My Sunday with Sidney Lumet
katy
Last weekend, Manhattan Country School celebrated its 40th Anniversary. MCS is a great, progressive, private school, which I was lucky enough to attend for three years when I was in grade school.
It’s truly a unique place — they were founded in 1966 with the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. guiding all of their plans — from pedagogy to creating a truly racially and economically diverse student body. It was an amazing experience for me to go to this school for a few years, sandwiched between two very different NYC public schools I also attended.
So now, here I am, 25 years later (scary!) and MCS presented 19 alums of the school, one of which was myself, with “Living the Dreamâ€? awards for our work in the arts and social justice, which was fun and very gratifying. But even better, they asked me to say a few words about legendary filmmaker Sidney Lumet, to whom they presented a special award for his influential 50-year body of work. They gave me a script to read about Lumet — thank goodness — but I took the liberty of going off the script briefly when talking about his debut film, Twelve Angry Men.
Lumet was sitting in the front row of the banquet hall and so I looked at him and told him how I had seen this amazing 1957 film when I was a kid — maybe junior high — and that it had impressed me then. And the reason it impressed me was because while the film takes place almost entirely in a hot room where the jury is arguing a case, the drama and suspense of the film centers around ideas — people talking about them, arguing about them, trying to change each other’s minds. So I think I understood even then that you don’t have to make a film that has exotic locations or car chases in order to create suspense and drama; people’s impassioned conversation and interactions can do a lot on their own. And this in a film whose entire cast is twelve white men which is proof to me that great films don’t have to be about your own experience to speak to universal themes that we can all draw something from.
Anyway, it didn’t appear that my words made a big impact on Lumet at the time — he looked at me with a sort of confused expression, actually, but I figured that regardless of his reaction it was worth saying it to him there, publicly. I mean, how often can you compliment a filmmaker about how a film they made 50 years ago affected you? I figured I should take advantage of that opportunity while I had it.
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