FILM TAKES TIME WITH ARTIE SHAW

Back in 1982, a young Canadian television producer named Brigitte Berman came to Filmex with a documentary she’d made about the great cornet player Bix Beiderbecke. It was called “Bix: Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet,” a quote from Louis Armstrong.

It had been a four-year chore, not only because it was a spare-time work but because there was virtually no footage on Beiderbecke, who died in 1931 at the age of only 28. He had been recommended to her as a subject by her friend, animator Richard Williams. Williams, an amateur cornet player, contributed some animation effects to what became a moving account of a sadly short but historic career.

This year Berman was back at Filmex, which concluded last weekend with a tribute to a still-living jazz legend, the eloquent Artie Shaw. “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got” (a quote from Shaw himself) is an engrossing portrait of the most interesting, and by several choruses the most articulate, of all the big-band leaders.

Berman met Shaw when she was here at Filmex with “Bix,” showed him the film and persuaded him to cooperate. The heart of the documentary is the excerpts from the five hours of filmed interviews she did with him at his home northwest of Los Angeles.

Unlike Bix, Shaw had been filmed a lot, made some Hollywood films (which he thought atrociously simple-minded) and several of those stiff musical shorts. But Berman also unearthed some delicious homemade footage shot by the bass player Sid Weiss--Shaw and the band on an airplane, Shaw clowning on a park bench in the early days of his success.

Berman and a crew also found their way to a farm Shaw had lived on in Bucks County, Pa., following verbal instructions as Shaw remembered them from 40 years earlier. “He’d say, ‘Turn left at the gas station and pretty soon you’ll see a low stone wall . . . ,’ assuming they’d still be there after all this time. We did a little backing and filling, but we found it.”

She also visited the town in Spain--Bagur, where Shaw lived in retirement for five years with his then-wife Evelyn Keyes, one of the eight he’s had. The name of the town is spelled differently now, but Berman discovered an old street sign with the original name. She was denied access to the house itself, but lucked on to some tourist footage that might have been shot from the front patio.

“Artie likes to say that luck favors the prepared mind,” Berman says. “I’ve always thought that if you don’t misuse people, luck will come in other forms when you really need it.”

Keyes gave Berman a lovely interview about Shaw--generous, amused, understanding. It is one of the several touching moments in the film. Ava Gardner, yet another of the Shaw wives, refused to be interviewed.

Behind some fine stills of the young Shaw growing up in New Haven, there are the tentative sounds of the young saxophonist practicing scales and simple songs. Shaw actually wrote out a score for the practice session and had a Los Angeles musician record it for Berman’s sound track, a charming touch.

Berman, born in Germany, emigrated to Canada in 1962 and was a student projectionist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in the early ‘70s when she realized that the medium might well have something for her. She audited classes at the Ontario Art Center, where a teacher, Peter Harcourt, persuaded her to try her hand at editing. She worked through a summer vacation instead of going home, and was hooked.

She joined the Canadian Broadcasting Co. in 1973 and became a producer. For the last three years she worked on a public affairs show called “Take 30,” turning out three half-hour segments a month and working on “Shaw” nights and on weekends and holidays.

Now, with “Shaw” finished and ready for distribution, she has left the CBC to give full time to film making. She’s been urged to do a documentary on yet another jazz figure, Armstrong--an appealing idea, but she’s not sure but that she’d like to tackle another area, moving eventually to TV drama and then features.

Meanwhile, she has captured for all time the outspoken, idiosyncratic, occasionally irascible and rebellious Artie Shaw, who several times walked away from a hugely successful career because it left him too little time to be a private thinker with an insatiable appetite for books.

It is a portrait with a sermon, given in the title. Time, being all you’ve got, is not to be wasted or trivialized, as Shaw has been demonstrating from the days of his dashing and handsome youth. He claims to have mellowed and to be happy with his life, but you do suspect that the secret of his vigor at 74 is that he remains deeply suspicious of contentment.