Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story is a documentary about Harold and Lillian Michelson, two unknown, sometimes uncredited staples behind the camera in Hollywood. The film chronicles their personal and professional lives from the 1940s through the twenty-first century. Harold started as an illustrator then got promoted to storyboard artist until his career culminated as a production designer and art designer. Because Harold recognized that he married a smart woman who wanted a career, he got her a volunteer position with Lelia Alexander’s private motion picture library on Samuel Goldwyn Studios, which Lillian later bought with his enthusiastic support, and it became the Lillian Michelson Research Library. Because they believed in each other, they were able to breathe life into the films that we love.
Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story uses interviews, illustrations, archival footage, movie clips, montages of movie posters, Harold’s storyboard and photographs and intertitles with definitions of movie terms and quotes to tell their life story. If you love movies, you have to see this film to get an understanding of how a vision comes to life. From a film history perspective, it provides insight into the intersection of art and business.
Even though Harold was behind such iconic films as The Ten Commandments and The Birds, if he wanted to remain employable, he would name drop his work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He called it “politics.” Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story is understated in the way that it demolishes the hierarchy of the film industry and punctures the illusion of the auteur’s single-minded vision. Think Hidden Figures with the human computers being relegated to the margins of history yet essential to the progress of the space industry. Harold is credited as the real visionary behind such greats as Cecil B DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock and such classics as The Graduate, but Harold also credits Hitchcock as honing his skill and taking interest in a person that most people in the industry would prefer unseen and unheard in the shadows to preserve the illusion of a single visionary.
A lot of people praise Harold’s skills without explaining why it is impressive other than the obvious excellent end result of classic, iconic movies. If I had to complain about Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story, it was frustrating that they did not spend more time on the technical difficulty of his work though I believe they tried. Only Lillian attempts to explain how Harold was able to draw accurately to fit the camera’s scope—being a World War II veteran! I will not ruin her story. Harold alludes to the chasm between his perception of The Graduate’s script and Mike Nichols, but the film never delves into how Harold managed to successfully have a meeting of minds with Nichols while having completely different psychological and emotional reactions to the film.
The real voice of Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story is Lillian, which makes sense if you knew that the film was made after Harold died. Lillian provides practical insight into how women’s role in the home and workplace have transformed over the decades. While Harold was ahead of the curve, and maybe our times in the way that he thought women should be treated like people, Lillian may be a time traveler from the future who accidentally got stuck in the wrong era, but because she looks and sounds like she belongs, she could maintain her cover.
Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story may be the perfect documentary for any person struggling from childhood trauma, in their marriage or raising children. Remember Lillian and Harold’s marriage is a self-proclaimed success and paragon yet they had their rough patches which spanned considerable periods whether it was figuring out how to raise a son on the spectrum to become independent and self-sufficient or continue to have “shared experiences” in spite of work demands. Remember that one day the kids should leave so it is important to have something else that you share when they do. Also one day, you will die, and your kid will be on their own so it is better to foster independence in them instead of doing everything for them and protecting them. She did all the work over the years, but you can benefit from her hard-earned wisdom by just devoting ninety-four minutes of your life to watching the documentary. “Even if you fight, there is no enemy there. We were a team.” I love how she described how hard she had to fight to make life fit her.
Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story seems quite frank, but any documentary that depends on access to the subject will not be able to probe further than the subject allows. Lillian, who was instrumental in making Rain Man refused those filmmakers access to her son, but we never get an interview with any of their kids likely to preserve their privacy. Lillian describes her childhood with her biological birth family as brutal, but does not go further, and while it is important to respect boundaries, and I would not want to trigger her, another filmmaker may try to go around her to get more on her background from other sources then ask her if she was fine with including that aspect of her story using other stories. Sunlight is a great disinfectant, and the shame is not hers, but those who did wrong. She provides so much on the ground, human insight on a historical era that seems distant and removed on a personal level that it feels like a real loss. She is also extremely circumspect regarding details of Harold’s eventual demise. She talks about an injury and how she has to care for him twenty-four hours per day, which means bringing him to work, but a viewer could assume that it was related to his injury, which it was not.
An unexpected result of watching Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story was wanting to know more about David Lynch as a person. I do not enjoy his films, but Lillian notes that he is the only person who was considerate enough to devote time and thought to understanding how she organized the library (no Dewey Decimal System there) and adhere to it. Lynch sounds like a respectful, thoughtful guy, an impression that I would not necessarily associate with him after seeing his work.
If you are a fan of Danny DeVito, then you should definitely see Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story because he appears in many interviews and is the executive producer of this film. He was also responsible for letting Lillian use his lawyer when she had to move her library from Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios to Dreamworks. DeVito clearly considers the titular couple to be his friends and respects them as colleagues. Her library was part work place, part watercooler for people to relax and chat.
I enjoyed the subjects of Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story so much that if I have to go to a nursing home, please find a way to get me into the Motion Picture & Television Fund Home if most of the residents are like her.
