Talk to Me (2007)
Screenplay by Michael Genet and Rick Famuyiwa and Kasi Lemmons (uncredited), story by Michael Genet
Directed by Kasi Lemmons
Produced by Pelagius Films/ Mark Gordon Company/ Sidney Kimmel Entertainment
Running time: 118 minutes

So, What’s This About?
At Lorton Reformatory in 1966, Dewey Hughes (Chiwetel Ejiofor) grudgingly puts in a visit to his convict brother (Mike Epps), fulfilling a promise he made to their mother. Dewey — the enterprising station manager of WOL-AM in Washington D.C. — is intercepted in the waiting room by the loquacious Petey Greene (Don Cheadle). Immensely popular as the prison disc jockey, Petey is serving a 10 year sentence for armed robbery, but doesn’t let this stop him from asking Dewey for a job, while he waits for a conjugal visit from his sassy girlfriend Vernell (Taraji Henson). Dewey dismisses Petey as a “miscreant” and brushes the con off by telling Petey to look him up when he gets out.

Petey wins an early release by talking a prisoner off a water tower, and with Vernell at his side, storms WOL, where his rap doesn’t go over well with Dewey or his boss (Martin Sheen). After being kicked out, Petey organizes a community protest against WOL. Recognizing the potential to tap into the prevailing anti-establishment mood, Dewey gives Petey a shot as a morning deejay. Off-the-cuff remarks about Berry Gordy get him yanked off the air, but Dewey refuses to give up on Petey. Through a successful radio program, a TV talk show and comedy albums, Petey becomes the voice of D.C.’s black community. Dewey gets him booked on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where stardom appears inevitable for Petey Greene.

Who Made It?
Lurma Rackley met Petey Greene in 1981 when she was hired to write an article on the broadcast legend for the Washington North Star. Greene looking for someone to pen his autobiography and was pleased enough with Rackley’s piece to offer her the job. Greene would pass away a year later, long before any book could be finished. Rackley was friends with Dewey Hughes, who by 1991 was a successful TV producer in Los Angeles. Hughes offered to take the material she’d finished and see if he could interest anyone in Hollywood on a Petey Greene biopic. He ultimately hooked producer Joe Fries with the idea. Producer Mark Gordon came on board as well and in June 2000, it was announced that Martin Lawrence had agreed to play Petey Greene.

Unable to reach a deal with Rackley, Joe Fries ignored her research and chose to center the film on Petey Greene’s relationship with Dewey Hughes. Titled Petey Greene’s Washington, a spec script by Hughes’ son Michael Genet was written and set up at Fox. Rick Famuyiwa was brought in for revisions, then Kasi Lemmons, who became more enamored with the project over time and aspired to direct it herself. After several directors in front of her passed, Lemmons — who’d made a big splash in 1997 writing and directing Eve’s Bayou — won the job, suggesting Don Cheadle for the lead. Talk to Me was put into turnaround by Fox and after several starts and stops, was financed by Sidney Kimmel Entertainment.

How’d They Do It?
Ralph Waldo “Petey” Greene Jr. was an ex-con, a disc jockey, a two-time Emmy Award winning host of Petey Greene’s Washington on WDCA, a Washington D.C. community organizer, guest of the White House and in 1981, the subject of an article that freelance writer Lurma Rackley was assigned. When the interview was over, Greene asked Rackley if she’d ever written a book. Greene was looking to pen his autobiography, but collaborations with two or three other writers hadn’t worked out. Rackley had never attempted a book, but Greene was sufficiently impressed with her article and gave Rackley the job. A year into their interviews, Greene would be stricken with liver cancer and pass away at the age of 52.

Rackley recalled, “When he was in the hospital on his final days, he really couldn’t talk anymore — he could just listen; a relative put the phone to his ear so he could hear. I told him I promised I would get the story out.” According to Rackley, Greene’s attorney lost interest in a book, leaving the writer with 60 hours of taped interviews. By 1991, Rackley was press secretary for Mayor Marion Barry and working on the book part-time when she received a call from her friend Dewey Hughes. The conversation got around to Rackley’s work-in-progress. Hughes offered to take what she had so far — an outline, prologue, five chapters — and shop it around Hollywood.

Seven years later, Hughes hooked producer Joe Fries, who’d grown up in Bethesda watching Petey Greene’s Washington. Fries — who helped launch The Learning Channel — recalled, “I was completely the cultural opposite of Petey. Yet I was drawn to this character on television.” Fries offered to buy Rackley’s unfinished manuscript and her taped interviews, but concerned about how her candid interviews with Greene would be used, Rackley held out for the opportunity to join the movie as a consultant. “Joe and his people didn’t want to negotiate. They wanted me to sign that contract or they didn’t want to work with me at all … It was one of those all-or-nothing things.”

