Paul Harrill Says Everything About "something, anything"

Special Screening

Paul Harrill Says Everything About something, anything

(from Sag Harbor Express Online 1/4/15)

 04 January 2015

Ashley Shelton in “something, anything.”

something, anything fits my category Movies That Should Play in Sag Harbor.  Until now Knoxville writer-director Paul Harrill’s impressive, thought-provoking feature debut has played in festivals from Austin to Madison, Wisconsin, to Edinburgh. And beginning this Friday you can see it at IFP’s Made in NY Media Center at 30 John Street in Brooklyn.

Peggy/Margaret on her journey.

Peggy (Ashley Shelton) is pretty and sweet but doesn’t know how to express herself.  When Mark (Bryce Johnson) proposes, she says “I don’t know what to say,” but, typically, doesn’t object.  Soon later the young bride is having difficulty with her pregnancy.  Despite her pain, when Mark coaxes her into accompanying him to bar for a work gathering, she doesn’t voice her concerns and goes along.  While he is occupied, she feels tremendous pain and goes into the bathroom.  She hemorrhages.  She desperately tries to call Mark but he sees it’s her on his phone while he’s engaged in conversation and doesn’t answer.  She loses the baby. In the hospital he offers no apology and exhibits no remorse, but says they can try to have another baby.  She leaves Mark.  He wants her back and her friends tell her she should be more responsive to him.  Still unable to express her feelings, she quits her job as a realtor, becomes a low-paid library assistant, pulls away from Mark and her friends, and begins to search for meaning in life.  She seeks out Tim (Linds Edwards), the brother of a high school friend who has become a monk and lives in a monastery. She asks that people start calling her Margaret. As Harrill says in his press notes, this “seemingly typical Southern newlywed gradually transforms into a spiritual seeker, quietly threatening the closest relationships around her.” “Quietly” is the operative word.  Peggy/Margaret says little and talks softly, and Harrill describes his film as “kind of a whisper—one not everyone may hear.”  Yet I believe you will find your way into this gentle young woman’s head and then the movie’s intriguing themes will come through loud and clear. The following is an interview I did this week with the talented Harrill about his unique and—despite it being about a female—deeply personal movie.

Paul Harrill.

Danny Peary: Did you emerge out of a film community in Knoxville or are you one of the few filmmakers who work there?

Paul Harrill: There’s a sizeable production community in Knoxville, but it’s more oriented to television. A lot of cable programming happens there because it’s where Scripps–HGTV, DIY, Food Network, etc.–is based. But as for “filmmakers”–people who are making fiction films or docs and really trying to get that work seen on a national level–it’s a small community.

DP: Do you think your shorts and something, anything are the products of someone who has watched thousands of movies or–since your feature rejects traditional movie storytelling–an instinctual director who pushes away all his movie memories?

PH: It’s a little of both, I think. I’ve seen a lot of films, and a lot of different types of films, and I studied film history in college and went to film school. That can’t help but influence my work. There were a few times shooting this film when Kuni Ohi, the film’s cinematographer, and I would set up a shot and say something like, “This is the Vive La Vie shot” as a kind of shorthand. But I’d say that overall I work pretty instinctively.

DP: Who were your movie and literary influences when writing and directing this film?

PH: At some point while we were shooting the film, Ashley Maynor, the film’s producer, described it to someone as “John Hughes meets Leo Tolstoy.” She was kind of joking, but also kind of serious. I had been reading a lot material by and about ascetics and monks–people like Tolstoy and Thomas Merton–and also listening to music by John Coltrane and G.I. Gurdjieff, who were both seekers. I was interested in telling a story about a woman who seeks a kind of spiritual solitude, but that also has elements of a love story. So films by directors like Frank Borzage, Leo McCarey and, to a lesser extent, Douglas Sirk were on my mind. It wasn’t that I studied those movies. It was more like, having seen them years earlier, I was trying to write my version of one.

DP: Is your first feature part of a natural progression that started with your female-protagonist shorts?  Or are they all independent of each other and this could have been made before them?

PH: The films are definitely independent of one another. But I hope there’s a progression there. I am now certainly more confident about finding how I want to work and what I’m trying to express.

DP: Talk about your title, which is lower-cased on the film itself but not in your Director’s Statement in the press notes. Am I right in assuming that the word “Say” invisibly precedes the two words in your title?

PH: Wow, that’s a good question. I’ve never heard that reading of it. I honestly hadn’t thought of it that way, but it’s interesting. If you’d asked me what words might invisibly precede the title I probably would have said “I need”–words spoken from Peggy’s point of view, instead of words spoken to her or about her.

DP: Is Peggy’s inability to articulate her feelings what the film is most about?  Her first line in the movie, when Mark proposes to her, is “I don’t know what to say,” and months later she tells him, “I still don’t know what to say.”

PH: Well, I definitely want people who see the film to feel free to interpret things as they wish, so I don’t want to be pinned down to state what the film is “most” about. But it’s true that her first words are, “I don’t know what to say.” And at the end Peggy—I prefer calling her Margaret, as she calls herself in time–not only articulates something she wants, but also her last lines, her monologue at the end, is another proposal of sorts. All that’s definitely intentional.

DP: I sense Peggy can’t articulate her feelings but is it likely that she doesn’t understand her feelings herself?

PH: Definitely. She’s searching.

DP: What I find really brave about your writing this script is that you have created a woman whose feelings and thoughts are private even from you—and is it true as I believe that you don’t want to know more about Peggy than the actress who plays her?

PH: Well, first, thank you. As far as your question goes, it’s not so much that I don’t want to know more about Peggy; it’s that I want to acknowledge that, fundamentally, people are mysterious. So for me to claim to understand everything about a character, even one I’ve written, seems dishonest to me.

DP: Tell me about why you cast unknown Ashley Shelton over a hundred others who tried out for the part?  What was her audition?

PH: This is where instinct comes into play. I definitely wanted someone whose presence on screen wouldn’t bring previous associations. Ashley brought that, along with her incredible talent. For her initial audition I actually had her do a cold reading of some pages from one of my previous short films. When I called her back, I had her and Linds Edwards read the scene where she and Tim talk seriously for the first time. There was both a strength and vulnerability in the way she played that scene, so that’s the moment when I knew I was going to cast her. And it helped that her chemistry with Linds was real.

DP: Without giving away too much, tell me about the conversations you had with Ashley about what Peggy goes through as the movie evolves.  Did she ever explain her character to you?

PH: Before we began shooting the film, even before rehearsals, Ashley and I went through the script scene by scene and discussed just about everything. Motivations, backstory, wardrobe. We didn’t explain these things, we tried not to psychologize too much. But we discussed them. The story is so introspective, even fragile, so we definitely wanted to plot out places where changes could be seen, and we wanted to be in agreement. So that was an important conversation, and it was a conversation about us as much as it was about Peggy, or Margaret. But I don’t think there was ever a moment where either of us felt like we had to “explain” the character to the other. On set, we were usually after the same thing.

DP: If the tragic event early in the movie didn’t happen, do you think Peggy would stay with Mark forever?

PH: Very possibly. I think it sometimes takes a tragedy or some kind of trauma to wake up a person.

DP: Is Peggy heartbroken solely by the tragic event or also because she has a realization about her husband Mark?

PH: What do you think?

DP: I think there are several things going on with her.  She has the natural traumatic reaction of someone who loses a baby. She also has a reaction akin to postpartum depression that she can’t understand or combat to get herself out of a dangerous funk.  Also, she is in shock.  This is partly due to her disbelief that the baby is actually gone (and for a while still feeling pregnant).  But she is also shocked (and hurt) that her husband and protector abandoned her.  And most of all she is shocked because her nice guy husband revealed a monster side—she is married to a monster.  Later in the film, he shows his Mr. Hyde side again and she realizes it wasn’t her imagination.  That’s what I think.  Were you at all thinking along these lines?

PH: The abandonment part is key. That’s the part, to me, that motivates her to leave Mark the first time. There’s probably nothing lonelier than feeling abandoned in a marriage.

As for Mark, at the screenings I’ve attended on the festival circuit, I’ve heard so many different opinions about him–from seeing him as, like you say, monstrous, to someone who is sympathetic, if limited as a person. I can see why someone would think that he’s a monster. He’s very selfish, very self-oriented. He’s materialistic. He has a temper. Those qualities don’t make him sympathetic. But to me this isn’t monstrous behavior–or rather, if it is, the world is full of monsters. I pity him. Over the course of the film he has not changed, he can’t see how his values are a trap. He’s not even aware that he would need to change in order to be in a loving relationship. Until, possibly, the very last moment we see him. And by that point it’s too late, at least it is for Peggy. To me, that’s very sad. That experience is, I think, true for many men.

DP: In your “Director’s Statement,” you say, “It’s a love story, but one in which love is defined as a woman’s search for meaning instead of merely a search for a partner.”  Is it also, perhaps even more importantly, a woman’s search for herself, her identity—which she might even need to create–and a way to love herself?

PH: Absolutely! I probably should have said those things. What’s so hard for me about writing Director’s Statements–and also doing interviews—is that, in essence, what I really want to say is the movie. The movie itself is the Director’s Statement. So after making it, writing a statement that tries to encapsulate what you were going for, trying to sum it up… it’s so hard to put it into words. I understand that writing those things is necessary. But it’s very difficult. If I could state definitively, in words, why I made the movie or what it’s about, well, there’s no sense in it being a film. It should be a novel, or an essay, or something else.

