Susan Sarandon and Rose Byrne star in Lorene Scafaria's film that was inspired by her own meddlesome mother; North Carolina’s so-called “bathroom law" has some film/TV studios threatening to move out of state. Three below-the-line workers tells us how their lives and careers could be upended; Pace Gallery opens its first West Coast venue in Palo Alto.
Film and TV workers in North Carolina worried by effects of HB2
North Carolina's state legislature recently passed a bill, known as "the bathroom bill," which has been widely denounced as discriminatory. It places restrictions on who is allowed to use public bathrooms “based on their biological sex.” In other words, the law prevents people who are trans from using the bathroom of their stated gender.
Some musicians and touring companies — Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam and Cirque du Soleil among them — have canceled North Carolina shows in protest. Television production companies such as HBO, TNT and Fox say they are either reconsidering or abandoning plans to shoot in the Tar Heel State if the bill is not overturned.
While North Carolina does not rival nearby Georgia in terms of the volume of film and television production happening there, the state is a popular destination for Hollywood. There’s even a studio called EUE/Screen Gems in Wilmington with 10 sound stages where two TV shows are currently in production: the scripted Navy Seals drama, “Six,” which is produced by The Weinstein Company for The History Channel; and the TNT drama, “Good Behavior.”
When reached for comment about plans for future production in North Carolina, a TNT spokesperson told The Frame: "Turner is currently in mid production of one show which it will complete. Turner will however reevaluate doing further business in North Carolina."
And the statement from A&E Networks, which owns The History Channel says: “Production on SIX is already underway, however at this time we have no plans for any new productions in North Carolina.”
A spokesperson for The Weinstein Company says it supports A&E's position. If those shows and others abandon North Carolina, many of the state’s crew members who live and work there might be forced to move out of state to find work. We called up three such people in Wilmington to hear how HB-2 could change their lives.
Mark Gilmer is a digital imaging technician in the camera department. His credits include: "Flight," "42" and "The Conjuring 2."
Tracy Breyfogle is currently an art department coordinator. She's worked in the accounting department on "Iron Man" and "Heart of Dixie."
James Shaughnessy is what's called a Lead Person. He's currently working on the History Channel show, "Six." Previous credits include "The Notebook," Children of the Corn 2" and "A Meyers Christmas."
Below are excerpts from their interviews. Click the play button at the top of the page to hear the full story.
NORTH CAROLINA IS A "FILM FRIENDLY STATE"
Gilmer: North Carolina is a very film-friendly state. And the film production's been going on here for several decades now, so we have built up a very sizable infrastructure and crew . We have some very talented technicians here that are world-class.
Breyfogle: People have been doing it for generations here every since "Firestarter" [and] "Dawson's Creek." "Blue Velvet" was shot here.
Shaughnessy: The state offers a lot of backgrounds: It has the mountains; it has city life; it has the beaches. It has rural life and it has a lot of historic preservation if you need to shoot a period film.
HB2 MAKES NORTH CAROLINA "UNFRIENDLY" TO BUSINESS
Gilmer: House Bill 2 obviously raised a lot of eyebrows in the entertainment industry. Basically, Hollywood [and] most production companies have come out to say that if the bill is not repealed, they will not continue to shoot or have any productions in North Carolina, which drastically affects all of us who work here.
Breyfogle: Given the press that HB2 has generated, I feel like North Carolina has made itself a very unfriendly place for businesses, including productions, to come to. And it doesn't bode well for our being able to get continued jobs here.
Shaughnessy: Basically, policies of networks do not discriminate. And to come to a place that does discriminate violates their policy and does not look good on behalf of their network to do business with our state.
IMPACT ON PEOPLE WHO LIVE IN NORTH CAROLINA
Gilmer: When a film production pulls out, or somebody cancels a show here, or an industry decides not to relocate here, it definitely impacts the people who live here. It really kind of penalizes them. And most of the people who don't support this bill are the ones being penalized by it, unfortunately. But it's their way, I guess, of making a statement to get attention to hopefully put pressure on the lawmakers to repeal this bill.
Breyfogle: I think companies have to work in their best interest. I don't think they're trying to punish the people that live here. But if you are going to be hiring a large part of the population, or trying to recruit people, coming to a place that has already generated this atmosphere of being unfriendly or unwelcoming or discriminatory isn't really good business for them.
WHETHER TO LEAVE OR STAY
Gilmer: It's very disconcerting to have to think about packing up. I have a house that I've had here for 15 years. To think about packing that up ... My family lives here. I have a great number of friends here. To have to leave that all behind in order to pursue work because the bill [may not] allow us to work here anymore, it's very disheartening.
Shaughnessy: Friends that I have who have moved to Atlanta [for work] have spent between $8,000 -$12,000. That's just to rent an apartment, change your license and get all your stuff down and get set up.
