This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio. It takes the work of an insightful and creative mind to fully capture the unparalleled beauty of nature in its purest form. While a colorful sunset or ripples in the water might be a sight to behold for the average person, in the hands of my guests today, they become a work of art. Carolyn Marx Blackwood is a photographer who captures the changing seasons as
they unfold around her in New York's Hudson Valley. Her cloud series resembles rothco bold colors blocked out in chunks across the sky. Her Ice series depicts shifting frozen ice sheets on the surface of the Hudson River, resembling a makeshift stone path one moment and a scattered deck of playing cards the next. Yet Blackwood doesn't stop there. She is also a screenwriter and producer, bringing to life films
like Philomena and The Duchess. Considering her professional range, I wanted to learn how Blackwood first embarked on the path to fine art photography.
I got my first camera when I was seven, and my father was a really beautiful photographer. And I used to go in the dark room and work, you know, to develop the film because they were film cameras then, and I just loved it. I just was I took to a camera like a duck to water. I had been doing photography for a very very long time, and I just didn't show anyone what I was doing. I just my family. Well, I didn't think of myself as that good a photographer. I was just old who loved to take pictures.
It was kind of an advanced hobby for you.
Yeah, it was a hobby. And you know, my family said, wow, you take great pictures. But that was about it.
You know.
I was thinking about my first show, and you came to it.
It was my.
First big show in a gallery in New York City. So I live in a little hamlet and we have a library, and I live on the river, and I took some pictures of a lighthouse, two pictures to raise some money for this little library, the Morton Library, and they sold for eight hundred dollars each, which astounded everyone. They were little eight by ten's. I just couldn't even believe someone wanted to buy my photographs. The next thing that happened was they said, would you like to be
in a show? And so I was in a show with around fifteen other photographers and artists and in walks. This woman who I had invited and I barely knew her name was Barbara Rose. Barbara Rose is a very famous curator and art historian. And she walked up to me and I was with fifteen other artists and I was thrilled to be in this little library art show. And she said, I'm curating a show in the city. It's going to be with two photographers and two painters.
Would you like to be in it? It's probably equivalent to playing softball in your backyard and the Yankees come and say do you want to pitch for the Yankees? It was very scary. And that's the show you came to. What year was that It was two thousand and six now?
But was that your nature that you kind of undervalued yourself and your skills When they say to you come and do this, you were like Wow, you couldn't believe it? Or was it something you'd hoped for? Did you want to have a commercial careers a photographer?
No, it was a total accident because I didn't think of myself as a legitimate photographer. And to add to that, most of my artist friends. I was friends with lots of artists, and I collect art and I love art. They were horrified because they had been added for a long long time and nothing like that had happened for them, and I couldn't call myself a photographer for a very long time. I felt like an impostor do you.
Go out into your world or in whatever experience you're having, wherever you are, and everything is the opportunity to show to picture Because I know a lot of people have their camera and they love that they can whip it out and shoot this and shoot that. They've got it
in their pocket and the convenience is unparalleled. But I wonder, do you set out with a camera and say, this is my time to photograph something, whatever it is, or to find something to photograph with a real camera, and then the rest of your life your phone is a phone. You know.
I live in a place that is my subject. My subject matter is mostly here at my house. I get deeper and deeper and deeper into this place. I have made a study of this place since I've been here two thousand and six. I think it's great that everyone wants to take a picture. It doesn't take away from me. If people want to express themselves creatively by taking a picture with their phone, I'd love to see it.
But let's say the very least, you're walking around somewhere and you see something you want to capture, and you don't have your camera with you, your regular camera that you do your work with, and you take out a phone and go, well, I want to shoot this to remind me that I want to come back here and do it with a real camera or a real professional camera. Do you do that or do you pull your phone out and start shooting and you're satisfied with the quality
on a phone. Must your work always be done on a legit camera.
Because of the size of my photos, I need pixels, but my camera now has forty megapixels. I think it is my phone. For instance, I have a bird series. We're in the fall, all these birds, like flock thousands of birds, And I was walking on the farm road where I walk every day, and there was a flock of a thousand birds, and I used my phone because I didn't bring my camera. Of course, I came back later.
