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Life & Times Transcript

10/31/06

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Their mission is to guard the border against illegal immigrants, but is it having an unintended effect?

Jack Vessey>> We've been affected for the last few years on what we call a labor shortage. It's made it difficult to find harvest crews and people to harvest our crops.

Val Zavala>> And then, hers was the voice we sang along with, but we never saw her. Meet Marni Nixon face to face.

These stories and more next on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Val Zavala>> There are now six thousand National Guard troops along the United States-Mexico border, but these are National Guard as opposed to United States Border Patrol and they don't have the same powers that federal agents do. In fact, the National Guard is not even allowed to have physical contact with illegal immigrants. So what are they doing? Jeffrey Kaye headed to the border to find out.

Jeffrey Kaye>> With American soldiers at their posts in a bone-dry desert, this looks like a scene from Iraq or Afghanistan. But the troops are on duty in Arizona, just a stone's throw from the United States-Mexico border. They're among six thousand National Guard personnel assigned to Operation Jump Start, the Bush administration's high-profile troop deployment to help stem the tide of illegal immigration from Mexico.

>> The mission here is to secure the border.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Nine hundred National Guard soldiers and airmen are assigned to the Yuma sector of the Border Patrol. Its one hundred eighteen mile long stretch has been a major crossing area for illegal migrants. Just last year in the border town of San Luis, Arizona, Border Patrol surveillance cameras recorded people surging across the border illegally and overwhelming agents.

[Film Clip]

Jeffrey Kaye>> The Border Patrol still catches an average of about eighty migrants a day in this sector. These five men were apprehended recently by a single sharp-eyed Border Patrol agent who noticed their footprints just as the sun was setting.

>> "I was about, oh, maybe a hundred seventy-five yards from them."

Jeffrey Kaye>> But arrests of illegal immigrants have dropped significantly since the National Guard arrived this summer. The Border Patrol's Yuma sector chief, Ron Colburn, believes that's one indication that fewer migrants are trying to cross.

Ron Colburn>> We already have tangible and measurable results. Now we're going into the fourth month straight where we've seen about a seventy-five percent decline of illegal activity in the Yuma border area. I'm very pleased. I can now say that that is at least a measurable piece of intelligence.

Jeffrey Kaye>> The National Guard personnel have been deployed to support the Border Patrol. The soldiers' duties include repairing and maintaining Border Patrol trucks and operating a string of twenty-five fixed surveillance cameras along the international boundary.

On the border itself, Guard members are building higher and longer fences and constructing roads. Their round the clock observation posts are meant to serve as a visible deterrent to those seeking to cross the border illegally.

Kyle Lyons>> When they look over and see us, that should be our whole job right there, for us to be here.

Jeffrey Kaye>> The M-16s the soldiers carry are for self-defense in case troops encounter drug runners or bandits. In both the United States and Mexico, critics of Operation Jump Start have complained that the use of the National Guard to combat illegal immigration represents a militarization of the border. Guardsmen now say they have clear instructions on how to deal with any migrants they encounter.

Sergeant Jerry Hatfield>> If they come in and they walk over there, they're going north, right beside our position.

Jeffrey Kaye>> You can't walk over there and put the cuffs on a guy?

Sergeant Jerry Hatfield>> Nope.

>> Can't touch them. We're not law enforcement here, sir.

Jeffrey Kaye>> The deployment of the National Guard is just the latest in what's been a steady increase in security along America's southern border. For twelve years, in addition to fence construction, the United States has added Border Patrol agents, beefed up aerial surveillance, installed sophisticated cameras and sensors, and constructed more border fortifications like this project meant to stop cars from crossing off-road. It's also purchased portable watchtowers called Sky Boxes bristling with surveillance gear.

Cesar Diaz>> They know we're here and they still figure they're going to sneak past by us, but they still get caught.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Residents of San Luis, a town of twenty-five thousand, say the increased border vigilance has brought tangible changes. For one thing, there's been a dip in crimes associated with illegal migrants.

Heriberto Bejarano>> We've seen a decrease in calls for service in our residential areas closer to the border.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Heriberto Bejarano is San Luis's chief of police.

Heriberto Bejarano>> Stolen vehicles, stolen bikes, small crimes that, again, in their efforts to go undetected by Border Patrol, they will change their clothing and move on. They will steal vehicles and try to get further north.

Jeffrey Kaye>> But some crimes, according to law enforcement, have become more serious as a direct result of stepped-up border enforcement. A San Luis police detective took us to a home that he had discovered was used as a stash house by gangs smuggling migrants into the United States.

>> They'll stay here for a couple of days until transportation is provided. They'll try to move them out at night.

