The real-life story of Hollywood back-room couple Harold and Lillian Michelson is the sort of stuff that movies used to be made of. It’s a good old-fashioned true romance made more appealing by the fact that there were such a couple of really such likable people. They were both happy enough being together and just quietly slaving away practicing their art and without any real credit helping some very famous directors make better motion pictures. Now their story is very affectionately told by Academy-nominated filmmaker Daniel Raim in this low-budget documentary that aims to tug at the heart strings of every cinephile, and particularly romantic ones.
The couple met in Florida after WW2 and Harold got it into his head that life would be better for them in California, so he hopped on a train across countryside to set things in motion. When Lilian joined him soon afterwards, the young couple were still like total strangers to each other. He got a job as an apprentice in a Hollywood movie studio and very gradually worked his way up to being a storyboard artist in which he found his true milieu. Harold’s particular skill was that he knew what should be in each exact frame depending on the lens which some directors began to use as an actual blueprint for the movie they were shooting. So much so that people like Hitchcock, who really respected Harold’s input, had him on the set of his movies “The Birds” and “Marnie”. Looking at both the storyboards and the finished movie, it is very obvious to see Harold’s very significant contribution. Although he never was officially credited for any of this, he was even responsible for designing what are now regarded as some iconic movie scenes such as the view of Dustin Hoffman through Anne Bancroft’s legs in “The Graduate”.
Lilian stayed at home raising their three young sons ….. one of whom was autistic….. but the moment they were school age, she set about finding herself a job. First as a volunteer at a film research library which years later she would end up running, then actually owning too. Her forte was painstakingly researching all the minute detail for period movies in particular whether it be the girls underwear worn in “Fiddler on The Roof” or trotting off to Colombia to check out how drug barons lived for “Scarface” (Harold actually put his foot down on the later). Like her husband, who she now co-operated with doing his research for Hitchcock’s movies, Lillian made herself completely indispensable as she got to ensure that the designs of all the major movies she worked on, were completely accurate.
Raim includes interviews with several filmmaking heavyweights such as Mel Brooks, Danny DeVito and Francis Ford Coppola who enthusiastically sing the praises of not just how popular both Michelsons were, but they readily acknowledge their significant contributions to the movies. In fact Coppola eventually provided a home for Lillian’s library at one point. Raim fills this in with contributions from friends and also with actors reading the couples own love letters.
Most important however is the presence of Lillian herself, now a very spry 86 year old resident of a Motion Pictures Assisted Living Home , but having lost none of infectious zest for life. She is frank and funny and although passionate about her work, and that of Harold’s too, it seems that she may not always want to acknowledge how it significantly shaped the movies themselves. When she talks of Harold (who died in 2008) she becomes even more animated and it is so wonderfully clear that even through the rough patches their relationship went through that she openly discusses, this was a marriage made in heaven. As happy as she was that Harold finally got his just deserts professionally and finally became the Production Designer on movies such as “Star Trek”, Lillian was much more proud of the more important fact, that for over sixty years, he had been her husband.
Labels: 2015, biography, documentary
