Q: You told me once about the time that the interactive video [project that Charles and Ray worked on] . . .

Funke: What happened was that somebody in IBM had gotten a bug in his ear about the potential of the videodisc. You have to understand the era in which this happened, which is '76, '77. There weren't any personal computers yet really. IBM had built a thing called the Model 1500, which it never . . . it couldn't even give away. The mini-microcomputer didn't exist at all. It was not by any means a sort of household machine. They came to Charles briefly and said, Hey, what do you think the possibility is of blending some technologies? Blending computer technology and videodisc technology, somehow making them an interesting product? Of course Charles jumped on this: Hey, something new! Something we can try! Basically what the IBM guys wanted to do was make a consumer product which would be both a computer and a game--because computer games didn't exist at this time--a computer and a game and a machine that would play videodiscs. Now at this point the videodisc didn't really exist. About the only place you could go to see one was to go to the CIA in Langley, Virginia: they had three of them. In principle, you could buy them off the shelf, but the fact is there weren't any. There were three or four different technologies all competing to see which would be the one that was going to be it. Nothing was available on disc at all. If you wanted a disc you had to have one made--there were no films on them or anything like that. And here's IBM jumping into this with both feet saying, Hey, can we demonstrate this to the CMC [Corporate Management Council]? Everything that happens in IBM has to be approved by the CMC: they decide how to spend the money. So the idea is: what we'll do is we'll show how the thing will be used, an application for this nonexistent technology, this nonexistent home computer game videodisc player. So, we set out to do two games--one of them was called Time Scan, which Jon Boorstin worked on. I first shot the first one, then Eric Saarinen came in and shot it again. I think someone else shot the third. It was shot three times. Time Scan--it was like a game where you kind of jumped; it was kind of like Carmen Sandiego. It was the same kind of thing only it was actually with piction--with live, interactive scenes that you would be involved in where you would . . . knives would flash and all this kind of stuff. This is essentially what it was. It was a fragment--as if you were actually playing the game where you would jump from to King Arthur's court and jump to the Medici Palace and then it would jump to New York in 1920 and then jump back and forth and all this stuff. The idea was to try to show what it would be like if you owned this product--what it would be like to play the game. The other one was called Art Game, which Jim Hoekama designed [for the Eames Office], which was a little kind of study piece, like of the impressionists. And it would talk about what the things were that characterized the impressionists and then give you a little quiz that would show you the detail of a Van Gogh painting and then you'd try to decide whether it was Van Gogh or Renoir or Cezanne and if you chose right it would say: Good, I'll bet you knew that it was Van Gogh because of the brushstrokes and the color--whatever. These were built as little running pieces of film that would appear as if you were actually playing the game. The idea was that they would show the CMC a piece of film of a family playing the game. And so we built a little set back in New York . . . then this whole thing in order to actually do this. They had to have something like three System 360's in the warehouse with two-inch videotape machines all linked together with people pulling levers and pushing buttons and strings--all this elaborate performance in order to make this thing happen so that it could be sort of happening in real times because none of the technology that was supposed to be in it actually existed. The thing was just an empty box. So an enormous effort was put into making this thing. Then, in the end, it died. The reason it died was that IBM didn't know how do you sell a product like this, so they gave up on it. Later on, of course, they realized that they made a mistake. But they had never shown a consumer product before and so they had no notion of how you go about selling one. So they simply dropped it and later on they realized that this was a major market and they introduced the PC, which they did in record time. But this original concept of this sort of omnibus, one-thing-does-it-all game device that never . . . well, nobody's ever built a thing like this.

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Q: Do you feel like [Charles felt that] either a company of vision or a Tom Watson would have pursued it?

Funke: I think so. I think that. He never said that in as many words. I think he felt, though, that basically they had gotten this idea and they had worked very hard on it--the IBM guys--and then, jointly with the office, a tremendous amount of work had been put on it, but in the end they sort of just . . . they wimped out; they just hadn't . . . nobody had bothered to carry through on anything. And it's another one of those symptoms: this is all that same period when he was feeling less and less happy with the way things were going since he had done . . . worked hard to do something and essentially it wasn't . . . it didn't deliver. Neither the client delivered nor did the product really deliver what it was supposed to do. There are a lot of projects that are kind of like that.

Q: What are some others?

