Dee Rees made her first Emmy splash a big one, scoring both Outstanding Directing and Outstanding Writing nominations for Bessie, the HBO biopic which starred Queen Latifah as iconic blues singer Bessie Smith, and Mo’Nique as her mentor (also both Emmy-nominated for their performances), Rees, who wrote the screenplay and story, shares the nom with Christopher Cleveland and Bettina Gilois (for screenplay) and the famed late playwright Horton Foote (for his early work on the story). In total Bessie scored a dozen nominations, including for Outstanding TV Movie.
In a recent Chat Room, Rees reflected on the biggest creative challenges Bessie posed to her as a director and writer. A prime challenge, she observed, was “getting Bessie’s voice right. Not just her singing voice but how she spoke, her world view. Queen Latifah was very much attuned to that voice, how she moved through the world. She tended to walk through things, not around them.
“Also the performance scenes include not just Bessie’s performance but the performance of her audience. As a director, I tried to capture how the crowd responded to her. Bessie lived those lyrics and there were people in the audience who found her songs in a sense redeeming them or saying something for them that they weren’t able to easily articulate otherwise.”
As a writer, continued Rees, she had a major advantage knowing up front that Latifah would portray Smith. “She [Latifah] had been attached to the project for 22 years. It’s not often you know who you’re writing for,” noted Rees. I could write for her physical rhythms. I could write words which I could envision her saying.”
Rees was originally asked to rewrite the script for Bessie in 2012. “I plunged into research,” she recalled. “There is so much mythology about Bessie Smith. I tried to get behind all that, to understand who she was on her own terms. I looked at her old songbook–the songs she wrote herself, which was my road into her personality, the entry point to who she was as a person. She was a character who was interesting not just on stage. She was very conflicted which made her even more interesting.”
Among the collaborators Rees worked with for the first time on Bessie was cinematographer Jeffrey Jur, ASC. “Jeff is genuinely passionate about his work,” assessed Rees. “He shot [HBO’s] Carnivà le, a series set in the 1920s with a washed out monochrome feel, similar to the kind of feel we saw for this period piece telling Bessie Smith’s story. Len Amato [president of HBO Films] recommended Jeff to me and I liked what he could bring to the project.”
Bessie just landed Jur his third career Emmy nomination. Jur won an Emmy for Outstanding Cinematography for a Single-Camera Series on the strength of the “Pick A Number” episode of Carnivà le in 2004; he was nominated the following year in the same category for the “Lincoln Highway” episode of the series. Jur is a two-time ASC Award winner, including for Carnivà le in ‘04.
Transparent
Like Rees, editor Catherine Haight has earned her first career Emmy nomination, hers coming for Outstanding Single-Camera Picture Editing for a Comedy Series on the strength of the pilot for the Amazon series Transparent which copped a total of 11 nominations, including for Best Comedy Series.
Haight, who is currently working on season 2 of Transparent, said she got the opportunity to cut the breakthrough series based on her close working relationship with show creator/director/writer Jill Soloway whose Emmy nominations haul also includes Directing and Writing honors. Haight and Soloway first teamed on some workshop scenes and a few months later Haight cut the Soloway-directed short, Una Hora Por Favor, which they teamed on at Sundance in 2012. A year later, they came together on Soloway’s feature directing debut, Afternoon Delight. And in 2014, Soloway came to Haight with Transparent.
“One of the first attractions of Transparent was being able to work with Jill again,” said Haight in a past installment of this The Road To Emmy series. “It’s a working relationship that I adore. The series itself is a hundred percent what I want, appreciate and like. I remember reading the first script and I just loved the show’s honesty. It was funny, heartfelt and all that good stuff.”
From an editorial standpoint, Haight noted that Transparent cinematographer Jim Frohna deploys “a unique, sort of documentary shooting style, with cameras often roving and moving about. There’s not your typical, traditional coverage of characters, which makes it more creatively exciting and challenging for me as an editor. You have to come up with creative solutions to help tell the story, weaving everything together.”
