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Marianne Heider discusses her involvement in the Vivian Project, centered around street photographer Vivian Meyer. Vivian took over 150,000 photos but didn't develop many due to cost. After her death, her work went viral, leading to global exhibitions. George, a friend of Marianne's, became interested in Vivian's story and envisioned a musical based on her life. He collaborated with Marianne's husband, Matt Heider, to create the music for the show. Okay, well, I have here Marianne Heider, and we are going to talk a little bit about Vivian and the Vivian Project. So, Marianne, welcome. Hello. Thank you for having me. Yes. Why don't you tell us a little bit about just who you are. Well, my name is Marianne Heider, and I have been working on or helping to work on the Vivian Project since January of about 2024. And we'll get into all the details. I'm retired. My working life was spent as a librarian and a library manager for the Chapman Branch Library in Salt Lake City. But throughout my life, I've been involved with various theater projects together with George and my husband, Matt Heider. And we'll get into that as we move along. So that's basically who I am at the moment. Very good. Very good. That was a great explanation. So tell us, who is Vivian Meyer? Vivian Meyer was a street photographer. And for those who don't know what street photography is, it's someone who takes a slice of life photos of people and places. They're not landscape photographers like, say, Ansel Adams, but they like to go out on the streets and just take photos of everyday people doing everyday things. And these people can be from all walks of life. The places can be grand places, or they can be poverty-ridden places, or they can be just average streets of any town USA. So that's what a street photographer does. And did she do this all of her life, or was it just a certain part of her life? It was part of her life. I'll give you a little bit of her background. She was born in New York City in 1926. Her mother was French, and her father was Austrian. Her mother came directly from France. Her father, Charles Meyer, he's kind of an enigma. We're not sure if he immigrated or if he was second or third generation Austrian. But at any rate, they met and married in the early 20s. When Vivian was very young, she was, oh, let's see, about four years old, her father left the family and just took off. And it's probably because of the Great Depression. The stock market crashed in 1929, and he left in 1930. So he's probably wandering around looking for work. They weren't very well off at all. So anyway, about this time, Vivian's mom befriended a woman named Jeanne Bertrand. And this is very important because Jeanne Bertrand was a very successful photographer who was part of the French community. And Vivian's mom got to know her. And Jeanne Bertrand was a very good friend of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and she was the founder of the Whitney Museum of Art. So when Vivian was four, the family all moved together, Bertrand and Vivian's mom, Vivian, Vivian's brother. And so at this young age, Vivian was exposed to a lot of photography because that's what Bertrand did. And so she was probably taken to a number of exhibits and got to know camera equipment because it was probably laying around the house where they lived. And so I think this Jeanne Bertrand person was influential in developing the young Vivian, but she wouldn't get involved with photography for a number of years. And then Vivian, she moved back and forth from New York to France, back and forth. Her mother still had family in a small little village in France. And anyway, people often commented on Vivian's accent. It was sort of French, it was sort of European, and it was sort of New York. So she had a very interesting voice. Eventually, Vivian, in her 20s, she settled in Chicago and became a nanny. And oddly enough, in the 70s, she was the nanny to Phil Bonahue's kids and worked at Phil Bonahue's house. Oh, that's interesting. At any rate, in the 50s and 60s, she was a standard nanny and helped with young children in the Chicago area. And in her free time, she started to just start taking photographs. I think her love for photography sort of reemerged, and she remembered her time as a child. And so she started wandering around Chicago just taking photographs of anything and everything. The most interesting thing about Vivian is during the course of her lifetime and her interest in photography, she took over 150,000 photographs. A huge amount. What did she do with all of them? With all of those photographs, a lot of them she developed, but it was costly to develop photographs the way she wanted them developed. So a lot of them were never developed. She just kept them, rolls of film and negatives and so on, and she put them in boxes and just kept them in boxes. She was kind of also a hoarder. She not only hoarded her photographs and her negatives, but she also hoarded newspapers and all sorts of things. And she also recorded conversations with people. She was interested in quite a number of things. And whenever she moved to help with a new family, all of her stuff went