Dear Cinephiles,

“I ask no favor for my sex,” says Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg at the beginning of “RBG” (2018). “All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.”

Left bereft on Friday night, and simply not knowing whether to turn left or right, I ran to the comfort of the documentary “RBG” (2018). At first, I thought it’d be painful, but soon it worked its magic. This Academy Award-nominated film directed by Betsy West and Julie Cohen brings you closer to her. It’s a remarkable origin story of a true life superhero whose intellectual agility and determination changed our lives.

It’s the peeks into her private world that are the most rewarding moments. She makes for remarkable company. In her own words we hear her talk lovingly about her mother whom she lost when she was 17 and wishes she’d had for longer. She taught her two things, “to be a lady and be independent” by which she meant that she wanted her not to let her emotions get the best of her and to learn to fend for herself.

We see her as a young woman going to Cornell University and meeting her husband Marty. He had a sense of humor, and by her own admittance “I tend to be rather sober.” From the moment they met he saw her as his equal. Their extraordinary love story is the through line for the film – and it is quite moving. We get archival footage of him speaking about her. We meet their children James and Jane – as well as her granddaughter who graduated from law school and calls her “Bubbe.” “What was she like a mom?” Jane is asked. “Exigent,” she responds without hesitation. Also, she couldn’t cook. “It wasn’t until I was 14 that I could eat a live vegetable,” her daughter says. Her father was in charge of the cooking, while RBG was busy remedying so many wrongs and making history.

I cherish her talk about her love for opera and attending performances. “The sound of the human voice is like an electric current going through me,”she says. “Justice and mercy — they’re all in opera. Very grand emotions.” Fellow Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and she shared a love for the arts and their odd-couple friendship is explored.

There are candid moments of her showing us her collar collection and the coding for the ones she wears for dissenting opinions and majority opinions. She elucidates that Justice Day O’Connor and she knew that the standard robe was designed for a man, and they needed to add something feminine to them. There are scenes of her vigorous daily workouts, and it’s endearing to watch her wearing a blue sweatshirt with the words ‘Super Diva” across her chest. There is also a hilarious sequence where she gets to see Kate McKinnon’s impersonation of her on “Saturday Night Live.” “It’s marvelously funny,” she chuckles. The cultural phenomenon around her is richly detailed.

As I finished watching the documentary on Friday night, I felt a great sense of privilege to have spent time with her. A friend of mind sent me a message explaining that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died on Rosh Hashanah. “God held her back until the New Year. She’s a Tzadik. She is the most human of human beings. She allowed us to realized that each of us are essentially divine.”

L’Shona Tovha

Love,
Roger

RBG
Available to stream on Hulu, hoopla and Kanopy and to rent on YouTube, Google Play, Amazon Prime, iTunes, Vudu, Redbox, FandangoNOW, Apple TV, Flixfling and Microsoft.

Directed by Julie Cohen, Betsy West
Starring Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Jane and James Ginsburg, Clara Spera, Gloria Steinem, Nina Totenberg, Lilly Ledbetter, Sharron Frontiero and Stephen Wiesenfeld, Irin Carmon and Shana Knizhnik, Bill Clinton, Ted Olson, Judge Harry Edwards, Senator Orrin Hatch, Eugene Scalia and Bryant Johnson
98 minutes

About Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Affectionately called “R.B.G.” by her supporters, Ruth Bader Ginsburg has inspired generations of women to break gender barriers. Even after facing gender discrimination as she pursued her academic goals, Ginsburg forged ahead and became the second woman–and first Jewish woman–to serve on the Supreme Court. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born on March 15, 1933 in Brooklyn, New York. Born to a Jewish family, her father Nathan Bader immigrated to the United States, while her mother Celia Amster Bader was a native of New York. Ginsburg’s family valued education and instilled in her a love of learning. She attended P.S. 238 for elementary school and James Madison High School in Brooklyn before continuing on to attend Cornell University. Ginsburg graduated from Cornell with a bachelor’s degree in 1954, earning high honors in Government and distinction in all subjects. She was also the College of Arts and Sciences Class Marshal. That same year, she married Martin D. Ginsburg and the couple have two children together. After graduating from Cornell, Ginsburg subsequently started attending Harvard Law School. While at Harvard, Ginsburg was one of only 9 women in a class of 500 students. She often faced gender discrimination and was asked to explain how she felt about taking a spot in the program instead of a man. Ginsburg and her female colleagues were called on in class for “comic relief” and they were even excluded from using certain sections of the library. Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School in 1958 for her final year. During her studies, she made both the Harvard and Columbia Law Review. Ginsburg graduated with her law degree from Columbia in 1959 at the top of her class. However, even with all of her academic accomplishments, it was hard for her to find employment after graduation. She explained, “In the fifties, the traditional law firms were just beginning to turn around on hiring Jews… But to be a woman, a Jew, and a mother to boot, that combination was a bit much.” Ginsburg was able to land a position as a law clerk for the Honorable Edmund L. Palmieri, Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1959. She served in that office until 1961.

Following her clerkship, Ginsburg began working as a research associate for the Columbia Law School Project on International Procedure. After a year as a research associate, she became the associate director and continued in that position for a year. In 1963, Ginsburg began as a Professor of Law at Rutgers University School of Law and taught classes until 1972. She also became involved with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and she was central to the founding of their Women’s Rights Project in 1971. Ginsburg returned to Columbia Law School in 1972, where she became the first woman hired to receive tenure. While teaching at Columbia, she also served as the general counsel for the ACLU from 1973-1980 and on the National Board of Directors from 1974–1980. During that time, she became a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Stanford, California from 1977-1978. Ginsburg was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter. She served there for thirteen years, prior to being nominated as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993. She accepted his nomination and took her seat as a Supreme Court Justice on August 10, 1993. She became the second woman, and first Jewish woman, to serve on the Supreme Court. During her tenure as a justice, Ginsburg has fiercely advocated for gender equality and women’s rights. For example, she wrote the court’s opinion in the United States v. Virginia case, ruling that qualified women could not be denied admission to the Virginia Military Institute. She was also a voice of dissent to the court’s decision in the Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. case, denying a woman’s gender pay discrimination claim. Ginsburg subsequently worked with President Barack Obama in 2009 on the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to combat pay disparities. At eighty-seven years old, Ginsburg continued to work for gender equality as a Supreme Court Justice. Ginsburg died on September 18, 2020 due to complications of metastatic pancreas cancer. (womenshistory.org)

Co-Director Betsy West on Bringing “RBG” to The Screen
“When we sent her an email lying out our big plans…her initial response to us was ‘not yet,’” they told the audience at the film’s showing at the International Documentary Association’s annual screening series. “So we just didn’t go away, basically.” Instead, they spent a year strategizing until Ginsburg agreed to the project. “It certainly wasn’t easy and it didn’t happen overnight,” they said, but they made it work. In order to complete the long list of interviews they needed to conduct, they divided and conquered. “Once we could breathe a sigh of relief that we had filmed the things we wanted to film…that was a joy,” said West…But the documentary is also important, the filmmakers said, because it can educate viewers on just how much Ginsburg has done for women in the U.S. “The extent to which Justice Ginsburg’s career [made an impact both in] what she achieved for herself and what she pushed to get for other women…can’t be understated,” said Cohen. It also acts as “a way in for people” to learn about the importance of the Supreme Court — which, as the past six months in American politics have shown, also can’t be overstated. Though the filmmakers began working on “RBG” in 2015, it took on a new level of importance for them after Donald Trump’s election. Some of Ginsburg’s fellow Supreme Court justices have seen the film — West and Cohen said they know Justices Breyer and Sotomayor have — and their reaction has seemingly been positive. “In terms of their reaction to her popularity…her answer to that is her colleagues have been judiciously silent on the matter,” Cohen said. But in general, said West, “I think there is a lot of affection for Justice Ginsburg in the Supreme Court and they seem to get a kick out of it.” (indiewire.com)

