Original subtitles

An artist is a title that you earn.

And it's a little embarrassing to hear

people refer to themselves

as artists.

It's like referring to themselves as a genius.

This was a man who was a Merlin of curiosity.

He was driven by his curiosity.

We weren't sure quite what he was.

Was he an architect?

Was he a designer?

Was he a filmmaker?

But what he was, obviously,

was something we all wanted to be.

I had been trained as a painter,

but when we were working on furniture,

and again in film,

it never seemed like leaving painting in any way,

because it was just anotherform.

She made paintings out of what she was surrounded by.

Everything she touched, she turned into something magical.

Everything that they did in design, she saw as

an extension of her painting.

And everything they did in design, he saw as an extension

of his architecture.

For them, these names like painter and architect,

they weren't job descriptions.

They were ways of looking at the world.

They were introducing people

to look at the world differently.

Life was fun, was work, was fun, was life.

People would say it was childlike behavior,

butwhat's wrong with that?

The Eameses have put all this joy back in life.

You know that modernism, let's face it,

was getting boring.

Had they just designed the furniture,

they'd be in the pantheon.

It's the multifaceted nature of the career

that is extraordinary.

They give shape to America's 20th century.

I came from an architectural office

where there were individual tables with a conference room,

and there was carpet on the floor.

There were lights.

We had drafting tables, and all the equipment

that you needed, et cetera, et cetera.

I walk into Eames Office,

and it was like walking into a circus.

I walked in the door, and of course I immediately thought,

"Got any jobs here?'

I'm just totally blown away by the patina on every surface

of graphics, and there were models everywhere,

and there was just stuff.

I was just overwhelmed.

I saw this incredible apparition

of animation stands

and photographs spread out on tables.

Models being lit for photography,

a screening room,

and a wonderful wood shop.

Saltwater tanks.

There were Eames chairs with Steinberg drawings on them.

Every kind of visual treat you can imagine.

And I thought, "I've come to work in Disneyland."

If you had taken the roof off of it,

you would see that place

changing constantly.

So we'd just go around

and take everything out of the middle

ofthe studio, to put up a movie set

to take pictures tomorrow, and then the next day,

you'd take out all the movie set and put the tables all back up,

and everybody's back at work again.

It was very informal.

I mean, there wasn't ever any kind

of routine.

There were no "regular meetings."

Because I did not have a design degree,

many of the people in the Office thought

I probably shouldn't bethere,

but Charles had a different attitude.

And he said this to me --

"l can teach you how to draw.

"lf you can think and you can see,

and you can prove that to me, you can work here."

For four decades, 901 Washington Boulevard

in Venice Beach, California, was one of the most

creative addresses on Earth.

Dozens of gifted young designers

cuttheirteeth within the walls ofthe studio.

But the vision for the Office came from the top.

We have to have a place where you can recognize

where you're going when you start out.

Modern design was born

from the marriage of art and industry.

The Eames Office was born from the marriage

of Ray Kaiser -- a painter who rarely painted --

and Charles Eames -- an architecture school dropout

who never got his license.

"Eventually, everything connects," Charles said.

Furniture, toys, architecture,

exhibitions, photography,

and film were all connected

in the wild, whimsical world of the Eames Office.

Charles and Ray Eames wanted to bring

the most magnificent experiences

that you could have with your eyes

to the largest number of people.

I don'tthinkthere's anything more important

for an artist to want to do.

It was a career that defined

what it means to be a designer.

And it all began with a chair.

Charles, where did the classic Eames chair come from?

Did it come to you in a flash,

as you were shaving one morning?

It sort of came to me

in a 30-year flash, if you want.

TIME magazine called it

"the greatest design ofthe 20th century."

But it didn't start out that way.

It began as a failure.

Responding to a competition

at the museum of modern art in 1940,

two unknown young architects --

Charles Eames and his friend, Eero Saarinen,

set out to reinvent the very idea of the chair.

The goal is to create an inexpensive,

mass-produced chair which is well designed,

and which is molded to the body, because it doesn't need a lot

of upholstery, which is, "a," old-fashioned,

and "b," expensive.

Upholstery is what Louis XlV did.

Working at the Cranbrook Academy of Art near Detroit,

Eames and Saarinen thought they could mold

the new miracle material, plywood,

into two directions at once

to make a comfortable, form-fitting shell.

The critical point

is where that back becomes the seat.

The glues aren't good enough, and the chair splinters,

which means, when you'd sit on it,

itwould be a little uncomfortable.

So they have to upholster it.

Despite failing

at their goal of creating a single-piece plywood shell,

Charles and Eero won the competition.

The irony is that

the chairthat Eames and Saarinen designed,

they couldn't really manufacture.

Even with the upholstery to cover the cracked surface,

no existing machine could successfully mold the plywood

into the shape of the chair.

It couldn't be made

in the way that they claimed it could be made.

They had designed the look of it

without designing the substance of it.

After many unsuccessful attempts,

Eero Saarinen scrapped the project.

But Charles wasn't ready to give up --

this time, with a new partner.

At Cranbrook, he had become friendly with Ray Kaiser,

At Cranbrook, he had become friendly with Ray Kaiser,

a talented young artist who had helped with the chair project.

I said to Ray one day,

"How did you and Charles get together?'

"Oh! I can't talk about it."

I said, "Well, why not?'

"Well, we just did."

They sparked, and the rest is literally history.

And I think in Ray,

he really found his complement.

But there was a problem.

Charles was already married.

He had moved up to Cranbrook from St. Louis

with his wife, Catherine, and his young daughter, Lucia.

The love letters are Charles's letters to Ray,

because the letters that Ray wrote back to Charles,

Charles destroyed, because he was married.

They show Charles madly in love with her.

There's no doubt about that.

He talks about walking past

the building that she used to live in

and looking up at her window,

and they are very moving.

These letters are talking about

a joined future as artists together.

I think his decision feels made.

Ray certainly felt uncomfortable enough to leave Cranbrook

and go away and think about

what she was going to do thereafter.

Catherine was a very impressive person.

Knowing them both, as I did,

you can see why they didn't stay together.

