transcript

Audiovisual Cultures episode 96 – Fading Fame with Pam Munter automated transcript


please support our Patreon to help us provide accurate transcripts

this is audiovisual cultures the podcast that explores different areas of the arts and media join me your host paula blair and the researchers practitioners and enthusiasts i meet along the way see our website at audiovisualculture.wordpress.com and other links in the show notes for more information for now enjoy the show hello thank you for tuning in to another episode of audiovisual cultures we’re taking a virtual trip to hollywood today with my very special guest pam munter who is a former actor a musician an author and a film his story and we do love those on this show we’ll mainly be talking to pam about her latest book of short stories and plays fading fame women of a certain age in hollywood published this year in 2021 with adelaide picks before that though i’d really love to give a very warm welcome to pam it’s so wonderful to have you on the show hi pam hi paulus thank you for having me this is quite a pleasure to be speaking to another film historian that’s a rare treat for me awesome that’s great i’m hoping we can get into some proper nerdy business if i film uh especially early film in hollywood um and i can learn a few things from me as well before we talk about your book as well just wanted to ask how are you doing where bites are you joining us from i live in palm desert california which is about two hours east of los angeles it’s in the desert it’s really interesting when you think back to early early cinema and read about basically what a desert california was you know the whole of it before hollywood was built out of that arid landscape we’re catching up with that a little bit later on with your work would you be happy to tell us a bit more about yourself and your work and your interests sure i had the good fortune i think to be born and raised in los angeles which is a stone’s throw from hollywood uh my parents they weren’t into the business at all nor were any of the neighbors they were pretty solid traditional blue collar kind of folks but my mother took me to a film when i was five years old believe it or not and i remember the movie even and i was hooked i thought you know that’s the kind of life i want to know more about i wanted to be in it i mean it was so different from my everyday life with housewives gossiping about their husbands and drinking coffee and that’s maybe crazy i just couldn’t imagine a life like that so i kept going to movies even as a kid i spent my babysitting money going to movies and where i grew up even though my parents weren’t in the business a lot of people were i went to school with some famous kids in my high school for instance there was ryan o’neal and sandra d and nancy sinatra and a lot of the kids of celebrities sitting next to me in my english class was a mousekateer if you remember those and so fame just didn’t seem that far away to me you know it seemed like a doable thing but back in those days paula there was no mass media telling us what these people really like that we saw on the screen the hollywood was controlled by five major studios and five white men who were lord master of their domain and the only thing we knew about these stars that we adored came from the publicity departments of those studios who funneled the information to movie magazines that was it that was all we had you know there was no cable tv there was no not even any uh national enquirer you know or any uh newspapers that would tell the truth because all of that was controlled by the studios who were very wealthy and usually pillars of their communities but you know i never quite bought that i always wondered even as a kid could all these people be so freaking happy all the time i didn’t understand you know we saw pictures of women and men hugging and there were no gay people of course they were invented later on

they were moving or they were vacationing or they were on the set and they’re all immaculately dressed and i just was so fascinated with that world well i realized very young that even though i loved it and i wanted to be a movie star as all kids did at that age i knew that probably wasn’t really likely so i went into other fields i actually became a clinical psychologist and practiced for a quarter of a century and saw a lot of celebrities in therapy which is interesting and fun for me but i always kept writing about the business it was something that fascinated me i wrote i don’t know maybe two dozen articles very lengthy articles on not so famous movie stars for some of the magazines like classic images and films of the golden age and the ones that told the truth this is after the era of the five studios and i love doing that because i was afraid that people like i don’t know joan blondell or celeste home or joan davis would be forgotten so i took a lot of time out of my life to do that so i was writing nonfiction that was my life i read it i wrote it i loved it never read fiction never liked fiction it was not very politically correct to say since i just produced a book of fiction but that’s the truth i had left the practice we closed it down because of managed care it was just so intrusive it was very hard to feel ethical about doing lengthy psychotherapy when there was so much intrusion into the process from the outside and i went into an mfa program in performing arts creative writing and performing arts and i wrote a autobiography a memoir called as long as i want to be and i was fine i got through with that and then the head of the department said you know you need a second field i thought oh i’m in real trouble now because this is the only one i know he said why don’t you try fiction oh man wow that’s like saying why don’t you fly to mars tomorrow morning you know i just didn’t know how to do it how to go about doing it but then i thought you know i have an awful lot of information about hollywood history in my head to serve no functional purpose at all to anyone what happens if i take some of those stories fictionalize them and in some cases make them anonymous some of the stories in the book fading fame aren’t about a specific movie star but about a collection of people thought maybe i could get away with that you know maybe we could call that fiction because it was now the stories i tell there’s one in particular about joan davis who was a vaudeville performer i don’t know if you’re familiar with that name her history was amazing really she was in radio she had her own shows on radio she was did films for years she had a hit television program called i married joan in the 50s and then there was nothing they canceled their show what happened to joan davis what happens to women who get too old for the studios for the public no they’re no longer desirable even female comediennes like joan davis apparently had a shelf life that ran out so i wondered i wondered a lot i had written some place years ago that she had had an affair with another comedian named eddie cantor who’s also very famous more famous than she actually vaudeville movies all that kind of state a lot of stage work television i thought i’m gonna make a story out of that i mean i don’t know if it’s true i don’t know how long it went on but coincidentally both joan davis and eddie cantor had had homes just a few miles from where i live well as a former researcher i couldn’t help myself i had to drive over there and take a look which i did in joan davis’s house they were working on it i don’t know what they were doing but obviously she didn’t live there anymore she was long dead as was cancer but there were open doors and i thought ah should i go in and look around you know it helped my story maybe if i knew exactly what the setting was and i stopped myself come on come on this isn’t a research piece this is fiction back off but i discovered that even though they had long ended their affair if they ever had one they only lived a mile and a half apart in the palm springs area so what a great story this could be so that was the kind of way i fictionalized real stories for fading fame and there were a couple of others like that where i took the a nub just a little nugget of the reality and turned it into something i thought i could use that’s brilliant to hear yes i wanted to thank you as well for so generously sharing the text of your book with me i really enjoyed the short stories i didn’t manage to get to the place but i really enjoyed all of the stories and that one was really poignant in particular and i was wanting to ask you about to what extent you was anything from historical documentation and how true even is that in the first place um and then how much of it was imagined you know and played with that sort of thing so that’s really interesting to hear that stuff was in my head you know i i didn’t have to do the research i knew that joan davis had been an alcoholic which he is in my story also because of biographies written by other actors who worked with her and talked about her difficulty functioning sometimes because of alcohol in fact a lot of the women in these stories drank too much it was one way of coping i suppose with the loss of their fame you know the people who were in that era of show business had nothing else many of them started very young in mary pickford’s case she was on stage at six supporting her entire family on the vaudeville stage not much education which is true of all of these women none of them were well educated or college graduates few of them were high school graduates for that matter and they didn’t go through the normal developmental stages so their lives were filled with dare i say fame or the acquisition of it and when that was gone it’s like their identity had just been stripped away there was not much left and as you say it’s poignant to see people who were so talented uh mary pickford is a great example of that and she was the first female executive in hollywood she ran her own studio big star in the 20s she was called america’s sweetheart married douglas fairbanks and they were this dashing couple all over the papers and that’s also in my story because anybody who knows hollywood history knows mary pickford i didn’t really have explained who she was but a lot of her success was due to her screenwriter francis marion uh and they became good friends now i have them doing francis marion wanting a little more from mary than friendship but clearly fictionalized i hope i think i don’t know who knows this stuff but mary pickford had such a sad ending she ran the silent films ran out and she ran out i mean there was not much left she had gone through her entire career even up to the age of 40 playing young girls with curly wrinkly hair and at 40 you know you just can’t get away with that too much anymore and the public didn’t want to see her as the actor she had become as mary pickford so she kind of faded away the interesting part was that francis marion went straight up from there she won two academy awards for screenwriting the first woman i think to win two academy awards for writing film and mary who’s really the sad part to me is not just dissolving in alcohol which is sad enough but the fact that she lived in this mansion in hollywood from the early 1920s through two husbands and ended up living there still as she died you know you think about movie stars norma desmond you know the famous fictional character in sunset boulevard and she wasn’t too far from that it was a hard story to write but i thought it was a story that needed to be told even fictionalized because that’s what happens to women who get too old they get thrown away yes i had thought about that comparison with sunset boulevard.com was in my mind quite a bit when i was reading some of those earlier stories and how that’s depicted and i mean it’s made into a film noir and surrounded by you and murder and everything it’s glammed up a bit but there’s so much about what happened and and who didn’t make it when the talkies came in really sad yeah it is sad when technology comes in like that a lot of people get left behind actually with most of the men who got left behind the women get uh jettisoned because their age mostly you know the film moguls want someone they can imagine having sex with and once they got into their late 20s no sorry you know next they didn’t want the ones that actually they had signed the contracts i recently watched bombshell i don’t know if you’ve seen that film but that’s a very contemporary example of that very sort of thing happening at fox news based on a real story it’s very prescient so although your stories are set in the past they’re set in another century depressingly now it’s a very prescient issue is that idea of women needing to be stuck at a certain age and having value only because of what they look like and it doesn’t matter how talented they are or how committed they are how hard they work or any of it yes it’s still very much with us i particularly enjoyed the stories jerry’s interview and the curtain never falls i think because as well as those stories that look at perhaps the more negative impact of all of this context those two stories