Produced by Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey (there is no director credit), documentary "Eames: The Architect and the Painter" examines Charles and Ray Eames, one of the 20th century's most enduring and influential couples in industrial design. They were eccentric, too: In the film, a colleague of the Eames' talks about how he was invited for dinner and was confused to discover that the after a light meal, dessert was "visual" — meaning inedible ornamental flowers.
Charles was an architect-school dropout and Ray (born Bernice Kaiser) an unsuccessful painter when they met in the late 1930s. Charles ditched his wife and child in 1941 to embark on a creative/connubial partnership with Ray, whom he saw as the one woman who got what he was trying to do. (She drew the blueprints for what would become the classic Eames chair with dire results, but they soon rectified that.)
The couple hurled themselves into their work, guided by Charles' mantra of "the best for the most for the least." They believed design should be for the masses at affordable prices, and this belief played a part in defining the postwar lifestyle of the American middle-class. Now, of course, the Eames chair and the plywood coffee table are coveted items among design aficionados. I know no fewer than three men whose killer pickup line goes something like: "I have an Eames chair at home if you'd care to stop by."