Academy Museum Director of Film Programs K.J. Relth-Miller Talks Marlon Brando
by CHAD KENNERK
K.J. Relth-Miller, Director of Film Programs.
All images courtesy the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures.
The Academy’s annual ceremony is just one aspect of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ overall examination and recognition of film. The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is the largest museum in the United States devoted to the art, science, and artists behind the magic of the movies. Through exhibitions, curated film series and extensive programming, the Academy Museum celebrates and captures the stories behind the art of moviemaking. The museum’s David Geffen and Ted Mann theatres present a year-round robust calendar of screenings, film series, member programs, panel discussions, and more. Through retrospectives and thematic film series, the artistic and cultural contributions of those in front of and behind the camera are illuminated and explored.
One of the great actors of the 20th century, Marlon Brando studied acting in New York with Stella Adler and later honed his craft at The Actors Studio, where Brando was a founding member. While making history on Broadway playing the brutish Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, Brando was exercising his talent at The Actors Studio, exploring a variety of roles; his comedic performance as Archduke Rudolph Maximillian came complete with a rented elaborate costume, pencil-thin moustache, and Hapsburg accent. With a natural approach to acting, Brando quickly distinguished himself on the screen from his more stylized peers. Reprising his role in A Streetcar Named Desire for the 1951 film led to the first of his eight Academy Award nominations over a broad and varied six-decade career. He ultimately took home Oscars for On the Waterfront and most notoriously for The Godfather. Remembered today for his off-screen activism and his unforgettable performances, the many faces and phases of Brando’s remarkable career are represented in two concurrent retrospective film series at the Academy Museum. The ongoing Oscar Sundays program features Brando’s Oscar-nominated performances in the films A Streetcar Named Desire, Julius Caesar, On the Waterfront, and The Godfather, while the series Forever A Contender: A Centennial Tribute to Marlon Brando includes The Wild One, One-Eyed Jacks, Guys and Dolls, The Fugitive Kind, Mutiny on the Bounty, and the rarely screened Burn!
The desire to share films, whether through a tangible film collection or a collective experience, is a desire that resonates with many a movielover. It’s also a viable career path. Behind the programming at every local community arthouse and repertory cinema is a film programmer making the tough decisions of what movies to show and when. K.J. Relth-Miller, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’ Director of Film Programs sits down with Film Review to discuss her origins as a film programmer and share insights into her work through the lens of her current program, Forever A Contender: A Centennial Tribute to Marlon Brando.
In conversation with K.J. Relth-Miller
Director of Film Programs, The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures
Film Review (FR): You began your career with two seasons of a summer screening series. For those of us that love sharing film, can you talk about your first role as a film programmer?
K.J. Relth-Miller (KJ): I grew up loving film and watching film. Both of my parents are very film literate individuals. My dad was really into international film, specifically Japanese film, when I was growing up and also silent classic comedians like Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. My mom is a little bit more omnivorous and introduced me to a lot of the Hollywood classics that I love and know today. I really thought I was going to be an actor, so I really started my career thinking that I was going to be a stage actor.
Then I took one class when I was 20 called Film is Literature that kind of opened that up for me, but I really didn’t know that I wanted to be a film programmer until I was in my late 20s. I recognized that repertory film programming was a viable career and that the person who was making the decision of what to show at the New Beverly Cinema, what to screen at the American Cinematheque here in LA, was something one could do for a living. Before I realised that there would be opportunities in the field and around town to do this professionally, I was just working with a friend who lives in Atwater, who had a great backyard space and a giant VHS collection. Starting in the summer of 2014, we just started doing some double feature pairings. My favourite one was Phantom of the Paradise with The Toxic Avenger [laughs.] Really having fun with the idea of pairing films that you wouldn’t otherwise watch together in a free, very relaxed space where you could also drink, snack, and maybe step aside to play an arcade game, but very much an open, free, and accessible way to interact with movie culture with your friends.
I started that and put that on my resume [laughs,] and that attracted the attention of the first theatre that hired me as a film programmer. With this job specifically, it’s not a profession you can learn any other way. I did not know how to book film titles for theatrical screenings until I started doing it. There’s really no educational training for this kind of work outside of understanding film history, film movements, and studying different aspects of this very rich medium, but there’s really no way to learn the nitty gritty of it until you’re doing it. It was a fun exercise in audience experimentation, what I was doing with my friend in his backyard in the summer of 2014 and 2015. Really coming to the idea of film programming as not just picking movies, but understanding what your audience wants to see and anticipating that.
