The Co-Creator of Grey Gardens on Little Edie Beale and the Scene That Was Cut

Over the two years Muffie Meyer worked on the documentary Grey Gardens, she had no clue that it would go on to be such a cultural icon. The 1975 film, which followed aristocratic Big Edie and Little Edie Beale, living together in near-poverty in posh East Hampton, New York, has been selected for the National Film Registry and has been named to lists of best documentaries. A Broadway musical and a feature film have been based on the original documentary.

But Meyer, speaking at a NextTribe virtual event earlier this month, thinks it could possibly have been even better. As one of the editors of the film (also credited as a co-director), Meyer shaped the narrative, which tries to answer the question of why the never-married Little Edie Beale—Jacqueline Bouvier's cousin and once a glamorous, sought-after debutante—ended up living almost as a recluse with her mother. Right before the film's release, the directors, Albert and David Maysles, decided to cut a scene that Meyer and her co-editor desperately wanted to leave in.