DP: Talk about your filming for four days in silence at an actual monastery and your statement “the film’s story demanded I embrace the monk-like virtues that the film’s protagonist adopts: simplicity, humility, patience and quiet.”  Did you feel that since Peggy goes through hard times, you had to struggle yourself, like a right of passage?

PH: I certainly wasn’t setting things up to be difficult. There are certainly times I wish making the film could have been easier. But a lot of the struggles we faced in making the film–like filming at the monastery, or filming the synchronized fireflies, which took weeks of research and trial and error–were a consequence of wanting the audience to feel the film has an authenticity to it.

DP: You say your protagonist adopts the virtues of simplicity, humility, patience, and quiet.  I know she has a high-paying job and wears makeup, but isn’t she basically already a simple, humble, patient, quiet, and always kind person?  Isn’t that why she doesn’t fit in with her friends or her husband?

PH: I think that’s one way of looking at her. But she’s also pretty uncritical of the life she’s adopted for herself. I think of her as someone who hasn’t reflected on what life can be, or should be, or made decisions–instead she’s someone who’s gone with the tide. She certainly isn’t someone that has rebelled, as she ends up doing in her quiet way over the course of the film.

DP: Why did you have Peggy being a competitive cheerleader in high school?

PH: Ashley Shelton told me that she had done that in high school, so I added that line to the script. Sometimes when you can put those little things in a script for an actor, it gives them a toehold into the character.

DP: Are we to assume that Tim and Peggy were attracted to each other in high school but neither had the ability to tell the other?

PH: I think Peggy probably had one of those older-brother-of-a-friend crushes on him. Tim, I’m not so sure. I can imagine him just thinking of her warmly as his sister’s friend.

DP: Am I right in thinking that your producer Ashley Maynor and editor Jennifer Lilly were essential collaborators because of the nature of the story, always providing a female voice in your ear?

PH: Ashley Maynor, especially. She was the first person to read the first draft of the script, she was on set in the filming, and she was looking at cuts throughout post. Jennifer Lilly and I worked on the film together for about six weeks before she went on to another project. But her input during that time was obviously very important.

DP: What about Peggy, is you?

PH: Wow. Ok, so there’s a lot of Peggy in me. Or Margaret, as I prefer calling her. Definitely I relate to her feeling of exhaustion with the world, with her frustration about the pressures that money creates. I relate to her wanting to retreat and feeling in a kind of naïve way that it’d be “nice” to be a monk. Those things about her came from someplace personal. But there’s a lot of me in Tim, too. Tim wants to participate in the world. He’s not a monk any longer but he’s still searching, and he understands that solitude is part of that. But he also understands that connection, connection with another person, can be a holy thing, too. He’s looking to balance those impulses, and he sees someone in Margaret that might want to do that too. I’d like to think there’s not much of Mark in me, but there is. He’s egotistical. As an artist, almost by definition, I have experience with that.

DP: How important to the movie and you is Peggy’s line: “Sometimes it’s good to be lonely?”

PH: It’s very important. The “sometimes” part is key, though.

DP: Talk about the diversity of the music and how you use it to convey Peggy’s mental state and mood over the four seasons?

PH: During the parts of the movie where Peggy is on her own, we hear a lot of solo piano. But as the seasons change, and as Peggy engages with the world more, we encounter these other kinds of music–the song by Emily Jane White that we hear as she drives to the monastery, the choral music of the monks, rock music in a bar,. But we keep returning to that solo piano music, too. It’s hard to talk about the music, since choosing it and placing it is so intuitive. But there’s definitely a sense that the arc of the soundtrack is akin to the changes Peggy is going through.

DP: Talk about why you begin the film with a Christina Rossetti poem that asks “Who has seen the wind?”

PH: I decided very late in post-production to add those verses to the film. I had run across the poem when I was taking notes for the script and, after I found it, I wrote it on the first page of the binder of my notes for the film. There was something about it that helped me re-center myself when I lost track of what the movie was about. Anyway, in the late stages of post-production, I felt the film was picture locked, but it still felt like there was something missing. So I placed that poem at the beginning and then it felt like the movie was done. I guess I think of it as a way to transition audiences, whether they’re watching in a theater or on an iPad or wherever, to transition them from their daily life to this quiet, introspective story. In that sense, I hope that poem does the same thing for audiences that it did for me while I was writing it.

DP: This movie is as far from being ostentatious as it gets.  I’m sure many viewers will assume that it is so minimalistic that it was easy to make.  What can you tell them?

PH: I’d love for audiences to feel like it was easy to make, that there’s a kind of seamlessness to it. Of course, it was anything but easy. It took us a year, on and off, to shoot it. There was a crew of about five core people, and everyone was doing multiple jobs and was totally overworked. A lot of hard work over that period, a lot. And then it took another year– again, on and off–to edit it. It’s minimalistic, but we got to that by filming lots of things and then, like Peggy, paring things down to what was really essential. And that took us a lot of time. The hardest part, I think, was that making it over such a long time meant there was a lot of time to question what we were doing, a lot of time for doubt. I can’t imagine what Richard Linklater went through making Boyhood over twelve years! Anyway, if someone says it looks as if it was easy to make, I’d take that as a compliment, as some indication we were able to hide all of that challenging stuff happening behind the scenes.

DP: How can people in New York and elsewhere see your movie?

PH: Something, Anything will run in New York at IFP’s Made in NY Media Center from January 9-15. Tickets can be found here: http://bit.ly/saTickets. Several of us involved with the film will be at the screenings and doing Q+A sessions and so on. And then on January 20 the film will be released digitally on Amazon, iTunes, and so on. People can always check out the film’s website (www.somethinanythingfilm.com) or Facebook page (www.facebook.com/somethinganythingfilm)

A Revealing Chat with Larry Karaszewski, the Cowriter of Big Eyes

Playing in Theaters

A Revealing Chat with Larry Karaszewski, the Cowriter of Big Eyes
                                                                                                         (from Sag Harbor Express Online 12/20/14)

By Danny Peary

Amy Adams in “Big Eyes.”

One of the most anticipated films of the season, Big Eyesopens nationally on Christmas Day, including at the UA Southampton 4. I suspect that it is on your list of must-see movies.  Its stars Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz are doing the talk show circuit and Adams hosted Saturday Night Live, and it’s likely you’ll hear their names at most award shows, but its main drawing card is its celebrated director.  Big Eyes is being promoted as a “Tim Burton film,” and surely his fans will attempt to confirm his auteurship by pointing to the twisted story and slightly surreal imagery, hallmarks of Burton’s work.  Burton’s influence is undeniable, but in truth Big Eyes is the brainchild of its screenwriters extraordinaire, Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski.  These long-time writing partners have been responsible for a number of offbeat and highly intelligent screen biographies of idiosyncratic celebrities: Ed Wood, which Burton directed with Johnny Depp as the world’s worst director and Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi; The People vs. Larry Flynt, directed by Milos Foreman and starring Woody Harrelson as the publisher of Hustler; Man on the Moon, Foreman’s film with Jim Carrey as inscrutable comic Andy Kaufman; Autofocus, directed by Paul Schrader and starring Greg Kinnear as sexually-perverse actor Bob Crane; and now Big Eyes, directed by Burton and starring Adams and Waltz as famed artists Margaret and Walter Keane.  Actually, only Walter was a famed artist back in the 1960s.  His paintings of big-eyed waifs were attacked by critics for being kitch or, worse, garbage, but they were the rage among the masses–and celebrities.  Mass produced, his paintings, posters, and prints were so popular that for a time Walter was the most successful artist in the country.  Then came a bizarre twist. Years after she escaped his clutches and filed for divorce, Margaret revealed that Walter didn’t know how to paint at all and that she had painted every big-eyed child.  Years ago Alexander and Karaszewski were astonished to learn this story and realized that it fit in with the strange tales they’d already told.  Years later they showed Burton their finished script about the Keanes and his eyes grew big, too.  He agreed to direct.  Screenwriters often don’t get the attention they deserve, so I was delighted to meet with Karaszewski (who like me and Alexander attended USC film school) over breakfast at Bubby’s in Tribeca and do this interview.

Big Eyes’ screenwriters Larry Karaszewski (R) and Scott Alexander Photo by Fumiaki Yamazaki.

Danny Peary: Although you went to USC film school and remained in L.A., you are originally from Indiana.

Larry Karaszewski: I grew up in South Bend in a very working-class household.  My mom was a waitress and my dad worked in a factory.

DP: You grew up in a basketball state, in a football town, so did you feel that you had to find somewhere you belonged?

LK: I actually enjoyed sports, even if I was never really into them. My first experience was being on a Little League baseball team. My brother, who was really into sports, was a coach.  I just said, that’s it, he can have the sports thing and I just totally threw myself into the movie and theater world, which in South Bend means you’re probably gay.

DP: And instead of going to Notre Dame football games, you saw a lot of movies growing up?

