INTERVIEW: New documentary profiles obit writers at NY Times

Obit., now playing at New York City’s Film Forum and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, details the hard work and expert journalistic skill of the reporters on the obituary desk at The New York Times. The revealing portrait follows numerous writers, including Bruce Weber, Margalit Fox, William Grimes and others, as they tell stories of remarkable lives and historical time periods.

The film is the work of director/producer Vanessa Gould, who previously made Between the Folds and a couple episodes of TV’s Years of Living Dangerously.

“I was never really a reader of obituaries, but one of the featured subjects in my last documentary passed away sort of in the middle of his career, just as he was sort of on the cusp of getting some recognition as an artist,” Gould said in a recent phone interview. “The first thing that I did after he died was contact several dozen newspapers just to inform them of his death, not knowing what else I should possibly even do, and the only paper that wrote me back or called was The New York Times. And I couldn’t believe it, and they wrote a remarkably sensitive and authoritative obituary on an artist that the reporter had never heard before and it was unlikely any of The New York Times readers had ever heard of before. I really couldn’t believe it, and so I started looking at the page every day and soon figured out that there’s a real cultural anthropology going on on the obits page. And as a documentary filmmaker, I was just completely drawn in, so after that, I wrote to the Times and said, ‘Hey, what do you think about a film?’”

Although Gould was determined to make a film about the obituary desk, it wasn’t an easy go to have the newspaper approve of the project. She said they were “cautious and appropriately so.” Essentially the workers need to work, and a documentarian might get in the way.

Gould kept trying, and it took almost a year for her to present her case and receive the approvals. “It was slow going and, like I said, appropriately cautious, but at the end of the day, that really helped me figure out what I was trying to do, too, and get to know them,” she said. “And they got to know me, and that year turned into a year of the trust being built that was necessary anyway for a film like this to be done.”

In order for Gould to make the production work for everyone involved, she needed to ask for as little as possible from The New York Times. Because these writers are busy and under deadline pressure, there’s not much time to grant interviews. That left approximately 60 to 70 hours of shooting, which meant Gould would need to fill in the blanks with archival footage.

Viewers may catch a screening of the documentary at the Film Forum and enter the theater with some preconceived notions about these journalists. Perhaps the audience is thinking these workers are serious all the time given the subject matter they write about on a daily basis.

That’s not the case. Obit. features a good deal of gallows humor.

“Why would we presume that obituary writers would be anything other than funny and dynamic?” Gould asked. “I mean, I probably didn’t think that way when I was starting, but, yeah, they’re seasoned journalists. They’ve had a ton of experience across the paper, and they have a sort of gallows humor. But it comes from a place of great intelligence and humanity. Maybe you could say I was pleasantly surprised, but the more I got to know them, the more it made sense to me that these would be the kinds of people doing this kind of work.”

She added: “The way I saw it was just the beauty of the fact that in a daily newspaper that’s talking about what’s going on five minutes ago or yesterday, that you could turn to one page, and there’s incredibly strong journalistic writing about what happened in 1940 and 1950. That’s really what drew me to it.”

Once she started talking to the journalists, she realized there were so many interesting personalities in the newsroom. “It was an embarrassment of riches,” she said. “We interviewed everyone on the desk pretty much, and they were all fantastic. And they really all rose to the occasion, and I feel like we were fortunate enough to capture them pretty authentically.”

Ultimately, Obit. stands as a testament to Gould’s fascination and love for the storytelling that occurs regularly in this section of the newspaper. She said that after reading the stories, her brain opens up to the past.

“Instead of thinking about your daily schedules and what you’re working on and what’s going on with the presidential administration, you exercise [that] part of your brain that’s interested and primed to be curious about history and the civil rights movement and art from the 1960s,” she said. “It’s like a muscle that you start to exercise, but the more you do it, the more your brain starts to save the information and connect the dots of history.”

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Obit., directed and produced by Vanessa Gould, is currently playing the Film Forum and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City. The movie opens up Friday, May 5 at the Landmark Nuart in Los Angeles. Click here for more information and tickets.