Mary Blair was the designer behind the look of Disney in the 1950’s. You can learn more about her at The Disney Family Museum’s exhibit, MAGIC, COLOR, FLAIR: the world of Mary Blair.
Blair’s joyful creativity―her eye-appealing designs and exuberant color palette―endure in numerous media, including classic Disney animated films, such as Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan, and theme park attractions at Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World Resort, most notably the “It’s a Small World” ride.
Here’s a video featuring her work. You can find out more in The Art and Flair of Mary Blair. And you can catch a glimpse of one of the most significant influences on her work in the documentary Walt & El Grupo, where a cross-cultural exchange with South America inspired her more modernist, colorful style.
Interview: Director Steve James on the Roger Ebert Documentary “Life Itself”
Posted on July 5, 2014 at 3:32 pm
Roger Ebert said that Steve James’ documentary “Hoop Dreams” was the greatest film of the first decade of the 21st century. He wrote, “A film like “Hoop Dreams” is what the movies are for. It takes us, shakes us, and make us think in new ways about the world around us. It gives us the impression of having touched life itself.”
Those last two words became the title of Ebert’s autobiography. And when it came to make a documentary about Ebert’s life, James was the one Ebert wanted to make it. There were no restrictions or approvals from the subject. Ebert wanted his story told the way James thought best.
I spoke to James about making the film and the great loves of Ebert’s life.
Roger loved it when his friend Bill recited the last page of The Great Gatsby. Why was that so important to him?
I think Bill really nails it in the film so I’m just going to steal his thoughts on it. Number one it’s a great piece of writing and Roger loved novels. He probably loved novels as much as he loved movies.
In fact when he was younger, quite young he was one of those guys that had charted out his life. He was probably about 17 when he said, “OK, I’m going to be a newspaperman and then I’m going to be a political columnist then I’m going to move to New York to be a novelist.” He charted that out.
So literature meant the world to him and that passage meant a lot. But I think what Bill says in the movie is true. It’s that it was about a self-made man. Now in Gatsby’s case there was a lot of artifice there. It wasn’t with Roger but that notion that you can come from modest or nothing background and make something grand of yourself I think appealed to Roger as a small-town kid from Urbana who went on to the big city and sort of conquered the world in his own way but in an honest way. And then you know it’s about loss. I think Bill talks about in the movie about the loss of Roger’s father and death and the way in which death sort of haunted Roger. When he lost his father at that young age, it was not something he ever really got over according to Bill. Bill tells stories about other passages that he loved too that of course Bill committed to memory. He would quote something and then Roger would say, “Tell me again.” Or they would be at a dinner table and he would say, “Bill, give me the last page of Gatsby or this Yeats poem. And Bill is one of those guys that just commit a lot of great stuff to memory including a great editorial passage from when Roger was in college that is just remarkable.
He was a fully formed writer at the beginning as Bill says.
Yeah. I mean if I was a writer I would have hated this guy. I mean really hated them, just hated him. He wrote so well, plainly but with spiritedness and well chosen adjectives.
How did you find someone to do the narration who sounded so exactly like Roger?
Really I owe this to Chaz and her team. They were looking for someone to come in and read some of his great reviews, audio recordings. We had been for editing purposes using the book narrator. He did a perfectly good job but he didn’t sound anything like Roger. So we had been using him in editing because it’s convenient, but I knew I wanted to replace him and my thinking up until they found Stephen Stanton was that we would just find someone who kind of sounded like Roger but we weren’t going to try to channel the actual Roger. But then when she said, “We found this guy, you should hear him,” I was just like, “Oh my God!” And then my next concern though was, he was doing like a review on the show so it was kind of swashbuckling Roger and all that, it was kind of big and broad. So then I had him I reach out to him and had him read some of our narration passages that we had chosen that are much more intimate and he said, “Okay, I’ll do it but send me whatever kind of intimate recording.” So I sent him Roger’s Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross and we just sent him another interview that was done in Champaign with him where he was very relaxed and kind of speaking more quietly, more conversationally. He is not an impressionist; impressionist does not do him justice. He is an actor who can act in other people’s voices. He read the memoir himself before we did at the recordings. He listened to these tapes religiously and then he came in and he took directions like, I would say, “Oh, that was great but I feel like it could be even a little more private like we are just across the table together and you are speaking” and then he would boom! He was remarkable! He is so good that even though in the movie, in his voice, in doing Roger’s voice, he said, “When I lost my ability to speak…” there are a lot of smart people who say, “How did you get Roger to record it?” That irony of, “No way, that can’t be him,” just doesn’t even dawn on some people because they are just so immersed and that is what I wanted it to be. I did not want to fool you which is why I made sure you know if you are listening closely enough but on the other hand I want you to immediately forget it because it’s Roger’s words.
How do you as a filmmaker bring together several very distinct episodes in his life?
