Emile de Antonio was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania on May 14, 1919. He attended a small preparatory school, Wyoming Seminary, from 1933 to 1936, when he entered Harvard University. De Antonio entered Harvard the same year as John F. Kennedy, but he was expelled before graduating. After Harvard, he worked as a longshoreman. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army, and after the war attended graduate school at Columbia University and worked as a barge captain, using the barge as a place of isolation and study. He subsequently taught at Columbia, William and Mary College, City College of New York, and the New School for Social Research.
Late in the 1950s de Antonio became involved in filmmaking, first as a distributor of Pull My Daisy (G-String Enterprises, 1960), a film about the “beat scene,” written by Jack Kerouac and about poet Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, David Amram, Alice Neel, and Dick Bellamy. Robert Frank did the camera work. In 1960 de Antonio's friend Daniel Talbot suggested that the television kinescopes of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings could be edited for a film; as a result, de Antonio edited the 188 hours of footage to make the documentary Point of Order (Point Films, 1964). In 1965 he did a film for the BBC, That's Where the Action Is, about John V. Lindsay's mayoralty campaign in New York City and, more generally, about the distress of urban America. A year later, he directed and co-produced with Mark Lane Rush to Judgment (Judgment Films Corporation, 1966), which explored the circumstances of President John F. Kennedy's assassination and sharply criticized the proceedings and findings of the Warren Commission. This was a new type of documentary film, combining “radical scavenging” through television outtakes with in-depth interviews with the persons involved. De Antonio continued to use this format to explore such themes in modern American society as war, the political system, and twentieth century art. In the Year of the Pig (Monday Film Production Company, 1968), the story of the wars in Indochina—specifically in Vietnam—from the 1930s to 1968, used footage from ABC-TV, the National Liberation Front office in Prague, Paramount News, and many other sources. Produced and directed by de Antonio, this film's thesis was that the wars were totally immoral from the beginning; many scenes of atrocities committed against the Vietnamese people support the thesis. The film was nominated for an Academy Award.
De Antonio made America Is Hard to See (The March Twelve Company, 1970), a film that documents Eugene McCarthy's unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1968. This was followed by Millhouse: A White Comedy (Whittier Film Corporation, 1971), a didactic film about the political rise of Richard Milhous Nixon and the American political system. Next he produced and directed Painters Painting (Turin Films, 1972), a study of contemporary American art and artists, based on extensive interviews with the artists, many of whom were his personal friends. Underground is an unprecedented series of interviews with fugitive members of the radical Weather Underground organization. Filmed in secret at a “safe house,” the motion picture documents that group's philosophies, organization, and activities. It gained notoriety even before its release when the federal government tried unsuccessfully to confiscate the production materials and negatives while the footage was still being edited. The film premiered in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1976.
In the King of Prussia, released in 1982, documented the trial of the Plowshares Eight. In 1980 the Eight, including Catholic peace activists Daniel and Philip Berrigan, entered a General Electric plant in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, where components for nuclear weapons were being manufactured; there the group damaged two thermonuclear nosecones and spilled vials of blood over blueprints and machinery. De Antonio's film combined both a re-creation of the trial with footage of the actual events. In the film, professional actors such as Martin Sheen shared the screen with the actual defendants in the case, who played themselves. Later in 1982, de Antonio made a short documentary titled John Cage at the Whitney, which recorded a party given for the composer at New York's Whitney Museum. De Antonio had produced some of Cage's first major concerts in the 1950s, and this film was a continuation of their long association. Beginning in 1974, de Antonio had planned a film about the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to be called Inside the Company. This motion picture was to be based on a book written by former CIA agent Philip Agee. De Antonio was forced to abandon the project in 1977. As he became interested in the CIA and the FBI, de Antonio acquired parts of his own FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request and a lawsuit against the FBI. This interest in how the FBI saw him gave de Antonio the idea for an autobiographical film; finally in 1989 he succeeded in making Mr. Hoover & I, a title that refers to his relationship with the FBI as embodied in J. Edgar Hoover. This was his last film; de Antonio died on December 16, 1989, at the age of 70.
In addition to his life as a filmmaker, de Antonio was a friend of many New York artists, as well as a patron and advocate for their work. He also was involved in several anti-war groups, including No Business as Usual and Refuse and Resist. He was frequently sent drafts of screenplays, magazine articles, books, poems, and other works, and he became a mentor figure to many creative and politically minded people in the 1970s and 1980s.
