“Pauli’s Actual Voice Was So Strong That We Didn’t Want to Dilute That”: ‘THR Presents’ Q&A With ‘My Name Is Pauli Murray’ Directors, Producer and Editor

Amazon Studios’ My Name Is Pauli Murray is Hollywood’s first significant look at the 20th century multiracial Black LGBTQ legal scholar and human rights activist of the documentary’s title, and reveals Murray’s eventual influence in shaping the Supreme Court’s equal protection laws.

In a conversation with THR Presents, powered by Vision Media, co-writers and co-directors Betsy West and Julie Cohen, writer-producer Talleah Bridges McMahon and editor Cinque Northern detail their journey discovering Murray through their previous doc RBG (2018); the daunting process of unpacking Murray’s life and work via hundreds of documents and audio recordings; and ultimately, how they gave shape to the multifaceted identity of this civil rights and women’s movement champion in a way that’s accessible for a contemporary audience.

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Murray was many things: constitutional rights scholar, originator of the term “Jane Crow,” Episcopal priest, labor organizer and feminist pioneer, among others. And so one of the team’s most significant challenges was what to keep in and what to leave out.

“This was really, for us, an ongoing conversation that we were having from the very beginning,” Bridges McMahon tells THR. “There were questions around what would Pauli even want people to know, right? If Pauli didn’t talk about it in [their] book [Song in a Weary Throat], is this really something that Pauli wanted people to be aware of?

“In so many cases, it was spending so much time in the archives and understanding the intentionality behind Pauli’s choices. That what we were seeing is really what Pauli wanted us to see,” the doc’s writer and producer adds. “And we know that specifically because Pauli hid some things.”

With so much material — 141 boxes of papers, more than 800 photos and 40 hours of audiotapes — West acknowledges that time constraints came into play. My Name Is Pauli Murray’s editor Northern also had the task of figuring out how to string Murray’s extended life’s work into one coherent narrative.

“It was definitely a balance of trying to weigh all of those different sections of Pauli’s life, because it was such a diverse landscape of environments that Pauli was in,” the editor explains. “Finding that thread that wove through all of it, so it felt like one film and not like a lot of different chapters, was really … a challenge.”

Encapsulating Murray’s array of identities was compounded by the added task of conveying, with nuance and sensitivity, Murray’s personal experiences with gender, sexuality and race.

The team says they avoided explicit details of Murray’s personal life. When it came to Murray’s gender identity, they turned to family, friends, academics and historical experts close to Murray to shed light on the subject.

“We have characters in the film who were describing Pauli’s gender identity in varying ways,” Cohen says. “I think, for scholarly debate on that, we wanted to make sure that the film really included the voices of people who could explain in a modern context for a nonbinary or trans person what Pauli Murray’s historical significance means to them.”

While the documentary is meant to train a spotlight on Murray’s work, it also serves, as Northern notes, to “review Pauli’s legacy” — something that, as for many civil rights icons, is complicated.

“This [shows] how Pauli had evolved over time,” Cohen says. “But also, it allowed for some beautiful human moments.”

This edition of THR Presents is presented by Amazon Studios.