Goldsholl, Millie (was created by)
Millie Goldsholl was born in 1920 and grew up in Freeport, New York on the south shores of Long Island. As a child she developed a love for pastoral life and art, creating elaborate chalk drawings of her family and grandparents' farm animals outside her family's home. Millie moved from the sidewalk to the easel when she entered high school. Here, encouraging art teachers inspired Millie to make a career out her passion for art. Millie moved to Chicago when she was sixteen with her sister and widowed mother. They moved in with Millie's brother, who had recently acquired a factory job and needed help around the house. After failing to enroll in art classes that required too many prerequisites, Millie joined her brother in the factory. Millie entered the design world through her husband, Mort, who invited Millie to enter the world of advertising alongside him. The two met at work, a paper box manufacturer where Millie did accounting and Mort designed packaging. Mort kept his day job as a freelance designer and encouraged Millie to enter the newly formed School of Design - the first school in Chicago to offer a design degree. Millie ultimately studied architecture, but the school's Bauhaus inspired environment encouraged her to experiment with different materials, mediums and machines. It is here where she was first introduced to filmmaking, and where she developed a life-long connection to Moholy-Nagy's vision of industry, art and design. In 1955, Millie and Mort established Goldsholl Design & Film Associates. Mort took responsibility for the design division, while Millie took charge of building a film division. Their Northfield, Illinois studio, design by Millie and built in 1960, reflected the flexibility and freedom of the Bauhaus tradition, combining traditional graphic design work alongside a filmmaking studio. Millie compared the studio to a beehive, noting that the proximity led to collaborations and experiments that wouldn’t have happened any other way. “We are involved here in every step of the film process, from idea to imagery,” Millie told Rhodes Patterson (interviewer, Container Corporation colleague & CFA Collection namesake) shortly after moving in, “and we find this maintains the integrity of the concept. Phonics can be manipulated with the same freedom as image. The auditory is mobilized to create mood. Images may be heard, and sound seen. It is not so much in the components of the film structure that its art resides, but rather in relationships, interaction and transitions that it assumes its significance. The pulse or rhythm of a film can produce tension, excitement and release,” she continued. “In editing, the filmmaker gives wings to the parts . . . cleaving them from their place in time and space . . . releasing them into a designer’s stratosphere––there to be juggled, taken, rejected, extended, clipped, superimposed and recomposed.” Filmmaking for the Goldsholls was a cerebral process that nevertheless thrived on serendipity. Millie once stated, "We’d rather make films that have guts than gimmicks – and we don’t equate gimmicks with honest experimentation and unorthodox techniques. Serendipity is something we are committed to." Millie died in May 2012, preceded by Mort in 1995.

Goldsholl, Morton (was created by)
Morton (Mort) Goldsholl was born in 1911 with the dream of becoming a great painter. “That dream dissolved in the nightmare of a depression and factory work for too many years,” he recalled. But he did manage to find work in the advertising industry, producing mat books, layouts, engravings and typeset.

At this time he also found Millie, his future wife, who shared his passion for design. That passion led them to the School of Design where Moholy-Nagy was preaching the doctrine of design awareness. His was the first school in Chicago to offer a design degree so while Mort kept his day job, Millie enrolled. But both gravitated to seminars and classes where Moholy-Nagy, himself an experimental filmmaker, invited friends like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí to show theirs. “Film is the art of the century,” he would say, and the Goldsholls set out to prove it.

In a 1992 interview, Mort spoke of a special project he spent months on. He would take a single film slide, slice away pieces of the film and replace it with hair, feathers, dirt and other objects to make abstract images that, when projected, turned into impressionistic collages. He called the process “light painting.” When he showed it to Maholy-Nagy, his mentor walked him around the school into every classroom announcing, “This is what design is about.”

In 1955, Mort and Millie established Goldsholl Associates, which consisted of three groups - Goldsholl Design Group, Goldsholl Film Group and Informational Media. Mort already had packaging and design clients, so he became titular head with responsibility for the design division, while Millie took charge of building a film division. By 1963, the company had grown to about 30 employees so the Goldsholls built a spare office building on frontage road in Northfield, filling it with a stage, sound and editing suites for the movies alongside the designers.

While at Goldsholl Design & Film Associates, Mort created iconic logos and packaging for Motorola, Vienna Beef, Peace Corps, Alcoa and Brach's Candy, just to name a few. When he was asked what he liked most about his company, Mort Goldsholl said, “I enjoy my work immensely, but seldom the results. The playtime in design is the most joyful experience––the wasted moments in scribbles, dribbles and scratches that formulate vague thoughts into ideas and dreams into action. I don’t know how or why this is so. The problem is to get the final design to match the fleeting idea. The big dreams about the great work of art can too easily be dissipated in the practicalities of solutions, clients, markets, statistics, sales, function and committee decisions."

The Goldsholls worked together for 40 years until the company closed down in the 1990s. Mort died in 1995.