On Saturday evening, my wife and I walked from Carytown to Movieland, settling in just as the audio warning to shut off cell phones came on before a showing of Richmond screenwriter Megan Holley's Sunshine Cleaning, which was to be followed by a Q & A with Holley.
Megan's been a Richmonder since 1992, and we've had occasion to write about her efforts several times, like here and here. In 2004, she received a Theresa Pollak Prize for Excellence in the Arts.
By then, she'd self-produced a science-fiction feature called The Snowflake Crusade, which was her version of film grad school. "I made many, many mistakes," she said on Saturday, "but they all helped me learn how to be a better writer and filmmaker."
Richmond nurtured Holley's filmmaking desires; she started out making shorts for presentation at the bi-monthly Flicker movie festivals. She still lives here, though she admitted during the Q&A that she enjoyed the red-carpet L.A. premiere of Sunshine, complete with paparazzi shouting her name.
Holley explained that she actually wrote the script in 2001; it went on to win the 2003 Virginia Film Office Governor’s Screenwriting Competition. Which, if you compare that to its 2009 release date, should tell you something: This ain't Entourage.
When we spoke to Holley in 2004, Sunshine Cleaning was about halfway through its eventual production. She told us: "The film concerns a single mother cleaning houses to provide for her son and settling for scraps of affection from another woman’s husband. She ultimately quits her job and with her sister enters into the grisly but lucrative industry of crime-scene cleaning.
“While they are physically cleaning up after these tragedies, they’re also cleaning up the tragedies in their own lives.”
The movie was at first supposed to be shot in Richmond, then changing producers and circumstances moved it to Baltimore, followed by Philadelphia, but financial incentives eventually landed the Sunshine Cleaning crew in New Mexico.
Holley explained that after the writing, there's little or no input into how the work is transformed. Writers have no say in casting, music or, really, anything. "We're at the bottom of the totem pole," she said.
She was pleased by how much the descriptions of the various crime scenes were translated from her script, and she recalled how one scene that called for clouds of flies required a "fly wrangler."
"This cardboard box showed up, and a guy opened it up, and there were flies everywhere," she said.
Now here I have to offer full disclosure. I've know Megan for a while, she's served on the board of the Firehouse Theatre (of which I'm a co-founder) and I've liked her work ever since she was threading it into a projector for Flicker. Also, I have a celebrity crush on Amy Adams.
So take what I say with the proverbial grain of salt. I enjoyed Sunshine Cleaning and would recommend it to those of you who like some dark with your light dramas. Several poetic flourishes in the writing really got to me: how the two sisters try catching snippets of movies featuring waitresses (for reasons you'll find out); the memory box the "troubled" sister Norah keeps to remind her of their deceased mother; the one-armed clerk who is also a fastidious model builder.
And did I mention that Amy Adams is in it? And Emily Blunt, too, about a million miles away from her fashion-conscious, careerist character in The Devil Wore Prada. And there's Alan Arkin, playing a cantankerous and rather eccentric dad. The film's director, Christine Jeffs, lensed the Sylvia Plath biopic Sylvia.
But don't take it from me, here's what Rolling Stone had to say.
On Saturday, Megan spoke about future projects, including her screenplay A Jealous Ghost, a modernized Turn of the Screw, with Kirsten Dunst attached, but one can never forget that movies sometimes go into "development hell" and may or may never emerge.
Showtime is interested in a possible series based on Sunshine, and Holley's got a sci-fi script out there, too. But in the meantime, she's writing and raising a son, Samuel.
By the way, though the film was made in New Mexico, some Richmond references made it into the movie, including the address 2327 Grove Ave. In the film, it's an address where the sisters go to clean up; in reality, Holley lived there for a while.
