Richard Ledes: Difference between revisions

Richard Ledes is an award-winning American filmmaker and writer based in New York City.

Richard Ledes
Born	Richard Ledes November 11th, 1956 Baltimore, Maryland
Occupation(s)	writer, director
Awards	“Made in New York” Tribeca Film Festival.

Background

Richard Ledes began making Super 8 films at the age of twelve.

He studied Ancient Greek, English Literature and Theatre at Amherst College, graduating magna cum laude in 1979. He formed a theater group to perform plays in Ancient Greek and created a play from the last book of Iliad that was performed in the original Greek by Ledes at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Scotland.

He moved tp Paris where he wrote and direct plays such as “Midtown Stabber” and “The Gift of Walking”, a seven-minute play accompanied by Prokofiev’s “Seventh Sonata” and performed at Atelier Mahdavi on Rue de la Roquette. He also turned his then-apartment at 242 Rue Saint Martin into a theater where the play “Shade” was performed. Richard Ledes also directed and wrote a number of short films, among which, “Animals” a 5 minute 16mm film based on the grandmother’s tale in Buchner’s Woyzeck.

During this time he also began to write on art for a number of magazines, notably Artforum and Artscribe in London. As a result, he did a few performances himself. "Taste" was based on the records of Richard's uncle who had been a World War II veteran, had suffered a psychotic break after the war and died in a Veteran's Hospital when he fled the facility and was hit by a train. He had been recommended for a lobotomy but did not receive one.

Richard Ledes returned to New York at the end of the 80s. He began working on his doctorate in Comparative Literature at the New York University. His dissertation was finished in 1996 and named “The Pure Products of America Go Crazy: The Language of Schizophrenia in the United States During the Early Cold War”. It subsequently served as research material for his upcoming film A Hole in One with Michelle Williams. He also staged a series of pieces of performance art at various locations around New York City. At the American Fine Arts Gallery, curated by Colin De Land, he staged and acted in a performance based on the hospital records of a World War II veteran who had suffered a psychotic break in the early '50s. Ledes spent the following years doing further research on this subject.

As part of his research for A Hole in One, he volunteered at an out-patient center for severely mentally ill patients. He also assistant-directed a series of plays created and performed by the patients, one of which, "Room 13A" was about a drug that cured all mental illness but had one side-effect: it brought back the dead. Richard played a small came role as Antonin Artaud working as a waiter. "Room 13A" was reviewed by The Village voice.

Career

A Hole in One

A Hole in One stars Michelle Williams as a young woman who seeks out a lobotomy during the rise of the procedure in the '50s.The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003..

The film is about a young woman Anna (played by MIchelle Williams) in an American suburbs of the 1950s. Her uncle comes home after Word War II and her father rejects him. The girl is lured into a relationship with Billy, a local mob boss. When her brother dies and she witnesses Billy murder a local nightclub owner, she is driven to the edge of insanity. She develops a fixation with mental health that drives her to seek out a transorbital lobotomy. Anna leanrs about the procuder through sensational newspapers and Life magazine. which advertises the operation as the new vogue in American medicine.

When Dr. Harold Ashton, the foremost practitioner of this brand of lobotomy, comes to town the entire town is buzzing. He starts performing the icepick lobotomy on alcoholics, veterans and other troubled outsiders.

Billy is concerned with his girlfriend’s obsession, he takes her to a fake clinic fronted by Tom, a Korean War veteran on Billy’s payroll who masquerades as a neurologist. Tom convinces Anna to delay the procedure and visit him at night. Tom and Anna share their traumas with one another and grow closer. Billy finds them together and sets off a final conflict that draws the film to a close.

The idea for A Hole in One was born out of a performance piece Ledes had staged at the American Fine Arts Gallery in SoHo in the early 1990s. The performance was based on the records of a WWII veteran who had experienced a psychotic break and for whom it had been recommended that he receive a lobotomy. Ledes conducted extensive research for the film over many years, including volunteering at an outpatient center for severely mentally ill. Additionally, he visited George Washington University, which holds the archives of Dr. Walter Freeman.

Rather than doing a documentary on Freeman or case studies on mental illness, Ledes opted for fiction:

“I never considered doing a documentary. For me it was always important to tell the story in this way. That there were truths about the subject of mental illness and the use of transorbital lobotomy that were inseparable from the truths that one finds in storytelling rather than the true and false of science.”

Richard Ledes. Audio commentary. A Hole in One. Dir. Ledes. Perf.Michelle Williams. Meat Loaf Aday. 2003. DVD.Fox Lorber. 2004.

Ledes’ screenplay draws heavily on documents such as the New York Departmental of Mental Hygiene Annual Report of 1953. . Other sources were: Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness and Last Resort: Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness by Jack David Pressman. He also cites The Lobotomist: A Maverick Medical Genius and His Tragic Quest to Rid the World of Mental Illness by Jack El-Hai, which came out after A Hole in One, as a reliable reference point.

