The Historical and Contemporary Situation of the Highway Safety Foundation Films

© M. Tedholm
Special thanks to Bret Wood and Ralph Coon

ABSTRACT:

The subject of this paper is the perception of the verité highway safety films of the 1960s, and how this perception has changed over the last 40 years. Specifically, I will focus on the verité films of the Highway Safety Foundation, partly because they pioneered the genre and partly because the institutional history surrounding HSF is so interesting. Specifically, I intend to examine how these films were perceived in the 1960’s, when they were contemporary and genuine educational objects shown in many American classrooms, and how they are perceived and viewed today, often in the framework of ironic consumption or alternative media, and the implications of both situations. Beginning with a historical overview of the institution which put out these films, I will continue with an examination and analysis of this genre’s unique aspects, before examining how the films were perceived both in the 1960s and today, with an emphasis on the structuring absence of these films from contemporaneous educational materials, and their resurgence in alternative media.

I. The Highway Safety Foundation: A Brief Orienting Historical Overview1

The Highway Safety foundation was incorporated by Dick Wayman, in Mansfield, Ohio, in the late 1950s. It aimed to produce safer drivers by showing "verité" footage of fatal automobile accidents; the films were produced & distributed in partnership with various Ohio state police organizations. The HSF films are notable not just for the gore they inflicted on mainstream American youth, nor for the "purple prose" of their unrelenting and unsympathetic narrators, but for the interesting contrast these films made with the automobile culture of the 1950s, such as saccharine pop songs that wept over the deaths of fictional teens in terrible car accidents, such as "Teen Angel."2

After a close friend died in an automobile accident, Dick Wayman used his earnings as an accountant at Ernst & Young to buy portable photography equipment. Wayman had entertained aspirations of being a policeman but these were thwarted by a domineering mother who forced him into an accounting career. Wayman unofficially prepared slide shows of his macabre hobby (for insurance & police training purposes) until one officer suggested that he make films rather than still photographs.

The first film, Signal 30, was released in 1959. Over the next 13 years, HSF made several "verité" gore films, and later expanded into higher-budget films on such topics as child molestation, shoplifting, and anonymous sex in public bathrooms. The bigger-budget films, incorporating more re-enactments, were generally less successful than the highway gore films. The Foundation never operated with the kind of budget that would have allowed them to use sophisticated techniques or professional actors, so these films were too ambitious for their own good.

The Highway Safety Foundation quickly declined or imploded around 1973 after a disastrous telethon involving Sammy Davis, Jr. failed to result in manifestation of most of the pledges. This financial disaster resulted in an audit by the Ohio attorney general. While he failed to turn up any prosecutable wrongdoing, many allegations arose, not the least of which probably involved how a successful accountant at Ernst & Young could helm an organization that kept records so poorly. As more rumors surfaced, so did allegations that Dick Wayman had been involved in an affair with Phyllis Vaughn, another amateur photographer turned HSF filmmaker turned alcoholic; it was his break up with her that sent her battle with alcoholism over the edge and ultimately led to her death of alcohol-related causes. Others alleged that HSF had been making pornographic films on the side (false; this rumor probably arose as a result of the bathroom footage, whose security may have been compromised). Wayman left Ohio and largely disappeared from any sort of public record. Some say that he left for California and became Sammy Davis, Jr’s business manager.

II. Form: Unique Features of HSF’s Films

HSF’s films are remembered primarily for their unrelenting verité footage; the use of this footage coincided with the rise of verité documentary film as a more mainstream film phenomenon. Mikita Brottman writes in her essay on Signal 30 in Car Crash Culture that despite the narrator’s disclaimer implying that the film was a real product of cinema verité,

[Signal 30] is [...] carefully shot and edited to create a deliberate and special effect. Camera movements are sometimes loose and jerky, in the best traditions of cinema verité, and sometimes they are much smoother, particularly when the camera glides easily over piles of twisted mteal, panning for mangled body parts [...] Long shots lingering over wrecked vehicles are occasionally juxtaposed with stills of dead bodies [...] Poor film quality is offered as an index of "truth."3

However, there are other aesthetic markers of HSF’s films. For instance, several have an interesting narrative structure. Wheels of Tragedy is constructed such that the viewer, addressed as "you," is given a place within the film as a character: The "you" in Wheels of Tragedy generally meant to take on the role of a rookie traffic patrolman, just beginning to be exposed to the horrors of the highways, although there is slippage in the employment of the direct address. Sometimes "you" is the rookie patrolman, sometimes it is the mentor, and occasionally it is the accident fatality. In its use of direct address, the film employs a crude version of proto-interactivity.

