Interview: Bill Haney of ‘American Violet’

Posted on April 19, 2009 at 9:22 am

“American Violet,” the fine new film about the real-life woman who took on corrupt and racist law enforcement officials in 2000, was written by Bill Haney. It was a very great pleasure to get to talk to him about the film.

Tell me a little about your background and about what made you want to write this story.

I grew up in a Benedictine monastery in Rhode Island. My dad was a teacher there and I went to school there and left to go to college. It was there I got the general idea that the goal of life isn’t to get something from the world but to give something to the world. The purpose of storytelling is to illuminate and express something useful about the human condition, sometimes joyful, sometimes distracting, but in an ideal world, constructive. I like stories about an ordinary person called upon to do something extraordinary. I heard Wade Goodman on NPR talking about this case in Texas. His storytelling was classic NPR expositional context so that I felt compelled and moved, and that was what launched the journey to find the people and write the story.

It seems to me to be a essentially American story — an underdog seeking justice.

It is a systemically frustrating view of American justice, and the way they fought to get justice. We’ve been doing these word-of-mouth screenings with really interesting discussions. One woman said she was really pleased to see the message that we can get change through the system, that if we are educated and stand up it can work.

I am often of critical of films that set the lighting for the white characters and do not to justice to black skin tones but this film lights the black characters beautifully.

That was important to us, too. It is challenging to make sure the visual beauty is equally spread.

What has happened to the real-life woman who is called Dee in the movie?

In a lot of ways she is doing great. At one level this has been a marathon experience for her. She stayed in the community until four weeks ago. She’s gone through a lot of struggles including some serious health problems. She’s still there and he’s still there so it hasn’t ended, but it has been cathartic for her to get this experience out there. She’s a bright, charismatic woman. But her community is blighted. In the local high school, 169 entered as freshmen, but only three graduated and none went to college. There are these inherent limitations and she pierced right through that. She’s out giving talks, finding a voice and a place in society. Her children have found this process hugely validating and inspiring. Telling her story this way helped them respect and admire her. She is articulate and persuasive. It has left some marks on her but she is stronger and a person with a bigger voice in her world as a result.

What are some of the movies you saw when you were young that inspired you to want to make films?

At the all boys school we had no television but we had these screenings on Saturday nights. I saw “Guns of Navarone” and was completely smitten. I love Peter Weir movies, especially “The Year of Living Dangerously” — a magical story for me.

What are you working on next?

I’ve outlined three movies and a documentary about endangered species. Half my work is connected to something around the environment and food will be at the core of the next movie. Food is a great subject because it is about love, health, appreciation, beauty, soulfulness, and humor.

What makes you laugh?

PG Wodehouse. My wife has me on a Wodehouse allocation. She will only let me read for like 15 minutes at a time. I love dry humor, fish out of water stories. My own three kids make me laugh — kids know how to surf your waves. If you’re not laughing at them you’re laughing with them. I love Abbott and Costello and Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” and Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth.”

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Grey Gardens, Act III

Posted on April 18, 2009 at 12:55 pm

What is is about the story of Grey Gardens that has been so enduringly fascinating? They have inspired a documentary film, a Broadway musical, endless articles, even a song by Rufus Wainwright.

Some people think it is because the two women who lived in splendid squalor were the aunt and cousin of one of the world’s most famous and glamorous women, Jacqueline Kennedy. And some think it is because of the schadenfreude effect — seeing two women born to wealth and power fall into helpless poverty. Both are certainly a part of it, but I believe the reason that the story of the two Edith Beales is so enthralling is because of something central to the lives of all of us. It is about family ties that both sustain and constrain. It is about the line between function and dysfunction. It is about devotion. It is about love. It is about control. And it is about the way that the route to madness is much more slippery and treacherous than we would like it to be.

Edith Beale and her daughter “Little Edie” lived in a mansion in East Hampton called Grey Gardens. At one time they were at the heart of high society and Little Edie, a debutante, was known as “Body Beautiful Beale.” Their lives seemed filled with luxury and promise. But by the time a documentary film crew arrived in the early 1970’s the mansion had fallen into filth and disrepair. The two women shared the house with more than fifty cats and other animals. They had almost no electricity or plumbing. The women’s behavior was outlandish, even delusional, but their resilience and ferocious passion for survival were inspiring. They were not just willing to defy convention; they seemed to relish it. The film was a sensation. It led to a Tony-award-winning Broadway musical starring Christine Ebersole. Tonight, the latest version of the story premieres in HBO, starring Drew Barrymore and Jessica Lange.

Here is a clip from the original documentary with Little Edie explaining her “revolutionary” attire, followed by Ebersole in a scene from the musical based on that monologue and a trailer for the HBO movie.

