‘The Mummy’
Rated PG-13 — Tom Cruise stars in the action movie about the awakening of an ancient princess and the terror that she unleashes. The cast includes Sofia Boutella and Russell Crowe.
The names Lillian and Harold Michelson might not ring familiar, but anyone who has seen “The Birds,” “The Graduate” or “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” has seen their work.
Lillian, who owned and operated a film-research library, and Harold, a storyboard artist for most of his career, were responsible for making movies look better and more realistic.
What made the couple a Hollywood story, though, was their 60-year marriage.
“She was so supportive, and he was so appreciative — and then, in turn, so supportive — that you felt like you were watching the best of Hollywood as it could be as a lifestyle,” Rick Carter, an Oscar-winning production designer, says in “Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story.”
The Wexner Center for the Arts will screen the movie tonight and Friday.
The couple’s relationship began in 1945 in Miami, after Harold, a bombardier in the Army Air Force during World War II, returned home.
He was 28 and Lillian Farber just 17 when Harold’s younger sister introduced him to her friend. By 1947, Harold had proposed to Lillian just before moving to Los Angeles to find work as an artist in the movie industry. Lillian, who had grown up in Florida orphanages, soon joined him, and they quickly wed.
Harold became established in the film industry for his storyboard drawings, which serve as visual scripts for films. He worked on movies such as “The Ten Commandments,” “Ben Hur” and “Spartacus,” finding that some directors re-created his work shot-for-shot.
“He had this innate sense of cinema, an uncanny ability to — within one frame, one camera setup — tell an entire
“Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story” Wexner Center for the Arts 614-292-3535, www.wexarts.org 7 tonight and Friday
story,” Daniel Raim, director of “Harold and Lillian,” said during a phone interview.
“At times, he could replace several pages of dialogue. He worked with Cecil B. DeMille and Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, so he worked with the top directors. He got a lot of confidence and knowledge working with them.”
Meanwhile, Lillian was busy raising their three sons, one of them autistic, on a storyboard artist’s pay. Money was frequently tight. A voracious reader sparked by her time in orphanages, she would turn to books as a means of escape from the rigors of motherhood.
By 1961, their youngest son was in school and Lillian was searching for a new challenge. Harold suggested that she volunteer at the research library at Goldwyn Films.
In 1969, Goldwyn wanted to disband the library, but Lillian and Harold secured a loan on his life-insurance policy to purchase the archive.
Before long, Lillian became Hollywood’s go-to person for research, even bending the law to obtain information on the interior of the CIA headquarters or the lifestyle of drug lords.
“She has a very strong personality and a tenacity and a willingness to overcome great obstacles,” Raim said, “whether in her life or whether it’s finding out a piece of information that you’re not allowed to see but you need to know for authenticity.”
Often, Lillian would provide the research that Harold used in his storyboards. Their work would go uncredited — and, consequently, unnoticed by film fans — but filmmakers knew who they were.
“Harold and Lillian enhanced the quality of night $8, or $6 for members, students and senior citizens
movies,” Stuart Cornfeld, producer of “The Elephant Man,” says in the movie. “Both of them are the secret weapons people used to have access to that nobody talked about but everybody was trying to get.”
Harold Michelson would eventually become a production designer, the person in charge of set designs. He earned Oscar nominations for his work in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” and “Terms of Endearment.”
In 2004, the Michelsons might have received the ultimate Hollywood compliment via the animated movie “Shrek 2,” which presents Princess Fiona’s parents: King Harold and Queen Lillian.
Harold Michelson died in 2007 at age 87; Lillian retired in 2010. She remains active, Raim said, and will turn 89 in a few weeks.
In Riam’s movie, Lillian says that many Hollywood marriages falter because spouses spend too much time apart during shoots.
“You must have shared experiences for a marriage to have some kind of soil to grow on,” she said.
Director Mel Brooks, who was married to actress Anne Bancroft for 41 years until her death in 2005, understood the secret to the Michelsons’ enduring relationship.
“They fed each other not only their passion and their love,” he says in the film, “but they fed each other their creativity, their ideas.”