British actress Bel Powley is decidedly American in "The Diary of a Teenage Girl"; the Eagle Rock Gospel Choir is not a church-based group, but they've got the spirit; LA's theater community mourns the passing of playwright Lynn Manning.
The Eagle Rock Gospel Singers mix sounds and traditions
Will Wadsworth and Alissa Bird are members of an unlikely music group from the Northeaster Los Angeles neighborhood of Eagle Rock. The Eagle Rock Gospel Singers have a new album, "Heavenly Fire," which blends many different types of classic American music genres.
The group got started in 2010 when Wadsworth's love of gospel music brought some friends together for casual collaborations.
"We started having parties," Wadsworth says. "We were friends, musicians, singers — many of them from a church that I was going to. We just had these people together and sang old gospel tunes."
Wadsworth and Bird met with The Frame's John Horn to discuss the formation of their group and their new album.
Interview Highlights
Talk a little bit about your religious upbringing. Alissa, did you grow up in a church? Were music and spirituals important to you as you came of age?
AB: Well, I definitely grew up in the Christian church, but I was never as familiar with this type of music until recently. So, it has been really fun to learn much more about this genre and revisit it through the music that we're making now.
WW: It's pretty much agnostic for the most part in my family. I can tell you that I've always had a deep respect for gospel music because I felt like I was listening to people [who] meant every single word that they were saying and were giving their entire bodies to the singing and the playing of this music.
Your music is not traditional gospel. There is a little bit of slide guitar. I don't even know how I would categorize it.
WW: I feel like the place where we're coming from, I guess to use a metaphor, it's sort of a river where all of these forms of American music kind of met. You have African American gospel, you have white Appalachian folk-country music, R&B and blues. We're trying to kind of echo what we love about that stuff.
Gospel is traditionally thought of in historical terms as being composed of African American singers. You are a largely Caucasian band. How did you guys wrestle or discuss the idea that you don't look like a traditional gospel group?
WW: I think it's a common misconception that gospel music is primarily an African American tradition. There are The Louvin Brothers. There are people in the Appalachian bluegrass tradition. Then you have the amazing African American artists, Sister Rosetta and Mahalia Jackson.
There is a whole list of people on both sides and I think that if you listen to a lot of the melodies and the nuances, you're going to see that they're often a marriage between these styles. These things met in many places. I think they influence each other in some respects.
You guys are signed to an indie label but you're in the middle of running a crowdfunding campaign to get enough money to tour. Is that the nature of being on an indie label or of the music you're doing? Why did you go out and raise money to get your show on the road?
AB: This is our first major tour. That has a lot to do with it. So we are just beginning to accumulate the things we need — a van, lodging and food. So I think that's because this is such a new experience for us.
WW: We're all taking unpaid leaves of absence from our jobs. We want to be able to do this again. We want to be able to record another album.
What is your day job?
WW: I am a 8th grade English teacher.
AB: I am also an English teacher. Hence the reason we're both able to come [here] in the afternoon. We're on summer break [laughs].
That means your lyrics are going to be grammatically perfect?
WW: [Laughs] Maybe.
The Eagle Rock Gospel Singers perform at The Echo on Thursday, August 13.
Renowned LA theater artist Lynn Manning dies at 60
Los Angeles poet, actor and playwright Lynn Manning died Aug. 3 at the age of 60. He had quietly been battling liver cancer.
Manning was a 23-year-old budding visual artist when he was blinded in a Hollywood barroom shooting. He re-channeled his creative energy and discovered he had a gift for the written word and performing. Manning went on to co-found the Watts Village Theater Company, and he performed his one-man show, “Weights,” on stages around the world.
Manning was much-admired in L.A.’s theater scene, and the news that he had died suddenly was met with sadness.
The Frame’s John Horn spoke with Oliver Mayer, Associate Professor of Dramatic Writing at the USC School of Theatre, and a longtime friend and colleague of Manning’s.
Interview Highlights
Who was Lynn Manning and what was his role in the L.A. theater community?
Lynn was a poet first, a playwright and performer, and then just someone that we all gravitated to — primarily I think just because of his soul. People use that term, but boy did he have one... I got to meet him in the very late 1980s and was very proud to be his friend and comrade in drama.
