Dick Fontaine

(1939 - 2023)

I’m not sure there’s a better way to begin a tribute to Dick Fontaine than to start with his work. Because for Dick Fontaine, my father, his work was not only his life’s proudest accomplishment, it was the way in which he felt most understood. His work was the topic he felt most excited talking about, the identity he felt most comfortable—and happiest—being in the world with. Dick Fontaine, thinker, storyteller, documentary filmmaker.

And, well, he was pretty good at it.

Over 50 working years, Dick Fontaine, was responsible for some of the most memorable moments in documentary film history.

He was there when one of the US’s most provocative thinkers got arrested; he was there when one of jazz’s most influential horn players reconsidered not just the meaning of his music, but of his life; he was there when one of the world’s greatest writers confronted his country’s biggest flaws. He was there at funerals of revolutionaries, and births of entire genres. And yes, it’s true, Tricky Dick rolled up camera-ready to that cavern in Liverpool, long before anyone had any idea that The Beatles would change everything.

Dick did it all with an incredible sense of story, a clear directorial vision of what he wanted to say and wanted the audience to learn about, be moved by. And he always did it with style. Whether it was his own personal style—from the flowing long hair, cool silver rings, and fly fur coats of the early days—(when Cambridge classmate Stephen Frears first saw him on campus 60 years ago silhouetted against the wall of St. Johns, an awed voice whispered to Stephen: “That’s Dick Fontaine!”)—to his later years’ uniform of corduroy pants, blue suede shoes, primary red scarf and matching socks.

Or whether, of course, it was the cinema verîté style he brought to documentary, and its chaotic capture of the truth, Dick created with a signature flair, giving whatever he put his name on an energy and enthusiasm for the subjects he was trying to tackle, and a deeply-held passion for the people he was trying to listen to, connect with.

Passionate. Yes, that’s an apt word to describe my father. He got fired up all right, he loved the debate and the dialogue, and when an idea took hold, he wasn’t afraid to spar with anyone. You kinda did need to be interesting enough though. I always had the feeling my father’s slightly awkward pauses before he replied to someone were not only meant to give him just enough time to sort out his next provocative question, but was also to give him the space to make a private assessment of whether or not it was worth his time to continue that very conversation. My father was obsessed with interesting people, and maybe that’s why he made a career surrounding himself with the most fascinating subjects in music and culture (and maybe that’s why, he and my mother, actress/director Pat Hartley, decided to give me the real name “Smokey.” Now they’d have kid who would forever be interesting to any stranger at any dinner party—or memorial—I would ever come across!).

My father was as much a participant in the documentary stories he would tell as he was an observer.  While his on-camera, voice-over days showed up mostly in his early work, from the great World In Action news shows of the mid-sixties, or the brooding and quite manic quasi-autobiographical Double Pisces, Scorpio Rising in 1971, he had a strong off-screen influence in every documentary scene he ever shot. The Dick Fontaine energy can be felt on the grounds of the Pentagon in 1967’s Will The Real Norman Mailer Please Stand Up!, on Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Bridge in 1968’s Who is Sonny Rollins?, and on the haunted freedom roads of Georgia during 1980’s remarkable film essay I Heard It Though the Grapevine with the great James Baldwin.

You see, for my father, a shared documentary experience was a vital part of the creative process, and he was not afraid to become friends with those whose story he wanted to tell.

In fact a friendship between director and subject was never simply a production tactic (although, yes, it was an incredibly successful one), it was the internal proof in his own head that he was probably telling the right story with the right person. And a connection made with a Norman Mailer or an Ornette Coleman or an Afrika Bambaataa wouldn’t just expire because the shooting was done or the film was wrapped (or, more likely, just ran out of budget!) Long after he turned off the cameras, the on-screen conversations captured on film would often continue long into the night. And as Dick’s career extended from one decade to the next, those long nights would turn into short years. I will always remember the summer when my dad, brother, and I were sitting on a misty Long Island beach early one morning, and I could’ve sworn I saw Paul McCartney walk past us with his shirt off.  Mentioning it to my dad, he quickly turned off the jazz in his headphones, and yelled out after him, “Hey Paul!” Surprised, the soon-to-be Member of the British Empire turned around, and after a few seconds of bewilderment replied, “Hey Dick!” And boom, an hour-long conversation between old subjects-turned friends went down right there on the East Hampton sand.  If someone had figured out that iPhone thing a few years earlier, I’d probably be playing that clip right now.