With Lurma Rackley no longer involved — she would self-publish her book, Laugh If You Like, Ain’t A Damn Thing Funny, in 2004 — and without Petey Greene’s life story, Joe Fries backed into the idea of a movie about the friendship between Greene and Dewey Hughes. He compelled Hughes’ son — screenwriter Michael Genet — to write a spec script. Genet recalled, “Joe Fries and executive producer Joey Rappa called and told me they wanted to do a movie about Petey and Dewey. As Joe started talking through the story with me, it all came rushing back like a raging river because I had lived it; my father and his best friend were two powerful brothers and the talk of our town, D.C.”

In writing a script about Petey Greene, Michael Genet turned not only to his father’s memories, but his own personal remembrances of Greene. “Whenever he opened his mouth and spoke, I would jump. As funny as he was, even as a boy I could hear the pain in his voice. Listening to him on the radio, I didn’t always understand what he was speaking about. But I couldn’t change that dial; he had me and an entire city mesmerized and hypnotized.” Genet added, “What I found in telling their story was that there is a love shared between black men that we almost never hear tell of. You wont find it defined in any textbooks or dictionaries, yet it exists.”

The script found a fan in Josh McLaughlin at The Mark Gordon Company, who’d also grown up in D.C. McLaughlin recalled, “Hearing Petey’s name, I remembered that there was a community center office dedicated to him. I found it was very difficult, though, to remember a non-blaxploitation movie about an urban city in the late ‘60s/early ‘70s. The three Sidney Poitier/Bill Cosby movies, beginning with Uptown Saturday Night, did depict that period, and of course there was that great documentary concert film Wattstax. There were also several civil rights pictures, but those were Southern-oriented. Those are all good films, but the Black Is Beautiful era in a world of change has largely gone unexplored. Petey’s story, about speaking your mind, was a window into there.”

Writer-director phenom Rick Famuyiwa (The Wood, Brown Sugar) took a crack at the script next. He stated, “What drew me in first was Petey. He was an iconoclast, and a torchbearer of the oral tradition that is an integral part of African-American culture. To me, he represented a bridge between the orators of the civil rights movement and the orators of today, hip-hop musicians. Like a rapper, he was the voice of people who didn’t have a say. What he had to say wasn’t always what people wanted to hear both inside the community and out but it represented a truth he felt had to be expressed. I felt he could be contemporary and relatable to today’s hip-hop-reared generation.”

Kasi Lemmons began her career as an actress — appearing in Candyman and Fear of a Black Hat most memorably — but seeking a challenge beyond just paying the bills, went back to school, enrolling in the film program at the New School for Social Research. She also started writing. Lemmons followed her critically acclaimed gem Eve’s Bayou in 1997 with a disquieting adaptation of George Dawes Green’s novel The Caveman’s Valentine starring Samuel L. Jackson in 2001. She then labored for four years trying to get an adaptation of Jeanette Winterson’s Napoleonic romance The Passion made, but even with Miramax poster girl Gwyneth Paltrow committed, tumultuous times at the studio ultimately squashed the project.

Petey Greene’s Washington came to Lemmons from The Mark Gordon Company as a rewrite. “I read the script years ago, and I respected it, but it didn’t speak my language.” Over time, the material begin speaking to Lemmons. ”I started to hear Petey’s voice in my ear. He was saying: ‘You better direct this thing. Don’t let this out of the house.’ I suddenly fell passionately in love, head over heels. One of the things that happened was the Iraq War. We were invading. People had strong opinions, and they were afraid to say anything. There was fear, you could feel it. People were afraid. I was. So I was attracted to a character who spoke loudly, without censoring, who let the chips fall where they would. There was something about a loud, uncensored, brave voice that attracted me.”

To get the directing job, Lemmons had to wait in line until Fox exhausted the names of the directors in front of her, prestige-wise. She recalled, “Finally I got a meeting. I went in über-prepared. I was very clear in how I wanted it to feel — very alive, very dynamic, immediate. Which is, I believe, how it feels. Instead of looking at the past, have it feel that you could enter it. It would have a movement, a beat. And to put Don Cheadle in it. I knew what people were afraid of — that it might be pretty. I said, ‘I want it to be gorgeous, without being pretty.’ I had to say without saying that I wouldn’t make it feminine. Once I had the movie I never thought about it again.”

