Kate Plays Christine

Presents Kate Plays Christine ** U.S. Documentary Special Jury Award for Writing** 110 Minutes / English / USA WORLD SALES CONTACT: PRESS CONTACT: ANA VICENTE YUNG KHA DOGWOOF DOGWOOF [email protected] [email protected] 19-23 Ironmonger Row, London, EC1V 3QN T: +442072536244 Synopsis In 1974, television host Christine Chubbuck committed suicide on air at a Sarasota, Florida, news station. This is considered the first televised suicide in history, and though it was the inspiration for the 1976 Best Picture nominee Network, the story and facts behind the event remain mostly unknown. Now in the present, actress Kate Lyn Sheil is cast in a “stylized cheap ‘70s soap opera” version of Christine’s story, and to prepare for the role, Kate travels to Sarasota to investigate the mysteries and meanings behind her tragic demise. Filmmaker Robert Greene cleverly forgoes your standard talking-head-and- sound-bite approach to nonfiction storytelling, instead choosing to employ Kate Lyn Sheil as a conduit to understanding an impossibly complex issue. Committed to doing justice to Christine’s life, Kate not only candidly pulls back the curtain on her acting process, but she also reveals the biases and presumptions even supposed experts can provide in their diagnosis. Kate Plays Christine boldly challenges its subjects and audience alike to accept that answers from the past are never easy. About Christine Chubbuck Chubbuck was born in Hudson, Ohio, the daughter of Margaretha D. "Peg" (1921–1994) and George Fairbanks Chubbuck (1918–2015). She had two brothers, Greg and Tim. WXLT-TV owner, Bob Nelson, had initially hired Chubbuck as a reporter but later gave her a community affairs talk show, Suncoast Digest, which ran at 9:00 am. Chubbuck spoke to her family at length about her struggles with depression and suicidal tendencies, though she did not inform them of her specific intent beforehand. She had attempted to overdose on drugs in 1970 and frequently made reference to the event. She had also been seeing a psychiatrist up until several weeks before her death. Chubbuck's mother chose not to tell station management of her daughter's suicidal tendencies, because she feared Chubbuck would be fired as a result. Her focus on her lack of relationships is generally considered to be the driving force for her depression; her mother later summarized "her suicide was simply because her personal life was not enough." She lamented to co-workers that her 30th birthday was approaching and she was still a virgin who had never been on more than two dates with a man. Chubbuck's lack of a romantic partner was considered a tangent of her desperate need to have close friends, though co-workers said she tended to be brusque and defensive whenever they made friendly gestures toward her. She was self-deprecating, criticizing herself constantly and rejecting any compliments she was given. On the morning of July 15, 1974, Chubbuck confused co-workers by claiming she had to read a newscast to open Suncoast Digest, something she had never done before. That morning's talk show guest waited across the studio while Chubbuck sat at the news anchor's desk. During the first eight minutes of her program, Chubbuck covered three national news stories and then a shooting from the previous day at local restaurant Beef & Bottle, at the Sarasota- Bradenton Airport. The film reel of the restaurant shooting had jammed and would not run, so Chubbuck shrugged it off and said on-camera, "In keeping with Channel 40's policy of bringing you the latest in 'blood and guts', and in living color, you are going to see another first — attempted suicide." She drew the revolver and shot herself behind her right ear. Chubbuck fell forward violently and the technical director faded the broadcast rapidly to black. The station quickly ran a standard public service announcement and then a movie. Some television viewers called the police, while others called the station to inquire if the shooting was staged. After the shooting, news director Mike Simmons found the papers from which Chubbuck had been reading her newscast contained a complete script of her program, including not only the shooting, but also a third-person account to be read by whichever staff member took over the broadcast after the incident. He said her script called for her condition to be listed as "critical". Chubbuck was taken to Sarasota Memorial Hospital, where she was pronounced dead 14 hours later. Upon receiving the news, a WXLT staffer released the information to other stations using Chubbuck's script. For a time, WXLT aired reruns of the TV series Gentle Ben in place of Suncoast Digest. About The Filmmakers Robert