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Special Features
- Back to Binghamton– a mini-doc with Director Amir Bar-Lev that includes follow-up interviews, Sundance Q & A, Binghamton Q & A, deleted scenes, etc.
- Kimmelman on Art – a mini-doc with the New York Times art critic
- Audio Commentary
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Suitable for framing, Amir Bar-Lev's "family human interest story" indelibly captures the media maelstrom that engulfed the Olmsteads of Binghamton, N.Y. when their daughter, Marla, age 4, became the darling of the art world with her abstract paintings. As a gallery owner tells Bar-Lev, the situation is "perfect": The family is charismatic, and Marla is, indeed, "a doll" and her paintings, "unbelievable." More on that later. Bar-Lev chronicles how a community newspaper article about Marla was picked up by the New York Times, leading to more newspaper articles, sold out gallery showings, and media throngs. Marla's paintings sold upward of $25,000 (the owner of the Houston Rockets bought one), and talk-show hosts (Conan, Dave, Oprah) wanted Marla on their shows. "You're in for a wild ride, I hope you're prepared for this," the gallery owner says he told Mark Olmstead, Marla's father, a Frito Lay factory worker who also dabbles as an artist. But no one is prepared when Charlie Rose, during a 60 Minutes Wednesday broadcast, raises questions on whether Marla is the sole artist. Was she coached? Were the paintings doctored, or even painted by someone else? Could she even be called a prodigy? Bar-Lev's canvas expands to consider the nature of art and media culture. It also becomes something of a self-portrait as he struggles with his own growing suspicions about Marla's paintings after he has befriended the family and earned their trust. My Kid Could Paint That is not a masterpiece, but it will resonate especially for everyone who says they don't know art, but they know what they like. It would be an excellent companion to Who the #%&% is Jackson Pollock? --Donald Liebenson
Stills from My Kid Could Paint That (click for larger image)
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Product Description
In this thought-provoking documentary, Director Amir-Bar-Lev tracks the overnight celebrity of little Marla Olmstead, a toddler who creates gallery-worthy paintings on the dining room table of her family home. A media sensation by the age of four, critics compare her work with Jackson Pollock’s. Sales of her paintings reach $300,000. But, sadly, the bubble bursts. When a 2005 profile by "60 Minutes" suggests that Marla had help making her paintings, the finger is pointed at her father, an amateur artist and night manager at Frito Lay. Almost overnight, her family is ensnared in a web of accusation and denial – with the burden of proof placed squarely in their lap: Is Marla a child prodigy or an innocent victim of a hoax?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
This documentary exposes, in a very objective manner, the manipulations of the "art world," the media and a very young child by parents.
Parents are ultimately charged with assuring the well-being of their offspring. This is a not-for-profit endeavor. I was as disturbed by the actions of these parents as I am by the pushy stage mothers who dress their daughters up as mini-adults and parade them on stage to win pageants. I perceive that the father in this story would be just as easily at home on a Little League field bullying an umpire as well as engineering this greed and publicity driven scheme.
My heart was also aching for the little brother. The scene depicting him pulling on his father's chair, seeming to beg for attention by announcing that he also painted while "in his mother's belly" spoke volumes.
I viewed the father as a strutting peacock who glories in the exploitation of this situation, and squirmed with discomfort as I watched the mother seem to gain sudden "awareness" while watching the televised expose. When that dawn came, it did nothing to bring the exploitation to an end. The documentary later shows her tearfully regretting what has transpired, but this masterpiece of manipulation and exploitation continues. Therefore, I hold her just as culpable as the father, who is the ring-master of this sad circus.
What is tremendously clear in this documentary is that this situation had become quite disturbing, that this negativity was abundantly clear to the parents, and that they fostered the continuation of the exploitation.
This is a brilliant and objective but very disturbing film.