Funke: Well, for example, it was proposed that the little piece of cardboard that spits out from the [Polaroid] SX-70 pack, which normally just has some advertising for copies of the SX-70 pictures, that that should be an informative thing. It should be packed solid with useful info so that you could keep them as a little sort of little looseleaf file of useful tips and hints and tricks. We even produced a few of them just as a demonstration. But then Polaroid was never very interested in it. Charles wanted to do a whole series of films on styles of photography, techniques of using the SX-70. We did the film called Something About Photography, which is kind of a condensation of a lot of potential films--low-light photography, closeup photography, action photography, how to hold the camera still and all these different things here and there--several things. But in the end that never came to anything. If Ed Land had been in a position of power it would have, but it was just at the time when he had been toppled really--largely because of the disaster of the Polavision--and so he really had no power. In order to save the company he had had to step down, I guess is the way it works. Maybe I am doing him an injustice--that was my understanding. He had to step down from his position of SCEO and put it in the hands of somebody else. And they just weren't interested. Again, they didn't understand what merit a series of films like that could possibly have.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Funke: SX-70 is one of the great, kind of, tours de force of expository filmmaking. It's a brilliant piece of filmmaking.

Q: Tell me more about it.

Funke: See, I didn't work on it. That's one of the few I didn't work on because that was when I was teaching at UCLA. Steve Slocomb led the technical team on that one. But, if you look at it, it's one of the best examples of explaining something very, very technical in a way that you can follow, but at the same time is fun to watch, exciting and interesting, and involving, and you really feel that you're being let in on the innards of it. It's kind of the way Glossary [A Computer Glossary Or, Coming to Terms with the Data Processing Machine (1968), excerpted in the CD-ROM in the Eames Strand at 10-9] works--same way. Even if a person doesn't understand what's being said, he goes away feeling that he's learned something. And that, of course, is something that the whole Eames gang was very good at, was making you feel that you were really being let in on something, you were really being . . . getting down to the innards of something. Not to mention the fact that it's a beautiful film. It's technically brilliant; it's nice; it's fun to look at; it's fully of interesting insights; it's got history; it's got technology; it's got good pictures; it's got all the stuff you're looking for--it's great. It's one of the best films the office ever made and I think Charles thought that it was one of the best films they had ever made. And that's basically a straight advertising picture. It was made to be shown to the stockholders' meeting to demonstrate how their money had been spent the last few years and to introduce this amazing, wonderful, beautiful new process. I mean, the same thing could have happened with the Polavision [an instant home movie system developed by Polaroid in the 1970's] except that it was a doomed project, doomed because of the fact that videotape grew faster than anything else. And Polavision started . . . it's like building an airport--you know, by the time you finish it it's obsolete. Polavision started so far back and had so much momentum it had to be finished. But by the time it was finished videotape had obviously taken over the market. There was never going to be a use for this process. It's such a limited process and it just died.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Q: To focus on the three screens . . .

Funke: Well, [Charles and Ray's] interest in three screens was not: Here's how you do it, let's use projectors, let's use computers, let's use this, let's use that. His interest was putting up images in a way that was compelling and interesting and contained more than the images by themselves contained. That was what he cared about and the mechanics were in a sense at a very low level of interest to him, other than the fact that he wanted them to work right. So the fact that you could do three screens shows or twenty screen shows with video--I don't think that that would have interested him because he was . . . he was interested in the content. Particularly if he would have been able to see some of these multi-screen shows that are done, let's say, with slide projectors, I think he would have been dismayed by them because in a sense he invented this idea. He invented the idea of covering a wall with lots of moving images. This is his creation. But the use of it is so crude because what happens is that the people who do them don't have enough good pictures to make them all compelling. They've got to fill these screens with something, so they fill them up with junk. At the end of his life was where these multi-screen things are first sort of . . . multi, big multi-screen shows with twenty or forty projectors were first sort of catching on and . . . I think he saw a couple . . . I think saw Where's Boston? for example, and he felt the same way I did, which was that it was . . . it was a nothing. It was a technical tour de force with absolutely no substance at all because they had to fill . . . Oh well, let's do twenty screens with the same image, now let's take the same image and fragment it so all twenty screens make up one picture. Okay, great, so you've shown off and you show off and you show off, but it doesn't add anything to it. The thing that he would have, I think, been fascinated by is electronic photography--the non-film still camera. I think that would have thrilled him. Not because it's any good as an image, but because it contains so much potential for fooling around with it and storing it and manipulating it. For that matter, all the things that they're doing with scanning images in them and modifying them on the computer. I think that would have fascinated him because he was always in love with manipulation, he was always in love with how you take a photograph, let's say, and take a model that is one fifth of the total building and then move it five times without moving the camera and essentially produce a complete set of prints that you can then cut together and splice together: By God, there's the whole thing! This kind of idea . . . . He was fascinated with tricks, with hanging miniatures and forced prospective and this kind of stuff. Were he living in the age that we have today of Paint Box and all that stuff, I think he would have taken to it like a duck to water. Because that's a very direct thing, it has a very direct application. We have a picture, we want to do a certain thing with it, here's how you do it, here's the pen, here's the paint box, you do it. He was interested in the end result.

