Stardust: The Story of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown is a highly anticipated documentary film about two of the 20th century’s most important architects. It was made by Jim Venturi, the son of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown; and Anita Naughton, a New York–based writer.
The documentary debuts in New York this week at Architecture & Design Film Festival (ADFF). After ADFF, it will be shown at theaters around the world. AN interviewed Venturi and Naughton about Stardust, and why the film is a timely one.
The Architect’s Newspaper: When did you start production on Stardust? What drove you to make it?
Jim Venturi (JV): I thought it was important to capture my parents on film while they were still alive and energetic. That was my immediate impulse. This led to an array of different footage and interviews. After we amassed all of the archival footage, it became a jigsaw puzzle that had to be put together. That’s when Anita joined production which was about 10 years ago. The editing process by Anita was really a writing job in that it required a narrative to be crafted. This narrative became an intimate portrait of Bob and Denise.
I wanted this film to help people understand my parents and the intention behind their work. We have their buildings, which people can hopefully still go inside, and we have their books. But architecture is such a tragic and fragile medium that can end up getting ruined over time. Their buildings and books allow us to understand their intellectual ideas, but I wanted to shed light on who they were as human beings.
My goal was to create a film that was worthy of them and their architecture. Denise likes to say that there’s a special place in heaven for artists with a social conscience. I think they’re incredible role models for this generation of artists and architects.
How many hours of footage did you collect?
JV: It’s in the hundreds. Not the thousands, but definitely in the hundreds.
Anita Naughton (AN): We’re actually planning two more documentaries each individually dedicated to Bob and Denise because we have so much content that didn’t go into Stardust.
Anita, how did you amass all of this content into a story?
AN: First of all, I didn’t know anything about architecture when I started. I came into this film as a novice. After watching all of the footage Jim compiled, I really fell in love with Bob and Denise. My goal was for the audience to fall in love with them, too, like I had. I also of course wanted people to understand their work, and their story. I really tried capturing the essence of these two amazing people who are brilliant in their own ways.
Was it difficult making a documentary that had two main characters? As opposed to one?
AN: It was so difficult because each of them has done so much. So what you’re dealing with is two very full lives, but also two very different ways of looking at things. Denise looks at things differently than the way Bob looked at things. Even though they’re very together aesthetically, they’re very different.
There’s a scene in the film where Denise is at Robin Hood Gardens, and she’s talking about why that space is important. This is different from Bob in Rome, you know, and what he was interested in. So there had to be balance, but this balance kept shifting. Sometimes Denise was the more dominant one, other times Bob was. Even when we changed something a little, the whole thing changed.
Sometimes people would say, ‘Oh, there’s not enough of Denise in the film,’ or ‘There’s not enough of Bob.’ You can’t have everything, though, so you have to try to capture the essence of each character. We compiled so many interviews like with Frank Gehry about why he loved Complexity and Contradiction that we liked but didn’t use because they didn’t fit the tone of it anymore.
People might still say ‘It’s all about Bob’ or ‘It’s all about Denise.’ But I did try and have it be a balance between them. There’s a scene in the beginning where Fred Schwartz says ‘There’s Bob and there’s Denise, and there’s Denise and there’s Bob.’ So in a funny way, it was almost like a film with three characters. It took a lot of time to get this right.
Stardust has been compared with other documentaries like Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect, and Tomas Koolhaas’s Rem. Do you think these are apt comparisons?
JV: I’m not a character in the film. So, in other words, it’s not a first person documentary. Denise is really the film’s narrator. And Anita was the writer.
AN: I don’t think Jim is trying to discover his parents through the film, so I think it’s different in that respect. I don’t mind at all the films being compared. I love My Architect; it’s a great film. In fact it was the first film I ever saw about architecture. But I think My Architect was about a son’s journey to discover his father through his architecture. Maybe Stardust is similar, but I don’t know. I don’t think so.
A lot of people outside architecture are interested in Stardust. Why do you think that is?
JV: I think my parents’ work has always been greater than architecture, which is where its broad appeal comes from. In 2003, I remember I was at a yoga retreat when I saw a poster that reminded me of the Gentle Manifesto, which has a kind of universality to it. My dad’s influences like Thoureau, T.S. Elliot, and William James, who had been greatly influenced by Swami Vivekananda, were introduced to him by his friend Philip Finkelpearl and my grandmother, Vanna Venturi. My father was also immensely influenced by Gestalt psychology, of course.
Around 2004, when we started making the film, a lot of people were interested in revisiting Learning from Las Vegas and Complexity and Contradiction. In 2016, I was heartened to see David Byrne writing about Las Vegas, and talking about my parents’ work. This was special because one of my favorite films is True Stories [by David Byrne] from 1986.
True Stories and my parents’ work have a lot of overlap I think in terms of the sociological and anthropological mechanisms they use to understand the built environment. The Signs of Life exhibition by my parents at the Renwick Gallery in the Smithsonian (1976) is in line with this too, but also the Learning from Levittown and Las Vegas studios they taught. It’s this approach that I think gives it such wide appeal.
Stardust sheds light on the bad relationship between Philip Johnson and Bob and Denise. Can you talk about that?
JV: We gathered plenty of archival material which speaks to this. BBC commissioned a film that was completed around 1991 called The Godfather of Architecture, which was about Philip Johnson. There was some really interesting material in it that pertains to Johnson’s relationship with my father, and also how Johnson excluded my mother from the dinners he organized at the Century Club. The little world that existed there was very much about patronage dinners and handing out work. This world explicitly excluded women.
One of the richest parts of the film I think is Denise’s story, and the fact that she didn’t acquiesce. She didn’t accept the role of playing the wife. Instead, she insisted on being at the table. For that reason, and also because my father didn’t want to participate, my father chose not to go to those Century Club dinners in New York.
You noted that production started more than 20 years ago. Do you think the film benefitted from that long duration?
JV: Let me start by saying I’m not embarrassed about the fact that it took so long. The challenge of making a film with two main characters, narratively and structurally, is very difficult. Neither Anita nor myself had ever made a film before. So naturally there were a lot of inefficiencies.
I had editors in the beginning who had backgrounds in architecture, people from the U.S. Anita became the film’s editor about ten years ago. She came from England, just like Denise. In many ways this was most fitting because Bob learned to love American pop culture while studying in Rome, and Denise viewed the American Southwest after growing up in South Africa and studying in London. It was a good thing that Anita didn’t know anything about architecture because, like my parents, she could look at things with fresh eyes.
Another person who helped us make the film was Jonathan Oppenheim, who sadly isn’t around anymore. At an important moment in the editing process, Jonathan asked Anita: ‘What do you want the audience to take away from this documentary?’ That helped Anita realize the story she was trying to tell.
Jonathan took a long time on his documentaries to be finished, so I didn’t mind taking a long time either. I obviously wanted to get it finished, and move on with life. We really wanted it to be done. I think today however one of the things I’m most proud of was insisting we waited until it was really done, and not pushing to have something that wasn’t really as good as it could be.
I feel great about the film now. The regret I have is that I really wish certain people were alive to see it. I’m sad that Bill Menking passed away before the film was finished too. He was a great supporter, a giant. Bill appears in the film’s beginning. But I think those people who aren’t here today would have preferred the film be the best film it can be for the people who watch it.