(FR): There is a tremendous amount of research, consideration, and effort that goes into the process of creating a film series. What does that process typically look like for you?
(KJ): The process of ideating for a film series can start in several ways, especially at the Academy Museum. We take inspiration for the programs at the museum through several modes. Of course, we always have the opportunity to dive into our institutional history and the 96 years of the Oscars. We really get the opportunity to exercise that muscle through our Oscar Sundays program. There’s always opportunities to speak at the museum about our institutional history, trends, and certain figures that stand out throughout that history, especially with regard to leadership at the organisation, and the folks and filmmaking movements that have been reflected in the history of the Academy Awards. That’s always going to be a part of the film programming that we do and we’re so fortunate that we have access to resources like the Margaret Herrick library, where that vast wealth of institutional knowledge exists and is kept alive by the librarians and researchers who work there.
When we’re thinking about ways to activate our exhibitions and our galleries, there’s always different approaches that you can do. For example with our John Waters exhibition Pope of Trash, a full filmmaker retrospective is the easiest, go-to answer for how to take a John Waters narrative and put it on-screen in our cinemas. Tonight at midnight, we’re kicking off our series In the Midnight Hour: A History of Late Night Movies. If you have studied J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum’s book Midnight Movies, they make the argument that Pink Flamingos is one of the six first-ever midnight movies, with El Topo being kind of the initial midnight movie. In thinking of other ways to draw attention to the John Waters exhibit, my team and I thought it would be really a fun experiment to activate the history of midnight movies through a repertory series, and so we have John Waters joining us to introduce Pink Flamingos, which is really exciting. It’s also not a one-to-one way of thinking about the galleries. There’s fun ways to take our The Godfather exhibition, for example, and focus on a single figure who was working behind the scenes on The Godfather, the make-up artist Dick Smith in this case. We did a robust Dick Smith retrospective to honour The Godfather exhibition and point back to that.
Marlon Brando is also, of course, a figure represented in The Godfather exhibition. It’s been really fun to tease out his entire filmography and think about what would be the most interesting ways to showcase his trajectory as an actor and as a performer. The Godfather is one of those texts, so we’re pointing back to the galleries again, but this is also Brando’s centennial year, yesterday would have been his 100th birthday. We’re really lucky to also have our wonderful exhibition curators leading the way when it comes to that initial deep dive research, because our curators are working on such a longer lead time than our film programs are. When it comes to determining which films to include in a series, and we can use the Brando series as an example, for me it starts with watching and reading. Going back and re-watching some of his films that I haven’t seen in a while or making new discoveries. A couple of films that I watched that did not make it into the series were really revelatory for thinking about him and his trajectory as a performer and the different phases of his performance career. So it really just starts with watching and then reading.
There are so many biographies on Brando, even though he really rejected the idea of celebrity. He had a real disdain for celebrity actually and a lifelong resistance to biographers. So it’s interesting to see just how many there are; the wide breadth of books that are available, either written during his lifetime or posthumously, considering who Brando was on-screen and off-screen. So a lot of reading went into it and also a lot of consideration about what we’ve screened recently and what we think will play well with our audiences, which is not so much research, but really comes from a knowledge of our own institutional history as a museum. We’ve been open for about two and a half years at this point, but we have already done over 1,000 screenings at the museum. Even though we have screened The Godfather several times [laughs,] we decided to screen it again because it’s such a seminal text for his career and such a big moment for him as a comeback performance.
When we’re thinking about ways to approach a series, there are several different starting points, but ultimately for me it’s about watching, reading, and talking. Having thoughtful discussions with my team and asking them, because each of us comes from different backgrounds, experiences, and film history knowledge. To ask them wherever they think it would be interesting to watch his performance in Burn! versus The Chase, and which might offer a different side of Brando the performer for an audience that we hope are coming to as many of these screenings as possible.
(FR): What was your experience like working with Brando’s estate?
