Interview: “Sharknado” Screenwriter Thunder Levin

Posted on August 6, 2013 at 8:00 am

Amid all the summer superheroes and blockbuster sequels, no movie has captured the 2013 movie zeitgeist as much as a low-budget movie for the Syfy channel. Of course, I am speaking of “Sharknado.” And yes, it is about a shark-filled tornado. Its tagline is simple, but effective: “Enough said.”

If tweets were box-office receipts, “Sharknado” could win the summer. Produced by Asylum for $1 million, it has become a sensation, with television rebroadcasts and a one-night special event theatrical release. And my favorite costume at Comic-Con. And yes, a sequel is in the works and they’re crowd-sourcing the tagline.

It was a pleasure to speak with “Sharknado’s” screenwriter, Thunder Levin, who is amused, delighted, and perhaps a little bit dazed by the reception for the film. He told me what a scientist had to say about this idea, what the movie has in common with “Snakes on a Plane,” and the famous fans he was most excited to hear from.

How has your life changed?

I got an agent and I’ve been going on a lot more meetings. I hope to move forward to bigger and better things.

It’s hard to imagine anything bigger or better than “Sharknado!”

It depends on how you use the words “bigger” and “better.”

What was your goal when you began to write the script?

To have as much fun as we could. The script I turned in should have cost $100 million to make. And they had $1 million. My vision would have been even bigger. I had flaming sharks at one point falling from the sky. And the whole thing was about LA being hit by a hurricane and flooded with water. We were shooting on sunny days, so it was limited how big it could finally be. The main thing was to have fun with it and not believe it could ever be too over the top. The big moment at the end with the chainsaw and anything, there was some concern expressed that maybe it was going to far. My response was, “It’s called ‘Sharknado.’ We can’t go too far.”

Yes, I think that should be the tagline for the sequel. Were you presented with the title?

They came to me with the title. I had made another movie with the production company, Asylum, last year. Everybody was pretty happy with it and we were talking about what to do next. They were talking about a movie to be called “Shark Storm.” I said, “Is this a straight movie with sharks attacking during a storm or is this going to be some crazy storm of sharks?” They said, “sharks attacking during a storm,” and that didn’t really interest me. Apparently, about the same time, SyFy had decided they wanted to make a movie called “Sharknado.” And so somehow the guys from Syfy were talking to the guys from Asylum and they discovered they both wanted to make a sharks in a storm movie. So they basically combined the projects and kept the better title. They said, “We want you to write a movie called ‘Sharknado,'” and I said, “What do sharks have to do with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? Are they invading Europe?” I was thinking of NATO!

That’s a different species of sharks. So you have the title, and then what?

They had about half a page of notes, the stuff they’d like to see. I started from a fairly — I hesitate to use this word — realistic place about what would happen if LA was hit by a hurricane. We’re in the desert and our streets flood if there is five minutes of rain. If there’s a big rainstorm that’s the news all day, like two feet of snow in DC or New York. The city is not equipped to deal with it. It’s called the LA basin for a reason. It’s basically a shallow basin. So, if a hurricane hit Los Angeles, that much rain and a storm surge, the city would basically become like a lake. How would you get around and all of those problems. So I started with that premise, and then I added sharks! And tornados! And just kept going. If the ocean is washing into the city, why couldn’t there be sharks in the water? And if a hurricane spun off a tornado, which often occurs and creates a water spout, why couldn’t sharks be sucked up? There are verified cases of smaller fish being sucked up into water spouts and being deposited miles inland and so I took that to the next perfectly logical extreme. I don’t know why anyone wouldn’t find that believable!

Have you heard from any marine biologists or meteorologists about this idea?

Not directly, but I’ve read stuff online. Just a few days ago there was a quote from a JPL scientist who said that said it is incredibly unlikely but it is theoretically possible that sharks could be sucked into a tornado. It would have to be an F5 tornado and and there would have to be sharks there, but I felt vindicated!

How do you create a story for viewers to care about in the midst of a shark tornado?

There was more about the characters in the script. But we had a very short shooting schedule, just 18 days. Stuff gets cut, and for something like this the character development is going to have to go because they want the sharks and the killing and all that. But you have to care about the characters. Even though the situation is ridiculous, and the way we’re presenting it, the characters themselves have to exist in that reality. They can’t ever wink at the camera. They have to be in the moment and this is really happening to them. Otherwise it turns into a farce. It was important to me to make them as real as I could make them, give them a certain amount of background. I liked the idea of Fin and his ex-wife, the separated spouses, coming together and re-uniting because they have a shared history. A lot of people thought he had more chemistry with Nova, the gun-toting bartender, but I wanted Fin and his wife to have their past experiences come out and make them work together better as a team. Nova is from a different generation. I wanted the attraction between them to lose out to the less obvious but deeper relationship with his wife.

