Ellen Hovde, a documentary filmmaker who was one of the directors of “Grey Gardens,” the groundbreaking 1975 film that explored the lives of two reclusive women living in a run-down Long Island mansion that turned into both a Broadway musical and an HBO film, died February 16 at her home in Brooklyn. She turned 97.
Her death, which was not public knowledge, was confirmed last week by her children, Tessa Huxley and Mark Trevenen Huxley, who said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.
Ms. Hovde (pronounced HUV-dee) worked on several films with the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, in the late 1960s and 1970s, when they expanded the documentary format to include cinéma vérité techniques, avoiding sitting in a chair for interviews in favor of capturing life and events as they happened.
In 1969, she edited “Salesman,” a documentary by the Maysleses and Charlotte Zwerin that followed four salesmen as they sold $49.95 door-to-door Bibles in New England and Florida. The following year, she edited “Gimme Shelter,” the documentary by the Maysleses and Mrs. Zwerin that captured a Rolling Stones tour, including the concert at Altamont Speedway in Northern California in late 1969 in which a concertgoer was killed by a Hells Angel.
In 1974, she was credited as a director, along with the Maysleses, for “Christo’s Valley Curtain,” which was about an environmental art project that the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude started in Colorado in 1972. That film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film.
The following year came ‘Grey Gardens’. That film, which garnered a lot of attention at the time and was inducted into the National Film Registry of Culturally Significant Films in 2010, took an up-close, often awkward look at the lives of Edie Beale and her mother, Edith Beale, relatives of Jacqueline . Kennedy Onassis who had stepped out of high society and lived in a crumbling mansion in East Hampton, NY, along with several cats and raccoons.
The film came about somewhat by accident when Mrs. Onassis’ sister Lee Radziwill suggested that the Maysleses and Mrs. Hovde make a documentary about her childhood. Among the people she suggested she talk to were the Beales—Little Edie and Big Edie, as they were called. The documentary Mrs. Radziwill had suggested fell through, but the Maysleses and Mrs. Hovde were intrigued by the Beales and suggested a movie to them.
“Big Edie didn’t really want to do it at first,” Ms. Hovde said in a 1978 interview with Film Quarterly. “Little Edie did it.”
Soon, Muffie Meyer, who would go on to collaborate with Ms. Hovde on numerous films in the following years, joined the project. Mrs. Hovde and Mrs. Meyer, along with the Maysles brothers, received directing credits on the film, but they, in addition to Susan Froemke, were also the editors, which was Ms. Hovde’s pivotal role.
“The person doing the editing does something like a mix of writing and stage directing,” she told Film Quarterly. “That person forms, shapes and structures the material and makes the decisions about what will actually appear on the screen — what the ideas are, what the sequence of events will be, what will be the focus.”
For “Grey Gardens,” that went through dozens of hours of filming and shaping a portrait that revealed the codependent relationship between the two eccentric women. Ms Meyer said that if portable cameras and tape recorders enabled the type of filmmaking used in “Grey Gardens”, the other crucial element was editing.
“Essentially, huge amounts of footage (usually over 60 hours), with no script and little or no direction, were dumped in the editing room,” she said in an email. “It was the editor’s job to screen it, organize it, take careful notes, and then find the story and structure. Ellen was a master at this, and there aren’t many masters (Charlotte Zwerin was another).”
“Grey Gardens” received both acclaim and disapproval from critics. The film critic Roger Ebert called it “one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time”. But in DailyExpertNews, Richard Eder acknowledged that there was “no doubt about the artistry and dedication” involved in making the film, but said that “the moviegoer will still feel like an exploiter”.
The debate over whether “Grey Gardens” and other similarly styled films exploit their subjects or invade their privacy is ongoing, and there was a chorus of such complaints when the film was released. But Ms. Hovde said in the Film Quarterly interview that the Beales themselves disputed that interpretation.
“In the months when there was a lot of controversy about it,” she said, “it was Mrs. Beale and Edie who called us and said, ‘You know there’s been criticism — don’t worry. It is well. We know it’s a fair picture. We believe in it. We don’t want you to feel upset.’ That was their attitude and they have never deviated from it.”
A musical based on the documentary premiered on Broadway in 2006 and won three Tony Awards, and in 2009, HBO’s movie “Grey Gardens,” starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as the Beales, won six Emmy Awards.
In 1978, Mrs. Hovde and Mrs. Meyer founded Middlemarch Films, which went on to make numerous documentaries and videos in a variety of styles and on a wide variety of subjects. Some explored pre-film and photography subjects and used actors to recreate scenes. One of these, a television miniseries about Benjamin Franklin co-directed by Mrs. Meyer and Mrs. Hovde in 2002, won an Emmy for Outstanding Nonfiction Special.
Ms Meyer said that Ms Hovde was in favor of accuracy in such projects.
“One example was her insistence on the accuracy of the tweets of birds and frog sounds in our colonial period films,” she said. “She drove the sound editors to distraction (and to tears during one night session): ‘Was this frog endemic to the Northeast and did it croak in late fall?’ “Was this bird tweet added to the soundtrack really a bird found in Virginia in the 18th century?”
Ellen Margerethe Hovde was born on March 9, 1925 in Meadville, Pa. Her father, Brynjolf (known as Bryn), was president of the New School for Social Research from 1945 to 1950, and her mother, Therese (Arneson) Hovde, was a nurse.
Ms. Hovde grew up in Pittsburgh and received a degree in theater from the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1947, after which she studied for a time at the University of Oslo. In 1950 she married Matthew Huxley, son of the author Aldous L. Huxley. The marriage ended in divorce, but Mrs Hovde’s son said that she and Aldous Huxley remained close until his death in 1963, and that when his eyesight began to fail, she sometimes read books to him on a tape recorder.
Mrs. Hovde had hoped for a career as a stage director, but after not finding work, she took a job as an administrative assistant at a film school. In the early 1950s, she learned editing. Her credits before working with the Maysles brothers included editing “Margaret Mead’s New Guinea Journal” (1968) for New York’s public television station WNET and a Simon and Garfunkel television special broadcast on CBS in 1969 .
Mrs. Hovde’s second marriage, to Adam Edward Giffard in 1963, also ended in divorce. In addition to her children, she leaves behind two grandchildren.
Ms. Meyer said Ms. Hovde’s homes were gathering places for documentary filmmakers in the 1970s, and that she once helped organize a cookbook for filmmakers, a photocopied collection of everyone’s favorite recipes.
“Most of us still use it,” she said.