He really thought he had something to offer the world,

and this was going to be a journey

with a lot of unexpectedness.

This was a journey that might not lead to, uh, success.

And I think that maybe at that point in her life,

this was not necessarily

the place that Catherine wanted to go.

But I think that maybe in Charles's mind

that he had wanted a life where love and work

and life and work were all blended together.

Charles quit his job at Cranbrook,

and, in one last letterto Ray, asked for her hand in marriage.

His future with his new bride

now depended on making the chairwork.

Broke and short on options,

Charles and Ray headed from Michigan to L.A.

to finish what he had started.

Part of this journey to California was

they were both going to figure out

how to mass-produce molded plywood and compound curves --

which sounds very unromantic, but I think it probably

was pretty romantic, underthe circumstances.

In their two-bedroom apartment in Westwood Village,

Charles and Ray set up a makeshift workshop.

The -- the first to --

that did the molding,

which was so magic,

we called it by a magic name.

So we called it "Kazam!"

The "Kazam!" machine was a jury-rigged molding device

made out of heating coils and a bicycle pump.

But in 1942, with the nation atwar,

raw materials were scarce, and the "Kazam!" lay silent.

Butwith the setback, there was also opportunity.

The U.S. military needed better splints.

The standard-issue splintwas metallic,

and so the vibration of the two people carrying them

actually would make the wound worse.

Theywould actually be better off

if you grabbed a stick off the ground and tied it to it

than with this amplification.

So Charles and Ray said, "Well, you know,

we're experimenting with molded plywood.

Why don't we try and design a new splint?'

They're trying to make a three-dimensional curve,

kind of a bowl, you might say.

They can't quite do it yet.

So they need holes in the plywood

in order to release the tension,

'cause otherwise it's going to splinter

where they try to do it.

Butworking within the constraints,

what's nice is that this is exactly what you need

for a splint, 'cause you need a place for the bandages to go.

In a rented warehouse space,

their team of skilled designers and craftspeople

made 150,000 splints.

With peace approaching, Charles and Ray

had one thing on their minds --

applying the lessons of the splints

to the failed plywood chairs.

Thistime, they wouldn't design the look of the chairfirst.

They would never make that mistake again.

They would let the design flow from the learning.

That meant knowing who they were serving.

In Charles's words,

it was always about being

a good host to their guests.

The people we wanted to serve were varied,

and to begin with we studied the shape and postures

of many types -- averages and extremes.

But it was more than just a search

for the best chair design.

Itwas the beginning of the Eames design process,

a process of learning by doing.

In the design of any structure,

it is often the connection

that provides the key to the solution.

"Never delegate understanding," Charles said.

It would become a hallmark of Eames design,

their secret ingredient.

Charles said, yeah, there's a secret.

First you have an idea, then you discard the idea,

then you have 50 other ideas and you discard them,

and then you do several models, and they don'twork,

and you throwthem out.

And the secret is work and work and work and work and work.

The plywood furniture was good to go in 1946.

Charles said of the furniture,

"We wanted to make the best for the most for the least."

That sentiment struck a chord

with the Herman Miller furniture company.

Honest and simple in its use of materials,

the plywood furniture was also affordable for the common man.

Together, they would become one of the great success stories

of the postwar era.

Charles and Ray Eames provide much of the furniture

for a kind of Upper-middle-class,

educated audience

moving to suburbia.

When the Second World War ended,

itwasn't just five years of pent-up demand.

Itwas actually almost 15 years,

because you also have 10 years of the Depression.

And people have much more money,

so if you wanted to sort of do something

differentthan your parents, you boughtthat Eamesfurniture.

And itwas promoted that way.

Everything around the marketing suggested,

"Here is something new for a new society."

And America was a new society in '45.

In the decades to follow,

Charles and Ray scored success

with line after line of Eames furniture.

And their unmistakable designs

became a ubiquitous part of American culture,

right up to today.

Sold for $900, 232.

I think the work retains a real freshness.

Elements of it still inform contemporary design today.

$700.

$2,000.

$2, 100.

$2, 100.

$7,000.

Fair warning, selling...$13,000.

Are we done?

Sold for $13,000.

The rightness of thefurniture

will continue to appeal

to new generations.

The word "Eames" has now become a generic word.

I mean, if you go on eBay, it always says, "Eames era"

blah, blah, blah.

So it's become a word like "Victorian."

Maybe it's, in a way, accurate,

because just like Queen Victoria

represents an attitude,

Eames also embodies a certain approach

to life and to thinking.

By the early '50s, Charles had grown

an outsized reputation as an icon of modernism,

fighting to inject an ethical dimension

into American capitalism.

At that price, the customer knows

exactly what he's going to get.

This!

In MGM's "Executive Suite,"

William Holden stars

as a curiously Charles Eames-like

furniture designer.

We'll have a line of low-priced furniture,

a new and different line,

as differentfrom anything we're making today

as a modern automobile is different from a covered wagon.

In the outside world, Charles's reputation

may have grown larger than life,

butwithin the Eames Office,

there was always the lingering question of credit.

There are still some sore issues

among certain people who feel they never were recognized

as much as they should,

but it's a very delicate issue.

The issue came to a head back in 1946

atthe unveiling of the original Eames chair

when the museum of modern art gave Charles a one-man show.

MOMA gives the name Charles Eames,

and this causes a certain tension in the Office,

because it was thought to be a collaborative effort.

It's not that he's swooping in or is doing nothing

and scarfing up all the credit,

but he is not the only designer that was involved.

This happens all the time.

Agroup of young people co-creating

and influencing each other and inspiring each other,

and then the question is, "Who did what?'

One of the last projects

I worked on was "Day of the Dead," the film.

I was down in Mexico helping with thatfilm,

shooting, gathering objects,

and setting the type.

And I wrote, "Assistance in Mexico,"

and I wrote the names ofthe people.

So Charles came by my desk and said, "What is that?!"

And I said, "But we worked on it, didn't we?'

I went to New York many, many times,

putting the time life lobbies together,

and Charles never went and saw them

while the things were being constructed,

but I could never say

that I designed anything at the Eames Office.

