BIRMINGHAM, MI – A few weeks ago, Sue Marx met a new mail delivery person as he stood on her front porch. “I know who you are,” he said, as she raised an eyebrow.
“Could I see it?” he asked. She relaxed then, and smiled; she knew what he wanted. “Of course,” she said, and took him into her basement, and used his phone to take a picture of the mailman holding it, holding her Oscar.
Whoever heard of a former English teacher in the Detroit suburbs, a self-taught freelance photographer who grew up in small-town Indiana winning an Academy Award?
Yet she did, back in 1987, for a half-hour documentary called Young At Heart, which she and her then-filmmaking partner, Pamela Conn, had made the year before on a bare-bones budget of perhaps $25,000. The film, which has since warmed audiences in many parts of the world, was a very personal one for her; the romance between her own widowed father, at the time an 84-year-old Russian immigrant named Louis Gothelf, and Reva Shwayder, an artist.
Somehow, it touched viewers’ hearts, possibly more than had far bigger-budget films, including the 1955 Frank Sinatra movie of the same name. Sue Marx, who has a quality one might call “sweet chutzpah” managed to call George Burns and get him to allow her to use, for free, his version of the song, Young at Heart.
That’s not surprising, given that she had to have chutzpah to do nearly everything she’s ever done. Born in 1930, she grew up in a small town in Indiana she couldn’t wait to leave. After graduating from Indiana University, she planned to move to Chicago — only to have her very proper mother insist that nice girls don’t live in big cities by themselves. But she did have an aunt and uncle who lived in Detroit, which was then a dynamic and bustling city.
That worked. She moved there; met the man she always calls the love of her life, the late Hank Marx, a business owner and later, professional mediator and dispute resolution specialist, and had three babies in four years. When they started to grow up, she needed a new challenge. After a brief stint at modeling, she decided she was more interested in being behind the camera.
So she taught herself photography; became a well-regarded news photographer, and then got interested in two things: Television and improving race relations. Following the Detroit riots of 1967, she created and began producing a regular TV series, Profiles in Black.
Gradually, she realized she wanted to make her own films. “I basically taught myself,” she said. “I took one course, but it wasn’t very good, so I worked with other people,” and so in 1980, she opened Sue Marx Films. Her very first one was on John Glick, the celebrated ceramic artist (“still maybe my favorite film I’ve made.”)
Six years later came Young at Heart. When she was making it, did she ever think it would win, that she would win an Oscar? “Never!” she said. “But then it started winning a lot of awards.”
They loved it at Telluride, and the New York Film Festival, and then there she was in Hollywood, looking absolutely stunned when they announced that she, co-producer Pam Conn and Young at Heart had won. “From Hollywood, Hooray for Michigan!” she said.
That pleased everyone in the state – except her friend Coleman Young, Detroit’s legendary and cranky old mayor. “You should have said Detroit, not Michigan,” he growled at her later.
She told him “Mr. Mayor, you only get to say a few words. And Michigan has three syllables, and Detroit has only two!”
After that, Sue Marx Films was in demand. She and her team churned out more than a hundred documentaries, on subjects from John Voelker, Michigan’s fly-fishing Supreme Court Justice who wrote Anatomy of a Murder, to films on health, politics and the arts.
“Sue is, first and last, a storyteller,” said author and publisher Bill Haney. “Whatever the subject, she immerses herself in it.”
She won a slew of Emmy awards, but never came close to an Oscar again, nor expected to. As she approached her nineties, she regretfully gave up filmmaking, but later this year, the Detroit Historical Museum is expected to mount a major display of her still photos, many of them of iconic figures including Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Marvin Gaye, taken in the 1960s.
Next week, when the Academy Awards are presented, she will be avidly watching, as always, wearing a little mini-Oscar she had made as a necklace. After all, she has been a voting member of the Academy since she won her Oscar, and has a say in which films and directors and actors win.
Does she think that someone like herself could win an Academy Award today, someone from outside the system, self-taught, without connections? “I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully. “But I hope so!”
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