Judy Kinberg

With unlimited access to Jerome Robbins’ personal archive and performance library, Emmy-Award-winning producer/director Judy Kinberg captures a multi-faceted portrait of the complex mid-century master. Robbins’ life and works touch upon the larger issues of 20th century American culture, from the evolution of musical theater and the development of American ballet to the aspirations and struggles of first-generation Americans and the effects of McCarthyism. Kinberg was a member of the original production team of the groundbreaking DANCE IN AMERICA series, winner of over 80 major national and international awards, including 20 Emmy Awards and two Peabody’s. She has developed an important body of work on dance, both performance programs and documentaries, including virtually every major American choreographer and dance company of her time, such as George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Jerome Robbins Paul Taylor, Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor, American Ballet Theatre, New York City Ballet, and many others. The producer/director discusses her latest film, AMERICAN MASTERS Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About, which premieres Wednesday, February 18, 2009 at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings).

Q: You’ve worked with Jerome Robbins on past projects. Tell us about that experience.

A: Robbins was a handful and a half from a producing point of view. We made three DANCE IN AMERICA programs with him, including the only complete recording to date of the much-loved Fancy Free and the beautiful Other Dances, with Natalia Makarova and Mikhail Baryshnikov. He was demanding, unsympathetic to our problems, funny, scathingly honest, told great stories, and had the best eye of anyone with whom I’ve worked. And there was some pretty stiff competition there. The entire time we were making the first program with him, it was often so painful that I promised myself I would never work with him again. And then I did.

Q: What makes him an American master?

A: Robbins brought a uniquely American sensibility to his work, beginning with his landmark ballet, Fancy Free, which reflected his desire to “dance about how we are today,” rather than only perform the old Russian works that were the staples of ballet. He was a primary architect of four of the most enduring works of the American musical theater, including one, West Side Story, which was responsible for expanding and elevating the form, plus there is no more important American-born ballet choreographer. If that’s not an ‘American master,’ what is?

Q: How do you approach Robbins’ role during the McCarthy era when he testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC)?

A: Very, very carefully and as fair-mindedly as possible. We give the facts, both from Robbins’ point of view through his journal entries and also through several acquaintances, since he never discussed it publicly, and from the point of view of Madeline Lee Gilford, who he named.

Q: What would you say is the most compelling aspect of Robbins’ story?

A: I find the fact that Robbins was so full of contradictions fascinating. He was a wildly successful man who was riddled by insecurity, a man of enormous generosity who was capable of extreme selfishness, often inarticulate in person, but a poetic writer, a homosexual who very much wanted a family when those things were mutually exclusive, a natural storyteller who aspired to master the art of the abstract ballet, a man who rejected Judaism in his youth, only to produce Fiddler on the Roof. People can say completely opposing things about Robbins and both be right. It happened numerous times in our interviews, sometimes with a single person.

Q: What did you learn in making this film that surprised you the most?

A: I was very fortunate in that I was permitted to read Robbins’ diaries, and they were a revelation, not so much in what he said, but in how he said it. He was often described as “inarticulate,” and in person, he sometimes was, but I was greatly impressed by how he expressed himself in words, often poetically, and we’ve used many quotes in the program. We had an enormous advantage in that our writer, Amanda Vaill, had written Somewhere, a marvelous biography of Robbins, on which she worked for eight years, so she was thoroughly familiar with all his writings, whereas I was only able to read about twelve years’ worth.

Q: With so much great material to choose from, how did you decide what to include?

A: In some ways, there was too much material, such as all the hours of fascinating interviews we amassed, and in other ways, there wasn’t enough. There are just a few fragments of Robbins dancing, for example, and virtually all of them are in the show. There are no recordings of his original Broadway shows. Even the archive tape of his compilation show, Jerome Robbins’ Broadway, was not made with the original cast, and Robbins was so disturbed by the quality of the recording that he insisted a notice be put on the tape indicating that it did not represent his work.

