He Reveals Why He Tried To Kill Himself In The ’60s & Why He Failed

To me this guy is a great storyteller. He tells it like he sees it, and you get the sense when he is talking, of how he saw his life in the 1960s and how he described what he did in 1989 when I conducted this interview. The interview was done as one of 200 people that my team and I interviewed for our six part television series, Making Sense Of The Sixties, which aired in 1991. Our goal was to interview ordinary folk, people who had lived through the 60s in various ways and could talk about it straight to camera, without as we say in the movie business, editing themselves before speaking. To find great storytellers my team interviewed several thousand people on the phone to pick storytellers like this gentleman. I would share his name but without his permission (and I don’t have it) he will remain anonymous. I can tell you that he lived in Taos, New Mexico at that time. People have asked me how I got people to be so direct in front of the camera. I used several techniques. I told each subject that this was important and that it was being recorded for history and that 50 years later, what he said would be heard by people who had never lived in the 1960s and wanted to know more about it. I told each person that the viewer would know if they were bullshitting – that people could tell just by looking at their faces when they spoke. I said that what they were doing was historic and that if they were nervous, it was good to be nervous. I said that without their stories, a part of the history of that time would never be told. The responses that I got were extraordinary. There were interview subjects who cried in answer to the first question that I asked, as though they had been waiting since the 1960s (remember this was 1989) to share what they did or didn’t do and why. As you can see in this video, he shared plenty. Being drafted into the Air Force. Vietnam. His enlistment. Being raped. Searching (hunting) for women and getting bored with sex. Becoming suicidal. As I listened to each person share bits and pieces of themselves, in my mind was only a desire to give them the space to do so. No judgments came from me. I just asked the next question imagining myself to be an audience watching 50 years in the future. Of course I had no knowledge of YouTube which has been a wonderful resource to allow me to share longform interviews like this one. David Hoffman Filmmaker