10.25.24
Zoom call

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Mike Gualdoni and Zach White are film makers behind Concrete Jungle Gym, a 2024 documentary tracing the artistic career of Bob Cassilly.

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Daniil:

Could you guys start by sharing a little about the film?

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Mike Gualdoni:

For me, it's a look into Bob Cassilly's world. We go from when he's a teenager sculpting stuff and follow his journey as an artist through college, then doing reconstruction of a neighborhood revitalizing Lafayette Square, and then his rocket launch of a career through his many different endeavors, like City Museum, which obviously people know him for. And then going on to even bigger things with Cementland. You're attached to a rocket ship, and Bob Cassilly is driving it. It's pretty wild.

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Zach White:

Yeah, I think that's pretty good. It's a profile on an artist who was born in the right place at the right time. I think St. Louis is as much a part of a lot of his work, especially at City Museum and Cementland, as he is. If he had chosen to stay in Hawaii when he moved there for a brief time, I don't know if he would've ever made any kind of projects like City Museum or Cementland. Maybe it would be more just sculpture based. So it's a profile of him, but also of the city, and how he has made the idea of a city inside of City Museum.

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Daniil:

How did you get interested in Bob Cassilly and his work in the first place?

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Zach White:

Before we had the idea, when Mike and I were kids, we had been to City Museum and climbed around in Turtle Park and played on the sculptures that Bob had created at the Zoo. It's always been there: being from St. Louis, you see this stuff, and you play on it. Someone in a St. Louis NPR article compared him to the Gaudí of St. Louis, who was very revered in Barcelona. I've never been there, but I know people really like his art, and people visit because of his art. So I was thinking, "Why don't people visit St. Louis because of Cassilly's art?" I know people visit for the Arch and baseball games and the typical things if you're going to visit a Midwestern city, but they call it flyover states and all that.

So I was thinking that this is sort of a secret. There's a guy who is like Gaudi, who makes art you can climb on and play on and crawl through. And it's pretty impressive and magnificent, and I can't help but think that if it was in New York or LA, it would be talked about more, and it would be highlighted and showcased. I felt like that wasn't really happening, and figured Mike and I are from St. Louis and could maybe try it.

And we had the free time, because this project was conceived right after the pandemic started. So we were working remote and spending months and months away from people and not going into work. So you had time to get bad ideas, get good ideas, and we decided we should try and do another project together. 

I don't know if we would've been able to do this project now, because of COVID being over with and having to be at an office again. On days I was supposed to be working, I was definitely standing behind a camera interviewing somebody, or walking through Cementland, or at City Museum doing time lapses. I definitely let this project eat away a lot of my life. I was driving up there or flying. If I had to estimate how many people we interviewed, I would at least double that time for B-roll and family visits, cause I still have family there. I made it another full-time job.

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Mike Gualdoni:

We did Dignity Harbor in 2010 through '12, which is a documentary about the homeless encampments down north of the Arch. We did that in college, and after it was finished, we were thinking, "What's the next project we can do?" And I thought, "Shit, the City Museum—nobody's told that story. And how is this place even real? This would be an incredible story." And I wrote a letter to them, and I mailed it off and never heard back.

Zach and I both went our different ways, and then almost 10 years later to the day, Zach said, "Hey, we should do this." I wrote them an email, and they got back to me. And ever since then, we've been bouncing around, interviewing people, and telling this story, which is a great honor to be able to tell.

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Zach White:

There's a magnetism that we were drawn to; you couldn't get away from it. We went and did our own separate things, dealt with separate life things, did things you do as an adult, and focused on our careers. And that all seemed to be a reset in 2020–2021, and it allowed us to do this.

I had a friend from Atlanta who was like, "Hey, I'm going to take my daughter to look at colleges in the city. What should I do?" And what does St. Louis have that no one else really has or can compete with? I would say it is City Museum, and it would've been Cementland.

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Daniil:

So you guys met in film school?

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Zach White:

No, Mike and I have known each other since elementary school. We lived not too far away from each other and had a mutual friend and spent time playing PlayStation. We just became buddies, and we didn't even realize we wanted to mess with videos until 10th grade in high school, once we found out we could make videos to suffice for class projects instead of writing papers.

We did go to the same school, Lindenwood, for television and film. We thought we had to do that because they had access to better gear and equipment, which you would've had to pay for and rent otherwise. In St. Louis, it's hard to get that stuff without going to a school or something.

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Daniil:

And what do you guys do now?