Q: You mentioned teleconference . . . to me this is something he would have . . .

Funke: Oh, I think he would have totally fallen in love with that too. Because he had so much conferencing that he had to do and he was always on the phone, he was always going to New York and the idea of using technology . . . see here's the deal. Let me digress for a minute. A number of the films that were made, like the IBM museum film and the National Fisheries Center and Aquarium film and the Metropolitan Museum Metropolitan Overview were made as models of a potential exhibit or a potential museum, or whatever. Not because, necessarily, C.E. wanted to work on that project or do it or be the mastermind for it or anything else, but because, he said, by doing this film we have tried to honestly present what could be. And by doing that we have set a standard that we hope whoever actually does the work will not fall below. And he viewed this as a responsibility that he had: to set a standard for what the people who came after . . . for what they should reach for and hopefully much exceed. Okay. He was very interested in technology being used rightly, used well. That's how he got into filmmaking. That's how he got into doing slide shows--using technology in a good way, in a way that was well suited to its potential. And that's why I think he would love the idea of teleconferencing because it's . . . mechanically it's simple, it uses stuff that's pretty much available, and yet it gives you a tremendous amount of power and it enables you to do things, and bring people together, that you could never otherwise do because they're too busy, because they can't possibly travel; not to mention just the convenience of not having to get on the airplane twice a month. But using technology well. You know, he was . . . the great driving force was . . . and this is something that I have carried with me and that I believe in and that has influenced a lot of my work: If you wanted to define what the thing that drove him or drove his relationship to his work, it was what he called the guest-host relationship. And he maintained that this existed everywhere--it existed in a nomad's tent; it existed in when the clowns come out and do the walkaround in a circus; it existed when your client walked into your office; it existed when you brought the lights down and rolled the film; it existed in every aspect of life and work. The guest-host relationship was tremendously powerful and tremendously significant. Not only in terms of business, like the fact that if somebody comes in and if they have a good reception in your office, they'll think well of you and maybe come back, but that's not the point. It has to do with when somebody walks into the lobby of your building, how do you greet him? What does he see? What does he hear? What does he feel? What happens? Or the entry to a museum, or the way that you walk through a museum. He was tremendously concerned with this--the guest-host relationship. Given the sad state of teleconferencing today, he could have been an amazing force in terms of bringing it to its feet, because that's what's lacking--it's crude and it's clumsy. And if he had grabbed it and said, Okay, now we're going to have . . . I want to set up a teleconferencing system. Or, I want to do a teleconferencing, but I want to do it right. I want to do it so that it's comfortable on my end and it's comfortable on their end and we have visual aids--how can we do it? You can't do that, boss. Well, let's find a way to do it, let's find out how we can get pictures onto the line, let's solve this, let's figure out a way to do it. He would take that ball and run with it, I'm sure. I think he would have been fascinated by it and he would changed it, as he changed so many other things.

Q: Where did that guest-host relationship come from?

