Far removed from the structured world of office hours and writing workshops, Professor of Literary Arts Erin Cressida Wilson has spent the fall semester off College Hill creating a world of her own. No run-of-the-mill screenwriter, she's deep in the trenches of Tinseltown, adding a distinctly Brown flavor to the Pacific Coast.
Most recently, Wilson penned the screenplay for the unconventional biopic "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus," starring Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey Jr. The film, which was inspired by Patricia Bosworth's book "Diane Arbus: A Biography" and directed by Steven Shainberg, had a limited release on Nov. 10.
The film is a highly stylized, fictional interpretation of the iconic photographer's artistic birth over a three-month period. One fateful day, she ventures into the kaleidoscopic, lushly hued apartment of her new neighbor Lionel (Downey Jr.), a mysterious, seductive recluse who usually wears a mask because his body is covered in hair, the result of a rare disease called hypertrichosis.
Sexually and creatively repressed, Diane works as a stylist for her husband, who photographs models wearing fur for her parents' department store. Lionel inspires Diane to plunge down the rabbit hole and peer through her own looking glass to discover beauty in a different kind of fur. "Alice in Wonderland" meets "The Elephant Man" as Lionel gradually liberates Diane (pronounced "Dee-Ann") from the constraints of her life as a 1950s New York housewife stifled by the foppish, bourgeois excesses of her surroundings.
"I was influenced by Arbus since I was a child, and I think she was a remarkable woman who changed the face of women and art in America," Wilson told The Herald.
Wilson got inside Arbus' mind through a year of research and compiling an image portfolio including photographs by Arbus and others. "I wrote a script that was a dream or a metaphor, taking the background of Diane Arbus's life, taking any number of the incredible jewels from Patricia Bosworth's book and weaving them into the fabric of a metaphor about her birth as an artist," Wilson said.
Bosworth, also a journalist and author of biographies on Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, co-produced the film. "I think (Wilson) is enormously talented and very imaginative," she said. "It's totally different from my book, but the spirit of Arbus is in the movie. I feel in that sense the movie was very true to my book, and I'm very glad a woman wrote the screenplay."
In light of some dismissive reviews, Bosworth acknowledges that purist critics with conservative tastes might not appreciate the film's nuances and artistic liberties. "It's very ingenious. Either you go with it or you don't," she said. "Some people want a biopic to be more conventional. This is totally unconventional, unorthodox and gutsy."
While "Fur" is only her second feature-length screenplay to be produced, Wilson is no novice when it comes to drama.
Her first produced screenplay was the 2002 cult sensation "Secretary," also directed by Shainberg, which depicts a sadomasochistic relationship between a lawyer (James Spader) and his new secretary (Maggie Gyllenhaal). The screenplay won an Independent Spirit Award for best new screenplay that year.
Born in 1964, the native San Franciscan's career as a playwright began in 1985 soon after she graduated from Smith College. Since then she has had over 15 plays, radio plays and musical theater and opera librettos produced nationally and internationally at venues including the Mark Taper Forum, the Classic Stage Company, the Traverse Theater in Edinburgh and the New Grove in London.
Beyond penning such critically acclaimed plays as "The Trail of Her Inner Thigh," "The Erotica Project" and "I Feel Love," Wilson played Jessie Darrow opposite Kevin Spacey in the 1991 teleplay "Darrow," among other roles. She has also received numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.
In her plays and screenplays, Wilson often delves into the realm of erotica, portraying complex women and their intimate desires.
"I don't know that my subject matter is sexual, but the lens through which I write can be sexual, or sensual, or erotic," Wilson said. "I try to affect the five senses of the mind. I love to go to the theater and films and feel it in my body, so that the act of seeing is not just with the eye, the act of hearing is not just with the ear, but with the entire being."
While film is not always as intimate or exciting as live performance, Wilson said she has found that the medium can sometimes allow for more intimacy.
"I found that with the obsession with training actors to project in this country and throughout the world, this projection eradicates the opportunity for intimacy," she said. "The combination of the intimacy I tried to create in plays and the breadth of image made it difficult for me to bring my work to fruition. I found in film that intimacy and image are incredibly easy to do."
Once the performance is preserved on celluloid, actors don't have to worry about maintaining a consistent energy level every night, she said. "What's beautiful about film is you capture the actor on film and you've captured the performance, and you don't have to sit in the back of the theater praying and hoping that the actors will be present for the moment," she said.
Wilson said she does not have to wrestle for creative control because of the chemistry she has with Shainberg. "I love working with him for many, many reasons. We share a similar sense of humor," she said. "Also, he allows me to write the way I like to write. That in itself is a gift."
Previously an associate professor at Duke University, Wilson was hired in 2003 as a tenured professor in the Literary Arts Program to co-direct the Graduate Program in Dramatic Writing.
"She's a real asset to the program and an incredible teacher, and we all learned a lot from her," said Sam Marks, a 2006 graduate of the M.F.A. program in playwriting, who was recently named the first recipient of the John C. Russell '91 Fellowship in Literary Arts. Marks is currently a visiting lecturer in playwriting at Harvard University.
"I feel like I learned, essentially, what it means to be a writer from her, in terms of habits, honesty, discipline and imagination," he said. "I think her plays are these really vivid, imaginative, creative, daring, difficult at times, pieces."
Wilson's current projects include an adaptation of the 2003 French film "Nathalie," which tells the story of a woman who hires a prostitute to see if her husband is committing adultery, and a remake of "The Hunger," a 1983 film about lesbian vampires.
Wilson will be living in Santa Monica with actor J.C. MacKenzie and their 2-year-old son for the remainder of the academic year and could not comment on whether she'll be returning to Brown next fall. Despite her uncertainty, she stressed the value of teaching.
"I would say that the life of a writer goes hand in hand with that of a professor," she said. "It always helps my writing to be teaching. It's great to focus on other people's scripts and that's an incredible balance that I have been lucky to have."