LK: My parents got divorced when I was about 9.  My dad got me one night a week and didn’t necessarily know what to do with a kid.  This corresponded with my new interest in movies, so I talked him into taking me to the drive-in. He’d have a beer and I would watch drive-in movies.  My dad was oblivious to the fact that I was seeing women-in-prison pictures. We’d also go to the grindhouse downtown so from 1969 to around 1976, I saw three or four movies a week.  What was great is that I got to see a total mix of movies.  If a drive-in or grindhouse played a triple-bill, it would often book any print it could get rather than films of the same genre.  I saw Gillo Pontecorvo’s Burn! with Marlon Brando when I was only about eleven years old.  I didn’t go to the drive-in to see it but it opened for the film I wanted to see and I got lucky.  I’d just see a weird combination of things and I became really obsessed with movies.

DP: Were you interested in writing?

LK: Always.  When I was in high school, there was a new junior achievement project for the NBC affiliate in South Bend. The idea was to have kids run cameras and write and act. We had to audition to be part of it.  There was a very, very smart guy who ran it, Dave Williams, who viewed it as a way of tapping into youth culture as well as his own  comedy writing skills.  He turned what we did it into a weekly half-hour television show. It was a Saturday Night Live-style sketch comedy at the time SNL was starting out and it was very funny.  It had a great gimmick–viewers lost control of their television for half an hour so whenever a sketch got boring or long there might be a switch to another channel or a commercial before returning to the sketch in progress.

DP: Were you getting encouragement about your writing?

LK: Yeah. It’s a huge thing in any young person’s life when someone says, “Hey, you could do this professionally.” For me it was Dave Williams. He was our mentor and definitely made me and a bunch of other people feel special.  Unfortunately, he died halfway through my high school years and the show was in jeopardy for a while, but it kept running and we kids got power to do almost everything by ourselves. We directed, wrote, and acted.  I was primarily in the writers group, which was the most powerful group because we actually came up with stuff.  The group included Dan Waters, who later wrote Heathers and Batman Returns, and David Simkins, who wrote Adventures in Babysitting. It’s really weird that we were all in this small town in Indiana and learning how to write.  We’d have writers meetings on Monday and Tuesday nights, cast on Wednesday, rewrite on Thursday, build sets on Friday, shoot Saturday morning, and air the show on Sunday. I did that for four years straight.

DP: What did you learn about writing?

LK: How to write with partners, for one thing.  I compare what we did to what the comedy writing team did on theDick Van Dyke Show.  I also learned to get things done.  I think a lot of young writers are very precious with their work and in our computer age they revise and revise, but for that show, in good days and bad days, I just kept going to work and finishing my writing on time. It taught me to be very professional.

DP: Then at one point you decided to leave Indiana and go to film school?

LK: Dave let us know there was nothing wrong about staying in South Bend but there was a bigger world out there. Because of my background, I could have just been a factory worker, but I always had a sense that I could make it as a writer. I was never that intimidated by people who were saying, “I’m gonna go to Hollywood and I’ll write a script and I’ll make a movie.”  That’s what I would do.

DP: When you announced you were going to USC–Notre Dame’s biggest rival in football–did most people in South Bend say you should go somewhere else?

LK: Yeah, but when I applied that rivalry didn’t even cross my mind. USC and NYU film schools were the only places really offering what I wanted.

DP: How long were you at USC film school?

LK: From 1981 to 1985.  I was in critical studies.

DP: Did you take production classes, too?

LK: There were only a few production classes they would let me take, but I figured a way to work around the system.  I always had to be on a waiting list, but I wound up taking just about every production class. I totally respect USC and I’m glad I went there because it allowed me to go to California and meet a group of like-minded people, but because I spent so much time there battling to be a part of it, it was a  bit of a frustrating.

DP: Did you know Scott Alexander from critical studies?

LK: No, Scott was in production.  We met standing in line to get our food card and we started talking about movies. There was a vacancy in the room where I was staying, so I manipulated the system a little bit to get him for my roommate.  I did this because Scott was a local boy, from L.A., and I knew he’d go home on weekends and I’d have the place to myself. We’d be roommates off and on for the next four years.

DP: When did you start talking about writing together?

LK: Not until before our senior year.  He was visiting me in Indiana over the summer, and we read an Ann Landers column about a kid who broke into a school and because he was injured while vandalizing the gym, he sued the school district. We said, “What if that was funny?”  What if a thief is robbing a guy’s house and gets hurt and sues the homeowner for negligence and winds up getting money through the legal system?  We were thinking it would be like Billy Wilder’s The Fortune Cookie. Scott had one of the very first word-processing programs and when we got back to school we just started writing.  He sat at the computer and I walked around the room talking. It’s funny, being the writing partner who was not on the keyboard, I had to keep a lot of different balls bouncing around in my head.  Today I still have to know everything that’s on the page and keep all the other ideas moving back and forth. It’s an interesting dynamic. We have never been partners who say, “You take the first act and I’ll take the second act and we’ll meet up again in six months.”  From the beginning, we’ve worked everything out together. In our writing class at USC, no one was expected to write a feature screenplay, just thirty pages of the first act and an outline for the rest. We were the first students we knew who decided to write the script to the end. So in our senior year, we wrote a feature script.

DP: Did you submit it to an agent?

LK: I was a TA for a production class and one of the kids in that class had an internship at ICM, where there was a young agent who asked him, “Who are the hot writers at USC film school these days?” And he gave her two or three names. She called me up and it was one of those times when opportunity meets preparation. She asked if I had anything to show her and I had the screenplay that we’d just finished.  She knew she could sell it. Two weeks after Scott and I graduated, she sold it to 20^th-Century Fox.  I was working in a record store and next thing I knew I was being offered money that I’d never had before.  Scott and I were now professionals.

DP: Was that movie made?

LK: No.  But it put us on the map.  It’s a funny script that we wrote with two actors in mind—Albert Brooks and Morris Day.  Crazy. This was right around the time of Purple Rain, and we well in love with Day, Prince’s costar.  We even named the character Morris.  The script never got made, which was frustrating, but it got us meetings instantly and our career took off from there.  Scott and I never imagined that we’d be writing partners for the rest of our lives, but we haven’t stopped working since.  

DP: You two have had a number of scripts produced, from the comedy Problem Child to the Stephen King adaptation, 1408, to Screwed, your directorial debut. However, you’re best known for writing quirky celebrity biographies–Ed Wood, The People vs. Larry Flynt, The Man on the Moon, Autofocus, and now Big Eyes.  The two of you must talk endlessly about structuring biographical material for the cinema.

LK: Well, we’re constantly being offered biographies or thinking of possible biographies ourselves. If we are interested, we always stop and really look at someone’s life to see if there is a three-act story. People hate most movie biographies because they are great-man stories that start with them as children and go on forever. We try to find the drama and figure out how it connects to telling a story on the screen. Often we’ll just very simply ask, “Why should this person be remembered?” If we can answer that question, we work backwards and that’s what our movie is.  We don’t try to tell someone’s entire life story. For example: Why should Ed Wood be remembered?  The two reasons are that he made the worst movie of all time, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and he had a relationship with Bela Lugosi that people remember fondly. So we say, “All right, page ten he meets Bela Lugosi.  Page thirty he makes use of that connection to get his first movie made. In the second act, Bela dies. Can he possibly make the movie without Bela? Well, he’s shot a few seconds of footage of Bela, so in the third act he completes Glen or Glenda? and Bela Lugosi is his lead.”  Why is Larry Flynt remembered?  He’s remembered for being the smuttiest man in the 1970s and for his Supreme Court case that was very essential in regard to free-speech and libel laws. Oddly, it wasn’t our protagonist Larry Flynt, the plaintiff, who speaks in court, but his lawyer [Edward Norton as Alan Isaacman], so we had to give him an important part in our story. We had to construct a movie where Larry being quiet in front of the Supreme Court is actually his arc. Larry had disrespected so many courtrooms and the American Way for so long but when he finally is in front of the Supreme Court and doesn’t treat it like a circus, he gets respect from the country. The Supreme Court case had to be the climax of the movie, just as we knew instantly that the Keane court case sounded so fantastic that it had to be the climax of Big Eyes.

DP: How did you and Scott come up with the arc for Big Eyes?

LK: Once again, we looked at non-traditional Hollywood subject matter for form and content and pushed that into the traditional Hollywood three-act structure.  In the first act, Margaret meets this man Walter in the park, where they are both selling their art. She takes a leap because he seems to be her perfect mate and they can be fellow artists.  She’s living that 1950s-early 1960?s dream of San Francisco, beatniks, and paintbrushes–and bam, her art becomes successful.  But there’s a catch. It’s successful under her husband’s name and not hers. So the second act of the movie is Margaret trying to live and cope with that situation as their success keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.  Then in part three, she can’t do it anymore. She stands up for herself, and he threatens her violently, and she winds up escaping in the middle of the night with her daughter. That third act, I often say, is “the Ike and Tina Turner story in the art world.”

DP: Do you portray Margaret as an abused woman?

LK: She’s psychologically abused. Walter really wasn’t hitting her. He hit her once and she drew a line. That’s a true story.

DP:  But he got worse?

LK: He got worse and worse, and I think a lot of that was because once the lie that he was the one who painted the big-eyed orphans became solid in his mind, her art was a daily reminder that he wasn’t really the artist. I think there was an anger that came from that and it contributed to his drinking.  It’s only shown a little in the film, but he was a hard-drinking man.

DP: What’s the selling point of the movie?