Funke: I don't know. But it seems to me that it must have been shown in all of his work, to his earliest things. Because it has to do with--everything has to do with--how you design a book or how you take a photograph. I mean, in the sense that you take a book and you open it . . . it's a book so you open it . . . the way that the page is laid out--that's part of that relationship. It's how does the white relate to the picture, how do the corners of the picture look--all this stuff. It's . . . and I'm not sure when he formulated it as a precept, but I think it carries through a lot of . . . a long time in his work. And look at things like the sample lesson for a hypothetical course [A Rough Sketch for a Sample Lesson for a Hypothetical Course (1953), a multimedia presentation by Charles Eames and George Nelson exploring a multimedia approach to learning] which is sort of the ultimate in guest-host relationing where you've got Sandro Girard cooking bread in the air conditioner and all this stuff to make the scent come out into the audience and all this stuff. That's the ultimate. And it's things like what do your main titles look like on your movie? Or, he would never let us put a dimmer in the conference room. We said, Oh, come on boss, all theaters have dimmers. No, no, I want you to just turn off the lights because . . . I don't want it to look like we're showing them a movie. I want them to know that they're looking at something that's a piece of work, it's not a feature, it's not a . . . . This is not a theatre--this is part of my work space. He didn't want to have us dim the lights; he wanted us to just click them off and we would count three: Off--one, two, three--Roll. And it had to come up in frame, in focus, sound right--I mean it had to come up exactly right.

Q: Tell me more about that . . . these are just like tools of the trade . . . just the work. I mean, the films as being part of that . . .

Funke: You mean in terms of the mechanics or whatever?

Q: I mean that's what I was kind of getting at before when it seemed like they weren't treasured so much for themselves as for being . . .

Funke: Well. He would love to show people lots of films. Visitors would come and we would be given--he would give a list and say, Well you know, the Sarabhais are coming today, so let's see what we've got. We can show them a rough, I'd say, and, well, we've got the first ten powers of the Powers of Ten, or first six powers of the Powers of Ten, and we would be showing that, and we've got a rough soundtrack. Okay, let's show them that. And what else have we done? Well, what haven't they seen? And so, he'd go on and ask Hap, or whoever was in charge, or Etsu: What haven't the Sarabhais seen? And, of course, all of this had been carefully recorded from the last time they visited--what they'd seen. Well, let's see, they haven't seen the P Haplus film [A Small Hydromedusan: Polyorchis Haplus] and they haven't seen the Goods slide show and they haven't seen the Movie Sets slide show--Okay, that sounds good. So you'd have a little list of what you were going to do. It would all be planned and then everything . . . the machine would swing into motion, the films would all be pulled out and laid ready and the slide shows would be racked up in the trays and the lamps would be set up and running and all this machinery back of it. The thing was that you wanted it to be perfect--you didn't want to let him down. And then maybe . . . in the middle of this, he would decide to change it: I also want to show them so and so. And then everything would be shuffled around. Because he loved to show them in the context of the office. I think it's outside the office . . . when we were talking about whether they . . . films as something that you've done as opposed to films that sort of have a life of their own. I think in terms of showing them outside the office, you know, he showed them on lecture tours and stuff. He was never terribly interested in distributing them or getting them widely seen, with an exception of a few like, in the early days, like A Communications Primer and Feedback [Introduction to Feedback] where those were intended, they were distributed through Modern Talking Pictures which handles free distribution for big corporations. There were many, many, many hundreds of prints distributed. He loved to show the films to people who visited the office; he loved to show them work in progress; he loved to show them things they hadn't seen. But in terms of anything outside the office--it didn't matter. But I think that the inside of the office was one thing, the rest of the world was something entirely different. I don't think it's any conflict there. When you were his guest, part of the treat was, in addition to getting to eat ice cream and drink good coffee, you got to go and watch films, or the Ed Land full-color-from-one-color demonstration, for example, which we had set up. I don't know whether I dug this up or what. I had read about this: Ed Land wrote an article in about 1956 or something about doing three colors from one, in Scientific American. I had kept it in my head all this time. For some reason we were talking about this and I said, Hey, Ed Land wrote an article about this, and I went in back, and they had this bound set of Scientific American. I pulled out this thing, Oh, that sounds good. So we did all these tests on it. James and I shot all these tests and did this little gadget--you've probably seen it, the gadget that makes . . . that more or less synthesizes full color from a single red filter. Well, he was fascinated by this, he loved to show people this. And it was great because depending if you had any physicists in there, of course, he would immediately want to start fooling with them to see if he could make it not work. Or if you had somebody who wasn't scientifically oriented, they would just marvel at it. He was a showman and he loved to show people things and he loved to please them and have them enjoy themselves sitting in the conference room, some of them for a long time, a couple hours at a time, looking at this stuff.

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Q: To what extent did Charles think about . . . or Charles and Ray think about the editing of the film as they were shooting it?