(KJ): The Brando archive have been incredible collaborative partners on this program in opening up their vaults and letting us have access to some incredible primary source material – letters that Brando sent and received from various figures and celebrities, politicians, people of cultural import. They have audio recordings, he used to record on, I believe a dictabelt, his rehearsals, so that he could listen back to them. Even though, throughout his life he was an incredible mimic. He could spend five minutes with you and be able to emulate your walk immediately after those first five minutes of knowing you. He was really keen on studying people’s speech patterns and being able to replicate them. He perfected, through the use of this recording technology, his practice of his accents. They have some of those recordings, and so to be able to listen to those was also a fascinating way to see this different side of this almost godlike figure for so many people. To have that access and that intimate access to him was so great. A major thank you to the Brando archive for opening their doors to us as we were doing the initial research for this series.
(FR): One of the great benefits of what the Academy Museum does with a series, or in many cases, a combination of series, programs, and exhibitions, is provide a greater picture of an artist’s life and work. What were some of your thoughts behind the choice of films in both series?
(KJ): There are two parts to this series, there’s our Oscar Sundays Brando celebration, which is four titles that include his Oscar-nominated or winning performances, and then there is the limited series Forever a Contender that is focusing on the films that didn’t receive Oscar recognition for his performances. We knew that part of the story of Brando was always going to be the story of the Oscars, famously and infamously in one specific case. We wanted to pay tribute to some of his more interesting performances in different modes. Of course, recognizing his close collaboration with Elia Kazan and their important work back at The Actors Studio and when they were both studying with Stella Adler. It was really important to showcase some of these better known titles, like The Godfather, On the Waterfront, Julius Caesar, and A Streetcar Named Desire, in order to look at the dominant narrative of Brando, which is the narrative that most of us are familiar with.
Then in thinking about some of the titles that maybe don’t screen as much or show a different side of his personality and his incredible talent, I did want to dig deep. There are some that I just didn’t have the space for, because we don’t have the space for everything, unfortunately. I would have loved to screen The Chase, I would have loved to screen The Freshman, I would have loved to screen Apocalypse Now. Instead, we’re pulling out films like the rarely screened Burn!, which we found an amazing print of. We were able to find a version that is not dubbed, where Brando is actually speaking for himself. There are both versions out in the world, so it was very important to do that research and actually locate a print where we hear Brando’s voice in that role, because there is a dubbed Italian version of that film that I think audiences would have been very disappointed to see.
Also to focus on his sole directorial effort in One-Eyed Jacks, which is at this point, one of my favourite westerns of all time. I think it’s so idiosyncratic and part of that comes from the nature of its production, with Stanley Kubrick stepping off the project and Brando stepping in to take over for him. Also the fact that it’s a California western – it’s not very often that you see horses riding along a beachfront in a western and to see horses riding along a beachfront ridden by Marlon Brando is truly a one-of-a-kind image. As with so many of the projects that he worked on, especially in the 1960s and moving into the rest of his career, social justice was such an important aspect of his life. That comes from his family and a sort of genetic history of being predisposed to gravitate toward and speak about social justice causes and issues. Some of the more complicated portrayals of marginalised figures come through in One-Eyed Jacks in a really nuanced way that we, quite frankly, rarely see in westerns. It was important to allow some of the off-screen aspects of Brando to seep into the films that we were picking.
That also includes Guys and Dolls. There was a moment when he started at The New School and was studying under Stella Adler, that he was also taking classes in the dance department and taking choreography classes. He thought for a minute that he wanted to be a modern dancer. The fact that he’s engaging with a late-era classic Hollywood musical like Guys and Dolls is also a dip into that career that could have been for him. Even though he never quite fancied himself a singer, it is really interesting to think about him engaging, in his own way, with a production mode that usually does have exuberant song and dance. I have always, from childhood, loved that movie, so it was important to include it.
(FR): The Academy Museum is really good about offering a broad scope of formats. As in many of the series the museum presents, you’ll be screening in a number of different formats for Forever a Contender, including 4K and 35 mm.
(KJ): Whenever we can, we really prefer to screen a film in the format in which it was shot. In the case of all the films in this retrospective, they were originally shot on film. There have been some instances like One-Eyed Jacks, where it’s been rescued from relative obscurity and been restored. And so, of course we want to show the best available copy of that film. You kind of nailed it, we really are looking to find the best quality material for each film. In some cases that’s a 35 mm print and in other cases it's a more recent 4K restoration.
(FR): What are some of the conversations happening in and around this series?
