The Kindest Cut
How John O’Brien shepherded Nosey Parker to the screen
IMAGE BY JACK ROWELLVermont Is for Lovers follows a New York couple around Tunbridge as they seek out seasoned advice from long-married locals on the eve of their wedding. In A Man With a Plan, Fred Tuttle, a charismatic, septuagenarian dairy farmer with a 10th-grade education and a bad hip, assumed the role of, well, Fred Tuttle, a charismatic septuagenarian dairy farmer… who decides to run for Congress to pay his bills. A Man With a Plan made a national splash in 1998 when, in a twist of life imitating art, Tuttle beat out “carpetbagger” candidate Jack McMullen to become the Republican opponent of Senator Patrick Leahy.
In Nosey Parker, professional actors play a wealthy couple from New York settling into a million-dollar hillside home in pastoral Tunbridge. But the real star of the film is the late George Lyford, O’Brien’s farmer-neighbor and poker buddy. As in A Man With a Plan, it offers more than a touch of social commentary. But unlike the earlier film, which is largely structured around Tuttle’s political high jinks, Nosey Parker explores a complex personal relationship that embodies changing physical and social landscapes in Vermont. In the end, as O’Brien likes to say, it is “a love story about friendship.”
Following its premiere this spring at Montpelier’s Green Mountain Film Festival, Nosey Parker opens at the new Roxy — the former Nickelodeon Theater — in Burlington on May 30.
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A visit to the Tunbridge headquarters of Bellwether Films — O’Brien’s home-based production company — starts with a steep sequence of serpentine dirt roads and ends in a shallow scratch of driveway before a yellow farmhouse. Here fat, tufted sheep mill about in a pasture hemmed with split-rail fencing, and a white dog the size of a young polar bear amicably noses a visitor’s crotch. A sliding glass door bangs shut and John O’Brien ambles outside.
The filmmaker wears 40 lightly. He has the gently masculine visage of a Renaissance David, and a crown of fluffy, dark-brown hair not unlike that sported by his Romney sheep. He has a subtle, wholesome effervescence about him and he smiles openly and often. You get the feeling that O’Brien would clean up nicely, but doesn’t bother. On the day of the visit, he’s wearing a dirty white T-shirt, lentil-colored pants and rubber boots. Even those unacquainted with fashion’s cutting edge in Hollywood can guess that O’Brien’s attire is not industry-standard. But then, neither is he.
“He’s not unaware of his own strengths, but he’s an anti-star,” says Ed Koren, a Brookfield-based cartoonist for The New Yorker who has been friends with O’Brien for years. “He could be a star, but he’s taking great pains to be a part of the landscape where he lives, where the people also don’t have an inflated sense of their own importance.”
Koren has a deep admiration for O’Brien’s films — especially Nosey Parker, which he deems the deepest and richest of the trilogy. “John uses experience and weaves it into a wonderfully complex and complete vision of the very deep feeling he has about [Tunbridge],” says Koren.
“It’s interesting, being a first-generation Vermonter,” O’Brien notes. “Not many my age have grown up here. I have a foot in both the native and the new camps. I know it takes about seven generations before you can call yourself a native — and it takes more than just paying taxes before you’re accepted.”
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O’Brien’s abiding affection for Tunbridge is obvious to anyone who has seen his films. According to Rick Winston, co-owner of Montpelier’s Savoy Theater, where Nosey debuted in March, such warmth is unusual in independent filmmaking. “Apart from being a truly independent filmmaker, the kinds of films [O’Brien] makes are against the grain,” says Winston. “There are a lot of young filmmakers today who want to make their mark as dark, ‘edgy’ directors. We call them ‘Tarenteenies.’ John definitely is not interested in making the next Reservoir Dogs.”At the same time, O’Brien’s direction is far from saccharine. “Audiences are interested in seeing their lives up there — a recognizable way of life that’s treated with some respect,” Winston says. “Usually, in American films, the rural life is a source of fun or condescension.”
The filmmaker’s approach to rural life is nuanced, as well it should be. After all, he grew up on the farm where he lives today, milked a Holstein through high school, and, during his four years of college at Harvard, came home every other weekend to help out on the farm. These days, in addition to working on film and farm, O’Brien is involved in Tunbridge’s civic and cultural life as a Justice of the Peace and a debate coach for the nearby Chelsea high school.
