It appears at first as if it’s a great burden for Molly O’Brien to lug the double bass that Orin O’Brien has played much of her life down to the street from her aunt’s sixth floor apartment in New York in the opening scene of “The Only Girl in the Orchestra,” telling her “I can’t believe you did this for 55 years.” Yet any question as to how she did it is answered upon reaching a concert hall where it couldn’t look any more light and delicate in Orin’s hands as she prepares to play.
The classical bassist that Leonard Bernstein once proclaimed was “a miracle” upon enlisting her to be the first female musician to join the New York Philharmonic full-time, Orin O’Brien is shown never to have strained to play all the right notes in a remarkable life, yet that is hardly to say she’s had it easy, combating early raves for her work that couldn’t help but compared her curves to that of her instrument and fiercely determined to escape the shadow of her parents, movie stars Marguerite Churchill and George O’Brien, by actually gravitating out of the spotlight while pursuing a career in the arts. As she confesses to Molly at one point, “You have a better life than me because it’s more normal,” yet this humility just becomes one admirable quality among many that the filmmaker finds as she follows her aunt at a particularly momentous time, announcing her retirement from the Philharmonic and moving out of the apartment she’s spent over five decades in right down the way from Lincoln Center.
“The Only Girl in the Orchestra” may tell of someone who would rather not be celebrated, but has achieved a professional and personal balance to be envied when she hasn’t sought attention and while the film may tug her out of the orchestral pit a bit, it observes how she continues to share her wisdom with students and has dedicated herself to playing a part in something far bigger than herself. Fittingly, the short profile packs quite a punch in its modest run time and as the film recently made its debut at DOC NYC where it was bound to lure audiences with its beautiful soundtrack lingering in the hallways, Molly O’Brien generously took the time to talk about the tenacity required to convince her aunt that her remarkable career should be committed to film, bringing out the passion that Orin performs with in the film’s editing and camerawork and how pandemic stay-at-home orders opened up the story in ways that couldn’t have been anticipated.
How’d this come about?
I wanted to make a film about my aunt Orin for the last 10 years, and she kept saying no. If you see the film, you’ll understand why. She’s somebody who doesn’t want a big fuss made, and she chose the double bass for a reason – she wants to be part of an ensemble. She’s the child of two movie stars, and she saw the effects of celebrity culture on her family, and she wanted to be in the background. But around 2021 when she decided to retire, she finally said yes, so I was thrilled. And it turns out that that was really great timing and made the film richer because we were able to follow her journey out of classical music. I think it’s difficult for anyone to give up work, but if there’s anybody who’s done it well, it’s her.
Did it coincide with her move out of her apartment? That seems like it must’ve helped bring some things to light with all those boxes.
It did. It was right around the same time, maybe six or eight months apart, although she had to leave that apartment, It was a fabulous rent-stabilized apartment in New York City where she’d been for 50 years, but there were regular floods. Every time a hurricane came, the three inches of water on the floor and there was black mold growing everywhere and the landlord was not repairing it, so she was uncomfortable. It was just a nightmare.
But I did help her sort through a lot of the materials and she kept everything. She has such a rich life and [we looked through] all of her schedules and the posters and the playbills and so much wonderful material. Of course, there’s always so much that you can’t use that I wish we could have. It was a short film, but my editor Monique Zavistovski is a bit of a genius and was able to pull all this incredible emotion out of the archive that we had.
It was really impressive to me that this moves back and forth in time as much as it does, but remains propulsive throughout with no obvious throughline. Was it tough to structure?
Yes, it was difficult. We approached the process in a way that echoes Orin’s philosophy of life in that it was a work of an ensemble. I’m directing the film, but this is very much the work of a producer, Lisa Remington, an editor, Monique Zavistovski, and a cinematographer, Martina Radwan and it was an intergenerational group of women who came together to tell the story. We approached it so that the edit and the shooting were going along simultaneously. We all have other day jobs, so we were able to stop and start. Monique would edit a bit and this theme of celebrity culture [emerged], the tension between having soloistic celebrity parents and choosing the double bass and wanting to be part of an ensemble, yet Leonard Bernstein making you the very first woman ever hired by the New York Philharmonic in 1966, so of course you’re thrust into the spotlight. We discovered this great tension pretty early between soloist and ensemble, and celebrity and background player and how we all sometimes have to play the double bass and we’re happy about that, and sometimes we’re not. That theme really is what we kept wanting to come back to.
