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[0:09] Robert Bannon: Welcome to The Roundtable, everybody. My name is Robert Bannon. You're listening to some Broadway World over here on the Broadway Podcast Network, iHeart, and Spotify, wherever you listen to artists talking about art. And you know, we don't just talk about stuff on stage, we talk about stuff on screen as well. And our next guests have some incredible stuff. So I have so many questions because Georgia O'Keeffe: The Brightness of Light, the film is gonna be out and about, GeorgiaOkeeffeFilm.com. I want to know from our guests today, because Paul allegedly has put out movies that have won awards, and I want to know what awards and does he have those statues in his house. Plus, why this film, what is going on? The lovely Wagner are here. Can I call you that? Is that what you go by? They're the Wagner. They are the Wags. Welcome to the show.

[1:01] Paul Wagner: Thanks so much, Robert. Great to be here.

[1:03] Ellen Casey Wagner: I'm so excited to be able to talk to you all, and I am very excited to find out about this film.

[1:10] Robert Bannon: So, Ellen, did you—before we get to the film, how did you meet in an artistic, artsy kind of way?

[1:20] Ellen Casey Wagner: Well, we did, as a matter of fact. We met at a reception at the National Museum of American Art many, many years ago. It was all meant to be. I was working for public television, he was already an independent filmmaker. We had both had projects that had received some funding from the DC Humanities Council.

[1:45] Paul Wagner: What she's not telling you is I wanted to keep talking to her, and she skittered away from me. She resisted my advances.

[1:54] Ellen Casey Wagner: What he is not saying is that he had just won the Academy Award for Best Short Documentary called The Stone Carvers. And I knew there were a bunch of people waiting to also talk to him and shake his hand. So I politely moved on.

[2:11] Paul Wagner: That's none of this is true. I did win an Academy Award, but there was no one waiting to talk to me. I wanted to talk to her.

[2:20] Ellen Casey Wagner: She was trying to be polite so the masses of people and the fans could come talk to you.

[2:25] Paul Wagner: That's right.

[2:26] Robert Bannon: You do have an Academy Award.

[2:29] Paul Wagner: We do.

[2:30] Ellen Casey Wagner: Yes.

[2:31] Robert Bannon: And is it in your house?

[2:33] Paul Wagner: It is in our house.

[2:33] Robert Bannon: And if I come over, can I take a selfie with it?

[2:37] Ellen Casey Wagner: Of course.

[2:40] Robert Bannon: You know, all the people that come on here that have a Tony, have a Grammy, have they all promised me the selfie, and nobody has followed, no one has come through with my award selfie.

[2:49] Paul Wagner: You just have to make your way to Charlottesville for it.

[2:53] Ellen Casey Wagner: Or we'll bring it in and you can get it, we'll put it on screen with the three of us and you.

[3:02] Robert Bannon: Before I get into the film, can I just bother you about this for one second, Paul? Because not every day Academy Award winners come up. You married an—you guys got together and he had an Academy Award, and you were working in public television, and you guys are in the arts. Is that a fun marriage? Was it exciting that you both are in this industry? Was it a shared language? Was it stressful? Like we better make some money. How does it work?

[3:30] Ellen Casey Wagner: All of the above now.

[3:33] Paul Wagner: When I had left public television about a year before and was working for an independent filmmaker, Jenny Duran, and so Paul and I got married and started working, it just seemed kind of like a natural thing to do. I mean, we started having kids right away, and the office was at home, and I had certain skills that I brought, and you know, we just kind of started collaborating.

[3:58] Ellen Casey Wagner: So our first big production together was Out of Ireland, which was a two-hour history of Irish immigration.

[4:05] Robert Bannon: Oh my gosh, you could have been talking about my grandparents, my great-grandparents back there.

[4:09] Ellen Casey Wagner: So you work together, you live together, you have family together.

[4:13] Paul Wagner: I grew up in Kentucky.

[4:19] Robert Bannon: I was gonna say Kentucky, the University of Kentucky alumni, yes, with an English degree like me.

[4:26] Paul Wagner: And what can you do with an English degree?

[4:28] Robert Bannon: Not very much.

[4:29] Paul Wagner: You can communicate.