And the actors have to put themselves in the reality of the moment. Ian Ziering was kind of a revelation for me. I only knew him from “90210,” and I thought he really reinvented himself as an action star. He could do straight action after this. I think it’s just a matter of them committing to the reality of the character, no matter how extreme the situation we put them in, they have to say, “What would I do in this situation?” Really, that’s what acting boils down to.

What has been the best moment for you in the reactions to the movie?

Bleeding Cool picked up on the title last year and the reaction began building from that. The most amazing thing was trading tweets with Damon Lindeloff during the first broadcast. He tweeted that he would have a sequel written before the movie was done airing. I tweeted back that it should be a prequel, and he tweeted “touché” and we tweeted back and forth. To think that the guy behind “Lost” and “Prometheus” is trading tweets with me, about this ridiculous movie on Syfy, incredible. And Mia Farrow and Philip Roth tweeted about it! That’s just bizarre and surreal and amazing.

What is it that captivates people in a movie like this?

I was at the opening night of “Snakes on a Plane.” The audience I was with had a great time. They were laughing and shouting out lines and saying, “Hey look behind you!” and “Don’t do that!” and throwing popcorn at the screen. I know the movie didn’t do very well box office-wise, but the audience I saw it with had a great time. And I think that’s what happened when “Sharknado” was on, but in a virtual sense. It all happened on Twitter.

Unlike “Shakes on a Plane,” you didn’t have to face high expectations. You had the benefit of surprise.

And that’s something we’re going to have to deal with in the sequel. They’re going to see us coming. I haven’t figured out how to handle that yet.

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Interview: Jim Rash and Nat Faxon of “The Way Way Back”

Posted on July 3, 2013 at 3:59 pm

Nat Faxon and Jim Rash won a screenwriting Oscar for “The Descendants” and won the next day’s headlines by imitating Angelina Jolie’s leg-out pose when they accepted it. I talked to them about “The Way Way Back,” which they wrote, produced, directed, and appear in as actors. It is a coming of age story about a 14-year-old boy named Duncan (Liam James), reluctantly staying at a summer home on the beach with his mother, Pam (Toni Collette), and her new boyfriend, Trent (Steve Carell). To get out of the house, he takes a job at a local water park, where he is befriended by the manager (Sam Rockwell as Owen). Faxon and Rash play some of the other employees. I talked to them about casting Steve Carell as a bad guy, using Spotify to find songs for the film, what acting has taught them about directing, and the very important task they forgot on the first day.

Do all teenagers look for a new family?

NF: You’re always saying, “I don’t belong here! Where is someone who understands me?” We all go through that.

JR: Except me! My family was perfect. (Laughs)

What do we look for?

NF: We think there’s something better, someone who’s not going to tell us what to do. We hope there’s always going to be a cheerleader who will give us independence. And then we realize — hopefully — that the place we were in was good for us in the long run.

Adolescence is such an excruciating time of life and yet we keep being drawn to those stories.

JR: The vulnerability that you have at that age, the innocence that is transforming, a rite of passage, becoming more of a free-thinker, more opinionated about what your views are and what you like and don’t like as emblems of who you are — there’s something very relatable and very honest in that transition time. With the help of someone else or on your own, you’re making that leap and that’s universal no matter where you come from.

NF: And once you’ve been through it, you have a context, and you can look back and remember it and understand more than you could when it was happening. You’re endeared to these characters pretty instantly because you know exactly what this is.

Who thinks of nicest-guy-in-the-world Steve Carell as a bad guy who is a liar and a bully? Where does that come from?

NF: We went against type for a lot of reasons and he came to mind pretty fast. Steve’s character, Trent, is difficult. He’s a jerk, but he’s more complicated than that. He’s a tragic male character, stuck in a cycle. But we needed that innate likability. His girlfriend, Pam , where she is right now, she is scared, so she needs to see the attractiveness in this protection he offers. We see him with his friends. We see what he’s like with them, and how he is appealing. We needed an actor who understood that Trent’s not on a typical arc of change. He’s in a circle of non-change. Some people who have seen it a second time start to feel some sympathy for him. Not that they want to hang around him, more like, “I hope you get better,” or “I hope you wake up.” He’s also needed for Duncan and Pam to allow them to have this moment of awakening. So Steve was perfect because he embraced that.