I never saw anything come out of there that was not

signatured, you know, by him and Ray.

When a product comes out,

it's a river.

It starts at one point,

and it ends at another point.

Many people jump into it along the way.

And everybody contributes a small piece,

but only if they go on after that

to produce a stunning amount ofwork,

I think, are they capable of saying,

"l did this, this, and this

in the Eames Office with no credit."

I think he ran the Office a bit like a Renaissance studio.

You know, there's a master painter,

butthen there are all the other people

who help realize the work.

He may have been exploiting us,

but if you were not stupid,

you were also exploiting that relationship.

I was happy,

being exploited

by a proper master.

The most wonderful work is --

is the conscience and the talents of a person

who have every right to have their name on it,

even though it's done by minions of other people.

Things good and bad,

he rightfully has his name on them, and they rightfully

are Charles Eames or Charles and Ray Eames products.

Almost always, when there's a successful man,

Almost always, when there's a successful man,

there is a very interesting and able woman behind him.

And a better case could seldom befound

than in Ray and Charles Eames.

Come on in, Ray.

Hello, I'm so happy to see you.

This is Mrs. Eames, and she's going to tell us

how she helps Charles design these chairs.

How do you manage that?

Well, uh, aside from serving

as an extreme in the testing,

there are a million things,

but, uh, I think the most difficult thing

is to keep the big idea,

to be able to look critically at the work.

Arlene Francis is clearly having a hard time

with this husband and wife working together.

You know, this is the era of "Mad Men,"

as we're watching now.

This is not fitting.

And Charles Eames is trying to promote Ray Eames,

as saying that, "We collaborated on this."

Well, uh, Ray -- Ray was a painter.

Ray worked here in New York with Hans Hofmann for a long time,

which is a pretty good start.

I actually thought Charles was more embarrassed

than Ray.

Ray is hidden away.

Charles is being highlighted, the great male designer.

It's a very interesting moment

of American sexual politics in the 1950s.

Uh, I wonder if you're going to maybe take us through

and show how -- how the Eames chair has developed.

And, Ray, shall we let Charles do it,

or do you want to help with it?

Please, please.

No, you see, as I told you, she is behind the man,

but terribly important.

Thank you, Ray. All right, Charles --

The feminist conscience had not been yet raised.

Ray would always stand behind Charles.

And on camera or in interviews, she said hardly anything.

Her warm but quiet conversation

shrank to total silence before the camera,

but her impact on Eames' work spoke for her.

She sat like a delicious dumpling in a doll's dress,

concentrating on a sweep of subjects

which would seemingly choke a computer.

People always made the mistake

that Charles and Ray, it was two brothers.

They were a married couple,

while at the same time, they were partners

in whatever their design effort was.

Ray felt, I think,

deeply enraged and hurt, on occasion,

when it was assumed that it was

actually just Charles's business

and it was the office of Charles Eames,

not the office of Charles and Ray Eames.

It was Charles who was in charge,

but the body of work would not have been the same

without Ray's contributions,

and how you separate that out, I don't know.

If the public saw Ray as little more

than the devoted wife supporting her husband,

Charles saw a talented artist who had participated

in the birth of abstract art in America.

Her mentor was the German abstract expressionist

Hans Hofmann.

Hofmann is one of the great catalytic figures

in American art.

He starts a school in New York City in '33

with at times no more than a dozen or two students.

They, together, are the seed out of which

the new American art really grows.

He was getting ideas from people

Iike Mondrian, Paul Klee, Kandinsky,

but he was communicating them

not as textbook learning, but as this incredibly visceral

sensation.

And I have talked to people who remember him

walking into the studio and looking at a drawing of theirs

and tearing it down the middle

and then taking the two parts and moving them.

And then suddenly something that had been very static

was dynamic.

So I think it's there that Ray learned

some, at least, of this wonderful capacity that she had

for collaging, for juxtaposition.

She could move things around very, very easily

and beautifully and find form,

and find form in relation to other form.

Ray knew what was art

and what was not.

And Charles depended on her aesthetic genius.

And she would put objects on shoots

that would just bring the whole thing to life.

By putting the stack of black wire chairs

naked with the wooden bird

with the little wire legs,

gave you a very different feeling about those chairs.

Charles could not deal with the idea

that any of the furniture would have color on it.

If you put a palette of colors in front of him,

they just-- like he couldn't handle it.

It just went over his head.

He deferred to her completely on color sense.

She saw everything as a painting.

She had these enormous eyes that were --

they were open like this all the time.

And I think Charles was very dependent on that.

You could just hear him say,

"Ra-ay!"

Which meant, "Come and help!"

At the Library of Congress,

Ray's letters to a traveling Charles

show herfastidious attention to every detail

of their life and work.

When she writes to Charles in Paris

and she's talking about the slides that he's just taken,

and she has this sketch showing how she

and Sandro and Don Albinson have changed the chair.

And then she's going on about thefilms,

and she's going on about Elmer Bernstein.

Then she tells him all the places to shop in Paris

and where to get his shoes

and where to get her gloves

and whatthe stitching should be like on the gloves

and howthis perfume by Balmain is $55 an ounce here,

but it's cheaper in Paris, "and please get it for me."

It's as if they were one individual

with two different special areas,

and a lot of it was unspoken,

just eye -- eye contact.

A nodding of something -- an idea

thatthey both would agree on.

So that's how you begin to separate

their artistic personalities and their contributions.

Butthe separating them isn't the important part.

It's what they created together.

That's why it's so good.

Perhaps the greatest Eames design of all

was the image of Charles and Ray.

Their playful self-portraits, eccentric dress,

and quotable quotes all contributed

to the endearing picture of a happy, modern couple

absorbed in the challenges of their work.

Charles and Ray were cultural icons,

buttheir public face masked a deep desire for privacy.

After long hours at 901,

they would retreat to the home they built

in Pacific Palisades.

Charles and Ray were their own community,

and we were in the satellite group.

And so was everybody else.

I had no sense that they were trying to keep out

the outside world or anything else.

