Sundance 2019: Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins...

Sundance 2019: Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins is rousing tribute to one of best American political columnists ever
By Les Roka -
January 30, 2019


In the trade publication Editor and Publisher, when nationally syndicated columnist Molly Ivins died in 2007 after a triple bout with cancer and its complications, Greg Mitchell recalled in a piece headlined Molly Ivins: The Plucking Truth a classic moment that eventually would lead the stuffed shirts at The New York Times to send her packing. In 1980, she had written a piece about a chicken slaughtering festival in New Mexico that she characterized in her inimitable style as a “gang pluck.”

When Ivins died, newspapers around the country recalled that incident using the original phrase as she had written, which Mitchell says stood out “not because it was her sharpest or funniest, but because it helped spark her departure from The New York Times.” Yet, as Mitchell aptly put it, the ‘Grey Lady’ “chickened out” in the end. In its obituary about Ivins, the Times wrote, “she used a sexually suggestive phrase, which her editors deleted from the final article. But her effort to use it angered the executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal, who ordered her back to New York and assigned her to City Hall, where she covered routine matters with little flair.” As Mitchell wrote, the obituary editor held steadfast that the standard had not changed at the Times since the incident 27 years earlier and the remark still stood as “gratuitous” in his estimation.
Molly Ivins.

Janice Engel does full justice to that incident and so many more iconic moments of one of the country’s most popular newspaper columnists of the last 50 years in her latest documentary Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins, which received its premiere at Sundance this year.

Engel frames Ivins’ outstanding career with all of its proper merits. Ivins was a sharp thinker, even sharper writer who disavowed the pretenses of objectivity, false equivalence and whataboutism that have dragged political journalism into its current distressed state. She perfectly fused the pedigree of her education at Smith College and Columbia University with the plainspoken wit of west Texas and the liberal urbane tones of Austin. Engel’s documentary resonates so well in Ivins’ true voice that one sincerely misses the column writing style that framed the contemporary social and political issues with devastating accuracy.

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https://www.theutahreview.com/sundance-2019-raise-hell-the-life-and-times-of-molly-ivins-is-rousing-tribute-to-one-of-best-american-political-columnists-ever/?fbclid=IwAR3PwbukAEfwg-giYseD56P3c1ysTCzU86yur_eldvAJB7XxFQUTRTGyFAU