And Steve Carell was probably thrilled to play a role like this.

NF: He wrote us a very nice note saying that he loved the script. And then there was this phrase…

JR: He said, “I love this, but, lest I become a Trent to my own family, I have to decline.” We were shooting during the summer and he spends a lot of time on the east coast with his family. He didn’t want to be on location away from them. So we wrote back and said, “What if we shoot where you’ll be?”

That’s how you found your location?

JR: And so he said all right. We were originally planning North Carolina, which is where I’m from. But the East Coast experience is the East Coast experience. East Coast destination vacations are completely different to me than West Coast, where we are now. We were like, “We can shoot in your back yard.”

NF: We lucked out in terms of locations. We were so fortunate because our scouting literally took one day. We had two locations that were central in the movie, the water park and the house. We found one in the morning and one in the afternoon. We wanted the place to feel local and not one of these enormous, corporate, Six Flag-y type water parks. We also didn’t want it to be so sad and pathetic that you would never go there. It had to be fun and sort of Oz for our movie. And this place really exists, it’s really named Water Wizz, off of Route 28, and it really is a family-owned establishment. It’s the perfect size, it’s the perfect look, it had everything that we needed. We shot there while the park was open, and so a lot of those people were just water park go-ers.

What have you learned as actors that helps you work with actors as directors?

NF: Because we know this material and we are actors and have had the fortune to work with good directors, we know that for actors it is nice to talk about the character, what makes them this way. There are directors who are more technical. We are more about how we know the script, we know the intent, we know the performance, we know actors. We put that angle on it, and we try to keep those conversations with the actors about that. These people are fantastic. All you need is to give them any kind of clarity about what is happening now, what’s it about, where we are in the story. And then you just let them have a little free reign to explore that. And we’re all in a tight time line, so we have to do it in four takes! Some of these bigger movies, they’re shooting two pages a day, and so that’s different — we have to shoot six to make our time line. And we had a lot of one set-ups, maybe two set-ups. We had walks along the beach that was basically one shot, sitting and waiting for Trent at one point, all in one shot. So we did a lot of those for time and for the aesthetic of feeling in the moment, feeling that we’re voyeurs, eavesdropping on this moment. Both creative and logistic decisions.

JR: Trying not to micro-manage, letting the actors trust their instincts, trying not to over-note them. That’s something that feels more comfortable when you’re not thinking about the twelve things the director just told you but just one or two adjustments that might help.

What guided you as first-time directors with camera placement and all the technical stuff? Who influenced you?

NF: Being first-time directors, it was important for us to surround ourselves with very experienced, talented department heads, like our Director of Cinematography, John Bailey, whose list of films is incomparable. We had a lot of discussions with him about the look and feel — that was something we could speak very confidently about. It’s important while Duncan is in the house that he feel very isolated and claustrophobic. What’s the best cinematic way to achieve that? Should we put the camera down low to feel a little bit of the closing in? Then when we get to the water park it would be great to have it more open and fluid and vast and colorful, use steadicam more. When it got super-technical, lenses and all that, we would just say, “That looks great!” “You got it!” That’s the benefit of having someone like John Bailey, who you can trust with all of the little, important, specifics.

And you worked with one of the greats in costume design!

JR: The legend, Ann Roth.

NF: Our producer had worked with her on “The Hours” and a bunch of other movies. He reached out and she read the script and she loved it and wanted to be a part of it. We were so incredibly fortunate. You don’t have to work with her to know what a legend she is, and to work with her is really fun because she is such an incredible personality and you want to spend as much time with her as possible.

JR: Just for the soundbites!

NF: She is brutally honest and she wants you to be brutally honest but terrifies you! The actresses showed up and it was fantastic. We would talk about the characters and as soon as they knew it was Ann Roth, they said, “Fine. She’ll tell me what to wear.” They trust her so completely. That type of care and confidence.