with her, and there were up to like 200 boxes of stuff that she hauled around with her wherever she went, until finally her employer said, you know, we can't keep 200 boxes of stuff in the house. So she moved them to a storage unit and just kept them there for a number of years. But when she was older, when she got old and enfeebled, she didn't have a lot of money, and so she couldn't pay the rent on the storage unit where she kept all of this stuff. And so finally the owners of the storage unit put the contents of the unit up for sale, as they do all the time. They still, of course, do this when people don't pay their rent on their units. And so her photographs were found, these piles of photographs, and then the people that found them started to become extremely interested in her work because the quality of the photographs was so great. Sometimes she would only take one photograph of something. She wouldn't take multiple photographs of images that she was interested in. She just had this incredible artistic eye for composition and light and shadow and all the things that go into making a good photograph a good photograph. And so Vivian died in 2009 in April, and the people who had found her photographs started putting the photographs online in October after her death. And, of course, all of this went viral. The story of her life started to come about, and people started to learn about her and this incredible body of work. And that's what makes her really a unique individual. I was just going to say, I think it's interesting that she was self-taught primarily, and she didn't really have an idea of what she was going to do with all those photographs. She was just doing it, it sounds like, for her own enjoyment. It really was. I think she liked to live life vicariously through all the experiences and emotions of things that she was capturing on film. And that's how she sort of absorbed life was through all of this observation of humanity and the taking of the photographs. That's great. So have people seen Vivian's work, and where would they have seen it? Oh, gosh. After all of this came out, she was just sort of a sensation. And since then, her photographs have been exhibited all over the world. I mean, I can give you a partial list, but truly it's all over the world. She's done UK, Berlin, Paris, Portugal, Sweden, Brazil, Taiwan, Netherlands, Argentina, Canada, Finland, Milan, France. So you kind of get this idea. And, of course, all over the United States. I believe there was another exhibit just last year in New York. Yeah, she's been seen everywhere. I wish we could have an exhibit here. That would be great. Right, here in Utah. So is it anywhere, her work, is it anywhere permanent, or is it just sort of an exhibit that roams around? I believe it's, I think, I can't say for sure, but I do believe that there is a permanent exhibit space, but I couldn't tell you offhand where it is. I'm guessing that it would probably be in Chicago, which is where she lived most of her life. Okay, interesting. Okay, so how did George become acquainted with Vivian? So just a little bit of background for those who are listening, George was with Los Angeles Theatre Company for a long time and also had been friends with you and Matt for many years, and you had done Starry-Eyed Puppets together, and then George passed away in 2023, and we miss him greatly. But, you know, it seems sort of random that he would have become acquainted with Vivian. How did that happen? Well, I think when all of this stuff went viral in her, she was all over the Internet, news stations and everything. Back in 2009, I think he became interested in her way back then. However, he was very involved with his life at the time. Life was very demanding. He worked full-time as the director of the English Language Institute at the U of U, and he was also heavily involved, as you know, Jim, with the Wasatch Theatre Productions. And then all of a sudden he decided to move to China to teach theater in Nanjing to high schoolers who were planning to study in the States. That was back in 2015, and I think while he was there, he had enough time when he wasn't teaching to start really thinking about a potential play based on Vivian's life. And that was in China, and I think he started to kind of work out notes and started mapping out the story and what he wanted to do. And he envisioned it as a musical because George loved musicals. Oh, my gosh. They were his favorite genre. For instance, he idolized the work of Stephen Sondheim. He relentlessly studied lyric writing and read extensively about the classical musical theater teams like Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe and others. I think he started to think that this would be his magnum opus, this musical about Vivian Meyer's life and her influence on others. So I think it started in China, and then it came back in late 2018 to Salt Lake City, and I think when it came back in 2019, he approached my husband, Matt Heider, who is a musician and composer, and asked if he wanted to be involved in creating the music for the lyrics he had started to write for the show. And they worked together. As you said, we were part of the Starry-Eyed Puppet team, and