He had an unbelievably hard life. His mother nearly killed his stepfather. He lived in six foster homes and went to nine different schools. Then when he’s only 23, in a bar fight, a stranger shoots him in the head and blinds him. How did he move from being a visual artist to a playwright after that accident?
I think you have to credit judo. He found a physical outlet in that incredible sport in which you actually don’t need eyes. And he indeed became a world champion. And at the Braille Institute he began working on poetry and spoken word. And from that point, I’m very proud to say that I was able to get him working at the Mark Taper Forum, where I worked at one time, in something called the Mentors Playwrights Project. Lynn was an original member and he really sort of found his drama roots and he wrote some really, really fine plays. People can actually read his plays in a collection that’s just come out. It’s called “Private Battle and Other Plays.” I recommend people read them and produce them.
It would be easy for us to remember Manning as L.A.’s blind playwright and think of his work only in terms of his disability. But Manning would probably have a different opinion of that legacy, wouldn’t he?
I think he would. I think he would like to be known as a writer from Los Angeles in the manner that [Raymond] Chandler and John Fante were writers of L.A. And I think he wanted to be someone who could bridge the gap. Someone brought up something about community last night. And I just wanted to say, Which community? Because he spanned more than one way that I think we all should aspire to.
'Diary of a Teenage Girl' challenges 'virginal princess' tropes by depicting teen sexuality on screen
In "The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” actress Bel Powley plays Minnie, an artsy 15-year-old girl who begins the movie by confessing she’s just had sex for the first time.
There’s a problem, though: Her lover, played by Alexander Skarsgard, is two decades Minnie’s senior — and also her mother’s boyfriend.
In reality, actress Bel Powley is 23 and hails from London — she mastered the art of the California accent for the role. “Diary of a Teenage Girl” was a hit at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where it debuted, and now opens Aug. 7 in theaters. But in Powley’s native England, no one under the age of 18 will be allowed to see the film. Even with a parent. Here, the film is rated R.
Powley was initially attracted to the script because she believed the movie contained commentary on the sexuality of young women that teenage girls aren't usually exposed to. But with a rating of "18" in the UK, it's likely that very few teens there will be able to see the film in theaters.
Bel Powley stopped by The Frame ahead of the film's release to talk about what attracted her to the role, re-learning how to walk and talk like and teenager, and how she's disappointed in the strict rating.
Interview Highlights:
What are your thoughts on the movie getting an "18" rating in your homeland?
It's just so upsetting because I feel that we made this movie for teenage girls. That's one of the reasons I wanted to do it so much. As I was reading [the script], it felt like I wish I'd seen a movie like that when I was a teenager, because it presents a young woman in terms of her sexuality in such an honest, real way. In a lot of movies that I watched growing up, women were presented in very 2D characters. Your virginity was seen as something that was so precious. You had to wait to give it away to this nice boy — your Prince Charming. You're just this kind of virginal princess. If you felt horny or you felt like you wanted to have a lot of sex it was seen as a very negative thing. I feel like this film, even though it is in a weird situation because she is sleeping with her mom's boyfriend, it normalizes sex for females. So it's really disappointing that young females aren't going to be able to see it.
The idea that popular culture — the way that women are depicted and women's sexuality is depicted — starts to affect the way you see yourself and the way you see your sexuality. I think what you're describing is what happens to a lot of people. The information and the stereotypes that are fed your way start to become the reality.
Yeah, I'm the first to admit that it took me a really long time to learn to love my body and even my face. I probably didn't learn to accept physically who I was until I was in my 20s, and I'm only 23. Having all this imagery pumped in our faces when we're young women ... is very damaging.
These people, their lives and the way they look is not real to the average young girl and is unattainable if you want to be like that. I think projects like "Diary of a Teenage Girl" are really important because they show a relatable character in a young woman.
The way that Marielle Heller directed the movie and your costume designer and hair and makeup people depicted you, Minnie doesn't look glamourous. She looks ordinary. She looks run of the mill.
Yeah. She almost looks kind of awkward and gawky in some ways. That is how you feel when you're a young girl — when your body is changing so much and you don't really understand what is happening. In one week you don't have breasts and the next week you've got these tiny weird things and you don't know what to do with them. One week you don't have your period and then your get your period. It's very affecting.