In the case of the ballets, there are many which were not professionally recorded, and only archive tapes exist, which show just the architecture of the ballet from far away, but no detail, so they don’t generally represent a ballet in a way that would be useful in a film biography. So what we chose to include was, in some measure, limited by what recordings exist in which the viewer can actually see the dancing well.

What, finally, we decided to include were the dances we felt were most important and were best recorded and those which enabled us to illustrate the points we wished to make about Robbins and the interconnections with his work. Nothing is there simply to represent itself; each selection is tied to an idea or an event, our aim being to illuminate the artist through the work.

Q: How much influence does Robbins’ art have on dance theater today?

A: I think most Broadway choreographers would tell you they owe a debt to Robbins. He was instrumental in elevating the musical to an American art form. There’s a reason that his greatest shows are still revived – Fiddler and Peter Pan just a few years ago, Gypsy right now, and next year, West Side Story.

Q: From where does your love of dance come?

A: Mark Morris once told me that he believed “dance is for anyone, but not for everyone,” and I think he’s right. I discovered ballet at a relatively late age, by a stroke of good fortune. I was a dramatic literature major in college and had studied music, but had no exposure to ballet, when I was invited by a young man whose parents had a subscription to American Ballet Theatre, but couldn’t use the tickets, to join him for a performance. I had no idea what to expect, but it took place in a theater, so I figured I’d try it. As luck would have it, I saw a performance of La Sylphide with Carla Fracci and Erik Bruhn, and by the time the curtain came down, I was hooked. I’ve completely forgotten who my date was, but can remember the image of Fracci and Bruhn as if it were yesterday.

Photo by Jess Gerstein copyright The Robbins Rights Trust

Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz was born in New York on October 11, 1918 and raised in Weehawken, New Jersey. Deprived of a college education by the Depression, he began his career as a dancer in the experimental troupe of Gluck Sandor. George Balanchine cast him in the chorus of a pair of Broadway shows, and soon after, he got into Ballet Theatre (later American Ballet Theatre). There he came under the tutelage of choreographers Mikhail Fokine, Anthony Tudor, and Agnes de Mille, and attracted attention in a number of roles, most notably as Fokine’s Petrouchka.

But Ballet Theatre’s Russian-influenced repertory stifled him. “I thought, ‘Why can’t we dance about American subjects?’” he said later. “Why can’t we talk about the way we dance today, and how we are?” Recruiting an unknown young American composer named Leonard Bernstein to write a score, he concocted Fancy Free, a jazz-inflected ballet about three sailors on shore leave that received 22 curtain calls at its premiere on April 22, 1944. And eight months later Robbins and his collaborators turned the ballet into On the Town, a Broadway hit that extended the boundaries of what the musical could achieve.

Soon Robbins was working with every major figure in musical theatre and – with such shows as Billion Dollar Baby and High Button Shoes – displaying an inexhaustible gift for combining character, comedy, and storytelling in dance. In 1948, he reconnected with Balanchine, who had just founded the New York City Ballet with Lincoln Kirstein. There he won audiences with his performances in Balanchine’s Prodigal Son, Tyl Ulenspiegel and other ballets, and with the innovative, character-based choreography of such works as The Guests, Age of Anxiety, and The Cage.

He continued to make award-winning dances for Broadway as well, and with The King & I earned his first ticket to Hollywood. But in the midst of this success, Robbins found himself swept into the whirlwind of the McCarthy era and, as a former Communist, pressured by the FBI to name the names of party associates at hearings held by The House Committee on Un-American Activities. (HUAC). For three years he resisted. But threatened by exposure of his homosexuality, he at length agreed to testify before HUAC and named eight people. One of them, the late actress Madeleine Lee Gilford, says that as a result she and her husband, actor Jack Gilford, “did not have any TV or film work and we managed mostly on unemployment insurance.” Robbins himself never spoke of his testimony publicly; in his journal he wrote, “Maybe I will never find a satisfying release from the guilt of it all.”

