Brandt Johnson and Ellen Jovin are cofounders of Syntaxis, a communication skills training firm based in New York City. Ellen, an internationally acclaimed grammar and language expert, is the itinerant grammarian behind the Grammar Table, an informal pop-up advice stand that she launched in 2018 in Manhattan and has since taken to every state in the US. Brandt is the director of the new documentary film Rebel with a Clause. Before this project, he wrote and produced several plays and was the writer, director, and star of Brad Advice, a comedy web series.
Rebel with a Clause follows the adventures of Ellen’s Grammar Table and will have its New York City premiere on March 4 at the SVA Theatre in Manhattan. A book with the same title was published in 2022. The film is the subject of this exclusive interview with Shop Talk editor Russell Harper.
Russell: Thank you, Ellen and Brandt, for making a pit stop to talk about this new documentary. Ellen, when CMOS interviewed you in 2022 about your book—which is also called Rebel with a Clause—the film was in postproduction. Or is it a movie?
Ellen: We are glad to be here, Russell—thank you. Either “film” or “movie” is fine. But the film is all Brandt’s doing; I stuck to conjugating things.
Brandt: It’s great to talk to you again, Russell! You can also call it a docu-comedy. It is, above all, meant to entertain.
Russell: Great to talk to both of you again—and to get an opportunity to learn more about your docu-comedy film/movie, which takes us on the road with the Grammar Table. You’ve now been to all fifty states with your grammar advice stand. Do you ever get tired, Ellen, of talking to strangers about grammar?
Ellen: Never. I’d already been talking about grammar for decades when the Grammar Table came into being. I will talk about grammar anytime, anywhere. I guess one thing I might get slightly tired of is people monologuing to me about how no one cares about grammar while I am literally sitting at a grammar advice stand that thousands of people have come up to of their own free will.
Russell: What about you, Brandt? Are you a grammar person also, or is that all Ellen?
Brandt: Ellen put me in the index [to her Grammar Table book] under apostrophes. That’s all I’m going to say.
Ellen: Yeah! The entry is “apostrophes, husband who knows how to use.” Brandt is totally grammarous. He even won the English award in his high school. He is also the one who more than thirty years ago taught me that not everyone pronounces “stalk” and “stock” the same way, which was total news to me. I didn’t believe him and had to go look it up.
Russell: I’ll remember that the next time I need celery stalks for my soup stock. So, which came first, the movie or the book? And did you have an idea of either one the first time you walked out the door and set up the Grammar Table?
Ellen: Absolutely not. I was in search of hedonistic grammar fun. I wanted to spend less time on the computer talking about grammar and more time in the open air talking about grammar. Even though I’d been trying to think of a good angle for a grammar book, for some reason the table didn’t occur to me as a book topic. It wasn’t until table visitors started saying “You should write a book about this!” that it bonked me in the head.
Brandt: When Ellen started out with the Grammar Table, I definitely wasn’t thinking of a movie. But after many hours observing what was happening at the table, just outside our building in New York, I really wanted to share it with a larger audience. I began filming less than three months after the start of the Grammar Table.
Ellen: And then I actually put Brandt’s plan to make a movie in my book proposal.
Russell: How did you pick the locations for the Grammar Table?
Ellen: In New York there are good locations everywhere. Above all, the Grammar Table needs foot traffic. The express subway stop at 72nd and Broadway was perfect, so that’s where I usually went at the beginning.
Brandt: Outside New York, we had to work harder to find pedestrians.
Ellen: The first task was to pick cities. Sometimes weather determined the city. For example, in Ohio we were planning to go to Cleveland, but it was raining, so we went to Toledo instead.
Brandt: In cities we didn’t know, we’d sometimes expect a spot was going to be just right for filming and then arrive and discover it wasn’t great after all. And we were also expelled from a few places. So then I’d maybe have to go off and look for another spot while Ellen stayed with the equipment, table, grammar books, and so on.
Ellen: Preferably in a nice café with excellent cappuccino.
Russell: Once you were set up and ready to film, did the presence of cameras—not to mention of Brandt himself (you played basketball against the Harlem Globetrotters, and you’re about six and a half feet tall, right?)—make it harder to get people to engage and be themselves?
Brandt: I think I look very friendly.
Ellen: Usually that’s true.
Brandt: And I don’t think people minded the camera, or me, very much. The volume of visitors didn’t change after I started filming. It stayed just as high. I had been worried about that—that having cameras would scare people off or alter the conversations—but mostly people seemed just as happy to talk about grammar with cameras as without.
Ellen: Yeah, and you might even have given me an air of professional legitimacy. I looked official with cameras around.
Russell: You’re certainly both Grammar Table pros by now. By the way, thank you for sharing a preview of your movie with me. The book may have the advantage when it comes to all the typographic details, but nothing beats watching it play out in real life. All those spontaneous conversations in the public square about apostrophes and spaces and past participles (not to mention Dutch and French and Tagalog) are often funny and even moving. And the scenery—mountains, haystacks, beaches—also plays a big role. Did you intend from the beginning to make a portrait of America and not just a movie about grammar?
Brandt: It was important to me to let the story emerge as we experienced this road trip and as I edited the film. My intentions at the beginning of all of this were flexible. The US landscape made itself a central part of the story.
Ellen: Brandt is really observant about physical space. He spent hours getting B-roll of things I never noticed. I like seeing beautiful places too, but I’m not observant and can easily get lost just finding my way back from the bathroom.
Russell: I remember Brandt running out to get B-roll way back in Providence [in 2019, when I met Brandt and Ellen at the ACES conference for copyeditors, where CMOS also had a table]. Is this it for the Grammar Table, or will you be returning to the road at some point?
Ellen: I still go out with the Grammar Table! I love going out with the Grammar Table. My new dream is to get a grammarmobile, just to make roaming around the country a bit easier. We’re car-free Manhattanites.
Brandt: I plan to keep filming as we go around the country screening Rebel with a Clause. I already have my eye on a new camera.
Russell: How can others see Rebel with a Clause, and do you have any plans for a follow-up?
Brandt: We are screening the film in person and virtually for organizations around the country, we’re going to be showing it at festivals, and we are constantly adding new dates on our website.
Ellen: People can sign up for our mailing list if they want to be alerted about screenings. Also on our website is a form you can fill out to bring the film to your organization. We are even going to be showing the film at a boat club soon!
Russell: Will the movie be available for streaming?
Brandt: We don’t have any details about that yet, but we’ll announce them on our website as soon as we do.
Russell: In other words, be sure to check out rebelwithaclause.com for details and updates. In the meantime, thank you so much, Brandt and Ellen, for talking about your film.
Brandt: Thank you, Russell. Don’t forget that you are in the film, in footage from that ACES conference.
Russell: My first cameo! And here you are, almost six years later, with a book and a documentary that brings it all to life. I hope you and the Grammar Table will be around for a long time to come.
Ellen: There’s an awful lot of grammar left to discuss.
Photo credit: Brandt Johnson
~ ~ ~
Russell Harper is the editor of The Chicago Manual of Style Online Q&A and was the principal reviser of the 16th, 17th, and 18th editions of The Chicago Manual of Style. He also contributed to the 8th and 9th editions of Kate L. Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.
Please see our commenting policy.