LK: It’s a female-empowerment movie. It’s about a woman who learns to stand up for herself and take what’s rightfully hers. I talked about my parents briefly, but didn’t say that my mom put up living with my father for twenty years.  My dad treated her terribly and didn’t talk to her for six months at a time, but my mother was a Catholic and divorcing him was out of the question. I don’t know if her priest specifically said what the priest says to Margaret in the film about staying with Walter, but I took it as that’s what she was going through.  It got to the point where she was worried that violence would occur to us, and she escaped in the middle of the night.

DP: Were you thinking about that when you started writing the script?

LK: It was definitely on my mind, whether it was translated to Scott or not. Even when you have a partnership, there are certain things that you feel a little more personally attached to than your partner.  It would be in the film anyway because it actually happened to Margaret, but certainly I can relate to the sequence where she grabs her daughter Jane and they take off in the middle of the night.   I remember very well my mom throwing me in the back of the car and taking off in the middle of the night. I was thinking, “Where are we going, what’s going on?”

DP: Was the story of Margaret and Walter Keane of interest to you long before the making of Big Eyes?

LK: Yes, Scott and I tried to get this movie made for close to eleven years, I knew the story and Scott read about it while we were doing research for another project.  He said, “Oh my god!”  We tracked down Margaret ten years ago and got her rights and also Jane’s rights.

DP: How much did you know of the Keane story while it was happening?

LK: Very little.  I don’t think most people did. I knew the art because I think it was up in my house when I was growing up.  Those paintings and posters were up in everybody’s houses. The big-eyes art was ubiquitous but not everyone knew the name of the artist. I think few people ever knew the full story because when Margaret decided to stand up for herself and tell the truth, the big eyes paintings were no longer in vogue. And when they sued each other in court [in 1986], it wasn’t front page news but was way back in the newspaper.  We were very close to rock musician Matthew Sweet, who in the early days of eBay was able to get Keane art cheaply and became a big collector. He’s the first person who ever told me the tale of the Keanes. Some time in the ‘90s, the New York Timesdid an article about Margaret, and Matthew and Tim Burton were quoted in it.  [Sweet's 1999 album In Reversefeatures one of Margaret Keane's oil paintings on the cover.] Before Scott and I started writing this project we already knew that Tim was a big fan of the art. It turned out he had commissioned a bunch of Keane paintings, so there was something about them that really connected with him. When you look at Tim’s art and some of the Keane paintings, there’s a similar sadness and creepiness.

DP: Did you write Big Eyes with Tim Burton in mind to direct?

LK: No.  It was a movie that we originally planned to direct ourselves and we had numerous false starts. About two years ago, after the movie fell apart one more time, we decided to approach Tim.  He was already on board as a producer.  We said that if he wanted to direct it we would swap places and act as producers.  That’s because the whole Ed Wood experience had been one of those perfect, magical things in our career. And we felt an obligation to Margaret.  She was in her late seventies when we optioned her rights, and now she was in her late eighties. We wanted her to see the film.  

DP: Did Tim Burton bring a fairy tale look or heightened realism to the movie?

LK: There are Tim Burton touches in the movie but they’re very minor. I think people are going to be shocked when they see the film. It’s unmistakably the work of a visual artist, but Tim has really made an old-fashioned women’s picture. This is a Universal International film, much like a Douglas Sirk film.  I believe this movie has potential in that it is a movie biopic but it fits into that that female-driven, women’s-picture genre.  It looks absolutely gorgeous, but Tim played it straight. I think he really wanted to stretch himself with this movie, working with actors and telling a good tale. It’s likely people will go right to the Ed Wood comparison, but Ed Wood had a heightened and gothic quality even though Tim was dealing with real people. Ed Wood had a sense of oddity, and I don’t think this movie does.  It feels almost mainstream, not like an art movie.

DP: Though you say the two films are visually different, do you see any similarities between the stories of Ed Wood and the Keanes?

LK: I think there is some similarity.  Ed Wood is regarded as the worst filmmaker of all time, and many people in the art world look at the Keane paintings as completely ridiculous. Ed Wood is a really good movie about the filmmaking process, and I think Big Eyes is a really good movie about the art world.  Big Eyes is much different than a movie about Jackson Pollack or another artist who was really good at what they did.  It is about people with questionable talent who are outsiders and can’t get into the art world.  Similarly, most people’s experience of the film world is closer to Ed Wood’s than David Lean’s.  They worry about finishing their movies because they have no money and all these bad things are happening that wouldn’t happen to David Lean, for example.

DP: Even on Wikipedia, Walter Keane isn’t categorized as an artist, but “an American plagiarist.” Do you think he was in any way an artist?

LK: He certainly wasn’t a painter. He was a salesman. He was a genius at marketing. I think that idea is in the film. Margaret will happily say that there is no way her paintings would have been exhibited anywhere but the park if it hadn’t been for Walter’s marketing abilities. He was able to take these things and make them explode. He was not an artist but he invented the mass production and mass marketing of art. Walter invented a story about seeing starving children in Europe after World War II to explain why he painted these sad big-eyed waifs.  That tale made the initial sales take off. He was able to get on the television. He realized very quickly that art critics didn’t matter, what mattered were Hollywood celebrities. So he would give famous people the paintings and have a picture taken with them and that photo would get into a magazine and then the regular people who read them wanted those paintings, too.  They sold because of the marketing machine that happened around them, and Walter was a whirling dervish making this stuff happen.

DP: You open the film with an Andy Warhol quote: “I think what [Walter] Keane has done is just terrific. It has to be good. If it were bad, so many people wouldn’t like it.” Are you endorsing the quote?

LK: I’m endorsing the quote, there’s a tiny arched eyebrow at the same time. I think one of the big questions the movie asks is, What is art? And: Who are you to say that’s not art? If someone is touched or moved by a big-eye painting, why isn’t that art?  Even Walter has a level of frustration, asking , “Why don’t people think this is good?”  Margaret is sincere about her art, she is expressing her emotions in these paintings. The Warhol quote is there because we want people to know that the Keane art connected with people on a major level, and just because art is popular with the masses doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. It doesn’t mean it’s good either.  Walter aside, the villain of our movie is the New York Times art critic John Canaday [Terence Stamp]. The Keanes receiving such contempt from the art world gave us conflict, gave us a motor–and that added to the insane personal story of theirs, in which Walter stole credit for the paintings of waifs with big eyes.

DP: We’re often told that art should elevate, not pander. In the movie, we can see, as you say, how sincere Margaret is.  She’s thinking, “I’m not painting for the masses, this is what I want to paint.”

LK: What the masses are responding to is Walter’s salesmanship–he’s shoved down America’s throat the “fact” that the paintings are great art.  And John Canaday is going, “No! I am the gatekeeper, you’re not allowed to go around me. You’re not allowed to just put out your own coffee table books and build your own galleries because I’m the cultural gatekeeper and I won’t allow it.”

DP: People generally like Margaret’s big-eye motif, so I wonder if her paintings would be appreciated more if they hadn’t been mass produced but were discovered in a garage by a collector who labeled them outsider art.

LK: We’ll see what happens with the film, because I think her paintings will be rediscovered by a whole new generation.  Learning the context of her story will allow people to look at her paintings as outsider art, as folk art.  Part of the reason it was regarded as so kitschy and silly is that came along with Walter Keane’s crazy tale.  Now we realize that those paintings of crying children were the result of a sad woman being locked in a back room and not being able to express herself any other way. I think that her story is going to make those paintings take on a much richer, deeper meaning.  It’s an easy comparison, but when we made Ed Wood, I felt a little different about some of Ed’s films. It had been very easy to joke and laugh about his work, because it seemed ridiculous.  Glen or Glenda?, his movie about a cross-dresser, has all these cheesy things in it, but once you understand that Ed was a cross-dresser making a personal statement, it plays more like a really odd avant-garde film. It’s harder to laugh because you know the heartfelt sincerity that went into that movie. I think Margaret’s art connected to so many people because coming from her, there is a sincerity to it.  The big-eye paintings became so successful that they were ripped off and a bunch of people made big-eye paintings. But Margaret’s paintings are better because they have more feeling.  There is a sadness in the eyes of her hobo kids that the other painters can’t duplicate.

DP: The art is so personal to Margaret, but does Walter think, in a twisted way, this is my art?

LK: Absolutely, I think it happens with a lot of these frauds.  If you read interviews with Milli Vanilli you’ll see that they really believed they deserved to win a Grammy for Best New Artist and could go up against the Rolling Stones because they, too, were in the pantheon.  Never mind that they were lip-synching.

DP: Walter disparages Margaret because he considers himself the artist in the family, and I think he died thinking that [two days after Christmas in 2000].

LK: The lie became so big that I don’t think he even knew anymore who did the art.

DP: He silences Margaret’s objections to his taking credit for her work by saying nobody will buy women’s art.  She believes him.  Do you believe that?

LK: Yes. One of the interesting things about her story is that it was in synch with what was happening in our country. Margaret starts out as a 1950s housewife who is told by a priest to stand by her man and think he is the head of the household and what he says should go.  The movie wraps up in the early seventies, at the beginning of the women’s liberation movement, and she’s learning to stand up and speak up for herself.  Finally, she realizes she can have a voice and be a brave person on her own.

DP: Was it difficult to cast an actress to play a woman who is so passive and submissive?