Jerome Robbins rehearsing West Side Story film. Copyright: The Robbins Rights Trust

If he did find release, it was in his work. In the aftermath of HUAC he created some of his signature ballets – Afternoon of a Faun and The Concert, both made for the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq – and extended his theatrical reach to directing as well as choreographing with Pajama Game, Peter Pan, and Bells Are Ringing. In 1957 he enlisted his old collaborator Leonard Bernstein, plus the playwright Arthur Laurents and novice lyricist Stephen Sondheim, to re-imagine Romeo and Juliet for the gang-ridden streets of New York City. The result was West Side Story, a show conceived, choreographed and directed by Robbins. Said former theatre critic Frank Rich, “It was as if, for the first time, something modern and new was crashing into the commercial Broadway world.” Robbins also co-directed the film version of West Side Story with Robert Wise; and although he was let go before completion for allowing his perfectionism to wreak havoc with the budget, he still won two of the movie’s ten Academy Awards, for his co-direction and his choreography.

The success of West Side Story was followed by a string of Broadway hits. He directed and choreographed Gypsy (1959) starring Ethel Merman, and supervised the production of both A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962) with Zero Mostel and Funny Girl (1964) with Barbra Streisand. In 1964 he directed and choreographed Fiddler on the Roof, which became the longest running musical of its time. It was also to be Robbins’ last — but he continued to push the limits of his art, exploring experimental theatre with the American Theatre Lab in the late 1960’s, and returning triumphantly and joyously to ballet with works like Les Noces, Dances at a Gathering, Goldberg Variations, Glass Pieces, and many others.

Although his work was garlanded with 48 prestigious awards, Robbins rarely felt satisfaction with his success. Notes Mikhail Baryshnikov, “For Jerry, every achievement was torturous.” But despite a bicycle accident in the 1990s and open-heart surgery in 1995, Robbins kept making dance. At the age of 79, six weeks after overseeing a revival of Les Noces for New York City Ballet, he suffered a massive stroke and died July 29, 1998.

Robbins never married or had children. At his death, the bulk of his considerable estate passed to the Jerome Robbins Foundation, which has helped numerous artists, arts organizations, and AIDS charities; with the aid of a multimillion dollar gift, it has also enabled the New York Public Library to develop the world’s largest dance archive. But Robbins’ most important legacy was the humanity of his art. “Give me something to dance about and I’ll dance it,” he once told Irving Berlin. As this film shows, in the theatre and in dance, he did that over and over again.

No other creative figure of the latter twentieth century was as contradictory as Jerome Robbins, and few were as controversial.  He was a master of the Broadway musical, transforming its possibilities with such works as West Side Story, Gypsy, and Peter Pan, and was one of the greatest ballet choreographers this country has ever produced.

Thirteen/WNET’s AMERICAN MASTERS profiles this complex mid-century artist in Jerome Robbins: Something to Dance About, premiering February 18, 2009 on PBS (check local listings). Directed and produced by six-time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Judy Kinberg and written by best-selling Robbins biographer Amanda Vaill, the two-hour film is narrated by Ron Rifkin (Brothers & Sisters), who performed the roles of both Robbins and his father in a workshop production of the director/choreographer’s theatrical autobiography, The Poppa Piece.  This first and only documentary on Robbins features excerpts from his personal journals, archival performance footage, and never-before-seen rehearsal recordings, as well as interviews with Robbins himself and over forty witnesses – among them Mikhail Baryshnikov; Jacques d’Amboise; Suzanne Farrell; Arthur Laurents; Peter Martins; Frank Rich; Chita Rivera; Stephen Sondheim; and Robbins’ Fiddler collaborators Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein.