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Zach White:

I'm a production supervisor at Adult Swim in Atlanta. I am working on the new season of Smiling Friends right now, so I'm pretty busy with that. 

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Mike Gualdoni:

I'm at Channel Nine, PBS, and I make content for them to help spread the word on the great things we do for the community. And I'm a full-time dad now as well.

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Daniil:

One of the really great things about your film is that you got to interview so many of Bob Cassilly's crew members and loved ones in it. How did you approach recruiting them for the doc?

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Mike Gualdoni:

It was a delicate dance, and it reminded me of when we did the homeless documentary. You don't just go down there guns blazing with your cameras. No, you get to know the people. You make friends, you gain their trust, and make sure they know that you're not any kind of a shyster. You're a human just like they are. So we started out slow.

Our first interview was Rick [Erwin], and Richard Callow helped us get that going. And then he would say, "Oh, you gotta interview this person." We went to Mary [Levi], and then that led to another one. And then as time grew and we talked to more people, they talked to more people. And some people were reluctant and didn't want to talk, because there have been productions in the past that scandalized the whole thing and did some of the people dirty. But then people found out that that's not what we were about. We were trying to tell the real story and make it as good as it deserves to be. So as time went on, those people warmed up to us as well. And it was a long process, but it was worth the time and effort and the investment that we put into getting to know these people, because then that's how you get the real stories out of them. And I think we did a great job at that.

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Zach White:

In the beginning, we thought, "Here's 10 people we want to interview." And we thought they'd say, "Yeah, sure. It's been years since he passed away, and we would love to get a story out there." So we thought it'd be easy to do all those interviews in a week, maybe do a few pickups and go from there. And we were in for a surprise.

It turned out, you need to start with one person and then prove yourself, kind of like a video game boss. Every level, you talk to these people and prove yourself. Then once you're done, you go to the next person. And then you're finding out other stories that you're not even getting from official channels. You're getting names, and you're told you should talk to this or that person, and then that goes down another avenue. And then the next thing you know, you think you only need to talk to 10 people, and instead it's 30.

Daniil:

How would you guys frame the project when you approached people? What would you tell them?

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Zach White:

We started reaching out to people on our own, and usually we would say, "Hey, we just did an interview with so-and-so, and they might've talked to you about it. If you're interested, we'd love to talk to you." Or, "We just heard about you. You weren't on our radar, but we found out about you through an interview." Usually, if you told them you were already talking with someone on the crew, it would put them at ease. And then let them do their own research and find out about us, do a background check. We would usually tell them we're doing a documentary about Bob Cassilly, and that it was a positive story; we weren't looking to do the true crime angle that he's more known for nationally.

Some of these people we were messaging, we didn't have official contact information for. It would've been great to just get a list of emails. At my regular job, that's how it is: you get all the tools, and you're good to go. This was different. Some of them were on LinkedIn, like I think Tim Tucker was.

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Mike Gualdoni:

We wrote hand letters to some.

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Zach White:

Yes, we wrote hand letters for two very important interviews. I would argue the two people closest to Bob, we got them by writing a letter. I had their address; that's not that hard to get. One of them was Gail, his second wife, and the other one was Bruce Gerrie, his best friend. He would've been easy to talk to in person, but he was only at his shop once a week, and it was hard to nail it down. We would go sometimes, and he wouldn't be there. So I figured, "Well, let me try and write a letter to the shop, and he'll get his mail eventually." Sure enough, we got a phone call a couple of weeks after he got the letter. Oh, and I wrote a letter to Watson Scott. So the older people who probably aren't online as much.

From LinkedIn to letters to Facebook messages to phone numbers, it was just any way you could get any kind of contact. With Cece, we were asking and asking and asking, and never got an email. I found her website and where she taught art, so I was able to get her email through that. It was a lot of research.

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Daniil:

For some of the folks, did it take a lot of in-person interaction after that initial request and before you went on camera? Or were most people ready once they got the general idea of your project?

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Zach White:

Usually, they were pretty on board once we laid out what we were doing. I think it helped that I lived out of state and could tell them, "Hey, I'm only going to be in town these three or four days." That would allow them to show up for that.

But there were a few people who wanted to meet us first and talk and get to know us and figure out what we were doing, and then they agreed. But just like with Dignity Harbor, even when we showed up to film, it wouldn't just be like, "Okay, sit down. Let's go." It would usually be at least an hour or more of conversation to let them know what's going on. Maybe I would talk to them while Mike set up the camera to put them at ease and let them know we're not going to ask any trick questions or surprise questions. Just to assure them and let them know we were there for a good cause or at least with good intentions.