They had created a world and a lifestyle

thatjust required them to go

in this tunnel from their house

to the work, you know, back home again,

sowhat you surround yourself with and the choices you make

about where you live and how you live

and the artifacts you have,

they're all based upon trying to create

a seamless environment and a seamless life.

Originally, the house was designed by Charles

with Eero Saarinen as part of

the influential case study housing program in 1945.

But Charles and Ray were not ones to let a good design rest.

Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen designed a house

that we now call the Bridge House,

and it was forthis site.

It would have cantilevered from the hillside

out into the middle of the meadow.

One of the ideas of the house was to use technologies

that had come out of the war effort.

So all the parts of this house

were off the shelf.

But the Bridge House was never built.

After World War ll,

there were major material shortages,

and it took about two or three years

to even get the parts thatthey had ordered.

And in that time, Charles and Ray

fell in love with this meadow.

We spent all -- all our spare time here.

Began to think itwould be criminal to put that house

in the middle ofthe field.

Charles realized,

"Oh, we're making the classic architect's mistake."

You find a beautiful site,

and you plunk a house in the middle of it.

With the meadow in mind,

Charles and Ray redesigned the Bridge House

and began construction.

It was relatively quick,

because they were relying on some form of prefabrication,

of bringing materials to the site

and assembling them.

On Christmas Eve, 1949,

Charles and Ray moved in.

The Eames house in Los Angeles

on that bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean

is surely one of the great buildings ofthe 20th century.

Known to architectural historians

as Case Study House Number 8,

it is the archetypal modern house.

Or at least, it started that way.

The Eames house as it was first made

is very different from what it became

as they lived in it through the years

and as it acquired all their little touches.

I think people miss that

unless you've really been there and been inside of it.

Now, do you remember this?

Do you remember this?

I do. I do.

Uh, I don't remember this one here,

but there was at least one at the Office.

Modern design has this sort of clich� of being

the, you know, the homes of super villains.

Very hard-edged things.

You can't have, you know, your Pepperidge Farm cookies

on the kitchen counter, because that's going to ruin,

you know, this perfecttableau

of this perfect life that you live.

But you would never look

at the Eames House and think that.

The container for your life can be simple,

but that doesn't mean your life has to be simple.

What was in the house was a combination of things

that one hadn't seen before.

There was a tumbleweed hanging from the ceiling.

Well, now you can see a lot of tumbleweed around

in people's houses, but in those days,

itwas.

And nearthe tumbleweed hanging from the ceiling,

there were two Hans Hofmann paintings

suspended from the deck of the roof.

The floorwas just another canvas for Ray,

the ceiling was just another canvas,

a sofa was a canvas for a collage of objects.

She would have entirely all of her famous

blue and white dishes stacked up.

But she would have little red hearts or little red accents.

And it was all perfect.

I went to dinner

at Ray and Charles's house one night,

and it came to dessert.

So what they had arranged for dessert

was three bowls of flowers

thatthey put in front of you

to admire, so it was a visual dessert.

I was really off with that,

I can tell you.

I was really -- because I hadn't eaten much.

I was saving up for the -- so I'm looking

atthese stupid flowers, you know,

and I'm saying, "What the hell is wrong with these people?'

You know, so I got in my car,

and I drove out to the nearest Dairy Queen.

"Take your pleasure seriously," Charles said,

and that's exactly whatthey did.

Every time

the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus

would come to town, we would all get out our cameras

and our ectochrome, and we'd go

running downtown, and we'd photograph the circus.

And he said, "Photograph."

"What?'

He said, "Anything you want. Just photograph."

And a couple of people of the audience

were there to feed you.

It's like a machine gun,

somebody was feeding you the cartridges.

And I took a lot of pictures.

What impressed him was how everybody knew their place,

and sometimes they had

two or three different tasks thatthey had to do.

The circus looks like a free-for-all

and is absolutely a model of constraints.

And for Charles, this was one supreme example --

"the performance."

"Never let the blood show," he would say.

And this went back to his philosophy

of no good design, no good performance

without restrictions, without restraints, without rules.

He goes to the circus, and he just

is overwhelmed by the richness

of everything, you know,

the costumes and the wagons

and the tent.

And he comes back, and he's trying to --

you can't turn a circus into a piece of furniture,

but he's desperately wanting to.

Charles and Ray did not turn the circus into a chair,

butthey did turn the Eames Office into a circus.

He wasn't embarrassed at all

about what it is that he was doing.

You know, he felt really confident about,

"Yeah, this is a toy shop.

This -- I'm just having fun here.

And, you know, somehow or other, you guys bring me money

and tell me to go ahead, and I'm going to."

Royalties from Herman Miller gave Charles

the freedom to move beyond his reputation

as a designer of modern furniture.

Herman Miller was always after him

to do more chairs, and he would do chairs every now and then,

but I don't think he liked to think of himself

or have others think of him

as the chair designer.

I was a film critic,

and that gave me an excuse to go down to 901.

I fell in love with the whole concept of 901,

which was a kind of

Renaissance art workshop, where they did everything.

At the time, he was considered

a kind of cutesy, pass� little filmmaker,

but no one had ever written about the films.

Eames films are their own genre,

the product not of a film studio concerned with profits,

but of a curious mind yearning to communicate

the complex beauty of everyday objects.

We've never used film as an art form.

We just use film as a tool.

They were, at heart,

a kind of mixture of vanity and self-expression.

They only had one obligation, and thatwas

to satisfy Charles.

Much of our energy

is like the guy in Vaudeville that has

the plates going, and he's

intent on getting 30 plates spinning at one time,

but part of the process is

quickly being aware of the ones that are winding down,

and keeping them spinning.

One of the titles that began to circulate

between all the employees

was the Eamery, because it was like this place

where everyone was driven to work all the time.

It was 24/7,

365.

Going to the Eames Office

and watching people at their desks

was like watching people take their brains out

and knead them like dough.

People that came from the outside

couldn't believe that this was the way things were done,

but itwas a delicious agony.

Itwas like a temple for me.

Many of us understood very well

thatwe were very poorly suited for employment

in certain kinds of jobs.

