Kenneth Merrill and Professor Jeff Parkin, Theater & Media Arts

This project began as a poorly-written draft of a script about a woman struggling against the strict social pressures of the 1950’s. I took on the task of turning it into a film because I liked the setting, the action, the tight dialogue, and I really thought that it could go some very interesting places. Of course, as the script got better, with the help of Martha Rallison (the writer), it breached the wall of generalities and evolved into a personal story about Hazel and her love for a wayward son, Allen, and the mad moments that every single one of us face when we have to navigate the varying and sometimes-conflicting needs of our loved ones.

And so research for this project began at the academic level: watching, re-watching, or reading about films (typically American, because we were interested in 20th century American culture) concerned with mothers and their travails. This stage revealed that there is distinct lack of such films in the American cannon; and our “secondary research,” as you may call it, ended fairly quickly.

Recognizing our unique position of being able to contribute to a relatively small collection of films, we refocused our attention on what we wanted the final artistic statement to be. We decided we were less concerned with moralizing about the past, our culture, or the situation of women, and more interested in creating a personal experience that would allow the viewer to do their own moralizing, look circumspectly at the women and mothers in their own life, and come to conclusions about the state of things themselves. To do this, we needed to create fully-fleshed characters that weren’t stand-ins for ideas, but could be connected with on a human level, as friends do.

Thus, our researched turn from analyzing similar films to ours, and the social climate of the 50’s, to rewriting and rewriting and rewriting the script, and really learning/deciding who Hazel was and how she would act in the situation, and how the other characters would react. We stripped out everything superfluous to the core of the story, the personal side of Hazel’s experience, and finessed the presentation of the story until it felt not only realistic but palpable. I developed histories for each character, detailing where they were from, what they did there, the moments that shaped their life, what they thought of each other, making sure that I could answer any question about them as well as any of my friends.

After all of this preparation, with a locked script and a thorough orientation toward our final product, the rest was a matter of execution. As the director, I worked with my cinematographer to develop a look for the film that would serve the final goal of connecting the audience in a very personal way with the character of the mother. We decided to do the entire film hand-held, giving it almost a documentary aesthetic, and we decided to go with low-key, motivated lighting, to create a more intimate and distraction-free space for the story to take place.

While the film is not yet finished, it is in the very final stages of the picture edit, meaning that the basic structure of the film is being locked down now—after which we will mix the audio, finesse the color of the images, procure a score, and make final copies of the film. Editing this film has been an exercise in returning to the script, returning to our research and looking again at our goals for the film. It is easy to get caught up in making sure the final film reflects the screenplay exactly, but we have really tried to treat the footage independently and focus on the characters that are actually in front of us rather than making them fit our original ideal. This has meant that we have cut lines or shots because they hindered the connection to the characters. The project is now a collaboration with the actors, who have made a permanent imprint on the material, and we have to shape the film around the living characters rather than the written ones.

Looking at the film, even while it’s not quite finished, I am more than glad that we focused on simply telling a story and showing the experience of a particular woman, and not trying to reach beyond that. A morality play such as the first draft of the script would have fallen flat and would have likely had no effect on the audience. It’s the kind of thing that turns us off—and it feels phony. But there is nothing phony about an experience, a crisis, even a fictitious one. And an audience drawing its own conclusions will remember those conclusions longer than if they were handed them.

Overall, the film is turning out wonderfully, and we do feel a connection with Hazel and the others. I am confident that our research and the time invested in preparing the piece has had a crucial and lasting effect on the power of the film, and I am happy to say that the characters are likely as real as they ever could have been. While the film is certainly not perfect—and probably won’t be, even when it is finished—it carries authenticity. We have shown it to a handful of crew members as well as friends and family, and they have all responded well, and feel a connection with the characters. Hopefully this connection will prompt circumspection in real life, and we will all learn something about the mothers around us.

We will be submitting the film to the LDS film festival, among others, in 2014. Its new title is Spare the Fatted Calf. We do hope you will hear something about it