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Daniil:

You guys both have affiliations with media organizations, Adult Swim and PBS. You worked on this project independently, but would you ever reference those affiliations to establish your background? Was that something people paid attention to?

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Zach White:

Probably more so for Mike, because PBS feels more prestigious.

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Mike Gualdoni:

It's local. We're heroes in the community, so that definitely helped.

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Zach White:

Yeah, and a documentary makes sense to go on PBS. A documentary on Adult Swim is kind of like, "What?" But we do animation in it, and I think being from Adult Swim would give other people a sense of, "These guys know what they're doing. They have a story." So I think a combination of both gives it a sense that we are professionals, that we're in the industry, as lame as that sounds. We know shows and movies and docs, and all that together with our first documentary definitely helped. I think I wore an HBO Max hat a few times on shoots, just to make it seem like I was affiliated. Not lying to anybody that we're doing it with HBO, but just more like, "Look, I've been around. I'm not a ding-dong."

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Daniil:

Something that we didn't anticipate to the fullest extent coming into our project is how emotionally heavy it is for a lot of the crew and family to talk about anything Bob Cassilly related still, years later. You've already touched on this a little, but were there specific things you did during the interviews to make folks feel safe and comfortable in sharing their emotions?

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Mike Gualdoni:

I think we never really asked. I think we asked one person, but most of them just came out with it. With some people, we weren't even planning on bringing it up. But I think it's kind of a release for them, almost like therapy on camera. Probably something they don't often talk or think about. And it was a very special thing to have these people pour their heart out to us, because it was a terrible tragedy, and it was family and a great friend to these people that they lost. And it comes across on the screen.

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Zach White:

As far as comforting for his family—Gail, Max, and Daisy—we approached that as best as we could in all professional aspects. And I don't think I wore the HBO Max hat that day. We went into it thinking we're doing this hand in hand. They want to get a chance to officially tell their story without being surprised. So they were the only ones that we actually sent the questions to in advance, which sometimes I don't like to do. But for them, I said, "Hey, this is what we're going to ask. We will, of course, ask questions based on your answers." And I did meet with Gail a few months before that interview and talked with her. 

So it was just explaining yourself, what your intentions are, rehashing and assuring them what the project is about: telling a positive story. I think they're fine talking about him passing away. It's a fact; it happened. I think if we had gone in and were like, "We're with Investigative Crime Daily and we want to talk about what happened at Cementland,” I don't think anybody would have talked to us then.

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Daniil:

To what extent do you keep the interviewees involved in the creative process after the interview? Do you keep that relationship going in any way, or will they just see the final cut once it's ready?

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Zach White:

You mean talking to them, keeping them in the loop and informed about what's going on? Not really, no. Max, his son, we talked with a lot. But for the most part, we would just say, "Okay, we're going to be working on this and editing it. If you have any questions, we're available." And sometimes, I'd think about doing a follow-up interview as we were editing and finding new questions that we wanted to ask. But oh my God, we would be working on it for another 10 years if that was the case.

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Daniil:

Have you gotten any reactions from folks yet, or are they still yet to see the doc?

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Mike Gualdoni:

No, it's still under wraps until the premier.

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Zach White:

Leef, one of his crew members, saw the first clip. We did a trailer very early on, just a highlight of some of the interviews we had done already, a two minute little sizzle thing, and we showed it to people. And I think that helped a tremendous amount to convince people. I think they saw, "Okay, the quality is pretty good, and I see my friends in it. I see people I used to work with, and this is something exciting to be a part of." And Leef told us it made him tear up.

But we haven't shared the film with anybody yet. I think we're doing that two days before it premieres.

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Mike Gualdoni:

Yeah. They're going to get a screening on the Friday before. Cause we only had it done like a month ago.

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Zach White:

Sharing it with people is interesting. I'm always curious to talk about that. We've only done two of these [documentaries], but when we did Dignity Harbor, we shared a rough cut, and it totally changed the atmosphere. The camp leader saw the cut, and he didn't like some things. He had an idea of how things should be portrayed. So he started to tailor interviews and not even allow us to interview some people. And it created this sense of, "Why did we show this?" We were trying to be trusting and open, and it bit us.

