SXSW: Mary Tyler Moore Doc Director of TV Star’s Legacy

“Mary is an easy person to fall in love with,” says filmmaker James Adolphus, who has been making a documentary about Hollywood icon Mary Tyler Moore for the past three years.

In being Mary Tyler Moorewhich HBO will release in May after a March 13 premiere on SXSW, Adolphus documents Moore’s career and interweaves professional highlights such as the Dick Van Dyke Show and the Mary Tyler Moore Show, with inclusions from an extensive personal archive. The goal is to show Moore’s impact on entertainment and on generations of women. One of those women is the documentary’s producer, Lena Waithe.

After Moore passed away in 2017, Adolphus says, her husband Robert Levine was tasked with preserving the star’s legacy, but wasn’t sure how to go about it. There were offers from other filmmakers to tell Moore’s life story, but he wasn’t convinced until he got one Vanity Fair 2018 cover story by Lena Waithe where she is photographed watching an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show. Waithe told later THR that she wanted to make a biopic of Moore, saying “I’ve read her autobiography more times than I can count.”

Ahead of the film’s SXSW premiere, Adolphus narrates The Hollywood Reporter that Levine “found it remarkable that a young, unapologetically black and strange woman from Chicago’s south side gave this huge shout out to Mary.” Levine teamed up with Waithe’s Hillman Grad flag, while Adolphus, whose credits included Soul of a nation, collaborated with Waithe on a project set up in ill-fated Quibi. When that project was sidelined, Waithe presented him with the option of a Moore documentary.

The director read Moore’s autobiography and immediately felt a kinship: “I’m black and Puerto Rican. I fully understand the glass ceiling defined by the white male patriarchy.” The star spent much of her career as a feminist symbol, battling a male-dominated field both on screen and in Hollywood.

The film opens with a 1966 television interview with Moore conducted by David Susskind, who rants about the relationship between husbands and wives, asking questions such as, “Don’t you think that working mothers, regardless of their jobs, tend to Shortcoming? emotional?” Looking back over sixty years, the line of questioning can easily provoke outrage. Adolphus says, “It was so irritating to see Mary go through that, and then I love that she stands her ground and quotes Betty Friedan. What David Susskind represents is what Mary has to fight for the rest of her life. ”

The document includes audio testimonials from Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Phylicia Rashad, James L. Brooks, and Norman Lear, but it’s Moore herself who takes the audience through her entire career. The documentary is largely narrated by Moore’s voice, using audio of career-spanning interviews from various late-night performances and talk shows. She follows her childhood in New York and moves to Los Angeles, where dance ambitions became an acting career, which brought her into the world Dick van Dyke show and her eventual eponymous sitcom and production company.

It also deals with Moore’s relationship with her son and her stepchildren, as well as her three marriages. Adolphus worked with Levine to retrieve old photos and home videos from the personal archive, including a precious video from Moore’s bachelorette party before he married Levine. All told, editing took 50 weeks to complete, with the entire documentary taking some three years in the making.

While the documentary is comprehensive and touches on key touchstones of a decades-long career, Adolphus notes that there is one facet of Moore that the filmmakers failed to include, namely Moore’s sexual assault at just six years old by a family friend. The actress wrote about the experience in her autobiography, but, Adolphus says, there is no audio of her speaking about the incident.

Mary went out of her way and was in her sixties to include it in her book. And she did that for a reason. And I think it was incredibly brave,” says the director, who says Moore’s willingness to write about her past with sexual assault helped him share his own experience with sexual assault.

After SXSW, being Mary Tyler Moore, produced by Debra Martin Chase Ben Selkow, alongside Waithe, will be available on both HBO and HBO Max streaming service. Adolphus hopes that audiences, whether fans of Moore or introduced to her by the documentary, see themselves in her story.

“I think people think of Mary, and they think of a woman who was an actor who was on TV,” says the director. “I didn’t grow up watching her. i was none Mary Tyler Moore fan. I just fell in love with Mary Tyler Moore, the human being who dealt with – not all things – but also many of the things I dealt with in life.