Jeffrey Kaye>> The detective, who asked not to be identified because he works under cover, says smugglers are becoming more violent towards law enforcement and seeking higher payments from their human cargo.

>> Usually, they are charging between a thousand per person and each person makes up their own price range, where they want to go, how they want to get there and everything.

Jeffrey Kaye>> So it starts at a thousand and goes up to what?

>> Goes up -- it could be a whole family up in the high thousands. It's high.

Jeffrey Kaye>> The effects of stepped-up border enforcement are also being seen in agriculture, an industry which relies heavily on a large illegal workforce.

Jack Vessey>> We've been affected for the last few years on what we call a labor shortage. It's been difficult to find harvest crews or people to harvest our crop.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Jack Vessey farms ten thousand acres just five miles from the Mexican border in California's Imperial County. Some of his workforce used to make daily commutes, legal and possibly illegal, back and forth across the border. They no longer make the trip, he says, because they're scared of the National Guard.

Jack Vessey>> You've got to realize that some people that heard this thing that there's going to guys with machines guns sitting on the border waiting to shoot them. That's what some people feel about when they cross the border and they don't like doing it.

Jeffrey Kaye>> Even as some hired hands prepare his fields to plant to winter vegetables, Vessey fears Operation Jump Start will cause a more severe labor shortage. He says he pays the California minimum wage, at least $8.50 an hour, and can't afford to raise payments to attract more workers.

If greater border vigilance has deterred some would-be migrants, others like these young men vow to keep trying to cross. This park in San Luis, Colorado directly across the border from San Luis, Arizona is a gathering point for people planning to make the journey. The would-be migrants from deeper in Mexico know little about Operation Jump Start, but like Martin Perez, a twenty-five year old father of two, they say they're willing to risk everything to get into the United States.

Martin Perez>> I'll get to the United States dead before I come back here because here it's the worst. Do you understand me? We can't earn enough to eat. That's why we're here. We're trying to get something that's better.

[Film Clip]

Jeffrey Kaye>> There's also a popular grassroots dimension to the politics of border policing. Local citizen groups such as Yuma Patriots which have maintained their own border patrols for the last fifteen months say that vigilance is needed not only to stop illegal immigration, but to make sure the government gets the job done.

Flash Sharrar>> We have put our lives on the line to protect this border and it's about time they got here. I think they're about ten years too late. We're going to keep an eye on them and make sure they do their job.

Jeffrey Kaye>> That job is supposed to keep the troops on the border for the next two years as newly-hired Border Patrol agents move in to replace them. I'm Jeffrey Kaye for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, plus transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org, scroll down the page and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> She's known as an intellectual, a novelist, a philosopher. She is Ayn Rand. Yes, that's the preferred pronunciation. But despite her potent intellect, she couldn't resist the tug the Hollywood. As you know, her famous novel, "The Fountainhead", became a classic Gary Cooper movie. Now there's an exhibit of Rand's Hollywood years from movie extra to screenwriter. Vicki Curry talked with Michael Berliner, the former director of the Ayn Rand Institute.

Vicki Curry>> Novelist and philosopher, Ayn Rand, was one of the most influential and controversial thinkers of the twentieth century. It was hard to imagine that a woman of that stature spent the first years of her career as a starry-eyed girl in Hollywood.

Michael Berliner>> She had sixteen really important years out there in Hollywood from 1926 to 1934 and went to New York and then again from 1943 to 1951. She was very much involved in the film industry. But what people don't know is that was her goal from the very beginning. This was no whim, coming to California, to Los Angeles in 1926. She had in her mind early on to become a screenwriter and that was going to be a stepping stone to a career as a novelist.

Vicki Curry>> Rand fell in love with movies during her childhood in Russia.

Michael Berliner>> Films first came to what was then Petrograd in I think about 1913 and she was eight years old. She loved films. From the time she was a teenager, she was a real film-goer. She kept a diary of over four hundred films that she'd seen from 1922 to about 1929, grading each of the films and underlining her favorite actors and her favorite directors.

Vicki Curry>> She graduated from Leningrad State University and then enrolled in the State Film Institute. She took classes in cinematography and acting and published her first writing.

Michael Berliner>> It's a booklet that she wrote called "Hollywood: American Movie City". We think that the information for the book was taken mainly from film magazines that her relatives in Chicago were sending her because there are chapters about producers and chapters about actors and even a chapter about animals in films.

Vicki Curry>> But what she really wanted to do was write about her own ideas.

Michael Berliner>> All her life, she wanted to be a fiction writer and write her kind of fiction that she knew. If she wrote the sorts of things that she wanted to write while she was living in Russia, she said "I'd be dead in a year". So she got out on the pretext that she was going to learn film writing here and go back and help the Soviet film industry.