All of HSF’s films are remembered for the grim, unsympathetic narration that accompanied the horrific visuals. The idiom of these films is one of "...gore and purple-prose narration."4 The narrator of the films often began with a statement about the films, reassuring the audience of their authenticity. Signal 30’s narrator actually tells us, "These are not real actors. Most of them only ever received top billing on a tombstone." Brottman notes "At its most excessive, the narrative rhetoric sounds almost Elizabethan in its melodramatic archaisms: ‘Mark well these few words’ [...]` This heightened, literary discourse seems to conflict with the cinema verité style and promises of urgent and spontaneous police action."5 Brottman mentions the contrast between this rhetorical excess and occasional "wryly sardonic" remarks from the narrator (e.g., regarding a driver who had driven headfirst into an exit sign: "It was his exit, too.") and offers an explanation for how the two styles reconcile.6 "Perhaps the deliberate bad taste of these ironic asides is a way of helping the audience deal with the horrors of death [...]"7

In the Weltanschauung of the Highway Safety Foundation, accidents happen because people make careless mistakes.

Consider the semantic distinction between a car ‘accident’ and a car ‘crash,’ words used interchangeably in Signal 30. A crash is not necessarily inevitable, and usually occurs as a result of human or mechanical error. An ‘accident,’ on the other hand, denies all responsibility, separating the car from the actions of the driver involved, suggesting an implicit fatalism — an unlucky conflation of circumstances that is nobody’s fault and could not have been avoided.8

III. The Perception of HSF Films in the 1960s and Today

The Highway Safety foundation, perhaps unintentionally, became part of the American consciousness in the late 1950’s. The Highway Safety Foundation‘s films were shown to millions of American high school students in the 1960s. Unlike many of the other educational films of that time, the gory films like those made by the HSF obtained a mythic status. For this project, I hope to explore to some extent the place occupied by these films in two time periods: The 1960s, when they were frequently used in school classrooms, and the present day (ca. 1995-2007), when the films appeared in several "alternative" forms of cultural media, such as a "zine" (a homemade and self-published special-interest magazine) and an independently produced archival documentary (Bret Wood’s Hell’s Highway [2003]), as well as many local watching clubs.9 The films have also been reproduced as collections for at-home viewing. "[T]hese films are now marketed in compilation or out-take form, and advertised as ‘Real-Life Traffic Splatter,’ ‘Mechanized Death!’ or ‘Highway Safety Films — Two Hours of Blood and Bone-Crunching Horror!’"10

During their heyday, the films received surprisingly little attention in the mainstream trade journals. The genre is only indirectly alluded to in a 1964 Educational Screen review of another driving safety film, Broken Glass: "At the same time, the audience may have a very strong feeling of involvement as the "passengers" are thrown, broken, or crumpled in horrible ways. Yet this film does not depend heavily on the shock technique that has been used in some other films that deal with automobile safety."11. This structuring absence is significant, for one can deduce much from their absence, although these deductions in turn raise more questions. Why were the films not mentioned? How did the films become so ubiquitous without the aid of traditional advertising techniques?

