‘Rebel With a Clause’ Is a Love Letter—to Grammar and the Upper West Side

By Tracy Zwick

Upper West Sider Ellen Jovin’s “Grammar Table”— a folding table at which she fields grammar questions from strangers – was launched in the UWS’s Verdi Square in 2018. You can still find Ellen periodically answering language queries in Central Park, but the table long ago left the proverbial nest. In fact, it’s now travelled to all 50 states, as documented in “Rebel with a Clause,” a 90-minute film about the table, its travels, and Ellen’s journey preaching the gospel of grammar to usage nerds and novices from sea to shining sea.

Jovin and her husband, first-time director Brandt Johnson, are on the road too, promoting the book Ellen wrote about her varied interactions with people at the Grammar Table and the 90-minute documentary Johnson made about the experience. “Rebel with a Clause” has played to sold-out houses in NYC and around the country, scooping up several awards at film festivals, including the Audience Award for Best Feature at the San Francisco Documentary Festival this month. The film will return to the UWS’s New Plaza Cinema later this month.

Jovin and Johnson gamely sit for Q&As after many of these screenings. When the film screened at New Plaza recently, attendees’ questions ranged from the intricacies of participles, to how they planned their years’ long cross-country trip, to how one gets permission to set up a Grammar Table in public spaces (Jovin’s 2023 scrape with law enforcement at the Broadway and West 72nd Street subway stop was covered by WSR.)

Ellen and Brandt, who’ve been married since 1999, spoke with the Rag last week via Zoom. They made clear the UWS remains the Grammar Table’s spiritual home, and their own. The table’s still open for business, they confirmed. Its hours may be irregular, but Ellen continues her career connecting with neighbors and strangers alike – one Oxford comma at a time.

WSR: Brandt, this is your first film. What made you decide to pick up a camera and turn Ellen’s experience with the Grammar Table into a documentary?

Brandt: My film experience was limited, but I’d written and produced plays. What prompted me to start filming in 2018 and keep filming was what I was seeing at the Grammar Table. I’d been an observer from the start, just taking in the majesty of the Grammar Table. What I was seeing was so funny, so connecting, so genuine and loving and beautiful in this divided time – I wanted to share that.

WSR: Having taken the table across the country, how do UWSers and their questions and conversations at the table stand out?

Ellen: The UWS is super high density in terms of writers, editors and language professionals. That’s one reason I love living here and why the table works so well. The UWS is a global grammar capital.

WSR: We know where Ellen stands, but where does Brandt [whose earlier careers include investment banker and professional basketball player in Europe] fit on the spectrum of grammar evangelist to grammar non-conformist?

Ellen: Brandt won the English award in high school! He’s a writer and he’s amazing with language. That’s part of the glue that bound us together from the beginning.

Brandt: I grew up with a love of language. My mom would read me poems she’d written, and we were very playful with language. I grew up with that and continue to share that love with Ellen.

WSR: What do you hope audiences take away from the film? It’s about grammar, but it’s also about human connection and these incredible face-to-face interactions Ellen had with strangers.

Brandt: I hope the underlying theme comes through as meeting people across differences in a divided time; how valuable that is. This is a grammar and road trip movie, for sure, and it’s fun and silly and full of grammar, but the heart of it is human connection.

Ellen: We’re in a divided time. There’s a distortion in how people perceive our differences. If you sit down and catalog what people on opposite ends of the political spectrum do minute-to-minute, there’s massive overlap. But there’s a perception that we can’t get along about anything. We have to focus on common ground, like commas.

WSR: What were the most common and obscure questions you got?

Ellen: The Oxford comma was by far the most popular thing people asked about. As for obscurity, people asked about etymologies of individual words and some non-language stuff. Occasionally people approached the table with a story instead of a question. One woman told me she loved footnotes and said she had a tattoo of a footnote on her foot. I’m not tattooing anything on my body!

WSR: Brandt, as a first-time filmmaker, did you have any cinematic models in mind, or were you figuring things out as you went?

Brandt: I was rather asea with respect to all of that – I just started shooting.  As I started editing, I didn’t have a structure or plan, I just wanted to let the moments emerge. That was pretty fluid and loose, but also stressful, because I didn’t know where this was going! I had 400 hours of footage. It was a staggering task. I edited it entirely by myself and had so many beginnings and endings along the way. I think maybe I’m glad I didn’t know what was ahead of me back in 2018 when I began filming. Though I’d do it again for sure.

Ellen: The whole thing astonished me because there were so many hurdles that would’ve caused me – and I think most people – to say, “I can’t do it.” Even when huge challenges came along, Brandt would just figure it out. He’s very determined and tenacious, and I’m more like “Am I having fun? No? Then I’ll stop.”

WSR: The film’s not just a love letter to grammar; it’s also a love letter to Ellen. You two were in very close quarters, on a long road trip together alone, staying in all kinds of places, facing all kinds of challenges. Yet there is only one small moment of discord between you in the film. How’d you manage that?

Ellen: We’ve lived and worked together intimately for so long. Brandt knows I’m very impatient, and I hate technology. I got grumpy about being mic’d. I was difficult. He didn’t include any of my whining. That’s love.

Brandt: More than learning anything new, it reaffirmed some of the things I already knew about Ellen. One of which is her genuine curiosity about other people and her interest in openness to really connecting to any kind of person and feeling that’s interesting and worthwhile.

WSR: Last question: Ellen seems to have an array of grammar-forward clothing. Are these items custom-made?

Ellen: Brandt is the grammar t-shirt designer! I like to say “I’m wearing Brandt.” “Grammar Hedonist” is my favorite t-shirt slogan. He made me one that says: “Two spaces after a period are the mom jeans of punctuation.” We had a store on the website, but I’m not sure it’s open right now; we’ll put it back up. The truth is, many of the pieces are from Amazon.

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