Vicki Curry>> Rand made her way to America in 1926 to visit relatives in Chicago, but six months later, she boarded a train and headed straight to Hollywood.

Michael Berliner>> She had a letter of introduction to the DeMille Studios from a friend of her relatives. They owned a movie theater. So she comes to Hollywood with her letter of introduction. Her first full day in Hollywood, she takes the trolley over to Culver City to the DeMille Studios, turns it in and figured, well, she's done her duty and that's it. They told her, in effect, don't call us, we'll call you.

She walks out of the front door of the DeMille Studios and there is Cecil B. DeMille sitting in his car. Apparently, he was on his lunch break. She was staring at him because she knew him and she was mesmerized by him. This is one of her favorite directors.

He says, "What are you looking at?" She says, "Well, I've just come from Russia. I'm very happy to see you. You're my favorite director." He says, "Get in." She gets in the car and he drives her to the back lot where they were shooting "King of Kings" and he gave her a job as an extra. Then when that finished shooting, he gave her a job as a junior screenwriter.

Vicki Curry>> When DeMille Studios shut down in 1928, Rand took any job she could get in Hollywood including a three-year stint in the wardrobe department at RKO. But those jobs were just a way to pay the bills until she could make a living as a writer.

Michael Berliner>> Her friend had a friend who worked for the Myron Selznick Agency and which was the top agency at the time. He took a look at a couple of her screen ideas and sold one of them to Universal in 1932, so that was when she was able to quit working full-time and devote her time to writing.

Vicki Curry>> Rand finished her first novel, "We the Living", and her first play. "Woman on Trial" was produced at the Hollywood Playhouse in 1934 and was such a success that it moved to Broadway and Rand followed, figuring New York was the best place to find a publisher for her novel. She was right. "We the Living" was published in 1936 and Rand immediately began work on her next novel, "The Fountainhead".

Michael Berliner>> She finished "The Fountainhead" in late 1942 and, shortly after it was published, Warner Bros. bought the rights to it. So she came back to Hollywood to write the adaptation. She worked on that for a short time and then, because of the war, they had to postpone it.

Then she went to work for Hal Wallis writing screenplays for him. She wrote "Love Letters" with Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotton. Right after that, she quit working for Wallis and spent all of her time working on "Atlas Shrugged". At the time she was working on "Atlas Shrugged", she was living in the San Fernando Valley in a house designed by Richard Neutra for Josef von Sternberg. She wrote almost half of the book, "Atlas Shrugged", while she was living over there.

Vicki Curry>> It was during this time in Hollywood that Rand became increasingly active in politics. She testified as a "friendly witness" before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

Michael Berliner>> She was involved with the Motion Picture Alliance which was an anti-totalitarian group that was concerned primarily with the spread of communism in Hollywood. Her concern were movies that subtly brought in collectiveness or communist ideas. She wrote a pamphlet while she was there called "Screen Guide for Americans". Her theme is the indirect means by which ideas are conveyed in films. For example, smearing businessmen, smearing individualism.

Vicki Curry>> She was able to counteract these movies when the film version of "The Fountainhead" was finally released in 1948.

Michael Berliner>> She saw films as a very dramatic and effective way to convey her ideas. That's why what she did in Hollywood was part and parcel of her career goal all her life. So her goal was Hollywood only as a means to the further end. Then after she got into even "The Fountainhead", she began to realize the importance of technical, more academic, philosophy.

Vicki Curry>> Rand moved back to New York in 1951 to finish her final novel. The groundbreaking "Atlas Shrugged" was published in 1957.

Michael Berliner>> She really became a philosopher at that point and that was her reason for moving away from films and moving away from fiction writing too.

Vicki Curry>> And she had moved away from Hollywood for the last time. But that starry-eyed girl from communist Russia had lived her American dream of writing for the movies and it was her work here that paved the way for Ayn Rand to share her dreams and ideas with the rest of the world.

Val Zavala>> The Ayn Rand Exhibit is at the Frances Howard Goldwyn Library in Hollywood through February 28. For details, go to their website at aynrand.org.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

Life and Times
4401 Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles, California 90027

You can also call our viewer comment line (323) 953-5555) or contact us the fast way by e-mail at kcet.org.

Val Zavala>> She's been a vital part of some of the most memorable scenes from Hollywood's greatest movies: "West Side Story", "My Fair Lady", "The King and I". Yet, if you met her, you might not recognize her.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> There is an invisible co-star in this famous scene.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> In this one as well.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> And in this one.

[Film Clip]

Marni Nixon>> My family was very musical, so we needed something to pay for our lessons all the time. So we started singing together.