Parents are ultimately charged with assuring the well-being of their offspring. This is a not-for-profit endeavor. I was as disturbed by the actions of these parents as I am by the pushy stage mothers who dress their daughters up as mini-adults and parade them on stage to win pageants. I perceive that the father in this story would be just as easily at home on a Little League field bullying an umpire as well as engineering this greed and publicity driven scheme.
My heart was also aching for the little brother. The scene depicting him pulling on his father's chair, seeming to beg for attention by announcing that he also painted while "in his mother's belly" spoke volumes.
I viewed the father as a strutting peacock who glories in the exploitation of this situation, and squirmed with discomfort as I watched the mother seem to gain sudden "awareness" while watching the televised expose. When that dawn came, it did nothing to bring the exploitation to an end. The documentary later shows her tearfully regretting what has transpired, but this masterpiece of manipulation and exploitation continues. Therefore, I hold her just as culpable as the father, who is the ring-master of this sad circus.
What is tremendously clear in this documentary is that this situation had become quite disturbing, that this negativity was abundantly clear to the parents, and that they fostered the continuation of the exploitation.
This is a brilliant and objective but very disturbing film.
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
By ScottJ
Format:DVD
*SPOILERS*
This is an excellent movie that is made even better if you figure out what is actually going on here. For while the film begins as a celebration of this girl's amazing talents, it quickly becomes an involving detective story much like Capturing the Friedmans - though one that ultimately inverts the trajectory of that film. Among many ironies and paradoxes in the film's treatment of modern art, the ultimate one may be that if you don't think through the evidence clearly the film itself becomes a similar kind of Rorschach test, eliciting dramatically opposed views of the film and especially the filmmaker. But make no mistake: the ambiguity is superficial. Especially with the fantastic bonus materials on the DVD, there is enough evidence to figure out what is really going on. The filmmaker is clearly torn between the academic film theories he embraces and foregrounding his own views. I have no such qualms about explicitly connecting the dots.
I presume familiarity with the movie. The central question is as follows: Did the father do these paintings, or the daughter, or some combination? The possible answers vary depending on which paintings one is talking about. For the paintings that initially made her famous, it is stated unequivocally by several people in the film that no one outside the family ever saw the girl painting. Thus, these paintings could have been done entirely by the daughter, entirely by the father (who is a painter), or some combination. After CBS' 60 Minutes II places a hidden camera (which the couple took two months to agree to), we see the first example of a painting definitely painted by the daughter - at least physically painted by her, a point to which I will return. This painting is pretty clearly seen as far inferior to her other works by everyone who discusses it in the film, including the parents. Now, "inferior" is not really the right word to use in this context, because there can always be someone with a different view of what constitutes interesting art. What is really at stake here is the clearly different style from her other works, and especially the fact that it much more closely resembles the art of other children her age (a point both obvious and explicitly stated by the children's art expert interviewed on CBS, one of three experts they consult who all agree). And the problems don't stop there: CBS also captures the father sternly commanding his daughter off-screen with lines such as, "Pssst .... Paint the red. Paint the red. You're driving me crazy. Paint the red." "If you paint, honey, like you were ... This is not the way it should be." (heard in the film; also see the CBS transcript, a link is provided from the "My Kid Could Paint That" Wikipedia site).
When Marla's reputation is at least partially restored, it is courtesy of a DVD made by the family of her painting the work "Ocean." This seems to show conclusively that only the daughter did the painting, and the work is clearly more in the style of her other paintings than the one done for CBS. While the whole video is not shown in the film, it almost certainly follows the pattern of the more recently documented paintings on Marla's website (which are short excerpts from longer films available only to collectors, though the principles involved would be the same for the longer versions). There are two crucial differences from the CBS taping: music is the only sound, and they are splicings showing only the moments when she paints at many different times. It also suffers from a limitation apparent in the CBS video, a frame that only encompasses the canvas, not what is going on in the room. These can be interpreted as aesthetic choices, but they also eliminate all information on one of the crucial factors exposed by the CBS video: the father coaching his daughter on what to paint. Two different people in the film and bonus feature, and implicitly the filmmaker, note that "Ocean" seems different from her more famous prior works: certain kinds of brush strokes in those earlier paintings are absent, and overall it has a more "primitive" childlike quality. Again, this is not to make a judgment about the quality or value of the piece as art, which is subject to individual judgment; it is, rather, to note that the piece does not have many of the qualities in the works that initially made her famous.