Flush from the success of Hustle & Flow, Terrence Howard was briefly attached to play Petey Greene before agreeing to switch parts with Don Cheadle and take on Dewey Hughes instead. Fox ultimately put Talk to Me into turnaround, but Focus Features picked it up and tentatively agreed to provide financing. Lemmons flew to Toronto in September 2005 and with producer J. Miles Dale, started scouting locations. Lemmons recalled, “When I got to Toronto to shoot the movie we worked for 12 to 14 days, but we started getting a bad feeling around Day 10. We kept it together a few more days, but then things unraveled. There were legal issues in transferring the film from Fox to Focus. It was not a pretty feeling.”

With filming pushed back at least until April 2006, Don Cheadle remained on board, but Terrence Howard had to drop out. Chiwetel Ejiofor read for the role of Dewey Hughes and clicked with Cheadle so well that Lemmons used a rehearsal tape between the actors to secure a new financier. Lemmons recalled, “It’s extremely difficult to get money for films with a predominantly black cast. We were independently financed by Sidney Kimmel Entertainment because a producer there, Bill Horberg, felt passionately about the story but we were extremely lucky.” On a budget of $12.5 million, Talk to Me commenced shooting July 2006 in Hamilton, Canada, which was not only less expensive and less restrictive than D.C., but featured architecture locked in the 1960s.

After being screened at Cannes in May and the Los Angeles Film Festival in June, Talk to Me opened in limited release July 2007 in the United States. Critics were mostly supportive. Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “With its R&B soundtrack and footage of civil unrest, Talk to Me might seem to cover familiar ground. But as an intimate portrait of the complex, fruitful and extremely volatile friendship between trailblazing African American men whose daring came to redefine an industry, it’s fresh and revelatory.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “Talk to Me has a great subject and a great actor working in tandem, reminding audiences that once upon a time media personalities used to fight The Man, not be The Man.”

Distributed by Focus Features, Talk to Me never expanded beyond 193 U.S. theaters, where it was held to $4.5 million at home and $245,115 overseas. Disappointed with the box office, Lemmons was energized by her Petey Greene experience. “At the beginning of the Iraq War, people felt scared to say anything because you were going to be labeled ‘unpatriotic.’ People were very, very cautious and I felt like saying, ‘Wake up, goddamitt!’ I felt like screaming at people all the time. Talk to Me is this perfect anti-censorship film in a way. You’ve got this character that is going to tell it. Whether or not that’s a mistake, he’s going to have to judge later — but at the moment that he is speaking it, nothing is censoring him. I thought that was kind of exciting.”

Should I Care?
Talk to Me is at least five different movies and four of them range in quality from “really good” to “great”. There’s a 15-year friendship between two men from different worlds who become hugely successful by trusting each other. There’s a fantastic social document of an urban community in the late ‘60s. There’s a hugely entertaining story about a community radio station — with Cedric the Entertainer (as “Nighthawk” Bob Terry), Vondie Curtis-Hall (as Sunny Jim Kelsey) and Martin Sheen as progressive owner E.G. Sonderling — that rivals anything on WKRP in Cincinnati. There’s also a good story in here about events that overtake an R&B station on the day of Martin Luther King’s assassination.

By living so many lives in 52 years, the story of Petey Greene was probably never going to gel as a movie, taking creative license with history and losing focus in the last half hour, when Petey’s rise to celebrity isn’t very compelling. That said, Don Cheadle & Chiwetel Ejiofor — two of our best actors — have remarkable chemistry together. The sensational Taraji Henson figures somewhat less into their story, but Cheadle and Taraji can star in every movie as far as I’m concerned. Amid the clashing tones here, one Kasi Lemmons rings truest is how endangered we’ve allowed our speech to become in an effort not to offend anyone. Talk to Me is a testament to a time when even the people who had a lot to lose didn’t back down from challenging the status quo.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Remembering Petey” By Kathryn Sinzinger. The Common Denominator, 8 March 2004

“City core subs for Washington D.C.” By Doug Foley. The Hamilton Spectator, 6 July 2006

“The Ready Return of a True Believer” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 8 July 2007

“Talk to Her” By Amanda S. Miller. The Washington City Paper, 1 August 2007

“Talk to Me Kasi Lemmons” By Emanuel Levy

“Kasi Lemmons Finds the Voice to Speak Out in Talk to Me” By Lily Percy. MovieMaker Magazine, 15 October 2007

Stop-Loss (2008)
Written by Mark Richard & Kimberly Peirce
Directed by Kimberly Peirce
Produced by Peirce Pictures/ Scott Rudin Productions/ MTV Films
Running time: 112 minutes

So, What’s This About?
While manning a checkpoint in the Iraqi city of Tikrit, a U.S. Army infantry unit is sucked into an ambush in which three of its men are killed and one critically wounded. Staff Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) finishes his service and returns home to “Brazos, Texas” with two busloads of men on leave. These include his friends Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) and Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Steve is a marksman going on five years of promises to his fiancée Michelle (Abbie Cornish) that he’s coming home. Tommy is unable to cope as a soldier or civilian and his fiancée (Mamie Gummer) calls off their wedding.

