It was important to all of us who worked on this film to make this as close to an autobiographical project as we could, so we focused on things that Pauli spoke about either publicly, or in some cases only privately, but all saved in that archive to weave together this extraordinary story. We were really just trying to start the process of unearthing this spectacular figure from American history and were hugely helped in that endeavor, interestingly, by Pauli Murray, who had the foresight to save an enormous collection - 141 boxes worth of notes, journals, drafts of papers, photographs, audio cassettes, and even videotapes - that really tell Pauli’s story in Pauli’s own words. We realized pretty early on we weren’t going to be able to tell Pauli Murray’s whole story. Julie Cohen: All along we just wanted to take pieces of the story that we felt most deeply and that we could connect to one another. Was there something that you could hold on to from early on? Given the archive you had, there were so many ways you could’ve told this story. RBG put Pauli’s name on the cover of the first legal brief that she wrote arguing for women’s equality, really as a nod to the radical thinking that Pauli did in the 1960s about using the Fourteenth Amendment to broaden the opportunities for women, as well as for African-Americans, so we were thrilled when we did more research and discovered, “Oh my goodness, this person not only did this for women’s rights, but had such a profound impact on so many aspects of our lives.” I’m so happy that you decided that this was going to be the follow up to “RBG.” After knowing how important Pauli was to her, did you feel an obligation there or was it a natural extension of this story?īetsy West: I think we felt grateful to RBG for opening our eyes to Pauli Murray. After premiering earlier this year at Sundance, the film is now streaming on Amazon Prime and Cohen and West, who are having quite the fall with iconic portraits of both Murray and Julia Child, spoke about how they built upon the work they did in “RBG” to chronicle this equally remarkable trailblazer, bringing their voice quite literally into the film and why the time is ripe to tell their story. An extraordinary person apart from their myriad achievements, West and Cohen are able to answer the question that opens their film when it seems like so few are unaware of Murray’s contributions to the greater good so vividly that they’re unlikely to slip under the radar again, with “My Name is Pauli Murray” coming alive in letting its subject’s words reverberate across the film, echoing how they’ve cut across generations and continue to leave a mark in the present day.
Rather than having identity become a limitation, Murray’s considerable mind opened up to thinking about injustices that were happening across America in ways that might require some time for the rest of the country to catch up, but planted the seeds for reframing conversations around equal rights for all as they became an educator at Yale and eventually ordained as an Episocopal priest. Murray understood far earlier than most that such social constructs were largely arbitrary, brought up as a Black woman but knew from an early age that they didn’t entirely align with either gender. Ferguson, used by Thurgood Marshall to undo segregation in schools, could be used to argue a number of civil rights cases. An inspiration to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who West and Cohen previously profiled to great acclaim with “RBG,” Murray pioneered the line of thought that Ginsberg embraced as a lawyer that the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause could be applied to issues of discrimination when it came to gender as much as race and that Plessy vs. It was about as fitting a tribute as one could give Murray, both a brilliant legal mind and a gifted poet, as someone who could find the art in all aspects of life and whose many interests increased their capacity to approach them all differently than most. “And Diana created artworks, all of them based on actual images that then turn into a piece of art.” “We were just trying to look for ways to really highlight the ahead-of-timeness of many of the things that Pauli did and thought that could be both intellectual and visual theme there’s so much to this complex, multifaceted life that we were trying to think of some things that would draw it all together,” said Julie Cohen. In order to do justice to a subject who transcended so many barriers, Betsy West and Julie Cohen sought out the services of the animator Diana Ejaita to help them create interstitial title cards for “My Name is Pauli Murray,” realizing that in order to celebrate achievements that continue to live on, they shouldn’t be consecrated in only the formats of the past such as fuzzy film and photographs.
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