ShareThisBy BETSY PICKLE
Friday, November 03, 2006
Ryan Murphy has Nielsen ratings, awards nominations and hate mail to tell him what people think of "Nip/Tuck," the button-pushing FX show he created and writes, produces and directs. But only one person's opinion matters to him on his feature-film directing debut _ that of Augusten Burroughs, who wrote the best-selling 2002 memoir on which "Running With Scissors" is based.
"He was the first one I showed it to," says Murphy. "At the end of it, he just sobbed. He said, 'This is exactly how it was.' He was very upset by it, but he loved it. He loved that it was both funny and sad. He said, 'That's what my life was like.'
"At that point, I thought, well, even if I lose the film in a terrible fire and there's no negative, I did my job because I made the movie for him, and to have him love it so much and tell everybody that he loves it and he's endorsing it _ there's not very many people who write a memoir who love the movie based on their life."
"Running With Scissors" is Burroughs' take on his unusual childhood. After his parents split up, his mentally unstable, aspiring-poet mother assigned guardianship of him to her psychiatrist, an eccentric therapist who lived in squalor with his family and made decisions based on the shape of his bowel movements.
Annette Bening and Alec Baldwin play the parents. Brian Cox and Jill Clayburgh play the psychiatrist and his wife, while Gwyneth Paltrow and Evan Rachel Wood play their daughters. Joseph Cross, who co-stars in the new Clint Eastwood film, "Flags of Our Fathers," plays Augusten.
Murphy fell in love with the book after it was published and started pursuing Burroughs to get him to let him bring it to the big screen. At the time, the Indiana native had been living in Los Angeles for more than a decade. He had written some screenplays, none of which had been produced, and had earned kudos for the short-lived TV show "Popular," which he co-created. "Nip/Tuck" was in its early stages, but Murphy was basically an unknown quantity.
"He didn't want to sell it," Murphy says of Burroughs, who took two months to agree to a meeting. "I think he was very protective of it, particularly the Annette part. He didn't want her to be a 'Mommie Dearest' gorgon. So I flew to New York on my own dime, and I was prepared to mortgage my house to make it."
Murphy, graduated from Indiana University and had worked his way into screenwriting from a career as an entertainment journalist by the mid-1990s. He felt confident that he could do justice to "Running With Scissors."
By the time he got to shoot the film last year, he had a wealth of experience behind the camera. He says he felt very comfortable as a film director.
"I had great training, I think, in television at that point, and I'm such a micromanager on that TV show," says Murphy, who also adapted the screenplay and produced his first film. "I used much of my crew, who I'm very comfortable with, so it seemed like a very natural leap for me.
"If anything, (it was) more luxurious because I didn't have to shoot as much every day as I do on the TV show. But the challenges were greater. It was a lot of work with Annette ... getting her part right, and it was a lot of really hard, emotional stuff. It was tougher, but it felt similar."