We were very well suited to be thete.

Charles had a terrible time interacting with people.

Several times, I hired people,

and they would be there like three days,

and he'd come to me and say, "l just can't stand that guy.

Get him out of here."

And I never did know what it was

that he saw in that person

that he could just not work with them.

I happen to have a sort of interest in language

as a means of communication, which I like to believe

can be simple and direct.

Charles, I would say, didn't subscribetothat.

Uh, no, we have to -- you know, the only thing is, uh, Perry,

we have to have some sort of a background before we do this,

because one sort of begins to --

His speech wasn't yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda.

It was stop and go, and stop and go.

No, you -- you let me -- cut this, let me re-- let me --

He had this incredible ability

to surround every subject

with a little cloud ofwords.

We -- we were hoping to --

there were two -- there were several things.

There was, uh...

You finally got the message

at the end of about 15 or 20 minutes of wondering,

"Whatthe hell is he talking about?'

It finally dawned on you that he was telling you

you were an absolute clown

becausethere's something wrong.

This one is going to have something to do

with what I think of as the new covetables.

He appeared one day at a conference at UCLA,

and he started to speak, and it just ran right off the track.

Looked up, and he said, "I'm sorry.

I just -- isn't going to work today."

And somebody said, "No, no!"

So he said, "Well, give me a minute."

He put his head down.

And everybody waited.

And it took about two minutes.

And he raised up.

And he just took off. Boom.

Reams of paper.

What you do with a ream of paper

can never quite come up to what the paper offers.

He knew where his center was.

And there are not a lot of people that can do that.

I -- I have buttons that get pushed,

but I don't know where my center is.

For Charles, knowing where his center was

meant working for powerful clients

without compromising his ideals.

And making a film to represent the United States

in communist Russia in 1959

would put that philosophy to the test.

At the height of the Cold War,

the American government

and the government of the Soviet Union

decided to hold joint expositions.

The United States would show what America was about

to the Soviet public,

and the Soviet Union would show what they were about to America.

And one of the centerpieces were a series

of American kitchens,

and it was there that Khrushchev and Nixon

had their so-called Kitchen Debate.

There are some instances where you may be ahead of us.

There may be some instances -- for example,

color television -- where we're ahead of you.

But in order for both of us --

For both of us to benefit --

for both of us to benefit --

But the U.S. Information Agency

decided that they had to show Russians more about America

than just cars and household appliances.

The idea is that Charles and Ray will make a film

"Glimpses of the USA."

How could you make the world

as we see it in the United States --

how could you make it really credible

to an audience like that?

We could've shown the greatest freeway in the United States.

If we'd shown one picture and they'd gone,

they'd say, you know,

"They've got the great freeway interchange,

but we've got one at Minsk,

and we're going to build one at Smolensk,

and we'll have two, and they have one."

But in the redundancy of the multi-imagetechnique,

in something like 12 seconds,

I think we showed 120 freeway interchanges.

People were sent all overthe country.

Friends were called to take images

so that it looked nationalistic.

It couldn't look specific and regional.

It had to be national and egalitarian.

Charles said -- wanted pictures

of people setting off for work,

children coming from school, coming up from the subway.

And freeways.

So I did my first,

you know, helicopterflights,

sort of strapped in, leaning way out.

I think the State Department had sort of envisioned

having lots of troop marches.

And Charles said he'd do the film,

but he didn'twant to have it reviewed before it was shown.

The government really didn't have any idea

whatwas happening.

We would have these showings

for the guy who would represent the government, coming out.

It seemed like each time,

itwould just get going, and then it'd go blank.

And we'd say, "That's as far as we are right now."

And he'd say, "Well...

Yeah, I guess it looks okay.

I don't know."

So he'd go away.

Well, as Charles said, sometimes

if you don't ask for people's opinions,

then they don't give them to you.

They just got there the day before,

and I think by that time,

the USlAwas just relieved

that there'd be anything to show.

You know, and here you have this giant effort

that'd gone into building the building

and putting the screens up,

and tickets being -- all of that happening.

And he's waiting till the very last minute.

It's just kind of his nature.

Right at the end,

he would suddenly appear,

and itwould look like itwas effortless.

He'd say, you know,

"This is just a little something we've been doing."

You know, and there'd be blood all over the floor

from the thing, you know?

When we look atthe night sky,

these are the stars we see --

the same stars that shine down upon Russia each night.

We see the same clusters, the same nebulae.

And from the sky, it would be difficult to distinguish

the Russian city from the American city.

If you're going to communicate

with 3 million Soviet citizens, you need to say something true.

You can't just show off you've got

better weapons or this or that.

You've got to try to speak from the heart, and they did.

Was it propaganda?

Goodness, yes, have you seen it?

Yes, it's, it's selling the U.S.,

and it's selling, I think, a very sanitized USA.

Of course it was propaganda.

They were Cold Warriors.

The difference is they --

I believe they genuinely believed it.

One of the interesting things was how to end this.

Charles had this idea of a jet plane.

Ray still felt this might be a bit hard-edged, a bit --

could have military implications.

We never had an ending, and one day Ray walked in

and said, "Forget-me-nots."

Charles said, "Okay, forget-me-nots."

Forget-me-nots,

the universal symbol of friendship,

translates directly into Russian,

Nezabudki, "forget me not."

They described Nikita Khrushchev

with tears running down his cheeks.

So you have this wonderful sort of double ending

of the simplicity of a flower, butthen this "Forget me not."

And it worked like the best Hollywood movie.

The Moscow show made Charles and Ray newly famous,

not as designers of furniture, but as communicators.

Communicators who used images ratherthan words.

Charles was very wary of words.

It's not about writing a script.

It's about a sequence of images

that can tell a story.

In the Eames film "Tops,"

there are no words, just pictures.

In a way, the film is a kind of an essay

aboutthe nature and meaning of a top.

In the beginning, it's all aboutwinding up,

getting started, putting it together,

assembling the materials.

And then it's aboutthrowing them,

seeing how they work, what they do,

how they dance, how they spin, how they sing,

whatever it is that their meaning is.