they have a bit of a lift in them and the characters that are depicted geraldine leonard and maggie bose they get to be quite heroic in their own ways so i was wondering you know if you had any thoughts on that because there are more positive ending stories in the book as well but also are there any any other favorites of yours or any other highlights you’d like to mention well the curtain river falls came out of a single line i heard i don’t know if you’re familiar with rosemary she’s gone now but she was probably best known for a television show called dick van dyke show she was one of the main characters in that but she had a long and illustrious career again on stage nightclubs and stuff like that she had there was a documentary about her just before she died and the interviewer said you know how are you doing and i don’t know she says you know at night when i’m in bed i go over my act i thought ah how poignant is that here’s a woman 80 something at that point and she’s still thinking she’s going to get back to it so there’s a story there’s got to be a story in that and everything that came out of maggie beau’s story came from that one line in the documentary so you never know when uh inspiration is going to strike actually my favorite story i think is the one that’s called dinner with daddy and it’s the story of irene selznick irene mayer selznick who was the younger daughter of elbie mayer the kingpin of mgm really one of the founders of mgm as in metro golden mayor and i have her in the story coming back to the family mansion in bel air which i have actually seen and uh it’s been years since she’d been there she doesn’t know why she’s there it’s a family dinner and daddy’s being daddy and ordering people around and there’s a butler and there’s a younger sister or older sister actually who is on her constantly and all like most of us when we go home as adults some of the old patterns come back so easily in spite of ourselves and we see that in dinner with daddy there’s a lot of history and dinner with daddy that i threw in sort of incidentally i have irene challenging her father on why he would invite charlie chaplin to dinner with a high school girl well it’s again a fact that charlie liked young girls i don’t know if he ever had dinner it’ll be mayor’s house i don’t know if they were friends i don’t know if they work together but it was an irresistible tidbit i also threw in uh in the story about mary pickford a tidbit about peg entwistle who is a sort of a footnote to history she uh was a young actress who is probably best known for killing herself by jumping off the hollywood sign which is very sad i bet i have her at the dinner party with mary pickford and francis maria so any story where i can insert real history even as a parenthetical aside it’s just more fun for me and i think that’s why i like the selznick dinner with daddy story and that’s one that ends happily too incidentally i mean she one of the reasons the family is there is that they’re announcing their divorce and irene helps her mother learn to cope with what she knows will be an awful ending in the family again i don’t know if that happened i do know that irene sort of made her bones as a producer on broadway in the streetcar named desire in 1949 she completely changed careers which one of the things that makes this such a positive story i think she wasn’t a victim like some of the others sort of feels like they were she made the best of a bad situation married to an awful person david selznick who was obsessive-compulsive and a womanizer she had the good sense to leave so some of the stories as you say are positive i don’t know that whether they end well or not affects how i feel about them some of them are harder to write than others everything that mattered was very hard to write because it’s about a real person who actually did kill herself by whom i knew so that made it a little tougher to write in many cases i had met these people in different settings i had met doris day for instance a couple of times i was a huge fan of tourist day i consider myself the world’s expert on doris day so i couldn’t not put a story about her in the book even though it’s it’s kind of dark comedy more than positive or negative and she just never learns her lesson and never did accidentally right up to the end she always put her life in disreputable men’s hands it was a fun book to write really and and as you suggest all the stories are quite different we have young women in their 40s who have been shipped out because of age and we have older women like ethel barrymore who’s probably the oldest subject who is on set with frank sinatra doing a film in which she kind of it’s not a walk-on but it’s a character part it’s not what she has been used to doing and that was hard to write because i knew that she struggled in her later years and i knew she was in that movie because i had seen it it was one of my favorite films i knew the lines and everything was embarrassing and i just had to include her in it somehow so all these stories are a part of me really and they involve people that i felt some some emotional connection with in jerry’s interview to you mentioned she’s in sort of a nursing home sort of a last stage of life dementia process and i knew an actress like that i kind of watched her go through all those difficult stages and she had people around her which gary didn’t have she didn’t have family at least in this story but i thought it was an important story to tell because all the memories you know when you get older like that come flooding back not necessarily in sequence you know she’s an unreliable narrator we don’t know if these things are true she talks about a murderer you know we don’t know if this actually happened the plays are a little different you say you hadn’t hadn’t read those they are also a little bit about real people but they’re lighter there are dark comedies intended to be kind of oh my god did she say that kind of situation same theme though it’s you know the post-metoo era what happens to women after they pay their dues what do they do themselves and how do they cope with that and what are they willing to do to get it back and one of the stories we see one of the women in the plays janet drake private eye we see two women who are fighting over the same role and they’re both older you know they’ve played it once one of them played it on television one of them played it in on the radio which tells you their age and there’s a movie now being made with this character and both of these women want that part well what are they gonna do to get it it was a fun thing to write because i sort of knew those people in a way i hope you’ll enjoy reading the plays when you get to yeah i’m looking forward to it yes just thinking about drawing out more on some of those things that you’ve mentioned as well that idea of competitiveness just runs right through the whole thing that how so many of these actresses and writers and musicians performers in general they were pitted against each other and pitted against other people and new things coming in all the time and and just how much that eats away at them and there’s a lack of really developing deeper relationships that i hope has changed to an extent these days um it seems that actors are more or at least they will maybe continue to perform solidarity and collaboration but i don’t know i feel like some of that’s more genuine these days and so that’s part of the pathos i think of so many of those stories is that they’re underpinned by that competitiveness yeah i think that what has changed today for the better has been the strength of women’s networking you know they didn’t do that then they were at the mercy of men sadly there are still no women at the head of studios they’re still all white men but more at the secondary and tertiary levels of authority and they have helped other women i think rise you know it wasn’t until the 70s that another woman ran a major studio after mary pickford in the 20s took him 50 years to do it which is pretty amazing and discouraging but sadly that was not to last that was a short-lived era we had sherry lansing at 20th century fox and i think she was a ceo at paramount for a couple of years we had don steele at columbia and amy pascal and stacey schneider at universal but i don’t think there are i think a couple of them are dead but i don’t think any of them are in power anymore again the competitiveness at that level was uh every bit as vicious if not more so than competing for a part against a younger actress it’s a tough life you’re never quite good enough yeah it’s that idea of even if you’re more than good enough you just don’t look the way somebody might want you to look or you’re not prepared to do something that a producer wants you to do in private i mean hopefully the landscape’s changing because you mentioned as well earlier that of course these were all white men highly privileged people at the tops of these studios and today we maybe don’t have studios but there are certainly maybe independent production companies so somebody like aveda renee can have her own production company and you know in a way we’ve come so far but it’s been such a difficult fight for somebody like that to you not only have the gender barrier but the racial one as well so hopefully that landscape is changing maybe not fast enough but i don’t know there is a legacy to what these women suffered as you depict well we still have netflix and amazon you know to control the uh cinematic universe as you say there are smaller independents but then there’s people like harvey weinstein who ran them one of those smaller independents who’s notoriously predatory of course we know that he’s in jail which is a good thing and and many of his cohorts have had to resign their positions there’s a group of men at cbs who had to resign because of sexual harassment even feminist ellen degeneres had to explain to her fans why producers were harassing women on the set and fired them or they quit i’m not sure what happened actually so you’re right it still goes on i think that women banding together to help one another climb to wherever as they want to go is probably the best antidote for the sexism in the industry and talent is wonderful but as we know it’s not enough yeah very true

are you interested in early access and behind the scenes extras then visit patreon.com forward slash iv cultures to check out our membership tiers

i was wondering as well pam who do you expect to be the reader for this book and do you have hopes for it it would be great if your book could be part of that landscape of change yes i would hope so i’ve been a feminist since i was about eight and tried to get girls into little league that wasn’t possible back then uh so i’m hoping that it will ring that bell loudly that this is what we do to women and what we’ve always done to women in this business and we need to rethink that because it’s not worth it you know people shelf life it shouldn’t be a matter of shelf life it should be a matter what they can contribute and for how long my publicist was telling me that a lot of the people who are reviewing it are women so i would guess that’s the natural audience i mean the subtitle is women of a certain age in hollywood but i think anyone who is curious about how things were you don’t have to be a film historian to be curious about how a harvey weinstein could happen and be such an ogre for so many years you know how did he get away with that you know the casting couch goes all the way back and it was a normal accepted event if a woman wanted to be up on that screen she had to lie down on the couch first that was just unfortunately a given i don’t know that that’s true anymore i don’t think it is certainly there are those predators out there but it’s not as widespread as it once was and i think anybody who cares about that issue will be curious about these stories at least i hope so it was fun to write because of the feminist background i’ll say that because i was a clinical psychologist for so many years i felt that i could get inside their heads and give the reader some idea about how women think about these things how they process that kind of oppressiveness and disappointment and uh edging process itself you know as we know some of them did pretty well with that i think the strength to my writing is always the internal dialogue it’s not so much what happens it’s how the the woman processes the information and that was extremely fun to write because i think i know more about that probably than anything having been in practice so many years yes i think there are a lot of the characters who tend to almost build themselves back up again by tearing down another woman there’s quite a lot of that and that’s part of the system that’s part of the culture you know you have to really put it in that context and remember that this is conditioning that everybody’s going through that’s right part of that competitive nature the adversarial nature of the business i think continues i i don’t think that’ll change there’s so few slots for stardom and so many people will want to get there and not just women of course but women i think