Ledes has compared the character of Dr. Ashton to Dr. Strangelove. While he isn’t modeled on one historical person, he is derived from real-life figures.

The film is distributed by Chapeau Films.

The film depicts both a fantastic and nightmarish image of the 50s. It with Michelle Williams saying “My memories of the time leading up to my decision to get a lobotomy are fragmented.” Michelle insists that a lobotomy is the only way to feel normal again. The style of the film has been compared with David Lynch and the Coen Brothers.

Ledes successfully creates a mood of constant narrative dissonance, a sensation heightened by the strange comings, goings, and seemingly ad-libbed sayings of his characters, countless jumps in time, scientific and historical information thrown about with reckless abandon, and dreamy cinematographic moves (in one shot, the camera takes on the point of view of an oncoming wave)

The film was praised for Michelle William's performance: she delivers the proper mix of innocence, quirkiness, comedic timing and dramatic awareness. She could easily become a major star. Meat Loaf Aday is adequate as the odious Billy, slightly guilty of overplaying the role. The others fill the bill much as supporting players do in many David Lynch films.

Stephen Trask (soundtrack for Hedwig and the Angry Inch was the original score composer. Cinematography was done by Stephen Kazmierski.

David Rooner from Variety has compared the film to Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind

The film talka about radical thought, misguided medical advances, anti-Communist hysteria, 50’s naivete, media manipulation, Hiroshima, Ethel Rosenberg’s execution

The film was produced by Alexa L. Fogel and Joseph Infantolino. It was directed and written by Richard ledes.

The Caller

Next, Ledes directed and co-wrote the noir thriller, The Caller, starring Frank Langella and Elliott Gould. A contemplative thriller about an executive whistleblower who exposes a corrupt energy corporation's abuses, the film is a departure from the high stylization of A Hole in One. The screenplay was co-written by Lacanian psychoanalyst Alain Didier-Weill.

The film won the Made in New York award at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival.

Fred Won't Move Out

In Fred Won't Move Out, Elliott Gould plays Fred, who stands at the chasm between living alone with decreasing mobility in the house where he has lived for fifty years or leaving to live closer to his wife Susan (played by Judith Roberts), who has moderate Alzheimer’s and whom the children (the son played by Fred Melamed and the daughter played by Stephanie Roth Haberle) are preparing to move to a care facility closer to them.The emotional precipice on which Fred teeters at first seems most shaken by the shifting condition of his wife Susan; her own dementia and ailing health has rendered her physicality a mere shadow of her former self and, to Fred, a stark preview of that which is coming his way, too. Susan – his Susan, anyway – is on the verge of no longer being there.

In Fred Won't Move Out, Elliott Gould plays Fred, who stands at the chasm between living alone with decreasing mobility in the house where he has lived for fifty years or leaving to live closer to his wife Susan (played by Judith Roberts), who has moderate Alzheimer’s and whom the children (the son played by Fred Melamed and the daughter played by Stephanie Roth Haberle) are preparing to move to a care facility closer to them.The emotional precipice on which Fred teeters at first seems most shaken by the shifting condition of his wife Susan; her own dementia and ailing health has rendered her physicality a mere shadow of her former self and, to Fred, a stark preview of that which is coming his way, too. Susan – his Susan, anyway – is on the verge of no longer being there.

"Fred Won't Move Out" was shot in the house where the director’s parents lived for close to fifty years, just weeks after they moved out. The story is semi-autobiographical and was shot in sequence in just three weeks with a heady mix of improvisational work by Ledes and his cast.

Filmography

Date	Title	Length	Notes
2014	The Darkside	51 mins	Just as Hurricane Sandy breached the boundaries of New York City, interviews with fire fighters who lost their homes breach the romantic comedy. Eventually, the fictional characters and the real people meet--or do they?
2014	Golden Dawn, NYC	31 mins.	A documentary about the NYC Greek community's thoughts and reactions to the rise of a neo-Nazi party in Greece and its attempts to ingratiate itself into New York.
2012	Fred Won't Move Out	74 mins.	With levity and sadness, two grown children and their aging parents struggle with the decision whether the older generation should stay in the house where they have lived for fifty years.
2012	Foreclosure	N/A	The story of a broken family striving to stay together while a curse and the ghosts of a haunted house try to tear them apart.
2008	The Caller"	92 mins.	An energy business exec is assisted by a private investigator in his effort to expose his corporation's corrupt practices.
1995	A Hole in One	97 mins.	When her brother Bobby returns from World War II mentally damaged, Anna has to deal with her parents who don't aknowledge her brother's existence, who is now brought to a mental hospital. After his sudden death Anna begins to question her own sanity. Her gangster boyfriend Billy's action pushes her further, she's now convinced the only way she can be "cured" is to have a lobotomy.