Val Zavala>> Marni Nixon. She's the face we don't know and the voice we all love. For years, she was Hollywood's premier female dubber.

Marni Nixon>> I was in "The Sound of Music". I player Sister Sophia in the film.

Val Zavala>> Right. That's actually you and not just your voice, right?

Marni Nixon>> Right.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> But most of the time, it was her voice that brought these scenes to life.

Marni Nixon>> "And you hear me singing? That's me with the curtain, you see."

Val Zavala>> We caught up with Marni Nixon as she was rehearsing for her one-woman show.

Marni Nixon>> "You see the Sharks come out and then you see Rita Moreno and I'm singing for Rita Moreno too at this point, but nobody ever knew the difference. Here comes Simon Oakland. Now you hear me on the top and on the lower part of the screen, you'll hear Rita."

Val Zavala>> Her stage play also incorporates clips from now classic movies.

Marni Nixon>> "Here comes the start. You hear that? That was Rita, but that's me. There we are. That's me with the hair spray." You have to color your voice. You have to do a lot of imagining.

Val Zavala>> And when you dub, you're actually watching them on the screen? Is that correct?

Marni Nixon>> Well, no. You're working with the actors ahead of time. Oh, yes, you have to be in touch with them. I mean, in "The King and I", we worked one week per song before we even recorded those songs. Then she had to mouth those, of course, when each song was finished. Then she had to record it and then she had to mouth to that track when she filmed it.

Val Zavala>> Oh, so the track precedes the filming?

Marni Nixon>> Well, that's the way it should be. I won't say that every one of those jobs was -- I mean, we don't have enough time to tell you. Besides, I want people to read my book (laughter) and all of that is described in the book.

Val Zavala>> Her book is called "I Could Have Sung All Night", which is also the name of her one-woman show.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Marni grew up in Altadena. She was a teenager working as a messenger at one of Hollywood's big studios when her first opportunity came along.

Marni Nixon>> I sang for Margaret O'Brien in "The Secret Garden", this child star. The composer of the score saw me and he said, "Hey, Nixon, if you think you're so smart, can you sing in Hindu?" I said, "Of course."

[Film Clip]

Marni Nixon>> He said, "Well, here's this child star. Here's her speaking voice. Let's see if you can sing it like you think she would sing it." So I did, and that was kind of like the first inkling of doing any kind of dubbing like that.

Val Zavala>> She went on from there. She even dubbed the high notes for Marilyn Monroe in "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes".

[Film Clip]

Marni Nixon>> Yes, that was me.

Val Zavala>> Just that one part?

Marni Nixon>> Yes.

Val Zavala>> Because she couldn't reach those notes?

Marni Nixon>> The rest was her. They wanted to dub her out, you know. They wanted to have a whole different voice for her. They didn't like her voice.

Val Zavala>> Well, her voice is not classic.

Marni Nixon>> It's charming. I think it goes with her a lot, so I was glad to be a part of it (laughter).

Val Zavala>> Now how do you deal with stars who are very accomplished or they might feel insulted when their voice is dubbed and changed? How did you deal with that?

Marni Nixon>> Well, actually, by the time I get on the scene, they have to accept that I'm there and they have to be nice to me. Otherwise, they don't get a good job out of me (laughter). So I don't have to deal with the temperaments, except that it's easier if they really know that they're going to be dubbed.

Val Zavala>> Marni's background was in opera and classical music. She performed on stage with Liberace, Victor Borge and Leonard Bernstein, but she never had any ambitions to become a movie star herself.

Marni Nixon>> I think that's why I did the dubbing and it didn't seem like such a put-down that my face wasn't on camera because I thought my career was something else, you know. This was just something I did, a lark, and being a part of this wonderful music.

Val Zavala>> In fact, there were times when their anonymity was an asset.

Announcer>> "What is your name, please?"

>> "My name is Marni Nixon."

>> "My name is Marni Nixon."

>> "My name is Marni Nixon."

Announcer>> "I am what is known in Hollywood as a dubber, or a ghost. I do the actual singing while the star mouths the words before the camera. Will the real Marni Nixon please stand up?"

Val Zavala>> Today, the real Marni Nixon lives in New York. Her schedule would exhaust someone half her age. She travels the country with her one-woman show, appears regularly in Broadway productions and teaches master classes to aspiring singers.

Marni Nixon>> I'll always be busy at it. My trick is to really be able -- this is very hard for me -- to really be able to relax. I don't need the money. I'm going to stay alive if I don't work an inch. I have my children. You know, I can just pick and choose various things that I want to do, but get out of my way if I want to do them because I want to do them (laughter).

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Marni Nixon has written her autobiography. It's called "I Could Have Sung All Night". And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

Sponsored in part by:


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