You could call it a three act, four act, or even five act life. He had a lot of adventures and he went to a lot of places in his life. He left a small town, he went to Chicago and became a newspaper man and fell into this job reviewing movies and then there was drinking and then he gave that up. Then there’s the TV show and then Gene’s dying and then the cancer and then the blogging. I mean it’s like there are so many aspects to Roger’s life. Plus he loved to go to the Cannes film Festival and he loved to go to the Conference on World Affairs and a lot more.
I felt like I wanted to use the present as a springboard to the past, something he does in a memoir in places which was really moving to me and so I wanted to do that. But otherwise when I do interviews, I do interviews with people for hours on end and we talked about a lot of stuff and not all that got in the movie but when you start to put the movie together, you start trying to identify what are the strongest strains in his life and I guess what I kind of came to realize is, and I did not realize this from the start but I came to realize that the film is kind of ultimately a series of love affairs. It’s a love affair with writing, it’s a love affair with movies, it’s a love affair even with Chicago of course. And then there’s Chaz.
And kind of like what all those love affairs add up to, in a weird way it is a love affair with Gene Siskel. It’s a torturous one but it’s a love affair. It’s like he had a series of love affairs but he was never not true to his wife. It all adds up to this kind of love affair with life. I mean he called the book Life Itself, not My Life and Movies or Me at the Movies. “Movie” is not in the title. It’s life itself that was the grand movie of his life, you know what I mean?
Was it hard for you to maintain objectivity as Roger became seriously ill?
I never worry about trying to maintain objectivity in that kind of journalistic way. Because like for instance I knew that this ultimately was going to be an admiring portrait of Roger Ebert because I wouldn’t have wanted to make it otherwise. I am not that kind of filmmaker. I want to be around people I am interested in. And so I knew that so it was never going to be objective in any kind of purely journalistic way. I did not go out of my way to find someone who hated Roger or something. But I went out of my way to find people critical of his contributions. I knew that I wanted it to be honest, though, and I think there is a difference between honest and objective. Honest is it may have a point of view and I feel like all my films do but I try not to make my point of view blow out of the water and eliminate anything that’s contrary to it, that’s contrary to who this person is or that there is other ways to look at this person. And so that was important. I mean when I saw how stubborn Roger could be with Chaz, I was a little surprised until I thought about it, “Well, you don’t get to be Roger Ebert and you don’t survive all he’s been through without being stubborn.” And I am not talking about just doing this; I’m talking about 20 years with Gene Siskel. You don’t get to be that way without having a stubborn streak in you. He had had a toughness about him that was essential to his success. He also had a generosity about him that everyone commented on that didn’t just happen late in life. Although he became even more generous, it was there all along.
In the film we hear filmmakers talk about how instrumental he was in helping them. How did he help you with “Hoop Dreams?”
First, he and Gene reviewed the film on the show when it was just going to Sundance. For them to even review it was remarkable because it had no distribution and it was three hours long and they knew that. And so they watched it and then they decided they were going to go on the show while it was at Sundance and they said something to the effect of, “You can only see this film if you are at the Sundance film Festival but we really feel that this film should be seen by a wider audience.” And they just sort of planted this flag. Sundance made an enormous difference because up until then, it was the three-hour documentary about two kids playing basketball that no one ever heard of and nobody was really going to see it. It was getting some buzz with the audiences a little bit but the distributors weren’t. And then suddenly, it was like we were a hot ticket at Sundance and we had ended up with three or four different offers and none of that would have happened without what they did, no way that would’ve happened even if they loved it.
And then over the years, Roger continued to write very thoughtfully about my work and support my work. Three years ago when “The Interrupters” came out, when it premiered at Sundance, we had sent a screener to him, just hoping that he would watch it. I don’t tweet but someone told me, “Roger just tweeted this wonderful thing about the film at Sundance.” He knew that we were premiering there; he knew exactly what he was doing. He had 800,000 Twitter followers; it was picked up, it was tweeted all around and then he continued to champion that film right up through the end of the year and was outraged when we did not get shortlisted for the Oscar. He was just such a supporter of my work. For me to be able to kind of do this film means a lot.
Interview: Joe Berlinger of “Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger”
Posted on July 5, 2014 at 8:00 am
Joe Berlinger is one of my favorite directors and it was a treat to talk to him about “Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger,” his new documentary on the trial of the notorious gangster. We know Bulgar was a crook. What this movie explores is the manipulations and cover ups from the law enforcement that kept Bulgar from being prosecuted for decades.
If you had a chance to interview Whitey and he agreed to tell the truth, what would you ask him?
The most important question is the central assertion to his claim that he had on immunity deal with Jeremiah T. O’Sullivan and the reason that’s such an important question is it goes to the heart of whether or not he was an informant and if he was not an informant the level of corruption and abuse of our institutions of justice is like significant.
The film raises the question of how much crime you can allow an informant to commit to hold on to his credibility. Presumably killing is over that line.
