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Just another informative article. If you're easily bored, hit your 'back' key. - Perdita
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A Filmmaker Inspired by Lobotomy - By RANDY KENNEDY, NYTimes, 4.29.2004
In the never-ending search for truly original topics in a world of cinematic recycling, Richard Ledes, a first-time director, probably deserves some kind of award.
As far as he or anyone else can determine, he has made the first full-length feature film in which the chief subject is lobotomy.
With that in mind, it may almost seem beside the point to mention that the movie, "A Hole in One," stars Meat Loaf. Or that the screenplay relies heavily on an unusual source for dramatic inspiration: the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene Annual Report of 1953. Or even that one character is based on a real neurologist, Dr. Walter Freeman, who pioneered outpatient lobotomies in the late 1940's and, before he lost his surgical privileges in the late 60's, drove around the country promoting the operation in a camper van he called the lobotomobile.
"It's hard now to believe that someone like Freeman really existed," said Mr. Ledes, 47, who has been involved for many years with performance art and experimental theater groups in Paris and New York. "And that's one of the reasons that I decided to use the historical material in a made-up story. I felt that fiction could convey the truth better than documentary."
The movie, which will have its premiere on Sunday at the TriBeCa Film Festival, is a resolutely absurdist critique of 1950's conformism that has few aspirations to appeal to a mainstream audience. The story of a small-town woman (played by Michelle Williams) who wants to have a lobotomy to deal with the emotional pain caused by her murderous gangster boyfriend (Meat Loaf), the movie sometimes feels like a combination of David Lynch, Sam Peckinpah and an old high school hygiene film. Mr. Ledes said he became interested in the subject of lobotomy after he produced a performance-art piece in the early 1990's at the American Fine Arts Gallery in SoHo, based on the records of a World War II veteran who had a psychotic breakdown after the war.
Mr. Ledes was so fascinated by the soldier's account of his treatment that he spent the next five years researching what he described as a vogue for mental health and psychosurgery that swept America in the late 1940's and early 50's. (The movie soundtrack uses original recordings of mental-health public-service radio plays made by the federal government in the 50's, including one narrated by Ralph Bellamy.)
Mr. Ledes's research led him to George Washington University, which keeps the archives of Dr. Freeman, who along with Dr. James Watts developed what was known as the transorbital lobotomy.
The procedure did away with the need to drill holes in the skull. Instead, the patient was anesthetized with electric shock, and the doctor, using a mallet, inserted an ordinary household ice pick above the patient's eyes into the frontal lobes of the brain, moving it around to destroy brain cells. The patient was often able to leave the doctor's office the same day but was never quite the same again. (At the peak of lobotomies' popularity, in the early 1950's, even as criticism mounted in the medical community, it is estimated that American doctors performed about 5,000 a year, at least some of which were elective.)
Dr. Freeman used lobotomy to treat patients suffering from anxiety, depression and many other maladies, even alcoholism, essentially turning on its head a motto often used by the singer Tom Waits, "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." In the movie the character based on Dr. Freeman, played with a creepy zeal by Bill Raymond, is shown performing the procedure quite realistically. "Except I changed the real centimeter measurements," Mr. Ledes said, "so that nobody would go home and try to do it on his kid sister."
In the course of researching and writing, he said, he was constantly struck by how much stranger than fiction the truth was, and how much more depressing. Recently he returned to a huge, abandoned mental hospital, the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Centerin Dutchess County, N.Y., that he had considered using as a location for the movie. (It was eventually shot in Nova Scotia.)
Several of the strange plot ideas — for example, a mental hospital's patients caddying for its doctors on a golf course — were taken from patients' descriptions of the Harlem Valley hospital, which was mostly shut down in 1993 and whose buildings and land were recently sold to developers.
Mr. Ledes went back there in March with the movie's cinematographer, Stephen Kazmierski, to revisit the hospital's cemetery, which had inspired a scene in the film in which a character visits the grave of her brother, who had been a mental patient.
Instead of gravestones with names, however, she finds only small markers with numbers: the movie explains that the purpose was to spare mental patients' families any embarrassment. (The hospital kept a registry linking patients' names and numbers.) While it may seem like an overly dramatic device, the practice of numbering graves was widely used in many New York mental hospitals. The Harlem Valley hospital cemetery closely resembles the one in the movie, with more than 500 small, numbered concrete disks spread throughout a field. Atop a gate that leads to the cemetery, "Gate of Heaven" is spelled out on a rusty arching sign.
"Can you believe this?" Mr. Ledes asked, as Mr. Kazmierski began to shoot documentary video of the cemetery, for possible inclusion on a DVD version of the movie. "It's really so sad. Who's going to maintain this cemetery? Who's going to remember who these people are?"