Funke: I can only assume that Charles had the finished film in his head as he was doing it. Because, first of all, he knew exactly what he wanted to do. It was never a case of Let's shoot a whole bunch of stuff and then we'll make something in the editing room. He had a complete vision of what it was going to be: shoot this angle, go over here, we'll do this close up, we'll go in to pick up a master from here, we'll do a medium shot, let's do a rolling shot through here . . . . There were very, very few shots that were just done speculatively or just to have them--a few occasionally, but for the most part it was all pretty much . . . he knew what . . . where he wanted to go. One of the few films that didn't do that was The Look of America where we just kind of shot and shot and shot and who knows. But in Machine Room, literally it's the case that he would sit with a thousand-foot reel, and he would go through it, and he would put his little tadpole marks on it: here's the head, here's the tail--one, two, three, four. He'd number them and then essentially you'd go in and cut the marks and put them together in order and the sequence would be done. And that was it--amazing. And it didn't have to be changed. Maybe he would go in and fine-tune it a little bit, but literally he could go through a thousand or two thousand-foot roll of film and mark thirty scenes, mark them exactly--cut in here, cut out here--and put it together and it would flow perfectly. The timing would be right. At the most you'd go in and trim it a little bit, tighten it up, add a few frames and that would be it--it was extraordinary. He had an amazing gift for the rhythm of the editing. And particularly so in the sense that he wasn't actually doing the editing as he was doing it, he was just marking takes, marking the scenes . . . I did this later on, Mike Ripps did it. But I actually cut together most of the real kind of action films. Mike Ripps worked an awful lot on the later films, like Franklin and Jefferson [The World of Franklin and Jefferson] and The Look of America, which were done very much differently. But Tops and Fiberglass Chairs [The Fiberglass Chairs: Something of How They Get the Way They Are] and all that stuff--I pretty much edited those, which means to say I stuck them together. I didn't have to do anything but stick them together.

Interview with Alex Funke (Part 2)
includes discussion of the making of Powers of Ten

Q: Tell me about the differences between the two Powers of Ten. Or tell me about what the Powers of Ten process . . .

Funke: Well, there's actually three Powers of Ten. There's a thing called Truck Test, which is a 16mm demo film that they did to study the theory of the accelerating motion. And then there's the original Powers [A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, 1968] and then there's the 1978 Powers [Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, and the Effect of Adding Another Zero, 1977]. The first Powers was done on no budget at all I guess. Just a very few people, just Parke [Meek] and Judith Bronowski and, I guess, Ted Orlan and Antti Paatero--those four guys working on it. Parke built the track and they shot . . . they sort of learned as they went. And they just took the information out of books and stuff like that . . . . I think it has a kind of richness to it because of its defects and because they were just kind of using whatever they had and they still managed to make it have this kind of nice, well-fitting feel. In the later Powers of Ten . . . I spent a year of my life on it and it's . . . it was nowhere near as satisfying--it's flawed; it has technical problems. There's a lot more science in it, but the science isn't very interesting. I'd rather have bad science and have it be exciting . . . .I haven't seen it for a long time, but I must have showed the original Powers of Ten 500 times at least and I never fail to get a lump in my throat as the camera starts moving out and all you're looking at is the galaxies like dust. I mean that's a moment, that thinking about it, just is a very strong emotional kind of . . . I don't feel that at all about the other Powers--about the new Powers. The old one was so rich and so strong. It was neat. So anyway, they did it, and it really was a sketch--it was just intended to kind of study the idea. Charles was fascinated by the notion of time, of course, and in a sense it's the ultimate timeline: it was an accelerating timeline.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Q: About Powers of Ten . . .

Funke: Charles had obviously been fascinated by the idea of doing this for a long time. Of course, part of it is the discovery of the magic number, which [mathematician] Ray Redheffer created for them. This is the magic number that makes it possible. It's like the secret of the atomic bomb. It's the 1.001416297, which is the incremental change in the camera moves from frame to frame, which was lost between the first and second part. It had to be reinvented the second time.

Q: Tell me what that means.

