Behind a 'Crisis': Filmmakers return to the Capstone
by george daniels

Confident of their own place in American television history, two eyewitnesses to the preparations for the 1963 integration of the University of Alabama came to Tuscaloosa on Tuesday to tell the story behind the only documentary of a U.S. presidential decision in the making.

Forty years to the day that Robert Drew, a producer with Drew Associates, and Jim Lipscomb, a videographer, filmed the production of the ABC documentary "Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment," the two men recounted the experience.

After a screening of the film, Drew and Lipscomb were part of "Media and the Moment," a panel discussion sponsored in conjunction with "Opening Doors," the university's three-day celebration of the successful 1963 enrollment of Vivian Malone and James Hood as students at the university.

Malone and Hood, along with many of the principal figures in their enrollment were on hand for the event at the Bryant Conference Center.

Lipscomb recalled how it took three days of visits to the late Gov. George Wallace's office in Montgomery and lots of persistence in order to make the groundbreaking documentary a reality.

"I took a sheet of paper, and I wrote to the governor what we were going to do and that we had the cooperation of the [U.S.] attorney general and the president, and if he wanted his side of the story told, I was here to tell it for him, if he'd just see me. Fifteen minutes later I was in his office," said Lipscomb, who eventually not only gained access to film Wallace at his office, but also to capture scenes at the Alabama governor's mansion.

Meanwhile in Washington D.C., Drew used the late President John F. Kennedy's difficult decision over whether to intervene in the Alabama matter and to make a civil rights address to the nation to advance what Drew called a "new kind of journalism." Before the "Schoolhouse Door" incident, Drew had filmed Kennedy during his presidential campaign.

At least a month passed before word of the filming of "Crisis" reached the public in a front-page article in the New York Times. Later that same week, the New York Times editorial board called Lipscomb and Drew's an attempt to "eavesdrop on executive decisions of serious government matters" and "highly inappropriate."

"There was no more media savvy movement than the civil rights movement," said E. Culpepper Clark, dean of the College of Communications and Information Sciences and author of "The Schoolhouse Door: Segregation's Last Stand at the University of Alabama." Clark served as convener of a series of panels on the media's role in the June 11, 1963 confrontation between the late Wallace and federal authorities at Foster Auditorium.

"'Crisis' remains a solitary historical document," said Mary Ann Watson, a third member of the panel and author of "Expanding Vista: American Television in the Kennedy Years."

"The television documentary that was being filmed 40 years ago on this very campus has preserved a priceless key to understanding a pivotal passage in the American journey," she said.

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