Columnist Who Charted Young Artist Featured in New Film

By: Barbara Bedway [The following article appeared in E&P's print edition in March and then online. The film opened in New York City today and is reviewed in today's New York Times.]

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in," Graham Greene once observed. On a slow news day in August 2004, the Press & Sun-Bulletin in Binghamton, N.Y., ran on its front page a story by reporter and columnist Elizabeth Cohen that opened the door to a complicated future for Marla Olmstead, whose exuberant abstract landscapes -- some priced as high as $5,000 per canvas -- were being exhibited at a local gallery.

She was four years old at the time.

When The New York Times picked up the story one month later, Marla was catapulted into worldwide celebrity, sparking a debate on the meaning of modern art (her success suggested to some that all modern art was meaningless) and eventually a probe by the now-defunct "60 Minutes II" alleging that her father, an amateur painter, helped her with the work.

Now Cohen is herself prominently featured in "My Kid Could Paint That," a documentary by Amir Bar-Lev that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Sony Pictures Classics bought the film for $2 million, and plans to release it this summer.

"In essence, I'm one of the only reporters who has consistently said this is not about Marla, it's about the story of Marla," asserts Cohen, whose commentary is woven throughout the film (one reviewer described her as "the well-spoken local reporter"), along with that of New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman. "The family didn't know what hit them," she says.

It all began after a friend asked Marla's mother, Laura, to hang her paintings in his coffee shop. Someone offered to buy one, which led to Marla's first gallery show, more sales, and then the predictable media frenzy. Cohen met Laura and wrote about her daughter. By the time Bar-Lev convinced the Olmsteads to let him film them for a year, Marla had already sold more than $300,000 worth of paintings.

Bar-Lev at first planned to focus on the meaning of modern art and how money and attention would affect the family, who, he told the New York Press, "were ambivalent about their daughter becoming a celebrity. I had no way of knowing that five months into production, I would be faced with the possibility that the whole thing was a hoax." (In an e-mail, Bar Lev tells E&P that Sony has asked him not to comment further before the film's release: "I have already gotten into all kinds of trouble with my big mouth," he wrote.)

So Bar-Lev decided to widen the film's scope. "I began to see it as a story about the 24-hour news cycle, the hungry machine of media, that is so desperate for little cute stories every night after stories about war," Cohen relates. "Amir started getting wrapped up in true and false -- 'is she really making these paintings?' At that point, the film takes a turn into a mystery, and he's the detective."

Cohen notes that "when Amir first came to my house, I was in my overalls and playing a board game with my daughter. I didn't think he would include so much of me in the film. It was just one afternoon at my house, but it got into a My Dinner With Andre kind of night, a lot of storytelling."

Though her parents (and Cohen) never used the word "prodigy," in numerous media outlets Marla's work had been compared to that of Pollock and Kandinsky. That hype, Cohen believes, set Marla up for a predictable takedown: "Once a story gets a certain amount of exposure, to keep it in the public eye, there's only one way to go, and that's 'Marla the Fraud.'"

Cohen avows she has never had any doubts about the paintings' authenticity, and finds the Olmsteads incapable of the kind of "duplicity and cunning" needed to orchestrate a hoax. She believes the Olmsteads were naive -- Laura is a dental assistant, and Mark a manager for Frito-Lay -- in agreeing to let "60 Minutes II" place hidden cameras in their basement, and set Marla up there to paint.

"It was a bad idea," she observes. "Her parents should have recognized that. She usually painted in the kitchen, with her parents and brother around." The results, reported correspondent Charlie Rose, were less polished than her previous efforts, and her father can be heard offering her advice on the tape.

There's a scene in the new film that illustrates the multiple-media angle: Cohen in a corner taking notes for a story about Bar-Lev, who is filming the Olmsteads, who are watching themselves on "60 Minutes II."

In a column written after the show aired in February 2005, Cohen issued her own mea culpa as "one who helped start the machine that catapulted [Marla] to those crazy heights. But I will never trash a 5-year-old or her parents, who got so swept up in it all." As the media coverage turned more negative (the New York Post, where Cohen once worked, referred to Marla as "Willem de Frauding"), the Olmsteads began receiving hate mail.

Two years later, Cohen praises the film as "poetic and haunting," and agrees with the New York Times' assessment of it as "one of the most honest, enjoyable tutorials on media ethics out there," but she acknowledges the cost: the Olmsteads, looking to Bar-Lev for vindication, felt betrayed when he continued to have doubts. His own efforts to film Marla working yielded paintings unlike her other work.

After viewing the film, the Olmsteads declined to attend the Sundance premiere. They asked Cohen to read a statement for them at Sundance, which said in part: "When we met Amir Bar-Lev three years ago and he expressed interest in our daughter's work, we welcomed him into our home and lives. But we are heartbroken by some of the choices he made in his portrayal of our family in the editing of the film." (In an e-mail to E&P, Laura Olmstead added, "I'm not sure I have much to say beyond [that].")

Cohen's Sundance experience came complete with car service, four-star hotel, and launch parties, which left her wishing, as she noted in her blog, "that Laura Olmstead was with me. That she could see the circus of it." Cohen, in addition to her stories and column, is working on a book of essays for Random House tentatively titled "The Right Life for Me." (Her previous books were profiled in E&P's June 2005 issue.)

Though she had decided not to write about Marla anymore, she did pen one final column in January, after she was freshly struck by the very shy Marla's cry of "No!" in the first scene of the film, as Bar-Lev approaches with his camera. "I find it fascinating," she wrote, "that now, three years after the first article about Marla ran on the pages of the newspaper you hold, that this little girl who said 'No' so vehemently, was not heard. Not heard by reporters from here to China, by Bar-Lev. Perhaps not even by her own parents. Not heard by me. ...

"The most important questions about the story of Marla are about how a person's story can cease to be their own, how it can be co-opted by person after person, organization after organization, media company after media company. And it all started with a little girl who just loves to paint."

Marla, now almost 7, continues to paint, and her Web site offers "video documentation" for her artwork. Cohen saved her ticket from the premiere to give to Marla's mom ("Like it or not, your daughter is a movie star," Cohen told her), and says Laura felt her last column had been fair.

"When it all exploded I thought it was funny, a lesson about the slow news day," Cohen reflects. Now she worries about stories with kids at the center: "There's a responsibility attached to those kinds of decisions. I would be very careful about writing stories about young children. It's dangerous waters you're swimming in, once you put any kid's face on a newspaper."