Photograph by Joe Midthun
Al Milgrom
On any given day from the early sixties to the 2010s, University Film Society director Al Milgrom could be spotted furiously marching around Dinkytown or the East Bank, hanging flyers for screenings by Ingmar Bergman, or Michelangelo Antonioni, or Bob Rafelson, or some obscure Iranian director nobody had ever heard of. Any interesting movie made anywhere in the world? Al knew about it.
When I learned Al died of a stroke last week, at 98, my first thought was that he still had to finish his documentary about Russia he’d been working on since the 1950s. In 2015 his film The Dinkytown Uprising was finally released, and last year his documentary Singin’ in the Grain began screening, about a multigenerational polka band from New Prague. He referred to himself as “Minnesota’s oldest emerging filmmaker” (if not the world?), and his finished output took decades to complete.
Al grew up the child of Russian Jewish immigrants in Pine City, the kind of town people in the area might call “resorty,” but only relative to the rest of East Central Minnesota. He started college as a chemistry student, until he enlisted to serve in WWII. He worked in a military photo lab and roamed around the Pacific. After the war he returned to Minnesota to study journalism at the University of Minnesota. Stints working for prominent newspapers around the country followed, and then he landed back at the U, got a Master’s and a gig teaching film. He also worked for a time as the poet John Berryman’s teaching assistant. I once asked Al if Berryman leapt to his death from the Washington Ave bridge to get away from him. Al laughed and said it was possible.
Photograph by Caitlin Abrams
Al Milgrom
You needed a dark sense of humor to work with Al.
I first met him in the early 2000s when I was in my early 20s and he was in his early 80s. Independent film exhibition in Minneapolis was limping along by then, sustained by meagre grants and even more meagre box office proceeds. I was fresh out of college and programming the Oak Street Cinema, down the street from Al’s University Film Society. We were East Bank rivals until financial necessity drove the two organizations to merge. After joining forces, Al and I would spend all day (and sometimes all night) working together in the Film Society’s basement bunker office, producing the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival. All the while, I desperately tried to wrangle Al through the merger and the accompanying move that would bring our offices under the same roof.
Al was a creature of deeply entrenched habit and it wasn’t easy getting him to pack up and accept the change that was coming. The stories I’d heard about his reluctance to embrace change of any sort daunted me. After his previous office had been condemned by the University, it seemed he’d broken in with a crowbar so he could keep working in his familiar workspace. The image relayed to me was of Al, among packed-up boxes, hunched over his old desk, hammering out brochure copy on his manual typewriter.
During the merger, Al had promised for weeks to pack up his workspace in preparation for the move, and it was my job to help him sort the accumulation of a lifetime of magazines and notepapers and napkins and god knows what else that filled his space. Just when I thought I was making headway, I found Al in the parking lot, crouched inside a dumpster. His shouts echoed around the metal bin as he tossed papers and boxes back out onto the sidewalk at my feet. Clambering out with piles of trash in his arms, he shouted at me that this stuff was important, and he just needed more time to sort through it all.
Al’s was a holy profession, an obsession that transcended reason and intellect and, sometimes, sanity. There was a rumor that one of his wives had cited the Film Society as the other party in their divorce. Even if it’s apocryphal, it feels true. Another story went that he once stranded his young kids on the side of the freeway for hours, instructing them to pick dandelions while he drove around town stapling Film Society flyers to telephone poles. For weeks at a time he’d only eat Arby’s roast beef sandwiches that he’d bought on sale and packed into the freezer of the office fridge. Any other lunch would have taken too much time away from work.
The iconoclast in Milgrom was irresistible, full of stories about the time a wasted Jean-Luc Godard crashed on his couch or how Les Blank fried him bacon. Word had it that he’d romanced (tried to romance?) Liv Ullman when she was in town shooting Jan Troell’s epic classics The Emigrants and The New Land. Well into his 80s, Al was hobnobbing with the rich and famous at far-flung film festivals and sleeping on floors to afford it.
And then there was the driving. He terrorized the streets of Minneapolis with a succession of rusted-out station wagons, unwilling to observe the most routine traffic laws. When fancy film visitors came to town—Josef von Sternberg, Pauline Kael, and Roberto Rosellini among them—Al insisted on doing the chauffeuring, over our repeated protests. I once witnessed his scarred yellow Volvo careen into a stop sign while legendary Canadian documentarian Allan King sat in the passenger seat, gripping the armrest, his face gone white.
I’m told that Al was still driving in the weeks before he died.
The petty tyrant in him was grumpy and infuriating. He observed no boundaries, calling up sponsors and muckety-mucks in the middle of the night to holler at them about some treatment that he considered unfair. As a young person with a rebellious streak, this impressed me as badass, until we started losing major sponsors and, along with them, our revenue streams. I soon began to see that Al experienced most human interaction as persecution, and his duty in life was to tilt the scales back in his favor.
To love Al—and I very much did—was to acknowledge that he inhabited the best and the worst of himself, that he lived extremely even as he staggered through a nearly identical daily routine for decades on end. Al couldn’t see the forest for the trees because the trees were on fire, and he alone could put them out, armed with only an expired extinguisher and a straggly line of poorly paid young people, like me, holding empty water buckets.
Al dedicated his life to showing and making movies in order to generate greater empathy and understanding in the world. And, he was an impossible SOB. When you called him on this contradiction, as I often did, he’d wink and flash me a perfectly crooked, crumpled smile. “Who, me?”
At 90, Al was at the Berlin Film Festival when he fell and broke his neck, and in the aftermath he got pneumonia. Even in the hospital he was reaching for a phone to call a guy about a thing.
Al seemed indestructible, and well into his tenth decade, he still burned with the energy of youth—that feeling that the best is yet to come. To spend time with Al was to feel like every big thing lay just over the next hill, and he’d stop at nothing to get there. He dragged the rest of us along with him, never pausing to rest or regain his senses. Now that he’s made it over, I hope he finds what he was looking for. Or at least somebody to holler at in the meantime.
Emily Condon worked with Al Milgrom in various capacities from 2001-2006. After her tenure at Oak Street Cinema, she spent a decade managing This American Life and oversaw the debut of Serial.