Brandon is notified that he is to be shipped back to Iraq under a clause known as a stop-loss. Challenging the legality of this with his CO (Timothy Olyphant) earns Brandon a trip to the stockade. Overpowering the MPs and going AWOL, Brandon’s mother (Linda Emond) urges him to head to Mexico, while his veteran father (Ciarán Hinds) feels his son should turn himself in. Brandon hopes a senator he knows might help and Michelle drives him to D.C. Along the way, they visit one of Brandon’s men, the disabled and blinded Rodriguez (Victor Rasuk). Brandon comes to realize his options are Canada or Iraq, with the possibility of never coming home from either.

Who Made It?
Kimberly Peirce grew up in South Florida and bounced all over the globe after high school. She moved to the Windy City to enroll at the University of Chicago. Running low on money, Peirce landed in Kobe, Japan next, where she worked as an English instructor (to mob lawyers) and as a model. She also began taking photographs, until a motorcycle accident in Thailand prompted her return to the United States. She completed her bachelor’s degree at U of C — in English and in Japanese literature — and enrolled at Columbia University Film School, where Peirce became absorbed with the murder of Teena Brandon. This became the focus of her first feature film: the award winning Boys Don’t Cry (1999).

After being offered projects from virtually every major film studio, Peirce began dealing with the events of 9/11 and subsequent deployment of her brother to Iraq by interviewing hundreds of soldiers and combing through videos they’d shot within their unit. She considered a documentary, before funneling her research into a screenplay about an AWOL soldier, which she wrote with Texas novelist Mark Richard. With producer Scott Rudin and a 5-minute trailer consisting of soldier videos helping make her pitch, Paramount bought the script and immediately greenlit Stop-Loss, one of six politically charged dramas that would be released around the same time and go largely ignored by audiences.

How’d They Do It?
Kimberly Peirce considers herself a New Yorker and was there on September 11, 2001. She recalled, “New York was in a state of crisis and mourning. There were people still looking for their loved one wondering, ‘Did he miss going to work that day?’ For us, we were in that state of mind and then, it was like, suddenly the country is going to war and I realized we were in the middle of a seismic change here. I became immediately interested why soldiers were signing up, what their experiences in combat were and what was going to happen when they got home. As I started thinking about all that as a movie, that’s when my little brother enlisted.”

She continued, “It wasn’t that I had a problem with him enlisting. I understood the whole patriotic response, the whole wanting to get the guys who did this. I was just very curious what the experience was going to do. My brother is significantly younger than me. I brought him home from the hospital as a baby. This was literally like it was my little baby and he’s pure innocence. Who is he going to be? What’s he going to do?” After Peirce’s first feature film — Boys Don’t Cry — won Hilary Swank an Academy Award for Best Actress and Chloë Sevigny a nomination for Best Supporting Actress, Peirce was deluged with offers from the major studios.

Warner Bros. hired David Mamet to pen a script about John Dillinger for Peirce, which she loved, but the studio got cold feet with. Peirce was attached to direct an adaptation of Dave Eggers’ best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius for Universal, but that project never got off the ground either. She traveled to the Middle East to research the life and death of Israeli spy Eli Cohen; Columbia enthusiastically bought her pitch and hired Andrew Davies to pen a script, which didn’t work. DreamWorks offered her Memoirs of a Geisha, but Peirce didn’t cotton to the idea of directing a big budget, PG-13 movie about a Japanese courtesan.

Peirce spent years exhaustively researching the case of William Desmond Taylor, the silent film director whose 1922 murder was covered up by the film studios. Titled Silent Star, it almost became Peirce’s sophomore film. “I’d cast that movie: Annette Bening, Hugh Jackman, Ben Kingsley, Evan Rachel Wood, a dream cast. The studios said, ‘We love this movie.’ I was on the one-yard line. We were going to shoot it and they said, ‘We would love to shoot a $30 million version of this movie, but we would like to pay for the $20 million version.’ I was like, ‘Should I cut $10 million?’ They were like, ‘No, we want to see the $30 million version, but we want to pay for the $20 million version.’”

Peirce mused, “This is the thing that people should understand about directors’ careers. Unfortunately, if you want to do stuff that you really believe in and really love, it can take longer than you would like it to take. I was offered millions of dollars and I was offered a number of projects. As I would go down the road with them, for me, it really is about telling stories that I love and that are meaningful to me. I couldn’t just pick up a script and do it if I didn’t believe in it because every day of my life is living and breathing the movie.” On her own dime, Peirce had already begun interviewing soldiers and military families with her friend Reid Carolin.

