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American Experience - Eugene O'Neill: A Documentary Film

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Anyone can make a documentary. It's become quite formulaic. You start with a story you want to tell, have a narrator anchor your tale, illustrate with moving images or still images over which you move, layer music and sound effects to create a mood, and add a healthy dose of "talking heads" to gain intimacy and credibility.

Put together Muhammad Ali, Lloyd Price, Zaire, "Rumble in the Jungle," and George Plimpton, and you get Leon Gast's ninety-minute "When We Were Kings." Put together Babe Ruth, Billy Crystal, Ebbets Field, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," and Bob Costas, and you get Ken Burns' eighteen-and-a-half-hour "Baseball."

Anyone could have made a documentary on Eugene O'Neill. Of course it helps to have a big brother, who plucks you from the Columbia University campus to help him fight nine episodes of "The Civil War." It helps to have already made a highly acclaimed documentary of your own on the Big Apple. It helps to have enlisted the venerable Arthur and Barbara Gelb, who know more about your subject than you can ever hope to know. It helps to have a bit of luck - to have your hand slapped by a PBS executive for stretching a two hour documentary into three, and then being told that your next project on Eugene O'Neill, which you had planned on running four hours, WILL come in at two - or more precisely, 112 minutes. And it helps to be a genius.

On Monday evening, January 23rd, some 150 invited guests filled the MGM Screening Room at 6th Avenue and 55th Street in New York City. They previewed the American Experience PBS documentary "Eugene O'Neill," which will premier on Monday, March 27, 2006. They previewed the genius of Ric Burns.

"What does it cost to be an artist? What did it cost to be Eugene O'Neill?" director Lloyd Richards asks in the opening moments of the film. "It cost Eugene O'Neill a mother, a father, a happy marriage, children. It cost the many wives that he tried to have because he didn't know how."

Burns uses Richards and his other "talking heads" to seamlessly tell his story. "When I interview them, I sit across from them and look them in the eye," Burns related at his Steeplechase office, several days after the screening. "If you don't look them in the eye, they lose interest, and you've lost them."

Burns didn't lose playwright Tony Kushner, who movingly remarks in the film, "In O'Neill, there's this absolute, sort of God-ordained mission, which is to keep searching, even if in the process he discovers that there is no God. It's a terrifying sort of mandate, but it also I think should be the mandate of all artists, and in a way, of all people." Narrator Christopher Plummer provides the anchor for playwrights Kushner and John Guare, directors Richards, Sidney Lumet and Robert Brustein, and O'Neill scholars Edward Shaughnessy and the Gelbs. They all respond to Burns' deft technique, and are transformed from "talking heads" into eloquent orators. Burns uses these heads to speak words about O'Neill. He uses a second set of heads to speak O'Neill's words. Al Pacino, Zoe Caldwell, Christopher Plummer, Robert Sean Leonard, and others strategically speak dialogue from O'Neill's plays. They "speak" O'Neill's words, as opposed to performing them, and tell Burns' story in much the same way that the playwrights and the directors and the scholars tell it. It's a brilliant juxtaposition that helps Burns keep his story moving at a cohesive, break-neck pace.

Burns starts his story in 1937, when O'Neill moves into Tao House, his California hillside home. Burns uses this point in time as a fulcrum to look backward and relate O'Neill's break with his family, and then look forward, as O'Neill reclaims his family and, as his reputation declines and illness threatens to silence him forever, wrenches from himself three of the greatest plays ever written by an American.

Burns' story could have been told over four hours, or even eighteen-and-a-half. The Gelbs would have had no problem providing the necessary substrate. But that hand-slapping PBS executive fortuitously forced them to cut and cut and cut their story to 112 minutes. Integrated with Brian Keane's magical score, a perfectly accessible tale was crafted that can be easily consumed in one sitting.

The 150 invited guests in the MGM Screening Room already knew most, if not all of Burns' story. It wasn't necessary to give the likes of Ted Mann and Ben Brantley a history lesson on O'Neill. Had Burns' documentary served only to educate, it would have been just another formulaic example of its genre. But, it did much more than educate. It forced those gathered on January 23rd to feel what it cost to be an artist, and it forced many of them to shed a tear for O'Neill and for others they had known who had paid that price. Those assembled felt the tragedy and the genius of Eugene O'Neill. And they felt the genius of Ric Burns.

I just saw the preview on PBS last night, and came straight here this morning to get a copy - it's that good. Kushner and Gelb have great insights, the music and photos are wonderful, and Plummer does a heartbreaking rendition of James Tyrone's Booth speech from Long Day's Journey. If you've ever been a fan of America's greatest playwright, you must have this DVD.