LK: We didn’t really have problems getting actresses interested in the part because at the end of the day there’s a lot going on with Margaret.  It is interesting that it’s mostly men who ask why Margaret put up with Walter.  Many women have been in a situation where they swallowed their pride to stay with a man.  Or they saw their mothers in that situation or know friends who were.  Guys are rarely in that situation. I think Amy Adams is amazing as Margaret. Because Walter is such an impressive character, he has more lines in the movie than Margaret, although she is the protagonist. So the really interesting thing about the editing is how much of a scene can you stay on Amy while Christoph is talking? What’s great about Amy is that she’s like a silent-movie actress and you can tell what Margaret is thinking by looking in her eyes–”I love this man, I’m afraid of this man, something’s happening that’s not right.” All these complex emotions are evident in Amy’s face. It’s an extraordinary performance, with a great deal of subtlety.

DP: Did you talk to Amy and Christoph Waltz about their characters?

LK: Yes, about certain things.  Actors often talk to us because we’re the historians and have researched the story and their characters. Christoph actually didn’t want to know much about Walter, because he wanted to do his own interpretation of him. And he’s one of those instinctual actors who understands things that aren’t necessarily on the page.  For instance, we didn’t know how Walter held his paintbrush or things like that, but Christoph made the right choices. With Amy we acted as a go-between her and Margaret.  We arranged for Amy to go to Margaret’s gallery and spend the afternoon talking to her.  Margaret could tell Amy exactly how she held her brush and other things she did. So that was really lovely.

DP: When they are just beginning their relationship, what do Margaret and Walter want in life?

LK: I thinks she’s happy to be a painter and he’s smelling success in a big way. You have to understand that when he takes credit for her paintings initially, in the restaurant, there’s no way for them to know it’s going to become the most successful art in the United States. When she gives up control and allows him to sell her paintings as his paintings in the basement of the hungry i, she in no way thinks this lie is going to continue for the next ten years.

DP: Is she thinking that eventually Walter’s going to give her credit?

LK: Either that, or he won’t.  But for now it’s, hey, we’re sitting right under a bunch of paintings that people are buying because a man was the artist. I think Walter was like, “Hey, we’re making money, we can buy a house, we can do all kinds of stuff.” So he convinces her to say yes to that and then it’s a slippery slope. It’s almost like Watergate, when the cover-up becomes bigger than the crime itself.  She is now complicit in her own debasement. And once the lie becomes so large she can’t tell the truth to anyone including Jane, because they’ve committed fraud by taking in all this money on the pretext of something that isn’t true. Walter is really adept at manipulating her into feeling that she has to stay suppressed. What makes him an interesting villain is that he can’t understand why she’s unhappy. Everything he promised her has come true–they’re making money, they’re living a fantastic life, they’re meeting Joan Crawford. And Jane has a college fund. So why isn’t Margaret satisfied?

DP: Obviously because she is like a slave in a locked room all day turning out new paintings for him to sell–and she has to live a lie in which he receives the praise she deserves.

LK: Margaret has talked about how when the lie happened and Walter took over her life, she felt she could no longer socialize with people.  She was so uncomfortable telling the lie, she found it easier just to push people away. That’s the truth.  Scott and I felt we had to dramatize that, which we did by using the composite DeeAnn character [Kristen Ritter].  DeeAnn’s a friend she knows from the old days, but as her life progresses it becomes increasingly difficult for Margaret to let her be part of her life.

DP: Shunning a friend is one thing, but I think the hardest thing for audiences to understand will be Margaret’s increasing neglect of her daughter, Jane [Delaney Raye and Madeleine Arthur].

LK: That is part of the movie.  Margaret starts out being very close to her daughter, but because she must paint all the time in seclusion and lie to Jane that it is Walter who is painting the big-eyes art, they drift apart. In the film you get a sense of them coming back together.  They lived a long time in Hawaii and now they both live in San Francisco. A few weeks ago Scott and I drove up there to see them.  They’d been aware of the project for a long time and had read the script but we showed them a rough cut of the film.  We felt like we needed to get them on board, so Scott and I sat to the side and watched them watch the movie. It was really an emotional experience for both of them. Jane’s husband was there along with the son of the gallery owner who exhibits Margaret’s paintings today.

DP: After a few years, Walter continued telling the public that he painted the big-eye art, but he said that Margaret and even Jane dabbled as painters. That allowed Margaret some freedom to paint something other than the big-eyed waifs.

LK: I actually think Margaret’s other paintings are quite lovely.  They’re my favorite paintings of hers.  I think at a certain point painting the big-eyed children became work, because Walter demanded so many pieces from her so that they could be mass-produced. Whereas with the others–and this is purely my take on it–she had more artistic freedom. In some of those late-’60s paintings we know exactly what’s going on. A woman bursting out of her frame, a woman being torn in half–you can read the psychology of what’s going on in Margaret’s mind. You brought up the family angle.  When Walter states that everyone in the family is a painter, it is really another way of keeping Margaret in her place. Margaret had her paintings up on the wall alongside Jane’s scratch drawings. She was allowed a spot in the gallery but it was at the kiddies’ table.

DP: How did religion fit into Margaret’s story?

LK: Margaret was always searching for something and she dabbled in a lot of different religions.  She was raised Methodist, but she was in San Francisco during the sixties and  looked into various New Age-y kind of things–numerology, stuff like that. She was a person looking for an answer, and it wasn’t until the Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked on her door in Hawaii, after she’d left Walter, that she felt she found one.  She found a religion that actually spoke to what she was going through. The two women who came to her door and talked to her were the first people that she allowed into her house.  They could console her and tell her that maybe there’s a life outside of this. I’d say that the things they gave her were all about telling the truth.  Margaret got religion and it allowed her to take her work back. It allowed her to finally break free of the chains.  She’s still a Jehovah’s Witness and it’s something she’s very sincere about. We wanted to be respectful of that, and when we approached her, we said we wanted to include that in the film and not make fun of it. I actually didn’t know that much about Jehovah’s Witnesses and had to educate myself.  Scott and I went through all the literature and scriptures trying to find lessons and quotes.

DP: You mentioned that you started working on Big Eyes while you were working on something else. Do you still write several things at the same time?

LK: We do even though it’s always a little frustrating.  The problem is that you always feel that if you’re working on one script you’re not working on the other.  We’re writing a project right now for Warner Bros. and at the same time we’re writing a television miniseries about O.J. Simpson. The script for Warners is based on John McAfee, who started out developing anti-virus software and went off into the jungle. He’s an eccentric character and I think we’ve written a very interesting script about him, so hopefully that’ll happen. The O.J. Simpson miniseries we’re doing right now is the most ambitious project we’ve ever done.  It has given us a bigger canvas than we’ve ever had. It’s ten hours starting with the night of the murder and ending at his acquittal. What we’re doing is a big a very juicy Altmanesque portrait of Los Angeles with all these different characters, the birth of 24-hour media, the LAPD and Rodney King and race relations, and, of course, the court case.

DP: Big Eyes is a script you wrote after many years in the business. Do you think you two write the same types of scripts now that you wrote when you were younger?

LK: I think so.  I think we know what we’re good at. There was a period in the nineties when everything we wrote just got made, but then studios changed a bit.  Problem Child today would be– what an irresponsible film, run those people out of town!  And I can’t imagine studios making a movie like The People vs. Larry Flynt right now.  But we still continued to write as we always had.  I feel like there’s a better answer for this, but I think it’s a good thing that we still write the way we do.  Often people do their best work when they’re young but I think Scott and I are still fiery.

DP: You’ve worked on Big Eyes for eleven years.  You’re eleven years older than you were when you started. Is it the same film?

LK: It is very much the same film, I think, in that we always had a clear vision for it.  Over the years we never got it made but we always controlled it, even though it fell apart a couple of times because of the financial crisis or an actor getting pregnant.  We just had bad luck, but we always were able to extract it from that bad situation to keep it going, because we really believed in it. There was frustration but we kept thinking, “We’re going to keep it out of the system so that we can control it and keep it going until we can figure out a way to get it made.” Some people thought we were crazy because we were devoting so much time to this one project, but we managed to pull it off with this high level of talent attached to it.  I’m really quite proud.

It's a Wonderful Life Is Even More Wonderful on a Big Screen

Special Theatrical Screening

It's a Wonderful Life Is Even More Wonderful on a Big Screen

(from Sag Harbor Express Online 12/18/14)

By Danny Peary

George and Clarence get to know each other.

Sure, you’ve watched or plan to watch It’s a Wonderful Lifeon television for the fifteenth or twenty-fifth consecutive December. But did you know that that you can also see Frank Capra’s incomparable Christmas classic in 35mm in a theater in New York City?  The IFC Center at 323 Avenue of the Americas, off 4th Street, has been showing it several times a day and that will continue through holidays. Wouldn’t it be very cool to see it there on Christmas Day?  Or see it this weekend. I can testify that as splendid as it is on television, despite an avalanche of commercials, watching it on a big screen is a totally different, much superior experience. The first time I sawIt’s a Wonderful Life was on a big screen in the late sixties, when a 16mm print was screened by the Wisconsin Film Society in a lecture hall on the UW-Madison campus. At the time, it was by no means a holiday favorite and, in fact, none of my film fanatic friends had seen it either–or even wondered about it.   Afterward, I was shocked that one of the best films I’d ever seen had such a sorry reputation for twenty years.

Capra had been shocked by the negative reaction himself when he released the picture in 1946. “I thought it was the greatest film I ever made,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Better yet, I thought it was the greatest film anybody ever made.”