With my camera that's what I'm saying.
Yeah, yeah, but it's most of what I take. Like that flock of birds are so ephemeral. It's there for a moment, it's there for thirty seconds. It happened to be there for an hour, and I took pictures. But when I take pictures out here of a moment, it really is just a moment. If you look at my I mean, like it can be a lightning strike, like you know that photo of the lightning strike.
That's a that's a moment.
That's a moment.
That's a real moment. Now, you were born in Anchorage. How long did you stay at Anchorage before you guys relocated?
Two years?
She were there for two years. So it's hard for you to recall what Anchorage was like back then.
It's hard for me to recall it. But I have to say. I went back because I was hired to be a photographer on the USCG. Healy, which is the biggest icebreaker. It's a Coastguard icebreaker and it's a scientific expedition icebreaker four hundred and fifty feet or something, and I was hired to do that. So I went back to Alaska. I went to Anchorage and Then I got on the boat in the Aleutian Islands and it was I felt like I was going home. It was so
emotional flying over Anchorage. I just because I had heard the stories from my parents. My mother was eighteen and my dad was twenty four or twenty three, and it was their great adventure, and I felt like I was really going home. I love it there.
Even only two years you were there, it felt like home. Yeah, that's interesting. And your dad was there? Why he was stationed there? What was there here?
Was stationed there? He had gone to West Point and they gave him a choice of places to do his three years of service after west Point, and he chose Alaska because of the salmon fishing. He was an avid salmon fisherman. He chose Alaska for that reason.
Well, then what could be better? Now you wind up coming back and your family moves to where to New York?
Yes, to Great neck Long Island.
Yeah, to Great neck Long Island. Quite a difference from Anchorage to Great neck Long Island. But better shopping, I would imagine in Great neck Long Island, as I recall. But your grandmother was a painter, Yeah, and I guess she took you through that portal into a world of appreciation of art. Is that correct? Yes? And what was her background meaning? Did someone pass it on to her, did she come from a very cultured family or was she herself an artist?
My grandparents were interesting. They came from extremely humble backgrounds and ended up being well off. My grandmother had worked in it.
Oh.
I have to go back a little bit. I found online my great grandmother, my great grandmother, my grandmother's mother, she had somehow landed gosh in Kansas, in Kansas City, in Kansas City, and there was a notice that I found in a newspaper through ancestry where she's suing for a breach of promise. She sued my great grandfather because he had promised to marry her and then renegged on it. So she sued him for five thousand dollars and then he married her. I wonder about that relationship as.
A way to land a man. You don't marry me, I'm going to sue you, breacher promise, and I'm keeping that diamond pal.
Yeah. I mean, and this is in the eighteen hundreds and she's from Germany.
I mean, Wow, she's like Annie Oakley with a law degree. Wow, you know. So that was my grandmother's parents. She worked in an oil company. My grandmother and then my grandfather. I knew my great grandmother. She came from Russia and she was a character. And my grandfather was a runner on Wall Street. And then he kind of got the gist of what was going on, and he asked if
he could invest. And at the end of the day he invested so well and made so much money for his employer, they wouldn't give him what was to him the ten percent that they promised, so he went out on his own and I have pictures of him and this woman and another man sitting in a very small room the size of a bathroom. That was the beginning of their company, which was opened in nineteen twenty nine.
Carolyn Marx Blackwood, if you enjoy conversations with brilliant photographers, check out my episode with Brian hamil Well.
You have to be discreet, but you have to get you work done. You can't tell the studio later on when they see it infurious out of stills. Hey, the guy was tough, you know, the actor was a pain in the ass. That's not an excuse. They just want to see end results. I worked on Raging Bull. De Niro had an eyeline problem, but he would always accommodate me. He was so sweet about it. He would always not make a big deal at it. He'd just do it with a hand. I'll do it for you.