are subjected to a different kind of criteria than men are men can age gracefully carry grant i think is the greatest clark gable the old stars i mean they they acted until they died in their old age and there aren’t many women like that you think of who they might angela lansbury is a favorite of mine and she’s what 93 or something 94 now and it’s acting up until last year i don’t know if she’s still working that i mean there are women who can do it but that’s because she’s so powerful she has produced her own television series has the money and the backing to pretty much do what she wants there aren’t many performers who have reached that pinnacle that she has yes i think they start to get thin in the ground in the uk we’ve got people like judy dench who’s in her 80s now um i think helen mirren would probably be in that category i think she’s in her 70s you know so i think in a way it’s loosened up a bit it has changed but you have to build a lot of power to have that level of control yeah and you can count them on one hand or maybe two if you’re lucky yeah i think there’s still so much discussion of what these women see stars what they do with their bodies what they are socially permitted to do and expected to do and often being hauled over the coals for doing something they’re expected to do that they get criticized for not doing and what are they meant to do you know because i think there’s instances of or there are mentions of facelifts and geoplastic surgery and that sort of thing quite a bit in the book and these are just necessities that especially hollywood stars have had to meet but yet even today the headlines are very derogatory towards people who do anything cosmetic with their bodies there’s still say pressure on people you when when somebody’s had a baby for example to get that weight back off as soon as possible and it feels quite glacial any change in mindsets there i agree i agree in fact there are pictures in the press of mostly women who’ve had bad plastic surgery we don’t see that but men are having it too you know they are under the same pressure that women are to appear to be younger how sad that is i mean the people you’ve mentioned and i’ve mentioned even katherine hepburn who worked almost to the end was old and grizzled and beautiful you know it’s a different standard perhaps that we need to evolve to where the aging process is a thing of beauty not something to be shunned and plastic surgerized out of existence that’s it yeah i mean there’s so much talk now about body positivity and loving your body as it is but yeah there’s still so much tension with you need to be this sheep and that size and hide your wrinkles and dye your grey hairs and all of this stuff i just want people to be able to breathe yes it’s a silly example maybe but i’ve been watching um star trek voyager and there’s the character of seven of nine and played by jerry ryan and she’s squeezed into these corsets and she’s made as tiny as possible and you in these skin tight outfits and i just look at her and i think gosh that’s really painful looking and yet all these teenage boys 20 odd years ago were getting very excited over you know and it’s very strange to me but the whole barbie doll thing you know when i was a kid you could put your fingers around your waist easily you know with one hand the thumb and forefinger and what are we telling girls if that’s the standard to which they have to adhere you know it’s unrealistic and not very healthy i might add be part of the conversation with av cultures pod on twitter instagram and facebook pam was there anything else you’d like to tell us about some of your other work as well while we’re chatting and you know because you’ve mentioned your psychology background and your autobiography as well and you know is there anything else you’d like to point out that might be interesting for listeners to think about too well i think as a writer i’ve pushed myself beyond my comfortable limits writing fiction and writing plays for that matter and i would suggest to people that they do the same thing that they make the best use of themselves they can to use themselves up so to speak to access all their skills and develop some they didn’t know they had to sounds corny but to live life as fully as possible because it’s a it’s a carpe diem world you know we don’t know how long we have and why not take advantage of what you do have and make the most of it whether it’s helping other people or you know writing books like i do in essays i have essays up the wazoo and on my website pamundr.com by the way you know why not it’s part of making life meaningful and you know if you don’t do it who will that’s great yes because i was going to ask you as well if you had any movie advice or just anything you’ve learned over the years as you say you were um you’ve met so many and spent time with so many of these types of celebrity before and i mean if there was somebody who’s maybe aspiring to or is just starting out in the entertainment industry as well as um those really important messages you’ve just said you is there any advice you would give to anyone in that position well i think what we’ve learned from at least the stories in fading fame is the importance of getting an education when i was a kid i thought that walking down sunset boulevard or going to the brown derby would mean i would be discovered you know and some talent agent would come up to me and say you’re the one i want for my next movie well there’s still some of that fantasy i think going on among young actors that if they put themselves in certain settings they will be discovered well if that is ever going to happen you need to get grounded in education first and i mean standard education honor doesn’t mean actors studio education i mean a good liberal arts education so you have a sense of how the world is not just your little world or the world of show business but all of it and it will also stand you in good stead when the fame starts to fade if you’re ever fortunate enough to be famous it’ll give you something more to it than just seeing your name in a marquee and sadly the women in my book fading fame that’s all they wanted and pretty much all they got for the most part wasn’t enough it’s our responsibility to fill our life responsibly i think those are really accent points that puts me in mind again of so many of the characters in the stories they don’t understand their own downfall quite a lot of the time because as you say there’s not that basic education they don’t understand the maths around the money that is disappearing on they don’t understand what because they don’t have basic legal understanding either and again it calls to mind for me the um character of geraldine leonard who has the humility to go and get a job in a typing pool when her work dries up i mean i love that about her i love that she just didn’t care she just i need a job i could do that and she had had that education to be able to do that you know i really loved that part in the story we had her feet on the ground and a lot of these women sadly did not she was a good example of that she knew what she had to do and she went and answered fan mail for an actor who was more famous than she would ever be again as you say humility it’s really nice to see him somebody who’s almost famous she wasn’t quite famous but almost famous yeah and we so often forget about actors who play the smaller characters or supporting characters it was so lovely as well to just have it i really i think that was my favorite story i just i just raced through it because i just loved her so much you know i just wanted to give her a cuddle or something i really admired her you know that she’d been a supporting actor to a much bigger actor and was doing a lot of work in westerns and then tv westerns i was that a bit of a reference to rawhide oh no it was probably before wrong i didn’t okay it was uh i think probably early 50s is where i i had her having her career at small studios i think if she’d been on rawhide she would have been more famous real she didn’t have that happen to her i liked her too i liked her a lot as i was writing her and you know sad that her mental faculties were declining and as you say i wanted part of me wanted to go and say it’s okay it’s okay this is gonna happen to you and you’ll be all right everybody cares about you and you know just a lovely person i think yeah i think she was awesome and because it was sad in a way the dimension how that affects her but her attitude was just so lovely and positive that he just thought oh she’s awesome she’s just so awesome and she doesn’t know how awesome she is it’s great i really fell in love with her she seemed to accept any you know whether it was famous or having to get a job or losing her faculties or having mismatched shoes or whatever it was nothing seemed to bother her very much it’s admirable i think i wish i were selling flat absolutely yes it felt like life goes it’s a really lovely example actually that she wasn’t bothered that she just i think i will shoot him oh well yes oh god i’m glad you like that one yeah i did actually it was one of the last ones i wrote i felt i needed to have something lag ethel you know where the person is clearly coming to the end ethel was not declining mentally but she was declining physically but jerry had uh some issues with dementia as you say and it didn’t diminish her enjoyment of her life though as you say it was uh inspiring that she could look back and still wonder what happened in certain instances and and still miss the man she loved and was with just good memories that she had which is wonderful i would hope that we would all have good memories in our 80s yeah or be a total hero like maggie yes yes indeed pam is there anything else you’d like to chat about today anything we haven’t got to that you really want to say well i could tell you how it all started really the writing thing oh yeah it’s weird it was strange when i was a little girl there was a republic studios and monogram studios which are bmc studios and best sold their entire film load to television stations which were having trouble filling the content and so they would show old movies all the time and one time i saw a movie and i was just captivated by the people in the film there were teenagers and i was just a kid i was probably eight nine maybe and then i saw a couple of weeks later there was another film with the same cast on tv and every time after that i saw it was in tv guide was what we used to those days i would somehow get sick you know i would get a headache or i just couldn’t bring myself to go to school i would come up with some faux illness so i could stay home and watch these movies and there were a whole bunch of them and i couldn’t figure out who they were and how many there were and when i got older and started to do this writing about people i’ve looked up the cast which you could do more easily at that point you know years later decades later and i found that the star of the these movies was freddie stewart and it’s probably the only thing he ever did were these eight movies starring quote the teenagers two words uh and it had the same cast june pricer was in it i wanted to write about him and i wanted to write about them because it was unfinished business from my childhood who were they well the only person left alive was noel neal who was best known as the original lois lane of superman fame and she was still alive she was in her 70s i think by the time we met and i spent a lot of time with actually we became friends a lot of time asking about these movies well they were all shot in two weeks this wasn’t rocket science this wasn’t metro golden mayor if you know what i mean they get the thing and they if they made a mistake they just keep going they just roll right over the mistake and i think it was that that got me interested in knowing more about these people from my own childhood that i saw on television and in movies that transfixed me for some reason freddie stewart had a glorious a conscious soprano voice he sounded male certainly but it was very high and clarion and in fact one of the songs he sang penthouse serenade was one of the songs i did on stage in new york when i was performing because it was like an ode to him you know he had made such a difference in my life in so many ways i met his daughter and he was long dead by the time i was writing but it’s little things in life you can grab onto like that and value and uh you can change your life because you’ve just had so many experiences weird part of being alive it’s supposed to be interesting yeah yeah make it interesting yeah you’ve been so generous with your time and your stories and everything and um it’s been so interesting to hear about that process of doing the historical research and carrying it with you for such a long time and then doing something creative with it that’s a really interesting approach and hopefully it will attract people who maybe aren’t too bothered about reading history or biographies or anything but might go for those you know if they’re framed as stories and you know they’re pretty quick to read as well you know you can sit down and read one um and not that long an amount of time and you know it’s very digestible and they stay with you i think they’re you know they’re visually i think quite striking too so it’s been really great to hear just about that creative process but also just the background that you’re coming from and the you know the psychology of these people and what they what they were negotiating with in their own minds as well as in the outside world i can’t thank you enough for taking so much time oh thank you for having me let me put in a plug for fading fame it’s available on amazon.com also as an e-book as well as a paperback so if your listeners are interested in knowing more about some of these stories they can find it at the end of their keyboard brilliant and i will be sure to put those links for the book and for your website in our show notes wherever people are finding this as well so you’ve no excuse but to go and check them out oh great pam hunter it’s been just such pleasure i’ve really really enjoyed spending this time with you and thank you so much for your generosity with your time and ideas and taking so much out of your morning well thank you paul it’s a pleasure to be with you thank you for having me

