Behind the Scenes

When documentary filmmakers D.A. Pennebaker and his wife, Chris Hegedus, decided to focus on the world of Broadway for their next project, Wendy Ettinger, who had produced their Oscar-nominated “War Room” about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and would be co-producing this one as well, gave them a piece of advice.

As the sister of Heidi Ettinger Landesman, one of the producers of “Moon Over Buffalo,” the making of which was to be their model, she knew Broadway. “The one law that prevails in the theater,” she told them, “is that someone is always a victim.”

So who did Pennebaker and Hegedus think was the “victim” as they shot more than 80 hours of film in and around limousines, offices, rehearsal halls and theaters as the comedy by Ken Ludwig (“Crazy for You”) chugged in fits and starts toward its opening night on Broadway in October of 1995?

Is it the star Carol Burnett, the television legend who is returning to the stage for the first time in 30 years and who can be glimpsed in the film gamely listening to condescending criticism of her performance?

Or is it the playwright who worships Woody Allen and Tom Stoppard and thinks that the door-slamming farce he has written about a second-rate troupe of actors in the 1950s is somehow beneath him?

Or is it the Los Angeles-based director Tom Moore, returning to his roots in theater (“Over Here!”), whose face is etched in such tension that one of the producers, upon hearing that the body of a suicide has been discovered on the roof of one of his theaters, asks, “It isn’t Tom Moore, is it?”

Actually, the “victim” kept switching around as they filmed, said the Pennebakers, both engagingly sympathetic--he older and garrulous, she youthful and shy--as they lunched together at a Mexican restaurant not far from their apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

“At one point, it was even us,” said Hegedus, describing a mortifying moment during the show’s opening-night performance in Boston when part of the equipment she was working malfunctioned and emitted a loud screeching sound. “I ran out totally embarrassed, and everyone gave me the evil eye later,” she recalled. “But if you’re successfully victimized, everyone will feel a little sorry for you. It binds the family closer together.”

The “family” that emerges in the resulting documentary, “Moon Over Broadway,” which will be released Friday, is a fascinating if dysfunctional one, immediately familiar to anyone who has had any contact with the roller-coaster world of making theater.

The high stakes--”Moon Over Buffalo” cost $2.3 million--and the naked risks of theater, no doubt, were attractive to Pennebaker and Hegedus, not to mention the emotional vicissitudes of actors who are by nature high-strung.

“There’s always a chance the family will unravel,” he said. “Read R.D. Laing: ‘You don’t need enemies if you have a large family.’ ”

Indeed, Pennebaker, who has been making documentaries since 1953, including the acclaimed “Don’t Look Back” about Bob Dylan, has combed this terrain before, beginning in 1962 with “Jane,” chronicling Jane Fonda’s appearance in the Broadway comedy “The Fun Couple” and in 1970 with his classic account of the creation of the original-cast album for the Stephen Sondheim musical “Company,” in the course of which Elaine Stritch has a near-nervous breakdown. “At times like those,” Pennebaker said, “I often wonder, ‘Why are they letting us film this?’ ”

Good question. But the filmmaker said that there is really only one answer: “Because you want to.” Indeed, that is what he said he told James Carville, the caustic general of Clinton’s War Room who at first was highly skeptical of letting cameras into his inner sanctum.

“But you bank on the fact that people want to see what will happen,” Pennebaker said. “You don’t get people to watch you go off the high board very often.”

That idea of being caught in amber becomes doubly attractive when it comes to such an ephemeral art form as the theater. Moore says that is what attracted him when he was approached with the idea at the very start of rehearsals.

His last collaboration on Broadway, “Frankenstein,” had closed overnight, evaporating into gossamer after years of hard work. “For better or worse, there’ll now always be a record,” he said, adding that he never worried that the cameras would interfere with the process. “The exigencies of the situation always superseded the knowledge that their cameras were there.”

This becomes dramatically apparent at the beginning of the film when Philip Bosco, a Broadway veteran who is playing opposite Burnett as her husband and fellow thespian, angrily explodes during rehearsals, accusing the director and writer of not accepting input from the actors.

“They [Pennebaker and Hegedus] were so unobtrusive that after the first few days you weren’t aware they were even there, so no, I wasn’t ‘playing to the camera’ at all,” recalled Bosco recently. “I was really angry and frustrated. Both Carol and I felt that there was this pact between Tom and Ken not to accept our contributions. But she was careful not to throw her weight around, so she fully supported me saying something.”

“There were times when I wish there hadn’t been a camera peeking over our shoulders,” said Rocco Landesman, one of the producers who with his straight talk, flamboyant red cowboy boots and lacerating wit emerges as one of the larger-than-life characters in the feature.

“Outside of making love to your wife, reading a review of a show you’ve produced is probably one of the most intimate moments a producer can have. But I wasn’t worried about that as much as those times in the film when people are voicing concern over Carol’s performance. A certain amount of dirty laundry was being washed in public.”

Burnett, of course, is the focus of the documentary. Indeed, Pennebaker admits that her enormous popularity, which kept “Moon Over Buffalo” running for nine months on Broadway despite poor reviews, is also a hedge against the notion that the documentary itself, focusing as it does on a fairly insular world, may not have wide box-office appeal.

Yet the film reveals a fairly subdued, nervous Burnett, clearly anxious about whether her fans would support her in a piece that, initially at least, was to show her in a different light from the television work that had established her as a comic genius.

“That’s an inherently dramatic situation for us,” Hegedus said. “This question as to whether her fans would be available to the change.”

Indeed, throughout the film, there is a palpable tension between the artistic pretensions of the piece and the commercial ploy of having booked a popular star. Early criticism that her performance is “too television” becomes moot once the preview audiences start to respond warmly to any sign of the old shtick from Burnett.

“They don’t lie,” says the star in the documentary, referring to the audience. (Though Burnett reportedly likes the documentary, she was not available for an interview.)

“Carol didn’t turn out to be exactly what we thought she’d be,” said Pennebaker, who expected her version of the wise-cracking television persona to end up on the film. “So we get a different Carol Burnett, but one who’s still very winning. She instinctively knows how to do something that everybody else has to practice to do. She’s a wild rabbit and everyone else is hutch rabbits.”

That is amply demonstrated in one of the high points of the film when, during the first preview performance in New York, a winch driving the set changes gets stuck and brings the show to a grinding halt. Forced to vamp, director Moore brings Burnett out front and, for nearly 20 minutes, she holds the audience enthralled with spontaneous comic responses to questions shouted at her. The actress who, up to this point, has been the subject of much skepticism and even derision behind the scenes, suddenly morphs into a woman of uncommon talent and poise. A wild rabbit, indeed.

“That winch getting stuck was such a stroke of luck for us,” Pennebaker said. “These are the moments that you pray for. But once you get all the permissions you need to do something like this, you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get. You just know that the ship is ready to sail and that your destination is somewhere out there. The voyage is what really the film takes up. The only rule is: If you’re bored, stop shooting.”