8/31/2023 0 Comments Artrage bob rossSteve says the Kowalskis did not attend his father’s funeral but exploited his cultural afterlife. “You could hear him screaming, ‘I’m not giving you my name’ … They literally wanted to steal Dad’s name, and did.” Steve says in the film: “It looked to me like they were trying to get Bob to sign his name over to them,” and claims this led to a furious argument. Steve alleges that, when his father was nearing death, the Kowalskis asked him to get Ross to sign a “memorial agreement”. More consequentially the Kowalskis, who declined to be interviewed, now control Bob Ross Inc, the company that oversees the lucrative use of Ross’s name and image on paints, brushes and other merchandise. In the film, Ross’s son, Steve, giving his first on-camera interview, says: “There was an affair between my father and Annette, yes.” (The Kowalskis deny this.) They helped build his brand but the relationship was messy. The source of their fears was a couple, Annette and Walter Kowalski, longtime business partners of Ross during the glory days of The Joy of Painting. More than a dozen people who knew Ross declined to be interviewed for the film. And so in that moment, I, like any documentary film-maker, knew that this was going to be something that I had to do and this was probably going to be more compelling than I even could have anticipated.” “This fear was murky initially, but it was they made it clear that it centred around some form of legal retaliation and there was a corporate entity that they wouldn’t name. One was everybody loved Bob and missed him dearly and then, two, they also let us know that there’s no way that they’re going to participate in a documentary about him because they’re afraid to speak about him on camera publicly. “I got two things back pretty much every time. Once Rofé and his team got to work tracking down potential interviewees, however, it was clear even this project would not be straightforward – less warm bath than shark attack. The couple had originally conceived a biopic but, with information about his life sketchy, switched focus to a documentary. Rofé had been mulling a film idea about American artists and their relationship with American history when he was brought in by Melissa McCarthy and husband, Ben Falcone, both actors, writers, producers – and enthusiastic fans of Ross. He becomes an iconic figure, I would say, at a level that he hadn’t even reached previously.” Rofé adds: “If you fast-forward to around 2015, we’ve got the advent of streaming platforms and all of these apps and technology and now a whole new generation is discovering Bob Ross for the first time. Now the artist is enjoying a posthumous second act as pop culture figure on the internet. “It was chaotic, a lot of yelling, a lot of fighting and their home life was rough, but when they got home from school and they could watch Bob Ross for 30 minutes they were completely detached from the angst that permeated the house. He recalls speaking to one person who found Ross’s show a refuge from arguing parents headed for divorce. Ross was an “incredibly skilled artist” whose work elicits “a cosy winter feeling”, says the director. ![]() ![]() There was no Netflix and so to see Bob Ross was to tune into his show when it was programmed to be on television and he had a huge following. Rofé, 38, says: “It was right size for the era. We just have happy accidents.” It was comfort television, like soaking in a warm bath, in the days when appointment television ruled. His words of whimsy included, “Every day is a good day when you paint,” and “We don’t make mistakes. With permed hair and balmy voice, he hosted The Joy of Painting on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) from 1983 to 1994. Indeed, the documentary starts as conventional biography, telling how Ross served in the air force for 20 years, learned a wet-on-wet painting technique from a close friend and became best known for producing tranquil nature scenes featuring “happy little trees”. “I just wanted to make a film that would represent this individual who is in many ways a mystery and yet completely beloved by so many.” “In no way did I set out to make a film that was a ‘gotcha!’ film,” Rofé says via Zoom from New York. This is the surprise twist in Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed, a Netflix film about the landscape artist who created more than 30,000 paintings and touched millions of lives before his death from lymphoma in 1995 at the age of 52.
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