Emile de Antonio

At one time or another, Emile de Antonio has been everything from a longshoreman to a teacher of philosophy. Now, with the startling commercial success of his latest and only movie, Point of Order, he has abruptly become a widely-known film director as well.

De Antonio is an enormous, powerfully-built man with a Rabelaisian taste for life and its varied pleasures. Few of the scores of things he has done have been able to hold his attention for more than a couple of years. No doubt he will stick to making films for what will probably seem to him an inordinately long time. But he would never allow something like the favorable public response to his movie to seduce him into an easy routine. He is through, for example, with documentary movies. The film he is now writing will be utterly different from Point of Order. "This one will be another kind of political parody," he says. "It takes place in an old actors' home, without a single character under 70."

De Antonio came to movies in a roundabout way. He enrolled at Harvard with the Class of 1940. He was a serious student with Group II grades, but he also had a great deal of fun. He was finally fired after a binge climaxed by the attempted arson of Claverly Hall. It was 1938, and de Antonio went to work on the docks to wait for America to enter the War. By 1945 he had flown thirty-eight bombing missions over Japan as the pilot of a Flying Fortress.

Piloting that B-29 was the nearest de Antonio has come to holding, or even wanting to hold, a steady job. He has clung to his independence, which means that no one--not wives (he has had four), not employers (he has had dozens)--has been able to cling to him. After the War he got his master's degree in philosophy at Columbia while working as a barge captain. It was an ideal job for a graduate student: all he had to do was untie the barge in the morning and tie it up again at night. The rest of the time he just sat, reading and soaking up sun, as a tugboat pulled the barge along.

Since then he has taught philosophy, edited books free-lance, and been a reasonably successful artists' agent. A typical de Antonio venture was his fictitious corporation, "Conservative Enterprises, Inc.," which he founded one day about five years ago. It was, of course, a satire on business: the company's board of directors was a list of impressive-sounding, Anglo-Saxon, and completely imaginary names. But by selling a Texas oil millionaire a warehouseful of nylon ropes that no one wanted because they had communications wires inside them, de Antonio made enough money out of Conservative Enterprises to take a rather long, rather pleasant vacation.

De Antonio started making Point of Order in 1960. The film was the brainchild of Daniel Talbot, owner of the New Yorker Theatre, but it was de Antonio who edited it and organized it into its present form. At first the two men, neither of whom had ever made a film before, hired an experienced German editor to do the cutting. "He was a real Stalinist type," de Antonio recalls. "He wanted to open the movie with the American flag waving in front of a Vermont church and end it with McCarthy's funeral. In between scenes he wanted film clips of starving children in Africa and pictures of the sea. So we got rid of him."

While making the movie, de Antonio watched the 188 hours of television kinescopes of the Army-McCarthy hearings many times. He has gotten to know McCarthy, and he both likes him and despises him. "McCarthy had an enormous amount of charm," de Antonio says, "but it was rough, belching charm, not Union Club charm."

"I tried to make Point of Order an anti-establishment movie," he adds. "We hope to make the point that the American establishment, from the White House on down, made McCarthy possible. Even Welch was no hero--Welch to me was a brilliant and superb trial lawyer; he was personally affronted by McCarthy, but like most lawyers he did a job for pay.

"The real hero of this film is the camera, the TV camera. McCarthy rose on the mass media--he invented the two-headline-a-day technique--and in the end he was destroyed by the mass media. And in a way he destroyed himself; his instinct for the public mind finally failed him, and that's what makes him interesting."

De Antonio is now toying with the idea of an expanded version of Point of Order. "It would have to be at least twelve hours long," he says. "There's one thing the present version doesn't capture, the boredom of it all. And that was really the greatest thing about the hearings."