Marley & Me

Posted on March 30, 2009 at 6:00 pm

Life is messy. And in this movie, that very important lesson is embodied by Marley, affectionately dubbed “the worst dog in the world” by his loving family. Jennifer (Jennifer Aniston) and John (Owen Wilson) Grogan are newlywed newspaper writers who have just moved to Florida. John’s friend Sebastian (Eric Dane of “Gray’s Anatomy”) tells him he can distract Jennifer from her desire to have a child by getting her a puppy. So he surprises her with a Labrador they call Marley after the reggae singer. Marley grows up to be big, omnivorous, and completely out of control, an obedience school reject, a destroyer of property, and an utterly devoted and utterly beloved member of the family. Yes, the movie has cute puppies and cute people, but it is not a soft-focus valentine that could be a commercial for dog chow. I like the way Marley is the most comic of the problems facing the Grogans as they struggle to adjust to the challenges that life brings to their plans and their marriage. John sees his friend Sebastian living his alternate life as a globe-trotting journalist with the glamor assignments and a new girlfriend every week (often with Marley acting as a chick lure). Jennifer sees John living her alternate life as she stays home with the children. They have to deal with other kinds of losses, a stillborn child, changes at work. Marley leads John to finding his voice as a columnist, a temporary sideline that becomes his truest calling.I never quite believed Wilson or Aniston as suburban parents but then I never quite believed their homes as being within the budget of a newspaper columnist. Wilson needs to develop more range of facial expression and Aniston needs to stop acting with her hair. But director David Frankel nicely evokes domestic chaos and the dog is irresistible. (more…)

Milk

Posted on March 10, 2009 at 8:00 am

“My name is Harvey Milk and I want to recruit you!”

This disarming introduction became the trademark of the man who would become the first out gay man to hold major elective office in the United States. With this greeting, Milk let his audience know that he understood their fears of homosexuality and could not only make a little gentle fun of them but could make fun of himself, too. He did want to recruit his audiences, not to being gay but to fighting for justice.

As the movie begins, Milk (Oscar-winner Sean Penn) is about to turn 40 and feels that he has never done anything important. So he and his boyfriend Scott Smith (James Franco) move to San Francisco, open a camera store, and begin to get involved in the community and to become active in opposing a system that perpetuated bigotry and abuse of the gay community. After running unsuccessfully, he makes an important change in his approach — instead of running against something, he starts to run for something, to talk about hope. He becomes a respected leader. He forges some unexpected alliances — with the Teamsters and with people who want pooper-scooper laws. He is elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. But he has enemies. There are threats. And finally, he is killed, along with the city’s mayor, by one of his former colleagues, Dan White (Josh Brolin).

This film has some of the elements of the traditional biopic, but Oscar-winning screenwriter Dustin Lance Black spares us the shorthand formative childhood experiences and minimizes the internal struggles. From the first moment we see Milk, picking up a stranger coming out of the subway on the eve of his 40th birthday we see a man who is already completely comfortable with who he is, a man of great sweetness and humor (both as in good humor and as in wit).

Every performance is impeccable, especially Penn, Franco, and Brolin. But what makes the movie so vibrant is the exquisitely evoked setting, not just the meticulously re-created Castro neighborhood of the 1970’s but the era, the moment, when so much seemed against what they were trying to achieve (the archival footage shows a casual homophobia that is a powerful reminder of how far we have come, even in an era of state initiatives to ban gay marriage. The sweetness and thrill of a heady new sense of possibilities in the pre-AIDS era is almost unbearably poignant. It is a tragic story but it is also a story of hope. It was hope, after all, that Milk learned to bring to his community. That community grew to include the entire city, and now, thanks to this film, to all of us.

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Changeling

Posted on February 17, 2009 at 5:00 pm

Radiantly beatific, Angelina Jolie glows with mother love in bright red lipstick and a series of divine cloche hats as Christine Collins, a devoted single mother, in this fact-based drama directed by Clint Eastwood. In 1928 Los Angeles, while she was at work, her son Walter just disappeared. Months later, the police told her they had found him, but the boy they gave her was not her son. She was pressured by corrupt cops to accept the new boy as hers. When she persisted in pointing out that not only was this boy physically different from Walter but that his dentist and teacher were on her side, she was committed to a mental institution and told she could not leave until she dropped all efforts to prove that her son had not been returned.

Eastwood’s meticulous direction and the sheer outrageousness of the story make for absorbing drama, though the very strangeness of the underlying facts makes the material seem overpacked (the running time is almost two and a half hours) and its discursive unfolding diminishes the dramatic effect.

It is impossible not to bring Jolie’s public role as a devoted mother of six to her performance here. Once Hollywood’s most notorious wild child, Jolie has transformed her public persona into a sort of earth Mother Courage on behalf of her own multi-cultural brood and on behalf of all the world’s poor and neglected children with her work for the United Nations. All of that blends in to the ferocity she brings to this role, diminishing the power of the story. The stand-out performances here are Ryan as the indomitable inmate and Jason Butler Harner as the man who probably knows what happened to Walter.

An additional distraction is the effort to put three separate stories into one long drama. The first act is the boy’s disappearance and the horrifyingly absurd attempt to persuade Collins that another child is her son. The second is a “Snake Pit”/”One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” diversion after she is thrown into the state mental hospital, where she is subjected to abuse but meets another inmate (the always-outstanding Amy Ryan) whose honesty and courage helps sustain her hope. And then there is a third act, where Collins all but disappears as the crime drama plays out and we find out what happened to the boy and what happened to those responsible.

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