So for this one, I was like, "I don't really want to share it." My fear was we're such a small, lowkey, independent thing that if we share it with a person, and they go and tell other people we have left to interview, they might shut us down. And not only to interview, but even to help us with B-roll, cause some of them had photos. So we really wanted to keep it in the dark. Like, "We're working on it." And we were; we're not lying. But you gotta trust us and let us keep our voice. We spent so much time on it that it's just as much of a part of our lives now as it was theirs, because we're trying to tell the story. Not to say we're a crew or anything, but we have a shared goal.

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Mike Gualdoni:

And there was a time where I was thinking we should maybe share this with the crew just to make sure we got things right. But as the project got towards the end, I said, "No, I feel like we did this justice. I'm going to stand on this. This is good stuff. I believe in it."

Daniil:

Did you end up changing your first film, Dignity Harbor, based on that feedback you got?

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Zach White:

I don't think we changed it, because we didn't want to appease the person who requested it to be changed. It just made it more difficult for us. We had built a trust, and an expectation that we are going to be here with cameras. But after that, it was like, "Hey, don't talk about this to these guys." It created a censor that we had to get around.

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Mike Gualdoni:

He was the king of the camp, so he controlled what went on. He could tell people, "Alright, don't talk to these guys." So he made it tricky after that.

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Daniil:

As you were working on the doc, were there things that you were surprised to learn, or anything you were particularly interested in learning?

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Mike Gualdoni:

I always loved the story about how Bob bought a bunch of old Twinkie molds. They had thousands and thousands of these molds for the Twinkie, and then the Twinkie went out. They stopped making it at some point in the last 10 years or so. And then they wanted to bring it back, so they bought some molds from the City Museum. So Bob helped save the Twinkie.

Zach White:

The story of how Bob saved the Pietà in Rome in the 1970s was like an extra bonus. He built all this cool stuff, but also he saved the Pietà, and that was fascinating. We knew about it, but we never really got much more besides an old news story from the 70s on the [St. Louis] Post Dispatch. So it was like, "Okay, this is so far removed. How do we really address this?"

But it wasn't until we actually talked with his first wife, Cece, to learn what he did that it really opened our eyes to Bob being a superhero of the arts. Hearing that story with the details was the first time I've ever felt like we're capturing a piece of history, and it's being documented, and we have a story. I don't know if anyone ever interviewed her about that. And it's just cool that it lives on forever now, kind of like the project you're working on.

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Mike Gualdoni:

We were talking to all these people, so we had all these secondhand accounts of hearsay, like, "Oh yeah, Bob did this; Bob did that." But then we finally sat down with Cece, who was there, so now we have a firsthand account of what actually happened. That was really one of the highlights of the whole production.

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Daniil:

It seems like in the doc, you draw a parallel between the way that Bob saved this revered Renaissance sculpture and his role in saving bits of St. Louis architectural history. Can you talk more about what you've learned about the urban planning history of St. Louis, and what role it plays in Bob Cassilly's story?

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Zach White:

That's awesome that you got that. We always knew the architecture and buildings were pretty awesome, but I didn't really learn that until I left. When you move to a different area and start to see some of the buildings that are revered in Atlanta or anywhere else, you're like, "Wait, we have that in St. Louis." So it creates this appreciation. But also I want to learn how come we have all this. How come it's all there?

Inadvertently, we learned a lot through interviewing Michael Allen and Emery Cox at the National Building Arts Center. It opens up a whole other story, so many things that are tied. It's a cool idea that in St. Louis, the buildings and things were all built by hand. You can see the fingerprints on the brick from the craftsmen, laborers who built it. And that's pretty special. It's handmade, human made, all the way back to Cahokia. The mounds were made by hand, an incredible accomplishment. And then Bob was building everything by hand. Taking things apart and saving them, but also rebuilding them and sculpting them into something else new by hand.

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Mike Gualdoni:

You don't know what we have here until you're gone, and then you can appreciate it more.

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Daniil:

In the first part of the film, you are talking about the general context of handmade St. Louis architecture going away. Then you talk about Bob's origins in Lafayette Square and him trying to preserve some of that. And then you go into City Museum as the creative pinnacle of his career. Where do you see Cementland fitting into that narrative you're building in the film?

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Mike Gualdoni:

Cementland was his next step. His life was just him going from one thing to another. He'd play in this puddle for a while, and he'd say, "I'm tired of this. Oh look, there's a cool tree. Let's go climb that tree. Oh well, what's over there? Let's do that." And then he just kept bouncing around.

