BEFORE: Judy Gold carries over from "George Carlin's American Dream" and here are my links for the rest of July: Alix Elias, Mary Woronov, Lou Reed & Andy Warhol, Paul McCartney & Mick Jagger, Elton John, Taylor Hawkins, Neil Young, Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey, Carl Reiner, Anne Bancroft, Sidney Poitier, Regis Philbin, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Louis Malle, Carol Burnett, Warren Beatty & Faye Dunaway, Olivia Newton-John, Gloria Estefan, Norman Lear, David Letterman, Jose Andres, Julia Child, Emeril Lagasse, Oprah Winfrey, Dizzy Gillespie. That should bring me ALMOST to the end of the Summer Music & Documentary programming.
For a long while, this film was going to be the FIRST documentary I watched in the Summer Rock & Doc Block - months ago I'd seen it playing at DocFest and then put together the initial plan, and the way the linking worked out, it seemed at the time like it would only connect to ONE other documentary, however, since a bunch of actors like Paul Rudd were interviewed for it, I figured I could use it to link TO the doc chain fairly easily and then the 2nd film would be "The Amazing Johnathan Documentary", linked via Judy Gold, and I'd progress on from there. The final documentary in the program would have then been the one about the Velvet Underground, which also presented a number of linking opportunities for where to go next.
But, then a funny thing happened, Turner Classic Movies ran the film I'm going to watch tomorrow, and the film I'm going to watch the next day, and I realized that instead of linking from the Velvet Underground doc to those films (neither of which is a documentary, BTW), I could link back to the beginning of the doc chain, this film "Adrienne". What are the odds of that? So I'd essentially created a loop, a perfect circle of films, and this gave me a ton of options - I could link into the chain via anybody interviewed or appearing, which was probably a few hundred people - and I could move around the circle in either direction, so that's twice as many options right there - with 35 docs (at that time) I had at least 70 ways to run through the list, probably more. It's great to have options - so then I decided to find the order that made me the most happy, which meant putting the BEST possible film on the July 4 holiday, and making sure that I had the intro and outro that I wanted - to best increase my chances of keeping the chain going all the way to Christmas.
THE PLOT: As the muse of Hal Hartley's indie classics and as writer/director of the critically acclaimed film "Waitress", Adrienne Shelly was a shining star in the independent film world.
AFTER: Tonight, another celebrity death is explored, and also, another director is forced to insert himself into his own film. The director in question here is Andy Ostroy, and his wife was Adrienne Shelly, the actress you may know from the film "Waitress", and she also wrote and directed that, which was the inspiration for the current Broadway musical. Wait, is it still running? Let me check - ah, no longer on Broadway, though it DID re-open after the pandemic, it closed again in December 2021 and is now touring the U.S. I guess we're all still in recovery mode, and musical theater productions are no exception. Come on, it's summer and we all want to get out and party, though I guess maybe nobody wants to be stuck in cramped Broadway theater with a bunch of potentially sick people and poor ventilation. Outdoor backyard parties, anyone?
Anyway, Adrienne was found in her production office one night, and the NYPD wanted to treat it as a suicide, but something didn't add up for her husband, who found her. Why would she hang herself when things were going well, she had a three-year-old daughter that she adored, her marriage was, by all accounts, the best relationship she'd ever had, and she'd just finished making the film "Waitress", and was waiting to hear if it would get accepted at Sundance, which it did? Hope springs eternal, even with film festival entries, that's one thing I've learned over the years, and if you can't make it into Sundance, there's always Slamdance, or Raindance or Moondance or Vandance (I don't recommend that last one, it's just a guy in a van who wants to show you movies, I'd think twice about it.)
I've spent 30 years working in independent film now, and I've learned that success, in the festivals or otherwise, is a very tricky thing. It's not a yes or no thing, you're not usually one or the other, successful or not, quite often it's a matter of degree. Back when I was in film school, I figured that after learning how to be a director, I'd start looking for my big break, maybe I'd write a letter to one of my favorite authors, somehow get the rights to make a movie from a book I liked, then there were a few steps I hadn't quite figured out yet, but at the end of that process I'd be a famous, successful director. Yeah, that's not how the process works, not at all, and I'm embarrassed about how naive I was back then. Instead I was a Production Assistant and Office Assistant for a couple years, changed jobs a couple times, and when I was offered an office manager job at a small studio, I took it, figuring I'd be able to work my way into producing, which I did, for a few years and several animated features. But I slowly transitioned out of the producer role because I hadn't learned the emerging digital technologies, and I didn't have the time or money to go back to film school and learn them.
