Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story

Recently, I was reading one of the posts linked in the blogroll of my blog -- I think it was Laura over at Laura's Miscellaneous Musings -- and she mentioned director Daniel Raim, who directed the documentary Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story. I had this one on my DVR because I have a tendency to DVR the documentaries on movies that TCM runs, and since Kino Lorber put it out on DVD, I decided to watch it.

Now, I hadn't heard the names of either Harold Michelson or his wife Lillian, but apparently both of them did things that were very important for Hollywood movies. Harold was a World War II veteran who did some sketches of the things he saw in World War II, which led his commanding officer to tell him that perhaps he ought to try to make a professional go of art in some way. So after the war he made his way to Hollywood where he eventually became a storyboard artist. For those who don't know, storyboards are comic book-like drawings that are designed to show how the director and cinematographer could film a certain scene. There's a mini-documentary on North by Northwest that TCM has run once or twice before that talks about Alfred Hitchcock's use of storyboards and how he practically had the movie already directed before he even began filming, something that would fit his quote about actors being little more than cattle.

Lillian was an orphan in Florida who was quite a few years younger than Harold, but who somehow knew Harold's younger sister. There was a bit of love at first sight, but at the same time, Harold's parents weren't certain about the relationship. Still, not long after getting out to Hollywood, Harold sent Lillian a letter that perhaps she should come out to Hollywood and marry him. She obviously did go out, and married him, with the result being the two of them remaining married for the next 60 years until Harold's death in 2007.

Along the way, Harold and Lillian had three sons, the eldest being born with autism at a time when little was known about the condition and psychologists thought it was brought on by mothers not taking care of their kids properly. This, unsurprisingly, horrified Lillian, and when she realized the advice of the "specialists" wasn't helping to ameliorate her son's condition, and was causing problems with the relationships the two younger sons had with the rest of the family, she stopped taking part in the psychiatric charade. We only see vintage home movie footage of the sons, although it is revealed that the autistic son became a computer programmer and had a successful career. I guess nowadays he'd be considered one of the 49320572105% of people diagnosed as being "on the spectrum", but relatively "high-functioning". (The local autism center runs radio ads that over the past few years have claimed the autism diagnosis rate has gone from 1 in 69 to 1 in 44, something which sounds rather scammy to me, apologies to anyone with a child on the more severe end of the spectrum.)

At some point, Lillian felt unfulfilled with a life as just a mother, so she began looking for work to do. Not being able to type well enough to get a secretarial job, she eventually found work in one of the studios' research libraries. Much like the library that Katharine Hepburn and her assistans run in Desk Set, such libraries had all sorts of reference works that could be called on to look up things from what New York City looked like in the 1910s to fashion, slang, and so on. Any scriptwriter or director who wanted consistency and wanted to avoid anachronisms would use the research library to impart a greater sense of verisimilitude to their films.

And then the research librarian Lillian was working for retired; not wanting the books to go to waste; she offered to sell them to Lillian since the studio didn't own them. Lillian bought, which led to her career as one of Hollywood's more respected research librarians. However, it wasn't without a struggle, as she was always looking for space for that research library.

Harold and Lillian is an interesting movie, in large part because it shines a light on two different aspects of film-making that are both quite important, but generally go underrecognized. (Both worked on hundreds of movies, but Lillian only has credits for about 10 according to IMDB, while Harold has a few more, thanks to getting elevated to art director later in his career, which also earned him a pair of Oscar nominations.) It helps that the two were apparently very well-respected, so any number of famous people (most notably Danny DeVito and Mel Brooks) did interviews for the documentary. But another sign of the respect they had is that they got a pair of characters named after them in the movie Shrek 2.

Harold and Lillian may not be for everyone, mostly because casual film fans may not be too interested in the more arcane work of things like storyboarding and research. But anybody who's more of a movie buff will probably really like the movie, which is very well made.