[4:32] Robert Bannon: You can win an Academy Award or you could be a school teacher. One or the—it's a range, it's a wide range.

[4:37] Paul Wagner: Exactly.

[4:38] Robert Bannon: What about what you learned about growing up in Kentucky and being an English major and then going back for communications and getting your master's? What have you learned in your career that makes a good storyteller, makes a good film documentary filmmaker?

[4:54] Paul Wagner: Well, I mean, English majors or filmmakers are all about storytelling, so I don't view it as being too far off. The weird thing was I really didn't, you know, unlike Steven Spielberg, who was like, you know, six years old and saw a movie and said, I want to be a filmmaker. I was like into my late 30s before I even had the idea that I would be a filmmaker. I was sort of one of these people who didn't know what I wanted to do when I grew up, and so I just kept going to school. And finally, I stumbled into a documentary film class at Penn, actually in Philadelphia when I was in a graduate program there to get a—allegedly to get a PhD. And I'm like, okay, this is a lot more fun and interesting than getting a PhD.

So I quit the PhD program and sort of declared myself a filmmaker, started making films as an independent filmmaker, and then a few films and a few years down the road, we met, and that's really kind of crystallized because, you know, we've kind of obviously created a family and film endeavor, and also found a place in Charleston. We met in Washington, but you know, fairly soon, well, a couple of kids later, we moved to Charlottesville, where, you know, it's just like it's more possible that it would be, you know, certainly in New York or even Washington, where we can just kind of have a nice lifestyle and not be under too much pressure, you know, financial or business pressure.

[6:23] Robert Bannon: I think that's so wonderful. So, Ellen, your career, you're no slouch yourself, you know. Take his Emmy and Oscar away. You could say, I'm just fancy like you, Paul. You have your own career and you have run a nonprofit organization called American Focus, which—and you've done other films. You talked about Out of Ireland, you've talked about Black and Blue, which is about football players who broke the color line. You have done your own litany of work. Why did you commit to making films about America and the people? America is an interesting place over the past few decades.

[6:59] Ellen Casey Wagner: It has been interesting for 250 years. It is a unique spot in this earth and world. Why do people that are Americans and their stories move you?

[7:11] Ellen Casey Wagner: Well, that's a really good question. I mean, for one thing, we founded the nonprofit film organization over 35 years ago now. So in some ways, America is a very different place now. But we just found ourselves gravitating towards certain subjects. And honestly, it just seemed that seemed to best encapsulate and describe kind of what we were about in very broad terms. So, you know, that's the—and they're not really films about American politics so much. They're about American, the American people and the American culture. And you know, that may mean American history too, of course, but it's more of a kind of humanities approach, if you will, to thinking about America and what does it mean to be an American? And so, you know, that's a pretty broad subject, and it's embraced a lot of things from Irish immigration to America to Georgia O'Keeffe. But it's all in there.

[8:16] Robert Bannon: That's why he's a good storyteller because he gave me the perfect set. You could host the talk show, gave me the perfect segue. Speaking of American icons and people who have incredible stories, you would then eventually stumble maybe upon Georgia O'Keeffe, you know, the incredible modernist painter who, you know, from Wisconsin and all of her incredible—what Ellen makes because if I see Georgia O'Keeffe, I think I'm gonna go to an art museum, I'm gonna look at a piece of painting on the wall. We don't know a lot about the life of these people. You know the name, and unless you're an art historian or very into art, you may not know what her paintings look like. How do you—what made you say, like, I think Georgia O'Keeffe has got a story?

[8:53] Paul Wagner: Yeah, that—yeah, well, it's a great question. It actually was almost stumbling upon it because we—there was an art exhibit at the Fralin Art Museum here at the University of Virginia in the fall of 2018. That's how long ago it was. And it was just about her time in Charlottesville, which was a huge moment for her early in the 20th century, the summers of 1912 to 1916. She took summer school classes in art. And that first summer, she had not painted in four years, and it turned her head around, it turned her life around. And so we just found this whole small and beautiful exhibit fascinating. And originally thought, let's do a short film about that, because no one knows this about O'Keeffe. Well, then, as soon as we started researching more and more, we realized there hasn't been a major film done on her in decades. And the more you learn, the more you want to learn. She's just endlessly fascinating. She had a very long, very diverse life. And so we just decided this is it, we're gonna dive in.

