Chicago filmmaker Scott Goldstein grew up visiting his grandparents’ home on the Tamarisk Country Club golf course in Rancho Mirage, Calif., beneath the stunning San Jacinto mountains and across the fairway from an architectural marvel, Richard Neutra’s Maslon House.
“The view from my grandparents’ yard was just insane,” Goldstein says of the home Neutra built for art collectors Samuel and Luella Maslon in 1962. The house, with its flat roof overhang, floor-to-ceiling windows and long hallways for displaying the Maslons’ collection of Warhols and Giacomettis, was a quintessential example of the midcentury modern design that was coming to define the desert. It was, in the eyes of many architecture scholars, a masterpiece.
“And then one day there was just this sort of empty hole,” Goldstein says.
In 2002, after both Maslons died, a new owner bought and quickly demolished the house, sparking an international outcry and becoming the catalyst for a robust preservation movement today. On Feb. 19, in the middle of Palm Springs Modernism Week, Goldstein will premiere a short film he directed about the lost masterpiece, Preservation Mirage Presents Richard Neutra’s Maslon House, at the Palm Springs Art Museum.
“We were like, how do you get people to care about this house?” says Goldstein, who made the film with his brother-in-law and business partner at their Chicago-based production company, Streeterville Productions, Dave Yakir. “And we kept talking about the Goodfellas opening—we have to show people that there was a murder so that they’ll invest their time learning the backstory.”
Using home movies and archival photographs, and including interviews with Neutra scholars, community members and the Maslons’ granddaughter, Hilary, the film tells the story of the collaboration between the Vienna-born architect, who helped define modernism in California and the Maslon family.
Goldstein, who has directed at Chicago’s Second City and Improv Olympic theaters, self-financed the $25,000 movie with Yakir, who works as a creative director at a tech company, and who edited the film and did much of the cinematography.
The impetus for the movie came when Hilary Maslon gave the family’s home movies of the house to Preservation Mirage. Goldstein, who sits on the Preservation Mirage board, saw an opportunity and made a pitch to the board to turn them into a film. “I thought, this is sort of the Rosetta Stone of preservation in the desert,” Goldstein says. “But this is relatable to anybody in any neighborhood where there’s an important piece of architecture. It doesn’t have to be fancy, it could be anything. So why not make a film? Let’s get the story and try to tell it right for posterity.”
After the Maslon House demolition, an informal group of mid-century homeowners began meeting to exchange ideas and organize, ultimately formalizing Preservation Mirage as an official nonprofit in 2017.
Goldstein sees the potential for more storytelling around homes like the Maslons’. “There’s a moment happening where people are really appreciating this type of architecture,” he says. “I think there’s 20 years of stories here, minimum, maybe more.”
One issue the film doesn’t tackle is why the buyer who demolished the house in 2002 did it. At the time, Goldstein points out, “It was not a crime what they did. So you can’t be like, ‘Oh, you broke a law.’ There was no law.”
Goldstein said he prefers not to comment on the house that replaced the Maslon home, noting, “My grandmother started growing a hedge.”
Comments