This is how I tend to think of show biz - a film is like a big bus, and the director is the bus driver. The movie studio is, I don't know, the company that owns the bus line. The director has the most control over where the bus ends up, but the bus company obviously wants the driver to stick to the route, and also get there on time and with the passengers all still alive, preferably but this last point is somewhat negotiable. The passengers are everybody else working on the film - the actors, the set designers, costumers, props, continuity, tech guys, editors, sound editors, composers, etc. The bus driver is in charge of all the passengers, he's paid well, but also he's the one responsible if the bus crashes or drives off a cliff, aka the movie is a failure. If the bus arrives on time with everyone alive, he gets to drive the bus again the next day. I'm perfectly happy being a passenger on the bus, as a script guy or a producer guy or an office manager guy, just let me ride the bus every day and get where I need to go. Do I want to drive my own bus? No thanks, it's too much pressure and I don't want to be held responsible when the bus crashes. I'm still ON the bus, so if it crashes, I go down too, but at least then it wasn't my fault.
Adrienne had been a bus passenger (actress) in notable films made by Hal Hartley, and she was just getting to the point where she got to drive her OWN bus, and jeezus, more power to her at that point. To die just after bringing her bus into the depot, on time and on budget I assume, that's just awful - I mean, it happens, life turns out to be capably both magical and unfair at the same time, which is a quote from this film. Everything and everybody has an expiration date, that's clear from this week's documentaries, and many people are gone from this world sooner than they should have been. But Adrienne's husband was so right, ideally even if someone has suffered depression in the past, they're not going to take themselves out RIGHT when they might be on the cusp of something really good. Not that anybody should commit suicide just after NOT getting their film into Sundance, but you know what I'm trying to say here.
I may not be a big fan of the film "Waitress", but that was somebody's bus, and I'll champion her right to drive that bus, because I know how much it takes to even learn how to drive a bus in the first place. The majority of people in the industry may think about getting to that point someday, but how many really do? There are a lot of people already driving buses, and most of them don't want to give up their jobs to the up-and-coming drivers. Just saying.
You do find out in the film how Adrienne died - and yeah, it takes a while, but not a LONG while, just over 90 minutes. But there are stops and starts, the storyline with her husband and daughter dealing with her death, and the police solving the crime, gets interrupted frequently to flash back to Adrienne's life, or her progressing career, and then the part of her life where she met her husband, then gave birth to a daughter and the "Waitress" movie. I'm not a fan of telling the story in non-linear chunks, but really, there was no other way to do this one. Also I don't like directors becoming the focus and addressing the camera directly, but again, given the circumstances here there weren't many other choices or structures available.
Also starring Andy Ostroy, Sophie Ostroy, Sara Bareilles, Robert John Burke (last seen in "Connie and Carla"), Nathan Filllion (last seen in "The Suicide Squad"), Hal Hartley, Cheryl Hines (last seen in "The Ugly Truth"), Elaine Langbaum, Jessie Mueller, Paul Rudd (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Irma Rivera-Duffy, Keri Russell (last seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Jeremy Sisto (last seen in "Robot & Frank")
with archive footage of Adrienne Shelly (last seen in "Waitress"), Martin Donovan (last seen in "The Sentinel"), Rachel Dratch (last seen in "Wine Country"), Griffin Dunne (last seen in "The French Dispatch"), Alix Elias, Andy Griffith, Eddie Jemison (last seen in "All About Steve"), Tim Guinee (last seen in "Ben Is Back"), Louise Lasser (last seen in "Stardust Memories"), Gretchen Mol (last seen in "Laggies"), Julianna Margulies (last seen in "Three Christs"), Max Parrish, Martha Plimpton (last heard in "Frozen II"), Gary Sauer, Amy Sedaris (last seen in "Romance & Cigarettes"), Ally Sheedy, David Strathairn (last seen in "Nomadland"), Margaret Whitton.
RATING: 5 out of 10 memorial Foundation grants
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