Roberta Henault, librarian at the Tunbridge Library, says O’Brien is “really great at showing how people are here — not backwards, but laid-back and close to the earth.”
Kay Jorgensen of the Tunbridge Historical Society notes that one of O’Brien’s strengths is his attentiveness to the stories ordinary people have to tell. “Everybody has a story. John knows that,” she says. “You could go to any farmhouse in Tunbridge and get a good story.”
O’Brien’s story is no exception. After inviting his visitor inside, O’Brien pauses to check his answering machine. He does almost all of his business by phone, so this takes some time. Between calls to investors and filming arrangements for the Nosey Parker trailer, he dashes outside to pour Guinness down the throat of an ailing ewe — the beer is good for getting calories into a listless sheep — and to move some new lambs into the barn. It’s a good opportunity for the visitor to be a nosey parker herself and snoop around the first floor of the house where O’Brien has lived his entire life.
The rooms of on the ground floor of the house are light, spacious, and strewn with creative clutter. Plants crowd the kitchen. Innumerable books, records, periodicals and a foot-tall stack of unopened DVDs eddy around the furniture in the living room. Guides and encyclopedias solidly pack one windowsill. A thin, balding, black-and-white cat, sprawls on the couch, all but submerged in a thick sheep skin.
O’Brien’s attachment to hands-on craftsmanship, to doing things well and beautifully, manifests itself in curious ways. The entries in his Rolodex are meticulously inscribed and illustrated. For lunch, he puts out a ceramic bowl of couscous, broccoli, cilantro, lemon juice and tomato. Chives and slices of pear fringe the dish. A pin by the kitchen sink — “Beat the System: Unplug a Computer” — speaks not to a Luddite’s knee-jerk abhorrance of technology, but to an artist’s aesthetic aversion to digital media.
O’Brien jokes. “I really must have been born in the wrong century.” For personal correspondence he shuns email, which he feels circumvents the creative potential of the pen and fosters degraded grammar. Instead, he sends his friends postcards, which he illustrates and inscribes in a whimsical fashion. Koren, one recipient of these paper missives, comments, “Now there is an art form in which John excels, where his wit and artistic talent can be seen on a daily basis.”
When it comes to filmmaking, O’Brien is definitely not a Luddite. He is more than a little in love with the technical aspects of filmmaking.
Off to one side of his house, a hulking editing table dotted with large metal spools squats in the center of a dim, curtained room. The table is a Steenbeck 2000, built in Hamburg in 1976. It’s a good machine, but, says O’Brien ruefully, “Pretty soon this is going to be in a museum.”
Two reels of 16-mm film, one for sound and the other image, snake about the board at 24 frames per second. They hiss and rattle when in motion. Strips of film dangle from a metal rack in bunches, like drying beans. As O’Brien works with the skeins of film, he shortens and lengthens shots by cutting film out and pasting it in. When the blade slices through the film in a miniature guillotine, the celluloid makes a light snick! A spool of clear tape — perforated at the same intervals as the film — adheres shots together.
One shot seems to linger too long. Snick! One shot might be better than another. Snick! O’Brien’s hands move quickly. As film is excised and patched in, a narrative emerges, along with a sense of rhythm and flow. The process is laborious but, even considering the fleet feats that editing software enables, O’Brien is committed to celluloid. “There’s something about light shining through the film that gives us a physiological pleasure,” he insists. Also, digital editing makes filmmaking too easy. “It makes a lot of non-creative people think they can make good films.”
Since O’Brien has his characters invent their own dialogue, he’s never sure what he will have to work with when shooting is done. “It’s a funny process,” he says. “I’m constantly rooting around for truffles.”
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Editing is a critical phase in film production, but it was an especially laborious and defining stage for Nosey Parker. Originally, the story was about the redemption of old-timer George Lyford’s character: At first a grossly unethical “nosey parker,” he eventually becomes a mediator between the Newmans — the wealthy newcomers to the community — and the Tunbridge natives. Nary a whiff of that scenario remains in the final version.
Shooting for Nosey Parker was almost entirely finished by the end of 1997. O’Brien likes to joke that the reason for the delayed release is that “It took us five years to cut the plot out.” But that’s not the whole story. Part of the reason for the long wait, he explains, was that in 1997, A Man With a Plan was airing on PBS. Underwriters were needed and it was up to O’Brien to find them. (Ultimately, Ben & Jerry’s funded the film’s network appearance).