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A Filmmaker Inspired by Lobotomy - By RANDY KENNEDY, NYTimes, 4.29.2004
In the never-ending search for truly original topics in a world of cinematic recycling, Richard Ledes, a first-time director, probably deserves some kind of award.
As far as he or anyone else can determine, he has made the first full-length feature film in which the chief subject is lobotomy.
With that in mind, it may almost seem beside the point to mention that the movie, "A Hole in One," stars Meat Loaf. Or that the screenplay relies heavily on an unusual source for dramatic inspiration: the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene Annual Report of 1953. Or even that one character is based on a real neurologist, Dr. Walter Freeman, who pioneered outpatient lobotomies in the late 1940's and, before he lost his surgical privileges in the late 60's, drove around the country promoting the operation in a camper van he called the lobotomobile.
"It's hard now to believe that someone like Freeman really existed," said Mr. Ledes, 47, who has been involved for many years with performance art and experimental theater groups in Paris and New York. "And that's one of the reasons that I decided to use the historical material in a made-up story. I felt that fiction could convey the truth better than documentary."
The movie, which will have its premiere on Sunday at the TriBeCa Film Festival, is a resolutely absurdist critique of 1950's conformism that has few aspirations to appeal to a mainstream audience. The story of a small-town woman (played by Michelle Williams) who wants to have a lobotomy to deal with the emotional pain caused by her murderous gangster boyfriend (Meat Loaf), the movie sometimes feels like a combination of David Lynch, Sam Peckinpah and an old high school hygiene film. Mr. Ledes said he became interested in the subject of lobotomy after he produced a performance-art piece in the early 1990's at the American Fine Arts Gallery in SoHo, based on the records of a World War II veteran who had a psychotic breakdown after the war.
Mr. Ledes was so fascinated by the soldier's account of his treatment that he spent the next five years researching what he described as a vogue for mental health and psychosurgery that swept America in the late 1940's and early 50's. (The movie soundtrack uses original recordings of mental-health public-service radio plays made by the federal government in the 50's, including one narrated by Ralph Bellamy.)
Mr. Ledes's research led him to George Washington University, which keeps the archives of Dr. Freeman, who along with Dr. James Watts developed what was known as the transorbital lobotomy.
The procedure did away with the need to drill holes in the skull. Instead, the patient was anesthetized with electric shock, and the doctor, using a mallet, inserted an ordinary household ice pick above the patient's eyes into the frontal lobes of the brain, moving it around to destroy brain cells. The patient was often able to leave the doctor's office the same day but was never quite the same again. (At the peak of lobotomies' popularity, in the early 1950's, even as criticism mounted in the medical community, it is estimated that American doctors performed about 5,000 a year, at least some of which were elective.)
Dr. Freeman used lobotomy to treat patients suffering from anxiety, depression and many other maladies, even alcoholism, essentially turning on its head a motto often used by the singer Tom Waits, "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." In the movie the character based on Dr. Freeman, played with a creepy zeal by Bill Raymond, is shown performing the procedure quite realistically. "Except I changed the real centimeter measurements," Mr. Ledes said, "so that nobody would go home and try to do it on his kid sister."
In the course of researching and writing, he said, he was constantly struck by how much stranger than fiction the truth was, and how much more depressing. Recently he returned to a huge, abandoned mental hospital, the Harlem Valley Psychiatric Centerin Dutchess County, N.Y., that he had considered using as a location for the movie. (It was eventually shot in Nova Scotia.)
Several of the strange plot ideas — for example, a mental hospital's patients caddying for its doctors on a golf course — were taken from patients' descriptions of the Harlem Valley hospital, which was mostly shut down in 1993 and whose buildings and land were recently sold to developers.
Mr. Ledes went back there in March with the movie's cinematographer, Stephen Kazmierski, to revisit the hospital's cemetery, which had inspired a scene in the film in which a character visits the grave of her brother, who had been a mental patient.
Instead of gravestones with names, however, she finds only small markers with numbers: the movie explains that the purpose was to spare mental patients' families any embarrassment. (The hospital kept a registry linking patients' names and numbers.) While it may seem like an overly dramatic device, the practice of numbering graves was widely used in many New York mental hospitals. The Harlem Valley hospital cemetery closely resembles the one in the movie, with more than 500 small, numbered concrete disks spread throughout a field. Atop a gate that leads to the cemetery, "Gate of Heaven" is spelled out on a rusty arching sign.
"Can you believe this?" Mr. Ledes asked, as Mr. Kazmierski began to shoot documentary video of the cemetery, for possible inclusion on a DVD version of the movie. "It's really so sad. Who's going to maintain this cemetery? Who's going to remember who these people are?"
A good friend of mine actually considered it last time she was in the hospital. *shudder*