Unfortunately, the mood of the country had changed because of the war and moviegoers and critics were so quick to reject “Capra-corn” and unabashed sentimentality and search for darker films with cynical themes that they failed to notice that much of It’s a Wonderful Life is as dark and cynical as it gets.  It would take decades before the film was embraced by America.  That we fans began to see it repeatedly and spread the word made it an obvious choice for inclusion in my 1981 book, Cult Movies.  Also, it was my choice for Best Picture of 1946 in my 1993 book,Alternate Oscars (in which I also gave James Stewart my Best Actor designation).  In those books I wrote full chapters about It’s a Wonderful Life.  I hope you check them out, but for now, here is my brief entry in my 1986 book, Guide for the Film Fanatic:

“Once neglected, Frank Capra’s masterpiece about the importance of every individual has become a Christmas perennial and one of our most popular films.  Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Capra wrote the script, with an assist from Jo Swerling–they adapted a story, “The Greatest Gift,” which the writer Philip van Doren Stern sent as a Christmas card to his friends.  James Stewart is George Bailey, who has always dreamed of traveling but has spent his entire life in Bedford Falls running his modest building-and-loan and making sure that the good townspeople aren’t left in the evil hands of rich Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore).  He has sacrificed all his life for others’ happiness and security, but where has it gotten him?  On Christmas Eve he realizes that he’ll be going to jail because his Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) mislaid–actually, Potter stole it–a large check.  George wishes he’d never been born and contemplates suicide.  But his wife Mary (beautifully played by the beautiful Donna Reed) and daughters have been praying for him, and a sweet angel, Clarence Goodbody (Henry Travers), arrives to help George–and earn his wings in the process.  In a nightmarish sequence he shows George what a dreadful place Bedford Falls would have been without him and what miserable lives all his friends and family would have led if he hadn’t been around–George realizes that every man makes a profound difference, and that a good man such as himself can benefit countless people.

George follows in the steps of other Capra idealists who have their faith in themselves and their conservative values severely tested.  But when he’s at the brink of giving up, his faith is restored by those very people he has spent a lifetime teaching through words and by example.  Coming to his financial rescue in a tear-jerking finale, they prove to George that they have learned (while he has forgotten) his great lesson: people’s most important investments are not in stocks, bonds, or property, but in each other. Throughout we get teary-eyed not from sadness but because George (mostly) and others do good deeds.

The success of this film surely has to do with how reassuring it is: not only do you have a family who adores you, a hometown sweetheart who loves and marries you, a guardian angel (Travers is great!) who loves and protects you, but also an entire town of people who love you and come to your aid when you’re in trouble.

This film allowed Stewart to show how great an actor he was, as his character ranges from optimistic hick philosopher to the pessimistic postwar figure he’d play in Vertigo and Anthony Mann westerns.  Likewise, the film itself ranges from riotous comedy to dreadful nightmare, allowing the rest of the wonderful cast to exhibit versatility. Also with: Beulah Bondi, Ward Bond and Frank Faylen (as the first Bert and Ernie), H.B. Warner, Gloria Grahame, Todd Karns, Samuel S. Hinds, Frank Albertson, Virginia Patton, Bobbie Anderson (George as a boy), Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer, Sheldon Leonard, Karolyn Grimes (as Zuzu).

Box Set Features Oates in Outstanding Oater

The Shooting on DVD

Box Set Features Oates in Outstanding Oater

(from Sag Harbor Express Online 12/8/14)

A double feature now available through Criterion.

By Danny Peary

Warren Oates.

If you’re looking for the perfect stocking stuffer for a friend or yourself, I can confidently recommend Criterion’s new Blu-ray and DVD box-sets of a terrific double feature directed by Monte Hellman, who provides audio commentary.  Unique to their genre, The Shooting andRide in the Whirlwind are exciting and thought-provoking cult westerns that were filmed back-to-back in Utah for only $150,000 combined of penurious producer Roger Corman’s money.  They were barely released in America in 1967, but were celebrated in France because of their existential, almost surreal nature.  Each starred a pre-Easy Rider Jack Nicholson and post-The Diary of Anne Frank Millie Perkins, but a major reason The Shooting is the superior film is that veteran character actor Warren Oates was given a rare lead, playing a smart, nice guy bounty who escorts Perkins through the wilderness for reasons she won’t reveal.  (His companion is played by Will Hutchens, TV’s Sugarfoot.) Among the box set’s special features is an exceptional new video/textual appreciation of Oates by critic Kim Morgan.  Like Morgan, whose essay is long, thorough, and passionate, I am a big fan of the versatile actor who passed away in 1982 when just in his mid-fifties.  This is what I wrote about him in my 1991 book Cult Movie Stars: “A dynamic presence in extremely violent pictures.  Sam Peckinpah, after using him in his TV westerns, cast him in four of his films: Ride the High Country (1962), Major Dundee (1965), The Wild Bunch (1969), and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974).   He began in character parts but ultimately moved into leads, most notably in three quirky existential films for Monte Hellman.  The short, dark-haired actor could be friendly ferocious, and funny.  In Two-Lane Blacktop, he talked a blue streak; in The Cockfighter, he spoke only once.  In The Shooting, in which he outsmarts and outfights the sadistic Jack Nicholson, he proved he even was capable of playing a western hero, the hardest of tasks for an actor.  Oates himself wasn’t impressed; as he told F. Albert Bomar and Alan J. Warren: ‘I feel most uncomfortable in a western role, because my image of the western man is John Wayne, and I’m just a little s**t.’  With a scruffy beard, slovenly appearance, and a crazed, puzzled expression, he was ideal playing subhuman villains, as in Ride the High Country.  But he was a cerebral actor and had much impact when his villains, losers, and heroes were complex figures.  There was always something going on behind those bulging eyes and that sheepish grin, something dark that was driving him to be violent (or mean) or tearing him apart.  You usually felt his character’s pain, and even if you didn’t like who he was or what he did, you felt empathy for him.  You also marveled at Oates’s great performances working for out-of-the-mainstream, often new directors.  He really was a great actor.  His death was a shock –we fans felt robbed.”  I hope the new release ofThe Shooting will introduce Oates to a new generation of fans.

Norah Shapiro and Tenzin Kecheo Find Real Beauty in "Miss Tibet"

Playing at Film Festival

Norah Shapiro and Tenzin Kecheo Find Real Beauty in Miss Tibet

(from Sag Harbor Express Online 11/25/14)

By Danny Peary

Norah Shapiro (left) and Tenzin Kecheo.

Miss Tibet: Beauty in Exile fits my category Movies That Should Play in Sag Harbor.  I expect it to play at various festivals, but the enthusiastic reception it had at a recent sold-out screening at Doc NYC indicates that a smart distributor might snap it up and you’ll be able to see it in theaters in the not-too-distant future. The second documentary feature by Minneapolis director Norah Shapiro follows a young, assimilated Tibetan-American, Tenzin Khecheo, as she travels from her home in Minnesota to India, where she was born in exile, to compete in the Miss Tibet beauty pageant. It’s a most peculiar event in Dharamsala run by a dynamic but somewhat untrustworthy personality. As Shapiro’s press notes state, “Pageant founder Lobsang Wangyal seeks to fill a void within the Tibetan exile community by bringing a bit of glamour into his corner of the world.  Complete with catwalks and evening gowns [and skimpy swimsuits, his] pageant [gives] an opportunity for exiled Tibetan women to both immerse themselves in Tibetan culture and add their voices to the global fight for a free Tibet by using the pageant as an unlikely political platform…Tenzin Khecheo finds herself feeling like a fish out of water, surrounded by contemporary Tibetans desperately clinging to their culture while striving to return to their homeland.”  Below is a transcript of the brief Q&A session with Norah Shapiro, Tenzin Khecheo, and coproducer Kelly Nathe that took place after a screening last Monday at the IFC Center. It is followed by my interview, over tea, with the personable director and her smart-beyond-her-years subject.

Audience Q&A with Norah Shapiro, Tenzin Khecheo, and Kelly Nathe

Q: Norah, how did you get involved with this film?

Norah Shapiro: I first heard about the Tibetan beauty pageant when I was in the middle of making my first film, If You Dare, about an inner-city theater company that works with at-risk kids.  Somebody who was peripherally involved came up to me and said, “I’m watching what you’re doing as a filmmaker. I’m writing a play about the Miss Tibet pageant. What do you think about it as a documentary?”  I was immediately fascinated by what seemed to be an impossibility from my limited understanding of Tibetan myth. Kelly came into the project years later.

Kelly Nathe:  We met at the time she was finishing If You Dare and talked about doing something together.  She told me she was working on a film about the Tibetan beauty pageant.  She’d filmed the pageant a couple of times in a row and wanted to go back and finish it.  So I offered to help her.

NS: It was a crazy story.  I had been working on Miss Tibet for a couple of years.  Then I put it on the backburner to finish If You Dare and take care of my children. I had traveled around the world looking for my subject and actually had thought I’d use a different young woman.  Then inadvertently I learned that Tenzin Khecheo who lived only minutes from me in Minneapolis was entering the Miss Tibet North America Pageant here in New York City.  And the prize for winning was to compete in the 10^th Anniversary Miss Tibet pageant in Dharamsala, India, where I was already planning to go. We came to New York and the pageant took place on New Year’s Eve in an Armenian church. Lo and Behold Tenzin won. She was so compelling from the get-go, and remarkably gracious and courageous to allow me and the camera inside her life. And it went from there.

