Architect of her own reality

Britni Harris helms ambitious Bruce Goff doc

Tulsa filmmaker Britni Harris would be the first to say she doesn’t know how to tell her own story. 

“I hate talking about myself,” she tells me over drinks at Cellar Dweller. “I just feel like I’ve always been the listener, never the teller.”

But she has an idea of how to tell Bruce Goff’s story. Harris, 23, has been working on a documentary about the famed Oklahoma architect for several years.

“I don’t think there is an exact correct way to tell someone’s story. It’s almost impossible to tell a man’s life in an hour to two hours. I like documentaries that hold a mirror to the audience, where they can see themselves, think about who they are as people, how they lead their lives.” 

A self-described “fairy-child” brought up in the hot, thrumming backwoods of Oklahoma, Harris has long been the architect of her own reality. “Growing up in the middle of nowhere, you have to create the world around you.”

After a recent gallery opening for her uncle, visual artist R.C. Morrison, the young filmmaker’s family praised Harris’s talent—a talent that rests comfortably in a family full of artists. 

“It wellsprings back to our great-grandmother,” her cousin J.P. Morrison, also a visual artist, explained. “And our grandmother had a degree in interior design… and became passionate about fine arts after her kids left the nest.”

Harris’s mother is a teacher and graphic designer, and her father acts in local theatre productions in his spare time. A childhood among artists seems novel, especially for those raised in Oklahoma, but, for Harris, it was commonplace.

“Art has always just been a part of who I am,” Harris told me. “I've never known anything else than to have strong female artists in my family.”

As a teenager, Harris attended a film camp for two summers in Virginia, but she didn’t find her niche until she worked with documentary filmmaker Ben Steinbauer (“Winnebago Man”). Under his mentorship, she found her place, both as someone who values listening over speaking, but also as someone who didn’t feel comfortable enough in her own voice to tell her own stories.

“I remember there was a switch in my mind when I was working with Ben—I was just logging footage—where I realized I could do this. I could tell other people’s stories. I’m not the strongest writer out there… but I believe in other people’s stories and the impact they can have.”

While attending the University of Oklahoma, Harris applied for an internship with PBS in New York City. 

“We held an interview over the phone—I was in my pajamas—They said, ‘oh, but you’re from Oklahoma, do you really think you could live in the city?’ I was like, ‘Here’s the deal, I am driven, and I was born to do bigger and better things than the stereotype you’re making me out to be.’ Then I told them that they needed to hire me.” 

And they did.

Her final year at OU, Harris found a compelling documentary subject in architect Bruce Goff—himself an Oklahoma artist largely forgotten by all but a handful of rapidly aging architecture aficionados.  She was immediately drawn to his story after discovering his famous Bavinger House—designed to look like a DNA helix—in Norman.

“It was this really weird spiral building in west Norman… It sung to me,” Harris remembers. “It was weird, it was different, it wasn’t anything Oklahoman at all. I was curious as to who the hell did this. It was a legacy that had been tormented and forgotten.”

When I asked what compelled her to learn more about Goff, she fell mute for a moment. 

“You know…no one’s ever asked me that before,” she answers after a considered pause. “He was interesting to me because he was an expansive creative in a hindering environment. He couldn’t grow or share as much as he wanted. … In a way, I feel like it parallels with my life, being an Oklahoma filmmaker.”

Goff was known for his flamboyant designs, but he was also known for tailoring each design to a specific environment, to a specific client. He was both high-flying dreamer and hard-nosed realist.

Harris presents her own collection of contradictions. She is young but old-souled, green but wise, comfortable in her own voice while still beating back the caterwauling of her own self-doubt. 

Goff was a complex figure, almost as well-known for his alleged proclivity for underage boys as he is for his contributions to the American architectural canon. Harris visibly bristles when I broach the subject.

“I don’t think I’ve learned enough about Goff to form a concrete position as to whether or not he was destructive,” she retorts. “I learned that no one’s perfect, all of us make bad decisions. It doesn’t matter what you do, but how the art you do impacts other people.” 

In 2014, after she graduated from college, Harris shelved her Goff project and was swooped up by the local film industry. She began working full-time as a production assistant on the Food Network show “The Pioneer Woman.”

Harris outgrew the position and went on to work for an advertising agency in Tulsa, but, before long, she outgrew that position too. All the while, she was gaining experience as a freelancer and working with other filmmakers in the scene.

Oklahoma filmmaker Shane Brown was particularly encouraging. 

“I remember talking to Shane, who I’d admired for so long,” Harris remembers. “Talking to him about the doc, and he was like ‘yeah if you need any help let me know,’ and I just didn’t really take him seriously… It wasn’t until he was like, ‘no, let’s fucking make this happen,’ that I was like oh, my God, someone else besides myself believes in this project and believes in me. ” 

Heartened by Brown’s encouragement, Harris dove back into the project with a renewed vigor, researching and conducting interviews, often with no supporting crew.

This summer, her efforts culminated in a ten-day road trip to the West Coast, full of back-to-back interviews with Goff homeowners as well as some of his former students and colleagues. She hired a skeleton crew of Oklahoma filmmakers and artists: Shane Brown, Royce Sharp, Zack Gilpin, Scott Bell and Kaitlyn Owen.

In a white 15-passenger van, the crew of six careened from Kansas City to Colorado to Albuquerque, shacking up in roadside motels for a few hours each night before hitting the road again, back on the beat. They traversed the desert to emerge weather-beaten and sun-stroked in California, then ticked up the West Coast to spend one final night in Yosemite before high-tailing it back to their welcoming, humid Oklahoma.  

“Honestly, that road trip gave me my voice as a filmmaker,” she says. “Before that, I was very nervous to power through the story and really take a hold of it. But once we took the road trip, it was on my shoulders to keep us going and keep driving.”

“Once we were there, at the end of it, I really felt like I had become a filmmaker with a voice and a story.”

Who is Bruce Goff?

Bruce Alonzo Goff (1904 – 1982) was a mid-century American architect, best known for his eccentric designs that flew in the face of conventional architecture. 

At age 12, he became an intern for an architectural firm in Tulsa, OK, eventually becoming a partner in the firm in 1930. Around this time, Goff and his high school art teacher Adah Robinson designed Tulsa’s Boston Avenue Methodist church.

In 1942, Goff accepted a teaching position at the University of Oklahoma’s School of Architecture.  He proved to be a very popular professor—architectural students from across the country flocked to Norman with the hope of studying under him. This would prove to be his most professionally prolific period as well. 

In 1955, Goff was forced to resign from his position at the University of Oklahoma after being accused of “endangering the morals of a minor,” though many historians believe he was actually forced from his position because of his homosexuality.

Following his break with the University of Oklahoma, Goff went on to build more flamboyant, singularly exuberant structures in Oklahoma and beyond, including the Pavilion for Japanese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 

Though well regarded in his time by Frank Lloyd Wright and cited as an influence by both Frank Gehry and Philip Johnson, Goff never attained the same level of canonization in the architectural world. 

Goff passed away on August 4, 1982. One of his former students, Grant Gustafson, designed his headstone. 

For more from Claire, read her article on Hollywood screenwriter and native Tulsan Meaghan Oppenheimer.