“Robbins’ remarkable body of work forever redefined dance and musical theater for a contemporary audience,” says Susan Lacy, Creator and Executive Producer of WNET’s AMERICAN MASTERS, a five-time winner of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Primetime Non-Fiction Series.  “The revival of West Side Story on Broadway this winter just validates his lasting importance, his lasting impression. We are thrilled to air this film in tribute to Robbin’ genius, celebrating the 90th anniversary of his birth.”

Paul Robeson was the epitome of the 20th-century Renaissance man. He was an exceptional athlete, actor, singer, cultural scholar, author, and political activist. His talents made him a revered man of his time, yet his radical political beliefs all but erased him from popular history. Today, more than one hundred years after his birth, Robeson is just beginning to receive the credit he is due.

Born in 1898, Paul Robeson grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. His father had escaped slavery and become a Presbyterian minister, while his mother was from a distinguished Philadelphia family. At seventeen, he was given a scholarship to Rutgers University, where he received an unprecedented twelve major letters in four years and was his class valedictorian. After graduating he went on to Columbia University Law School, and, in the early 1920s, took a job with a New York law firm. Racial strife at the firm ended Robeson’s career as a lawyer early, but he was soon to find an appreciative home for his talents.

Returning to his love of public speaking, Robeson began to find work as an actor. In the mid-1920s he played the lead in Eugene O’Neill’s “All God’s Chillun Got Wings” (1924) and “The Emperor Jones” (1925). Throughout the late 1920s and 1930s, he was a widely acclaimed actor and singer. With songs such as his trademark “Ol’ Man River,” he became one of the most popular concert singers of his time. His “Othello” was the longest-running Shakespeare play in Broadway history, running for nearly three hundred performances. It is still considered one of the great-American Shakespeare productions. While his fame grew in the United States, he became equally well-loved internationally. He spoke fifteen languages, and performed benefits throughout the world for causes of social justice. More than any other performer of his time, he believed that the famous have a responsibility to fight for justice and peace.

As an actor, Robeson was one of the first black men to play serious roles in the primarily white American theater. He performed in a number of films as well, including a re-make of “The Emperor Jones” (1933) and “Song of Freedom” (1936). In a time of deeply entrenched racism, he continually struggled for further understanding of cultural difference. At the height of his popularity, Robeson was a national symbol and a cultural leader in the war against fascism abroad and racism at home. He was admired and befriended by both the general public and prominent personalities, including Eleanor Roosevelt, W.E.B. Du Bois, Joe Louis, Pablo Neruda, Lena Horne, and Harry Truman. While his varied talents and his outspoken defense of civil liberties brought him many admirers, it also made him enemies among conservatives trying to maintain the status quo.

During the 1940s, Robeson’s black nationalist and anti-colonialist activities brought him to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Despite his contributions as an entertainer to the Allied forces during World War II, Robeson was singled out as a major threat to American democracy. Every attempt was made to silence and discredit him, and in 1950 the persecution reached a climax when his passport was revoked. He could no longer travel abroad to perform, and his career was stifled. Of this time, Lloyd Brown, a writer and long-time colleague of Robeson, states: “Paul Robeson was the most persecuted, the most ostracized, the most condemned black man in America, then or ever.”

It was eight years before his passport was reinstated. A weary and triumphant Robeson began again to travel and give concerts in England and Australia. But the years of hardship had taken their toll. After several bouts of depression, he was admitted to a hospital in London, where he was administered continued shock treatments. When Robeson returned to the United States in 1963, he was misdiagnosed several times and treated for a variety of physical and psychological problems. Realizing that he was no longer the powerful singer or agile orator of his prime, he decided to step out of the public eye. He retired to Philadelphia and lived in self-imposed seclusion until his death in 1976.

