People in Film

Have you noticed something about the title of the hit film My Week With Marilyn? It doesn’t bother to tell us Marilyn’s surname – almost 50 years after her death, it assumes that audiences will still know and care who Marilyn Monroe was. Even if they have never seen any of her films, they will recognise the pout, the hair so blonde it’s almost white, and the breathy voice.

In the beginning, she wasn’t blonde and she wasn’t called Marilyn. She was born Norma Jean Baker in 1926, and after an unhappy childhood and a short time working in a factory, she first appeared in a film in 1948. By 1950, she had a small part in the classic showbiz satire All About Eve. And within four years she was one of the most famous people in the world, after playing dizzy (although sometimes secretly scheming) but lovable characters in a series of brilliant comedies – Monkey Business, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Seven Year Itch. She even got to star opposite the greatest classical actor of the time, Sir Laurence Olivier, in The Prince And The Showgirl. The troubled making of that film is the basis for My Week With Marilyn.

Despite usually playing glamorous and not-too-bright characters, Marilyn Monroe was desperate to be taken seriously. She read serious books and took classes in the deep emotion-based Method acting. Her third husband was the respected playwright Arthur Miller, but she never managed to change the public’s view of her.

She had a reputation of being hard to work with, needing dozens of attempts to get a scene right, but the hits kept coming, including Some Like It Hot, which turns up on lots of lists as one of the funniest movies ever.

Her final film, The Misfits, showed that she was capable of doing serious work in a bleak drama. Marilyn Monroe died in 1962 – she was only 36 years old. But her fame hasn’t faded. It helps that so many of her movies were good – she was in surprisingly few failures. She also had an incredibly strong image – even more than other traditional Hollywood movie stars, she looks and sounds the same in most of her films. And just as importantly, that image worked perfectly for still photographs – her posters are still big sellers up to this day. That Marilyn look has been copied by dozens of stars since, from Madonna in her Material Girl video to Miley Cyrus. And as My Week With Marilyn shows, that legend isn’t about to disappear.

More from FILMCLUB

Read our interview with My Week With Marilyn director Simon Curtis

Perhaps you’ve already heard of the puppeteer Jim Henson, and you instantly think of some of his famous ‘Muppet’ creations like Kermit the Frog. But you may be surprised to discover how influential he was in the world of film during the 1980s.

After his experimental short film, Timepiece, was nominated for an Academy Award, Henson’s big break came in 1969, when he was asked to work on a new children’s TV programme called Sesame Street. Thanks to the popularity of puppets Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, and many more of Henson’s zany cast, Sesame Street became an enormously successful show.

As well as ‘performing’ characters (providing the voices and operating the puppets), Henson played an important role in their design, working with different materials like foam and felt, which made them more expressive than marionettes made from wood or plastic. He is also credited with introducing the methods for filming scenes with the puppeteers off-screen, out of the shot, rather than hiding behind boxes, as in a ‘Punch and Judy’ show. This technique allows the characters to appear more believable and ‘real’.

In 1976, filming began on The Muppet Show, Henson’s new TV series, produced in the UK. And three years later, the Muppets hit the big screen with The Muppet Movie. By now Henson was a highly respected figure in Hollywood, and film studios would often ask for his help when creating characters for the screen. The success of the Muppets allowed him to work on other ideas and 1982 saw the release of an ambitious fantasy film, The Dark Crystal, followed up with Labyrinth in 1986.

Throughout his career, Henson collaborated with lots of other talented filmmakers, including Star Wars director George Lucas. Henson helped with the realisation of the character Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, voiced by his great friend and collaborator, Frank Oz.

Though he died in 1990, Henson’s legacy continues and, if you watch the credits at the end of films and television programmes, you’ll notice that Jim Henson’s Creature Shop is mentioned surprisingly often. It’s one of the most highly respected special effects studios around, and has worked on the likes of Babe; Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Batman Begins. And the ever-popular Muppets are still starring in their own films like The Muppet Christmas Carol; Muppets From Space and 2012’s The Muppets.