Materials were reviewed in Educational Screen when the filmmakers sent them in for review. Were the films sent in for review and ignored or rejected, or did the HSF worry about the negative review they might receive. Perhaps sales were sufficient enough so that the exposure an Educational Screen review might bring was unnecessary. Curiously, not one of the HSF’s films appears as an entry in the "New Materials" section of Educational Screen from 1959-1962 and 1964-1967 inclusive; the volume for the year 1963 was unavailable in time for this paper. An email from Bret Wood postulates that "I was never able to find any acknowledgment of the Highway Safety Films in any kind of mainstream educational material [...] I tend to think they were being snubbed because of the unsavory content of the films -- but there's no way to prove that."12

While contemporary student audience reaction is difficult to report upon, Bret Wood noted in an interview that according to a letter he had received from a 1960s student who had had to watch the films in class, "[d]uring one [screening in an Ohio classroom], a girl in the class recognized her aunt in one of the films, and ran from the room. But that was an isolated incident, and nothing really became of it."13 Brottman also alludes to "Those who remember being forced to watch such films as teenagers often confess to being terrified even to look at another automobile, to say nothing of actually getting into one. As a result, ‘atrocity exhibitions’ like Signal 30 stopped being shown in schools in the early 1970s, and were soon replaced by less traumatizing material. "14

One can also look at a 1971 Los Angeles Times news article for an idea as to how these films were perceived and how that perception has begun to change. In the article, an unnamed judge is quoted as saying, "Films like this have a devastating impact on the people who see them [...] I don’t know how long that really lasts, but we like to think it has some residual benefit, some cautionary effect on their driving habits."15 Earl Deems, one of the few surviving HSF crewmembers as of his 1991 interview for The Last Prom, stated that "few if any complained of his macabre teaching tactics. ‘Most people I heard from told me, ‘Way to Go.’"16

Despite the film’s lack of inclusion in mainstream educational journals or materials, the films made their way into many American driver’s education curricula. Despite their remarkable prominence, their educational value is negligible. Unlike the more traditional (and forgettable) driver’s education films of the time, the HSF films offered no strategies or demonstrations of safe driving; they showed only the worst consequences of unsafe driving. Occasionally, the films implicitly suggest that driving while tired is unsafe, or that one should maintain one’s vehicle properly: The officers give small "autopsies" of each accident, and judgmentally discuss the contributing factors: "If only he had stopped for coffee. If only he had worn a safety belt."

Traditional educational materials emphasized the preventive measure (such as the safety belt, or when to tell if one is too tired to drive), but HSF’s films only mention the preventive measures as an afterthought, when they mention them at all. It is strange that educational materials on such an important subject would rely so heavily on implication, rather than explicitly mentioning the devices and strategies that save lives. The HSF sought to provide an alternative to the traditional drivers education films of the time, which were often dry, cornily humorous, or very forgettable. Thus, it was the intent of the HSF to use a different rhetorical strategy than the mainstream driver’s education film in order to shock students into safer driving habits. The ipso facto logic of the films seems to defeat them. This technique would not correlate in another educational setting; it would not make much sense from a teaching standpoint to begin educational science films with footage of experiments done incorrectly, or of failed math tests showing only the incorrect answers. Assuming that the objective of educational materials is to instill or reinforce concepts, it is debatable whether the HSF films added anything to the curriculum. Certainly they reinforced the concept that automobiles can be deadly, but this seemed to be a reality that many Americans lived with: even Wheels of Tragedy notes that at the time the film was made (1963) over 40,000 Americans died each year in automobile accidents. As Ken Smith explains in Mental Hygiene, "...the roads really were deadly in the heyday of highway safety films[ ...] If you hit something, you would probably die, for there were no air bags, shoulder belts, and very, very few seat belts in cars.""17 The prominence of the issue of automobile safety, as well as the contemporaneous push for safer cars seemed to undermine or make redundant both the rhetorical and educational work of these films.18 Ken Smith goes on to state the obvious: "What the kids really needed, of course, was safer cars."19 Brottman notes:

It is important to understand that most crash injuries are caused not by the first collision (between the car and an external object), nor by the scond collision ( between the victim’s body and the interior of the vehicle), but by the third collision: between the internal organs and the walls of the body — injuries that often can be reduced by the use of a safety belt.20

The question that remains, then, is one related to rhetoric: how can one measure the efficacy of a message that simply reinforces well-known facts? It is perhaps for these reasons that the films were removed from classroom use. After years of scarring America’s youth, the films became battered, torn, and less effective in the classroom. Bret Wood explained some reasons for their fall into obsolescence: "The haircuts and car styles were clearly from the 1960s, the acting style was bad, the narration was heavy-handed, and this made the students take them less seriously in the classroom. As films meant to convey a frightening educational message, the films were no longer effective."21

