Alleged child artist Marla Olmstead is the subject of My Kid Could Paint That. (Mark and Laura Olmstead/Sony Pictures Classics)
Two years ago, a four-year-old, tiny-toothed upstate New Yorker named Marla Olmstead was being hailed as the next great abstract expressionist. Over a few months, the wee Pollack sold $300,000 US worth of paintings. A young filmmaker named Amir Bar-Levin was allowed into the Olmsteads’ lives to shoot a documentary about Marla, who literally embodied the most commonly espoused critique of modern art: “My kid could paint that.”
Then, 60 Minutes cried foul. The program suggested — inconclusively — that Marla’s father had a hand in her work. Immediately, the media shifted their take from cooing in the Style pages to vilifying the Olmsteads as exploitative liars.
Bar-Levin was stunned, and not too happy, to discover that he was suddenly in the role of, as he puts it, “judge, jury and executioner.” But instead of an exoneration or a condemnation, he made a movie about the responsibility of filmmaking, subjectivity in art and the mosquito-like attention span of the media.
During the Toronto International Film Festival, CBCnews.ca sat down with Bar-Levin to talk about the result, the documentary My Kid Could Paint That.
Q: Did the Olmsteads end up accompanying you to the Sundance Film Festival like they were supposed to?
A: They sent a statement. It’s online. Just Google “Laura Olmstead” and “heartbroken,” and you’ll find it.
We’re in contact, and it’s amicable, but much of the contact has been through things like this where I say something to a reporter, and they Google it and contact me. So there’s this funny kind of feedback loop happening, which is sort of ironic given that the film tries to explore the difference between the media’s representation of things and reality.
They’re not happy with the film. They posted on their website more recent footage of Marla painting in part at least to rebut the film, I think. But you know, I have never said that Marla doesn’t paint. I don’t have any information that I didn’t put into the film. I think everybody has to make up his or her own mind not just about whether or not there was a hoax, but also what you think about the art.
Q: What I found remarkable in the film is that the more that the parents seem to hang themselves, the more sympathetic one, as a viewer, becomes to them. They’re not really villains, whether you believe Marla painted the paintings alone or not.
A: It wasn’t easy. I think it’s not uncommon that in making a documentary film you spend a lot of time with your subjects and then you sometimes find yourself representing them in a way that they aren’t going to be happy with. What’s compelling for me about those issues is that they dovetail nicely with abstract art issues. You want there to be objective truth in documentary filmmaking, but what does objective truth mean? You’re taking this story, you’re shaping it, so subjectivity and opinion is clearly at play. But the interesting thing to me is that doesn’t let you off the hook about truth. You still have an obligation to the truth and it becomes about personal truth, and representing the story as you accurately experienced it. That’s what we struggled with in the editing room for a year.
Q: The media make mincemeat out these people. How culpable did you feel as another person who, in some way, profits from Marla’s story?
A: In the States right now, we’re so used to seeing people get humiliated on television, whether it’s news or reality TV, and I found myself in a situation where I was quote-unquote, “sitting on documentary gold.” And it didn’t feel good. I didn’t relish it. It doesn’t feel like documentary gold when you’re holding a family’s reputation in the palm of your hand. I don’t know how producers of reality TV feel when they go home at night after filming a great scene where somebody gets humiliated.
If something did happen [and her father helped Marla], I don’t think it was motivated by exploitation or greed, and I don’t relish being the guy who will put the thing out there that Marla will see five, ten years from now. It will impact her.
A:
It was absurd. It made me interested in pointing a little to the process because it was impossible to be a fly on the wall with a four-year-old. She and her brother were always trying to get me to intervene in a dispute, or give them a shoulder ride. I didn’t want to be in the film, so I’d be hiding behind the cameraman and they’d run around to find me. It said a lot about the artifice of documentary filmmaking, in a way.
The other element of having a four-year-old at the centre of the film is the Chauncey Gardiner thing, where she would say these child-like things and adults were imbuing it with great significance. I didn’t want to mock them for this because I see it as a deeply human thing, the desire to see a UFO, or see the Virgin Mary in a water stain, or a child who paints as some kind of vessel. It’s a very deeply human thing to want to believe that these extraordinary moments happen. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t.
A: I’m really glad you asked me that. The film is young, and I’m trying to see how people take it. I want to be clear that these things that I’m pointing out in the film are inherent in the medium of storytelling. It shouldn’t make people sour on documentaries. It should make people aware of how they work. The same way abstract expressionists were trying to make people aware of the act of painting, not trying to pretend as though a landscape is a real landscape. That’s all I was trying to draw attention to. A painting is not a window into reality; it’s a construction, and every documentary is a construction. Every painting, every piece of journalism, every 60 Minutes story, every online interview is a construction. But there’s no getting around it. You’re going to take this interview, you’re going to edit it down, and I took a year of film, I made it into an hour and a half. It’s not a thing; it’s a representation of a thing.
My Kid Could Paint That will open in select theatres in Canada this October.
Katrina Onstad writes about arts for CBCNews.ca.
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