houses. At that point, the village had 17 homes and close to one hundred residents--few of whom Howard Taylor knew. After he and his sister Elizabeth celebrated Christmas dinner with the campers in 1970, Howard, who had no agreements with, or guidelines for the campers, left them to their own devices and would never be seen on the site again. By 1972 communal memory of the village’s founding was lost and several creation myths, complete with religious fanatics in robes, circulated in the community.
2. Did you live at Taylor Camp?
John Wehrheim: I moved to Kauai from Honolulu in 1971 after making forays in 1969 and 1970. My timing was perfect. I was 23 and had just been fired from the Hawaii School for Girls in Honolulu. Rumor had it that I was a pot-smoking hippie-seducer of high school girls thinly disguised as an English teacher from Notre Dame. So I grabbed my surfboard and backpack and moved to Kauai with Stella Kellett, one of my graduating students. The Kelletts had been neighbors of the Taylors on Oahu before Howard moved his family to Kauai. The Taylors, then living across Haena bay from the camp, invited Stella, her sister Catherine, and me to stay in their guesthouse while we looked for a place to rent. But I never lived at Taylor Camp. I was often an overnight guest but retained the perspective of an “observer”.
Robert Stone: I was a bit younger and a lot more conservative. I was spending time at another island camp: Camp Cherry Valley on Catalina Island, teaching Boy Scouts how to cook and camp in the outdoors. Kinda fits!
3. What compelled you to make such an extensive photo collection?
John Wehrheim: I began photographing Taylor Camp when I first moved to Kauai in 1971, but it wasn’t until 1976, after two years in Asia documenting refugees, that I recognized Taylor Camp’s significance and began to photograph the camp seriously in archival black and white, seeing it as both a traditional village and a refugee settlement. Yes, Taylor Camp was built with the same materials that poor squatters used throughout the tropical world—bamboo, scrap lumber, rough logs and branches, salvaged tin roofing, plastic sheeting and screens, flimsy mosquito netting and cheap printed fabric. But though the materials were the same, the manifestation was quite different. This “refugee” camp was perched in a pristine forest along a beach in paradise. Built in the spirit of playful creativity and whimsical practicality, Taylor Camp developed by the aesthetic principle that drives both the most humble of poor builders as well as the greatest architects: no form without function. I thought it was a fantastic subject and felt compelled to record it for history.
Robert Stone: And don’t forget that just about ALL the photos that appear in the film, plus more, are captured in print form in John’s Taylor Camp Book, a beautiful coffee table hardback that not only visually tells the story, but also contains many more in-depth interviews that couldn’t fit into the film itself.
4. How did the idea for a film come about? What inspired you to make the film?
John Wehrheim: Taylor Camp Alumna Fran Pearson helped me with this project as my darkroom assistant in 1976 and continued to encourage, prod and remind me for over 30 years that I had promised the campers that I would make a book. But I was stuck on how to write it until I gave the photographs to my guru, Oahu resident Paul Theroux and asked for his help. Paul told me that I couldn’t write the book and he couldn’t write the book, that the campers themselves had to tell their story and he gave me three pages of notes on how to do it. I thought, “That’s a great idea!” and since we have to track down and interview everybody, let’s go ahead and make a film while we’re at it! At the same time I was working on the Bhutan film with Bob Stone and Tom Vendetti and asked them to help me put a slide show together of all the old photos to pass out to the Taylor Campers who had been patiently waiting for their “book” for over 30 years. Tom put the old photos to classic 60s and 70s music and we screened this 20-minute “slide show” at the 300 seat Kilauea Theater on Kauai as a benefit for the local public radio station KKCR. Over 1000 people showed up and the theater held the “slide show” over for a week. It was then that Bob and Tom became serious about making the feature length documentary TAYLOR CAMP.
Robert Stone: Although I loved the photos that John and Tom brought to me for ‘tweaking’ in the slide show, my inspiration really came at the screening of the slide show in Kilauea, where I met some of the Taylor Campers for the first time and got a sense of what characters they were, as well as how an audience might react to them. The nice thing is that people in places other than Hawaii have a similar reaction to the film. They Love It!