He bounced around at the International Shoe Company building for a few years and had a blast there. But then he finally got bored of that. So he's like, "Well, what the hell am I going to do now?" And then he gets that giant lot, the world's largest cement plant, an abandoned industrial site. He says, "Oh boy, what can I do here?" And there you have it. You can see remnants of his mind all over that landscape, even today. Unfortunately, as with any great ruins, they erode with time. But the echoes of Bob Cassilly are still in those hills, so it's cool to see even now.

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Zach White:

He would always describe himself as Master Blaster from the Mad Max movies. Almost like a split personality; he even admitted it might be a mental illness. A brute carrying around a fragile inner child that needs to be protected. As a child, you know how to draw, and you know how to sing or dance, cause that's all you do. But as you get older, you don't want to do that anymore, because you think it's not good. So you gotta protect that fragile child.

So sometimes I wonder, was he doing it as a business venture to make more money? I doubt that. He never would've thought like a CEO or a shareholder, "We need to build another thing so I can make more money." I don't think it was ever that. I think he really did want to play, and he got tired of one thing and moved to another to play with it.

But then there's also other positive ulterior motives underneath it: saving, cleaning up that land. Bill Christman told us that Bob had told him that the birds returned after he went and cleaned it. It used to be a dumping spot forever after the cement plant shut down. And when the cement plant was operating, they were causing pollution around the area to neighboring homes. All sorts of people were complaining and writing letters; it was such an issue. And then it shuts down, and then people are using it as an illegal dumping ground, and birds wouldn't fly over it. So he saw this as an outdoor park to play with, but also it's this environmental theme that is running through all of his work: saving things that would end up in landfills and repurposing them. Not just the beautiful architectural relics, but also rubble, pieces of terracotta, broken, busted concrete and rebar. He could build mountains with them at Cementland.

So he was recycling and also, in the process, using his crew to clean up the place and create what would've been one of the best outdoor parks and experiences, in my opinion, in the nation and maybe the world. I haven't been around the world enough to know, but in the US—for sure. It's so big and so interesting, and it's very fascinating to me. I could talk about it for years, because I go to bed at night and I still think about it. It's weird. It's like invaded my brain. The only way to get it out, I think, is to work on another project.

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Daniil:

Have you guys talked about what you might do next?

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Zach White:

We are hoping to do another documentary, more historic. We won't have to worry about chasing down any family members or stepping on any toes. We would like to tell the story of the St. Louis Commune of 1877: the first general strike in the United States, where Marxists took over one of the largest cities at that time. And the idea of Chicago or Atlanta or Houston today getting taken over by communists for a week. The revolutionary idea of all that.

It's also fascinating to me, because it was before what we know as communism, and what the world knows, where you relate it to the Soviet Union and China. But the roots of it are interesting, and how it spread to America. And why it didn't work, and what things are put in place to stop it from working that are still operating today. It really feels like as we go further into the future, we're getting into a time travel wormhole. We're going back to that time period, where the more you learn about it, the more it makes sense today. Workers are not getting paid fairly—you could argue that with AI and all sorts of stuff. So we're excited to try and crack it open and tell that story.

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Daniil:

Did that idea arise while you were working on this project? Do you see any connecting threads between the two?

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Zach White:

When we were interviewing Emery and Michael at the National Building Arts Center, they showed us one of the German newspaper articles that ran in the city around that time period talking about the strike and the commune. And I had read The Broken Heart of America around that time. My landlord opened up the idea of it. 

What made me realize it's a bigger story than St. Louis was when my landlord at my old apartment said he was reading an article about St. Louis, and they were reviewing a book, The Broken Heart of America. It's about how St. Louis represents America, the heart of it. Because there are so many things in its history that are good, that America you would think would do well, but also, obviously, a hell of a lot of things that are the ugly side of America that happened in St. Louis. It highlights all these things, but one of the good things they say that happened was that in 1877 the [city] government got taken over, and they had to call in the military to bring it down.

So I looked into it and got the book and read it, and we were talking about it, and I knew they had all these pieces of history. So we asked about it, and they were like, "Oh, yeah, right over here." We are really fortunate that there's people in St. Louis who preserve all these things. So it's right there if you ask about it, to look at and review.

And I really think that what you're doing with this project for Cementland is the exact same thing. Creating this system for people to be able to review and look back and research and learn and gather information themselves and form their own opinions, and it is wonderful. It's such a cool thing. I'm glad to be a part of it.