The facts presented above can be explained in one of two ways. By the father's explanation, the girl happened to do a poor painting for the CBS hidden camera, and she is so shy around cameras that she can only paint when they are absent. By the filmmaker's suggested view, the father has been at the very least co-painting with his daughter. According to this view (but not explicitly stated), "Ocean" is an improvement because the father could coach from the sidelines, if not directly paint himself. There are two main factors in defense of the parents' view: their absolute seeming sincerity, noted by the filmmaker and apparent in many key scenes in the film; and the "circumstantial" nature of the evidence against them. I will begin with the second point and return to the first.
After the CBS report, the filmmaker went back over his recordings and found, to his surprise, that what he had thought was clear footage of her painting instead revealed the dramatic differences in quality between painting caught on film and the completed paintings. As he notes in an article, "I was never able to film satisfactory footage of Marla Olmstead painting. When I wasn't around, she completed remarkable canvases larger than herself, with sweeping paint splashes and elaborate flourishes. But every time I tried to film her painting, Marla was distracted or unwilling." This went on for an entire year. Is she just remarkably shy around cameras, as her father suggests? Watch the film again and note how Marla is around cameras: she seems not to notice them at all, and is certainly entirely unrestrained by the presence of the filmmaker, who is frustrated at his inability to film her without her talking to him and breaking the "fourth wall."
If Marla had help, why has she never said this? Marla's remarkable lack of interest in doing or talking about art when anyone other than her parents are around offers part of an explanation. The film leaves this question mostly open, but the DVD bonus feature shows her painting while demanding repeatedly that her father help her. Her father, clearly rattled, tries to cover by saying that she's just acting like a child, and implicitly argues that making anything of this would amount to "gotcha" pseudo-journalism.
In defense of the parents one keeps returning to one main issue: their seeming absolute sincerity. Could such nice, sincere people really be, as one critic sarcastically put it, "supernaturally cunning con artists"? (Harvey review) One first must ask: are there any cases where they clearly do not tell the truth? Marla's parents state repeatedly that they never tried to promote their daughter's work or make their daughter famous, that it fell in their lap. The DVD bonus feature shows otherwise: a curator for a feminist art show discusses a letter (shown to viewers) she received from Mark Olmstead before his daughter was known, asking for inclusion of her work and including a ridiculous "artist's statement" clearly not written by Marla. Not the sort of thing one would forget.
Once it is clear that Mark Olmstead is willing to lie, and to put words in his daughter's mouth, the possibility of it all being an act becomes easier to believe. If he is a very good liar, what about his wife? In a key scene, the woman cries when the filmmaker reveals his doubts. There are three possibilities: her story is true and she is upset that the filmmaker is going to put her through the kind of public humiliation that followed the CBS story; she doesn't know that her husband helps her daughter paint (made at least conceivable by the fact that she and her husband work different shifts and say that they hardly ever see each other) and so thinks her story is true; or she is lying - but this does not mean she would have to fake crying. She would still be very upset that the filmmaker is not going to do what they stated earlier that they hoped he would do, namely to exonerate them. She would probably fear that the whole story would finally fall apart, as it almost did after the CBS expose.
No evidence other than direct documentation of the husband's involvement can officially count as more than "circumstantial." But when "circumstantial" evidence exceeds a certain point one would be foolish not to see where it leads. Nothing about my suggested account requires "supernatural" cunning, it requires only a father with some real painting talent (defined as ability to emulate the standards of successful modern art) and parents (just possibly only the father) with charm and the unswerving ability to lie well. In the age of Madoff and balloon boy, is this really so hard to believe?