She’s so intimidating. She had an idea for a shirt for Duncan in the opening scene. In our eyes it felt slightly too Midwestern, maybe like a farm boy look. I worked up the courage to say, “Ann, I just want to let you know, we might want to go another way with the shirt, look at some other choices….” and she goes, “All right…” and calls the co-designer, Michelle Matland, and says, “THE DIRECTOR DOES NOT LIKE THE SHIRT. THE SHIRT WILL NOT PLAY!!” And I was like, “I’m so sorry! Is that okay?” “I PREFER THAT YOU TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT.” She’s very intimidating, but very collaborative. She wants to know what your opinion is and respects you more if you are able to tell you that.

JR: She was so excited because the pants Allison is wearing the first time you meet her, these tight pants with a rodeo on it, she has been trying to get that into a movie forever. Shirley MacLaine wore them many many many years ago, and she’d been saving them. She pulled them right out and did not miss a beat.

NF: She is a love and a joy to work with and so is Michelle, who is a wonderful counter-balance.

I thought the music was exceptionally well chosen, too.

JR: We had Linda Cohen. We were on a budget and music is not cheap. We wanted to make sure the film had a cross-section of music to represent both the characters — Trent probably had CDs he left at the beach house year after year — and we needed some more modern stuff for the water park, with a blend of what Owen would love. Imagine his Shuffle. We wanted to make sure it had a timeless feeling. When you’re a kid at first your taste relates to your parents’ music, and then it evolves. We had to get creative. Linda sent us tons of great music and sometimes we would put bands we loved into Spotify and that’s how two songs came, from Trampled by Turtles and The Apache Relay.

NF: My father-in-law is this legendary drummer, Steve Gadd, and he knows an incredible amount of artists. I said, “if there’s anybody you can think of, we’d love your help in any possible way.” He had been playing with Edie Brickell and he made the connection. She watched the movie and really liked it and wanted to be a part of it. She sent us song after song after song for ideas for the movie. She was so sweet, so collaborative, so creative, an amazing wealth of music. Two of those songs bookend the movie. They fit so well and we were so fortunate.

How did you cast yourselves?

NF: We knew we needed a great-looking guy…we played against type, really stretched ourselves. I was a little stressed out about it to do both. We didn’t have the technology to make it a little easier, playback, monitors, so you could see what you’re doing. So it was a bit of a challenge. But we started writing together because we wanted to write parts for ourselves that Hollywood had decided we didn’t play. Not these particular roles, but it was frustrating because you go through these fazes with casting and movies, any actor, even a star. It’s really upon you to say, “No, no, I can do other things.” Sometimes you have to fight to audition for those things and hopefully you can prove that you’re right. Even though this is not exactly an example of that, that was our intention. It’s important for us always nurture the performers in ourselves. We’ll have smaller parts, and we’ll work cheap, save a few bucks, and we’re pretty easy to work with.

JR: We had rain the first few days and we didn’t have a lot of rain cover in terms of what else we could shoot. So we sort of pushed our acting debuts in the movie until near the end, but we were forced to do them on the first day because of the rain. There was one particular moment when we were in a scene and the scene just sort of ended and we’re looking around, “Hmm, somebody’s not saying ‘Cut.'” then we heard our producer, saying, “Um, cut…?” And we’re like, “Yes! Cut!” We had completely forgotten.

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Tonight on TNT: The American Film Institute Tribute to Mel Brooks

Posted on June 15, 2013 at 3:24 pm

Be sure to tune in tonight at 9 (8 Central) for the American Film Institute Tribute to Mel Brooks, writer/director/actor and very, very, very funny guy. From his early days as a writer on the legendary Sid Cesar television variety show to “Get Smart,” the Oscar-winning “The Producers” (later a record-breaking Broadway musical and a movie again), “Young Frankenstein,” “Blazing Saddles,” the 20,000 year old man comedy duo with Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks has kept us laughing.

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New Documentary About the Mysterious, Fascinating J.D. Salinger

Posted on June 14, 2013 at 8:00 am

The author of Catcher in the Rye, one of the most popular and influential books of the 20th century, made no public appearances and published no new writing for the last forty years of his life. A new documentary reveals extensive new information about his life and, most intriguingly, the prospect that there are files of writing he did over the decades that may be published. Deadline Hollywood has the first look at the trailer, featuring some of the other top literary figures of the era and writer Joyce Maynard, who lived with Salinger for a short while after he wrote a fan letter about her New York Times article that became the book Looking Back: Growing Up Old in the Sixties.