Then, in 1998, Fred Tuttle ran for Senate, and O’Brien was his handler. The footage for Nosey languished during election season. But most significantly, during that same year George Lyford — Nosey’s star — got cancer. The contrast between the healthy, vivacious character on film and the ailing friend in real life was impossible to reconcile, and the near-sociopath Lyford played now seemed false. O’Brien says it was “somehow a violation of how George Lyford really is.”
The project was further delayed by the media frenzy surrounding the Zantop murders in Hanover, New Hampshire. One of the killers — Robert Tulloch — was a member of the debate team O’Brien coached at Chelsea High School.
For a time, work on Nosey Parker was stymied.
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After Lyford passed away, O’Brien discovered that some shots he had initially dismissed revealed the vibrant, real relationship that had developed between Lyford and costar Natalie Picoe. The New York-based actress says she expected major changes in the editing. “The plot just didn’t work. I remember thinking, there is just no way this is going to work. It wasn’t going anywhere.”
The most authentic scenes, where things really “clicked,” Picoe says, were those in which she was improvising conversation with Lyford. O’Brien ultimately decided to reorient the film, shaping it around this budding friendship rather than “plot stuff.”
The result is by far the most mature of O’Brien’s films. Elegiac and complex, it best embodies “cinema in which real American lives breathe through the pores of the narrative,” as Wall Street Journal drama critic Donald Lyons described O’Brien’s filmmaking.
In one scene towards the end of the film, Lyford stands outside in the sunlight playing a lively harmonica tune. In the context of the film it’s a cinematic non-sequitur; a segue away from what plot there is so the camera can linger on the play of sunlight on the instrument and Lyford’s craggy, smiling face. Remembering the scene, O’Brien he says, “that was the last day he went outside.”
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Now that Nosey Parker is complete, O’Brien is working hard “to get the most out of it.” Local farmers have cooperatives that help them distribute their products, but there are few equivalents for independent filmmakers.
“This movie is made regionally, but we have to compete against the best —and the worst — cinema in the world,” says O’Brien. When he was trying to get A Man With a Plan into theaters, for example, the film was vying with such well-financed films as Sense and Sensibility and Leaving Las Vegas. “We barely got into Burlington,” he admits. “The film took off, but it was an uphill battle.”
Vermont filmmaker Jay Craven, whose latest works are In Jest (1999) and The Year That Trembled (2002), says it is increasingly difficult for independent filmmakers to break into the national — or even regional — consciousness.
“The overwhelming impact of hyper-commercialism in the industry makes it incredibly difficult for independent filmmakers to have a voice, ” says Craven. “That’s especially true for those working in a rural place, or with any regional sensibility.”
Thanks in part to the success of A Man With a Plan, O’Brien has been able to find some theater owners eager to show his new film — the Savoy was angling for Nosey Parker for three years before O’Brien was ready to show it.
Usually, it’s an uphill battle to place the film in commercial theatrical venues. Outside Vermont, O’Brien plans to focus on “semi-theatrical” venues such as museums for showing Nosey Parker. In the meantime, O’Brien is putting up posters for the film, booking with theaters, and trying to get the trailer out.
So what’s the film man’s next plan? After Nosey Parker has made the rounds, O’Brien wants to make a comedy about the “green” movement. “Like everybody else, I’m interested in what a model life would be, because we’re all living, to some extent, lives of contradiction,” he says. Whatever our intentions, none of us lives as purely as we like to imagine we do. “Somewhere in it all is a film about figuring out a design for living that isn’t preachy or polemical, but gets people talking and thinking.”
O’Brien plans to set this film in Vermont as well, though not necessarily in Tunbridge. “Think globally, act locally is the focus here,” he says. “I want to get at the universal through the particular.” As is his wont, the film will pair trained actors with real people playing themselves. “Some will be great, and some will make fools of themselves.”
At 40, O’Brien calls himself “a late bloomer. I’m at an embryonic stage. I hope to get better.” He looks forward to making films for the rest of his life. “There’s always a new story to tell; there are so many great subjects out there that no one’s making films of, and I’d like to make those films.”
Just don’t expect anything ordinary from O’Brien. Making Nosey Parker has crystallized his commitment to unorthodox filmmaking. “From now on, I don’t want to do anything by the book,” he says. “If I have complete artistic freedom, I might as well use it.”
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Published in Seven Days, 21 Mar 2003
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