Amazing journey

Park City

It's really quite balmy today. I'm standing here waiting for the shuttle to take me from Prospector Square up to Main and I'd say it's probably at least 30 degrees. Maybe this sounds really cool to some of you, but to me it feels pretty good. My jacket's unzipped, no gloves, no hat. If I had shorts I would wear them.

So I just got out of a screening of Girl 27, a doc about Patricia Douglas, a movie extra who was raped at a big MGM party back in 1937. She pressed charges, but was made a fool of in the press and ultimately the whole story was covered up. Enter David Stenn, a biography writer specializing in the golden age of Hollywood. While working on a story about another actress, he came across the newspaper headlines on the case and was struck by the fact that neither he nor any historians had ever heard of her story. So he decided to dig. Four years later, he presents this film, chronicling his efforts to unearth this woman's story and his ultimate triumph in finding Patricia alive and, after months and months of work and patience, willing to talk about her experiences. The result is a film that is not only a documentary of what happened to Patricia back in 1937, but also about the amazing relationship that forms between the two of them. All this culminates in him writing an article on her behalf for Vanity Fair that allows her to fully share her story with the world for the first time in 65 years. Within weeks of her story being published, Patricia is admitted to the hospital and dies a few days later. The night before she dies, she tells David how much she appreciates what he's done and how she finally feels at peace.

From a filmmaking standpoint, Girl 27 isn't anything amazing. It's David's first film ever and he self-admittedly had no idea what he was doing. What makes this film remarkable is the story and the journey that David and Patricia take together. I absolutely recommend seeing this film if it ever finds theatrical or DVD distribution.

Screening before Girl 27 was a short documentary called Scaredycat. This is a film about fear and prejudice. What makes this interesting is that it's a film about the filmmaker. See... the director, Andy Blubaugh, has serious OCD: he obsessively straightens things (pictures on a wall, things on a desk, abandoned newspapers on bus benches), can't walk on cracks in the sidewalk... etc. One night while biking home, five guys mug him. In the aftermath, he develops a huge fear of black men, which even Andy himself considers to be strange and unfounded since only two of the five guys were black (two white guys and a Latino make up the balance). This film is basically his own exploration of his fear and his attempts to understand why he's so afraid. Extremely interesting and well done. Probably one of the only self-documentaries I've seen that isn't masturbatory, Andy's film manages to be a really objective, yet personal look at the issues and reality of social fear.