Brett Peirce enlisted in the Army at the age of 18 and kept in touch with his sister through instant messaging. She recalled, “He came home on his first leave and he brought soldier’s homemade videos. It was shocking. It was like anthropology. It was like archeology. It was discovery. It was Thanksgiving 2003 and I was in my bedroom and I heard, ‘Let the bodies hit the floor, let the bodies hit the floor.’ Came out the door to pounding rock music to see my brother just sitting there, staring at these images.” Peirce hit on the idea of a soldier-made video documentary and buying cameras to send to soldiers in Iraq. Participant Productions was willing to finance it, but Peirce’s research pulled her toward a fictional approach.

Peirce had met Mark Richard in 2005 to work on an adaptation of his short story collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World. That project never came to pass, but when Peirce made the decision to write a spec script about soldiers coming back from Iraq, she contacted Richard, who would quit his day job on the Showtime series Huff and move in with Peirce to work on their script full-time. By his count, they went through 65 drafts. Richard recalled, “I’m this Southern conservative, she’s this incredibly intense liberal, but I think by the end of the process, the scales had fallen off both our eyes. I’ve always respected soldiers’ sense of honor, duty, service to the country. Stop-loss abuses the faith of these guys. You can’t keep sending them back and chewing them up.”

What began as a soldier’s story for the YouTube generation coalesced when a soldier Peirce was instant messaging with in Iraq told her about the stop-loss clause, referring to it as a backdoor draft. After 11 weeks, Richard & Peirce had draft ready to present to buyers, along with a 5-minute DVD trailer Peirce had cut together with Reid Carolin consisting of interviews with soldiers and their self-made videos. Peirce’s experiences in the studio trenches compelled her to seek an ally in producer Scott Rudin and in November 2005, it was announced that Paramount Pictures had outbid several other studios for Stop-Loss, promising a $25 million budget and a start date of April 2006.

Peirce enthused, “I don’t know if it’s ever happened before, but we greenlit a movie off of a script. That was a different experience than the one I’d had on the last movie, and to me it was a corrective experience. It will never take me that long to make another movie because I’ve already learned that lesson. Don’t put the things that are most precious to you in the hands of people who may not make them, whatever the cost.” Working with casting director Avy Kaufman, Peirce spent months auditioning actors and assembling the right cast: Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Abbie Cornish. Shooting commenced August 2006 in Lockhart, Texas. Morocco stood in for Iraq in the opening sequence.

Stop-Loss came on the heels of a slew of politically themed films in the fall of 2007: In the Valley of Elah, The Kingdom, Rendition, Redacted, Lions For Lambs. Each divided critics and was ignored by audiences. But hitting the road for a screening tour and Q&A, Kimberly Peirce wasn’t buying that audiences had Iraq War fatigue. “If you tell them the movie is going to be non-stop warfare they’re not going to go, it’s too threatening. But when you deliver a movie about people coming home and human emotions, they’ll go and they’ll love it. There is an appetite for that. I think that the reporting on Iraq and not making the stories personal has numbed the audience out.”

Screened at the South by Southwest Music & Film Festival in March 2008, Stop-Loss opened in the United States that month. Critics nudged it to the head of its class. David Edelstein, New York Magazine: “Stop-Loss doesn’t come together, but in its ungainly way it evokes the anguish of American shit-kickers who’ve lost all sense of autonomy.” Jessica Reaves, The Chicago Tribune: “While Stop-Loss doesn’t pack anything like the emotional wallop of her previous film, the movies do share Peirce’s clear-eyed refusal to answer difficult questions with simplistic answers.” David Denby, The New Yorker: “Stop-Loss is not a great movie, but it’s forceful, effective, and alive, with the raw, mixed-up emotions produced by an endless war.”

While Stop-Loss managed $10.9 million in the United States and $291,386 overseas, Peirce remained buoyed by how well her film had been received on the road. “We went to 24 cities, I showed it to soldiers who were both pro-the-mission and anti-the-mission at this point, wounded warriors, soldier’s families, and over and over what I got was: ‘Thank you for making an emotional movie. Thank you for making a movie that got it right. Thank you for making a movie that’s emotionally moving.’ Because it’s very cathartic for them to see reflections of themselves in the movies, and what they said is that people don’t always take the time to make it from a soldier’s point of view. That’s what was really satisfying — to bring it back to the community of soldiers.”

