From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. What do you say about someone, well, not like, but Varian Meyer, a series of

contradictions, a woman who died with thousands of dollars and uncasted checks, yet

she lived like a homeless person, a woman who surrounded herself by family, but yet had no

family of her own, a woman who lived in public, basically hid in plain sight, but hid an

incredible, valuable collection of art that she shot herself

as a street photographer. The film about her, the terrific documentary is finding Vivian Meyer.

Its directors, John Maloof and Charlie Siskel are here with me. Guys, thanks for being here.

John, I'm going to start with you because it felt like you, in some ways, sort of felt like Vivian

was kind of a kind of a kind of spirit. I mean, she's kind of

searched for things, and that's how you kind of got your start in searching for art too in

really unlikely places. Yeah. She, you know, discovering her work inspired me to completely change my course in life which was you know i got into photography

because of her work and it was a camera with you right now yeah and you're often carrying a camera

in the movie we get to see my camera never is without I should say, I'm not without my camera ever.

I like that locution better. The camera is never without you. It's a much closer connection.

It's my child. But one of the things I thought was, and I was saying this to Charlie before we started,

is that as I was watching the movie and it's on Toronto last fall,

what I thought was all those news pieces that came out about her and there was never really any

information. It was kind of the same story over and over and over again. And as the movies was

getting going, I realized I was kind of hungry for more about her than getting the same two or three nuggets that sort of felt like a story.

Oh, good.

You know, that's one thing I was worried about when, you know, the news, you know, just snowballed.

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