The documentary follows four salesmen as they travel across New England and southeast Florida trying to sell expensive Bibles door-to-door in low-income neighborhoods, and attend a sales meeting in Chicago. The film focuses in particular on salesman Paul Brennan, a middle-aged Irish-AmericanCatholic from Jamaica Plain, Boston, who struggles to maintain his sales.
The Maysles brothers wanted to be the first to make a nonfiction feature film after learning that Truman Capote had made the claim that his newly released book In Cold Blood was a nonfiction novel. The film was made on a low budget; just under seven minutes into the film, one of the two cameras used can be seen in the shot which was not unusual for a documentary film. The handheld microphone used to record the film's sound is visible in other shots, also not unusual in a documentary setting. Salesman was self-funded by the Maysles brothers, costing approximately $100,000. The brothers paid each salesman $100, along with their expenses. During production, the crew consisted of Albert Maysles shooting and lighting and David Maysles doing sound. Albert Maysles never prompted anyone for the film, except when he asked Brennan to describe his fellow salesmen. In determining whom and what they would film, the Maysles brothers consulted the salesmen's schedules. Throughout production, the Maysles brothers sent footage to Zwerin, who viewed it and provided feedback. When post-production began, David Maysles and Zwerin tried to structure a story about the four salesmen, but found they did not have the material. Instead, they realized that they were dealing with a story about Brennan. The Maysles brothers had themselves been door-to-door salesmen in the past, selling everything from cosmetics to encyclopedias. While filming, they became part of the pitch, telling those who let the salesmen and the camera crew into their homes that they were now part of "a human interest story." Elements of popular culture that appear as backdrops to the main story include the song "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof; a recorded orchestral performance of the Beatles' song "Yesterday"; The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson; the theme music of the television series Ben Casey; and televised boxing matches. As stated in the closing credits, Salesman was filmed in January 1967 and bears a copyright date of 1968.
Distribution
The Maysles brothers faced challenges in showing the completed film. As they tried to arrange distribution, they were told that the content was too depressing and realistic for the public. The brothers self-distributed through their production company, Maysles Films, and they booked theaters for screenings. The first theatrical screening occurred on April 17, 1969, at the 68th Street Playhouse in New York City.
Reception
Critical response
Upon its first release, New York Timesfilm criticVincent Canby lauded the film and wrote, "... documentary feature about four door-to-door Bible salesmen who move horizontally through the capitalistic dream. It's such a fine, pure picture of a small section of American life that I can't imagine its ever seeming irrelevant, either as a social document or as one of the best examples of what's called cinema vérité or direct cinema... It is fact, photographed and recorded with extraordinarily mobile camera and sound equipment, and then edited and carefully shaped into a kind of cinematic mural of faces, words, motel rooms, parlors, kitchens, streets, television images, radio music—even weather." Documentary filmmakerJames Blue once said of Albert Maysles that "his cinema is one in which ethics and aesthetics are interdependent, where beauty starts with honesty, where a cut or a change in camera angle can become not only a possible aesthetic error, but also a 'sin' against truth." Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune listed Salesman as one of the ten best films of 1970. However, in late 1970, Pauline Kael, in her negative New Yorker review of the Maysles' subsequent documentary Gimme Shelter, alleged that Salesman was "set up" and acted by its principals, rather than actually being direct cinema. Kael accused the Maysles of "recruit Paul Brennan, who was in the roofing and siding business, to play a bible salesman." In response, the Maysles threatened suit against the New Yorker and rebutted Kael's claims in an open letter sent to the magazine; because of the New Yorkers policy at the time of not publishing letters, the letter did not appear in print until 1996, when it was included in the appendix to the anthology Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary). The letter stated, in pertinent part:
Legacy
In 1992, Salesman was selected for the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." The film was preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2018. "Globesman" was a parody of Salesman in the fourth episode of the second season of Documentary Now!.
