Ellen Hovde, a documentary co-director of “Grey Gardens,” the groundbreaking 1975 film that examined the lives of two secretive women living in a deteriorating Long Island mansion and inspired a Broadway musical and an HBO movie, died on February 16 at his home in Brooklyn. He is 97.
His death, which was little reported, was confirmed last week by his 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 ’70s, when they expanded the documentary form using cinéma vérité techniques, which eschewing sit-in-a-chair interviews in favor of documenting life and events as they happened.
In 1969 he was a contributing editor to “Salesman,” a documentary by the Maysleses and Charlotte Zwerin that followed four salesmen as they sold $49.95 Bibles door-to-door in New England and Florida. The next year he was an editor on “Gimme Shelter,” the documentary of the Maysleses and Ms. Zwerin caught a Rolling Stones tour, including the Altamont Speedway concert in Northern California in late 1969 where a concertgoer was killed by a Hells Angel.
In 1974 he was credited as a director, with the Maysles, in “Christo’s Valley Curtain,” about a environmental art project actors Christo and Jeanne-Claude set in Colorado in 1972. That film was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary short.
The next year came “Grey Gardens.” That movie, which got a lot of attention at the time and in 2010 was named to the National Film Registry of culturally significant films, takes a closer look at the often uncomfortable lives of Edie Beale and her mother, Edith Beale, relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who quit high society and live in East Hampton, NY, in a crumbling mansion with assorted cats and raccoons.
The film happened by accident when Lee Radziwill, brother of Ms. Onassis, that the Mayslese and Ms. Hovde has made a documentary about his childhood. Among the people he suggested they talk to were the Beales — Little Edie and Big Edie, as they were known. The documentary proposed by Ms. Radziwill was unsuccessful, but the Maysleses and Ms. Hovde was intrigued by the Beales and proposed a film with them.
“Big Edie didn’t really want to do it at first,” Ms. Hovde in a 1978 interview with Film Quarterly. “Little Edie did it.”
Muffie Meyer soon joined, who would join Ms. Hovde in many films in the following years, in the project. Ms. received Hovde and Ms. Meyer has directing credits on the film with the Maysles brothers, but they, in addition to Susan Froemke, are also its editors, which for Ms. Hovde the important role.
“The person who does the editing does something like a mix of writing and stage directing,” he told Film Quarterly. “That person is shaping, developing and structuring the material, and making decisions about what’s actually going to happen on that screen — what the ideas are, what the sequence of events is going to be, where the emphasis.”
For “Grey Gardens,” that involved going through dozens of hours of film and shaping a picture that revealed a codependent relationship between two eccentric women. said Ms. Meyer that, while portable cameras and tape recorders made possible the type of filmmaking used in “Grey Gardens”, another important element was editing.
“Essentially, massive amounts of footage (typically upwards of 60 hours), unscripted and with little or no direction, are thrown into the editing room,” he said via email. “The editor’s job is to screen it, organize it, take careful notes, and then find the story and the structure. Ellen is a master of it all, and there aren’t many masters (Charlotte Zwerin is another).”
“Grey Gardens” garnered both praise and disapproval from critics. Film critic Roger Ebert called it “one of the most chilling documentaries in a long time.” But in The New York Times, Richard Eder, while acknowledging that there was “no doubt about the artistry and devotion” involved in the film’s production, said that “the moviegoer will still feel like an exploiter.”
The debate about whether “Grey Gardens” and other films in the same style 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, in the Film Quarterly interview, said the Beales themselves dispute that interpretation.
“In the months when there was a lot of controversy about it,” he said, “Mrs. It was Beale and Edie who called us and said: ‘You know there is this criticism — don’t worry. all right. We know this is an honest picture. We believe in it. We don’t want you to be angry.’ That was their attitude, and they didn’t doubt it.”
A musical based on the documentary opened on Broadway in 2006 and won three Tony Awards, and in 2009 HBO’s “Grey Gardens,” starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore as the Beales, won six Emmy Awards.
In 1978, Ms. Hovde and Ms. Meyer Middlemarch Movies, who went on to make scores of feature documentaries and videos in a variety of styles and on a wide range of subjects. Some explored subjects from the age before film and photography and used actors to recreate scenes. One of those, a television mini-series about Benjamin Franklin put together by Ms. Meyer and Ms. Hovde in 2002, won an Emmy for outstanding nonfiction special.
said Ms. Meyer that in these types of projects, Ms. Hovde is a stickler for accuracy.
“One example is his insistence on the accuracy of bird tweets and frog sounds in our colonial-era films,” he said. “He drove the sound editors to distraction (and in one late-night session, to tears): ‘Is this frog endemic to the Northeast and does it croak in late fall?’ ‘Is 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. His father, Brynjolf (known as Bryn), was president of the New School for Social Research from 1945 to 1950, and his mother, Theresse (Arneson) Hovde, was a nurse.
Ms. Hovde grew up in Pittsburgh and earned a degree in theater in 1947 at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, after which he studied for some time at the University of Oslo. In 1950 she married Matthew Huxley, son of author Aldous L. Huxley. The marriage ended in divorce, but Ms.’s son said. Hovde and Aldous Huxley remained close until his death in 1963, and as his eyesight began to fail, he sometimes read books to her on a tape recorder.
Ms. expects Hovde had a career as a stage director, but, after not being able to find work, he took a job as an administrative assistant at a film school. By the early 1950s, he had learned to edit. His credits before he began working with the Maysles brothers included editing “Margaret Mead’s New Guinea Journal” (1968) for New York public television station WNET and a Simon and Garfunkel television special broadcast on CBS in 1969.
The second marriage of Ms. Hovde, to Adam Edward Giffard in 1963, also ended in divorce. Besides his children, he is survived by two grandchildren.
said Ms. Meyer that the homes of Ms. Hovde was collecting locations for documentaries in the 1970s, and he once helped organize the filmmakers’ cookbook, a photocopied collection of everyone’s favorite recipes.
“Most of us still use it,” he said.