Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story movie review (2017)

Coming from a career of drawing, Harold started doing storyboard work, where he was able to draw with different camera lenses in mind. One of his first major projects was “The Ten Commandments,” of which he never saw director Cecil B. DeMille but did see his sketches on the big screen, as he claims in interviews shown here. That led him to projects like “Ben-Hur” (“I almost forgot how to draw a guy with a tie,” he hilariously asides) and “The Birds,” where Harold collaborated directly with Hitchcock in the editing room. During many of these references, Raim’s film displays the storyboards along with a particular project he worked on, and Michelson’s influence becomes ever apparent. 

His wife, Lillian Michelson, started working in research after starting a family with Harold; there’s a bewildered look on her face when she talks about once getting fired for being pregnant before she worked in Hollywood. She became an essential element for creative visions, and she expresses how she loves the idea of finding facts in order for Hollywood to create fantasy. Over time, she amassed her own library of materials, and when Francis Ford Coppola started his own Zoetrope Studios, it was her library that he put on the lot. 

The context of this documentary is always that they’re regular, nice people in a tough business, and the doc’s tone is one of grounded enthusiasm, like, “Have you met my friends, Harold & Lillian?” Likable they are indeed, and they’re funny, too. I laughed out loud when Lillian mused about Tom Waits hanging around her library (“Everything that came out of him sounded like a police confession”) or the time she was going to meet with a true South American drug dealer for “Scarface” research (“He was a nice Jewish boy”). The film humanizes people behind the scenes in ways we rarely get to see.