Should I Care?
With Boys Don’t Cry and now Stop-Loss, Kimberly Peirce has already demonstrated the empathy of a documentarian, the curiosity of a journalist and the eye of a first class filmmaker. Barely mentioning other movies in interviews, Peirce seems less keen on recreating her experiences as a film geek and more interested in answering questions nagging her as a human being. Peirce’s sophomore feature film isn’t bad; it’s exquisitely well made and very well cast, but feels like it needed to be run through the typewriter at least a few more times. Flying either too far over-the-top or so under-the-radar it barely registers as a blip, it’s also fatally flawed at its core.

Cinematographer Chris Menges (The Mission), production designer David Wasco (Kill Bill) and editor Claire Simpson (Platoon) each deliver Oscar caliber work. The movie features star making performances by Abbie Cornish and Channing Tatum. Ryan Phillippe almost had me convinced he was a rugged Texan, so the film totally loses credibility by having his character suddenly disobey stop-loss orders and go AWOL. The film just doesn’t earn this conceit and I didn’t buy it. The melodrama gets poured on too thick at times, while the story and characters just never hit me on a gut level. Victor Rasuk’s role as a disfigured vet committed to staying positive is a standout, but sadly, Stop-Loss never ascends good work to become a great film.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Phenom Director Goes To War” By Katrina Onstad. The New York Times, 23 March 2008

“War and Peirce” By Karen Valby. Entertainment Weekly, 28 March 2008

“A Soldier’s Story” By Sarah Michelle Fetters. MovieFreak.com, 28 March 2008

“Interview: Kimberly Peirce, Director of Stop-Loss” By Monika Bartyzel. Cinematical, 8 July 2008

“Interview with Kimberly Peirce, Director of Stop-Loss” By Melissa Silverstein. Huffington Post, 8 July 2008

“Kimberly Peirce Interview Stop-Loss” By Sheila Roberts. MoviesOnline

“Unstoppable: An Interview with Filmmaker Kimberly Peirce” By Gregg Shapiro. Chicago Free Press

Personal Velocity (2002)
Screenplay by Rebecca Miller, based on her book
Directed by Rebecca Miller
Produced by Blue Magic Pictures/ Goldheart Pictures/ InDigEnt
Running time: 86 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In the first of three portraits of women in a state of flux, Delia (Kyra Sedgwick) leaves an abusive husband with her three children in tow. She moves into the garage of a childhood friend and takes a job as a waitress, where Delia gains control of her life by reasserting herself sexually. Greta (Parker Posey) is a moderately successful book editor plucked out of obscurity by a red hot novelist to work with him on his latest book. Her changing fortunes gain Greta the respect of a powerful attorney father (Ron Leibman) but further alienate her from an unremarkable husband (Tim Guinee).

Paula (Fairuza Balk) drives upstate in a daze with a mute teenage hitchhiker (Lou Taylor Pucci) in the passenger seat. She reaches the home of her mother (Patti D’Arbanville) whom Paula hasn’t seen since fleeing to New York City two years ago. Now expecting a baby with her compassionate Haitian boyfriend (Seth Gilliam), Paula is distraught by the death of a man she chatted up at a bar and was struck by a car while walking her down a sidewalk. Paula is pulled back to earth when she realizes her scarred passenger is in a far more damaged condition than she is.

Who Made It?
Rebecca Miller is the only child of playwright Arthur Miller and photographer Inge Morath. A Yale graduate, Miller for a time chose painting over writing, but while on an art fellowship in Germany at the age of 21, discovered a love for filmmaking. She developed her craft by making short films and — with her father’s agent lining up auditions — earned a living as an actress, winning roles in Regarding Henry (1991) as Harrison Ford’s mistress and Consenting Adults (1992) as Kevin Spacey’s mysterious wife. Miller’s first feature film as a writer/director Angela won her a Dramatic Filmmaker’s Trophy at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995, but her screenplays went unproduced.

Miller started a family with her husband Daniel Day-Lewis and turned away from screenwriting. Producer/director Gary Winick — whose New York based company InDigEnt financed low budget features to be shot on mini-DV — called Miller to see if she had any projects to contribute. While none of her scripts fit the InDigEnt mandate, Miller sent Winick three of seven short stories from her forthcoming book Grove Press was set to publish in 2002. Adapted into a screenplay and directed by Miller in 17 days and on a shoestring of only $150,000, Personal Velocity was a sensation at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2002 and would put her on the map as a filmmaker.

How’d They Do It?
The segueway Rebecca Miller took from painting to acting to screenwriting would change again in the late ‘90s. The writer-director recalled, “I had basically given up, at least for the time being, the idea of making films, because it was so hard for me to get my films made at that point. I had made one film, called Angela, which had won the Filmmaker’s Prize at Sundance.” She added, “Angela did well with some critics and things, but it didn’t make money. It was a very uncommercial film … So I had gotten to the point where I just felt like I didn’t want to just wait and wait to make films and tell stories. All I did all day was write these screenplays that nobody seemed to want. So I decided to write short stories.”