But then you come to one moment

where there's an architectural plan on thetabletop,

a blueprint, and what spins

is a thumbtack, and you realize

you have suddenly gotten directly into the essence

of what it means to be a top.

Things have meaning, things have personality,

things express ideas.

Many designers were and still are happy with

the manipulation of objects.

Hewas only truly deeply happy

manipulating an idea.

Beginning in the 1950s, the idea ofthe computer

triggered fear in the minds of Americans.

People were seeing computers,

and there was a worry about them.

And this notion of the electronic brain

feeds into fears that we're

going to be taken over by machines.

At the time, computers were synonymous

with just one company -- lBM.

What was lBM's product?

Big vacuum tube machines, huge room-size machines,

building-size machines, so that

the average individual was feeling an alien,

science-fiction type invasion of my privacy.

How do you combat that?

lBM turned to the Eames Office.

To overcome the computer's PR problem,

Charles and Ray set out to humanize it.

Properly related, it can maintain a balance

between man's needs and his resources.

It's done in this,

what to us today looks really corny --

but at the time, this was thoughtto be radical --

to do a film for a science company, like a cartoon.

Something has now emerged that might make

even our most elegant theories workable.

And you go from the abacus.

As human problems become more complex,

people invent more complicated machines

to solve those problems,

and the culmination of that is the computer.

This is a story of a technique

in the service of mankind.

It's not going to take over the world,

it's not going to be robots.

It's the logical evolutionary progression

of man developing products to solve problems.

Charles's visionary interest in computers

helped to bring lBM into the Eames Office stables.

But it was not expertise that made Charles and Ray

indispensible to the rapidly growing company.

You sell your expertise,

You sell your expertise,

you have a limited repertoire.

You sell your ignorance, it's an unlimited repertoire.

He was selling his ignorance

and his desire to learn about a subject.

And the journey --

of him not knowing to knowing -- was his work.

Over two decades, Charles and Ray would complete

dozens of projects, large and small, for lBM.

But perhaps the most bold was their pavilion

for the 1964 New York World's Fair,

a 1.2-acre experimental space

celebrating the role of computers in everyday life.

I was drawing the stuff

as fast as he could conjure it up,

and they came up with this idea

of putting thattheater up on top of these trees.

And so I knew they were going to have these plungers

going into the ground -- they are going to move,

you know, 400 people up on this ramp.

And I knew, as a designer, I knew I was going to

have to figure out some way to make all that happen.

And he's just so excited about this thing.

And I'm just standing there like that.

And I said, "Charles, this is just nuts."

And he says, "Yeah, and no one had told us not to do it."

For the show in Moscow, they had used seven screens.

But at the lBM Pavilion, there were 22.

Charles was very big on making people feel welcome.

You don'tjust get them in an auditorium and showthe film.

You have a host.

But, uh, it was very hard.

Everything you said not only had to be memorized and rehearsed,

but it had to be timed,

so when you pointed to this screen,

what you were talking about appeared on this screen.

And the same with that screen and all the others.

Butthe problem was,

the host had a nervous breakdown.

As Charles and Ray's reputation

as visual communicators grew,

so did their list of corporate clients.

N is for...

Westinghouse, Boeing, and Polaroid

all trusted the Eames Office

to solve their problems.

When the Office was hired by Alcoa

to show off the uses of aluminum,

they built a solar-powered Do-Nothing Machine,

which did exactly that.

That was in the golden years,

when the heads of corporations would speak,

a chair away from the designer.

So that if you needed to talk to somebody,

you talked to the decision maker.

You didn't talk to a manager who talked to a director

who talked to a chief director

who talked to a vice president

who talked to a senior vice president

who talked to an executive vice president

who was allowed to talk to God.

Almost never was there a dissenting voice.

We trusted his decision making entirely.

So his freedom to do and to explain

and to conceive and execute

was almost unparalleled.

They didn't have contracts.

They had a handshake.

All those huge projects were done on a handshake.

"We're going to give you the best product,

butwe can't tell you what it's going to cost."

And for lBM

and for Polaroid, and for Herman Miller,

it was okay.

And for Charles,

these gentlemen's agreements went both ways.

The budget for "Mathematica" was $150,000.

It actually ended up costing $300,000,

and Charles paid for the $150,000

that itwent over budget.

Sothe whole thing aboutwhatthings cost

and trying to keep it within the budget

and meet the clients, he didn't care about --

he cared about it, but he just, he couldn't stop himself.

Charles and Ray's career began with a utopian notion

of providing low-cost, high-quality goods to the masses

through industrial production.

But they never viewed their work

for corporate titans as selling out.

They wanted to work for the Google of their time,

and they did, and it allowed them incredible experimentation.

And they believed they could have a bigger impact

on everyday life by working forthe bigger company.

lBM shared Charles's concern

that American kids were falling behind in math and science.

And as usual, they gave the Office free rein

to address the problem.

Maybe, Charles felt,

a film could help.

We begin with a scene one meter wide,

which we view from just one meter away.

Now, every ten seconds, we will look

from ten times farther away,

and our field of view will be ten times wider.

"Powers of Ten" would become the best known

of all the Eames films, viewed in countless classrooms

and copied freely by filmmakers around the world.

Everyone has seen "Powers of Ten."

They may not have seen the version Charles did,

but they have seen

one of the countless rip-offs ofthat film.

Ten to the sixth, a one with six zeros,

a million meters -- soon the earth will show

as a solid sphere.

Nobody had done a movie like that.

How can you fail, doing a cosmic zoom

in and out from all that is?

And so the concept is, all by itself, mind-blowing.

The trip back to the picnic on the lakefront

will be a sped-up version, reducing the distance

to the Earth's surface by one power of ten every two seconds.

It's "Ch-ch-ch-ch-shoo,"

excessive information, dizzying information.

Ten to the ninth meters,

ten to the eighth...

Like in a chase sequence in a movie,

everything is going by so fast,

it forces the observer to choose the information

that's truly important,

which is the car or the person

that is running away from you --

i.e., the idea.

One. We are back at our starting point.