Funke: In order for the camera movement to appear to be accelerating at a constant rate such that every ten seconds the camera is ten times further away, you have to move it so that the moves are very small when you're close to the artwork and very large when you're far from the artwork. These increments have a very specific--it was the 240th root of ten is what it is, but this switches us 1.00 whatever it is . . . and to do that you start with a small increment and you multiply that distance by that magic number and then take that and multiply it again and again and again so when you've done it 240 times it's 10 times bigger. It's simple when you talk about it, but the mechanics of doing it are quite complicated. In fact that was sort of the key to doing it, was [after Charles described the qualities of the number he needed] Redheffer saying, Oh yes, of course, that's the 240th root of ten, here's what it is. Then they carefully calculated and scaled it out and calculated it out. But that's the key to doing it. Because otherwise you don't have . . . otherwise you can't hook up. You have to be able to hook up the camera movement at the far point. When you're far away from the art, it has to hook up exactly with great precision to the next power as you're dissolving in. So it means that the motion when you're up front and you're making movements that are so small you can't even see them--they're like little lines so close together--and at the far end you're making movements for the camera so that they're six inches or eight inches per frame. And those are harmonically related. So that was solved. Parke and his gang solved it the first time, and Mike Wiener and I solved it the second time. We reinvented the wheel completely. It's just like you were saying about Parke telling you about how in Toy Trains they kept on going through the cars until they could draw one that would be the end car they could go out of. My impression is that the first Powers of Ten was made much the same way. It's kind of like they would be shooting it and they discovered they had to do something, so quick they'd stop and go make something and quick measure it and fit it in and--that looks about right--and keep on going. It was all sort of done that way. And then when we tried to improve it, of course we discovered that it's pretty hard to improve this stuff. To make a 10% improvement takes 1,000% expenditure of effort because everything about it is interlocked miracles.

Q: Which did Charles prefer?

Funke: I don't think he ever said. I think he liked the old one. The new one had so many problems. We had such agonies getting it done and getting it optically put together. And I was the project leader. I had some problems--there were things I didn't do that I should have done. I know a lot more about opticals now. None of us knew anything about opticals. The first one was done--Glen Fleck kind of masterminded it a little bit and it was done. There were no opticals in it: it was done entirely in the lab using A, B, C, D, and E roll printing--all done in the lab. And you just ran all these rolls through and that's . . . what you got is what you got. We had such a terrible problem getting it made and getting it put together. It was beautiful footage of the window, but we couldn't get it put together. And so, I think that the end result to him was painful and I think he probably liked the first one. [Editor's note: Though comparing the relative merits of the 2 complete versions of Powers of Ten is a fascinating arena, in fairness to the second version, there are those such as Philip and Phylis Morrison -- seen in the Eames Strand at 10-13 -- who are quite sure Charles and Ray preferred the 1977 version. Also, though it is understandable that someone close to a project sees it more critically than others, in fairness to Mr. Funke (and Charles and Ray and all involved) it must be stated that Powers of Ten (1977) is universally regarded as remarkable tour-de-force of filmmaking. To muddy the waters further, Rough Sketch is felt by many to be a much more existential experience. Watch them both and see what you think.]

Q: What is the significance of the Truck Test?

Funke: Truck Test was done long, long, long, long before the first Powers of Ten was done. And that was . . . . He got it into his head that you could do this thing--that you could make this camera move that would hook up to . . . from a closeup of a piece of art, to a long shot, dissolve, and go to a closeup, and continue. And basically this was to demonstrate the theory. And it's very rough, but all it is is squares--it's just squares linking, but it works. They figured out roughly how to do it and they matched the moves and they made them and they made it work. So this was done quite a long time before Powers of Ten.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Q: You used the expression "close to the muzzle."

Funke: God, yes. All right. We still use that expression around here--"close to the muzzle." Well, it had to do with the fact that very often something would occur, Charles would get a call that something was needed or something would pop into his head and it would end up sort of going to whoever happened to be passing by the kitchen when he was thinking about it. A number of times . . . you'd be working on something, some totally off the wall thing and C.E. would say, Alex, we need to do a timeline of technology, Franklin and Jefferson--can you do that? Need it by tomorrow. It was literally the case of being sort of whoever was happening . . . whether it was Randy Walker or Mike Ripps--whoever happened to be in sight when the notion popped into his head, that was the person who ended up being the team leader on it. That's how Mike Ripps ended up being the animator on the first Franklin and Jefferson and I ended up doing the technology timeline for the exhibition. It's, like, because I was the nearest one. It wasn't a case of deciding, Okay, let's see who is best qualified to do this. More like, Who is around? Which was fine because it meant that you got to do things that you hadn't done before. Or, if somebody else was busy, then it, sort of . . . just the nearest person to be dragged in. It wasn't a case of going through the chain of command--it was sort of direct drive.