this is a cozy people production with me paula blair the music is common ground by airton used under a 3.0 non-commercial creative commons license and is available at ccmixter.org if you’ve enjoyed this episode please give us a good reading subscribe and recommend audiovisual cultures to your friend all of our contact details socials information ways to listen and our mailing list sign up can be found on our website linked in the show notes thank you so much for listening and supporting take care and i’ll catch you next time

Advertisement
transcript

Audiovisual Cultures episode 30 – The Little Stranger automated transcript


please support our Patreon to help us provide accurate transcripts
hello and welcome to the official cultures the podcast which examined signed an image based cultural production I'm the host and creator polo player this time I'm joined by Angie Scheel for a post screening discussion of the little stranger the latest film directed by Lenny Abrahamson and an adaptation of Sarah waters's col thank historical fiction of the same title topics we touch on include the adaptation process and seems of abuse entitlement on the supernatural if you would like to be part of the conversation I'll be back at the end with contact details and ways you can support the podcast and building up the website and I enjoyed the discussion another time you know what just having a quick check before it starts I think we need to be uploaded for having done the Cinemark privilege of getting gym memberships and using references on site and we must have been twice as often as we previously one of our friendship with the time's right and why is this the phone for you separate semi as many rooms and the director well known for and what Richard J. our office work for quite awhile and also a stranger and from the novel of the same title by Sarah waters which I read just earlier this year I was a bit late to the party on that one as I am as most contemporary share and I thoroughly enjoyed it sparked a love reading in me again that had disappeared from me for awhile I just wasn't sure all saying could barely pick this novel so I made it a different phone number and see what he has done with it many because I've actually met him and he would call you the PMR very nice the little stranger it was shortlisted for the Booker a few years back and then a couple years ago it was made the recommendation one book project for some reason it might mean something we got coming in now because I still haven't read it what that involves is every single student that you consider us to get a free copy of the book and then there's a huge that's a great big discussion thing a big evening where the mindset comes and doesn't make conversations going on stage I have every reason to read this book and still have not making your very busy and he has time to read novels during the middle of reading an over pressurized stages thank you very much for this turn well the thing is when I read that back and I finished it I got so into it that I wanted to write something and I most of my net and say gosh say to me two thousand words of an essay on that and when I was checking into our waters from the St Louis post production at the time so I've been looking for this for months also we're at the Tyneside which likes to do screenings of films that I wanted to take part of it which you were not done in the past and I used to run it and I've been the guest speaker here this would be the ideal one for you to do is only going as a remembrance but nobody ever the organizes ma'am let it lapse it's done completely voluntarily see I'm gonna give myself a little credit it was really matter no I just been the currency and I and I am curious about I think that normally I would be quite worried but then it's hard to know what any filmmakers going to save money and for me it's somebody who's like I can't quality products with them every time so I feel more anxious and there will come a time when that would happen I think back to some things what research and these are from sixteen months and I have always stayed with me as always interest me Paul has always made us feel like well if anybody's going to make this time but I am quite interested as well because it's an awful and went so it's a woman writer and wonders is probably best known for tipping the velvet he does a lot of historical fiction and I have discovered in myself and I am really into historical fiction really ready in ten minutes to do seasonal help me for a long time any dawn on me that that was something I was very and early this year what did you put your finger on the extra I don't know what it is and something I could I think what would be going on there is when it goes on a piece of historical fiction but they're basically saying is I've also done some historical research yes exactly I'm saying that this terminology and the fact that we need to have research you come to know these things because any excess for things in our world anymore on some historical research even if it's second hand read some history that says to me only available for I'm willing to go the extra mile on this project I'm not even if it's a guarantee of it being a run page around the seven I don't see that being I'm really trying not to when you call really precise details of participants things stranger is in the U. K. it's a hundred and sixty eight months in highs and the countryside that has been the past historical resonance in the very fabric of the building specific terminology I had to look up the meaning of because we don't use them anymore just describing my needs parts of building the intricate details of that and the working of such a high hierarchy the staff as well as a family the bloodlines and then the geography of the please send all the connecting villages and proximity to London the cost comes tonight and to get that message out and during story she and you don't want to start reading it actually I started reading a novel end of the first hand I was just thinking I wish I could write I'm willing to lay a little money down that you could concentrate judging from the trailer we are going to have a tense next couple it is the reason of those things where I need to keep getting saying we need to see what I'm saying from this guy because this is what I was gonna say is safe hi it's been done because it's a male director but then also many of them right and this is a very nice story is set in nineteen fourteen just posted for the main character follow and he is the narrator the back and he's telling the story I'm the kind and work I think what happened he still doesn't understand one time so he's telling it from his past he is being revealed and the words he is writing despicable character he's called the reasoning white said medical doctor and may twentieth century it's so nice and just about everybody else he is not doing anything from the twenty first century everything wrong I'm really interested in I think it's a real examination of toxic masculinity the worst kind of toxic masculinity that may be normal and fine and but nine it doesn't realize that it is in fact talks played by Donald please I know it's don't know how many classes okay only two silent consonants and that particular name yes Sir he's basically only have a completely different kind of %HESITATION one of them was the going in Oregon he was a in a sense another Irish actor making thank with the the man's point of view written by a woman it's a real examination and I'm wondering if there's going to be Englishness examines by Irish or Irish or something going on that was a mistake just speculating at the moment the character Caroline well I feel so sorry for her so much she's a really incredible while running she's got strengthened not stable so much together throughout the whole thing but also you can almost see what's coming for her but when it comes I know it's building up to something hi it happens so I don't know if in just five point eight I really hope that hi this is black she is fascinating because I find that she's quite a sexual please read a line or not this difficult stuff to do no impossible yeah but also it's never explicitly said again every nation of the characters Dr Faraday he only get what he thinks of everybody to route to medically going to get a switch from first person narration and it's relatively focal ice the tree there though and it does seem as if there is a voice of her that subjective to fire day I'm going to make a prediction the existence of character races in films which usually manifests through the whole thing being a dramatization of some sort of like to my mom speaking with the tasting just speaking as the writing that usually involves having a bit of spoken Russian at the beginning I never spoken Russian but having nothing in between maybe one or two holes in between but not having spoken rations because that's generally seems to be inappropriate for me to rations to co exist with certain hours so that it is a move stipulates this construction to back points out that his character is mistaken to have these two numbers in racing going on at once Jemele seems to be seen to be inappropriate that's my prediction I'm going to turn to the right of course maybe they want to do from the part that is in the trailer it's very similar to the first pages of the novel actually and weekends with the earliest memories of being a hundred tall child because they're right there he's working class made history in the back is not his parents of Randy wrapped themselves probably actually damage their health side work themselves pay for his education comes medical doctor so he's quite middle class right her eyes are still there suddenly a lot of the money's gone they still are open class be on him I think he really wants his way in there and I don't think he realizes shares their status I firmly doing historical fiction about England in the first half of the twentieth century could somehow escape disintegrating closest it has to be a story about that first of for him as well because it's nineteen forty the story is told about some retrospective but you don't know when he's writing from possibly in the nineteen sixties it's really hard to tell maybe there are most of the story you're reading is nineteen forty eight and he's a medical doctor are you concerned about the prospect of any tax coming in tonight the film is quite timely in terms of discussions are trying to privatize the nation's the whole expecting many great things was published ninety six or something like that under two thousand six cents since meeting on ninety so it's not not recent a lot of times it's novels might never had a couple of years you have the adaptation I'd love to do a study of rich books get adapted about twenty years later as opposed to within a few years of a ride the crest of the original published thank tipping the velvet was very quickly packed up in a television series I didn't know about when the stranger was first published in this is the first expected or must be in a most recent book because remember when tipping the velvet came on television I think that rainy day a lot of people's minds you know and again it was a start thanks bye bye well it's movie nights and for discussion between somebody who's attention will be drawn to differences between source text and someone whose attention it's only a short duration this is going to have to wait no time we'll have to wait until a little stranger was originally published in two thousand number does feel very contemporary I think certain when I read that there so many issues that are really prescient night probably from Marshall taking back since insurance in mind I think we're talking more openly about issues around toxic masculinity entitlements certainly mail entitlements over possession and women created in nineteen desired possessions but also things like homes and status and things as well even what would've been called behavior and a woman dating