The invention of Liza: Documentary by Harpur alumni brings new light to a Hollywood great

“When I was born, they took a picture,” Liza Minnelli recounts.

The daughter of Wizard of Oz megastar Julie Garland and legendary director Vincente Minnelli, she was held by Frank Sinatra on the first day of her life. And that life unfolded within close proximity of cameras and stages, from Broadway to the silver screen.

The latest documentary by Bruce David Klein ’85 and Alex Goldstein ’12 focuses on the superstar in the 1970s, just after the tragic death of her mother. Minnelli then reinvents herself with the aid of extraordinary mentors such as Kay Thompson, Fred Ebb, Charles Aznavour, Halston and Bob Fosse to resounding success.

“She was the It-Girl, the Taylor Swift of the day,” said Klein, the film’s director, writer and producer. “She was bigger than life.”

LIZA: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival and opened Jan. 24 at New York City’s IFC Center. According to IndieWire, the film had “the best initial showing for a platformed documentary in quite some time”; it has also received positive reviews from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Observer, and currently has a 95% rating on the film-ranking site Rotten Tomatoes.

Another opening is planned for Jan. 31 at Laemmle’s Royal in Los Angeles and Town Center in Encino, CA, followed by a national rollout. The documentary includes interviews with friends and colleagues Michael Feinstein, Mia Farrow, Ben Vereen, Joel Grey and the late Chita Rivera, as well as Minnelli herself.

It comes on the heels of another successful documentary by the alumni filmmakers: Icahn: The Restless Billionaire, which was released in 2022 and profiles the activist investor and Wall Street titan, Carl Icahn. The HBO production is now streaming on MAX.

The subjects couldn’t be more different. Icahn is reserved and fairly unknown by many people. Minnelli, on the other hand, is the ultimate people person, drawing on the energy of the crowd. She loves to laugh and is eager to form friendships.

The idea for the latest documentary came by way of co-producer Dana Craig, a Liza super-fan. Klein, for his part, remembered seeing Minnelli perform on Broadway in 2008 and was struck by the explosive reaction from the audience, some of whom stood on their seats or wept.

Goldstein, in contrast, knew virtually nothing about the performer when he began the project. That proved a plus: The producer and editor played the role of the average layman audience member, pointing out potential knowledge gaps to make the film more accessible to non-fans.

Unlike the Icahn film, Klein and Goldstein began the filmmaking process with abundant footage; after all, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Minnelli was one of the most photographed people alive. In addition to 20 hours of archival footage from an unreleased ‘70s-era film, there were thousands of hours’ worth of interviews available from around the world.

“The challenge was finding ‘David’ in the blob of marble,” Klein said.

The film’s focus emerged from the material they collected. During many interviews, Minnelli often would say that this mentor or that “invented” her.

“That’s when the lightbulb went on. The story of Liza Minnelli is how, after her mother’s tragic death, she sought out these mentors to help transform her into her own person,” Klein reflected. “Whenever you find what the film is about, it becomes very exciting.”

Up close and personal

During the interview process, Minnelli leaned in and looked Klein in the eye.

“Now, tell me about you,” she said.

Rather than small talk, the superstar makes these connections out of genuine interest, asking follow-up questions about, say, Klein’s aunt. People who spend a few minutes with the performer often say that they feel like they could call Minnelli the next week and chat about dinner.

“You just feel so close to her. It’s a talent, it’s a real personality trait, that overwhelming need for you to love her, and she feeds off that, certainly on stage,” Klein reflected. “If you make her laugh, she’s your friend for life.”

During their first day interviewing Minnelli, Goldstein zoomed in on Liza from across the room, using a long lens. She sat in the director’s chair, glancing around the room — and then focused on Goldstein.

He put down the camera; her gaze still held.

“And then she just winks at me,” he counts. “That is just completely Liza Minnelli. In that moment, she made me feel like I had an inside joke with her, even though I was just paparazziing her from the other side of the room.”

He’s been a professed Liza mega-fan ever since.

While Atlas Media Corp. is based in New York City, LIZA is also a film rooted deep in their alma mater. In addition to Klein and Goldstein, the distributor — Emily Russo of Zeitgeist — is also a Binghamton graduate, they said.

Binghamton both attracts and nurtures “a kind of scrappiness in people,” reflected Klein, who majored in creative writing and psychology during his time at Harpur College.

“Binghamton’s about rolling up your sleeves and making things happen despite the odds. I think any documentary film — and certainly this one — needs that scrappiness to keep going despite all the odds, because there are so many,” he added. “There were so many times the film could have just died on the vine.”

He explained that Showtime originally bought it and then shut down its documentary division. They then needed to start from scratch and figure out a way to complete it.

A cinema major in Harpur, Goldstein reflected on the centrality of mentorship in the film. One of the few regrets about his Binghamton experience was that he didn’t make the effort to get to know his professors better, he said.

“Hopefully, people come away from the film realizing the power of mentorship,” he said. “You need to reach out and create those relationships to become the person that you want to be.”