Hattie McDaniel was a talented and pioneering African American actress of the 1930s and 1940s – but her career was not without controversy. Known for playing maids and servants across film, TV and radio, she is most famous for her role as Mammy in the 1939 civil war epic Gone With the Wind (PG). This role, for which she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, made her the first black actor to win an Academy Award and one of the most successful black actors of her time.

Born in 1892, in Kansas, Hattie was the child of two former slaves. Her path to Hollywood began when she joined her brother’s minstrel show. Made up of dancing, comedy and music acts the show travelled America until the Great Depression of the 1930s meant they could not afford to continue. Taking work as a bathroom attendant in a nightclub in Milwaukee, Hattie was soon on the stage again when the owner of the club discovered her voice. She performed at the club for a year then moved to Los Angeles in 1931 where her brother Sam got her a part in the radio play The Optimistic Do-Nut Hour. Playing Hi-Hat Hattie, a bossy maid, she was the first black woman to sing on radio.

Following her radio success she won small roles as maids or servants in films - her first being in The Golden West (1932) and continuing with films such as Blonde Venus (1932) alongside Marlene Dietrich and I’m No Angel (1933). Hattie was not credited in these films. It was only when she sang with Hollywood hero Will Rogers in 1934’s Judge Priest that she began to be noticed.

From then on Hattie was invited to play meatier roles, still maids or servants but with more lines and a bit more attitude. She built a career around being the comically outspoken and spiky domestic help, like Queenie in Show Boat (1936), leading her to the award-winning role of the daringly honest but caring Mammy alongside Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind (1939).

Unfortunately while Hattie celebrated her rise to fame, some civil rights leaders were embarrassed by what they saw as her promotion of a negative and dismissive stereotype of black people as doting, domestic servants. Her response to them was strong, announcing "Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making $7 a week being one".

Hattie continued her success into the 1940s, ending her career as the Housekeeper Beulah Brown in the TV family comedy The Beulah Show. Diagnosed with breast cancer, she quit the show early in 1952 and died later that year.

A controversial figure to the end, her dying wish be buried in the Hollywood Cemetery alongside other movies stars including Rudolph Valentino was refused by the cemetery’s racist owners - instead she was laid to rest in Rosedale Cemetery. In 1999 the cemetery came under new ownership, and they offered to right this wrong by reinterring her body. Her family didn’t want her remains disturbed, but a large memorial now stands there in her honour and is a popular place of pilgrimage for the fans she continues to inspire.

Say you are watching a news report about a troubled housing estate on the TV. Chances are that the crew haven’t been there long. No matter how good they are, they only have minutes to get the people who live in a difficult place to trust them and then 90 seconds of airtime to tell a complicated story they may not fully understand. It’s an almost impossible job.

Now, here’s how Steve James approaches things. For his classic documentary Hoop Dreams (1994) James spent 180 days over five years shooting with two high school basketball players from tough backgrounds and their families. He ended up with 250 hours of film. He then edited that down to the amazing three hours that make one of the most emotionally powerful and insightful non-fiction films ever made.

With Steve James, don’t expect lots of professors or journalists in his films explaining why the people he’s filming behave the way they do. “I don’t use experts,” James has said. “I want those people who are living in the world, the one I am filming, to be the experts.”

Journalist Alex Kotlowitz worked with James as a producer on his new documentary The Interrupters (2011), about some incredibly brave people from Chicago’s poorest communities who are trying to break the cycle of gang violence. Getting to see them at work on the streets meant forgetting about a regular timetable. According to Kotlowitz, “For the course of the year when we were filming, we were on call 24 hours a day.”

Of course, very few filmmakers have the chance to spend so much time on a project. But it has a lot of advantages: it means the crew get to know the people they are filming, and it means they can let stories emerge. “When you make films like mine, you don’t start with a script, you start with an idea,” James claims. “If you’re true to the experience, you simply let it take you where it takes you.”

