Transcript:
Interview with Anne Kelly, Feb. 19, 2018.
So what are we working on? We are working on a musical that’s based on the life of Leni Riefenstahl.
Leni Riefenstahl was most famous for being the main propaganda filmmaker for the Third Reich. But, she also was probably the most talented female filmmaker of the 20th century. Her contribution to filmmaking as an art and as a practice -- with the invention of camera techniques and really revolutionary cinematography is something that’s been really buried because of her affiliation with the Nazi party.
Aside from that though, she was a helluva firecracker of a woman who worked her way up and managed to, through her relationships with other German filmmakers, gain a larger and larger role until she was making, directing, shooting, and starring in her own films, prior to the outbreak of the war. It was from there that her affiliation with the Nazi party really took hold, because Hitler became a huge fan of her work, and then she was asked to shoot the 1934 Nuremberg Rally, in which they pioneered some incredible techniques that really cemented the party as being a force to be reckoned with, and it really was a masterwork in terms of galvanizing the German people behind the Nazi agenda.
She had a love / hate relationship with Joseph Goebbels, who is probably the most famous in the cast of characters of the Nazi party, but as the Minister of Propaganda, she really was sort of the arm of that, but she tried to create her own thumbprints on that work and take that assignment and just ultimately make a beautiful film.
This show is all about the responsibility of the artist. And how much you can really claim that all you were doing was making a film, and it doesn’t really matter who you were working for. Other key aspects of the story are just the fact that she was such a beautiful and charismatic woman herself that she had many opportunities -- and a certain mystery still remains around whether or not she used her feminine wiles in order to secure her place in the German filmmaking community. But she was also given the opportunity to go to Hollywood alongside Marlene Dietrich, and she chose not to go. That was the divergence between what her life could have been and what her life became as a result of her affiliation with the Nazi party.
To her dying day, she claimed that she didn’t know what her work ultimately did with regard to the Holocaust and the murder of millions of Jews. And so she, until her dying day, really refused to apologize for the role that she had because she claimed that she never actually belonged to the Nazi party, and in fact, after the war, the only way she was really prosecuted was that she was referred to as a “fellow traveler.”
So this is the person that we are making a musical about. And you make ask us why a musical is the form that this story has to take. And the answer to that is that there is a really rich tradition of artists who have come before us to tell sort of horrifying and complex stories using musical theatre as a medium. We’re definitely standing on the shoulders of people like Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill with shows like Threepenny Opera...Cabaret and a lot of that has to do with the way in which Leni herself was such a master at presentation, and such a master at manipulating people’s own view of herself. There’s really no other way this could be done except for her putting on a show herself. And so the musical is extremely aware of the audience and is a very curated perspective that she has created in her own world. And there’s a certain amount of -- because it’s German and because it’s Weimar-era Germany that then transforms into wartime Germany. So it really does feel like tackling things like contemporaries, like just the way Brecht would have done, seems like the right stylistic choice.
But we feel really really strongly that this story has to be told right now. Because, as you start delving into the story of Leni Riefenstahl, you start realizing that there are these incredible and disturbing parallels between what was happening in Nazi Germany with discrediting the media as being an essential part of the rise of nationalism and the rise of fascism in Germany. That Leni Riefenstahl completely aided in creating, really with just the pure emotional aesthetic quality of her films. So, that’s one thing -- is the rise of nationalism in our own country, and how the media has been completely discredited in that process.
The second is, that we’re in a particular moment, culturally, where females in entertainment are finally starting to… we’re starting to recognize the massive rift of not having female representation in media, not having female representation in the industry that’s creating the media, and what that does to us societally. So here we have a story of a woman who was directing her own films, making her own films in the thirties, and she wasn’t just Mae West with a camera, she was actually smart, and she was actually really, really good at it. So, in this particular moment of the #MeToo campaign, and the Harvey Weinstein scandal, and just recognizing how ultimately broken Hollywood is, this is an essential story to be telling right now, as far as, a female filmmaker is trying to make it in a man’s world and she’s literally fending off unwanted advances from very powerful people like Joseph Goebbels in the process. And then of course, how much she actually uses her sexuality as a part of her chips in the power play, as well to advance her own career and her own agenda. So -- that’s why we have to tell the story right now.