After. To hear more of my conversation with Brian Hammill, go to Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Carolyn Marx Blackwood shares a story from her early years listening and learning from the one and only Leonard Bernstein. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing. Screenwriting, producing, and fine art are just a few of Carolyn Marx Blackwood's talents. Before that, Blackwood made her living as a jazz singer in New York City.
Music actually was the primary focus for a long long time, and I started out. I was very lucky. The best part about my family was that my dad was one of the early people at Lincoln Center. He was on the board for many years and he was one of the early supporters of it.
What profession did he go into?
He went into my grandfather's business.
You know.
Culturally, I was very lucky, and I would got to young people's concerts as a matter of fact, the other day I went on YouTube and I started playing the young People's concerts with Leonard Bernstein, and there am I and there's my sister sitting in the front row. But what the amazing thing about it was that it was a room filled with little kids that were transfixed. Turn on one of those young People's concerts. Unbelievable. Kids are just staring and listening and transfixed. You would think it
would be in that room. It's unbelievable.
So when you're singing in these clubs, what would you say? You started singing in those clubs in the West Village around what year?
I'll tell you what happened. It was another fluke. It was another Barbara Rose walking into the room. I was getting my PhD in sociology at Livingston College, which is part of Rutgers, and it had a fantastic jazz department, and I was like, instead of taking my sociology courses, I started taking jazz courses with the best people in jazz. Kenny Barron was my piano teacher. I mean, it was
just unbelievable. So I'm singing and I'm playing piano in a practice room and there's a knock on the door and in walks this guy and he says, Hi, I'm here to do a masterclass with Ron Carter Bass masterclass. And I was wondering, can I listen to you? And I said sure, So I'm just playing and singing and he says, hey, listen, I have to go now with Bob Cranch or the bass player. He says, I have to go now, but would you like to come down to Hoppers and sing with us? And I said, really,
how old were you? Twenty three?
Just out of college.
I had just gotten into a program for a PhD in sociology, And I said okay. And I went down to the club three times where they would call me up on stage and I just went like, no, I can't do it. I was too scared. Finally I got the courage to do it. I got up on stage and I sang someone to watch over me, and I did it the way that I learned it from a record from Ella Fitzgerald, and she double times the bridge.
So I did that, and I had like eight more bars that were empty because I had double timed the bridge. And I just stood there and thought like, oh, that was a disaster. And they asked me to sing with them, and I packed up. I left a husband, I left school, I moved to New York City, and I started singing with them. I called up some friends and said, are they any apartments in your building? They said, we're moving, you can have our apartment. It was just like meant to be.
What was the jazz scene, I'm assuming now jazz is kind of like Shakespeare and other things where there's a perceived fragility to yes, love that. Now.
Then there was a real jazz scene. It was thriving. I mean there were jazz clubs all over the city. I mean we were paid fifty dollars. Everyone in the band was paid fifty dollars a night.
It's a lot of money.
And these are some of the best jazz people ever, you know, Like I sang with really great people, and it was it was a really wonderful experience. And I was doing backups and I sang rock and roll. It was a wonderful time.
If you got fifty bucks a night, three nights a week, four weeks a month, that's six hundred bucks. You could pay your rent for six hundred bucks back then, and then some.
Oh my rent was one hundred and seventy five dollars and I was living on eighty third Street between West End and Riverside, and I had a railroad apartment, and I was happy as a clam.
I have this image of you with your father who's worried that you're not making money and you could be making more money in the family business. And you look at him and say, I made six hundred bucks last week, and your father's like, wow, Wow, that's real money. What happens? Because I want to talk about it seems like you choose your men the way you choose your own occupations and your own passions, which is there all over the map.
I want to talk about Christian and Greg. But what is it that pushes you out of the world of singing? You stop singing professionally? Why do you stop? And when?
Because I had very bad nerves. I wasn't comfortable singing in front of an audience, and I decided I have been writing since I was a little girl, and I decided I think being a writer where I can just not do it in front of everyone, would be better for me. So I started writing.
How long did you do the singing thing downtown? For? How long?
I think I did it for like around seven or eight years.
Wow, getting close to thirty years old. Now you are thirty something years old.
Yes, and then I had my son.
And you decide to leave. What was that decision? Like after seven or eighte years you concluded that you were a little uncomfortable and was performing in front of people.
I just thought the writing part really really calling you, calling me what are you writing? I'm writing plays and then it turns into screenplays, which I still write today.
Right what got made? First?
Nothing has gotten made except now three of them are going to be made. Well, like all of a sudden things that I wrote in the eighties, and it's pretty amazing. You know. The movie thing is another aspect. I have a partner named Gabby Tanna, Dantanna's daughter.
How many meals I used to have in Dantana's in the nineties.
Well, you know what, we're doing a little documentary on Dantana's.
That was a real haunt. You go in there, you couldn't believe who was there. Dantana's was a was a really nice little den.
Yeah, reallyom old school exactly. But the interesting thing, and because I've been partners with Gabby since nineteen ninety two. I've had a few meals at d'antana's, and as a woman, I always felt great there. It was sort of safe haven for a single woman.
Not a lot of wolves there, no, but.
Really interesting stories, a lot of music people, and a lot of deals got done well.
I would see there. Oh my god, yeah, Jimmy Garner, I mean all the Jimmy Kahn, all these old school people, Burt Reynold's old school, you know what.
I think the young generation is going there now sure and rediscover those places. So we're doing a documentary on dance.
So singing, writing, When is the photography on that level? Do they overlap? Yes?
And they relapse to this day, right, I'm doing photography. I'm having museum shows that are coming up. I have galleries where I have shows, and I'm making movies with my partner and writing things. So when one part of my brain gets tired, I go to the other thing, right, and it's just a whole other part of my brain. It's wonderful.
Well, I would imagine that things like will you render something you know? Like I mean, of course writing render something, but where you render something you know? Like photography is and this is my interpretation. I'd love to hear yours. But I'm a huge not for photography. I've got some beautiful prints in my house that I love from friends
and colleagues who are magnificent photographers. But I would imagine that more than writing in a sense, you get fueled by photography and painting, you know, the process of making something and the beauty and your DNA becoming exhibited over time. Whereas writing is really.
Hard, you know, for me, photography, like I told you, is flying by the seat of my pants. I see something and I have a second to get it, so I'm grabbing my camera and I'm running outside and I'm grabbing the light where the patterns on the river or a storm. And I mean, you know, I love abstraction too, and so I because I was so immersed in painting when I was a kid. I see what Agnes Martin's saw when she was painting. I see what Rothko saw.
I see what these painters saw, and sometimes they inspire me to take a picture that is reminiscent of their work.
But would you say that your concentration, your main concentration of this area adjacent to your home and everything that's specific to that Hudson Valley community that you're a part of. Would you say that that's a furtherance of your anxiety about being in public. Does Carolyn Marx Blackwood shoot pictures in her backyard because there's nobody else in her backyard? Is that a furtherance of that where your creative expression is always you want comfort and that means less people.
You know, my work does give me comfort, enormous comfort, and the great discovery was that it gives other people comfort too. I have had notes from people when I do not put something up on Instagram or Facebook or whatever it is, and they write to me, I'm in the hospital, you haven't posted anything for a few days. I'm dependent on your posting.
Yes, my.
Dose of beauty for the day. I have gotten notes like that. It feels like a big responsibility. So other people, I found out gets comfort from it too, which makes me feel wonderful.
Carolyn Marx Blackwood, if you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow here's the thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Carolyn Marx Blackwood shares her thoughts on how we might navigate a different landscape, the current mind fields of our political environment. I'm Alec Baldwin and
you're listening to Here's the Thing. The first husband of Carolyn Marx Blackwood was acclaimed cinematographer and director Christian Blackwood, who made more than eighty documentary films and passed away in nineteen ninety two. I wanted to know how her time with her filmmaker husband influenced her career path and her pivot to writing.
I was with Christian Blackwood in the city and he had a movie he wanted to do, and he asked me if I would write it. And it was the first screenplay I ever wrote. In nineteen eighty something eighty eight eighty nine. It was called Barbette. And we found this book on a sale table in Paris that was manray photographs of this guy from Round Rock, Texas who was the toast of Paris walking a high wire.
As a woman.
His name was Vander Clyde Barbett. And I was so taken with this book. And Francis Steik Muller had written about him in The New Yorker, and so I went into Francis Steig Muller's archives, and then I visited the family of Barbette in Texas and I wrote this screenplay which never really saw the light of day, but it's about to.
And yeah, now Blackwood, I want to interject he was a part of one of my favorite documentaries, which was the Death of a Salesman. One was Slanders and John Malkovich and Hoffman. I thought that that documentary was one of the most mesmerizing documentaries I've ever seen. My god, that was a great project.
I'm so glad you know about the beautiful movie. Yeah, he was a beautiful filmmaker.
Now, you tend to minimize the commerciality of the projects you're doing, so setting aside that you obviously have the resources to or you can access other people's resources to produce and make these projects. Is it as satisfying as you thought it might be? Do you like making films and plays and producing these.
It's very I mean the things that we have produced, I'm very proud of. We helped to produce Thirteen Lives, which was our last film.
You mean, the Ronnie Howard movie about the cave thing.
Yeah, my company helped produce it.
Did you really YEA wow? Wow? I love that movie. Yeah, I love that movie because I could see, as an actor who's worked in film, how stressful that must have been to be in those dark, dark spaces week after week.
Gets my partner did it. It was during the height of COVID and only one of us was allowed to go because of COVID, and she went to Australia. Gabby went to Australia and then was put in a COVID hotel for two weeks with an armed guard outside her door. She just went right from the airport into a hotel where she was kept in her room for two weeks. Then she was allowed to go out, and there was testing all the time. I think there was testing all the time. Sure, and she was in these sets that
were caves. They were so they built sets for them to be there.
And.
It was not a fun shoot.
You could tell. These guys earn their money on that film.
Yeah.
Now let's just finish with this, which is the woman who grew up the way you did. You know, raised in a nice family with some degree of privilege and so forth, and everybody's in the finance world and doing well, and you're the blackwood sheep of the family. What about your political expression. Oh, you describe yourself as very political.
How well, anyone that's not very political now better start to be, because we're about to lose our democracy possibly. And I'm doing everything I can think of to support my local politicians, and I mean senators and congress people. I've been with Kirsten Chilibrand for a very long time and we have a wonderful congress person here named Pat Ryan, and I support him. And what I'm doing is I
am having zoom meetings with these politicians. The reason I'm doing it is because I want everybody to feel like they have access. I have access to these politicians because I support them, and so I get access. There are a lot of people, there are a lot of Republicans that I want to be able to come on a zoom ask questions. And when I say Republicans, I mean sane Republicans, ones that are not enamored of whose name I shall not say. And so I just think we
need to really talk to people. I want to do a podcast, by the way, that's called Neighbors, where people talk to each other, neighbors across the aisle, across the aisle and talk. Because we've helped each other. But it's important that we talk to each other.
Well, I mean, whoever can solve that problem, because it's tough for people to talk to people that they believe are responsible for the Mussolini of our generation. He's not Hitler, he's Musoline. He's like a clown and a cartoonish figure. But of course, the woman who had a camera since she was seven and went on to become a very successful and very well regarded photographer. She sang in jazz clubs in New York, in the West Village for years.
She's made movies, written screenplays, produced these projects. And that same woman, we were joking before the show, in your spare time you make scarves or that you sell to people to raise money for charity. Yeah, in that vast expanse of spare time that you have, I know it's insane. I wouldn't say insane, But you are the self styled you are the tender artistic soul. I mean, what a life you've had dedicated to just beautiful artistry. Thank you so much for doing this with us. Thank you, my
thanks to Carolyn Marx Blackwood. You can find her fine art photography at cm Blackwood dot com The Carolyn Marx Blackwood Scarves collection can be Founder James Paul Chung dot com That's Chang ch e Unng. Profits go to charity, including a food pantry in Rhinebeck, New York. This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City. Were produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Maureen Hoben. Our engineer is Frank Imperial. Our social media manager is Daniel Gingrich.
I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the Thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio