A Random Movie: My Kid Could Paint That (2007)
One art please
I’m going to be blunt: Marla Olmstead’s paintings weren’t actually that good.
To me, that was hanging in the background as I watched My Kid Could Paint That, a film about Olmstead’s life as a young painter and minor celebrity. For all the hype, all the attention, all of the big sales, at the end we had some fairly messy abstract paintings. She is filmed painting something called “flowers” for an episode of 60 Minutes. People insist that this work is of a significantly lower quality than the rest of her paintings. I can’t see a huge difference in quality. I’m not someone who can’t abide abstract work, and I even have some hanging in my home. But Olmstead’s paintings merely look messy and like something a child would paint. Given that Marla was four years old, that’s appropriate.
The film isn’t about Marla, a pre-schooler who just likes throwing some paint around a canvas. It’s about her parents, ambitious stage dad Mark and reluctant mother Laura - who openly celebrates when her daughter’s art career might be sidelined. It’s about gallery owner Anthony Brunelli, a frustrated painter who sees her as a path to success. It’s about 60 Minutes, who chose to do an in-depth investigation over a child’s art that became a hit piece. It’s about director Amir Bar-Lev, who not so secretly becomes excited by that scandal because it makes his film more interesting. It’s about an art world that embraces a story instead of a painting. It’s about attempts to make life fit a three act structure. It’s about the morality of putting kids into the public, which has only become more relevant as social media gets more common and more parents see venues for getting themselves fame.
Everyone in the film is using Marla for something - except for Laura, who seems desperate to stop the train and can’t find a way out of the mess that publicity has created without harming her daughter in some way.
Bar-Lev, to his credit, is not afraid of making himself look bad. At a certain point, he becomes a villain, more concerned with the arc of his documentary than the people caught in the middle. Interviewees openly question what he’s doing and the morality of it. He admits that he became excited by the 60 Minutes scandals because it gives him a hook. He feels bad because he doesn’t want to attack the family, but knows that is exactly what he’s going to do. It ends with someone saying his documentary is going to be a lie.
For the question of whether or not Marla is 100% the author of her work, it only matters in the sense that her story means more than her paintings. She definitely isn’t naming the paintings, however, given how ridiculous some of the names wind up being.
This is a film that wasn’t designed for staying power. It was written in the present tense, this was all happening at the time but still had the aura of something fleeting. But My Kid Could Paint That also tapped into something that would only get more prevalent as we saw the steady build of reality television, and then its replacement by social media. Parents use their kids for social media clout, they build a business around a precocious pre-schooler and put their family on display. Jon & Kate Plus 8 started airing in 2007, 17 Kids and Counting in 2008. Ryan’s World, a YouTube channel based on a kid playing with toys, launched in 2015. He’s still only 13. As audiences get easier to access, more families put their lives on display, reaching for the potential incomes that the Olmsteads had fall into their laps.
In Mark and Laura, we have the two dueling instincts of parents. Mark has stars in his eyes, the promise of a better life through his daughter. Laura sees how she could be damaged by the attention and the fame, and wants her daughter to live a normal life as long as possible. We can understand both of them. The cash that Marla’s bringing in will make a difference for her future - hundreds of thousands in a trust is an education. But a normal kid isn’t being forced to perform for 60 Minutes. Even at 4, Marla’s visibly bristling at being filmed all the time and being pressured to paint - Bar-Lev’s own attempt to film her painting sees Marla trying to convince Mark to take over and generally acting frustrated about the attention. Mark says she’s different when being observed, and why wouldn’t she be? She’s a young kid, but she’s not a dumb kid, she knows she’s being asked to perform. In some ways, she’s both getting too much and too little credit - the paintings aren’t that amazing, but she also is a lot more aware of the situation than anyone wants to admit.
It’s telling that the only person who can actually successfully film Marla painting a well-liked work from beginning to end is Laura, the only person who seems to recognize that she’s just a little girl, not an interrogation on the value of art, not the pin that makes a compelling documentary, not a big paycheck. Her motivation is not to sell more paintings, but to make sure that the name “Marla Olmstead” isn’t associated with “fraud” for the rest of her life because of a CBS news magazine.
The art becomes secondary, it dances near a criticism of abstract art and post-modernism but it doesn’t stick. The art doesn’t have much to say because a four year old doesn’t have much to say. She’s just painting for the joy of it - until she’s pressured into painting for the cash - and that’s all she needs to do. One of her main collectors talks about the joy of innocence, and that gives the paintings their real meaning. You don’t necessarily need a grand artistic vision to create, sometimes the creation itself is the joy. Half of the value of a painting is the artist’s intent, but the other half is what the audience sees. I have an abstract painting in my bedroom where I know the artist’s intent, I know what I see, and by our powers combined we have a work that means a great deal to me.
I’ve also got a painting of myself as a merman.
We have a happy ending. Bar-Lev is chastened for his inevitably exploitative documentary. Marla has a decent trust fund but has otherwise faded into obscurity - the most recent interview I’ve found is from 2015, her website no longer exists, and the only Marla Olmstead I found on Instagram is a middle aged woman who likes flowers. It’s clear that few people have learned things - kids are still being put in a spotlight where they shouldn’t be placed - but it all seems to have worked out for this family.
Not every kid with an experience like Marla will get a happy ending, not every exploitative documentary will end with a chastened documentarian. Fame, fortune, and the inevitable consequences are even more heightened in an era where good timing and shrewd marketing can make anyone famous.