they had always worked together on music and lyrics and scores and everything for those shows. And so Matt said, sure, let's give it a try. And then, of course, there was COVID. We sort of screeched to a halt for almost two years. And then work started again late 2021. They got together and started to work again on the music, the lyrics. That was his primary focus at the time because that's the most complicated part, of course, is the music and lyrics. And he wanted to get those as close to what he thought was perfection as possible. And the actual script evolved mostly as kind of a rough draft, a map, as it were, of what he wanted to see done with the actual script. And then, sadly, George was diagnosed with cancer in the fall of 22. So there really wasn't a lot of time to work on this. And then he died in March 2023. So the script itself, you could tell he just wanted to get the framework done before he passed. I believe he knew he was going to pass. He knew how ill he was. And he just wanted to get it out there, as it were. So the script was mostly a narrative form and kind of needed a lot of editing and work on character development and plot points and, of course, staging, which he just didn't have time to think all of that through before he passed. But he did. I think the lyrics are spot on for what he wanted to accomplish. And what state was the script in when you got it? So you said it was sort of a narrative form. A lot of the lyrics were done. But what was it like when you got it? When I got it, I was approached by the Pfautz family about the project. And I volunteered since I've known George for so many years. And we've worked together on so many scripts in the past together. And you have some background in playwriting as well. Yes, yes. So I said I will volunteer to edit the script. And at first I thought it was just going to be a standard edit, you know, making the lines chew so that they sounded like they were from individual characters, not just the author's voice speaking every line. So I did that. But the more I looked at it, the more I felt like we need to make other changes, slight but necessary. And they were changes that needed to be done with character development and adding and taking away certain aspects of the show. And it's nothing I feel like George wouldn't have done. If he had lived, if he were alive right now, I believe he would have taken a similar course and done the same sort of things. Yeah. Right. It's like you said, he didn't have time to sort of shape it the way that he really wanted to, but he was trying to get just the structure in place, which allows you to be able to do so much of the work that he did. Yeah, that's basically it. Yeah. Okay. Well, is this piece now that it's – so you've worked it through and you've had it in many drafts, forms, and it was performed to a certain extent earlier in 2025. Talk about that process. Well, the Prouts family and a sort of other people that forms what we call the production team really got going in earnest in about January of 2024. We met monthly. We talked about what was necessary to move toward production and the development of the script and what was necessary there. The process kept moving on and moving on until we had several versions of the show. Finally, we were able – let's see, I believe it was in – yes, it was in early fall of 2024 that we had a reading at the Prouts residence with actors so that I could hear the show and how it sounded like. The sound of the show was very important, the chewing of the lines, where they spoke by individual characters, all of that process. And so after that – and then I got feedback from the actors who participated in that. After that, we decided, okay, well, let's move towards an actual stage reading at the Wasatch Theater Company, you know, sponsored by you folks, with exemplary bits of music, not full music, but little exemplary items of music. We aimed toward that. We worked toward that. There was another revision of the script. I believe last April 2025 is when we had the stage reading down at the Eccles. So it was quite a process to get there. We had wonderful actors throughout that supported the whole project. We had wonderful music director Stephanie Sabin. She was great in directing the stage reading. And so we just invited people to come and have a look at this, and they were just like what Vivian took pictures of, people from all walks of life that came in and saw the free production that was put out. And then they, in turn, offered their opinions and suggestions for the script, how it could be further developed. And then from that, I took all of that information. We had a nice discussion after the show with audience members. And I took all of that information and sort of put it in the sorting hat, as it were. Can you give us an example of anything that might have shifted a little bit from that reading at the Eccles to the script that we have now that we're going to be producing? I think the thing that impressed me most was that the character of Vivian actually had to be developed a little bit more than was – there wasn't too much about her background, and I thought that needed to be brought out so that people would fully understand