USC’s Rolling Stones in Film Series
As part of “The Rolling Stones in Film” series at USC, filmmaker Bill Yahraus spoke in public for the first time about his role as a camera operator for the epic rock ‘n’ roll documentary Gimme Shelter, saying, “Music in general at that time was a visible demonstration of the counter-culture, and the films were the eyes watching it happen.”
As a cameraman for the film that captured the 1969 U.S. Rolling Stones tour and the infamous San Francisco Altamont concert- where a Hell’s Angel member stabbed revolver-wielding concertgoer Meredith Hunter- Yahraus spoke of the event firsthand. “A lot of people talk about that moment as the death of counterculture,” recalled Yahraus. “But that’s not true- it went on after that. It wasn’t dead; it was just the beginning. Plus, I was there, and it wasn’t that bad.”
Bill Yahraus spoke as part of a panel of rock ‘n’ roll experts including filmmaker Penelope Spheeris and USC professors Joanna Demers and Josh Kun. Interspersed amongst the 300 plus seats of USC’s Norris Cinema Theatre were a mixture of colleagues, students, diehard Stones fans, and people trying to escape the unusual L.A. downpour outside.
Bill Yahraus went on to describe that the new technology in cameras allowed filmmakers to break free from the previous model of filming, citing D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back as the beginning of this style of filming in music documentaries. “For me, that’s where it begins,” said Yahraus. “We were released from the tripod and we could take the cameras everywhere. We could follow people in and out of doors, down hallways, film someone lying on the ground- it was a big break.”
While Don’t Look Back revolved around the idea of being able to see the mysteriously iconic Bob Dylan behind the scenes of his 1965 concert tour of the U.K., Gimme Shelter revolved around an action: the death of Meredith Hunter at San Francisco’s Altamont Speedway, which was once predicted to be the Woodstock of the West Coast.
“Universal picked it up for $1 million- probably just because someone got stabbed. But for us, it was a film about making a film,” explained Yahraus.
Penelope Spheeris chimed in at the reason the film became revolutionary for music documentaries over the world. “In a way, it did mark the end of an era. All this hippy dippy trippy stuff-it was the end of that. Bur for music filmmaking, it was just the beginning,” said Spheeris. “It was deep, it was layered, and it was expertly made. It was good storytelling.”
While the editing of the film revolved around the death at the Altamont concert, Yahraus remembered that the cameraman who captured the stabbing didn’t realize he had done so until watching his footage. Yahraus recalls the confusion amongst the camera crew and the audience after the violence broke out, “I was up in the hills filming the bonfires and I saw the helicopters, but I didn’t really know what was happening.”
The documentary filmmaker, who once thought he would like to teach Old English for a living, began a career in film after enrolling in The Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. “We were conscious that there was a war taking place and we really didn’t want to go. I decided to enroll in graduate school and I remember them asking me to check a box. I saw one that said ‘film’ and thought, that looks fun. I got lucky because I ended up really liking it.”
After his role as a camera operator in Gimme Shelter, Yahraus formed a collective of filmmakers in San Francisco and has been producing films ever since.
Yahraus, who know continues to film and produce his own movies as well at teach at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, notes that today there is a whole new technological revolution taking place in filmmaking. “Back then, we could only shoot for ten minutes at a time before we had to re-load.”
Yahraus says that today, filmmakers can shoot up to an hour at a time and the camera weighs significantly less. In addition, cameras can record sound in sync with the filming. These factors, combined with the technology used in editing a film, lower the cost and editing time of the filmmaker.
“Today, anybody can be a filmmaker. All you have to do is grab hold of the technology and use it.”