Eames was aware that, in fact,

that this was somewhat dizzying,

and that it wasn't possible

to get all of this information across

in a single viewing, and that was fine.

What he probably didn't know

was that he was also looking into the future

of audio-visual perception.

The pace at which we receive information today

is as fast as he was doing back then.

As a single proton fills our scene,

we reach the edge of present understanding.

As time went on,

Charles became more and more and more interested in ideas,

especially science and mathematics.

Ray was less engaged.

I mean, I'm no mathematician, and I'm no -- not an architect,

I'm not -- I haven't had certain training,

so I just try to help in the way that I -- in any way I can.

I don't stop to think whether I can.

I just go as far as I can.

And if I --

if I can't, I can't.

I think Ray may have suffered

from a feeling of marginalization,

because some of those last projects

were heavy on ideas and not as heavy

on the kind of visual richness that was Ray's forte.

She's no longer as instrumental

in the entire thing.

She can apply an aesthetic,

she can dress a set, and so on,

but, um, she's no longer as central.

Ray's exquisite taste, her eye for form and color,

made her indispensible to the Office.

But it could also be aterrible burden.

I remember peering into Ray's office

only once or twice,

because when the door opened and I looked into it,

I thought, "l don't everwant to look in there again,

because it's a little frightening."

Ray had a little room, smallerthan Charles's,

directly across the hall from his,

thatwas just absolutely jammed

with all of her little pieces of paper

and all of her little slides

and all of the little notes

that people had mailed to her

and that she was mailing to them.

And she would go in and find things.

She would say, "Oh, I have one,"

and she would disappear into the room

and come out with the perfect kite.

Or she'd go in and find the perfect scarf or something.

Shewould go, and she would fuss with it,

and change it one day,

and the next day, she would look at it again

and change a little something else.

And I think over the years,

the perfectionism did get in the way.

In a way, it crippled her.

Here is oh, a picnic basket, a drawing of a basket.

Up in Seaview Village,

so probably Deborah Sussman.

It's a letter from Lily Saarinen.

That's cool.

Look at that, I've never seen that.

There we go --

"Dearest Queen of all Pack Rats."

I think it was almost a nervous tic with her.

She was constantly making notes,

and usually on the back of Benson & Hedges wrappers.

This is one of the wrappers,

and on this side

she designed something that looks very reminiscent

of some of herfabric designs.

And you turn it over, and you see it's a Benson & Hedges.

And on this side are notes she made

for lighting ofthe puppet shows

at the lBM pavilion.

You'd find them everywhere.

They'd drive you crazy.

And they could say, "Buy soap,"

or "Liver and onions for dinner,'

or they'd have very elaborate ideas.

She had her suits made,

and they had pockets that went all the way to the hem.

So whatever she wanted to keep,

she would just shove in the pockets.

So what would happen with these notes?

Well, for a time, she asked the staff

to try to type them up, and I think it became

too overwhelming forthe staff.

It was such an avalanche of notes.

Ray didn't communicate like everybody else does.

She expected that you

pre-understood what she was talking about.

The people who didn't make the effort

would sometimes use the epithet "Crazy Rayzy,"

simply because they didn't understand her.

But Ray is not crazy. She's brilliant.

And Ray had a lot of competition

for Charles's attention,

which I don't think anybody ever really gave her credit for.

That everybody wanted Charles and not Ray.

He was the guy that the lBM executives would call.

He was the guy that you went to

to discuss the projects intellectually.

He was very charismatic.

Charles was extremely charismatic.

He was very charismatic.

He was very handsome.

He was very handsome and very charismatic.

I know that word is really overused, but he was.

And especially very charismatic to women.

He reminded me of Henry Fonda,

and I met Henry Fonda one time, and I told Henry Fonda this,

that I thought they looked alike,

and he said, "That's a compliment."

I mean, he had these dimples,

and he -- "Aw, shucks," kind of guy.

He was handsome and smart, and cool.

So, you know, that's a kind of lethal combination.

It was the vision.

It was the personality.

It was the charm.

It was the unexpected.

It was the person.

This is just a small selection

of letters that I went through

to find things that pertain particularly to the work.

"ln the next few weeks, I must pull together a preliminary film

for the 'Franklin and Jefferson' show."

And then the rest is personal.

I think their marriage,

it was a mystery to everybody, in a way.

They were emotionally extremely bonded.

But he found excitement and thrills outside of Ray,

and outside of the Office,

which was really crushing to her.

I met him when he was on the visiting committee

forthe architecture department at M.I.T.

and I was a young assistant professor.

Charles said, "Let's experiment

with some films on art."

I have many, many letters, extraordinary letters.

Because we didn't live in the same city,

we tried to see each other as we could.

He had come to London,

and I was there, and I could not get away.

And he said, "l will come and stand in front of the house

at a certain time," and l slipped out of this

ratherformal dinner,

and there he was, and we just looked at each other.

We had a very profound love for each other.

He wanted very much for us to get married

and to have a child,

and to close -- he wanted to close

the Eames Office in Venice,

which he found very burdensome,

and for us to open an office together in New York.

And I made a decision --

and I don't know if was the right decision --

that I couldn't do it to Ray.

Because I had a friendship with her,

but above all because they had been together so long,

and I knew how much she depended on him.

And I said, "l can't do it."

Ray dealtwith it very privately.

Shewas hurt deeply,

but shewasn't the kind of person

who would have said, "It's me or her."

I don't think she wanted to leave.

I think itwas something that she had to accept.

This wasn't the era

of easy-come, easy-go relationships.

There was too much shared life and community,

and the fact that he, you know,

had other relationships outside of the Office...

he seemed to be constructed that way.

But there is a position that I think is nonsense,

which is to say that because Charles was having

a relationship with somebody else

that he couldn't then carry on a collaboration with Ray.

I mean, that clearly didn't happen.

In fact, Charles and Ray were about to collaborate

on the largest, most complex project

the Office would ever undertake.

For the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976,

the Eames Office designed

"The World of Franklin and Jefferson,"

a traveling show made up of three films,

40,000 words translated into four languages,

and thousands of photographs and objects,

including a stuffed bison.