Greene (Director) Robert Greene’s films include the Gotham Awards–nominated Actress (2014), Fake It So Real (2012), and Kati with an I (2010). Robert has edited films including Queen of Earth (2015) and Listen Up Philip (2014) by Alex Ross Perry, Approaching the Elephant (2014) by Amanda Rose Wilder, and Christmas, Again (2014) by Charles Poekel. Robert writes for Sight & Sound and is the filmmaker-in-chief at the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri. Meet the filmmaker: http://www.sundance.org/projects/kate-plays-christine Sean Price Williams (Cinematographer) Known for his work on Listen Up Phillip (2014), Heaven Knows What (2014) and Queen Of Earth (2015). Douglas Tirola (Producer) Known for his work on National Lampoon: Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead (2015), Hey Bartender (2013) and A Reason To Believe (1995). Olivia Zimmerman (Producer) Known for The Quitter (2014) and National Lampoon: Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead (2015). About Kate Lyn Sheil Kate Lyn Sheil is an American independent film actress. She I known for her roles in You’re Next (2011), V/H/S (2012), The Color Wheel (2011), The Sacrament (2013), and the award-winning Netflix series House Of Cards. An Interview With Jessica Ellicott (4:3 Film), Robert Greene & Kate Lyn Sheil How’d the premiere go? Robert Greene: I thought it was great. Kate Lyn Sheil: I think it went well. Greene: A lot of people… Sheil: Very beautiful theatre. I didn’t stay for it. Greene: We did not watch the movie. Although it had big German subtitles so I kind of wanted to watch it with German subtitles. But we did not watch the movie. I’m never going to watch the movie again probably (laughs). But it was good. One of my favourite lines in the film is when Kate says, “If a performance of mine is called ‘subtle’ one more time, I think I might lose my mind.” But your performance in the film is… Sheil: Relatively subtle? Relatively subtle, yeah. Sheil: Yeah, I know… I mean the film is such a particular thing and called for a certain level of subtlety because I’m playing myself, but there are other things I’ve done that I think are less subtle. I think the interesting thing for me was the subtlety of the artificiality. Sheil: Sure. I mean, the film-within-a-film is really quite grotesque in a way, could you elaborate on the decisions that lead to that? Greene: I mean for me, the film-within-a-film idea, it’s meant to be a failure of a film, which is sort of a weird idea. For me it’s like a typical, but not even typical, it’s like a metaphorically typical version of an attempt to tell the story. And part of what we wanted to get across is that you can’t tell the story. It doesn’t work. Because all those scenes are based on factual information that we knew about her life, lines that she says, conversations we know she had, based on very limited reporting. We’ve taken those and turned them into these melodramatic, soap-operatic, ’70s campy scenes that are meant to feel like, “this is not working,” you know. Because to me, it’s just… when someone commits suicide you want to explain why. It’s a natural human tendency to want to explain why, and you can’t. You can’t explain it. You could say like, there was chemical imbalances or someone was sad or something happened that was a trigger, but there’s something deeper that’s just not possible to get to. So, we wanted to make scenes that were about that emptiness, about that empty attempt to get past that point. Have you been tempted to make a cut of the film-within-a-film? Greene: No, no! Because the concept… Sheil: It would be too painful. Greene: It would be too painful. The concept is so specific, you know, and I really wanted those scenes to feel like documentaries about acting, too. You really are watching Kate – and others – struggle with the lack of material, in a way. But we also, I mean, Sean Price Williams, who shot the film, he had a good line about what he wanted them to look like. He was like, imagine going to some store in Copenhagen and you see this video box from a soap opera in Poland or something, and you look at the box and you’re like, that looks like it’s going to be the coolest thing ever. But then you watch it and it’s not. That’s the way he was thinking about how they looked. So, I mean I think they end up looking a bit more like stage plays in a way, too, which is sort of good and bad… I just wanted them to be failures. I wanted them to be like you’re watching but you’re not being sucked into the escapism of her story, you’re purposefully watching thinking, “this is not working.” Which is a weird thing to try to do.

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