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A film by Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey

“The Eames Era” began in the optimistic flush of American victory during World War II, and the global impact of the Eames aesthetic continues to
grow unabated today. Now, this film takes the viewer on a cinematic foray into the private world of the Renaissance-style studio that Charles and Ray Eames conceived in a cavernous warehouse on a gritty street in Venice Beach, California where design history was born. Narrated by James Franco, it is the first film to be made about Charles and Ray since their deaths – and the only one that peers deeply inside the link between their artistic collaboration and sometimes tortured love for one another.

Eames: The Architect and the Painter draws extensively from a virgin cache of archival material, visually stunning films, love letters, photographs and artifacts produced in mindboggling volume by Charles and Ray with their talented staff during the hyper-creative forty-year epoch of the Eames Office. Interviews with family members, including Charles’ grandson Eames Demetrios, and design historians guide the viewer on an intimate tour of the Eames era, while junior designers who were swept into the 24-7 world of “The Eamery,” as they called it, flesh out a fascinatingly complex blueprint of this husband-and-wife powerhouse.

- DVD
- 84 minutes
- Color
- 2011