Q: Tenzin, what is it like to see your story in a movie?

Tenzin Khecheo: It was probably the biggest experience of my life and I never thought I’d see it on screen.  And it’s really weird to see it from another person’s point of view.  At the same time, after seeing the movie and hearing people give feedback, I feel more confident and proud to have grown through this journey. I know my mom is really proud and that’s the biggest gift for me.

Q: Why did your family come to Minnesota from India?

TK: New York has the largest Tibetan population.  Second to that is Minnesota, in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

NS: The Twin Cities has a very rich and interesting history of having a really diverse refuge community. There are Laotians, the largest Somalian population outside of Somalia, Tibetans.  It is very welcoming.

Q: Was there any convincing you had to do with the Miss Tibet pageant organizers to make sure you weren’t limited in what you could shoot, including the political content?

NS: Remarkably, no.  There were many times we worried about that.  But my observation about how Lobsang Wangyal does his business is that any publicity is good publicity, even if it is controversial.  Controversy is essential to his idea of the pageant.

Q: Has anyone thought of having Miss Tibet compete afterward in the Miss Universe or Miss World pageants?

SH: I’m sure China would put pressure on the pageant to not allow her to compete.

TK: There was a small pageant in 2007 and China made a big deal of it. I don’t think any Tibetan girl or woman would go on stage representing China. If I went to Miss Universe, I’m pretty sure there would be a crackdown.  I’d step down because I wouldn’t represent China.

Q: Norah, how has Tenzin been since the Miss Tibet pageant?

NS: She’s going about her daily business, going to college and working toward a nursing degree.  I think she’s looking at the film and appearances in relation to it as kind of a platform. She’s walking that line but being Tibetan is central to her life.  I think she’ll always try to figure it out.

Q: Tenzin, you’re an extraordinary ambassador for your culture and country.  What more can people do about the situation in Tibet?

TK: I believe this film a small contribution to the cause of making more people aware of the Tibetan situation.  Tibet shouldn’t be thought of only as an oppressed country but as a country that has lost its home but is still fighting for it.  Its voices keep getting higher and higher and the passion for Tibet is still burning and is something the people will never let go of until it is free again. Just talking about Tibet, saying the name Tibet, is a great way to contribute.  People in Tibet don’t have the rights to talk about the culture, religion, and beliefs, so making Tibet an every-day topic is a step everyone can take.

Q: How can people keep track of your movie?

NS: We’re not sure where the next screening will be yet.  We expect it to be at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival in April. We’re waiting to hear from a number of other festivals.  We’re thrilled to have our premiere at Doc NYC.  If you’re interested in following our film, you can go to our web site, misstibetbeautyinexile.com or follow us on facebook or twitter.

My One-on-Two Interview with Norah Shapiro and Tenzin Khecheo

Danny Peary: Looking back, why do you think you were so drawn to this topic so that you’d spend years on it, even filming previous Miss Tibet pageants?

Norah Shapiro (laughing): I certainly didn’t think I’d be working on it for the next eight years. I was fascinated by it…

DP: And I’d guess the subject, a beauty pageant, also irritated you in a challenging way…

NS: Of course! I was a public defender before I was a filmmaker. Part of my personality is (A) being a little bit oppositional and (B) being really drawn to figuring out something that defies the easy, knee-jerk explanation.  Also I had read The Jew in the Lotus [Rodger Kamenetz's 1994 book about a historic dialogue between rabbis and the Dalai Lama] years before and saw there was an intertwine between the Jewish exile experience and the Tibetan exile experience that I found compelling. There has been a long connection between Jews and Buddhists.  This was out there in the cosmos, feeding me.  And I land in India for the first time and I meet this guy who runs the pageant, Lobsang Wangyal, a maverick Tibetan impresario. To have someone like that fall into your lap?  He’s in part a brilliant visionary and an admirable, amazing guy, but he’s definitely an antihero.  Who could walk away from a cat like that?  Then I met Tenzin Khecheo, and she was riveting.  So I kept having things happen every step of the way that told me I had to make this movie.

DP: Tenzin, did you ask Norah why she was making the movie?

Tenzin Khecheo: Yeah, I was curious.  I was surprised she was making a movie about the Miss Tibet pageant because I thought the only people interested in that were in the Tibetan community.  Not a lot of people know about it.  That’s what makes this movie unique.  She wanted to give a fresh perspective on the struggle of Tibetans since China’s occupation, but instead of the gloom she wanted to celebrate the Tibetan culture and identity.  She told me about her background and interest in the Tibetan history and women.  I never thought there would be a film about this and to have it premiere in New York City is so surprising.

DP: Did you do any filming in Minnesota prior to Tenzin winning the Miss Tibet North America pageant?

NS: None. We met there at the very end of October or beginning of November in 2010 and the event took place in a month or month and a half.  Some of the footage of that pageant that is in the movie was mine and the rest was the organization’s.  That’s the first footage I have of Tenzin.  Then after she won, we started spending time with her in earnest in Minnesota.

TK: Obviously, it was a huge coincidence to have us both be living in Minneapolis and both be going to the pageant in New York, but then to have me actually go to New York and win?  It was meant to be.

DP: Norah, if Tenzin had lost that North American contest, what would have happened to your movie?

NS: I don’t even want to go there.  That’s the fun of documentaries, you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen.

DP: Tenzin, if you had lost that pageant in New York would you have entered the next year because you wanted to go to India?

TK: I don’t think I would have.  There had been a small pageant in Minnesota that my friends were doing as a fund-raising event.  I like being on stage and getting attention, so when they asked me to be in it I said, “Okay, why not?”  That was really nerve-wracking because it was in front of the whole Tibetan community.  I had plans to come to New York before I heard about the Miss Tibet North America pageant from my cousin, who had a relationship with the organizers.  I was hesitating about competing in it because my confidence level wasn’t that high and I was embarrassed about speaking Tibetan and worried I wouldn’t be comfortable in front of judges. But my mom said, “You did it the first time so the second time won’t hurt. And you’re going to be in New York anyway so just do it for fun.” No one knew I’d win and go to India.  That was an eye-opener.

DP: Was your goal all along to go to India to be in the Miss Tibet pageant?

TK: No, that started with the New York pageant. After I signed up I saw that the prize was a trip to Dharamsala to compete in the Miss Tibet pageant.

DP: Had your mother ever talked about taking everyone to India to be with the Tibetan exile community there?

TK: Maybe eventually in the future.  But after I won, she saw it was an opportunity for her to go back then.  I saw it as a way for all of us to go and I’d be going there with a purpose. My family wanted to tag along to support me and to see India.

DP: As compelling as you found Lobsang, you wouldn’t have thought of making the film about him. You wanted to make it about a girl.

NS: True. I always wanted it to be one of the contestants.

DP: Because you wanted to relate vicariously to a young female?

NS: There was nothing vicarious about a girl entering a beauty pageant.  That’s the last thing I ever would have been a part of.  In fact, I’ve told Tenzin that I wouldn’t want my daughter to be in a beauty pageant. But there was a vicariousness for me in regard to her experience in relationship to her own cultural identity.  The pageant was an interesting way for her to experience this. Also, it turns out in many cultures beauty pageants have ended up being a really interesting vehicles for something more. They are not simply about objectifying women or anything else that feminists would traditionally snub their noses at, but a place for celebration of a culture and a platform for women to speak out that wouldn’t otherwise exist.  There have been a lot of movies made about these outsider pageants because it is a way for a culture to highlight itself. It’s complicated.

DP: The Miss Tibet pageant is almost subversive. It’s very odd.

NS: Exactly. Like other societies, the Tibetan society is patriarchal and there are not a lot avenues for women to have their voices heard. Even in this modern day, the women are supposed to be docile, demure, and quiet.  I think Tenzin was drawn to being able to present them in a different light.

TK: I was attracted to going to Dharamsala for the pageant because I thought I could break from the stereotype of the typical Tibetan woman. I grew up watching Miss America and other pageants, I was excited by the glamour part because I like being on stage with lights and cameras.  When I went to India I already knew the Miss Tibet pageant was a platform for us young women to talk about what’s going on in Tibet.  But when I was there I had a week of training and learned about the culture, the language, the music, politics–that wasn’t what I expected.  Those small talks and lessons made me realize this wasn’t like a westernized beauty pageant.  It has our culture and identity in it and lets us celebrate it as a Tibetan woman. I don’t want to my life to be doing the housework and being in the kitchen.  I want to be more than that.  I do not want to be stereotyped by gender but be seen as an individual; I want to see what I can do.

DP: Did your perception of what a Tibetan woman is change in India?

TK: No, because my mother has always been my main role model for what a Tibetan woman is. She’s hardworking, family-oriented, loves her children, and makes everyone happy.  She doesn’t have a lot of time for herself but she never lets that show.  Having her as mom gave me a strong sense of what a Tibetan woman is and how I wanted to be when I grew up.  I wanted to be someone who can do everything and doesn’t complain about anything. It was already planted in with me. And then to have Miss Tibet as part of my life, my impression of what a Tibetan woman kept building up and up. It was a huge leap. Obviously, my views have changed a little bit because the Tibetan women in India are a little more traditional and more closed-in, but the other contestants were more like me.