Several years passed and Miller received a phone call from producer-director Gary Winick, who had launched a new production company. Winick recalled, “InDigEnt was inspired after I saw the Dogme film, The Celebration. And I also thought about how John Cassavetes worked in the ’60s, with the 16mm cameras and the repertoire of actors and the small crews. I thought with this new medium that there was an opportunity here, because in New York there’s this great theater and independent film community. My idea was to form a collective where everybody gets paid the same amount, but also owns a piece of the film.”

Winick added, “Creatively, I was interested in using these new tools for experienced filmmakers to tell stories they normally couldn’t tell, or to tell stories in a different way because of these tools. I went to John Sloss, my lawyer, and we became partners and we partnered with IFC. IFC was the perfect partner because they wanted to be a part of the DV movement.” Winick’s plan had been to produce 10 films a year for $1 million each. 19 InDigEnt films ended up being made from 2000 to 2007 for roughly $250,000 each, including Richard Linklater’s Tape (2001) starring Ethan Hawke & Uma Thurman and the award winning Pieces of April (2003) with Katie Holmes and Patricia Clarkson.

Miller recalled, “I was sick of writing screenplays that no one was going to make, I said, ‘If you want to look at the stories that I’m writing, I could maybe do something out of one of them.’ So I gave him a few stories from the collection and he read them and he really liked them. He ended up giving them to Caroline Kaplan, who was running InDigEnt with him, and they ended up green lighting the film. It was also Gary’s idea to use three stories at once and make a trilogy, and when he said that my mind took off.” After laboring intensely on her book for two years, Miller adapted a screenplay for Personal Velocity in two months.

“I chose the ones that were the most dynamic in terms of action, where there was conflict that was externalized, because some of them were very interior. And also where I thought that there was a good clash; like I thought there was a very good clash between Delia, which is a story about a working-class woman struggling with an abusive marriage, and Greta, which is about an upper-middle class woman struggling with the clash between her own ambition and a marriage which is feeling increasingly stultifying, and finally her ambition propels her out of her own marriage.”

Producer Lemore Syvan — who’d founded Goldheart Pictures in 1995 and Blue Magic Pictures in 2002 – came aboard, with InDigEnt’s Gary Winick and Alexis Alexanian also serving as producers. While Winick maintained that the difficult subject matter Miller was exploring fit the intimacy and thrift of digital filmmaking perfectly, the format presented a host of challenges. Syvan admitted, “Well, the question came up every day when we were shooting Personal Velocity: why can’t we just shoot this on Super 16? But Personal Velocity was designed for video. The way the movie was born was by a mandate that was given to us by InDigEnt, which we all know is a company that makes movies on digital.”

Cinematographer Ellen Kuras recalled, “I had to talk to Rebecca about the limitations of the medium. Having worked on Bamboozled, I knew what we could and couldn’t get away with. On the wide-angle part of the lens, the image just falls apart, especially when you go to a 35mm blowup, so I told her that we really wanted to shoot on the longer part of the lens. You can’t verify the focus on the cameras; what’s on the viewfinder is not 1-to-1 with what you’re getting on the chip. The contrast is hard to deal with. And when you shoot at a certain shutter speed, you get this kind of stepping of the lines in the image.”

With a budget of $150,000, Personal Velocity commenced shooting May 2001 in New York using two Sony DSR-PD150P cameras. Ellen Kuras revealed, “I knew that creatively, my palette would be very limited. I just said, ‘You know what, I’m shooting with this mini DV medium, I’m going to think of these as a short story and I’m going to try to make it look and feel like a poem.’ And that would be my way of saying anything goes. ‘I’m making a poem so … ‘ That means I don’t have to form full sentences. That means I don’t have to put periods where you’re supposed to put periods at the end of sentences. That means I’m not going to do what everybody says you’re supposed to do. I’m just going to do what I think feels right for the movie.”

When screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2002, Personal Velocity was greeted as a sensation. Rebecca Miller was awarded the Dramatic Grand Jury Prize and Ellen Kuras the Cinematography Award. Miller would dedicate the film to her mother, who passed away days after the festival. She mused, “I probably will be thinking and talking and writing about my mother for the rest of my life. That’s one thing I find about having children — it does unlock a door that separates you from other women who’ve had children. There’s some basic feminist thing that’s the same for all women who’ve had children, it doesn’t matter what their class is or what their situation is.”

