Laurie Kahn-Leavitt’s lively and often hilarious film TUPPERWARE! chronicles the rise of an American plastics company and the extraordinary career of the woman who helped make Tupperware a household name. When Brownie Wise, a charismatic, driven businesswoman, convinced entrepreneur Earl Tupper that home selling was the way to market his products, Tupperware parties became a fixture of 1950’s American life. And while the film documents the rise and fall of the powerful and prominent Wise, it devotes equal attention to the stories of women who made a living hosting the parties, transforming themselves in the process into “Tupperware ladies.” This focus on the lives of “extraordinary ordinary” women is a recurring theme in Kahn-Leavitt’s films.
“Most of what we see in history are the stories of the top 10 percent of the population-the wealthy, the prominent,” says Kahn-Leavitt, who wrote, produced, and directed TUPPERWARE! “I’m interested in presidents and wars, but I want to make films about the people whose stories haven’t been told.”
Thus one of the most compelling moments in the film is when former Tupperware lady Anna Tate talks about the graduation ceremonies that took place after Tupperware training sessions. The valedictorian of her training group, Tate is brought to tears as she explains how much the graduation meant to her, and to thousands of other women who had never before been recognized in such a way for their achievements. Amid a lighthearted and funny film that celebrates 1950’s kitsch, Kahn-Leavitt finds a story that hits home with modern viewers.
“I’m interested in the kind of work women do, the recognition they do or don’t get, how they navigate in a world that may not be open to them,” Kahn-Leavitt says. “A common theme of my films is that they take women’s lives seriously on their own terms. It may be harder to get people to tune in for this type of film, but once you get them watching, they love the stories of ordinary people.”
Kahn-Leavitt is uniquely qualified to bring these neglected stories to cinematic life. In the 1980’s and 1990’s she worked on award-winning documentary programming including the PBS series “American Experience” and “Eyes on the Prize.” She has contributed to the National Public Radio news program “All Things Considered,” edited books for MIT Press, and taught philosophy at Harvard and Tufts. All of these experiences inform the films she makes, and contributed to her decision in 1992 to start her own company, Watertown-based Blueberry Hill Productions, to focus on the stories that fascinate her.
The Tupperware film was born as Kahn-Leavitt was researching the cultural history of plastic. Digging among the archives, she stumbled upon a treasure trove of film footage documenting the Tupperware Company’s “jubilees,” lavish sales conventions organized around such themes as fairytales, pirates, and beauty pageants. “I watched the footage, looked through Earl and Brownie’s papers, and thought, this is a film staring me in the face,” says Kahn-Leavitt. “By studying the images, I try to find out what the women thought about themselves and their lives. Then slowly, I figure out the arc of the story.” While Brownie Wise became the centerpiece of the film, it is the interviews with the women (and a few men) who experienced “that Tupper feeling” first hand who provide much of the story’s insight, appeal, and humor. TUPPERWARE! is being screened at film festivals throughout the country, and will be shown on PBS as part of the “American Experience” series this February.
Kahn-Leavitt explored history in a very different way in her 1997 film A MIDWIFE’S TALE, winner of an Emmy for outstanding nonfiction. Delving into the life of eighteenth-century midwife Martha Ballard, Kahn-Leavitt couldn’t rely on photographic records or living witnesses, and in dramatizing Ballard’s life had to supply the visual images herself. The fact that Ballard is known at all is thanks to her faithfully kept diaries, which were discovered by historian Laurel Ulrich and woven into a Pulitzer Prize-winning book. “I had to think a lot about what Martha Ballard’s world looked like,” Kahn-Leavitt says, “and I had a lot of questions. What did her house look like? Was it messy or neat? Was there clutter? The process got me looking at my own world differently.”
Kahn-Leavitt’s film, a hybrid of documentary and drama, meticulously re-creates an 18th-century life, in which Martha Ballard successfully delivered hundreds of babies, cared tirelessly for the sick and dying in her community, and raised a family of her own. A MIDWIFE’S TALE also explores the long hours of painstaking research and study that made the historical reconstruction of Ballard’s life possible, revealing historian Ulrich’s total immersion in the details of her subject’s life.
Kahn-Leavitt understands the lure of such immersion. “When I’m working on a film, I get so involved with the material that it takes all my energy to feel that I’m getting it right,” she says.
The other side of researching, of course, is the production process, and Kahn-Leavitt makes a point of crediting the talented professionals with whom she collaborates to bring women’s history to life, including co-producer Robin Hessman, editor Bill Anderson, director of photography Peter Stein, production assistant/researcher Julie Golia, and the late Richard Rogers, who directed A MIDWIFE’S TALE.
Kahn-Leavitt’s scholarly bent has garnered her a 2002-2003 fellowship at Harvard’s Warren Center for Studies in American History, and a place in the Women’s Studies Research Center Scholars Program at Brandeis University. In the coming months, she’ll continue her exhaustive research and tackle a new series of films exploring women’s history for “American Experience.” She has created a list of two hundred possible topics that she’ll pare down to the most compelling and visually interesting subjects. Then she’ll begin to shape her source material into individual documentaries. “It’s a slow process, finding the pace, look, feel, and style appropriate for each film,” she says. But Kahn-Leavitt believes the effort is well worth it. “There are so many stories out there waiting to be told. I keep making these films because I want people to see that women’s lives matter.”