By Laura P. Valtorta
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment