Bob's Take: ‘The Windmill Movie': about a filmmaker, by a filmmaker

Alexander Olch just sort of fell into the project of directing his first feature film, a form-fracturing documentary about moviemaker Richard Rogers.

That's ironic, considering that Rogers spent more than two decades planning to make a movie about life in the wealthy, privileged society of the Hamptons on Long Island. He dithered and dallied and piled up reels of footage, finally running out of time when cancer took him in 2001.

Now Olch is coming to Omaha, part of a 25-city tour to promote “The Windmill Movie,” his version of the film that Rogers might have intended to make.

Olch will appear at a 7 p.m. Friday screening of his movie at Film Streams' Ruth Sokolof Theater, 14th and Webster Streets, then hang around for a talk with the audience.

“Richard Rogers was my mentor and film teacher at Harvard,” Olch said by phone last week from Chicago. “He produced my thesis film.”

Rogers and Olch have a lot in common, growing up in New York (same street), going to exclusive prep schools and Harvard, and of course their interest in film.

“I moved into an apartment down the block from his loft in Manhattan,” Olch said. “After he died, his wife (Susan Meiselas) asked for my help in fixing his editing computer. When I got it to work, up came this project.”

Olch and Meiselas weren't exactly sure what they had. Rogers left no notes. Meiselas asked Olch what he was doing the rest of the day. Could he look at what was there and try to make some sense of it?

One day turned into a few days.

“It started out that I was going to cut together some footage for his friends,” Olch said. “The desire and idea came later that there was a movie to be made from this.”

He compares the project to a combination of a Rubik's Cube and a set of Russian dolls that fit inside one other: a movie within a movie about a guy who wanted to make a movie.

“It wasn't like we had something in an unfinished state waiting to be completed,” Olch said. “There was just all this footage.”

“The Windmill Movie” attempts to hint at what Rogers' movie about himself might have been, while at the same time creating a narrative about why it never got made.

That, of course, had everything to do with who Rogers was: part Upper East Side WASP; part rebel against the gin-soaked life in the Hamptons; part artist (he completed 18 documentaries, many for public television, plus some respected experimental films); part womanizer who couldn't settle down to conventional family life.

Telling Rogers' story was complicated. That, said Olch, is what attracted him to the project. It was Rogers who got him excited about experimental film. Now Rogers was his subject.

The crystallizing shot of the movie for Olch is one of Rogers talking into a mirror saying he didn't know if it was interesting to make a film about the difference between documentary and fiction filmmaking.

“The Windmill Movie” bridges the two.

“To write somebody else's autobiography is a logical conundrum,” Olch said. “This film treads some new territory between fiction and nonfiction. Some documentaries are about did this, or did this not, happen. This takes it a step further.”

For a while Olch employed other actors (Wallace Shawn, Cynthia Nixon) to play his central characters. Some of that footage is in the movie as well, though he ultimately didn't stick with that approach.

“The Windmill Movie,” named after a windmill that hovered over the tennis courts in Rogers' Hamptons community of Wainscott, is a collage of images from home movies, footage of life on Long Island shot by Rogers and more footage shot by Olch.

It's not a conventional biographical documentary.

Who is the audience?

“Anyone who has an interest in creativity, others' or your own,” Olch said.

People who have that unfinished novel in the drawer will be able to relate to Rogers, he said.

Young filmmakers and creative types love it for the editing, the different forms of footage, the unusual way the story unfolds.

People looking back at their lives, trying to make sense of it all, can also understand, Olch said.

“What's universal is a well-told story, an interesting character. If you tell the story well and create an interesting character, that is, de facto, universal.”

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