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About the Filmmaker
Ivy Meeropol graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where she focused on creative writing. After five years of working as a speechwriter and legislative aide for a U.S. Congressman, she began writing for newspapers and magazines such as The Orlando Weekly, The New York Times, O, The Oprah Magazine, Paper, Elle, Premiere and Nest. She has also written for numerous websites and was the copywriter for ABC.COM. Meeropol was a contributor and fiction editor of Provincetown Arts Magazine.
The filmmaker is the author of the screenplays "The Suffer Club", "Edgewood", "Mature Pines, and with Mark Campbell" and the screen adaptation of Dawn "Powell's The Happy Island".
HEIR TO AN EXECUTION is a documentary focusing on the legacy of her grandparents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, is Meeropol's directorial debut. The film, which she co-produced with Daphne Pinkerson, Marc Levin and Sheila Nevins, was selected for the Documentary Competition of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival.
IVY'S STATEMENT
I grew up with the story of my grandparents, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and executed by the U.S. government in 1953. I knew that my father had been orphaned but that his parents had acted heroically in their resistance of the government. I knew that they were revered and reviled with equal conviction; that they were called both martyrs and traitors. It was simply a fact of my life, and it helped define who I am.
Long before I embarked on this film, I began to wonder who they really were and how this could have happened to our family? After I graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, I worked in politics as a legislative aide and speechwriter for a U.S. Congressman and later began working as a journalist while also writing screenplays and short stories.
It is from this vantage point that I started working on what would become Heir to An Execution. I wanted to create a work that told our family story and reflected the political and intellectual climate of the time. I was at first unclear on how to tell the story, toying with the idea of a fictional treatment, either in film or writing until I recognized two things that would become crucial to how the film looks today. One was that there were people still living that knew my grandparents, were close witnesses to the case or had lived parallel lives. This was a rich resource of actual subjects who could tell their own stories. The other element was the beautiful and disturbing archival footage that had so affected me as a child that is, in itself, an essential part of the story. I came to the conclusion that I did not want to fictionalize the story because it would create distance whereas the documentary form would allow me, as well as the audience, to get closer to the subject.
I started out wanting to explore the ways that The Rosenbergs exist as The Atom Spies, iconic figures and great villains in our culture, versus the way that the grandparents reside in my own life. It is from my particular point of view that I've sought to humanize them. Rescue them from the obscurity of fame. Take them out of the mythic realm and into the human world and know them a little more as people. Not monsters and not martyrs, but the parents of my own father, a young husband and wife, a homemaker who aspired to be an opera singer, an engineer who struggled to keep a small machine shop running.
This is a search for my grandparents, and an attempt to get closer to the human story and understand how it is possible to feel pride, fear, anger and sadness about two people I have never met. By exploring the complex reverberations the Rosenbergs' fate had on their own family and the culture at large, I hoped to tell their story in a uniquely illuminating way and in doing so, come to understand something of who they were. Consequently, I also hoped to show this part of our history to a new generation for whom the names Ethel and Julius Rosenberg mean nothing. And for those who recognize "those Atom Spies", this film would be an experience that challenges conventional wisdom and the very way that history is recorded. I hope the film reveals that it is in the gray areas that history resides, not in the black and white we’ve grown so accustomed to.
I began the film knowing that my father was to be a central figure. What I came to realize along the way was how my own interest in the story was as much a desire to know what happened to my grandparents as it was the need to know what had happened to my father. I decided that all of the "interviews" with my father (and subsequently the rest of my immediate family) had to be conducted with only the two of us present and that the filming had to create a sense of intimacy between us and between the viewer and the subject. I wanted the audience to feel as if they were privy to something very personal yet not as voyeurs. My father speaks directly to me and into the camera.
It was an important goal throughout the film, to have the audience come with me, to be involved both emotionally and intellectually in my journey. I was constantly trying to walk the line between professional interviewer and the granddaughter who the audience relates to. I had to be in it, and be seen reacting to situations yet it still couldn't be about me. This was something to grapple with throughout the entire process from shooting through the final edit.
By delving into the family story I hoped to show just how terrifying a time the McCarthy period was. I discovered for the first time in making the film that both Julius and Ethel had numerous siblings, which begged the question how did we end up Meeropols? For fear of retribution, none of them would take in my father and uncle and when I attempted to reach the children of these aunts and uncles, most made it clear that the trauma of that time was still alive for them. The Rosenbergs made their attorney, Manny Bloch, the legal guardian of my father and uncle and it was he who later placed them with Abel and Ann Meeropol, complete strangers to my other grandparents.
In making this film, I hoped to raise more questions than I could answer. Because there are no easy answers here, the film encourages us to accept ambiguity. Our family has had to do so for 50 years. Before they were immortalized by the strange machinations of history, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg belonged only to their families and friends. This film is an attempt to reclaim them as such and challenge the simplistic definition that's allowed them to go down in history as "The Atom Spies".
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