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Q: What's the story about the power and the telephone?

Funke: This is not apocryphal. We know it's true. In order to run the curing oven . . . . When they were still living on Broxton in the house in Westwood when they were doing their very first molded plywood projects and they had built this vast curing oven that required a lot more current than they could get from their house service, so supposedly Charles climbed up the pole with a large piece of heavily insulated cable . . . climbed up the power pole and tied it directly into the power pole so as to bypass the fuses to run this huge resistance oven they constructed. He has himself talked about doing this on occasion. He was scared to death. He put rubber gloves on and tied it in.

Q: Did you ever talk about working at MGM?

Funke: No, not really. Once or twice he mentioned working on Meet Me in St. Louis. And, of course, there's all the stuff that shows in the Movie Set slide show . . . working with Billy [Wilder] and so forth. But he didn't talk about it very much. The only thing I remember is the thrill that they got . . . he talked about the thrill that they got when they discovered there was a Wright . . . an original Wright cyclone engine--which is the engine that was in the Spirit of St. Louis--still in its crate and they discovered this and brought it out. That's about the only story he ever told about those . . . that era. Of course, the montage in the Spirit of St. Louis [Billy Wilder's 1956 film starring Jimmy Stewart for which Charles second unit directed the montage showing the construction of the plane] is so classical, classical Eames that it's just amazing--it's a beautiful piece of filmmaking. It looks like Fiberglass Chairs basically.

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Q: Is there anything else that I haven't asked you about that you feel we should bring up?

Funke: One of the things that, of course, had always amazed people was that he could go off and shoot and be gone for a week or two weeks and shoot thirty rolls, forty rolls of film . . . of Kodachrome, and come back and we all sent them in to the lab and he could tell if there was one missing. We would lay all these rolls out and he'd say, Well, wait a minute, there's one missing. There's a shot missing here. And he would say, Oh my God, it's still in the box. There would be one frame out of 600 . . . out of 600 frames there would be one frame that somehow hadn't gotten laid out and he would remember that he had shot it. This was . . . . Which makes me think that he must have literally had this memory of every frame, which is probably why he was so good at editing stuff because he actually had a picture . . . as he was shooting it, he had a picture of what the film was going to look like, and he was just filling in the scene missing leader until it was done. That's the way he did it I guess . . . I don't know. Extraordinary, extraordinary visual gift. There was the famous episode of the drafting instruments where he was in the office all by himself one time and he wanted to do something very simple like draw a line or cut a piece of paper, and there was no scissor or ruler to be found. And so the edict went out: I want a complete set of drafting instruments on every table in this building . . . one of the few times when he actually . . . he was, like, storming: I was trying to do this and I couldn't find any tools, any equipment to do it. So, naturally in classical fashion this became like Ray's famous stainless steel exhaust pipe. It was like, Oh, my God, Charles wants . . . . So the first thing of course . . . the first thing we had to decide was what kind of basket to put the tools in. So Sam Passalacqua was given the job of getting the baskets. So the basket brigade was mobilized and several dozen different species of baskets . . . all of which had to be available in quantities of eighty, or what ever it was, to put on every table in the building. And the baskets were brought in and spread out for Ray to pick the right basket. And there was tremendous agonizing. And they were reduced from thirty baskets to six and then six baskets to three and then a tremendous discussion about which basket was going to be for the tools, and finally it was chosen and they went and bought a basket for every desk. And Sam went off and went to Daniels and bought, you know, sixty rulers, sixty Exactos, sixty scissors, sixty Rapidograph pens, sixty compasses, sixty triangles, sixty circle templates. I'm not kidding. I'm not making this up. And every desk in the office had this bin of drafting equipment in it. Well, this didn't last long. I don't think C.E. actually meant for this to happen, but once . . . . It was like, once the button was pushed it was pretty hard to stop the machine again. Some of the baskets eventually became used. They filled with dust and they became used for other things, people put their outgoing mail in it and stuff. But there's an example of sort of the knee-jerk reaction to this whole thing. That was the story of the drafting instruments.

[Interview ©1996 Lucia Eames Demetrios dba Eames Office (created for Eames Video Oral History Project)]

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DAa-13 Int. with Funke (F 6/1/96)
©1996 Lucia Dewey Eames dba Eames Office