Interview with Todd Haynes

Distillation of three phone interviews conducted by the author on November 3 and 22, 2011, and April 17, 2012.ROB WHITE:What is your family background?TODD HAYNES:My mom, Sherry Lynne Haynes, came from a middle-class Jewish family in Los Angeles. Her father, Arnold Semler, whom I called Bompi, and mother, Blessing, whom I called Monna, were a very supportive aspect of my upbringing. Bompi had worked in Warner Bros., starting as a messenger boy, becoming head of set construction. He was a union organizer and was close to many of the blacklisted figures in midcentury Hollywood. He left the studio in the later 1940s and set up a private business with his brother, making radio-communications devices for the military. He became very successful in the 1950s and ’60s. Monna studied harp and piano, and then when she was about fifty started painting in an abstract expressionist style. She was very progressive, went into psychoanalysis in the 1950s, and ...