Opening November 2002 in the United States, Personal Velocity met a mixed response from critics. Elvis Mitchell, The New York Times: “The cumulative effect is that of watching misspent lives disintegrate before your eyes. Ms. Miller’s canny accomplishment is a triumph, giving the material weight and heart. This is one of the finest pictures of the year.” Mark Caro, The Chicago Tribune: “Miller’s movie has its moments of impressive velocity, but it never quite takes off.” Scott Tobias, The Onion A.V. Club: “Taken together, the stories are a watershed of feminist clichés, composed of half-hour sections that are too tidy by half, and overlaid with writerly voiceovers that suggest an author too enamored of her own narration.”

Should I Care?
Never expanding beyond 43 theaters in the U.S., Personal Velocity grossed $811,299 domestically, but became Rebecca Miller’s calling card to the film industry, evenly demonstrating her unique voice as a writer and intuitiveness as a director, casting Parker Posey and enabling her to deliver the strongest performance of her career. This is a success as a project, but uneven and a bit appalling as a film. Miller’s prose — read by John Ventimiglia (Artie Bucco from The Sopranos) — has a simple clarity and keeps things interesting, but there’s no getting around how sloppy some of Miller’s narrative sensibilities pan out or how bad digital video makes them look.

The second segment — featuring Parker Posey as a daffy but distraught book editor who begins cutting the fat from her newly empowered life — is the best reason to see the film, with Posey coolly emitting the wit and sensuality that the other two segments desperately lack. If there was some confusion over how harried and unfocused this material was at its core, the Radio Shack technology imposed on the filmmakers by InDigEnt doesn’t help make Personal Velocity any more watchable. The fact that neither Miller nor her producer Lemore Syvan has made another movie on DV says everything about the limitations of the format.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Storytelling By Women Filmmakers Evolves with DV” By Philippa Bourke. MoviesByWomen.com, August 2002

“Digital Portraits” By John Calhoun. LiveDesign, 1 November 2002

“Miller’s Own Tale” By Gaby Woods. The Observer, 9 March 2003

“Crazy Like a Fox” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker Magazine, 3 February 2007

“Bucking the Digital Trend” By Pat Thompson. MovieMaker Magazine, 3 February 2007

“Rebecca Miller on Personal Velocity: Three Portraits” By John Gaspard. Fast, Cheap Movie Thoughts, 20 November 2008

This Distracted Globe has announced that its first ever carnival — The Class of ’84 Blogathon — will convene Monday, October 26, 2009. On this date, anyone with a website is invited to post their thoughts on a movie released in 1984.

The registrar’s office has released the names of those scheduled to participate and the films they plan on bringing to class:

Marilyn Ferdinand at Ferdy on Films will descend into director Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984.

J.D. LaFrance at Radiator Heaven to dream about Michael Pare and Diane Lane in the maligned “rock ‘n roll fable” Streets of Fire.

Jim Magovern at The Moviezzz Blog is weighing in on the most influential movies of 1984.

Neil Fulwood at The Agitation of the Mind will open up the ledger on Sergio Leone’s gangland masterpiece Once Upon A Time In America.

Ivan Lerner at The United Provinces of Ivanlandia to go gung-ho over John Milius’ guerilla warfare fantasy Red Dawn.

Amanda Rehagen at My Life In Movies is making her contribution a game-time decision.

Kelsy Chesnut at Cheerful Cynicism will take a trip to David Lynch’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Charles Bowen Jr. at Bowen’s Cinematic to take a look back at Tom Hanks’ first starring role with Splash.

Patricia Evans at Pretty Pink Patty’s Pictures is bringing Neil Jordan’s adult faerie tale The Company of Wolves.

Edward Copeland at Edward Copeland on Film will give props to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension.

Michael W. Phillips Jr. at Goatdog Blog to cover Marlene, Maximilian Schell’s documentary on Marlene Dietrich.

Daniel Getahun at Getafilm is naming his contribution at the bell.

Pat Piper at Lazy Eye Theatre will throw his gaze on whichever 1984 movie he pleases and the rest is for YOU to find out.

Ned Merrill at Obscure One-Sheet to throw a party for Jonathan Demme’s perfect concert film Stop Making Sense.

Jeff McMahon at When the Dead Walk the Earth is also naming his contribution at a later date.

Jim Wilson at Let’s Not Talk About Movies will be a horn of plenty, ‘84 style, with articles on The Natural, The Razor’s Edge and 2010.

Jeremy Richey at Moon in the Gutter to bring us all a dream of Wes Craven’s original A Nightmare on Elm Street.

October 26 will mark the 25th anniversary of The Terminator, which will be my contribution to the festivities.

Multiple perspectives on the same movies are welcome. To participate, RSVP This Distracted Globe in either the comments section below or via email at journeymanjones [at] gmail [dot] com. As soon as your post goes live on October 26, remember to email me your URL so I can publish it.