a man on is more likely to be called for what it is snowing in Tampa to rape and that sort of thing that emerges so the thing night after having seen the films were back home and in a quiet and thinking about it because I have some questions for myself I wonder if I'd if and joined the film more if I had not read the back I also wonder if another petition could offend the fitted from a serial perhaps because the film is about as faithful as a film adaptation of quite a chunky novel convey right but of course that means that the shed quite a lot of things and of course facially and three signs it's very economic there are a lot of things that are shown rather than what would have been explained at length and then awful on the converse of that you've got quite a lot of things being said there weren't set in the novel that you have to read between the lines to understand so I felt like it was very blatant on the back is a lot more ambiguous because you're coming at it from his point of the aid process %HESITATION I think issues as factors in this film can often daily it comes out of that a little bit and she was she walked you imagine might be happening whereas in the novel is completely subjective our date so even the descriptions of people you can trust the firm does things in a nice way and I suppose in a darkly funny way things like paradise developing relationship with Caroline very early on and it takes quite a lot in the back to get to the point where he's invited to the dinner party with seven quite quickly at times okay quickly in the film he ingratiated himself and they developed a friendship so the home very fast there's a massive bills up to that and the fact Caroline's presented as somebody she doesn't many years since my make up she wears quite ill fitting clothes she's not skinny she has a lot of labor to J. keeping this ice running via mostly she's doing quite a lot of the physical labor of fat so she perhaps the next bit slovenly but she's not solving the she's practical for lunch yesterday so she's not paying attention to %HESITATION hangar to make up in the tanks in the novel there's a lot of his descriptions of her of her own she even lags quite a lot of the first part of it takes place in a really hot summer a lot of that our country should during that time that's very very compressed and then found his descriptions of hurt actually he's quite repulsed by Caroline but yet is talking himself into a lasting on to her emotional range and the film the only hand that he it was at this party when she's dressed up and she's going a little bit of make up he says with the furry beautiful Caroline and then there's a shot of her slight Ching back the dog lying across a sofa with her on a cigarette hanging out of her mind she's about to light it and she's looking at him and at that time away it's a fantastic show it's a great shot and that's all of the reply you need if he's just saying I think it's also a good example of narration in cinema because that's not narration of level of basic character doing the right thing you know it's the the no rating agency of not the film makers in the direction of uses nonspecific hasn't been rating agency of the filmmaking process itself because what we had I was currently looking to all screens by saying you look very beautiful cut to an online match showing what he's looking at and it's ironically contrasting with what he just said because while Ruth Wilson I think you have to start with and that particular show everything about the way he's both dressed and positioned it completely counters wages and so there was a slight to moderate in our fifteen strong audience at the time that she's wearing a very nice dress but it's still setting yeah and she's not comparable and Rick Wilson has played the character calling so well you know she clumps of bodies with open blank senior bay Cappy Bates she's a hard worker and she's very intelligent and she has had no need for any fresh breeze she's a complete contrast her mother he still presents himself very well her clothes are very fine boxer aging as she is she's very fine but he is saying and then an awful hard today he's more attracted to the mother actually and he somewhere between their ages I think it's not clear what is still a good thing because he collects quite young still but fired a is a kids I thank the character of kindness it by twenty seven and the novel and he's me bearing for day and the mother is I think sixty thirty something like that we can do a quick bit of math Ruth Wilson was born at a nice nice tickets he's older than me but she's playing someone a character he's with them makes sense actually because people aged more and her life as hard so Caroline doesn't lack Keyon but nineteen forty it's twenty seven like school too tough nine and demolition was born in nineteen eighty three so he's actually on the ground %HESITATION fifteen months younger than that and then you've got something very elegant like Charlotte Rampling he has it's quite a lot of past behind her but still I don't know if it's a generational thing or what but don't know Grayson is perhaps a better known names start around playing some quite a lot of more obscure or more nation films for where parking ourselves why it is that the name Serra voices doesn't appear prominently in %HESITATION then trailers for this film you've pointed out but it's because don't listen it's probably the most bankable name him even Lenny Abrahamson it's just about director of the root in the brain now those are their history of room so it's very important asset valuations are so high let's go before the Senate let's have a mention the existence of a film similar to bring in its title on a scale of zero to a hundred center St this percentage how faithful an adaptation with over eighty percent but I say thank you to our most often not just new dialogue but even just need images %HESITATION and then take a the very ends at the end of the film your death with no doubt as to what they were hearing the poltergeist the long stay in the back he has no copay what he's brought to this place and there is still a question mark %HESITATION did everybody just go mad or was it something else quite early on in the film it's very clear that it's attached to him but then I don't know if that's made recognizing the signs because hi they've been dealt with him as a little boy being out then you're in the photograph that's not in the back there's a photograph of the staff and his mother's and not and he's not sure which person exactly says another bus stops what he sees when he sees the photographs in the home there's nothing about him being in a photograph and that she has resentments of cities and he's the daughter of the heiresses he died before Caroline and Roderick were foreign said I've got a sister that accounting even there's actually been a calling not being able to think of Susan as our sister because she died before she was alive there so many fascinating concepts are not that far days resentment towards Susan it's not really care and it's not really resentment that it's not necessary jealousy it's so subtle in the back that's what I think in a scenario might have to matter because it needs to be drawn night he's one of these up standing members of the community that behind doors as an abuser the bank does not tell you the reader I think interocean he's solo flaky so my monarchy such a good doctor he's such good manner by hand he's not even aware of his own powers of manipulation he's actually very innocent he doesn't realize he's call this darkness and hand yeah that's actually the worst kind of abuser if the abuser he on the surface %HESITATION to themselves is a good person he's a good friend he's good to everybody he doesn't realize what he's staying also then the reader doesn't quite realize because when things start you're thinking back you're going to all this started when Betty arrived at the Haris so for quite a while you you in the back and they sigh did stay strange goings on are tossed her perhaps and then the thing with the latter's starts because that happens again quite fast in the found at rump separating quickly with the latter so it's actually a really slow burn in the back but it's difficult for them in the drawing room and then it's quite awhile later it's months later they start appearing elsewhere in the heist it's a bad day as a message there's is a combine a set fire to it you know so as a Roderick because actually it looks like it's Roderick for a long time today there's quite of stability up to the fire in his run it chips away at you like that kind of relationship contemporary viewing your entry date before you realize something's not right here every time behind gives consent to something he's managed to get that out of her it's enforced giving yes consent consent through okay if I say yes to this number will stop bugging me %HESITATION as kids but it I'm just keep asking you until you say yeah %HESITATION this to me I've done so much for this country stick of it could be five different people and whatever it is that they're doing it might be super natural and the supernatural completely a thing in the store expects over it might be that I'm trying to do something to the others through natural means %HESITATION the better mentally ill or may have some sort of plan to kill the rest of the family that it could be for these five people it's a characteristic of detective fiction of course but this is detective fiction mixed with what very soon starts to become apparent yeah the natural which is I think I make sure I'm not familiar with it's probably as pre existed this usually the way that the supernatural detective fiction tend to attract is that the obvious assumption that people make an interactive fiction scenario is this this known explained phenomena and constant stories based assume that the explanation is supernatural and then the detective comes and shows that it's not that's usually the relationship between the six so this fresh way in which the team can be brought together their first when I was reading the back a while I was thinking is that the ghost of season that seeing these things and it was only when Mrs iris but completing not what I thought that's not right either I think the idea is to detective is interested in the film where Faraday bumps into see lady again who's a doctor who's of higher class and hand there's a lot more in effect between and Terry rather than going to the pub city brings to mind is hallways and again there he faces much bigger I suspect family is not invited to stay for dinner the state is the one he it's like this in the film where he says a really strange goings on in my experience before and I've read it fast and actually that was what the research from Sarah waters came and ABS actual bricks on phantasmagoria they never actually used to work poltergeist and awful right I think they refer to it is fun to have them send it being psychological he brings that idea up and Caroline fine specks of belongs to her father on that area an independent he starts to read these things and starts to think about them an expiry date because in the film he entertains the notion because he's trying to grasp an explanation but in the back he's upset a hard new scientists to bite it he said I will only believe this if I have to mulch build evidence that I can see and feel and hear and whatever he explains the way everything has a rational and that everybody has mental health issues because of the war and stuff like that or because the state of the license what's become of the family he writes everything off he doesn't entertain anything supernatural to be happening in so there's this constant denial of what he is so very much you can like the abuser narrative and they she they often can't see what they are it would have worked completely fine if it just turned out that there was nothing supernatural going on until it was just a psychological threat to do with the disintegration of their stocks economy to back like that you see it's open enough that it gives you that kernel of tight it's just there's a moment where it's I was gonna say it helps the secure but even then you can delete it when it's not it's clearest and most indicative fat it's a poltergeist and that's coming from him as the run up to Caroline staff and I was really quite dreading this in the phone I think that was part of it is well I think you can really relax on the phone because I knew what was coming and there were lots of the Korea Schultz of the staircase from below he said a point in the summer he hasn't been up stairs yet until he needs to start came from Mrs Irish but there's lots of shots of him making up the staircase and I knew what was coming the whole time the way it's written is incredible by Scott wrenching really upsetting they played actually a similarly as the kids and audio visual language details and to the left %HESITATION fearing that he pulled into a when he had an incident of Caroline and the January of that year when they went to the doctor sounds and afterwards she's been on her own her own life has had to be put on hold because her brother was injured very badly and the