Keen comic-book fans may well be aware of the satirist magazine MAD that was first published in the 1950s but they might not be so familiar with its creator, Harvey Kurtzman. In the programme notes for the Edinburgh International Film Festival, festival producer Emma Boa states that his “commitment to integrity and challenging the status quo with humour, edge and resilience is a hymn for our times”. With his sophomore feature, documentary filmmaker Bart Simpson paints a vivid portrait of the man behind the MADness and ‘The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman’ celebrates its world premiere in Edinburgh. I was fortunate to sit down with the director Simpson to discuss the piece.
“I wasn’t that familiar with him as a person either, but I remember seeing books of his work as a child and being scared by it”, said Simpson on his early discovery of Kurtzman’s artistry. “He was a complicated man and not always the easiest to work with. I didn’t want this to be a puff piece”. Despite his legacy as a creative revolutionary of sorts, the footage of him is scarcely available. “If you take Brett Morgan’s music doc Montage of Heck as an example, we know what Kurt Cobain looks like and there are countless photos and videos of him. With Harvey, there’s very little of that. We were given access to 36 boxes of his belongings; drawings, sketches, even shopping lists. We used these as much as we could”.
From this treasure trove of artefacts, there were tender love letters between Kurtzman and his beloved wife Adele who features in the film but has sadly since passed away. Scribbles within these are brought to life which enhances the playfulness of Kurtzman’s craft. “I can’t do animation; I can barely draw”, joked Simpson. “Adele was definitely the most important person in Harvey’s life so it was important to illustrate this. Thankfully, we worked with a great animation studio called the 2D Workshop based just outside of Edinburgh. It was very much a co-production between Canada and Scotland”.
“With documentaries, the good ones at least, they take a long time to make”, he explained when discussing the biggest challenges of the production. “We had COVID right in the middle of our process so it was difficult to interview everyone that we wanted to”. Robert Crumb, whose underground style inspired Owen Kline’s coming-of-age film Funny Pages, idolised Kurtzman and makes a rare appearance to speak on him. “If the film had been about his own work, I think he would’ve been reluctant to contribute but once he knew the focus was Kurtzman, he was open to be involved”.
“I lived in the Southside of Glasgow for a while and as a Canadian, you don’t have to go too far back to find a link to Scotland”, enthused Simpson about his film screening at EIFF. “Coming to Scotland feels like coming home in a way so I’m thrilled. It’s the right place for the film to be shown, especially now that the film festival runs alongside the other festivals in Edinburgh in August. Our film is a book film, an arts film, and a film film!”.
EIFF roughly coincides with the release of the latest Spider-Man picture, Brand New Day, and as Stan Lee was a collaborator of Kurtzman’s, we entertained the thought of what he would’ve made of Marvel’s meteoric rise within the cinematic landscape. “He would’ve loved it but he’d have been jealous. Like a lot of his peers at that time, he ultimately wanted to be a filmmaker. He found another medium for his art but if he was still around, he would’ve wanted to be a part of it”.
EIFF World Premiere: ‘THE MAD WORLD OF HARVEY KURTZMAN’ is on Sunday 16 August 15:00 at Filmhouse 1
Cinema Perspective 