‘What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael’ : Film Review | Telluride 2018
by Todd McCarthy
How do you sell a documentary? Watch and learn as five preselected up-and-coming nonfiction filmmakers pitch their ideas before a live audience and a group of eminent documentarians.
“In a 2011 magazine piece about the great and controversial Pauline Kael, who served as The New Yorker’s film critic from 1968 until 1991, Nathan Heller described the propulsive, sometimes vexing singularity of her voice like this:”
“Quentin Tarantino Calls Pauline Kael The Kerouac Of Film Critics In Upcoming Documentary”
By Erin Whitney
Some of you might know that we launched a Kickstarter Campaign to raise finishing funds for the film. Since it went online, the campaign has garnered a bunch of great press, including pieces in the New Yorker, Pauline’s former home, and the Huffington Post.
Besides that, here’s a nice mention from Film Pulse, another from The Film Stage, and from Sound on Sight which says: “We’re huge fans of the Roget Ebert documentary Life Itself, but now we could be getting a movie based on the life of a critic who inspired even him.”
Much good news!
- Shuchi
“‘What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael’ Examines the Genius of One of the Most Celebrated Film Critics”
With principal photography now complete, we have launched a Kickstarter campaign to seek finishing funds for the documentary. Find our project on Kickstarter under “New & Noteworthy” or by clicking this link.
By Katey Rich
“Hey directors: next time you get a bad review, just remember, critics hated Citizen Kane when it first opened, too. That’s the lesson learned by David O. Russell, at least, in reading the work of Pauline Kael…Russell is far from the only filmmaker who’s been hugely influenced by Kael. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael documentary includes interviews with Quentin Tarantino, Paul Schrader, Robert Towne, Francis Ford Coppola, and Alec Baldwin”
By Sam Adams
“What She Said comes at an important juncture, as Kael’s stock seems to have fallen in recent years, or at least her name is no longer spoken with the same reverence. But the live-wire crackle of her prose has not diminished with time, and her ability to break from the herd without (usually) descending into petty squabbling is sorely missed.”
Filming over the winter has taken the filmmakers from New York to Pennsylvania, to San Francisco and Berkeley, California, where Pauline Kael was raised and educated; then to Los Angeles, and Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where she lived for the last 25 years of her life. Over 40 interviews have been shot, with writers directors, artists and friends, amongst others.
Shooting continues in the spring in the New York metropolitan area.
Work also continues at the Pauline Kael archives, located at the Lilly Library at Indiana University, where the filmmakers have located new photographs and audio material that has not yet been made public.
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