FACT IN FICTION AND DOCUMENTARIES

By Laura P. Valtorta

www.gattafilms.com

www.thearthousemovie.webs.com

                                               

Without knowing much about Curtis Sittenfeld I began reading her novels and short stories: Eligible, The Man of My Dreams, You Think It, I’ll Say It and enjoying them very much. She uses intelligent heroines who work interesting jobs and have opinions about current issues. I assumed all the heroines were Curtis herself.

Then I read her novel American Wife. Here we have a public school librarian who comes from humble beginnings, kills a teenager accidentally in a car accident, has an abortion, and marries a silly, lovable rich guy who fails at business but becomes president of the United States. Wait, that’s Laura Bush!

           

How much of this story is meant to be fictitious?

While writing the script for my 13-minute documentary “Disaster Man” (coming out soon on Amazon Prime Video), I debated what to call the project – fact or fiction. The stories all come from Gene Feigley, the chaos-loving professor of environmental studies who came to lunch at Immaculate Consumption and regaled me with stories of personal disaster. Couple killed by feral dogs, summertime vacation catastrophes, pornographic forebodings of illness and death; each story was worse than the last. They made for entertaining lunches.

Gene wasn’t as comfortable talking on film. We shot two hours of interviews. The layout and editing process, which is where scriptwriting comes to play in a documentary, was tedious and exacting as we attempted to speed him up and get to the juicy parts. We added B-roll of a Peter Lenzo scary head sculpture and the funny zen-like music played during yoga classes.

When “Disaster Man” was finished, I didn’t know how to categorize it. The film was all Gene, but with my artistic spin on it. Luckily most film festivals have a category called “Experimental.” I ran with that. The hipsters loved it.

Every novel must have an element of fact in it. Every documentary is jigged in some way to deliver a message. The difficult part of writing a documentary is to stay true to the interviews and the physical background while transmitting a message. As I’m writing my current film project about an inexplicable disease, I ask myself every day – what messages am I trying to convey? The words of the patients and doctor become shaped by those messages.

Recently I watched a talk on the internet by Ms. Sittenfeld in which she describes her next book – a novel based on Hillary Clinton in which Hillary Rodham refuses to marry Bill. Will this be a novel or an essay about resistance? The barrier between the two has become very thin.