For With Love from Truman, the team used this approach to capture Truman Capote in the wake of the January 1966 publication of his landmark “nonfiction novel,” In Cold Blood. Inspired by the experience of making the film, they resolved to do for the documentary something like what Capote had recently accomplished with the novel: in their case, to produce a nonfiction feature of profound human interest that could play widely in commercial theaters, as opposed to showing only on television, at festivals, or in limited release, as their earlier films had. Their further motivation was to find a subject similar to the kind that John William De Forest had called on authors to embrace in his 1868 essay “The Great American Novel,” one that would allow their new documentary to resonate deeply with its cultural moment in the United States. Spurred by literary ambition, they initially turned to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, going so far as to spend time on a whaling ship on the South Atlantic in the hope of documenting the tracking and capture of a whale. That idea was quickly abandoned on account of the Maysles brothers’ increasing unease with the ethics of whale hunting, not to mention Albert’s revulsion at the odor of the mammals on the high seas. It was Joseph Fox, Capote’s editor at Random House, who proposed a more manageable, less pungent subject. If they truly wanted to capture something of the spirit of American life, Fox suggested, they’d be better off filming the trials and tribulations of the average door-to-door salesman. It was an idea that would alter the arcs of their careers and of documentary filmmaking. Salesman (1969) is a work whose stark emotional resonance connected and continues to connect with many viewers, and it propelled the brothers and Zwerin to the forefront of the Direct Cinema movement. While their next feature, Gimme Shelter (1970), would be a generational swan song steeped in the cultural aphasia of the late sixties, this one, though born of the same era, transcends the specificity of its cultural moment, capturing the very essence of what it is to be American.



The boom years after World War II were a golden age of direct selling. Anachronistic today, the door-to-door salesman is a tradition as old as free enterprise itself, embodied in the late nineteenth century by the “drummer,” who spent a solitary life in entrepreneurial pursuit of a sale, visiting village and rural homes by horse-drawn wagon, goods on hand. By the midsixties, close to a million and a half men and women were canvassing the roads of America, selling everything from cosmetics to soaps, from shoes to encyclopedias to magazines and all variety of household goods. The targets of these sales, more often than not, were the country’s young, hardworking suburban homemakers.



The existential plight of the road-worn salesman had been powerfully conjured into the twentieth-century imagination by Arthur Miller’s 1949 Pulitzer Prize–winning play Death of a Salesman. However, David Maysles had a different archetype in mind, finding inspiration in the work of another American dramatist: Eugene O’Neill. Whereas Miller’s Willy Loman embalms himself in delusion, never achieving self-actualization, O’Neill’s hardware salesman Theodore “Hickey” Hickman in The Iceman Cometh is a spellbinder: a charismatic confidence man, a magician of language who sees things a little too clearly. Researching the phenomenon of direct selling, the Maysleses encountered an article in the January 8, 1964, Wall Street Journal titled “Is Your Mother In?” The article—a clipping of which, annotated in David’s hand, is among the papers of the Maysles archive at Columbia University’s Butler Library—mentions one “Q. P. Carnevale, who quit medical school ten years ago to sell Bibles door-to-door and who now heads the Boston canvassing force for Golden Books, Inc.”



God establishes the work of our hands: Joseph Fox had offered the Maysles team a worthy subject; focusing on Bible salesmen now gave them a direction. In pursuit of screen-ready “protagonists,” David began his search in earnest, perfecting the pitch that eventually sold Feltman on the quixotic film project, and ultimately finding his Hickey in Paul Brennan, a door-to-door Bible salesman with the soul of an Irish poet.



As lower-middle-class Jews from the predominantly Irish Catholic Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, Albert and David had a finely tuned sense of the lives and idiosyncrasies of Paul Brennan and their other subjects, having grown up alongside such boys, while possessing no great insights into the workings of Christian faith. Salesman, to its credit, doesn’t attempt to penetrate the mysteries of the catechism. The selling of the Bible works best as a metaphor, one that bores deep into a particular paradox built into America’s character. Christianity, a vital force in the creation and development of this country, offers as a basic tenet that the poor come first. Standing in stark relief to that idea is the American ethic of enriching oneself at any cost. We can’t feel good about ourselves if we get rich, yet getting rich is the only metric we have by which to value ourselves. “No man can serve two masters,” wrote Matthew the Evangelist, quoting Jesus of Nazareth. Such is the American tragedy and the American neurosis.