Interview: Steve Taravella, Author of a New Book about Mary Wickes

Posted on June 9, 2013 at 8:00 am

I love the great character actress Mary Wickes, who was the nun who was replaced by Whoopi Goldberg as choir director in “Sister Act,” the nurse who was “a treasure” opposite Bette Davis in “Now Voyager,” and the hotel staff who operated the switchboard in “White Christmas.” And it was a very great pleasure to read the new biography about Wickes by Steve Taravella called Mary Wickes: I Know I’ve Seen That Face Before, the meticulously researched and beautifully written story of her life on and off camera. As an actress, she had impeccable comic timing. She appeared on Broadway, on radio, and on television as well as in the movies, appearing with some of Hollywood’s brightest stars. Off-screen, she was for decades the closest friend of Lucille Ball. Taravella generously took time to answer my questions about the book.

How did you decide to write about Mary Wickes?

As a former journalist who likes researching people’s lives, I always thought I’d enjoy preparing a proper biography some day, though certainly I never had Mary in mind. When I found myself moving from San Francisco to Washington DC without a job lined up, I decided this was my opportunity to try. Since I’d often considered writing a magazine profile of Mary, I turned to her life first, to determine if it might be interesting enough to justify a book treatment. I mean, would readers find her life genuinely intriguing or was my interest in her unusual? I quickly decided there was indeed a book in Mary’s story. It wasn’t generally known that she had been the original Mary Poppins, the animator’s model for Cruella de Vil, and a member of Orson Welles’ groundbreaking Mercury Theatre. There were interesting stories in each of these things – and many more, like her close friendship with Lucille Ball.

I began in spring of 1998, giving myself a year to research and write full-time. I was naïve to think I could finish this in a year. Twelve months became thirteen and, not wanting to incur debt to complete this, I returned to the workforce. My new job required frequent travel to the developing world – mostly Ethiopia, Kenya and South Africa, but also Uganda, India and other places – so the book lost some momentum. I’d pull it out on vacation to work on a chapter here or there, but was far from done. When I took a job with the UN in Italy four years ago, I decided that if I didn’t finish the book now, I’d never complete it, and I didn’t want all that effort to have been wasted. So my time in Rome became extraordinarily single-focused – not the typical ex-pat experience.

Your breadth and depth of research is remarkable. What or who was toughest to track down?

Hardest to track down were former child stars, who often leave the business, form social circles outside the entertainment industry and, especially with women, build lives under different names. I had great trouble finding Anne Whitfield, who played a teenager in White Christmas and would have been the only surviving member of the film’s principle cast. Finally, after several hundred pages in a Google search, I found her name in a PDF of promotional materials for an “old radio days” festival in the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s. I tracked down the organizer of the event, who agreed to pass my contact information to her husband. When we finally spoke, Whitfield was very helpful. She long ago stopped performing, became a grandmother, and worked in environmental programs in Washington State under her new last name, Phillips.

One of the biggest stars quoted in the book keeps her personal address and phone number private. My requests to her public PO box went unanswered. Since I knew the city she lived in, I searched public records available online in hopes that her name would be recorded with her residential address somewhere. I discovered a recent permit approval for a home construction project under a name that jumped out at me – that of the actress’ long-deceased mother. Female stars of a certain generation sometimes used their mother’s name to preserve their privacy (just as Mary used her grandmother’s name (Mary Shannon) whenever she was hospitalized, and I recognized this name from the actress’ own memoir years before. I sent a letter by International DHL to this address, and received the reply I needed.

In the end, I interviewed almost 300 people. In some ways, I had an easier time than expected because people sort of figure, If he’s going to all this trouble about Mary Wickes, it’s got to be for a legitimate effort, and they agree to cooperate. If I’d been preparing, say, yet another biography of Elizabeth Taylor, I don’t think doors would have opened so easily.

What surprised you the most in what you found out?

That for her entire life, Mary knowingly kept a man in Ohio from learning that they were first cousins. Discovering this episode of her life was stunning. Even though Mary had very little family herself — she was an only child, as was her father, and her mother had only one sibling – she always professed great devotion to family ties and family history. Mary knew everything about this man, one of her only two cousins – yet he knew nothing of Mary Wickes until I reached out to him for this book after her death, showing him personal family papers of hers that were clearly about him. This was a powerful family secret for her, and a painful one for him, even in his 80s. For instance, his whole life, he was unable to learn where his mother was buried; meanwhile, Mary visited her gravesite often.

She appeared in one of her signature roles, the nurse in “The Man Who Came to Dinner,” on stage, film, TV and radio — which did she prefer and why? Why was that role one of her favorites?

