julian_craster

Obituary
Debbie Geller
TV producer and writer who took popular culture seriously

Adam Curtis
Monday December 31, 2007
The Guardian

Debbie Geller, who has died of cancer in New York aged 55, was a Bafta
award-winning television producer and writer. During the 1980s and 1990s she
worked alongside Anthony Wall, Nigel Finch and Alan Yentob in the BBC's
music and arts department, making documentary films for Arena, Rhythms of
the World and Omnibus. Born into a radical New York family, Debbie had her
birth watched by James Baldwin, who later wrote an essay about the
experience. Her mother was a follower of Wilhelm Reich, and in her childhood
Debbie would spend time every day in one of Reich's orgone boxes
accumulating "universal life energy".

From Lowell high school in San Francisco she went to the University of
California at Berkeley, and graduated in psychology. After working as a
researcher for the music magazine Rolling Stone, she moved to London in the
early 1980s. Stints as a journalist followed, but she soon became part of
the maverick BBC group who ran Arena.
Their approach was a revolutionary one in the still snobbish and patrician
BBC of the time: they took popular culture seriously, making quirky films on
both sides of the Atlantic. At home in Britain, they were on steady ground,
but Debbie expanded their understanding of just how different the US could
be.

She became a central figure, researching and producing with editors Wall and
Finch a raft of arts films that investigated subterranean America. They
depicted a world as strange as it was true, peopled by the likes of
Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione, singer-songwriters Kinky Friedman and Slim
Gaillard, photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, underground film-maker Kenneth
Anger and jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie. Her ability to find odd characters
at the heart of 1980s America laid the foundation for Louis Theroux, who she
went on to produce, and others.

She continued in the 1990s to produce many serious pop and rock films -
including the two-part Arena, The Brian Epstein Story, which in 1999 won a
Bafta and a Royal Television Society nomination. The following year saw the
publication of a critically acclaimed book on the Beatles manager. As an
interviewer, she coaxed unique contributions out of Paul McCartney and Keith
Richards for her films: they were revolutionary because they presented pop
icons, from Epstein through to the Everly Brothers, Dolly Parton and Buddy
Holly, as artists to be taken seriously.

Returning to live in New York at the end of the 1990s, Debbie became an
important figure in the BBC New York office, where her perceptive views were
important in influencing the way the BBC reported America. She was scathing
about the anti-Americanism of many of the liberal British TV producers she
met, which she saw as mere ignorance and snobbish superiority: she
acknowledged no contradiction between her radical, progressive ideas and a
belief in America as a country that could be great and good.

A modest person, she often let others take the credit, but in her
encyclopedic knowledge of American popular culture she played a key part in
bringing to British television the view that it could be just as important
as politics or the established arts. She is survived by her father Arthur
Geller and her sister Ruth Isiah.

Deborah Geller, film-maker, born November 28 1952; died December 16 2007

smudge

We must have watched many of these segments over the years...

55 is way too young to be gone.

Respect.

smudge

Welcome to my house. Enter freely, and of your own will...