With more time, the small crew can do everything differently, says James. “When shooting scenes, I think it’s just as important, and sometimes more important, to see the person not talking. The impact on those listening can be more revealing than keeping the camera trained only on the person speaking.”

There can be problems, though, with getting so close to the subject of the films. Gaining people’s trust means they sometimes reveal things they later regret. “I get increasingly uncomfortable with the invasiveness of documentary filmmaking and I think there's no getting around it, especially if you're spending years filming people, because you develop relationships,” James has said.

But then those relationships are exactly what makes James’s documentaries so special.

More from FILMCLUB

>> On the Blog: An interview with Steve James
>> Films by theme: Inner City

The name Jean-Luc Godard may not mean much to you. However, if it wasn’t for this convention-smashing French filmmaker, cinema as we know it today would look and feel very different. Not only has he directly influenced an array of industry talents, from Martin Scorsese to Submarine director Richard Ayoade, but also many of the techniques he pioneered have now been incorporated into the mainstream. Consequently, almost every movie you watch has a touch of Godard somewhere in its DNA.

What’s particularly interesting is that Godard started out in the 1950s as a critic – writing for the groundbreaking French film journal, Cahiers du Cinéma. But after deconstructing cinema on paper, the then 20-something decided (like many of his Cahiers colleagues) that deconstructing it on the big-screen was the logical next step. The result was his triumphant first feature, À Bout de Souffle (1959), which established him as one of the key directors in a realism-centred film movement, known as the French New Wave (or ‘Nouvelle Vague’).

This vibrant crime flick, about a petty thief cop-killer and his American girlfriend, was a shot of celluloid adrenalin that stuck two fingers up at the stuffiness and fake gloss of traditional cinema. Inspired by American gangster movies, it became a New Wave benchmark, with its documentary feel, hand-held camerawork and inventive jump-cuts. Plus, thanks to a ton of pop culture and film references, every single frame oozed cool. At the time, nobody had seen anything like it: it was youthful, radical and exhilarating. Now, of course, all these stylistic elements are commonplace, with pop culture nods in particular littering contemporary pics, from comedies to animation.

Godard’s hip experimentalism continued to impress throughout the 1960s, as he consciously inverted everything he knew about cinema. He didn’t just want people to let his work sweep over them: he wanted to give them something to reflect on – to turn everybody into a critic. So in Le Mépris (1963), for instance, he used the crumbling marriage of a screenwriter (and Brigitte Bardot’s charms!) to debate commercialism versus artistic expression; while 1965’s compelling mix of sci-fi and film noir, Alphaville, laid the foundation for modern flicks such as The Matrix (1999) and Blade Runner (1982), with its cautionary themes of alienation and loss of individuality in a technology-dominated society.

Each of Godard’s projects during this golden period pushed the artistic envelope further, introducing such trademarks as disconnected dialogue, randomly combined imagery and sounds, blocks of on-screen text and characters talking direct-to-camera. Naturally, with Hollywood constantly hunting for new ways to attract audiences, diluted versions of these techniques ultimately filtered into the mainstream, rendering ordinary cinema more imaginative and interesting. The most exciting impact though was on the outlook and style of individual directors, including icons Jim Jarmusch, Wim Wenders and Wong Kar-Wai. Quentin Tarantino proved an especially big fan: visually referencing the dance scene in Godard’s playful 1964 heist movie Bande à Part in his own Pulp Fiction (1994), for example.

Unfortunately, Godard’s increasingly political and deliberately head-scratching work since the 1960s hasn’t always been so enthusiastically received; although, true to form, he’s refused to simplify his vision to become more accessible. Nonetheless, highlights have included his Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), a fascinating series of video essays chronicling cinema, and the enigmatic meditation on love, Éloge de l’Amour (2001). Now in his 80s, Godard is as challenging as ever: prompting adoration and condemnation alike with his latest socio-political art experience, Film Socialisme (2011). Okay, it’s not the easiest viewing, but the fact he’s still making us debate his movies after five decades in the business emphasizes how important he remains.