When Lena Waithe first approached Peabody and Emmy-winning filmmaker James Adolphus about the prospect of directing a documentary about her idol Mary Tyler Moore, she was confident that he was the right man for the job, even though he didn’t know anything about the TV icon.
“Mary was a name I’d heard in a Weezer song and I had a cursory knowledge of who she was,” Adolphus says, discussing the making of the film for Variety’s “Doc Dreams.” “But I hadn’t seen a single episode of ‘The Dick Van Dyke Show’ or ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show.’ And I managed to skirt through both undergrad and graduate film school without even seeing ‘Ordinary People.’”
So, the filmmaker started his research with Moore’s own words, diving into her 1995 autobiography, “After All,” where he, too, “quickly fell in love.”
“Within the first 3 chapters of her book I was in,” Adolphus recalls. “I felt a deep kinship to Mary, mostly because of how she opened her story, with her vulnerabilities and early childhood traumas.”
Those intimate revelations made a real impression, considering how rare it was for a woman of Moore’s generation to share such truths with her audience — and how uncomfortable many people are with expressing such vulnerability today. “Because Mary led with that, I felt a responsibility to protect those vulnerabilities on screen,” he explains.
Thus began Adolphus’ three-and-a-half-year journey to bring Moore’s truth to the screen in HBO’s “Being Mary Tyler Moore,” working closely with Moore’s widower Dr. Robert Levine and producers Waithe and Debra Martin Chase.
With more than 400 hours of footage of Moore in TV and movies and her personal videotapes at their disposal, plus interviews with entertainers she’d influenced, including Waithe, Chase, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bernadette Peters and Phylicia Rashad, the first cut of the film clocked in at around eight hours. In time, Adolphus and his editors whittled it down to the two-hour documentary, which premiered May 26 on HBO and is now streaming on Max.
Read on (and watch the full interview above) as Adolphus explains how a piece of advice from Waithe proved key to shaping Moore’s story.
As you’re sorting through these hundreds of hours of footage — between the archive footage of her on screen, then interviews, and all her personal footage — where do you decide to introduce that thesis and start the story?
We had set out to tell a story about a woman who had to break through ceilings. We wanted to tell a story about womanhood and American patriarchy. But finding that entry was difficult, and we had to be very patient. As a documentary filmmaker, patience is a virtue, but we also got very lucky.
We were three months into the edit. We were spending a lot of time combing through every interview Mary ever gave throughout her life when we came upon David Susskind [host of “The David Susskind Show”] berating Mary Tyler Moore. In that moment, I decided that’s the opening of the film.
I am Black and Puerto Rican. I think it’s easy to imagine a world where I don’t wouldn’t have any personal connection to Mary. I don’t have any real access to what it means to be a woman, but I do have an intrinsic knowledge of what it means to be under the thumb of American patriarchy. For me, as a filmmaker, as a cis man, that was my way into telling Mary’s story.
The film looks at Mary’s career as it intersected with the feminist movement. How did you find a way to weave those together and really cement her place?
It’s funny because, in the 1970s, the [second-wave] feminist movement came down fairly hard at different moments on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” for not going far enough. The film explains “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was in 40 million homes; that accounted for 100 million people, 1/3 of the country, every single Saturday night sat in front of the television to watch Mary Tyler Moore. How pointed can we be with any of our messaging, when you have to appease 100 million people? I think it’s really difficult, and I think the show did a really brilliant job.
But I love that Mary who was — as her friends have called her — a “feminine feminist.” She was a reluctant feminist, even though she understood that she was breaking down doors, she was smashing glass ceiling, she was a role model and continues to be for millions of individuals. [Mary’s story] forced us to really think about what it means to be a good feminist in the first place. Do you necessarily have to be on the streets marching? Or you could lead by example? Sometimes that feels like a softer approach, but in the end, that Mary’s legacy continues to inspire speaks volumes.
We didn’t want to take away points from Mary because she wasn’t an outspoken and devout second wave feminist. She was a woman. By default, Mary Tyler Moore is a feminist because Mary Tyler Moore, existed in the world that didn’t want her to be. She existed in the world that had a very specific design for her that she pushed back against. That’s feminist.
Tell me about the decision not to show video of any talking-head interviews. On occasion you’ll see a reporter, but for the most part, it’s only Mary that you see speaking in the film.
That note came directly from Lena.
We were eight months into the edit, and we hadn’t yet stumbled upon the trove of tapes. We were having a very difficult time expressing a lot of the sentiments that Mary spoke about and wrote about in her autobiography, so we were playing around with archival materials. We were using a lot of early cinema as visual metaphors for Mary’s life to explain details.
When Lena finally got around to watching the rough cut, she loved the weird things we were doing with the archival material. She looked at it and was like, “Every time we jump back into the world of archive, it’s magic.” And she’s like, “I’m a fan. Her fans are going to watch this. Why can’t we just live in the magic of the archive?”
To get a note from your executive that is, “You don’t have to rely on some of the conventions of documentary filmmaking, just go that way. I know that’s where your heart is, so lean into that.” That was probably one of the greatest notes we were given on this journey.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
