He’s made a film about the genius behind the Watts Towers

A documentary about Simon Rodia explores how something wondrous got built. Edward Landler was kind enough to chat with us about his film, and patiently waded through our questions.

Froggy Pumpkin: You’ve been incredibly steadfast and inspiring in persevering in the making of “I Build the Tower.” How many years has it taken, and is it fully completed?

Edward Landler: It’s fully completed, yes. 22 years. The first thing we did was we filmed the last filmed interview with R. Buckminster Fuller: a structural analysis of the towers, three months before Fuller’s death. So it’s internally dated.

This gave us a full, 40-minute interview with a man with major insights into the nature of the physical world of design and engineering, with a structural analysis of the towers. It gave us something priceless - nowhere else had Mr. Fuller expounded on Rodia and his towers. We were very grateful to him. It certainly helped us create our first, 5-minute tape to go out and start looking for funds.

What did you shoot the documentary in - did the technologies change over the years?

The changing of the technologies I’m sure helped us a great deal. We filmed in 16mm the Fuller interview, a couple of other early interviews, and most of the shooting of the towers themselves were in 16mm. We also shot in Beta SP; I’d say most of the interviews were Beta SP, and other kinds of location photography - you know, when we went to Italy - it was much easier to do that on video, to film Rodia’s birthplace. And around L.A., Martinez, where he lived, that was mainly Beta SP. Last year, we shot some supplementary things on DV. So, in a way, the editing of this film reflects the mosaic of the towers!

What led you to choose to make a film about Simon Rodia and the WattsTowers?

I’d been working in Watts; I’d been involved in the Watts Towers Arts Center. I’d shot another short film called “Pharaoh’s Dream” in which I intercut - this was 16mm - intercut Calcutta with Los Angeles, and I used the towers as a central image in that film. And then one day, into the Watts Towers Arts Center walks this fellow who was the great nephew of Rodia. He had done research on his great uncle’s life, and he thought it would make a great documentary film, and was looking for somebody to collaborate with, and he had spoken to a number of people. But the way of looking at it, what it should look like, we two agreed, so we worked together for all those years.

L.A. loses so many of its landmarks seemingly as a matter of course – for example, the Ambassador Hotel is about to go the way of all flesh – as well as many of its communities – often enough, to flame. It has been argued that L.A. has little by way of civic memory or sense of history, perhaps as a consequence of the demolishing of its “man”-built constructs, the displacement of its peoples, and the upending of its geology. Are the WattsTowers a triumph and a necessity precisely because they have