[10:02] Paul Wagner: Wow. We also now—we also had the advantage 20 years after her death, they released to the public 25,000 pages of letters between O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, who, as people probably know, was her lover, husband, nemesis, photographer, artistic partner. And those letters had never been used in a film. So that became sort of the narrative thread that we used to tell her story in these really powerful, very intimate terms. You know, it's like pillow talk almost between these two lover artists, and so it's really compelling stuff, and that becomes—that's sort of the thread to tell her whole life.

[10:57] Robert Bannon: So Paul, you know, what's amazing is she's not here to—you know, you have that artifact, you have that firsthand, but she's not here to be—you know, I watch a documentary, I turn on Netflix, I turn on Hulu, I watch whatever, and then, you know, I see a documentary about so-and-so, and they sit down and speak to a filmmaker and producers like you, and they splice what they say with clips and pieces of their history. Well, Georgia O'Keeffe was not on Instagram, she doesn't have a YouTube channel, she's not here to talk about it. So, where do you find the information?

[11:26] Paul Wagner: Right. Well, fortunately, there have been a huge group of scholars and biographers whose work we were able to draw on, and many of them we interviewed for the film, which was thrilling, and so we had the advantage of all of those resources. And even while she was alive, O'Keeffe was pretty involved in her—in making her image, leaving her legacy, yeah. Very consciously, very, very consciously. And in fact, there is a documentary done in the 70s by Perry Miller Adato, which is a terrific film. But again, I mean, Georgia is on camera and she is very much involved in shaping how she wants to be seen and remembered. So we have perhaps a much more unfiltered look at her because, I mean, to her credit, she could have destroyed the letters.

She could have destroyed the nude photos that Stieglitz took of her, and she did not do that. She chose to keep them. And 20 years after her death, you know, we then, of course, that's not been—she's been dead 40 years. So the materials have been out there for 20 years. And some, again, scholars and biographers have taken advantage of them, but we were able to utilize them.

[12:40] Robert Bannon: Talk uh talk about the uh footage you found in addition to the 1977 footage, which is what people are sort of if you go on YouTube, that's what you see, you know, in the clips of O'Keeffe.

[12:53] Ellen Casey Wagner: Uh, but I found some incredible footage that had never been seen since 1964.

[12:58] Paul Wagner: So tell him.

[12:59] Ellen Casey Wagner: Yeah, yeah, it's it was a thrill. We um we were all kind of our little team was researching, trying to unearth any perhaps new footage of her or new photos. And um, so I was actually looking online at the Museum of Modern Arts archives that is available online, and I saw a reference to television and the arts.

[13:20] Ellen Casey Wagner: And so there was this kind of just a piece of paper that had been scanned and uploaded. And here I found a reference to O'Keeffe doing an interview on NBC in 1964. No, no one knew about this interview, and it had been over 60 years that since it had been aired. So I started digging, trying to find out if we could get a copy of it. We haven't had an archive producer, Prudence Arnt, who also was helping. And through her context, she kept pushing. They initially said no, we don't have it. And she pressured them and was very persistent, and lo and behold, they came up with this footage, which is it's really quite remarkable footage.

[14:04] Ellen Casey Wagner: It's like O'Keeffe, you we just hadn't seen in forever. Uh, she's wearing a brilliantly turquoise colored dress and some makeup, and she's very youthful looking, although honestly it was '64, she was already in her 70s.

[14:18] Paul Wagner: Wow.

[14:19] Ellen Casey Wagner: But it's a remarkable look at her, and we were just so excited. Yeah, everybody has an image of O'Keeffe always wearing the black dress, never smiling, you know, which was something that she can't an image that she consciously created, particularly in her 70s when every famous photographer in America went out to New Mexico to take a photograph of her, and this wonderful filmmaker did the interviews with her. But the footage that Ellen found, she's wearing turquoise, she's smiling, she's you know, a whole kind of different personality than you think of, uh, you know, than the public thinks of. And so it was really a remarkable find.