Olive Kitteridge
In contrast to Haight and Rees, Jane Anderson has quite an Emmy lineage, having won in 1993 for Outstanding Writing in a Miniseries or Special for The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom. In ‘99, Anderson scored a pair of nominations for The Baby Dance–Outstanding Directing and Writing for a Miniseries or Movie. In 2000, she was a nominee in the Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries or a Movie category for If These Walls Could Talk 2. In ‘03 came another nomination for her writing, this time for Normal which registered in the Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special category. And now she has landed another writing nomination for the HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge, which earned 13 primetime Emmy noms, including Outstanding Limited Series, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series or a Movie (Richard Jenkins), Outstanding Lead Actress in a Limited Series or a Movie (Frances McDormand), Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or a Movie (Bill Murray), Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited Series or a Movie (Zoe Kazan), Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series, Movie or a Dramatic Special (Lisa Cholodenko) and Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie or a Dramatic Special (Jane Anderson)..
Reacting to her sixth career nomination, Anderson said, “I’m just plain lucky as hell that I get to work for HBO which lets us quirkier souls in the bizness have our way with a script and fly!”
That HBO connection continues with the debut next Monday (7/20) of Packed In A Trunk: The Lost Art of Edith Lake Wilkinson. Anderson is an exec producer, co-writer and subject of the documentary.
Anderson grew up in California surrounded by the paintings of her great-aunt, Edith Lake Wilkinson, which were rescued by her mother from trunks in a dusty attic. Anderson learned to paint and draw under the influence of Wilkinson’s brilliant, light-drenched canvasses. Later, when she moved to New York to pursue her own life as an artist, Anderson began a decades-long journey to get that work back into the spotlight. Along the way, she uncovered revelations about the woman she’d always found to be an inspiration–and whose life, she discovered, uncannily paralleled Anderson’s own.
Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Michelle Boyaner (A Finished Life: The Goodbye and No Regrets Tour), the heartwarming, feature-length documentary also highlights the progress society has made in the last century towards acceptance of gay and lesbian Americans.
The Knick
Another past Emmy winner (for Behind the Candelabra), production designer Howard Cummings has now garnered his second career nomination, this one for The Knick, a Cinemax series which earned a total of five nominations this time around. The Knick continues Cummings’ long-standing collaborative relationship with director/cinematographer/editor/producer Steven Soderbergh spanning features and TV, including the alluded to Behind the Candelabra.
For Soderbergh, Cummings went from the lavish excess of Liberace in Behind the Candelabra to a period piece miniseries, The Knick, about a surgeon in 1900 in a hospital on the NY’s Lower East Side. For The Knick, Cummings explained that Soderbergh wanted a look and feel true to the era but with a tinge of modern sensibility. “It’s the gilded age of 1900 but it’s also at a point when the gilded age is starting to fade,” explained Cummings. “A new modernism is coming in so both of these worlds are in our project.”
Cummings added, “Steven directs, shoots and edits–and he works in a way to bring the 1900s to life as authentically as possible. I do whatever I can to contribute to that. I remember after the first five minutes of The Knick thinking, ‘thank God, I’m not living in 1900.’ At the same time, he brings a modern sense to it–in for example the way it’s shot, using a lot of available practical light. The look isn’t romanticized. If there’s an oil lamp in the scene, it’s lighting the entire scene–it’s an unromantic, unsentimental version of the 1900s. I remember Steven telling me that if he could make this a black-and-white series, he would–but no one would fund that. Still I wanted to give that black-and-white feel. The one place I could control completely was the hospital setting. I wanted to do everything white, black and gray to reflect Steven’s vision. I also went to our costume designer Ellen [Mirojnick] to see what she was doing with the clothes to blend into this setting.”
Cummings thoroughly researched hospitals circa 1900, uncovering documents, reports and photos from the Presbyterian Hospital in New York during that time. Based on what he saw and read, Cummings made the rooms quite large, with the spacing of beds based on the actual history.
Yet with all the preparation and research, Cummings noted that Soderbergh is always open to improvisation. “He’ll notice a prop and see that it can help tell the story of an entire scene. I’ve seen him make a scene all about a prop. You always have to be on your toes with him. That’s why it’s so important for me to be on top of the props and pieces of set dressing so they are realistic–and potentially creatively inspiring because of that realism.”
This is the eighth installment of a 14-part series that explores the field of Emmy contenders, and then nominees spanning such disciplines as directing, cinematography, producing, editing, animation and visual effects. The series will then be followed up by coverage of the Creative Arts Emmys ceremony on September 12 and the primetime Emmy Awards live telecast on September 20.