(KJ): On the opening night of the program we are screening A Streetcar Named Desire, preceded by a conversation with Rebecca and Miko Brando, two of Marlon’s children. We’ve also invited actor Cary Elwes, who worked as his personal assistant for like three days on Superman. Cary Elwes’ stepfather made three pictures with Brando, including The Missouri Breaks, so Cary has incredible stories about their relationship, their time together on set and their times spent later as friends. We also have actor Ed Begley Jr., who is also a noted and very vocal environmentalist. He and Brando would have long discussions about ways to make the island that Marlon Brando later bought after shooting Mutiny on the Bounty. He purchased the island that was partially used to shoot that film and has been really at the forefront of considering sustainable ways of living in island territory. Ed Begley Jr. will be sharing some of the ways that he and Marlon were discussing to make clean and green power. Brando was a voracious reader and really interested in understanding how to turn algae into a fuel source and was thinking about deep ocean water cooling. All sorts of methods that were pretty ahead of his time. We haven’t really been thinking about clean energy in this country for more than 20 years in a really substantial way and Marlon has been gone for 20 years.
In the same way that he was at the forefront of civil rights issues, he was always thinking about the worker behind the scenes. He was incredibly invested in spending time with the grips and the artists who were working to support the major positions on a film set. That’s who he was eating lunch with on breaks, was the grips, the dolly grips, the third ADs. He was spending time with them not to soak up praise from them, but just to have fun and have real conversations with real people. When we’re joined on stage by David Page, who is one of Brando’s costumers for the last three films that they worked on together, including Don Juan DeMarco, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The Score. David will have a lot to share about the ways that they interacted – the late night conversations they would have when Marlon would call him at 3am to discuss what was on his mind, because he was having a bout of insomnia. I think David has a lot of stories to tell about the way Marlon interacted with folks like him on set, the hair and make-up artists, the folks you wouldn’t think a star of Brando’s calibre would maybe gravitate to. I think a lot of those will come up in conversation and also, his biographer, Susan L. Mizruchi, really thinks that some of his ideas were quite prophetic and were almost anticipatory. Not only the social justice issues that would still be on our minds today, but if Brando were still alive – I don’t want to speak for him – I would love to hear what Marlon would have to say about Black Lives Matter, about Me Too. I think he would have a lot of ideas that would really surprise us. His critique of celebrity and what it meant to be a celebrity was extremely evolved. I wonder, for example, what Marlon would say about influencers, because I’m sure he would have an opinion.
(FR): Growing up, were there classic movies that made an impact on you?
(KJ): The Wizard of Oz [laughs,] was a big one for me. We must have had it recorded off of TV on VHS. There’s actually a home movie of me sitting and playing with dolls in my room quoting lines from it when I was two. I didn’t realise how much that movie meant to me until I saw that home movie and was like, “Oh wow, this has always been a part of me. That’s pretty deep.” The Wizard of Oz is a major one for me. When I was in my tweenage years, I definitely gravitated toward thrillers, not necessarily what I would call horror movies. I was really into Hitchcock when I was 12 and 13, especially his earlier black and white films – Strangers on a Train and a lot of those thrillers. I was the weird kid who was bringing Psycho on VHS to a sleepover. Those are two major ones, big MGM musicals like The Wizard of Oz and there’s others of course. Singin’ in the Rain was a huge, huge movie for me as well and still is. It’s going to be a film that we screen at least once a year until the end of time, because it is not just one of the great Hollywood musicals, it is also starring one of the greatest performers to ever do it, Gene Kelly, and it is one of the best films about filmmaking ever made.
THE ACADEMY MUSEUM is the largest museum in the United States devoted to the arts, sciences, and artists of moviemaking. The museum advances the understanding, celebration, and preservation of cinema through inclusive and accessible exhibitions, screenings, programs, initiatives, and collections. Designed by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Renzo Piano, the museum's campus contains the restored and revitalised historic Saban Building—formerly known as the May Company building (1939)—and a soaring spherical addition. Together, these buildings contain 50,000 square feet of exhibition spaces, two state-of-the-art theatres, the Shirley Temple Education Studio, and beautiful public spaces that are free and open to the public. These include: The Walt Disney Company Piazza and the Sidney Poitier Grand Lobby, which houses the Spielberg Family Gallery, Academy Museum Store, and Fanny’s restaurant and café. The Academy Museum exhibition galleries are open six days a week, from 10am–6pm, and is closed on Tuesdays.
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