If you’re a member of Writers Guild of America (WGA) East, there’s a good chance you’re chapping your knuckles in the cold, gripping a sign with a slogan scrawled in black marker (something clever like “You can’t spell ‘dividends’ without ‘DVDs’”), pacing a slow, tireless circle around Times Square. If you’re a WGA West member, then you’re in front of the offices of CBS or Disney, pumping the same signs and showing solidarity for the people that write “The Office” or any other crew of writers missing a big dollop of dough for their work on Internet webisodes and DVD extras.
 A dirty job, but…Amy Adams (left, with Emily Blunt) helps send striking writer Megan Holley’s long-awaited flick, Sunshine Cleaning, to the Sundance Film Festival. |
Unless you’re Megan Holley, in which case you might be holed up in Richmond, Virginia, a member of WGA East but removed from the action, preparing for your first trip to the Sundance Film Festival and recovering from a nasty cold. “I called up [WGA East], because we’re supposed to put in 20 hours per week on the picket lines,” Holley tells Curtain Calls. “But, since there’s no place to picket here, I was waived from responsibilities.”
Holley says that the strike has disrupted her working life, but says it in a collected manner, fitting for someone who won the Virginia Governor’s Screenwriting Competition in 2003 and was named one of Variety’s “10 screenwriters to watch” in 2005 on the strengths of a film that still awaits an audience. Though she generated industry buzz among small festivals with The Snowflake Crusade, a feature about a cloned human struggling to distance himself from his creator, Holley’s next screenplay—Sunshine Cleaning, a darkly funny drama about a pair of sisters that Windex away pools of blood at crime scenes—arguably nabbed her greater attention.
And a five-year wait. Glenn Williamson, a UVA graduate and former executive at Focus and DreamWorks SKG, was on the judges panel at the competition and optioned Holley’s film for Back Lot Pictures, his production company. From the moment Williamson signed on to the moment the first shots were filmed in early 2007, however, the production team played Jenga with lead actors and directors, taking one from a stack of Hollywood names only to hobble the film. Karen Montcrieff signed on as the first director, but dropped for personal reasons, and actress Ashley Judd followed Montcrieff’s lead, dropping with a similar excuse.
Holley’s saving grace came in the form of Big Beach Films, the production team behind the hilariously dysfunctional Little Miss Sunshine (spoiler: Besides the “Sunshine,” both Little Miss and Cleaning share actor Alan Arkin). Big Beach tapped director Christine Jeffs (who directed Gwyneth Paltrow in a Sylvia Plath biopic), then scored huge when they nabbed Amy Adams before her career took off like a bottle rocket thanks to memorable-if-small roles in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and (wouldn’t you know it) “The Office.”
Adams “wasn’t an accident,” says Holley. “Big Beach knows what’s coming up, and knew that she would be in Enchanted” (Adams’ current box office smash). “They knew that it was gonna break.”
So, after besting five years of directorial duds and Ashley Judds, Holley’s film stood a bit taller as the writer herself has once every few years, and was one of a handful of films (along with ATO Pictures flicks Choke and Savage Grace) from more than 1,000 submissions to nab a slot in the Sundance Film Festival’s Dramatic Competition, where it will screen at various locations starting January 18.
Following the film fest, Holley returns to Richmond, the strike and her current project, adapting a film for Paramount Vantage that stars Kirsten Dunst. But, in a world of strikes and stars, things remain tentative. “[The screenplay] hangs there, taunting me,” says Holley.
Bombs away!
CC ran into Virginia Film Fest director Richard Herskowitz on the Corner last week; turns out the H-man was headed to the Satellite Ballroom for the Yo La Tengo concert. Feeling that the night might be a good’n for digging up the culturally attuned, Curt went to snoop around the packed Ballroom crowd.
While he saw a few pleasantly familiar faces bobbing to YLT’s Kinks and Stooges covers (at least one Nice Jenkins, local artists Jessie Katz and Lee Alter sans her everpresent iPod and C-VILLE contributor Nick Gorski; check out his review), Curt was most thrilled to catch Claire McGurk and Sean Chandler of cakes’n’ale theatre company, who shared their successes with fellow cakesman Robert Wray’s Bullet for Unaccompanied Heart at both Live Arts and The Bridge/Progressive Arts Initiative, which they filled to capacity on their second night.
The group’s love with the Bridge seems to be growing, in fact: McGurk told CC that the theater group hopes to start hosting “Hand Grenade Theater” nights at the Belmont gallery, starting with a night of Shel Silverstein poetry as early as next week. The information sidewalk ends here, if you catch his drift, but Curt’ll get you the goods in time for you to plan accordingly.
While we’re making plans….
All right, lit-wits, what’s the deal? According to the Virginia Festival of the Book’s website, you’ve swiped up all the tickets for the Crime Wave Luncheon and an event with local author Jan Karon. What’s more, the website places Mike “Captain Hunnicutt” Farrell from “M*A*S*H” in prime real estate on its homepage (next to Walter Mosley; no complaints there). Meanwhile, novelist Colm Tóibín and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Claudia Emerson are buried in the alphabetical listings. To paraphrase “M*A*S*H”’s Major Charles to Farrell’s character, “Hunnicutt, I’ve known a lot of writers in my life. You are not among them.”