I feel like when you're a teenager is when your physical body and your mind are most connected because you're changing in those ways. I think also in terms of the sex in the movie, it was important that it wasn't over-glamorized. We showed that awkward first-time teenage sex because that is what it really feels like.
Marielle Heller is a first-time director. She has acted a lot. When you were talking to her about being in this movie, what were the kinds of things that you thought were important to preserve? What were the kinds of things that started being reflected in the film that were not drawn as much from the graphic novel and the screenplay as they were from your personal experience?
The stuff that was drawn from my personal experience wasn't necessarily like practical situations that Minnie was in that I could relate to, it was just more the way that Minnie is. I feel like — and I'm sure this applies to teenage boys as well — the way you feel emotionally as a teenager is very specific to being a teenager.
Your emotions are much more heightened. You oscillate between loads of different emotions at one time. You see things in a very black-and-white way, so if someone expresses sexual interest in you, maybe you feel like you're in love with them or they're the one. If someone is mean to you, you hate them and they're the worst person in the world. I think it was just tapping back into that way of thinking.
Also, weirdly I found the way of physically moving about. When I watch it with my friends they say, "You're walking really funny in this movie." I think that the way you hold yourself as a teenager is very different. You're much more gangly. I think it was just more the essence of being a teenager. I had to really look back into how I felt when I was a teenager.
I want to talk a little bit about your upbringing. Your dad is an actor. Your mom is in casting. Were they people who were supportive of your becoming an artist? At what point did you recognize that you were interested in it and that you might have some talent to do it?
Well, when people hear that my parents are in the industry they think, Oh, that is why you're doing this. You're some like young child actress prodigy. It wasn't really like that at all. I went to a Saturday drama group that loads of normal kids went to and there was an open audition for a kids TV show. I basically accidentally got the job. My parents were basically like, "Oh god no. We were hoping that you were going to go to Oxbridge and be a lawyer."
I was super academic and very geeky when I was a kid. So anyway, I did this TV show for a few years, really wasn't interested in pursuing it. I thought, Great, I'm saving money to take myself to law school or whatever my parents want me to do.
Then I started doing theater when I was about 17 years old and that really just opened up my eyes to a whole different side of the industry and just a whole different technique to acting. I was untrained. I was really lucky that I was very young and able to work with some amazing high-profile theater directors who I felt really taught me what I can do and taught me to be confident in what I can do. Obviously, working on stage really builds your confidence.
It was probably around the age of 18, after I had done about a year of theater, where I decided this was something I wanted to pursue, much to my parents' dismay. I still applied to university and got in. I was like, I'm going to go study politics, and then deferred it a year because I was doing a play. Then I deferred it another year, then another year, then another year. And then I had to break the news to [my parents] that I was never going to go.
How did you hear about this part and why did you want to do it?
I got sent the script by my American agents in just the normal way, to do an audition tape. But I felt very differently about it compared to other film scripts I read. I just feel like it was the first script I read that I felt really passionate about. I just feel it was something that hadn't been done before.
As I was reading [the script], I was thinking female sexuality hasn't been approached like this in film. Actually, people don't talk about it in life. It's such a taboo subject. People don't want to discuss 13-18 year old girls feeling horny and wanting to have sex with people. I was like, That's crazy and this is a conversation I want to be a part of.
So I made an audition tape and then I added — it was really unorthodox and really weird — an extra bit onto the end of the audition tape in which I talked to the camera in my own voice and was like, "Hi Marielle Heller, I'm Bel. I'm in London, I'm not in Hollywood so I can't meet you in person, but I really need to have a conversation with you about this script. Please contact me." We just wanted the same thing for the movie.
Which is what?
We just both believed in Minnie as this entity and this representation of young women and older women all over the world. We wanted to present this story without any judgement on what Minnie was doing.
I don't think that there is a lesson or a message to the movie, but if there was anything going towards that way, it would just be for teenage girls to realize that the mistakes you make or the stupid things that you do when you're a teenager, if someone judges you for them, then they're an idiot. Also, the world isn't going to implode. You're going to be fine. You'll move on with your life and it will become part of who you are.