Charles Guggenheim Proudly Passes the Torch to His Son

WASHINGTON —  I was just hanging around the office the other day when the phone rang. It was Charles Guggenheim, inviting me to a screening of a new flick.

He makes documentaries (“D-Day Remembered,” “Nine From Little Rock,” “The Johnstown Flood”). He’s a modest, friendly guy living a quiet family life here, and it was nice to learn, writing about him a few years back, that he’d won as many Oscars for documentaries as Disney.

This call was different. He wasn’t pushing his own work but a film by his son Davis Guggenheim, 37. Something about teachers. Would I like to drop by the Motion Picture Assn. of America and see it?

I knew little about the son except that he grew up here, went to Brown and took off for Hollywood, where he’s directed episodes of “ER” and “NYPD Blue” plus a recent full-length feature, “Gossip.” He’d married Elisabeth Shue, who received a 1995 Oscar nomination for her performance in “Leaving Las Vegas,” and they have a couple of kids.

Over at the MPAA, Davis Guggenheim turned out to be as charming, self-effacing and earnest as his famous father. His film, “The First Year,” follows five novice teachers through their baptism in Los Angeles schools, and it’s stunning. I wondered how he could have captured moments of such ferocious intimacy.

The next Saturday, I called him, curious about his relationship with his father.

“When I was a kid, I loved being on Dad’s sets,” Davis Guggenheim recalled. “It was like the circus, with cameras and production vans and trips to Idaho and Puerto Rico and taking a tugboat out to the Statue of Liberty. I worked stringing electric cable, loading film, doing research.”

Charles Guggenheim had financed his beloved documentaries over the years by making political ads, and his son got a useful sense of the interplay of money, power and artistic process.

He was “a wonderful, conscientious father. People on his sets used to get angry, because no matter what crisis they were in, he’d always come home to dinner,” Davis Guggenheim said.

But the son had a classic problem: “You feel the weight of your father’s legacy. In college, I wondered how I’d ever be my own man. I thought, ‘I have to do this in a completely different world,’ and Hollywood was it. Dad said, ‘Come to Washington and work for me.’ I said, ‘I’m going to make hit movies!’ ”

He tried, but it didn’t satisfy. At last year’s premiere of “Gossip,” “I sat there thinking, ‘All this hard work and energy, and in the end it’s just a thriller about some college kids getting into trouble.’ It felt without weight.”

Also, the birth of his son got Davis Guggenheim thinking about education.

“I was very anxious about where we would send him to school,” said. “The idea of just turning our backs on the public schools in L.A. felt wrong.”

Gradually, he realized he wanted to make a documentary about the great human drama in those small, precious moments of connection when an inspired teacher touches a needy child, a film “outside the political debate.”

“There are great stories,” his father had once said, “in what is very common.”

Now, Davis Guggenheim was on the same path.

“I’d tried the Hollywood route,” he said, “but as much as I wanted to run away from Dad’s shadow by not doing socially conscious documentaries, I was eventually drawn back.”

Funding for “The First Year” came from California State University and the J. Paul Getty Trust. Davis Guggenheim, working with producers Julia Schachter and Senain Kheshgi, did much of the shooting himself, so unobtrusively that at one point, during a conference in which relatives gang up on a kid, there’s a close-up of the child’s face as a single tear rolls down his cheek.

The film ends with a simple message: “The United States will need more than 2 million teachers in the next 10 years. Who will teach our children?”

A shorter version is being distributed in a related public awareness campaign called TEACH, just as his father’s gut-wrenching survey of bigotry, “The Shadow of Hate” (1996), was shown to millions of high school kids.

Davis Guggenheim marveled at his father’s genius: “sitting in the editing room, watching him do his magic, turning a linear story into poetry.”

“It’s so intensely personal for him; he can take simple elements and manipulate them, and through his intense passion for the people, he makes the story transcend, lifts it outside the ordinary.

“He falls in love with his subjects.”

So does his son. “I stay in touch with the teachers,” Davis Guggenheim mused. “Their path is very hard. Their burden is very great.”

A Son’s Screening, a Father’s View

His “most terrifying moment,” Davis Guggenheim said, was showing his father the rough cut. “I was shaking. I was looking at him watching it. In his own quiet way, I think he was moved. I hope he’s proud of me.”

I called Charles Guggenheim and asked.

“I love it. I think it’s great,” he said. “His choice of people was so good. To bring out those personal moments that make the issues so real, he knew when to shoot.

“I was so proud of the way he was totally emotionally and intellectually involved in what these teachers were all about. I was broken up by it. I began to cry.”

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“The First Year” can be seen Thursday on PBS. Information on the TEACH campaign is at www.pbs.org/firstyear and www.teachersdocumentary.com.