I think it also shows up in the relationship between Orin and I, because for the last 10 years, I kept wanting to push her into the spotlight by making this film because I think she’s so wonderful, and she’s such a great example of how to live a life of purpose, especially the second half of your life. But she’s just resistant, so there’s a tension between the two of us because I want to put her on a pedestal, but she doesn’t want it. Once we discovered that in the edit room with Monique and Lisa, we built our shooting around that. That’s where the starry-lighted mirrored ball came from – that idea of glitter and the spotlights on that stage. It all was built slowly over time, bouncing back and forth from the edit to the shoot and that’s a luxury that most documentarians don’t have because usually we go out and shoot everything. Then we have to figure it out.
Did it actually influence the camerawork itself? I felt you made a great connection with the music with how the double bass was portrayed while it was being played.
Oh, sure, especially in those opening and closing scenes with the mirrored ball, we were very intentional. We didn’t storyboard it, but we picked Mahler’s second because we wanted the beginning of the film to hit you in the face with that incredible bass sound, and I really wanted to work with that, not only in the soundtrack, but also visually. As a young kid, I first remember walking into Orin’s apartment and there were these eight double basses in her apartment and they took up all the space. They looked like horses when I was a child, and I’ve always been struck by how beautiful they are. And Martina spent a lot of time talking about the verticality of the bass, being difficult to frame because of the horizontal aspect ratio that we work inside of now, so the decision was made to free the camera, take it off the tripod and be able to move up and down because you can’t get that whole bass unless you’re way back in a wide [shot]. So it was a lot of conversation about how to photograph the bass and how to capture the bass sound in the soundtrack to make the double bass a character in the film.
Of course, some of the music is diegetic and you get to work around it, but what was it like picking your spots to score this?
We started with the diegetic, so “Lieutenant Kijé” is the piece that she plays with David Grossman in backstage at the Philharmonic in the very beginning of the film and we heard a symphonic version of that, then David plays the Mozart in the middle and there’s a Bach piece that she plays with David later. But then we teamed up with an incredible composer, Laura Karpman, who’s a Juilliard-trained musician and immediately recognized that Orin needed to be involved in creating the original soundtrack, so she and Orin together, along with my producer, Lisa Remington, and our co-producer, Katy Beal, met in New York with four of Orin’s former students and they played arrangements Laura had made of all of those pieces Orin had worked on years ago with her teacher for the four double basses plus Beethoven’s seventh, which became like a theme in the film. And that’s very unusual since double basses usually don’t play alone, but these four double basses, all four former students of Orin, play in the very specific style that Orin teaches and recorded these arrangements of Beethoven and Bach and Mahler. Then Laura Karpman went back into the studio and made a mosaic out of them, just placing them beautifully in the film, and then she did some piano stuff too. But everybody on that soundtrack is somehow a student of Orin’s or an admirer of Orin’s and Orin was sitting in the recording studio when they were working.
Amazing. And was there anything that happened that took this in a direction you didn’t expect?
COVID. [laughs] Which I’m sure you heard a thousand filmmakers say. Originally, I wanted to follow Orin in her last year with the New York Philharmonic and go on tour with her and do a more verite shoot. They were supposed to go to Europe again, but of course, Orin’s last concert with the New York Philharmonic happened in February of 2020 and no one knew it was the last concert. That was a huge pivot because all of a sudden, I don’t have that story arc. I can’t be with her through her last year. Her last year already happened. So that meant really moving into a much better place [with the story], which was talking to her about her philosophy of life, about the difference between being a soloist and an ensemble player, how her parents shaped her choices, and how celebrity culture impacted her, growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950s. She’s always been a teacher, but to see her transition [out of the Philharmonic], she was just really, really digging into the teaching and her philosophy of life became much more our guide than just the last nine months of her career. That would have been a fine film, but more of a typical film, I think.
What’s it like getting this out into the world?
It feels so good. I mean, 10 years coming, right? So it feels wonderful and I’m very curious to see how Orin processes watching other people watch her life. I think it’ll be a great experience for her, but I’m nervous. I hope her example becomes something that we can all live up to – that I become a master of my craft the way she has and that I last long enough and am big enough to pass it on and not be afraid of the younger generation coming up behind me and just embrace it the way she has with so much grace.
“The Only Girl in the Orchestra” will screen at DOC NYC as part of Shorts Program: She Stories on November 15th at 9:15 pm at the Village East. It will also be available to stream online through November 26th on DOC NYC’s online platform.