who this person was and why she was doing it. The staging was also important to me. There wasn't much staging, and I thought that needed to be worked on. And there were a couple of characters that were superfluous and didn't really work. George didn't have enough time to develop them, so I just wrote them off. But, yeah, those kinds of things, just to tighten the script to make it more entertaining for an audience, more manageable, and more understandable. I think as a playwright, you get so involved with a piece that sometimes you don't step back and go, well, is an audience going to understand this part? Are they going to understand what's happening, and why is this happening in the first place? So all of those questions, I think, have been resolved to the extent of resolving them without absolutely completely rewriting the show, and then it wouldn't be George's show. And the whole point is to honor George's original vision and keep it as close to what he wanted as possible. So in this piece, it doesn't sound like it is, but is it a biography of Vivian's life, or is there something more? There's something more. You will understand who Vivian Meyer is or was during the play through excerpts of her life. But really what this show is about is how artists and their art impact others so that they can, in turn, find their own way of creating their own, or their own way of getting on their own creative path. The story of her influence to a young woman who is finding herself through art, and in this case, obviously, photography, and how that art influences the young woman in her life and her creative work. So that really is the rest of the show, but you will understand who Vivian Meyer was along with that sort of arc there. And I find that so appropriate because George inspired so many people through his own art, and so this is kind of a story about mentoring, in a way. Exactly, exactly. I'm glad you brought that up. That was George's whole philosophy of life, as bringing out the most creative aspects of any person that he came in contact with. And it didn't matter if that person wanted to be an engineer. George always encouraged them to be the best engineer you could possibly be. It didn't matter if he wanted to be an actor or a writer. Anybody in the performing arts, George was excellent at saying, you can do this. I know you can do this, and I will help you get there. It was his whole philosophy and thrust of life. That's what he was all about. He was really selfless in that way, absolutely. Yes. So why is Vivian an important figure for people to know? Well, I would say she's just a fascinating, enigmatic artist, as many fascinating and enigmatic artists are. She forged her own path during the 50s, 60s, and 70s when women's roles were very prescribed and very constricted. She loved kids, but she didn't have any of her own. She was very solitary. She liked her private time. She never married. She was never involved in any partnerships that we know of. She lived almost entirely through what she created, through the images that she created. I think she was like sort of a, I don't know, she just sort of siphoned the lives and emotions and experience of all the thousands of people she took pictures of. I think she just sort of took that into her whole being, and then I think she lived all of their lives sort of vicariously. She took the whole big jumble, the whole big puzzle piece, and made that her own. That was her life, but that's what she loved to do. Do you have any recommendations? I know George used some resource material, things that people could look into if they wanted to learn more about Vivian and her life. You can get online and just Google her, and there's a huge amount of biographical information and beautiful photography books with examples of all of her photography. One of the things that I watched that I really enjoyed was a documentary film that was called Finding Vivian Meyer. It's probably available to stream, or you can get it at your local library. That's where I got it, and it initially premiered at the Sundance Film Festival years ago. It's really an excellent look at her life, and I believe it was nominated for Best Documentary at the Academy Awards. That's a really good thing to watch, Finding Vivian Meyer. Then again, there are numerous, numerous books. I mean, she's got lots of them now. Okay, well, people can check them out then. Well, thank you so much for talking. We're going to do several episodes devoted to the Vivian Project and the creation of this musical. Auditions are actually happening in January. Then the show opens April 3rd at the Regent Street Black Box at the Echols in downtown Salt Lake. Anyway, thank you for joining us and for talking about your experience with this. Yeah, it's been great chatting with you. Oh, it's been wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. It's just been an honor to be part of this whole project. The team of which you are included has just been phenomenal and supportive through the whole thing. It's going to be a great show. Thank you, Vivian. It's been kind of a 10-year journey, actually, from when you started on it. Yes, indeed. All right, well, thank you, Marianne. Thank you.