No doubt, she preferred the stage version. The Broadway run was her big break, gave her steady, high-profile work for almost two years, brought her to the attention of casting directors and pushed her into social circles she wouldn’t otherwise have been part of. It cemented her as a performer who could deliver – and it reassured her that she could in fact make it as an actress. She got one of the show’s longest, loudest laughs every night. On the other hand, a TV version 30 years later was a disappointment for all involved, even with Orson Welles as star and the Hallmark Hall of Fame people behind it.

What was the change made from the theatrical to film version for “taste” reasons?

We forget today the power that Hayes Office censors once had over film releases. In this case, the play’s central character – arrogant, abrasive and over-bearing – refers to Mary’s character, a nurse, as “Miss Bedpan.” That was changed to “Miss Stomach Pump,” which censors felt would offend filmgoers less.

Mary Wickes worked with a range of top directors and actors. Who did she admire most?

She adored George S. Kaufman, the playwright who also directed her on stage often. The two of them developed a strong rapport; he didn’t just understand her comic gifts, he celebrated them. The director George Seaton (“Miracle on 34th Street”) was another favorite. Years later, she also really admired Mike Nichols, who directed her in “Postcards from the Edge” with Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine. Nichols won her over at the start by hiring her without asking for an audition or reading of any kind; this was during a particularly dry spell in her career, and she never forgot the gesture. As to performers, it’s hard to know who she most admired because Mary spoke so little about work. But she did on several occasions mention the respect she had for Bette Davis; no doubt Mary admired Davis’ directness on the set. They worked together in three films and one television show.

She was a close friend of Lucille Ball’s. What made their friendship so enduring?

Yes, Mary was inarguably Lucille Ball’s best friend for some 30 years, and was virtually a member of the family. Both women were both bold and direct and a little ‘in-your-face.’ They both loved to laugh, and neither had much patience for ineptness. Because they started working about the same time (Mary was 14 months older), they had experiences in common. Lucy appeared in the film version of Stage Door, while Mary appeared in the original Broadway production, for which Lucy had auditioned. They had deep affection for each other, evidenced by never-before-published letters that I excerpt in the book.

How did she get Cary Grant’s trunk?

An interesting story. In the 1930s, while Mary was a young amateur performer in St. Louis, an actor performing in a touring stage show there got a film contract offer and left quickly for Los Angeles. His name was Archie Leach and, when he left, he gave his theatrical costume trunk to a friend of Mary’s, Clifford Newdahl, who asked Mary’s family to store it for him when he entered World War II. It sat in their basement until after the war, when Newdahl decided he no longer needed it. So the trunk became Mary’s . . . and Leach, of course, became Cary Grant. Mary loved the trunk and made great use of it, like during her national tour of Oklahoma! in 1979.

What problem did she face on the set of “The Trouble With Angels?”

This was one of the few moments in her career where she let others down, and she no doubt agonized over it. Playing a nun at a Catholic girl’s school, she was to jump in a swimming pool in full habit to help two young girls flailing in the water. Mary had never learned to swim, so producers arranged for her to receive lessons at the YMCA in advance. The day of the shoot, without any warning to producer or director, Mary refused to enter the water, saying she was afraid she’d drown. In reality, she’d never showed up for the lessons that Columbia paid for – not out of fear of drowning, but out of fear that others would learn from her swimsuit and swollen arm that she had undergone a mastectomy. Mary went to great lengths to hide her breast cancer. So this consummate professional made a conscious decision to let her co-workers down rather than risk revealing her condition, since the production was now forced to hire a stuntman, incur additional costs and delay shooting. Both the cancer and the stigma surrounding it in the 1960s shaped many of her interactions with people later.

What role did her faith play in her life?

Mary’s faith was profoundly important to her. To her, church was not a place merely to spend Sunday mornings; it was the very center of her community. She was completely engaged in the life of her church (All Saints’ Episcopal Church in Beverly Hills, Calif.), serving on various committees, helping to organize special events, and even teaching Sunday School when in town. More than this, Mary put her faith into practice. She had a strong sense of service to others that was rooted in her faith. She was a longtime hospital volunteer in Los Angeles. She did not just providing comfort to patients, keep them company, arrange interpreters or assist the chaplain, but advocate on patient care issues to management. She spoke on public occasions about the importance of volunteerism and about her faith, often citing a verse from First Corinthians about having faith strong enough to move mountains not being enough without charity.