DP: I see that many films at this festival deal with characters trying to find an identity and learn their culture.

RS: That is certainly what interests me as a filmmaker, the work that I want to do.

TS: Identity is very important aspect to everyone, especially when you have a conflicted identity. For me it’s about how to balance being an American without losing my Tibetan roots.  Finding out who we are is such a universal topic because everyone at one time has an identity crisis and asks themselves who they are as person, what their values are, and what their beliefs are. The identity topic attracts people because it’s so relatable.

DP: What part does “beauty” play in this movie?

TS: Usually when I go out I’ll put make-up on.  During the week in Dharamsala there wasn’t much time for that because I’d wake up and go to our lessons.  Honestly, for me, going through the process of learning about Tibetan culture and getting more involved in it was the “beauty” part of it.  That’s what made this pageant different from others.

NS: I intentionally included an anthropologist talking about Tibetan beauty pageants and the idea of female beauty being about the culture. So for people to be looking at Tibetan women’s beauty is improper and ludicrous.  Tenzin and the other girls are beautiful but the culture and customs, the dance, the music, all of it was so beautiful to me.  I care about beauty.  I am a devout feminist and I reject the idea that feminists can’t care about beauty. I think it’s hypocritical to say beauty doesn’t matter. Tenzin and her sisters are stunning, as are many Tibetans.  They are a beautiful people.

DP: Tenzin, talk about sitting with Ama Adhe on the visit to the Tibetan Women’s Association  She tells you that she spent a third of her life in prison for protesting against China’s invasion of Tibet.

TS: When we went to visit her I didn’t know what would happen.  She just started talking about her struggles and how she spent twenty-seven years in prison and how there were three hundred women with her and all but four died of starvation. She survived and she’s still wishing for a free Tibet.  Just to hear that was so emotional for me.  You can see my reaction in the film.  I automatically connected to my own grandmother and wondered how she felt when crossing the border into India.  If she had been caught this is what she would have gone through.  It was amazing to see her spirits so high after going through what she did.

DP: Norah, how was it to witness that?

NS: It was an honor to be in the presence of Ama Adhe and I could see what was happening on Tenzin’s face as she listened to her.  Because of our relationship, I wasn’t worrying about anything else, I knew what was happening with Tenzin was profound.

DP: I heard Emma Griffiths, the film’s publicist, talk about Miss Tibet as a “coming of age” film.  I hadn’t thought of that.

Norah Shapiro: It’s funny that I hadn’t thought of it that way either.  When I first got in touch with Emma, I asked her what she liked about the film. And that was one of the things she said. The second she said that, I said, “Oh, my god, it is a coming of age film! Why didn’t I think of that?”  It absolutely is that.  Tenzin’s coming of age, the pageant’s coming of age—all of it. I realized at a certain time while making this film that this story is about any immigrant’s or children of immigrants’ experience in the American melting pot.  It’s my own story, too. I’m only one step farther along than Tenzin, she’s where my mother was.  So I relate to a lot of things I’ve seen Tenzin going through.

DP: Do you mean that you relate to her being young?

NS: No, I mean in terms of how I feel about what I know and don’t know about my own religious culture.  I’m part of an ancient religious culture, yet I don’t practice it on a daily basis. I ask, “How does that make sense?” and “What part of my identity is that?”  When I had those thoughts about my own cultural identity, the story I wanted to tell fell into place.

DP: What about you, Tenzin? Did you see this as a coming of age film because you feel you evolved?

TK: I was young Tibetan-American but through the whole process of going to India to be in the pageant, without thinking there would be a movie afterward, I saw there was a whole new world for me to be in. Going through that whole pageant experience was a bridge to get there.  I was able to not be scared to go out there and take this new journey.

NS: My perception of her change was so profound.  I watched her in America when she had tremendous uncertainty and insecurity about “Am I going to be accepted by the Tibetan community as being Tibetan?  Am I Tibetan?” Then she went to India and I saw her come out on the other side, with such a stronger sense of who she is. Now she could say, “I am a Tibetan woman.”

DP: You had been working on this film long before you met Tenzin and, being a feminist, had reconciled your feelings about beauty pageants long before.  I’m not sure if Tenzin considered herself a feminist then, but did you convey your personal opinions to her?

NS: Not really.  My approach to filmmaking is that I try to be a fly on the wall and don’t want to be affecting or impacting but documenting.  Of course what I choose to include in the film and exclude and how I put it together reflects my point of view.  But did I inject my feminist beliefs with Tenzin during the making of the film?  Not at all, intentionally. However, since we finished shooting, Tenzin and I have had conversations and I let her know I was pleased to hear that Tenzin took a Women’s Studies class in college. We talked about what she was reading.  A couple of weeks ago, I went to her family’s home and showed Tenzin and her mother Miss Tibet for the first time and we had a conversation afterward about the film and other things.  And we ended up talking about what a feminist is and what a new feminist is. Having those conversations pleased me very much.

DP: At one point in the film, Tenzin, you cry about something in the pageant—I won’t divulge what it was but Norah filmed you in close-up while you talk and get teary.  But did she hold you afterward and offer reassuring words?

TK: It was an upsetting, bad moment regarding the pageant.  But like my mom, she assured me that the pageant didn’t matter as much as what I got from the experience, and my crossing the bridge and getting to the other side.

NS: Part of being a good documentary filmmaker is knowing when not to talk.  There were many times during the making of this film, I had to put on hold how I felt as a person and I how I felt affection for her and sympathy for what she was going through. I had to very consciously wait and let moments unfold so I could capture them on film.  A number of times I cried with her while I was filming her.  Once the camera was off, then I could hug and talk to her.

TK: Norah was my backbone in India. She was there every morning and if I had any questions or troubles she was there to talk me through it.  She would always tell me that I had nothing to worry about and was doing the best I could.  That was so important because my mom was staying at another hotel.  She was like a step-in mom for me.  She was always supportive.

DP: Norah, in that emotional scene, I was thinking Tenzin was having exactly the wrong, young person reaction.

NS: Of course. That’s why she gets to that place. I told her, “Listen to yourself.  Listen to what you are saying.  And remember all the things on the other side of what you’re feeling and talking about.” She came to see it that way, and not because I manipulated her.

DP: It’s a matter of patience.  She’s smart enough to figure it out herself.

NS: It takes a long time to edit a film, to put things together, and raise the funds, and there was time for there to be a big shift in her perspective. As time passed, her perspective on the pageant changed, in regard to what was important. She now says the most important thing was the experience.

TK: To be in that environment in India is a totally different experience than being in America. There were more opportunities there for us to do something for Tibet. There was also the camaraderie I felt for the others in the pageant, so there were many things I could get out of the pageant rather than just getting a crown.

DP: In India Tenzin bonds with her competitors and seems to become very enlightened by her experience among Tibetans in exile, so it surprised me that she became so adamant about winning the pageant.

TK: Yeah, that’s because I hadn’t realized how a big a platform the winner would have. That’s when it hit me.

NS: I don’t think that for Tenzin or the other girls it was, “Oh, I want the crown for me!” I think they truly became awakened to how big a deal it could be for Tibet if they won. I think that was why the girls who didn’t win were so devastated.

TK: Yes, I knew how important it was even before I arrived in India just to be part of the pageant. It wasn’t about becoming Miss Tibet, but what I could do for Tibet if I did win.  Winning isn’t just for you but the whole community.

DP: I know Tenzin grew up watching beauty pageants so I thought that kicked in when she realized how much she wanted to win.

NS: I think there was a little of that.

TK: When we were realizing that the final round was coming, there was the feeling, “Oh, I want this more than the other girl does.”  But that was never an issue among the girls.  There were no catfights or sabotage.  Of course all the girls wanted to win but it wasn’t just for selfish reasons. It had to do with how they could use the crown.

DP: Tenzin, at the Q&A you spoke about your journey as if it were over. I would think your journey is continuing.

TK: I thought the journey was the pageant but now that the movie has come out I think there is a long way to go for me. This movie showing and premiering in different places is how the journey continues. Maybe along the way people can relate to the new journey. I’m watching it grow. As more people know my story and about being a Tibetan-American and the situation in Tibet, my journey continues.  I think it’s not only Tibetans in the younger generation who will be able to relate to the double identity.  The young generation that lives here and doesn’t have a huge knowledge about their cultural identity can relate to the film.

DP: It’s as you are walking down a road and people fall in with you.

TK: Yeah. Just to have a world premiere here in New York was a huge deal.  I didn’t think a lot of people would be interested but it sold out.  Norah really made a good movie.  She worked so hard on it. There is nothing more I could ask for.

DP: What do you want to happen with this film?

TS: I want everyone to know that even though Tibet is going through a terrible occupation, we’re still going to keep the culture alive and we’re going to continue to celebrate it.  And I want people to see that Tibetan women are no longer just in the kitchen but are out there doing something for their country.  I hope this movie goes a long way in getting our cause attention. And I hope Tibetans see it and are proud of me for getting the word out.

NS: I want all that Tenzin just said.  It’s also an opportunity for my work to be seen.  I am very proud of this film and I hope that many people who think they know what a Tibetan is and what a beauty pageant is will see this film and have their eyes opened.

DP: Tenzin, I won’t say whether you win or lose the pageant but only that you deserved to win.

TK: Thank you!

NS: We don’t want anyone know.  It’s our cliffhanger!