Born in 1939, in Hampstead in the north of London before moving to Hemingford Gray, a small English village in Cambridgeshire, bordered by the Great Ouse on one side and a miles-long Roman road on the other, Richard Hugh Fontaine, was the son of a school teacher, and a young Royal Air Force infantrymen, Stanley Champion, who - perhaps by circumstance and nature - wasn’t ever too much in the frame. Dick’s mum was a strong and quite successful young woman of the 1940s, not afraid to visit her relatives by boat in New Zealand, join a woman’s cricket team, or insist that her only child would get a scholarship to the private Kimbolton School, over the local parish situation around the corner. Grandma Jo correctly clocked that the only social advancement remotely possible to a country boy living in post-war England was a top-flight education. Jo’s efforts paid off when her son got a prized spot at the local Uni—better known as the best-on-the-planet school Cambridge University. Admitted for Maths, young Dick quickly realized however that his numbers chops weren’t likely to ever keep up with his classmates who were literally discovering oscillations of the Earth’s atmosphere. So instead he hung out in record shops, discovered the heady improvisations of be-bop jazz, and met his future wife, the beautiful, whip smart, life-of-the-party nursing student, Dierdre Grelier, the mom of my older brother Daniel, and awesome grandma to four of Dick’s six grandkids. (Diedre recently passed away at age 87, so may she, too, rest in peace.) So Dick quickly transferred out of Maths into Philosophy, a subject filled with many more possibilities for a deep thinker like him. That life change sounded like much more fun, got him to walk all over the Cambridge rooftops without having to apologize to anyone, and, in fairness, did put him in class with the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, before names like Sonny Rollins, Ornette Coleman, and Art Blakey were given similar labels in his life story, became dad’s first “hero.”

The music called jazz is as much of a central figure in the life and career of Dick Fontaine than probably anything or anyone else. He adored the art form. Was inspired by it. He endowed it with a social and cultural meaning ahead of many of his contemporary critics. There are very few Dick Fontaine productions where jazz isn’t the central figure, or certainly can’t be heard throughout. And even when he went beyond the notes of a jazz doc, it didn’t matter. To Dick, Baldwin was nothing less than a jazz artist in written form; hip-hop, for which my father was audacious enough to do a “history” of back in 1984 (!), was for sure a co-conspirator in the anti-establishment revolution jazz was a part of. If a story couldn’t make sense to his ears as a jazz man, then it probably wasn’t the right one for him to be telling.

My father was in awe of not only the sound of jazz and how it was made (he often admitted what he really wanted in life was to be a jazz drummer), but, most importantly, who was making it and why. And in the burgeoning be-bop genre of the early 1960s, that was all about young, Black and brown folks.  And that’s when the second pillar of the work of Dick Fontaine emerges: namely an unapologetic commitment to tell the stories of young black kids mostly in america who were writing and dancing and playing - in fact, living and dying - to fight for a fair and just experience for themselves.

There were young kids dancing with Blakey’s Jazz Messengers and boogie-ing at Jazzy Jay’s Zulu Nation party. There were young people excitedly following Baldwin through the Newark, NJ projects, and there were the sixteen and seventeen year-olds proudly saluting the casket of a Black Panther martyr in Oakland, CA, sharp with their perfectly pressed green lapels and black berets. There were the young UK street kids learning how to paint a wall in Bristol from the Bronx graffiti masters - teenagers themselves - that Dick had flown over for a real-life mashup and cultural exchange. Or the try-to-not-look-at-the-camera kids who were asked to innocently interrupt a harrowing late night conversation between civil rights activists in Mississippi (admittedly, one of them was 12-year-old me).

And then of course, there are the young people in this room. The young people my father dedicated the last decade or more of his career to - to mentor, to teach, to pay it forward, memorializing a well-lived creative life he was incredibly grateful for. “I’m a lucky boy,” he would tell my brother and me over and over in his final weeks. “I’m a lucky lucky boy.”

So welcome to this celebration of the life and work of Dick Fontaine. It’s a great honor and privilege to be sharing this moment with all of you here at the National Film & Television School, a place where he was so happy and grateful to come to work to every day. The NFTS was a chapter in his life where it seems —  judging from so many of the heartfelt comments many of you have sent to me over the past few weeks — that my father earned the label of “father figure” perhaps a bit more readily than he may have established it elsewhere, and for that reason alone, I am grateful to be here.

On behalf of the my older brother, Dan, and Dick’s six awesome grandchildren, Jack, Blake, Gus, Tess, Sofia, and Sage, thank you to all of you for coming and for director Jon Wardle and the staff for hosting this tribute.

We have a wonderful line-up of speakers this afternoon, each of whom will loosely represent the different chapters of my dad’s life. Each speaker will be intro’d by what else?—a clip of film, and then the plan is to open this cinema up for a few brief remarks from the audience. So let’s get this beat going, and the party started. I’m sure Dick would have it no other way…

To learn more about the work of Dick Fontaine, including the historic 4K re-release of 1982’s I Heard It Through The Grapevine with James Baldwin, made with producer/director Pat Hartley, visit the Harvard Film Archive.