To this day, Paul Robeson’s many accomplishments remain obscured by the propaganda of those who tirelessly dogged him throughout his life. His role in the history of civil rights and as a spokesperson for the oppressed of other nations remains relatively unknown. In 1995, more than seventy-five years after graduating from Rutgers, his athletic achievements were finally recognized with his posthumous entry into the College Football Hall of Fame. Though a handful of movies and recordings are still available, they are a sad testament to one of the greatest Americans of the twentieth century. If we are to remember Paul Robeson for anything, it should be for the courage and the dignity with which he struggled for his own personal voice and for the rights of all people.

“The King of Daredevil Comedy,” Harold Lloyd is best remembered today as the young man dangling desperately from a clock tower in the 1923 classic Safety Last. At the height of his career, Lloyd was one of the most popular and highest-paid stars of his time. While his achievements have been overshadowed by the work of contemporaries Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, he made more films than the two of them combined. With hits like his 1922 film Grandma’s Boy, Lloyd became a strong force in bringing about the advent of the “feature-length” film.

Born in Nebraska in 1894, Lloyd’s stage career began at the age of 12. Although he had none of Chaplin’s or Keaton’s childhood Vaudeville training, Lloyd had a natural talent that led him to make the most dangerous tumbles and falls seem effortless. In 1913 Lloyd moved with his father to Los Angeles, where the motion picture industry was still in its infancy. There he tried desperately to break into show business, taking any small part he

could get. He soon made friends with another extra, Hal Roach, who was putting together his own production company. In a short while the company had taken off and was making movies featuring Lloyd as “Lonesome Luke,” a Chaplin-inspired bumbler. While “Lonesome Luke” was popular, Lloyd knew his mimicry of Chaplin was an inevitable dead end.

In 1917, Lloyd began work on a new character, one that was to remain a signature through out his career. With round glasses, a straw hat, and an unkempt suit, this new invention still had many of the qualities associated with Chaplin’s Little Tramp, but something was different. He seemed both the fool and the fox, able to outsmart the bad guy, but only by a hair. In 1919, at the height of his acclaim, a tragedy struck. While posing for a photograph he grabbed what he imagined to be a fake bomb and lit it with his cigarette. The bomb went off in his hand, costing him a thumb and a forefinger. The story was front-page news and it seemed the end of this daredevil’s career. Never the quitter, Lloyd bounced back and made dozens of more films, among them his best and most highly acclaimed, including Safety Last (1923) and Speedy (1928). Even into the time of the talkies, Lloyd persisted while many other silent movie stars threw in the towel. In 1971, twenty-three years after his last feature film, he died in his Hollywood mansion.

From his early black-and-white shorts to his full-length talkies, Lloyd recognized that humor was nothing without a sense of play. Athletic and rigorous, he could fall from a window as well as he could scale a wall. It was said that Lloyd was not a natural comedian, rather, that he was a great actor playing comedic roles. His ability to create multi-dimensional characters, both funny and moving, has helped to shape our contemporary view of what a comic actor can be.

Lloyd also understood the role fear could play in heightening comedy. One day while on his way to the studio, he watched a man scaling the side of a building. Crowds had gathered around and were completely consumed by the sight of the climber. Lloyd knew that if he could keep an audience on the edge of their seats like this, he could make them laugh even harder. So, using the tricks of photographic perspective, he began to shoot scenes that looked as if they were happening on the sides of buildings, on scaffoldings, or hanging from clocks. These acrobatic hi-jinks seemed amazingly real in a time before special effects. More than simply renewing the audience’s interest in his work, these progressive techniques earned him the respect of others in the film industry.

Looking at the other films of the time and at the progress of comic acting and cinematography since, it is clear that Lloyd’s inspired work was an essential part in the growth of the industry. In his brilliant 1923 epic Girl Shy, Lloyd employed many of the high-action comic bits that made him famous. In its climactic chase scene, we recognize the beginnings of the action film genre, and can see the influence on movies from Ben Hur to Speed. While Harold Lloyd’s name has all but been forgotten and great films like Girl Shy and Grandma’s Boy are no longer in the public eye, Lloyd’s spirit lives on in the movie industry he helped to create.