[15:00] Robert Bannon: We're talking everyone about Georgia O'Keeffe: The Brightness of Light. Um, and uh where can we, before we go into it more, how can we support the film? How can we get the chance to see the film? And we'll talk more about the film in a minute. But I want before we get too far in the weeds, who can tell us a little bit about what we could do?

[15:17] Ellen Casey Wagner: Yeah, no well, the easiest thing to do is to go to the film website, which is Georgia O'Keeffefilm.com with no punctuation, just Georgia O'Keeffe Film.com. And um, as of next week, it will actually be available for streaming for video on demand. Um at this for the past year plus, we've actually been booking it in theaters all over the country, which has been fantastic to see it on the big screen. And in some cases, Paul and I could go out and do QA's, which we've loved, seeing the audience and hearing what they think and um getting some great feedback. But uh, but in any case, we'll continue to do in those screenings. But we're still gonna do those in the meantime, it will be able to be viewed by a lot more people through streaming.

[16:03] Paul Wagner: Yeah, no great. There'll be a link to uh to where you can uh go to video on demand right on the website.

[16:09] Robert Bannon: Yeah, I get it. So go to the website, the link for the website will be below so you don't have to miss a moment. So, Paul, she lived 98 years, so that's a lot of story and life to tell. So, what is the through? And I love, see, I love I do a lot of interviews with documentary filmmakers because people say, Why do you love documentary filmmakers more than narrative more than fictional narrative filmmakers? Because they don't there's no script. Sometimes you don't have an ending, sometimes you don't know what's gonna happen. You don't know if you're gonna find that footage, you don't know if you're gonna get the speaker, the person to come on and speak about it. So, what is the story that this is telling?

[16:42] Paul Wagner: Yeah, well, it's very much we sort of mold a lot of different approaches and we settled on kind of a classic straight biography. There's an opening and a closing, but within those is a straight biography, birth to death. And the reason it works so powerfully is her life was so long, so varied, with so many ebbs and flows and ups and downs. You know, today people think of Georgia O'Keeffe as like, oh, she was an incredible painter, she's an American icon, you know, one of the great, probably well, certainly the great American woman painter of the 20th century. And so you tend to think, oh, she was like infallible and could do no wrong and couldn't make a bad painting. Well, in when she was uh an adult into well into our guest 60s, she went back and destroyed about 40 of her own paintings because she felt like they weren't good enough. So she was very kind of self-critical of this of her own work.

[17:44] Paul Wagner: So this idea that, like, oh, she, you know, can always make a great painting. She didn't think that about herself. And she actually lived most of her life with a lot of insecurity. Ellen just mentioned that she had stopped painting for four years. When she was 20 years old, she gave up painting. She was already a rock star. She was known nationally uh in art schools as a great painter, and she just said, I'm through with it, and walked away from it for four years. Much later in her life in 1934, she didn't paint for a whole year. She had basically what was like a nervous breakdown. So here's this iconic Georgia O'Keeffe, who can all powerful, can do no wrong, is actually a very fragile person in many ways.

And when you track her life, you can see both things. You can see the talent, the brilliance, the power of her personality. And yet, because we have these letters, she's revealing the most intimate sorts of frailties and hesitations and insecurities. So it's this very dynamic portrait. And at the end of it, what we love about kind of making it a biography and telling the whole life is that you can relate to her not as an icon as a great artist, but as a human being, just like all of us. We all, you know, think we're great and then think we're horrible and have difficulties in our relationships, our intimate relationships, our public relationships. And you know, you tend to think, oh, I nobody else has these kinds of problems. But then you see this life of this amazing person, you realize she's just a human being too, someone that you can really relate to.

[19:25] Robert Bannon: I love that. And for Ellen, for uh women out here, I know at the end of your your website, you have a list of her life, and some of the pictures are so beautiful. Like I love her older in that black outfit you're talking about. It's such an iconic mood. The mood of it is like, oh my God, this lady's a boss. But yeah, a lot of women are a lot of women are inspired by her. A lot of women are inspired by her independence and who she was and what she stood for. For you, is that part of the appeal? What for people who think this is she's old, I don't know anything about art. I don't want to watch some documentary where it's gonna be black and white pictures that I'm gonna be bored. What is the women that are out here? What can you say like you how they're gonna be inspired by who she was?