second World War and she being with their friends and have this ready for %HESITATION an exciting life with them during the war but then how to stop a lot and returned home to care for brother because her brother as the Mayo he's the youngest but he see your main meal and they're so everything falls to him to look after the home and the business because it's not based on the phone but they run a little farm as well she's had this night or each fired a Spain you're really looking over her he's been watching her she bumps into somebody that she knows and dances and he doesn't really fare much less in any season heating and resentment that's because he's brought her right and he's had no attention from her she's been dancing with all these other people and having a great time and this is somebody he has got no life anymore and has a very hard working keeping this massive place running and by this point her probation pay and then asylum by fire day because he was starting to become affected by the things going on in the heis and has removed spontaneously went on fire but of course it's made to look like he probably doesn't sound and effect he says late goal time he's knocked out like he's drunk when the room goes on fire so they've done that differently in the film where he's staying away so in this case you know they're adding in elements in the film even the film's really care but at the end of the supernatural element to this already in other elements early on to sell more down and so we're at the point at the end of the night out which has been great when Friday and Caroline pullover and in Friday's or com yeah I have a little bit it's not going to build up so that I think is really important the context of what this character's life has been unlocked that night has been to her she said this burst of freedom something she's been enjoying yourself similar to that lace it's two in the morning he's driving her home it's very icy it's cold she's cold she's trying to get our legs warmed up she's being a little bit coquettish with him it's very similar I mean some of the dialogue was from what I can remember very similar to the the back as well it's almost word for word yeah she says and I don't want to go home yet I'm not ready to go home I don't want to go back to that place you got the sense that it's not but she wants to be with him yeah she just doesn't want to go back there she just doesn't want to stop having fun she's not ready to go back so hardly ever she wants that more fun it's quite aggressive in the back it comes across I think quite well in the film Terry where he reads between the lines and quite roughly starts going out %HESITATION basically starts from roughly Kessinger and grabbing at her growing at our clothes and things he's quite forceful and then she very suddenly push some offices no and of course in the back it's more drawn night she's very upset she's apologetic and he's very angry with her he really has to go out there and some of the dialogue same via recess I thought you wanted it and she said I thought he did reading between the lines what she wants is just fun yeah not necessarily west ham and not necessarily you got with him because it's told from his point of view it's hard to know what her sexuality might pay if she even has sexuality it's possible she's gay or bisexual or asexual it's hard to know I think the bottom line is she doesn't have the hots for him and he tries to force her into %HESITATION having those feelings for hand but one potentially redeeming moment which is when he says the morning after the actress is going to start again after all right he seems to be conscientious enough to go I did something wrong I think the only way to fix it is to say can we just ignore the actually Congress that was the last number of weeks and just I guess but then on the same day he's manipulating her into agreeing to marry yeah you were probably for explaining why it's clear in the loss C. ng C. McCarron once said that it supernatural and schools by far he has a night call something maybe that's why some of the underclass patients that he has yeah he does drive by thirty one of the pilots that they've let him have access to that go through the state he stops in the same place to see in the %HESITATION caring that that incident just happened and before with Caroline in the back he described the process as him being really upset him sitting having a cigarette and then he wakes up the next morning after having really favorite strains and he describes the training I find it really felt that she could almost see it happening and the terrain he can match and driving up to hundred striving right up to the front door bursting into the front door running up the stairs and it cuts off matter and novel then describe and going back home when he wakes up in the morning and his colleague inspired pake spends everything up but what's happened then Caroline had sought this horrendous fall from the top floor of the highways going through the whole star well and that has course killed heartbroken or neck and back and killed her instantly very similar and that you have the inquest earns him describing what Betty says very much as it is on the phone and for resale what happened with Caroline is that she's heard something upstairs in the nursery rhymes and so she's gone up to luck and she's reacted to something she turns and she says you TV and then moments later she falls there was some degree of clarity in the film about what was causing all of these well I suppose the whole range of things from a dog attack in %HESITATION go through to the final in roads remain three to Caroline being pushed by something off the top floors therapy it's clear that that's being called by something supernatural but I found myself still thinking at the end it's not very long shot we've seen walkie talkies on this particular occasion and it's the child version of Faraday but that still leaves lots of unanswered questions so does this mean that when Faraday gets angry he splits up a part of his psyche and then it goes off and does things in the form of some supernatural beings I'm not always manifests as his child %HESITATION four is it that back when he was a child he split this part of the psyche off and then since then it's been living in the house and then now he's come back to it one of twenty years later thank you since he's come back to it then he's he's able to influence what it does for is it that the things that manifests itself around the house it's some sort of non material non visible walkie force that it that far they send that back each time the gets angry and that little boy we say oh boy version fairly recently and isn't anyone who's been making any sort of difference that's just a projection of him and his thoughts maybe and once was there any real evidence we have is the Carolines is you and it's Caroline said you too adult Faraday or some sort of ghostly version of an out of her day that would make a lot of sense if you set it to the boys version of that wouldn't make much sense because she doesn't really know what he looked like yeah she's not seen him in the factors you see his shoulder in fact I don't suppose he'd have the same hackable as the leasing does say no you can't have quite to ginger hair but I don't think she'd say you I think what we're supposed to think there is that an adult version of finding is manifested in the house and that that's what's been happening throughout I'm not delays the he split off apartments off when he was a kid and that's been a house that was it but if that's not happening then why is it that rolled thinks that there is this thing living in the house and he's been thinking of for quite some time well before party tends up initially you keep saying I'm not strong enough to face it this time by the house is going to buy something yes it's been there for a long time I think that's what in the novel that's why I think you're a city that's belief that it's a ghost of season something along those lines because it can possibly offend fire day because their sister two year absence and so yes it points towards part of him being laughed and nice Michelle it's almost like an exchange happens when he snapped a corn to foster a corn off part of how you start figuring Ameritrade because I think it's actually part of them and the noble it's part of something on the wall it's more integral to the holiday studying carton wage something like that and also and his mother Stefanie employee whereas in the fountain I think the kids mother doesn't work here anymore she used to work for you yeah her point question because his mother was actually the nursed me it's two seasons %HESITATION I'm not for me was part of his resentment because he didn't designer Mrs Akers as his mother and his mother was spending most of her time raising this other titles and all hands so when I was reading a novel I felt that that was part of his resentment is that this other family call for everything of pages and then his parents later on P. party season because they're working themselves to the bone and they both died very young his mother Cumberland details like that I think in my blog post I wrote about this where again reading between the lines it's possible that Hayes simple stark ice has caused his own mother's dad as well there's a lot more on those things too I did like that at one point I mean from Scott to do this at one point for today talking to you who feel the doctor in the pub scene late Friday talking to Cindy says I know this sounds like nonsense but how about this for theory we know that our consciousnesses hearth right and that we can have in times of the past not using the power of our the idea that one of those personalities could splits off and somehow retain influence over the world outside of our bodies I just simply said it was invalid because that's the phone thing just to be clear that this is what's happening and when the characters describing exactly the sort of supernatural thing you know me to be looking for we've been given quite a few clues about that so far in that any time that one of the supernatural things was happening we get a shot fired ex face in X. remotely shallow for as if to say something weird going on now where he's being separated from the world around us to get over there which was a rumbling intense rumbling sound and some points I went is that intense rumbling sound of the farmers or is it a record with the times that %HESITATION yeah so we kind of we're told about this it was useful because we got this whole other roster of super stuff people have made up over the years and ghost is one of them people being so traumatized that they lash out with Ben mines so maybe one set the fire by just being traumatized that's another version of supernatural stuff that we've made up over the years spirit memories in objects and so on current %HESITATION with us the part into the idea that objects could have spared I've ever been around when something intense happened or something we could look on the old wikipedia to see if anyone had noted down where the look at town center scenes were shocked because it seems like when I was living history with the wikipedia may be completely wrong but it's reference for this is the sixth July twenty seventeen issue of screen daily different principal photography and it was as the credits stated it was U. K. on conviction principal photography may twenty seventeen in different locations outside London including Winslow in Buckingham shift in Yorkshire so removing his resume summary Yorkshire I'm thinking for that and then only from two sides of the square as a rule so we will not be sleeping tonight of course because that was quite scary first K. so there were times when I had a bit of trouble thank them and I three can affect some of the images even at the back gave made have reduced with me I don't sign will be replaced by the phone too much the Russian reading of the visual touches this visit she rarely the tactility of the Haris meeting comes alive just little touches like he's finally going up the stairs and he's caressing the banister because it's the first time he's going up there so it's quite a big thing for him he's been covering the upstairs of the size for a long time and things like watching Caroline pending the wallpaper back dying thirty seems to work well for patients yeah houses these pays a house and its falling to bits I'm at this farm which was a huge chorus that I was done made me think as they had told their few scenes in the same house looking completely pristine for back in the nineteen nineteen right back I can't help but think that it was two different houses because there's been times I've been to National Trust to English heritage properties and they've preserved a house in the simplest way whether they make sure that the roof doesn't mean nothing was smashed windows but that's it so they're not gonna maintain anything on the interior of the room is going to remain empty those filled very eerie next he referenced National Trust property which is maintained as if it's still lived people tend to find out most computing something about empty houses which is