Movie Star: The Secret Lives of Jean Seberg
- 2015
- 1h 56m
"Movie Star: The Secret Lives of Jean Seberg" is the first documentary film to focus on the private side of the famous Marshalltown, Iowa native. It will also examine Seberg's very public Am... Read all"Movie Star: The Secret Lives of Jean Seberg" is the first documentary film to focus on the private side of the famous Marshalltown, Iowa native. It will also examine Seberg's very public American and international film career, civil rights era activism, and her mysterious death ... Read all"Movie Star: The Secret Lives of Jean Seberg" is the first documentary film to focus on the private side of the famous Marshalltown, Iowa native. It will also examine Seberg's very public American and international film career, civil rights era activism, and her mysterious death in Paris. "Movie Star" features exclusive on-camera interviews with Jean's family, friends... Read all
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Storyline
These lasting legacies of film magic and selfless social activism are sensitively captured in the new documentary, "Movie Star: The Secret Lives of Jean Seberg."
More than 20 years in the making (since conceived by Seberg author Garry McGee of Elma, Iowa), the intensely personal, illuminating and sympathetic 93-minute portrait was produced by Kelly and Tammy Rundle of Moline-based Fourth Wall Films with Mr. McGee, who filmed key interviews with Seberg family and friends in the 1990s.
Some of the most moving footage comes from a 1991 interview with Seberg's sister, Mary Ann, who appears in her first on-camera interview and recalls that Jean declared she wanted to be a movie star at age 5. She was dead by 40, of an apparent suicide, which remains mysteriously questioned in the documentary.
Born in 1938 in Marshalltown, Iowa, Seberg shot to international stardom short of her 18th birthday when she was picked from among 18,000 applicants to play Joan of Arc in Otto Preminger's "Saint Joan" (1957). She went on to star in 37 films (over 22 years) in America and abroad, including the landmark French New Wave film "Breathless" (1960), by director Jean-Luc Godard.
From her high school drama teacher to others who knew her best, we learn what made Seberg special -- from her large, hypnotic eyes to a trend-setting fashion sense, to a thoughtfulness and intelligence that radiated from everything she did.
Mary Ann relates how Jean was ahead of her time in many ways, including her interest in politics, medicine, social justice and philanthropy. We see how she worked for the underdog, the underprivileged, and just wanted to make the world a better place. An interview with a 1950s-era Iowa governor shows Seberg as chair of a "Teenagers Against Polio" group, supporting the March of Dimes.
Seberg joined the NAACP at age 14, was an advocate for the Meskawki Tribe in Tama, Iowa (near Marshalltown), was active in the civil rights movement, and was targeted by J. Edgar Hoover with a successful F.B. I. smear campaign. That, according to the filmmakers, is the reason she has been largely forgotten by Iowa and America.
"She was a person, like all of us, who made good choices and bad choices," Mr. McGee said in a release on the film. "There were things that happened to her that she didn't deserve. Jean was just trying to do what was right. You see a consistent thread throughout her life of reaching out to people who had fewer opportunities than she had."
One of the highlights of the biographical film -- filled with private family photos and video -- is an interview with former Black Panther Party leader Elaine Brown, who was Seberg's friend at the time the F.B.I. targeted the Panthers (Seberg supported the civil-rights group's free breakfast program for children). Hoover personally issued a memorandum saying that Seberg should be "neutralized," and the actress' phones were tapped and agents were assigned to follow her.
"Her career was destroyed. Her marriage was destroyed. Her life was destroyed by what they did," Ms. Brown said.
"The documentary strips away the Hollywood gossip, the national media hype, and the F.B.I. propaganda to find a young woman of conscience embroiled in the important issues of her day," producer Kelly Rundle said in the release. "She also carved out a unique and important international film career."
An F.B.I.-instigated rumor while Seberg was pregnant with her second child said the father was a "black militant." At the time, she was married to French novelist/diplomat Romain Gary, with whom she had a son in 1962.
The story was printed as fact in Newsweek and 100 newspapers in August 1970. A shocked Seberg went into labor three months early. The child, Nina (conceived from an affair), lived for just two days. Seberg took her dead daughter to Marshalltown for burial to show the public the rumor was a lie, and her friend and musician Mark Adams-Westin (who played at the funeral) is interviewed in the film.
He wistfully recalls in that era, artists weren't about making money but "about being human and humane," Mr. Adams-Westin said. "That was something Jean had and Jean shared." He and his wife Amy (from St. Paul, Minn.) will provide music at a reception before Saturday's Figge screening.
After being reported missing Aug. 30, 1979, Jean Seberg's dead body was found Sept. 8, nude, wrapped in a blanket in the back seat of her parked car, just blocks from her Paris apartment. The official report showed she overdosed on prescription drugs and had a high blood-alcohol level. In the documentary, doubts are raised that she killed herself.
Seberg's heart and tenderness also "lit up the screen," Mr. Adams- Westin says in this beautiful, bittersweet film. "Her beauty was from the inside out and that made her a movie star, the genuine love that she had, that she shared on screen."
He will be among a post-screening panel that will answer audience questions Saturday. In addition to the Rundles and Mr. McGee, the Q&A will also include Richard Ness, associate professor of film and media studies at Western Illinois University, who's also in "Movie Star."
The Rundles received a Midwest Regional Emmy nomination for their documentary "Country School: One Room – One Nation," and multiple awards for their documentaries "Lost Nation: The Ioway" (1, 2 & 3) and "Villisca: Living with a Mystery."
Mr. McGee is the author of "Jean Seberg: Breathless" and co-author of "Neutralized: The FBI vs Jean Seberg" and "The Films of Jean Seberg." He received a Midwest Regional Emmy nomination for writing on "The Last Wright," a documentary he co-produced with Lucille Carra.
*** Originally published on QCOnline.com.
- jturner-16015
- Mar 7, 2017
Details
- Runtime1 hour 56 minutes
- Color