Ellen Hovde, ‘Grey Gardens’ Documentarian, Dies at 97

Ellen Hovde, a documentarian who was one of many administrators of “Grey Gardens,” the groundbreaking 1975 film that examined the lives of two reclusive girls residing in a deteriorating mansion on Long Island and impressed each a Broadway musical and an HBO movie, died on Feb. 16 at her residence in Brooklyn. She was 97.

Her dying, which had not been extensively reported, was confirmed final week by her youngsters, Tessa Huxley and Mark Trevenen Huxley, who stated the trigger was Alzheimer’s illness.

Ms. Hovde (pronounced HUV-dee) labored on a number of movies with the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, within the late Nineteen Sixties and ’70s, once they have been increasing the documentary type with cinéma vérité methods, eschewing sit-in-a-chair interviews in favor of recording life and occasions as they occurred.

In 1969 she was a contributing editor on “Salesman,” a documentary by the Maysleses and Charlotte Zwerin that adopted 4 salesmen as they peddled $49.95 Bibles door to door in New England and Florida. The subsequent 12 months she was an editor on “Gimme Shelter,” the documentary by the Maysleses and Ms. Zwerin that captured a Rolling Stones tour, together with the live performance at Altamont Speedway in Northern California in late 1969 at which a concertgoer was killed by a Hells Angel.

In 1974 she was credited as a director, together with the Maysleses, on “Christo’s Valley Curtain,” which was about an environmental artwork undertaking the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude erected in Colorado in 1972. That movie was nominated for an Academy Award for greatest documentary brief.

The subsequent 12 months got here “Grey Gardens.” That movie, which garnered appreciable consideration on the time and in 2010 was named to the National Film Registry of culturally important motion pictures, took a close-up, usually uncomfortable have a look at the lives of Edie Beale and her mom, Edith Beale, relations of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis who had dropped out of excessive society and have been residing in East Hampton, N.Y., in a crumbling mansion together with assorted cats and raccoons.

The movie took place considerably by chance when Lee Radziwill, Ms. Onassis’ sister, advised that the Maysleses and Ms. Hovde make a documentary about her childhood. Among the individuals she advised they speak to have been the Beales — Little Edie and Big Edie, as they have been recognized. The documentary Ms. Radziwill had advised fell via, however the Maysleses and Ms. Hovde have been intrigued by the Beales and proposed a movie to them.

“Big Edie didn’t really want to do it at first,” Ms. Hovde stated in a 1978 interview with Film Quarterly. “Little Edie did.”

Soon Muffie Meyer, who would associate with Ms. Hovde on quite a few movies within the ensuing years, joined the undertaking. Ms. Hovde and Ms. Meyer obtained directing credit on the movie together with the Maysles brothers, however they, along with Susan Froemke, have been additionally its editors, which to Ms. Hovde was the pivotal position.

“The person who is doing the editing is doing something very like a mix of writing and stage directing,” she advised Film Quarterly. “That person is shaping, forming and structuring the material, and making the decisions about what is really going to be there on the screen — what the ideas are, what the order of events will be, where the emphasis will be.”

For “Grey Gardens,” that concerned going via dozens of hours of movie and shaping a portrait that exposed the codependent relationship between the 2 eccentric girls. Ms. Meyer stated that, if moveable cameras and tape recorders made the kind of filmmaking utilized in “Grey Gardens” attainable, the opposite essential aspect was the modifying.

“Essentially, massive amounts of footage (usually upwards of 60 hours), unscripted and with little or no direction, was dumped in the editing room,” she stated by electronic mail. “The editor’s job was to screen it, organize it, take careful notes, and then find the story and the structure. Ellen was a master at all of this, and there are not many masters (Charlotte Zwerin was another).”

“Grey Gardens” drew each acclaim and disapproval from critics. The movie critic Roger Ebert referred to as it “one of the most haunting documentaries in a long time.” But in The New York Times, Richard Eder, whereas acknowledging that there was “no doubt about the artistry and devotion” concerned in making the movie, stated that “the moviegoer will still feel like an exploiter.”

The debate over whether or not “Grey Gardens” and different movies in the identical fashion exploit their topics or invade their privateness has been an ongoing one, and there was a refrain of such complaints when the film was launched. But Ms. Hovde, within the Film Quarterly interview, stated the Beales themselves disputed that interpretation.

“In the months when there was a lot of controversy about it,” she stated, “it was Mrs. Beale and Edie who called us and said: ‘You know there has been this criticism — don’t worry. It’s all right. We know that it is an honest picture. We believe in it. We don’t want you to feel upset.’ That was their attitude, and they never wavered from that.”

A musical based mostly on the documentary opened on Broadway in 2006 and received three Tony Awards, and in 2009 HBO’s “Grey Gardens” film, with Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore because the Beales, received six Emmy Awards.

In 1978 Ms. Hovde and Ms. Meyer fashioned Middlemarch Films, which went on to make scores of documentary options and movies in varied types and on a variety of topics. Some explored topics from the age earlier than movie and pictures and used actors to re-create scenes. One of these, a tv mini-series about Benjamin Franklin directed collectively by Ms. Meyer and Ms. Hovde in 2002, received an Emmy for excellent nonfiction particular.

Ms. Meyer stated that in these sorts of initiatives, Ms. Hovde was a stickler for accuracy.

“One example was her insistence on the accuracy of the bird tweets and frog sounds in our colonial-period films,” she stated. “She drove the sound editors to distraction (and in one late-night session, to tears): ‘Was this frog endemic to the Northeast and did it croak in late fall?’ ‘Was this bird tweet that was added to the soundtrack really a bird that could be found in Virginia in the 18th century?’”

Ellen Margerethe Hovde was born on March 9, 1925, in Meadville, Pa. Her father, Brynjolf (often called Bryn), was president of the New School for Social Research from 1945 to 1950, and her mom, Theresse (Arneson) Hovde, was a nurse.

Ms. Hovde grew up in Pittsburgh and earned a level in theater in 1947 on the Carnegie Institute of Technology, after which she studied for a time on the University of Oslo. In 1950 she married Matthew Huxley, son of the creator Aldous L. Huxley. The marriage resulted in divorce, however Ms. Hovde’s son stated that she and Aldous Huxley remained shut till his dying in 1963, and that as his eyesight started to fail, she would typically learn books right into a tape recorder for him.

Ms. Hovde had hoped for a profession as a stage director, however, after not discovering work, she took a job as an administrative assistant at a movie faculty. By the early Fifties she was studying modifying. Her credit earlier than she started working with the Maysles brothers included modifying “Margaret Mead’s New Guinea Journal” (1968) for the New York public tv station WNET and a Simon and Garfunkel tv particular broadcast on CBS in 1969.

Ms. Hovde’s second marriage, to Adam Edward Giffard in 1963, additionally resulted in divorce. In addition to her youngsters, she is survived by two grandchildren.

Ms. Meyer stated Ms. Hovde’s houses have been gathering locations for documentarians within the Nineteen Seventies, and he or she as soon as helped set up a filmmakers’ cookbook, a photocopied assortment of everybody’s favourite recipes.

“Most of us still use it,” she stated.