a little bit disconcerting anyway in an empty big house like that film is doing a great job of caring Hey look how occupied that isn't how full it is and how warm it is back in the nineteen nineteen flashback sequences but left now how is this leaks in the roof but in the house some rooms they just given up on some of direct TV they can see leaves blowing through some of the rooms I was just waiting for the scene where the whole place to just get burned down by somebody having an episode of some kind but I didn't get that as far as it it's their Starkey sees over now narrative was concerned it was mostly just having not one line where Ron said seventy five percent death duties I don't think this labor government will be happy until %HESITATION bagging on street corners deputies whatever home shortly after the second World War that is why so many stately homes are in the hands of the national trend because suddenly it just became impractical to occupy the echoes into quite a bit in the novel actually is a sector last family friends about the Baker uses stuff up tension bank the Inzalo often selling their land self to the knee high senior states as you see in the family ends is that there so that will have to log where Faraday a couple of years later one one of those visits because the high seas basically Hayes after he gets what he wants not the way he wants that he gets what he wants hi this is entirely is after that %HESITATION goes because it's just laughed derelicts and anybody can go in and then you see the crimes where they've been sold off and then hi fi St husband belts he walks through it and from Cincinnati she's the thing there with our she's getting one with her husband today she's only about seventeen or sixteen at that point and this is a couple of years after the events that he described as a nineteen fifties there's quite a lot more bite the carving up of the line from property to the working class people are doing better feeling she does go and get a factory job and she starts a new life this is a fantastic crops up and it's crap sevens of the acorn antiques quality traveler then there was the cafe next door to a cone and takes the seven MM surgery that made by with it today Walters yeah and she was telling somebody who's for years older than her it was crap that's part of the whole disintegration there still because the narrative is that they get to a point when they can afford one seven ten it's a crap seventies really young I mean I think Betty tries really hard certainty and although you see you're improving quite a bit and she gets very loyal she actually developed a very close relationship with Mrs Ayers and she gets better but she is very young thirteen fourteen when she starts working in the highest and ninety five has this and she had a furnace she can feel the presence in the heist may delay and there's a lot more of her trying to convince people but fail to sanctions she says that %HESITATION Carol there's almost a bottle of what's between what she can persuade and walks Friday is projecting right she really perceives it very strongly it doesn't seem to have fractured directly the first time it's one that makes me feel L. but it does not factor correct take enough to that he's quite strong there was one point where I was thinking %HESITATION whatever this thing is basically something supernatural and it's able to do quite a horrible things to Mrs as because that's not moment when suddenly the blood to pairing on the top and it's scary ghost will be supernatural force is pricking her skin life is give her a call and they split the both of them have shows history being wounded in the next five hours after all right service number so far that there's something supernatural in this house under most established that Faraday seems to have this ability but he can't quite control to split part of himself off and go and do supernatural things at least two force is going to be going head to head does this give interesting how it goes there to be disciplined to full symbolizing a stark said and if you're not careful symbolizing the upstart working class boy I thought that might be correct you for that but of course that just the same thing okay so coming from him that meant that he was unconsciously printing higher with his mind underneath her clothes for ten threat it's notable it's if you think about what they're talking about right at any time settling the land off you can see that you have to see if the hoodie so %HESITATION it's Caroline getting away from it no she has to stay here she belongs here this fight when necessary it comes through in the novel that she doesn't really have I'm trying to think of the password because when I say he doesn't have much regard for him the advice I mean she doesn't like him that's not what I mean he just comes and goes far she's concerned like she doesn't feel anything for him but in the film the ram this point home that she's saying you don't belong here at no point does she ever say that it's all implicit it's hard not welcoming him and the way he wants or cherry yeah he fails sought from her she never actually says that she doesn't even pay it any mind reducing thank okay well this is part of services fictionalized account of what happened to the landowning families England and it seems that what she's doing is she saying the poor things they were victimized %HESITATION which of what was okay yeah a class based hierarchy which they're the top the victimized out of this the position of privilege and horrible things were done to them in the process almost like it's an attempt to try to salvage some reputation for back hierarchical system and the nineteen nineteen five five eight it's strange that it's post first World War because usually if you looking back through a golden era it's before the first mobile right now is that it would be in the long hot summer everything was fine imperil glory a lot but having a flashback to empire today nineteen nineteen that seems to be a reference to just the lights %HESITATION version of people still having the same conceptions about England's place in the world the people are conceited and C. P. V. O. go seems to have died very soon afterwards she's mean to young Faraday I'm not thank god for me and the house is out of bounds in this big white ribbon across the way you might enter the house to Mrs able people don't come into the house that would be invited to the garden so there are these elements of these domestic tractor big mean only but then having them taken down in such a brutal way is a way of just Molly protesting the fact that they lost this status but also the path goes into a pressure they're under to maintain so much of it unintended dignity while everything's falling down around them it's huge a hard work what they're having today and especially after the father has died and nothing happens some point between the very first time particle sizes Giles and when he goes back as an adult so some point between and Roderick has to manage the high season %HESITATION he's very badly injured and the more you spend an hour after his plane to shop dine and he is I think and the basics of something right out of high school gymnasium the survivor so he's called survivor's guilt on top of the injuries and the mental health issues that develops it goes into quite a lot of detail actually in the back as well there's quite a few visits to him in the asylum the break tying it up once it's out of bracing of change there's constant worry as well by the idea of the NHS beginning and of course it begins in nineteen forty nine and the back when fired eight talks from his presence whenever that is he describes this collection everything turned out fine the committee nice practice on the NHS could this story be about how metaphorically if you rely on private practice does not own system of oversight that ensures that doctors are Catholic and without a system of oversight look what some very small percentage of doctors will do to that patient and that's become these little moral arbiters of situations to decide who lives and decide who dies in that sense his poltergeist his ability to do things supernaturally could be an allusion to ducks as having an inappropriate as far as the filmmakers are concerned have and of course for us seems maybe Sir what is considered insufficient oversight and therefore too much power over life and death maybe the family saying right at this point moment celebrating the seventieth birthday and one of its virtues is accountability if they are and it just looks is that part of the thing which it shows that they're responsible for their fellow humans rather than turning golf which is a reason to keep it many reasons to keep it there is the part of the film of the story where Saturday is he saying Roderick as a bit of a Guinea pig for treatment that he's trialling yeah because he's lost a lot of ability and it's like Saturday she using this as a co yeah interaction because he's using this to try and get a sensation and movement back in the lakes and it works and it starts to work on your order excerpts in praise but then the force and the highest get stronger and Roderick come fight it and he's trying to fight it and it seems like he's been carrying up for years picture on to will pull through yeah who is ten years younger again but %HESITATION birth Ruth Wilson on double bass and stone in January nineteen ninety three he replied but Rick case probably when they only picked playing with it same it's just the character almost kissed Broderick is quite young I think he's on the bike twenty four or something the character and so he's twenty five will he wouldn't twenty four women from nine to five he did a great job of looking all the better because of having been through so much yes ma'am voices as one of the poles on voices Bruce Wilson's voice in this was amazing it was deep and it was two hours it had that amount of space to it that indicates presence here fantastic may very well just give her her voice who knows what people actually had authority part of it was that sense of entitlement do you get when you brought up Porsche but part of it was a sort of the sense of just needing to get stuff done yes and don't basins voice the largely psychopathic it was clicked and it was quite quiet sometimes kept reminding each song from voting no just go look up who it is I think one night it's important as well and and no no fault there is the part where he discusses losing his regional accents and remembering finding a bit more like badly burned when he goes to medical school he very quickly gets rid of it who's been we're sure that's who impacted your voice from one of the few links actually between these taxes because will Poulter and there will be somebody with in the revenant together all right may have acted together before I kept thinking Ruth Wilson but on the phone she wore one of many J. as in the past week or so he is she was general for park TV thing that was and about ten years ago he was in saving Mr banks news the most of the main characters once and lock the thing with %HESITATION no yeah one research Dr Arne strand of the love offerings full full years of two thousand six years and four part TV miniseries of Jana as genuine and she was perfect for binging because nothing but Jim is he supposed to be not conventionally beautiful she's supposed to be a bit self effacing I'm the kind of person who just keeps going I want to look at me she did that amazing like there's all kinds of fat character in Caroline's mom she's been at a loss of stuff getting into those incidents short called get off my line now base to be Ruth Wilson's time he's still doing a lot of TV doc rivers maybe we need to see them grow and cultivate screenplay screenplay Lucinda Coxon the harms of me is asking but she's mainly a playwright last name please enter the heart of me Lillian the secret planting spaghetti slow and the Danish notation she also did a bit of TV screenwriting she adopted Michel Faber's novel the crimson petal and the white as a BBC miniseries back in twenty eleven I'm just trying to figure it out because I feel like when I so ran and Frank and more restricted I could see the hallmarks of many of them soon as a director and then this I'm not sure I could pick up a very much she is far from using quite shallow through this lens is quite short lenses there was nothing else that was bringing the Abrams and I think certainly since the old days an official to find areas where vision it's very economic and economic I mean it's telling a lot within one image stallion like several pages of dialogue for example but yes and wanna make sure you know what that's up quite a lot very effectively in the found almost no they said that we do not %HESITATION piece of prose fiction the firm is pick up a novel you shake it the mobile the description for example then you surgically take out more than half of the order and then you have to work at how are you going to create some sort of appropriate equivalent for that script shin %HESITATION actually and then they have to write a letter to your own doctors to add to all of that as well that's gonna process description of oppressors