[20:06] Ellen Casey Wagner: Well, yeah, honestly, you can't not be inspired. She was so persistent and she had such an integrity about her, despite everything going on in her life. She just had she just she knew she had to follow her deepest, deepest uh, you know, longings of her soul, and she just continued to do that uh throughout her life. I mean, it's it's really extraordinary and it's very inspiring. Uh and and it doesn't matter if you don't like her art at all. I mean, you could it it it's really the story of uh, you know, everyone has one life to live. What the heck are you gonna do with that life? And here's this woman showing you one way to live a life. Um and uh we we've just we've loved having the privilege of showing that life to people and and also hearing from people and how it's moved them and inspired them. So um yeah.

[21:04] Paul Wagner: How do you not love not love her art? It's the most gorgeous colors and and and designs in the ever. Um, what a brilliant uh artist and story. When you talk about the American story and people who come from somewhere and literally from I don't want to say nowhere in an offensive way, but nowhere, and grow to become an icon that will be talked about forever, is uh definitely a story worth talking about. So for people that are out here who love art, who love stories, who love empowerment, who are looking for creativity or inspiration, this is the film to see.

[21:38] Ellen Casey Wagner: Absolutely.

[21:41] Paul Wagner: We hope they do. I'll just mention one thing that we found in the audiences that we've talked to.

[21:46] Ellen Casey Wagner: Please, I'm sure there are a lot of O'Keeffe fans out there, and the comments that we get most in the at when we have a little talk back after the film is people say, I thought I knew everything about Georgia O'Keeffe. I'm a huge fan. I've always loved her for my whole life. But uh until I saw your film, I didn't really know Georgia O'Keeffe. And they come away with a whole fresh new vision of who she is, even though they've loved her and the image of Georgia O'Keeffe their whole life.

[22:18] Robert Bannon: Do you do you got wow? You so you see, this is why I'm not a filmmaker because my computer's gonna die. I had to get up in the interview, I have a bad shot, and now I gotta plug my computer. See, this is why they have Academy Awards. I can't even win anything. So when you guys come up with a subject and you come up with this idea, are there a running list of ideas? Like, are you ready to move on to the next one? Is this still ruminating in your brain? Do you and what gives you the inspiration? Is it do you see something? Do you speak of something? Do you watch, I don't know, CBS Sunday morning and say, Hey, it's George O'Keeffe's hundredth, you know, 200th birthday. What what is it that gives you the idea?

[23:01] Paul Wagner: The key word that you mentioned and Ellen mentioned about the Georgia O'Keeffe film was stumbled. We stumbled into her subject. We're the least kind of organized, you know, and then we're gonna do that. Now we're gonna do that. And this is a great subject. We kind of stumble onto our subjects, just like we stumbled into the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibit and thought, wow, this is nobody knows this. This should be a film. That's sort of how we find all of our subjects. And a lot of them start locally, uh, but we try to find stories locally that have larger implications, national or world or historical implications. And that's certainly been the case with O'Keeffe. And so I wish I could say we were very smart and organized and and uh, you know, had things all blocked out and had our next eight subjects lined up, but no.

[23:58] Robert Bannon: I love it. I I love it. This film, you got to go to the website, everybody. You have to check it out, Georgia O'Keeffe Film.com. You'll find all sorts of facts, like she was one of the most photographed people in the 20th century. I'm look reading a little bit about her before I talk to you all. It's her artwork is gorgeous, but her is what is really hooked me because they the look of her and this the the image that she portrayed through her life is like who is this woman? And you can find out who this woman is when you watch this incredible documentary by these incredible filmmakers that we're so grateful to talk to today. Congratulations to you about this.

[24:36] Paul Wagner: Thank you so much, Robert.

[24:38] Ellen Casey Wagner: So great to talk to you.

[24:41] Robert Bannon: So great to talk to you. I look forward to coming to Virginia and getting that selfie. I'm gonna and I'm and I'm ready for the next. I hope you stumble onto something else great.

[24:49] Paul Wagner: And we will be ready to.

[24:51] Ellen Casey Wagner: We'll be ready to talk to you about it when you do.

[24:54] Robert Bannon: Great. Thanks so much, Robert. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Ellen. Thank you for being here.

[24:57] Paul Wagner: Take care.