It has been said that great conflict makes for great drama. The life of Eugene O'Neill is living proof of this fact. His was a life of physical, emotional, and spiritual anguish, and yet he is arguably the greatest American playwright, an artist whose work still speaks to us today. As a matter of fact, it was the very torments that he lived through that fed his genius. His Muse was his pain, and this is what this film explores in detail.

The man that we encounter in this documentary is not one who was crushed by his trials, but rather, he was a survivor, who used his experiences to create some of the greatest works of dramatic literature to ever grace a stage. He was a man who was truly dedicated to his art, and this film gives us a chance to realize and appreciate exactly what that means.

Narrated by Christopher Plummer, and drawing on interviews with playwrights and actors of today, we are given a chance to see what made Eugene O'Neill the man that he was, and to appreciate just what he has done for the American stage. It is the portrait of a tortured soul, who at the same time was a great artist.

American Experience - Eugene O'Neill: A Documentary Film

Utterly moving, well made documentary about America's first and greatest playwright. Written by Barbara and Arthur Gelb, the difinitive biographers of O'Neill. Narrated by Christopher Plummer (none finer)and both the Gelbs - with tour-de-force acting from excerpts of O'Neill's works by Al Pacino, Jason Robards, Zoe Caldwell, Liam Neeson, Robert Sean Leonard, Vanessa Redgrave. Additional narration by no less than two of the former Deans of the Yale School of Drama (arguably the finest in the country): Robert Brustien and the late Lloyd Richards. As an acting major at the Yale School of Drama(66), I had the privilege to peruse a few pages of O'Neill's original manuscripts. (O'Neill's works are housed in the Yale Bieneke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.)

If internal emotional turmoil contributes to any writer's talent, then Eugene O'Neill has certainly earned his rights. From the day he was born, life on this earth was difficult for him. This documentary explores his life from his early childhood to his forming years as a writer. We learn how O'Neill's experiences shaped him as a writer that made him one of the most prominent american playwrights and eventually Nobel Prize winner for literature.

At the end of this documentary, you may not like O'Neill as a father or a husband; but you will definitely find a path to better understanding of his craving for privacy and why he made both personal and professional choices that he did.

I got exposed to Eugene O'Neill via this PBS documentary. I watched the second half of it and was so moved that I had to buy it. I hadn't bought anything from PBS in some years and I have many PBS works in my library, but I just couldn't resist after seeing this. I didn't even know that I had only caught the second half until I got the DVD and watched it in its entirety. Truly brilliant work on the part of Ric Burns. I then ordered some of the DVDs of O'Neill's plays and saw first hand why the subject of this film was so admired. This film does O'Neill and his work justice. The readings of his plays from Al Pacino, Christopher Plummer, Liam Neeson and others are fantastic. Jason Robards who performed in the original productions of some O'Neill plays says some great words on theater acting. This is yet another great work from Burns. Very moving and inspiring in its depth of exploration of such a powerful figure as O'Neill.

I enjoyed the Burns documentary about O'Neill a great deal, but his portraying of Carlotta was dismayingly flawed. She was increasingly horrific to O'Neill as years went on. I assume Burns was blinkered to this by the Gelbs who, in their works on O"Neill, also ignore Carlotta's near-savagery. For a detailed description of her conduct, see the book WHAT IS AN EDITOR? SAXE COMMINS AT WORK, written by Dorothy Commins. Saxe Commins was O'Neill's editor at Random House, and he saw the awful side of Carlotta up close.

Built around the idea of what it costs in emotional and psychological terms to be an artist, Ric Burns's captivating docu-portrait is disquieting rather than celebratory, and ultimately quite moving. O'Neill's cathartic personal struggles, like those of so many creative minds, fed into plays like "A Long Day's Journey Into Night" and "The Iceman Cometh," but exacted a hefty toll on the man himself. Kushner and theater director Brustein highlight what made O'Neill's unrelentingly savage moral vision so effective--and his technique unmatched--while Pacino, Redgrave, and Zoe Caldwell demonstrate why the finest actors always sought to interpret his works.

I was writing an English paper about Long Day's Journey into Night. All the websites gushed over O'Neil and his works as genius. I wrote a paper based on this information, but did not think it felt authentic. When I watched this DVD and saw the emotional pain he felt; the life he went out to live on his own. Subsequently how all this misery and questioning was funneled into his writings (even some of his creative writing process) affirmed that O'Neil was a genius. But the price O'Neil had to pay for his genius was great. Any lover of drama or American literature will consider this a must have.

A must see for any O'Neil fan. Beautifully executed with performances from some of the most talented theatre actors.