Gilmer: If the bill were repealed I would definitely stick it out here. It's a good quality of life here. North Carolina has always been a home for me as far as film production goes.
James Turrell in Palo Alto: hot art bling is the new thing in Silicon Valley
The May 14 relaunch of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has lots of people buzzing in anticipation. But downtown San Francisco is not the only place where truly exciting things are happening on the visual arts front.
Superstar artist James Turrell, for instance, is touching down in Palo Alto with a pocket-sized exhibition, ahead of the re-opening of a popular installation of his at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in late May.
Turrell is famous for his meditations on light and space that play with your depth perception. Take the most eye-catching piece in the inaugural show at the newly opened Pace Gallery in Palo Alto. "Pelée" is a curvaceous LED screen that looks like a window — or really, more like an opening in the wall to another world.
"You’ll see reds, and that can fade into other colors," says Pace Palo Alto president Elizabeth Sullivan. "It’s just beautiful, mesmerizing, really meditative in a way."
Sullivan figures the most casual passer-by will be entranced by the light of the artwork spilling out onto the street. Even those unfamiliar with Turrell's work may have been exposed by Drake's video for “Hotline Bling,” albeit without Turrell's consent: his work was ripped off. (For the record, Turrell has reportedly said he's not bothered by the hip hop artist co-opting his art.)
Pace, which has represented Turrell for years, is a bit of an art world celebrity, too. The global art gallery empire, based in New York with four galleries there, maintains outposts in London, Paris, Beijing and Hong Kong.
Sullivan won't say why Pace picked Palo Alto over more obvious choices like San Francisco or Los Angeles. But the local community is happy about the choice. "People in the art world are so excited that Pace would choose to come to Silicon Valley," says Cathy Kimball, executive director of the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art.
Pace started on the Peninsula with a “pop-up” gallery in Menlo Park in a converted Tesla showroom that is slated for demolition. There were a handful of solid exhibitions featuring artists such as Alexander Calder and Tara Donovan. Then came a blockbuster by a Japanese group called teamlab, which makes ancient Japanese art come alive in floor-to-ceiling digital animations.
From her vantage point to the south, Kimball looked on with some envy as Pace drew in 45,000 people in less than three months. "That teamlab animation is something to marvel at," Kimball says. "It’s immersive. It’s so animated. There’s so much to look at."
Kimball insists she’s not really feeling competitive with Pace, though she wishes her organization had resources more in line with the shiny new neighbor up the road. "Pace certainly has a kick-ass team," Kimball says. "They also have a kick-ass budget. There aren’t a lot of us who can mount a Turrell show or a teamlab show in the degree that they did in Menlo Park."
Pace is not the only big art muscle flexing on the Peninsula. In the past five years, Stanford has built an arts district in the heart of its campus. The site includes a new museum next to the Cantor Arts Center built to house the Anderson Collection, which was assembled by a prominent Bay Area family.
On a recent Saturday, a group of curators, gallery owners, collection managers and other visual arts professionals took a private tour of the museum. The tour was put together by the local chapter of Art Table, a non-profit that usually organizes special events like this one in San Francisco and the East Bay.
But that’s changing, says chapter co-chair Kathy Kenyon. "I think it’s real exciting what they’re doing here with this whole arts section, with the Anderson Collection, and bringing over the art department so that it is directly connected with the museums here is a huge thing," Kenyon says. And all of Stanford's art collection is available to the public for free.
There’s more to the scene than the high profile glamour of Stanford and Pace. Municipalities on the Peninsula are also doing a fair bit to nurture local talent. A number of them, including Redwood City, commission and exhibit local artists. Palo Alto goes a step further, providing studio space for 25 artists.
"Artists and arts groups can be considered here an endangered species," says Rhyena Halpern, who oversees the city’s public investment in the arts as assistant director of Palo Alto's Community Services Department. "Because the cost of living is so high, and the cost of doing business is so high."
But the very same economic boom has created more people in a position to invest in art. Pace, Halpern says, could well be the harbinger of things to come. "That they took this risk to come here to see what they could do, see if there was a collector base they could tap into: very smart," Halpern says. "But what it gives the community in return is this amazing access. You know, down the street. It’s incredible!"
How Lorene Scafaria used Susan Sarandon to break Hollywood barriers with 'The Meddler'
When filmmaker Lorene Scafaria’s father died, her widowed mother Gail basically moved into Scafaria’s life. Gail was so ever-present, and so over-involved in her daughter’s life, that she was jokingly known as “The Meddler.”
And that’s the name of Scafaria's new movie starring Susan Sarandon, who plays a very loosely fictionalized version of the director's mother.
