My Kid Could Paint That

My Kid Could Paint That

What ever happened to Todd Marinovich? Remember him? In the late 1980s, he looked like he was going to be the next great quarterback in football. He was a child football prodigy. His dad, former NFL lineman and workout guru Marv Marinovich had produced the perfect athlete, even tying the youngster’s right-hand behind his back, to make sure he learned to throw left-handed. How about Andrea Jaeger or Jennifer Capriati? How soon until we are asking the same question about teenage golfing sensation Michelle Wie? There is always something sad, to me, when I watch the Olympic gymnastics or figure skating. You watch these thirteen & fourteen-year-old girls, who have given up their childhoods by practicing for six or seven hours a day just so they can stand there with a medal around their necks, and you know that their life is all downhill from there. They will live another six or seven decades and never reach that height again.

There is something about fame and success that spoils a child. Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, the Olsen Twins, and Dustin Diamond are this generation’s neon warning signs. For every Ron Howard and Shirley Temple, who seem to grow up perfectly well-adjusted, there are a thousand Danny Bonaduces, Dana Platos, Macaulay Culkins, Todd Bridges, and Haley Joel Osments out there. For every Tiger Woods, there are hundreds of William Gates and Arthur Agees (stars of the documentary Hoop Dreams) littering the playgrounds of America. Will 4-year-old art prodigy, Marla Olmstead, implode when she is older or is she the Mozart of the painting set, or is there something else going on?

Director Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That was supposed to be a cute documentary about a child genius, four-year-old muppet Marla Olmstead. Her story seemed to be one of those feel good stories. Her family of four out of Binghamton, New York looked like they fell off the canvas of a Norman Rockwell painting. Her dad, Mark, works the nightshift at the local Frito-Lay factory and is an amateur painter. Her mom, Laura, is a dental assistant. And if Marla was not perfect enough, her little brother Zane is just as adorable. The story goes that when Marla was not even two, in order to keep her busy while he worked on his canvas, her dad allowed her to paint along side of him. Instead of producing the typical child-like chicken scratching, little Marla produced extremely sophisticated looking pieces of abstract art. Like any proud parent, dad and mom displayed the little girl’s works around the house. A few months later, a friend of the parents who owns a coffee shop saw these paintings and offered to hang them on his business’s walls. No one thought much of this offer. Just a kind offer by a friend until customers started coming up to the owner asking how much he wanted for the works of art. This led another family friend, professional artist Anthony Brunelli, to set up a formal show at a gallery for the little girl. Of course, the local newspaper sent a reporter named Elizabeth Cohen to do a human interest piece. Shockingly, the New York Times picked up the story and things exploded. Collectors started beating down the family’s door, offering up to $25,000 per canvas. Art critics and the media began to compare the 4-year-old’s use of colors and texture to such greats as Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky. The shy little muppet was feature in the pages of the New York Times and Time Magazine and profiled on CBS News and BBC News. With $300,000 in the bank, a waiting list as long as your arm, and three galleries displaying her works, this little girl looked like the Tiger Woods of the art world. What filmmaker could resist such a feel good documentary?

One thing about doing a documentary, is that you can never predict where it is going to go. After Bar-Lev had spent several months with the family, in early 2005, CBS News’ 60 Minutes II showed up to do a piece on the 4-year-old. Unlike the past fluff pieces about this little Picasso just out of diapers, the news show decided to find out if Marla was really the talent behind the paintings, or a fraud. With the permission of the parents, 60 Minutes set up a hidden camera to document the little prodigy’s efforts over the four-hour period she needed to complete a single piece. The work that resulted, with a great deal of direction from her father, was not nearly of the quality of “her previous works.” Showing the video to child psychologist Ellen Winner, who has made a career of studying gifted children, the psychologist indicated that the painting being created before the camera looked as if it was being done by an entirely different artist, than the works of Marla’s that she had seen previously. In her final analysis, Winner stated, "I saw no evidence that she was a child prodigy in painting. I saw a normal, charming, adorable child painting the way preschool children paint, except that she had a coach that kept her going." The family quickly went into damage control claiming that the difference was due to the fact that the little artist was forced to paint in a more regimented structure so that the camera could capture her efforts than the more spontaneous creative process that she was used to. A second video was quickly shot by the family to prevent crashing sales and possible lawsuits from previous buyers, and while the results were of a higher quality than the painted for the 60 Minutes piece, it was still “less polished” than the little girl’s previous efforts. Bar-Lev became troubled that he was witnessing a scam especially because the bouncy four-year-old refuses to paint seriously in front of anyone other than her parents.

So, is she a fraud or not? Did her father “touch up” her works? Does it matter? While prices and sales are not what they were before the news magazine show’s piece, Marla’s works remain in high demand. Even the embarrassing canvas she did before the hidden camera that was broadcast across the nation sold for $9,000. Her representatives at the A-Stuart-Gallery in Encino, California proudly lets buyers know that the little girl will always be a part of the gallery’s “permanent family of artists.” Also don’t be too concerned about director Amir Bar-Lev who struggled with the unfolding scandal, because he came to really like the sincere Olmsteads over the course of the year that he spent with them. After showing the documentary at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, he got a check for $2 million from Sony Pictures Classics, from the bidding war that resulted, to get distribution rights for the documentary.

This is a documentary that lets the viewer draw their own conclusions. [Paint your own picture here! – ed.]Is she a real talent? Are her paintings just a con job by her father? Are the people who bought the canvases suckers, or individuals who truly appreciate art? Are the Olmsteads loving parents or just living out their own failed dreams through their child? It is up for you to decide. Just like it is up to you to decide dozens of times every day when you come across different parenting styles. While most kids will never materialize into a Venus or Serena Williams, or a Tiger Woods, every day you will run into a parent pushing their child in ways that might not be good for the kid, like child beauty pageants, spelling bees, AAU sports, grades, etc. I have watched too many children in tears as the pressure builds and their father’s bark at them. Usually the father will look at you and tell you how much the kid loves the sport. It makes you wonder who the real frauds are.

Verdict: A Pretty Good Documentary