This is not a film about the media needing a new narrative to keep a story going. It is a film about investigative journalism getting something right. Read the transcript of the Sixty Minutes II expose, this whole story should have ended there. And yet, if it weren't for the damage to other people's lives, one might say that the real work of art documented by the film is this brilliantly conceived and executed hoax. Regardless, it's not a pretty picture.
This is an excellent movie that is made even better if you figure out what is actually going on here. For while the film begins as a celebration of this girl's amazing talents, it quickly becomes an involving detective story much like Capturing the Friedmans - though one that ultimately inverts the trajectory of that film. Among many ironies and paradoxes in the film's treatment of modern art, the ultimate one may be that if you don't think through the evidence clearly the film itself becomes a similar kind of Rorschach test, eliciting dramatically opposed views of the film and especially the filmmaker. But make no mistake: the ambiguity is superficial. Especially with the fantastic bonus materials on the DVD, there is enough evidence to figure out what is really going on. The filmmaker is clearly torn between the academic film theories he embraces and foregrounding his own views. I have no such qualms about explicitly connecting the dots.
I presume familiarity with the movie. The central question is as follows: Did the father do these paintings, or the daughter, or some combination? The possible answers vary depending on which paintings one is talking about. For the paintings that initially made her famous, it is stated unequivocally by several people in the film that no one outside the family ever saw the girl painting. Thus, these paintings could have been done entirely by the daughter, entirely by the father (who is a painter), or some combination. After CBS' 60 Minutes II places a hidden camera (which the couple took two months to agree to), we see the first example of a painting definitely painted by the daughter - at least physically painted by her, a point to which I will return. This painting is pretty clearly seen as far inferior to her other works by everyone who discusses it in the film, including the parents. Now, "inferior" is not really the right word to use in this context, because there can always be someone with a different view of what constitutes interesting art. What is really at stake here is the clearly different style from her other works, and especially the fact that it much more closely resembles the art of other children her age (a point both obvious and explicitly stated by the children's art expert interviewed on CBS, one of three experts they consult who all agree). And the problems don't stop there: CBS also captures the father sternly commanding his daughter off-screen with lines such as, "Pssst .... Paint the red. Paint the red. You're driving me crazy. Paint the red." "If you paint, honey, like you were ... This is not the way it should be." (heard in the film; also see the CBS transcript, a link is provided from the "My Kid Could Paint That" Wikipedia site).
When Marla's reputation is at least partially restored, it is courtesy of a DVD made by the family of her painting the work "Ocean." This seems to show conclusively that only the daughter did the painting, and the work is clearly more in the style of her other paintings than the one done for CBS. While the whole video is not shown in the film, it almost certainly follows the pattern of the more recently documented paintings on Marla's website (which are short excerpts from longer films available only to collectors, though the principles involved would be the same for the longer versions). There are two crucial differences from the CBS taping: music is the only sound, and they are splicings showing only the moments when she paints at many different times. It also suffers from a limitation apparent in the CBS video, a frame that only encompasses the canvas, not what is going on in the room. These can be interpreted as aesthetic choices, but they also eliminate all information on one of the crucial factors exposed by the CBS video: the father coaching his daughter on what to paint. Two different people in the film and bonus feature, and implicitly the filmmaker, note that "Ocean" seems different from her more famous prior works: certain kinds of brush strokes in those earlier paintings are absent, and overall it has a more "primitive" childlike quality. Again, this is not to make a judgment about the quality or value of the piece as art, which is subject to individual judgment; it is, rather, to note that the piece does not have many of the qualities in the works that initially made her famous.
The facts presented above can be explained in one of two ways. By the father's explanation, the girl happened to do a poor painting for the CBS hidden camera, and she is so shy around cameras that she can only paint when they are absent. By the filmmaker's suggested view, the father has been at the very least co-painting with his daughter. According to this view (but not explicitly stated), "Ocean" is an improvement because the father could coach from the sidelines, if not directly paint himself. There are two main factors in defense of the parents' view: their absolute seeming sincerity, noted by the filmmaker and apparent in many key scenes in the film; and the "circumstantial" nature of the evidence against them. I will begin with the second point and return to the first.
After the CBS report, the filmmaker went back over his recordings and found, to his surprise, that what he had thought was clear footage of her painting instead revealed the dramatic differences in quality between painting caught on film and the completed paintings. As he notes in an article, "I was never able to film satisfactory footage of Marla Olmstead painting. When I wasn't around, she completed remarkable canvases larger than herself, with sweeping paint splashes and elaborate flourishes. But every time I tried to film her painting, Marla was distracted or unwilling." This went on for an entire year. Is she just remarkably shy around cameras, as her father suggests? Watch the film again and note how Marla is around cameras: she seems not to notice them at all, and is certainly entirely unrestrained by the presence of the filmmaker, who is frustrated at his inability to film her without her talking to him and breaking the "fourth wall."
If Marla had help, why has she never said this? Marla's remarkable lack of interest in doing or talking about art when anyone other than her parents are around offers part of an explanation. The film leaves this question mostly open, but the DVD bonus feature shows her painting while demanding repeatedly that her father help her. Her father, clearly rattled, tries to cover by saying that she's just acting like a child, and implicitly argues that making anything of this would amount to "gotcha" pseudo-journalism.
In defense of the parents one keeps returning to one main issue: their seeming absolute sincerity. Could such nice, sincere people really be, as one critic sarcastically put it, "supernaturally cunning con artists"? (Harvey review) One first must ask: are there any cases where they clearly do not tell the truth? Marla's parents state repeatedly that they never tried to promote their daughter's work or make their daughter famous, that it fell in their lap. The DVD bonus feature shows otherwise: a curator for a feminist art show discusses a letter (shown to viewers) she received from Mark Olmstead before his daughter was known, asking for inclusion of her work and including a ridiculous "artist's statement" clearly not written by Marla. Not the sort of thing one would forget.
Once it is clear that Mark Olmstead is willing to lie, and to put words in his daughter's mouth, the possibility of it all being an act becomes easier to believe. If he is a very good liar, what about his wife? In a key scene, the woman cries when the filmmaker reveals his doubts. There are three possibilities: her story is true and she is upset that the filmmaker is going to put her through the kind of public humiliation that followed the CBS story; she doesn't know that her husband helps her daughter paint (made at least conceivable by the fact that she and her husband work different shifts and say that they hardly ever see each other) and so thinks her story is true; or she is lying - but this does not mean she would have to fake crying. She would still be very upset that the filmmaker is not going to do what they stated earlier that they hoped he would do, namely to exonerate them. She would probably fear that the whole story would finally fall apart, as it almost did after the CBS expose.
No evidence other than direct documentation of the husband's involvement can officially count as more than "circumstantial." But when "circumstantial" evidence exceeds a certain point one would be foolish not to see where it leads. Nothing about my suggested account requires "supernatural" cunning, it requires only a father with some real painting talent (defined as ability to emulate the standards of successful modern art) and parents (just possibly only the father) with charm and the unswerving ability to lie well. In the age of Madoff and balloon boy, is this really so hard to believe?
This is not a film about the media needing a new narrative to keep a story going. It is a film about investigative journalism getting something right. Read the transcript of the Sixty Minutes II expose, this whole story should have ended there. And yet, if it weren't for the damage to other people's lives, one might say that the real work of art documented by the film is this brilliantly conceived and executed hoax. Regardless, it's not a pretty picture.
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
This is a fascinating documentary for anyone interested in art and the deeper questions about art and the art world. I was pleasantly surprised by the depth of the film and the philosophical questions it raises.
When the parents of 4-year old Marla Olmstead begin to sell her abstract paintings, the questions and the investigations begin (interestingly it is not really the painting of the art that seems to be the issue, but the selling of it). Is Marla a prodigy? Is the only difference between her artwork and that of other 4-year olds the fact that she is getting thousands of dollars for hers? What does it mean to say a 4-year old "created" a painting? Was she "coached," or "encouraged" by her father? Does that really matter? The human interest aspect of this film is enjoyable, but the deeper questions it raises about the nature of art, and the reaction of the media and individuals to art, are even more fascinating. The reflections offered by Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times chief art critic, are especially thought-provoking.
The extras included with the film are not to be missed, for they go even deeper into the philosophical questions, and add much to the basic story presented in the film itself.
Highly recommended!
When the parents of 4-year old Marla Olmstead begin to sell her abstract paintings, the questions and the investigations begin (interestingly it is not really the painting of the art that seems to be the issue, but the selling of it). Is Marla a prodigy? Is the only difference between her artwork and that of other 4-year olds the fact that she is getting thousands of dollars for hers? What does it mean to say a 4-year old "created" a painting? Was she "coached," or "encouraged" by her father? Does that really matter? The human interest aspect of this film is enjoyable, but the deeper questions it raises about the nature of art, and the reaction of the media and individuals to art, are even more fascinating. The reflections offered by Michael Kimmelman, the New York Times chief art critic, are especially thought-provoking.
The extras included with the film are not to be missed, for they go even deeper into the philosophical questions, and add much to the basic story presented in the film itself.
Highly recommended!
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good documentary
The producers of the documentary don't give us a strong opinion on Marla's paintings, rather they have footage of Marla and the family, and let the audience form their own... Read more
Published 9 months ago by Timegoesby
5.0 out of 5 stars
Can a 4-year old really Paint that? It's Doubtful
Director Amir Bar-Lev presents a fascinating and balanced view of the world of Abstract Expressionistic art and if a 4-year old girl can paint it what exactly does it say about... Read more
Published 19 months ago by Mr. J. Murdock
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent documentary about the nature of art
Excellent, absorbing documentary about a 4 year old whose abstract paintings
sell for tens of thousands of dollars,
The film starts as a portrait of a prodigy, but... Read more
sell for tens of thousands of dollars,
The film starts as a portrait of a prodigy, but... Read more
Published 19 months ago by K. Gordon
5.0 out of 5 stars
Right questions aksed!
Sad Story. The parents, nor the gallery owner, nor journalists were familiar with the phases of children creative developement, and a perfectly normal kid was created "a prodigy. Read more
Published 24 months ago by Elise (plt)
5.0 out of 5 stars
My marmoset could paint that better
MY KID COULD PAINT THAT (2007) is the story of then-four-year-old Marla Olmstead of New York, and her painting abilities. She has been compared to Picasso ... Read more
Published on April 25, 2011 by E. Hernandez
4.0 out of 5 stars
The 60 Minute psychologist
Director Amir Bar-Lev failed to address an issue in the 60 Minute program that might have made this documentary even thought-provoking. Read more
Published on March 14, 2011 by Lynn Crook
5.0 out of 5 stars
So many questions...so few answers...
I have been looking forward to watching this for a long time. Not because I have an interest in abstract art, because I don't. Read more
Published on October 2, 2010 by Diane Moore
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good all around
I purchased this for a paper I was writing in my Modern Art class. Very helpful.
Published on April 21, 2010 by Kemo
5.0 out of 5 stars
Its a question of scam
It's a sad comment on the state of Art today, that some are such willing dupes and that the perceived value of these painting is based on the belief that a four year old girl... Read more
Published on November 30, 2009 by Bob from the Midwest
5.0 out of 5 stars
mind of a child
I won't go into the movie as it has already been covered by the other commentaries. As a former artist many of my best abstract works came from my subconscious much like the... Read more
Published on September 16, 2009 by Michael A. Scheurich
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