Stylistically, one of the things that we’re super excited about is because we’re making a play that’s about a filmmaker, and it’s absolutely essential that we include footage of the work. And so, we’re in the process of contacting all of the rights holders to some of her most essential films. So, for example, she shot the 1936 Berlin Olympics to create a film called Olympia -- which, the rights are currently owned by the IOC. There’s also a really essential film she created called Triumph of the Will that was based on the Nuremberg Rally, and these films are so beautiful artistically in their own right, and so horrifying as far as the subject matter that they’re communicating, that having the original footage from Leni Riefenstahl’s catalog is absolutely essential because, not only visually does it set the scene and the backdrop for everything, but also, we expect that much of our audience doesn’t even actually realize how familiar with her work they already are because it’s so prevalent in any documentary about World War II or about Nazi Germany. So including the footage in terms of also introducing our audience to the work is really necessary. So, in some cases, we’ll be licensing that footage and including it, and in some cases, we’ll be potentially recreating it ourselves. But one of the things that is really key to that is the way that we plan to incorporate live cameras and live video feeds of those cameras as part of the stage design and as part of the production concept of the show. And, moreover, not only is a matter of simply feeding back of those same images in real time, whether that’s of a fellow performers who are on stage, of Leni herself, the camera viewpoint and who’s holding the camera is really essential to the perspective of the piece. We also would be taking footage of the audience -- but moreover, than just pure reporting back of what’s happening from a particular viewshed, there’s also a massive component of actually live editing and manipulating those images -- which, of course, is what the whole piece is about. And so, for example, having a point where the audience bursts out in laughter and applause in response to a joke, and then having that footage played back at a completely inappropriate time later, and realizing that the audience has been had in that process, and that they've been manipulated to make it at least seem as though something happened that didn’t. That’s something that we’re very curious to play with, because we feel like it could further the story.
To that end, because we’re planning such a heavy media component, the set itself is planned to be very simple. This is also assisted by the fact that, in the script, the play ostensibly takes place entirely within Leni Riefenstahl’s hospital room, when she’s detained by the French after the war, and the whole frame of the narrative is that she’s being interrogated by Americans about her role in the Nazi party. And so, ostensibly the set is very simple, but also in doing so, we transform and we manipulate, and we layer media in order to create all these different environments as we create this kind of chronological, “Ghost of Christmas Past” version of what her life was like, or at least how she frames and hallucinates that her life was like.
Musically, we plan to lean in, very heavily, to that sort of Kurt Weill cabaret style of orchestration. The music team is conceiving of that as being a derivative of a Pierrot ensemble, and really making sure that the style stays true to that kind of Weimar-era musical sound. But, we’re also quite interested in how we can start to overlay practical sound effects and, with our sound design, create a stronger feeling of foreboding, etc. More words about the type of sound design we’re going to be creating as part of it...
The team that’s working on this has been drawn to it by the fact that this is just such a completely compelling story. When you actually watch interviews with Leni Riefenstahl, or the documentary that was made about her life, you really find yourself so horrified and yet, not being able to turn away. She really was a wildly charismatic individual, and the way in which she continued throughout her entire life to live in a bit of a fantasy or a constructed reality around what her role was in the party, just makes it so that you can’t turn away from the story. She is such an incredibly vivacious and individual personality to watch, and you’re so compelled to watch her. But our team was really drawn together by that, and I think that we are kept working on this project by the complexity of it. In this story that Christie wrote, it is the cognitive dissonance between -- we can all agree that Nazis and Nazi propaganda and fascism and nationalism are bad, and yet -- here we find ourselves rooting for the underdog in this female filmmaker who is trying to make her art in the process. But really what the story is ultimately about is the responsibility of an artist in the work that they create and who it might assist in the process. And, if an artist can claim that they can be apolitical.
We have a pretty unconventional, but super exciting team that’s working on this project. The words and music are written by Christie Baugher, who is a phenomenally talented writer based in New York City. She got her MFA from Tisch, and she’s got a number of different musicals that she’s been working on, but this one really sort of flowed out of her, on this particular story. We have Nathan McWilliams, who is a former audio / video engineer from Walt Disney Imagineering, thinking about the sound design and the orchestration component of this. We have myself - I’m an experienced theme park producer and a producer in the tech industry. We have Katie Moeller, who is a filmmaker working in Hollywood right now. We have Peter Torpey, who is a media artist, graduate of MIT Media Lab, who is adept both in the engineering and the artistic side of filmmaking. We have Elly Nattinger, who is an engineer working for Google’s VR team, but also has extensive experience in opera and directing movement and choreography. So we have a really diverse and interesting team, all of whom is drawn together by how essential it is that this story to be told.
Our plan for the coming year is -- since our team is completely remote and spread out all over -- we’re really trying to operate in a bicoastal fashion and build an audience in both New York and Los Angeles at the same time. Because of course, New York is the center of the world for musical theatre, and Los Angeles is the center of the world for filmmaking, so we feel like it’s really essential that we build a presence in both places and also because we feel that our audience is in both places. So, this year, our objectives are for us to start with a table read of the show based on some recent rewrites, and just sort of starting to build the creative team -- hiring the director, hiring designers, which we’ll do by initiating a table read in New York at the end of April. And we’ll follow that with a very simple cabaret staging of the show in Los Angeles in September, in which we’ll then start to invite prospective designers and investors into the process, all leading towards putting on a modest but complete production by the Fall of 2019 in New York. So that’s the roadmap for the show, and blah blah blah, more details in terms of the budget and the designers, etc. And you. You are going to help! And here’s the call to action. Yay!