Scafaria previously made the film “Seeking a Friend for the End of the World.” But because that movie grossed only about $7 million in domestic theaters, and because “The Meddler” was about an older woman, the film was very difficult to get financed. Scafaria’s producer, Joy Gorman Wettels, heads an initiative to support women filmmakers at the production and management company Anonymous Content. She was finally able to pull the movie together.
When The Frame's John Horn met with Scafaria and Wettels, he began by asking them the obvious: How did they do it?
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
JOY GORMAN WETTELS: Well, we are relentless as a team. Lorene, when she has a vision and when she writes something that's so moving and beautiful, and when she's really asked me to fight for something, I'm going to kill myself to get it done. But first, bringing it to Susan Sarandon was a great help.
LORENE SCAFARIA: I sent that, cold, to her agent, actually. We'd thought of [Sarandon] for a long time.
WETTELS: But people kept telling us we couldn't get this movie made.
SCAFARIA: We were asked to make [the daughter] Rose Byrne's part bigger than the mother role.
So when you get notes like that, how do you interpret them, especially considering how "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World," your previous movie, turned out?
SCAFARIA: The first time around, in order to get the first film made, you just make a lot of compromises out of the gate. Then you realize, Oh, I have to fight for absolutely everything the next time out. I wasn't as desperate to get this movie made the wrong way. I just wanted to do it the right way.
So you become careful about that, to not compromise. Because you know if you make all those little compromises, you'll end up making a movie that is not what you intended to make.
SCAFARIA: Yeah, the biggest note being, Make Lori's role bigger, make the daughter as big as the mom. It went against the entire point of the movie: to explore a character's loneliness and who they are when their daughter's not calling them back. Peel away the layers of this meddler to realize how much of it comes from loneliness, that she's a widow, has a lot of love to give and doesn't know what to do with it. All of those things would have been completely destroyed if we left her side to go see her daughter rolling her eyes when the phone's ringing.
WETTELS: It's hard enough to get your first movie made. It's hard enough to get your first movie made as a woman. It's even harder to get your second movie made . . . And we made this movie for a third of the budget that we made Lorene's first movie.
Because you couldn't get any more?
SCAFARIA: Yeah, and honestly I didn't think we needed more. Part of the process of getting this made [was shooting] the first five minutes with my mom, who's not an actress. That was our attempt to show our financiers [that] this movie can be made for cheaper than you think.
Lorene, the character of Marnie is very closely based on your mom, Gail. And it's about how she and you reacted to the death of her husband and your father. Could you talk about what happened to you personally and your relationship with your mother that made you think that this was a story that had an appeal beyond yourself?
SCAFARIA: I started writing the script about a month after she got here, officially — after she sold the house in New Jersey and moved to Los Angeles. That was in June of 2010. My father had just died. My grandmother — her mother — had just died. We were grieving in really different ways. I thought my mom was doing it very beautifully and optimistically, but strangely, for me. Because I was more in anger and depression, and she was somehow in denial and acceptance at the exact same time. The two of us were grieving so differently — that's what the story ended up being about. I guess I started writing it not sure how personal it was going to get.
We've talked a lot on this show about sexism in Hollywood. Something we haven't talked a lot about is ageism. And this is a movie that stars a 69-year-old woman. What are your thoughts about gender equity in terms of age, and that there seems to be a double standard, and was that an issue as you started taking this movie around?
SCAFARIA: It was. Before Susan [Sarandon] came along, it was a problem for people on paper. They asked us, Can you make the character in her 50s and the daughter in her 20s? When you see the movie, you see that the daughter has to be in her 30s as much as Marnie has to be in her 60s.
She has to have had a life. But Joy, when you're trying to get this movie financed and people are saying, Make her 50, how do you get them off that topic, or are those people never going to come on board?
WETTELS: Those people are never going to come on board. And I think what was so wonderful about getting Susan, besides the fact that we found the sexiest 69-year-old on the planet, is that she came on as an executive producer. She was really aware that we had to cast the other two roles to get the amount of financing we needed to make the movie. She was really behind that.
So Lorene, you said you sent the script to Susan Sarandon's agent blind. Did she actually get the script?
SCAFARIA: She did. Her agent has a mother a lot like this mother.
WETTELS: Susan's agent has this amazing Instagram and Facebook feed about her mother, who's very much a meddler. When Lorene said she was sending it to her, I said, "She's going to love this."
Why do you think that the story about a relationship between a mother and a daughter is so resonant? And what does it address that other stories don't in terms of family?
SCAFARIA: I do think it's the deepest, strangest relationship that you can have, if you're good friends. If you're lucky enough to have a mom that's around and cares about you in any way, chances are she cares about you a little too much. And I think it gets really complicated as you get older and you're navigating through your own stuff.
"The Meddler" is currently in theaters.