Co-Directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen on The Making of “RBG”
West: “Once we started filming and interviewing Justice Ginsburg’s former colleagues, former clients, her long-time friends, I think we were pretty committed to this film come hell or high water. But we knew that in order to make it as good as it could possibly be, we were going to obviously need an interview with her, which she had said she would give us. But the timeframe was a little scary because she told us in 2015 she’d talk to us in the summer of 2017. She’s a woman of her word, and we had a lot of confidence that she would give us the interview, but we didn’t know how much access we would get to the rest of her life, which we knew would really enhance the film. So we just kept pushing forward to try to gather those elements that would make the film as good as it could be. There is a fair amount of [archival material] so we started going through that and then we had the opportunity to start following her around the country to the various events that she participates in—speaking to legal audiences or attending an opera festival and also the wonderful visit that she made to the Virginia Military Institute on the 20th anniversary of the decision she wrote that opened up the school to women. We were slowly gathering our elements and just hoping that, yes, she will allow us to film in her office and at home. The ultimate ask really was to go with her into the gym, because that’s a pretty personal and intimate moment for her to share and we were very excited that she saw the importance of that.”

Cohen: “I think one thing that we tried to do that presents her as a real fully fleshed-out three-dimensional human being, not just a myth, is to show her in a lot of different contexts, whether you’re listening to audio of her arguing before the Supreme Court as a young lawyer in the 70s or standing before an audience of a couple thousand people at the university or at home making coffee with her granddaughter or rehearsing to perform in an opera…. Each of those things is just bringing you a different context of her. When you mix them all together you start to see a full human being. I think the person that comes through in our film—as much as she’s amazing in many ways, particularly her work ethic and determination—is also a real human being.” (arts.gov)

About Co-Director Julie Cohen
Producer and director Julie Cohen’s most recent work includes co-directing “RBG” (Mountainfilm 2018), a theatrical documentary starring Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She heads the Brooklyn-based production company BetterThanFiction, which produces documentaries, television programming and digital content. Her films have screened at more than 80 festivals and she has won three New York Emmy Awards since 2012. Other notable works include “American Veteran” (2017), “The Sturgeon Queens” (2014) and “Ndiphilela Ukucula: I Live to Sing” (2013). A former longtime NBC News staff producer, Julie still does consulting projects for NBC. She graduated from Colgate and holds masters degrees from Yale Law School and the Columbia Journalism School, where she is now an adjunct professor. (mountainfilm.org)

About Co-Director Betsy West
Betsy West is a video journalist and filmmaker with three decades experience in news and documentaries. Most recently, she directed RBG (CNNFilms, Magnolia, Participant) along with CJS alum Julie Cohen ‘89. RBG, a theatrical documentary about Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2018 and will be released nationwide this May. West was executive producer of the MAKERS documentary and digital project (AOL & PBS, 2012); the feature documentary The Lavender Scare (2017), and the short doc 4%: Film’s Gender Problem (Epix 2016.) Along with her husband, filmmaker Oren Jacoby, she is a principal at Storyville Films where she co-produced Constantine’s Sword (First Run Features, 2007.) West joined the Columbia faculty in 2009 after working three decades in network news. As a producer and executive at ABC News, she received 21 Emmy Awards and two duPont-Columbia Awards for her work on “Nightline” and “PrimeTimeLive” and the documentary program ”Turning Point,” where she served as executive producer from 1994-1998. As senior vice president at CBS News from 1998-2005, she oversaw “60 Minutes” and “48 Hours,” and was executive in charge of the CBS documentary 9/11, winner of the Primetime Emmy Award in 2002. At Columbia, she teaches classes in reporting, video production and documentary. She co-curates and moderates the FilmFridays screening series that brings first-run documentaries and their directors to the Journalism School. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brown University, West holds a Master’s in Communications from Syracuse University. She served two terms on the Corporation of Brown University, and sat on Board of Directors of The New 42nd Street. She and Oren live in Morningside Heights. (journalism.columbia.edu)