It's about turmoil in the house of art. A struggling New York actor is offered a small fortune for the personal letters that her world-famous novelist father wrote to her less famous writer mom. When she returns to her dysfunctional Midwestern family home after the death of her mother, she finds her recluse dad slipping into dementia, and struggles with the fierce creative rivalry that long ago destroyed the family.
"Winter Passing" is rated R for language, some drug use and sexuality. It opens Friday at The Oaks Theater in Oakmont. Rapp will be at The Oaks at 7:30 p.m. Monday to talk about the film. Call 412-828-6311 for details.
Having hung out with the creatively talented brother of the talented director of "Winter Passing," I wondered where the story came from. A couple of years ago, I spent a fun night bar-hopping with musician, stage and film actor Anthony Rapp ("Dazed and Confused," "Six Degrees of Separation," "Twister," "A Beautiful Mind," "Rent") as he scoured Pittsburgh for musicians to back him up in his City Theatre production of "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." Rapp spoke with pride of his brother Adam Rapp, a playwright whose American premiere of "Blackbird" had been staged at City Theatre. Not long thereafter, City offered a commission to Adam, which resulted in "Gompers." "Winter Passing" is Adam's first film.
It was logical, I thought, to ask if the creative tension and family competition that Adam wrote into the Holdin family reflected a similar creative sibling rivalry in the Midwestern house of Rapp.
"Not really," he says. "My dad left when I was 4. Mom was a prison nurse. Anthony and I are the only creative people in our extended family -- a large Catholic family. Mom wanted to be a writer and wrote a lot of letters, but we're the only artists in the family. Actually, I grew up an athlete. College basketball."
He hints, however, of a competitive family dynamic far less dysfunctional than the characters he invented in "Winter Passing."
"[Anthony and I] are competitive, but it's a healthy competition," says Adam. "The more he succeeds, the more I want to succeed. He keeps me honest. I'm glad, actually, that we do different things. That way, I can get competitive in creative ways. If he were doing the same things as I do, it would get weird."
As weird, perhaps, as the smoldering rivalry that has destroyed the Holdin family in "Winter Passing." The famous novelist has allowed his professional obsession and alcoholism to alienate his wife and daughter. When she reluctantly returns home, she finds her father surrounded by a substitute family of cultural misfits who are more defensive and supportive of him than she is.
Adam says "Winter Passing" began as an idea for a play.
"I'm a big fan of J.D. Salinger, and I know someone who knows Salinger's son. Matt [Salinger] went to his father's house for Thanksgiving about six years ago. His father opened boxes of manuscripts he'd been working on for 50 years. He asked his son to burn them after he died. What bitterness. I thought, that'd be an interesting character. How do you relate to a character with a splintered mind who's started to slip into madness? What about the children of the artist? That was the germ of the idea."
A Boston theater company asked Adam to develop a detailed synopsis to submit with their grant application.
"I didn't get the grant because I'm a straight white guy," says Adam, not even bothering to couch his frustration in the arts funding system. "So I was left with this half-gestated idea."
Adam had been courted by a West Coast agency that wanted him to write for Hollywood, and his film agent encouraged him to turn his play synopsis into a screenplay. The transference to another medium opened new possibilities.
"Every medium has strengths," he says. "In literature, Joyce captured one day in 750 pages. The social event, the voyeuristic experience that theater is, gets changed with the close-ups, set changes and the mechanism of film."
The first-time screenwriter, first-time director wrote a letter to Ed Harris asking him to star in his movie. As easily as that, after a meeting at Harris' Mailbu home, the answer was, "yes." Key cast members quickly fell into place. Will Ferrell was hired as an intentionally not funny 35-year-old virgin Christian rocker, and Adam says he was thrilled to get Zooey Deschanel ("Almost Famous," "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," "Failure to Launch") in the key role of the novelist's daughter.
"This was all a huge learning experience," Adam says. "I've directed a lot of my own theater work ... but film is a completely different animal. It's using space much differently."
Different but exciting, Adam says, to be working in another medium. The theater veteran is already working on his second film, an adaptation of "Blackbird," the play that premiered in the United States on the South Side.
First Published: March 30, 2006, 5:00 a.m.