But what happened after the films ceased to be effective? In 1991, Ralph Coon wrote and published the first issue of The Last Prom, a zine dedicated to "eclectic esoterica." The first issue focused on Drivers’ Educational Films. The patched-together, homemade "feel" of the zine, resplendent with typos and spelling errors, reflects the verité aesthetic of the films themselves. Zines themselves frequently work on a salvage / garbage aesthetic, recycling images from other sources. The Last Prom aims to both historicize and discuss the films, relying heavily on primary sources such as an interview with HSF filmmaker Earle Deems. Coons writes, "To my knowledge, there’s precious few printed words about [The Last Prom, a non-HSF driving "scare" film], let alone this genre of film, until now. [...]I created The Last Prom to fuel my desire to discover the undiscovered. There’s [sic] so many topics the ‘popular media’ doesn’t invest time in because the mentally bankrupt masses don’t care to learn about them."22 It is also interesting to note that the confrontational tone of this prose seems in some ways to mirror the judgmental tone of the narratives in the HSF films themselves.

Perhaps therein lies the appeal of these films in today’s alternative culture. These films snubbed for their gory content, represent some of the few objects in American culture and history that have remained undocumented and unanalyzed. By dint of their marginalization, the films are elevated to a different, privileged status as more interesting cultural objects. Simply because they have not been analyzed or documented, the films are not only deserving of these things, but the analysis or documentation would reveal something more substantial and interesting than mass culture. By incorporating these objects into the contemporary cultural machine, the people who work with them hope to achieve an equalizing effect. The inclusion of these objects in alternative media both preserves their status as privileged "outsider" objects, and allows them to achieve the documentation and analysis that give them their rightful place as historical and cultural objects. As Brunner writes in "Ersatz Truths,"

There is both pleasure and scandal in viewing these [ephemeral] films [of Prelinger’s collection]. The pleasure lies, in large part, in being placed as late-coming viewers who are in the powerful and superior position of looking over, around, through, and beyond these films. The only subject position never inhabited by the present-day viewer is that of the gullible audience-member who would take them at face value.23

Other appearances of these films in popular culture include a 2002 Onion article entitled "Driver’s Ed Class Finally Gets to See Legendary Film," which references Wheels of Tragedy and facetiously discusses the class’ viewing of the film as sort of a rite of passage. The subversion of the extremely serious subject matter into a source of dark humor represents a major shift not just in the way the films were perceived, but perhaps in the national consciousness as well. Further, its inclusion in The Onion indicates 1. That the layperson would be familiar enough with the genre, or even the specific film, to get the joke and 2. That the experience of watching the film had changed so significantly from the time of release that students look forward to watching it. Maybe they did in the 1960s as well, but there survives no black-humor documentation of such events.

The reinterpretation of these films as objects of humor begs examination. In Passwords, one of Baudrillard’s last works, he discusses obscenity and the ironic detachment contemporary viewers experience from it.

"If everything has to be said, then everything will be... But objective truth is obscene. The fact remains that when we are told all the details of Bill Clinton’s sexual activities, the obscenity is so laughable that we wonder whether there isn’t an ironic dimension to it. This ironic turnabout might perhaps be the last avatar of seduction in a world in perdition, in total obscenity; all the same, deep down, we cannot quite manage to believe this. Obscenity — that is to say, the total visibility of things — is unbearable to the point where we have to apply an ironic strategy to survive. Otherwise this particular transparency would be totally lethal."24

Perhaps most significantly, the films of the Highway Safety Foundation, as well as the scandalous story of the organization itself, have been incorporated into a contemporary documentary which utilizes archival footage from the films themselves, as well as archived outtakes deemed too ghastly even for these films. Filmmaker Bret Wood (Director of Hell’s Highway) explained his reasons for making a film about these films: "For some -- myself included -- the ‘death on the highway’ films were thought to be urban legends. I had heard of them as a teenager but never saw one in driver's ed. I had heard of the films from my brother, and my father, but assumed that they were mistaken -- that the accident scenes were fake and not real."25 In another interview, Wood added: "In high school, I learned about Signal 30 and Highways of Agony from older students who were taking driver's ed. The year I took driver education, the school stopped showing the shock-value films and replaced them with dull instructional films. This, of course, only fueled my curiosity, and I began to wonder if these films actually existed, or if I was being duped by my fellow students -- or if they were being duped by reenactments and ketchup-covered actors"26