which makes me think why does anyone make a notation I am wondering and then because before the screening started and we were in a very quiet classic which is the biggest screen and the time size comfy seats I think that's the smallest amount of people I've ever had and there have been too quick if he's not nice at midday not screening plus lots more people than not there when you were saying that it's not doing very well at the box office so far and it's been nice for it started in the Tyneside on Friday this week met Sunday so it's evening weekend here but I think you may have been nice for longer than not it opened up things like to Lucas but it's not not much which we can attribute to several things such as %HESITATION K. %HESITATION trailer it's hard to know what kind of phone that is yeah so we were talking about this event the food from the silence historic affection but there's also this paranormal element and there might be parts of it that are affected like horror but the company called a horror film because most of it isn't that scary just moments of our there's just moments of tension and there's slight moments so for you could call goer it's a really difficult one to market combine that with the proposed that the bad weather recently might have been planned somatic the storms but also adds in there isn't a really strong roster of names behind this I didn't even know shard around things and then I'm sorry did you notice who else was in it I didn't even say anything yes just into shock very small is a female in the back of the shop %HESITATION I was wondering if maybe he was one of Caroline's uncles there is just there to the shop that's necessary sixteen real transferring them online TV if he's just Spain Barras said say he had lines and cut all right I need tonight basically a background actor Nicholas faro %HESITATION Nicholas frost with the beam in %HESITATION first phone charge fine he was the man in mind hold on it's been a journey of tentacles he was brigadier Patrick McFarland in Bloody Sunday into the okay telling service reason telling that we can recognize him from you are from ministers went into which would miss the most growth in the two thousand seven TV series version suasion fanaticism of architecture was right next to my foot was described by expensive I needed to I took some of the good any they had seen that look up will be they were visiting friends on sept one day and someone would be so cool if you get a cameo and then can I was just being in the background if you're wondering hi match Abramson and director for hire on this and how much control he says it does feel like Sunday night TV may face I feel sick very high quality %HESITATION I don't know it just feel like probably if it was a four part serial yeah I have a nine fifteen so it's a place called bay I've been really impressed with the phone I've really enjoyed watching I can see why it's not gonna happen people and to go and see it in the cinema a lot of reasons why something do well financially on nothing to do with how good the film is but by the same token the reasons why a lot of films do do well financially is because a good word of mouth and I don't think this film is going to get back no because I just feel like people might say don't waste your money on it just to bring your home to sit at home wait for the DVD at so difficult with adaptations especially if the break is really low one night and some social media that I read this back and I feel really late to the party quite a lot of people I know said often toxic bracket so great you finally arrive at so it's like okay well I didn't know it existed so I called a free coffee a couple years ago just just to fill people in if a book ends up as the Booker prize foundation's one book a year that they give away thousands of copies to nuke us university students you guys university stuff tends to get free copies as well as just lying around there's quite a few companies in the various books that have been the one book book every year you were saying that learning is he's been a hit I don't know I'm hit with his he makes quite the she found certainly the likes of his Irish fan Ms Ottoman poses first phone I saw it quite a few years after it was first minutes and special screening that was fairly packed its fight homelessness and drug addiction it's quite great apes on the streets of Dublin and it's very quite a contemporary kind of realism it's deeply tragic but they're very funny moments and his wow it feels very true to life and done with non professional actors most safe than the likes of what Richard died when it's again an Irish %HESITATION but he's got more of a budget behind him and really strong cast and you start to see what he's capable of these incredible storyteller and the way that he tell things and this is where I think there could have been a really nice comparison differently so could be actually because when Margaret your date was very similar and that Richard is very privileged young man and %HESITATION quick push area of Dublin and he gets away with quite a lot of stuff but he doesn't even see what he's done wrong or that he could do you wrong he's this young man that everybody in the community that's up to the end he has stopped speller of the community type guy that everybody doesn't believe could possibly be violent or take advantage of young girls or any of that and he does all of those things fit quite a few things that Richard does sound but the thing that the titles really getting at is that there's quite a violent exchange with one of his friends and he kicks a guy and a hands on and at some point during the night the guy dice but there's no evidence and of course meticulous gets on this life and this tragic thing is happened everybody thirty things that he doesn't talk about it he just raises three life he doesn't even need to that then I have anything because there's a suspicion on him so he just gets on with his life I think in a similar way to fire day and night there's something very toxic underneath stopped very kind %HESITATION and pleasant surface so it feels like an examination of not kind of masculinity where on the surface you're pretty nice decent guy the third person people look up to you and I both you've got a class thing because Richard is to move very middle class fairly well off family I think you can buy in twenty twelve I think it might be sent during the Celtic tiger show it's set a few years before plus political for since I've seen it with fire J. he's battered himself but he's still not good enough and our people reminding him of that right neck at that party that he goes to bed there's room the first time your people keep saying alert they keeping your right because throughout our excel while I'm aghast here very indignantly you know but then of course she has to prove his worth as a great doctor because something sparks something in the dog can Jack %HESITATION this is a very placid friendly dog and I Carrington okay it's at a point in the story where you keep saying the girl please so that these very liberal parents have brought their child and their child as a nightmare and she's not especially badly behaved in an awful I don't think there is just a hint that she's trying to play with the dog and the dog's not interested smaller kind of dog is a working dog it's not really interested in plan and is quite an old dog so this comparable %HESITATION but there they make her very precocious and found a lot more than two years in the back she's constantly running after the dog she's drinking people's wine she's talking out of play yes where is in the back you're just getting the descriptions of his annoyance on her and her bothering the dog and then suddenly behind the curtain this horrible noise happens I was wondering how they were going to do that orderly and it's pretty sickening in the sign design %HESITATION signs of because you don't see anything I'm happy to see any violence but are you just here to offer find of screaming and tearing flash something has focused %HESITATION into doing something and when done a reading of the hotel just opened today at the book indirectly just occurred to me and it's since about the middle of the nineteen nineties the general tenor of thought about kids is that it's not possible for kids to be culpable for any acts of violence the matter even more innocent than they were imagined during the Victorian period we must take to make it gets to the point of automatic in %HESITATION to innocence on old masses this isn't to say that's wrong kids are culpable foolish things that they do it's just that it's much less simplistic and this seems to be a novel which is about a kid who has the ability to kill people not through doing anything physically he can just attach part of himself in that part can go off and kill people because it's I mean it's been pretty clear in the movie that's what happens to you siki shortly afterwards and it seems that that happened because young Faraday split his self offended magic pot went and did something she gets home along the left and that seems to be par misses as did say something like about getting L. late that night this is our version of a kid in which the kid has the ability to wreak horrible acts on the people around them Firelands as well as against women and girls with Roderick and the dog it's relatively gentle Roderick surviving seasoned the asylum he said but the girls too sticky season has died long ago and the little girl survived the dog attack but is disfigured the rest for life by it there's a lot more with her in the back as well it goes to visit her and then another doctor but super seats and because he's not high enough for class today with that any modification of a really good job of selling number face but she suspects urge our life is effectively read because their face becomes disfigured by this attack the dog hostilities it's life but it's best to sleep by Faraday very template it's the women who have violent death some cities have this prolonged illness it's been very difficult Mrs Ayres has these cops coming on her body spontaneously and then she wakes up and finds in the film because photograph of sticky shattered the glass shattered and that's what she's said arrests why you think she said her arrest there's actually a lot more work and the big because starting class cities as well where there is an increase for Mrs ours as well because she's been fined by Caroline it's fine to be set aside even though this possible that there's evidence that she couldn't do it herself something else that it was what this does and is it traces were found he's doing to the women around and back to that one moment when his mom hates him for snapping the acorn Ross the frame to America in the house and doing it in front of sticky in nineteen nineteen that's pretty interesting because sought justice and in the back he takes it home he hates it and she finds that confronts him and throws it on fire he never encounters the girls are rightly he just watches from afar so it's a bit more creepy actually and the bank but of course the from house to get there very quickly in a house there I mean in a way I think something that's making ME with the film is that I think it's treating the audience at seven o'clock however they come work to support themselves and that's what I'm thinking I don't know how much control any of prince's hot because that's just not today well next time you mean down the pub dogs the reason not mentioned better many being hit bottom it was so far he's been at he hits the market every time yeah and maybe this is just going to be his first he didn't quite hit the mark %HESITATION yeah but he's also jumping director he's call for me to provide your address and made anything since right now this is book comparison may be guy Ritchie four point four four mark Kermode is not coming when you need to reach you from comes along Hey guys open mind and sometimes you love that and then another guy Ritchie film company is going to I remind it's complete path toward possible that bloody will the three that are great and then %HESITATION due to that now and then there are the two that are great but this is only down him with faint praise of the moment he's not got the guy Ritchie record yeah but the thing is it's not a bad phone number by any means hello it's just not for the standard of room for what with your data Frank that's called visited them but then again that question off I read often awful so I'm my best prejudice against the film anyway because it can never be the novel that soft problem comes with adaptation beach here there's probably more to get into that section there it's different okay right thank thank part of the conversation we are not a fecal features on Twitter and Facebook we always welcome suggestions for topics and guest contributors to sustain improve and expand the podcast and website where you can find links to all episodes and more information please support us by at Petri on dot com I'm also very grateful for one off donations to pay pal dot me forward slash P. a platter thanks so much for listening following sharing and supporting take care and next time