5. After 30 years how did you track down the former Taylor Camp residents that appear in the film?
John Wehrheim: Again Fran Pearson. Fran lives on the Big Island with her husband David [the Taylor Camp “cop”] and had phone numbers and email addresses for most of the people who appear in the film. On each island the campers held reunion parties—some lasting for days. We’d find a quiet spot off to the side, pull people away from the party and interview them. That’s why so many of the guys interviewed have beer bottles in their hands. From there the project snowballed and we were contacted by hundreds of “Alumni” with stories, photos and home movies and even took a trips to California and Nevada to interview campers.
Robert Stone: And that's why you also hear music and voices in the background in some of the shots - “Hey, hold it down over there!”
6. How long did it take to make the film?
Robert Stone: We began working on the slide show in 2004 and had our KKCR benefit screening on August 29. We started filming interviews in 2005, which continued up until April of 2009. We showed early cuts to test audiences starting in 2008, and people kept coming out of the woodwork to be interviewed! We had to say PAU after the last filming on Kauai, where it all started. The editing literally took years, but we also had our day jobs, so we didn’t work on it day and night. We did have a period of about six months where we rented a hide-away cabin in a secret location and worked pretty much non-stop. But there are always refinements based upon repeated screenings with real audiences and observing the audience. Our last tweaks happened in July 2010.
7. What was the budget?
Robert Stone: You know filmmakers don’t really give ACTUAL budget numbers, right? Let’s just say it cost more than people think and less than it should have – between .5 and $1 million. - Or, maybe that’s less than people think and more than it should have. . .
8. How did you get the rights to the music?
Robert Stone: Money. Seriously. Money and negotiation. Some folks said no. Our music supervisor Tom Vendetti had quite a music recall from that time period. So he spent countless hours scouring the Internet and iTunes for songs that might work for different parts of the film. He’d email me or bring over a stack of CDs and we’d put his choice cuts up against the photomontage on which we were working. We went through a lot of music to find just the right cuts, versions and artists that worked perfectly. Then we hired Milton Hopkins, a music rights specialist in Austin, who negotiated with the different artists and copyright holders to cut us a fair deal. But it’s still a lot of money. The main thing is – people love the music!
9. Why does a DVD cost $30?
Robert Stone: There are many reasons why things cost what they do. In the case of Taylor Camp, WE paid to make the film. That means money out of pocket to pay for all the things that go into making a piece of art. The question is really – what value are you receiving for the money? In the case of Taylor Camp, whether it’s a $12 or $15 ticket at the theater or $30 (plus shipping) for a DVD, it's the experience people have when viewing it. To date, we have not had anyone ask for a refund because they didn’t like the film. That’s a testament to the care we took in making the film and testing it to make sure the audience has the best possible experience. And, we want to make some money back so we can do our next project! So, thanks for supporting independent filmmakers!
10. Who cares about a bunch of hippies anyway?
Robert Stone: You know, that was one of my concerns early on. I wasn’t a hippie, per say. I mean, we all wore bell-bottom jeans and had hair that touched our collars, right? So what we found is that a lot of people care about hippies. Actually, they care about a film that has done a great job in capturing the essence of what the 60s and 70s were all about – from a diverse group of people gathered together on a remote island, living in harmony with nature, with a dream of making the world a better place. Isn't that what we all want anyway?
11. Why isn't there a narrator? Where is the story arc?
Robert Stone: We had discussions early on about who to hire as a narrator or on-camera host. There were several possibilities, but we arrived at the same decision John did with writing the book – that no one can tell the Taylor Camp story better the Taylor Campers themselves. So the film doesn’t follow the traditional story arc. It’s a story-telling documentary. It’s kinda like sitting around the campfire and someone starts a tale and then someone else picks up the thread and adds their point of view, and on and on. In that regard, Taylor Camp is experiential – come open your mind and heart, and re-live what it was like, through story.
12. How did the three of you come together as a team?
Robert Stone: Hopefully, I’ll get this story accurate! Tom and I had worked together on several documentaries set in the Himalayas and Tom had heard about Bhutan and wanted to visit there. Apparently, John was a guest on Hawaii Public Radio one day talking about Bhutan and Tom and his wife separately BOTH heard the show, compared notes when they got home and contacted John. John shared his Bhutan photos with Tom and eventually also shared his Taylor Camp photos, asking Tom to put together a video slide show. I remember Tom bringing John and the slide show to my place to do some tweaking – and that’s how we met. The rest is history!
Our Bhutan Film, by the way, won two Emmy Awards in 2010.
You can check out that website at http://Bhutan-Film.com
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“In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”
Written by Douglas Ingle Performed by Michael Sena & Tip Peterson |