When "Franklin and Jefferson" opened in Paris,

it was seen by 50,000 people in two months.

More than a thousand visitors saw it each day

in London and Warsaw.

But when it came to New York,

the reception was different.

When it appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,

The New Yotk Times reviewed it, and the headline was,

"What Is This Stuff Doing at the Met?'

It was one of the first times

the Eameses were ever criticized.

It had an enormous amount of text.

Nobody could have possibly read it all, it was so dense.

This show was a bit picky for me,

too many little objects that I would remember none.

It was too many things to see.

I can remember about ten things.

He knew so much about all these things,

he couldn't edit out something.

These are things of the period

and of the time, from MountVernon.

They were all so interesting to him,

and he was familiarwith them,

and he could see all these connections.

But you can't keep it all in your head

if you're not that familiarwith it.

You could call it clutter, butthat's not

what Charles would have called it,

because clutter is just stuff that's

dropped and abandoned and forgotten and leftthere.

It was dense,

and it was complex,

but there was a mind at work

placing itthere.

Whether you as the recipient

were willing and able to accept that is another question.

They're pushing up against the envelope

ofwhattechnology could do,

because they're trying to give the visitor

a hypertext experience,

but they're doing it in physical space.

And it doesn'twork.

They are anticipating

what the computer can do today very easily

with layering text and giving you at different levels.

So it's a failure, but it's an honest failure.

The criticism of "Franklin and Jefferson"

hit Charles hard.

The "Franklin and Jefferson" show

was an exhausting show

because it was huge,

and I think sort of the machinery of doing that

was just tiring.

I saw Charles at his happiest

I saw Charles at his happiest

when he was getting to do a lot of photography.

And he was very engaged directly on the creative process

of doing the photographs --

which led me to the idea that maybe he felt

he was missing something, you know,

because he had had the transition

to more of an executive position at the Office.

It was very hard for him, because he didn't really have

a successor,

and for the years that I was there, he was always

Iooking for the perfect person.

It was a battle one day

with the lBM representative, Mike Sullivan,

and Mike said, "Why don't you shutthis down?'

And he said, "I'd like to."

And Sullivan said, "Whatwould you do?'

And he said, "I'd just travel and shoot."

"But," he said, "l don't know what to do about Ray,

and closing the Office."

He was tired, and he was,

I don't know if it was his heart, but he was cold a lot.

I brought him one morning -- it was a Saturday morning,

and I'd made applesauce cake or something,

and I brought it to the office,

and I handed it to Charles wrapped in tin foil,

and itwas still warm, and he took it,

pressed it to his chest,

and he was thrilled to have that warmth

just sort of on his chest.

I was out of the office the day that he died.

It was, in a way, it was expected.

It just didn't seem possible.

I mean, I knew that some people that Charles worked with,

men in the East, wept.

He was such a dominant force in the lives of designers that...

it was like there was suddenly a big empty hole.

There are still days

when I'm driving down the highway,

thinking about things, and I think,

"Why did you die?

I'm notthrough with you yet!

I haven't finished asking you the questions I wanted to ask."

He was the most important person in my life.

I mean, he could be, he could really be tough, you know,

but he...

he was an extraordinary person.

After Charles died,

suddenly Ray was

the head of the Office.

She gathered everybody around,

and she talked about her goals and what she wanted to do,

and how she needed our help.

And it was really very powerful,

because she had never donethat before.

But she feltthis huge burden about carrying on the name

and carrying on the Office.

And I think itwas killing her.

And I said, "Come on, Ray, why don't you

just close the Office, and let's go and paint."

And she said "No, that's all in the past.

I can't do that anymore."

Without Charles,

activity in the Eames Office dwindled,

until it was time to finally close 901.

Ray focused on the painstaking work

of cataloguing the voluminous 40-year output

of the Eames Office.

Nearly 350,000 photographs

and half a million documents had to be organized for shipment

to the Library of Congress.

But over the years, a new generation

Iifted Ray from Charles's shadow,

discovering in her exuberant design sense

a refreshing alternative to the austerity of modernism.

And Ray seemed to finally find her voice

as one of the most influential women of American design.

Best for the most for the least,

that was always the principle.

That's why we became interested

in mass production.

At that point,

women began to point to Ray.

You know, "lf there are two Eameses,

why aren't they both credited?'

And now, of course, they are.

She kept saying, in the hospital, "What day is it?'

And I would say, "It's Wednesday the 18th."

And she would say, "Oh."

And then the next time I would come,

then she would say, "What day is it?'

"It's Thursday."

"Oh."

I think she wanted to die on the same day as Charles

because it sort of symbolized their being one.

Her last statement was one of being with Charles.

This guy and that guy could trade places.

There's probably an Eames chair

Iiterally in every single issue thatwe've published.

You know, you could go

from the DAX to the DSS to the LCW,

you know, you'll get thiswhole range.

Clockwise just a little.

Just a little.

Thefurniture still has a quality

that every young designer

is searching for, because of the amount of thought

that's been put into it

by everyone whose hands touch the project.

I think you see that optimism of the American spirit

in their design.

It provided just a great blueprint

for how we could live our lives.

What furniture designers

ever have produced 40 to 50 pieces of furniture

that have been in production for five decades?

Butthe other thing is the sheer joy,

that aspect of play.

No one else, I think, had that combination

of the pragmatic and the aesthetic.

Seven...

They loved to say, "We don't do art.

We solve problems."

It's the process.

It's, how do we get from where we are

to where we want to be?

Grasp the rear of the viewfinder...

Charles and Ray were always looking to the future.

They weren't sort of sitting around,

telling war stories about organic furniture.

What they were doing is like,

"What's the nextthing?'

They were there

for the major moments in American history,

and they were really the pioneers of the information age.

The visitor can try out the computer

as a carrier of information.

The breadth of the work is extraordinary,

but there is also a unifying theme of beauty

and a desire to reach a broad audience.

So if it was pulled forward a little bit?

Every designer owes them some amount of debt,

but at the same time, part of that debt should be to kind of

take what they did and move beyond it.