David Boeri is a WBUR Reporter who says that as long as informants are the mother’s milk of criminal investigations we have to be really careful because on the one hand you they can’t blow their cover but it doesn’t mean they should be killing people with institutional knowledge because that puts the government in the position of picking and choosing who should live and who should die and that’s not the role of government. You know to empower the Irish mob so that they can bring down the Italian Mafia; there’s something inherently wrong with that. And it wasn’t just limited to Boston. We see the same thing in Gregory Scarpa’s cas. There’s no question he was a major informant there to bring down the Colombo Crime family and over 50 people were killed under his watch. There’s something wrong with that system. One of our bedrock principles of our legal system is a defendant should be able to present whatever vigorous defense he wants with the presumption of innocence. Again this is not a wrongful conviction cases, but the guy should have been able to present his point of view.
I love the line in the movie from one of the witnesses: “Of course I lied; I’m a criminal.” What do you do when everybody that’s testifying is a liar by definition?
The three star witnesses for the government are murderous thugs. I mean could you imagine somebody going up for trial for 20 murders and getting 12 years? He’s a serial killer and yet the government treats him as a star witness, now how is that guy incentivised? It’s what I love about the movies, it is a true Rashomon experience and yet the truth rises to the top and something stinks. The real story has been swept under the rug because it’s just implausible on so many levels that all that murder and mayhem and bad behavior is solely the responsibility of one relatively low level agent and his corrupt supervisor, it’s just not plausible.
I really want to know how truthful is the claim that he had a deal of protection and frankly it’s an important question that is the major disappointment that I had in observing the trial because that was a question that was not allowed to be aired. Even before the trial began, the judge ruled that the immunity claim was not allowed to be brought up in trial so that was disallowed as a line of inquiry. It’s a complicated question but he should have been allowed to bring that up at trial because it’s a central question to the saga and I was disappointed that the judge would not allow because I think it was pretty clear that no matter what happened at trial Whitey Bulger was not going to walk out of that preceding a free man. Right from the start he admitted to being a drug dealer and loan shark.
I was really interested in the comments on the file by the woman who’s an expert on informants. Normally when someone gets immunity, isn’t that very well documented?
Well there are two levels, if there was a personal deal of protection like, “Hey, keep me from getting bumped off from the mob and I’ll keep you from being indicted”. That’s not going to be documented. That’s a personal deal of protection. There were were all these hallmarks of a fake file and in civil proceedings and in the proceedings against Connolly the government acknowledged that much of that informant file was faked by John Connolly. You can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to say you faked the files in the proceedings against Connolly then let’s talk about where is the real file if he was an informant? And there are just so many things that don’t hold water. Again I don’t know whether he was or wasn’t but something stinks. If he was an informant then there’s some basic protocol that wasn’t being followed by like targeting the head of the gang, he was the head of the gang.
The first person we see in the film is a man who was threatened by Bulgar and is looking forward to testifying against him. But he was murdered before he could appear in court. At the end, the film tells us the murder was unrelated. Really?
I can see it’s a legitimate coincidence but to me the importance of it is that when Rick’s body was discovered on the news and that rippled through the courtroom, everyone — reporters, observers, family members — all were debating, almost like as if they were debating a horse race or a Red Sox game, they were debating with equal plausibility whether or not it was in the government interest to knock him off or in Bulger’s interest to knock him off. I was just kind of stunned by the fact that the government was even considered a possibility, which is demonstrative of the complete erosion of faith in their institutions that they would actually believe they might have a hand in it. That demonstrates why this trial should not have been so narrowly focus on confirming the obvious. The obvious is okay he’s crook, we know it let’s let Bulger talk about whatever he wanted to talk about.
This story has so many people and so many incidents and so many boundaries being crossed, how do you try to help people keep that straight? How do you address that is a filmmaker?
It’s a very challenging story and in addition to that there’s a certain subtlety that I hope the audience gets. I was very conscious that there is a certain amount of the conventional story that you need to tell to set the table and then you have to start picking that conventional story apart and do it in kind of a seamless way. I was so worried that some people would walk thinking, there’s no problem with the conventional story. So the challenge is you start with what everyone says is the truth and then you start showing what the issues are with while still maintaining that that’s still a possibility. You know, people expect to be told what to think and many filmmakers believe you have to have a very singular point of view. I’ve always in all of my work tried to embrace multiple points of view and then hope that the truth rises to the top. And look, I do want to say for the record I don’t think everyone in law enforcement or everyone in the FBI is rotten. I think the majority of people in law enforcement and the majority of people who are in persecution take their job seriously. And actually I think Wyshock and Kelly are the heroes of this story on a certain level because they came to town in the early 90s being sent from other places said, “what the **** is this?” And against the will of their own Justice Department they were fighting vociferously to bring about those indictments, the indictments that ultimately led to this proceeding. They fought tooth and nail for those against their institutions but at a certain point at this trial they now were put in the position of defending the institution that they once fought against in order to bring these indictments. And you can’t serve two masters; you can’t defend an institution that screwed up while you’re simultaneously trying to get to the root of the problem.
. And when it came to make a documentary about Ebert’s life, James was the one Ebert wanted to make it. There were no restrictions or approvals from the subject. Ebert wanted his story told the way James thought best.
. Why was that so important to him?