Perhaps this could explain the resurgent interest in these films. A generation that has grown up watching the Saw and Hostel movies may on some level want to watch what is supposed to be the "real thing." Had an entire generation indeed been "duped by reenactments and ketchup-covered actors?" Could horror film fans endure the "real thing"?

Mikita Brottman, citing J.G. Ballard’s Crash, mentions that "The photographic image of the fatal accident is both the testament made by the dead to the living and a sacred talisman to ward off the ghosts that we fear may survive when both body and mind have disintegrated."27

Further, the past few decades have brought sanitized images of death and destruction into the living rooms of America. The images of spectacular destruction only imply corporeal damage, and the genuine Thing is rarely shown in mainstream or even alternative media. The actual physicality of death itself has become a mystery to many people. Perhaps, for many, these films offered an insight into what death looks like, and thus reduced fear or mystery about it. Mikita Brottman explains: "Another reason [for the films’ contemporary popularity] could be because the film actually reduces the mystery and superstition surrounding the dying process, thereby — in total contrast to the film’s explicit intentions — actually helping to prepare us for death by making us think very carefully about our own mortality."28 David Edelstein wrote for Slate magazine about the release of Hell’s Highway: "Someone in the movie suggests that these films aren't as shocking now that we've lived through Sam Peckinpah, zombie cannibal movies, and graphic video games. That seems bizarre to me: I find them more shocking than ever."29 Edelstein goes on to mention Aristotle’s Poetics, specifically, the section regarding the causes of poetry: "Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies."30 The Highway Safety Films are reproductions of the real thing. They occupy a liminal space that covers both "the thing" and the reproduction thereof. They speak both to the Aristotelian impulses that inspire poetry, and to the impulses that are titillated by repulsive images of the real. Thus, perhaps the function that the highway safety films provide is a "safe" way for viewers to access the real, as one can always be reassured that the images are just that — only images, and that they represent reproductions of events that happened long ago.31 After all, Aristotle notes that "[t]ragedy advanced by slow degrees; each new element that showed itself was in turn developed. Having passed through many changes, it found its natural form, and there it stopped."32 If tragedy (and if we are to take tragedy as the thing, not just the spectacle) has ceased to evolve, then it makes sense that as time passes, people would experience tragedy differently. Brottman further notes that

One of the most vital of [the cultural and social imperatives surrounding the resurgence of interest in the HSF films] is the way the film fulfills the repetition compulsion. To sit through a series of violent car crashes [...] is a way of integrating the trauma into a psychic economy, thereby attaining some level of mastery over it. [...] repetition of the trauma produces two conflicting attitudes towards death: that which acknowledges it as traumatic and that which denies its power to harm.33

It is significant to note that the HSF films have always been "alternative," circulated outside of mainstream media or educational venues. It is probable that their lack of mainstream availability has increased their appeal. One doesn’t spend a lot of time seeking out media in which one is not interested, and those who may have been only mildly intrigued were probably dissuaded by the difficulty inherent in obtaining these materials.

The films are obviously doing important work today, but the long-term impact of this work remains to be seen. Are the films truly helping to ameliorate feelings about death in a censored and sanitized culture? Are they merely providing fodder for sick gore-hound enthusiasts?

IV. Access to Films

1. The majority of the Highway Safety Foundation films are available at www.archive.org and also on www.youtube.com. As Mikita Brottman notes, many of them are also available on DVD as compilations; a cursory Internet search of the titles she mentioned yielded vendors of questionable repute: e.g.: http://www.revengeismydestiny.com/Documentaries.html.

2. Hell’s Highway: The True Story of Highway Safety Films is available on DVD, distributed by Kino Video. It is available to rent via Netflix, via Kim’s Video in Manhattan, and for purchase via many online retailers such as www.amazon.com.