Liz Carpenter was 26 when she found her way into the Washington DC press corps, covering politics, a position that few wanted her to have when women were often relegated to covering high society if they got to do any reporting at all in 1942. In “Shaking It Up: The Life and Times of Liz Carpenter,” it’s vividly recalled, as the feisty Texan surely want, that Eleanor Roosevelt had set up press conferences for herself almost for the exclusive purpose of inviting female journalists to the White House for the first time and Carpenter wasn’t only one of the first attendees, but made sure to leave the door open even wider than it had been cracked for her when she was able to insist that women could get a seat in the balcony at the National Press Club. Carpenter would eventually move on from covering politics to being right in the middle of the scrum (as she probably preferred), acting as an assistant to President Lyndon B. Johnson and a press secretary for First Lady Lady Bird Johnson, yet she remained invested in keeping power accountable and championing equality in every position she would ever hold.
When “Shaking It Up” moves like a freight train, co-directors Abby Ginzberg and Christy Carpenter, Liz’s daughter, honor their ferocious subject whose bigger-than-life personality cultivated from her youth in the Lone Star state made her a force to be reckoned with in the nation’s capital where she and her husband Leslie, a journalist, could disarm just about anyone at social functions and work the gears of power like no one else. Her quick thinking was responsible for the statement LBJ made to calm a grieving nation after the Kennedy assassination and her long view helped gain traction for the potential adoption of an equal rights amendment after the end of the Johnson Administration, which may have been unsuccessful as a piece of legislation but built a coalition of activists that continue to fight for change to this day.
The likes of Dan Rather and Bill Moyers show up to pay their respect, but Carpenter is allowed the chance to tell her story in her own inimitable voice, full of fun digressions attested to by family and friends (often involving her pets) but always arriving at an important point when it’s clear she wasn’t someone who wasted time. From her childhood in the small town of Salado from which her great-grandmother started the first literary society in Texas to eventually having her name adorn buildings in the state capitol and the University of Texas’ most prestigious lecture series, it isn’t just a life of accomplishment that’s described but filled with the energy of one that’s been well-lived and shortly before the premiere of “Shaking It Up” in Austin at SXSW, Ginzberg and Carpenter generously spoke about capturing such a remarkable woman in full and how her enduring legacy carries on in times where her example is more needed than ever.
How did the two of you join forces on this?
Christy Carpenter: We’ve been friends since we attended the London School of Economics our junior year there, so Abby and I go a long way back, and I had been doing a lot of research on my mom’s life, going through all her very extensive papers at the LBJ Library for a couple of years. Then I wrote an article in 2020 [for] my mother’s 100th birthday. She was born five days after the 19th Amendment was adopted, and that year was the centennial of the 19th Amendment, so I wrote this article, sent it to Abby among other friends and Abby gave me a call and said, “Hey, I think I’d like to do a film about your mom.” Through my research, I knew about a whole bunch of interviews [with Liz], and of course I’d remembered some of them [too] so I was able to pull together some things for Abby to look at and for us to think together if it was really viable to do a documentary.
Abby Ginzberg: And I wanted to do it. I thought Liz would be so much more interesting alive and on camera than just as whatever Christy was going to write, so I thought, “Look, I know how to make a documentary. Christy’s got this great story. Let’s combine forces to see what we can do about bringing Liz’s story to the screen.” And I generally don’t do dead people. I’m generally more interested in unsung heroes who are still alive, but I was sure that Liz had been covered well enough and in enough interviews that we could make her feel alive in the film and use her own words to talk for herself.
Obviously you did, but was it a challenge with the material you had?
Christy Carpenter: You have to dig. We hired great archival researchers, and our archival producer, Susanne Mason, who is Austin-based had worked on “The Lady Bird Diaries,” so she dug up all kinds of things and I, of course, had a lot of photographs. But it turned out that there was really quite a lot of news footage, even if it wasn’t an interview with Liz, it was news footage covering her, so we were able to piece that together we cobbled it together from the best clips we could find. Here’s an interesting challenge in all of this — when Liz is working in the White House, she’s behind the scenes. That’s her job is to be available to advise President Johnson or figure out what she’s going to do around Lady Bird, who wants to take her environmental story out on the road, so part of the challenge is you get all this great footage, but she was successful at staying in the back, so it’s hard to find Liz sitting in the raft going down the Snake River. You’ll see her urging Lady Bird onto an airplane, but the focus is always on Lady Bird, which is what Liz’s goal was, so now that you’re turning the camera on Liz and trying to get her story, you’re like, “Could we just have a few more frames of that, please?” The good news is there was just enough, but there were times where we wish we’d had more. And I had relationships with a lot of people that we interviewed, from Dan Rather to Bill Moyers, to the two Johnson daughters, Linda and Luci, Gloria Steinem and Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson and other feminists that are in the film so we were able to shed light on what Liz was doing.
Abby Ginzberg: One important interview was with Julia Sweig, who wrote the most recent and wonderful biography of Lady Bird’s time in the White House, which was the basis for “The Lady Bird Diaries,” so she could talk about what you can’t really capture so well on camera, which is [how] Liz, working with Lady Bird, strategized and orchestrated all the tremendous things Lady Bird was doing in terms of promoting the environmental protection and poverty programs and civil rights and so forth. Through these interviews, we were able to augment the full dimension of what Liz was doing.
Liz lived such a full life and the film generally moves forward in time, but between the different facets to her and all the life experiences that were formative such as growing up in Salado where she was surrounded by strong female writers, was it difficult to find the structure?
Abby Ginzberg: That is every filmmaker’s challenge, figuring out where Salado comes in. We had a clip that started with the assassination [of John F. Kennedy], and you don’t even know who Liz is at that point, so the questions that I ask in every film are what do we need to know about Liz so that we care about the fact that she’s the person taking out the card and writing Johnson’s speech [on it] when Air Force One is going to land. I think the choice to put the 1940s and her work as a journalist early in the film, so we get, “Okay, trailblazer, female journalist in Washington when nobody was doing any of that, president of the Women’s National Press Club,” we see some of the building blocks.
Now, do you need to know that she grew up in Solado for that to appreciate Johnson? No, you don’t. That can come later, so it’s like, how much do you need to know? Where do you need to know it? Another choice we had to make was that opening two-minute bit where we established that at least the media thought Liz was important, so you see her in all these different media contexts and that tells an audience member who has no idea who she is, “Well, I don’t know who this woman is, but she’s important, so let me stick with the film to find out more about her.” Those were not so much debates, but ways of crafting the film that took time. We didn’t know we were going to start with Washington in the ’40s, but it really provided the basis and the bedrock for everything that comes after it.
Christy, given what an iconic figure your mother is, and her story has been told before, was there anything really important for you to shine a light on?
Christy Carpenter: That a lot of people, if they know the name Liz Carpenter, they immediately think Lady Bird Johnson, and she was really a trailblazer from the get-go, from the moment she hit Washington in 1942 was a 22-year-old, going to Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt press conferences. This was a chance to give people an understanding of the full spectrum of her career through the women’s movement. Some people are not even that aware how active she was, and certainly didn’t know about the journalist period, so this is giving a multi-dimensional story of a woman who had an impact all along the way, from the very beginning up until the end and our goal is to inspire people to go on and shake things up in whatever way they want to shake them up.
When she was ahead of her time and so much of what she fought for continues to be for today, did you feel like you were responding to the present at times when putting this together?
Abby Ginzberg: How could it not, right? We’re both children of the feminist movement. Liz was ahead of us, but we were also influenced by it, so when we look at the rollback of women’s rights that are taking place on an express train right now, we hear her voice in our ears saying, “You just have to keep fighting. There are going to be setbacks.” And these may be even worse than some of the setbacks she lived through, but her message to us and to every other younger woman would be, “Get up, put on your big girl pants and get out there and join the struggle because someday you’re going to win this. History is going prove all of us right, but we don’t know if we’re going live to see it,” and I feel that message is super important.
Christy Carpenter: Yeah, she was a relentless optimist, so she always believed that things will get better, but you can’t sit on the sofa and expect that to happen. You’ve got to do things.
Abby Ginzberg: I also feel Liz is a really important role model for older women, myself included, in the sense that she was working as long as she could to make things better in this country. It wasn’t like, “Oh, I’m 65, I’m done.” That was not her attitude. [Her feeling was] “If there’s a new battle to be fought or somebody wants me to give a speech, let me get out there and do it,” so I just feel like for people who are more my age and Christy’s, she also has a message, which is it’s not over till it’s over.
Christy Carpenter: Yeah, there’s a soundbite toward the end of the film where Evan Smith talks about Liz was joyful in her work and there’s a lot of disillusionment nowadays and a lot of despair about the state of our country, so we’re hoping this is something of an antidote. Liz’s outsized personality is something that people take something from regardless of their age, and that it’s not just women. We hope men, young and old, will also be inspired by the story they hear.
“Shaking It Up: The Life and Times of Liz Carpenter” will screen again at SXSW on March 13th at 6 pm at Violet Crown Cinema 1 and 6:30 pm at Violet Crown Cinema 3.
