The Kindest Cut

How John O’Brien shepherded Nosey Parker to the screen

IMAGE BY JACK ROWELL

Tunbridge, Vermont, is home to 1200 people, 13 active dairy farms, 0 traffic lights and one film trilogy. Since the early 1990s, resident director John O’Brien has turned out a series of fresh, genre-bending movies that are unjaundiced portrayals of small-town Vermont. With Vermont Is For Lovers (1993), A Man With a Plan (1996) and the recently relased Nosey Parker, O’Brien has become to Tunbridge what Peter Jackson is to Middle-Earth. But unlike the Lord of the Rings characters, O’Brien’s actors are neither heavily made up, costumed nor scripted; for the most part, they’re real people ad-libbing as fictionalized versions of themselves.

Vermont 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
More from John O'Brien at Bellwether Films

Contra Diction

A first-time do-si-soes some old dance moves

IMAGE: JEB WALLACE-BRODEUR

I had noticed the terse and mysterious blurb last Wednesday: Montpelier Contradance: Move your feet to live piano, fiddle, mandolin and clarinet. Capitol City Grange, Montpelier, 8 p.m. $7. It was not the first time a contradance was listed in the paper -- it seems there's at least one every weekend -- but it was the first time I mustered the guts to actually attend one.



Friends and family who contradance assured me that lack of experience would earn me no black marks at the Grange. That's the only reason I was going, since I can dance about as well as I can fly. Though the directive in the calendar was simple enough, I suspected there would be more to the evening than "move your feet" suggested.

With the sun setting on Route 12 last Saturday, civilization seemed to ebb away as soon as the capitol dropped out of sight. The H&P Grange is easy to miss; the only indicator of its existence is a weathered wooden sign in the shadow of an I-89 overpass. The faded lettering on the peeling placard is barely legible from the road. If a veteran contradancer hadn't given me directions, I probably would have missed the turn. As it was, I successfully steered my decrepit Honda up the Grange's narrow dirt driveway and parked. And got out of the car. And blinked.

A big crowd had turned out. The windows of the Grange blazed with light and flickered with the silhouettes of careening dancers. The parking lot was packed and on my way inside, I noticed tags from Rhode Island and Massachusetts among their green-and-white Vermont brethren. A red Subaru sported a "Brattleboro Dawn Dance" bumper sticker. I've heard of the Dawn Dances -- they last from eight at night until eight in the morning. I swallowed, hard, as a kernel of apprehension formed in my stomach. These people were serious. Was this any place for a novice?

At the entrance to the Grange, a hand-painted notice politely spelled out the house rule: Clean shoes only on the dance floor. The kernel of apprehension became a peach pit: I hadn't brought any spare shoes with me, and the ones I was wearing had trekked through a section of yard my cats used as a toilet.

Fortunately, a staircase to the right descended to the basement, bathrooms, water fountain and "official shoe-cleaning station" -- a cardboard box of hard-bristle brushes and screwdrivers. I headed down and set to work dislodging pebbles and gum from my sneakers. The dancehall was directly overhead, and the basement ceiling rocked and creaked under the syncopated tread of hundreds of dancers. Muffled strains of lively music drifted downstairs, giving my shoe-cleaning efforts a sense of urgency.

As I brushed and picked at the stubborn sediment in my soles, a steady stream of new arrivals trickled down the stairs, with spare shoes in hand and no need for the cleaning equipment. They quickly changed and darted up to the dance floor. As soon as I could, I slipped back into my freshly flossed footware and huffed back upstairs to check out the action.

The Capitol City Grange was chartered in 1871. The walls were festooned with crumbling certificates and black-and-white photographs of 19th-century men with somber mustaches and regal sashes. They seemed to regard the evening's proceedings with approval. Contradancing is an old tradition in this area, and the monochrome men on the walls likely participated in a dance or two in their time.

On a stage at the far end of the hall, caller Susan Kevra stood by an eclectic acoustic scratch band that was churning out a roiling, Irish-influenced dance tune. At first I stood at the periphery, where I planned to watch and learn. But I had trouble divining the steps. My eyes were beguiled by the swirl of skirts and loose hair, the snappy sashays and spins of contradance regulars and the freewheeling turns and awkward allemandes of first-timers. Dazzled by the kaleidoscopic currents of motion on the floor, I soon realized that it was impossible to learn a dance without being in the thick of it.

I don't dance often, or well. I get self-conscious bobbing and shuffling at DJ dances, and, because I'm a control freak, I don't do well in couples dances where my partner is supposed to "lead." But contradancing moves too quickly for a person to remain self-conscious or inhibited for long. And based on what I could see from the sidelines, there seemed to be very little leading involved. In any event, I hadn't come all this way just to sit and watch other people cut a rug. When the dancers dissolved into new sets for the next number, I moved onto the floor.

Each dance was explained step-by-step. Some moves, like "do-si-do," I remembered from middle-school square dances, but most were alien to me. Ladies' chain? Balance and swing? Ripped and snort? Fortunately, most of my neighboring dancers knew what they were about, and helped me navigate the caller's instructions.

A gap-toothed, grinning old man in a blue T-shirt helped me perfect my allemande, showing me the appropriate grip and tension to apply. Several people gave me spinning pointers -- one said gently, "It helps if you don't jump up and down." Some steps no one knew, like "ripped and snort," in which one couple forms an archway and six other dancers thread between them hand-in-hand. Mostly, though, I just watched other people and picked up the steps as the dances repeated themselves.

Even so, I did get hopelessly dizzy during a few dances and more than a little lost during most. The dances are rapid, with one step bleeding into the next in a fluid weave of movement. But as disoriented as I sometimes got, I never stopped having fun; the music was wild and vibrant, it felt good to be moving and my more accomplished dance partners were always forgiving -- even when I trampled their feet.

Towards the end of the evening, I took a break to speak with Todd Taska, who organizes the Montpelier contradance. In a voice raised to carry over the band, he affirmed my sink-or-swim approach: "The way people learn is by doing." Taska added that it's important for new dancers to be flexible about who they dance with, even if they come with a date. Partner-swapping is de rigueur in contradancing, and you're unlikely to learn much if you only dance with fellow beginners. (And you never know what might happen in the arms of a stranger; Taska met his wife at a contradance.)

Because of the rapid exchange of partners in a single dance, contradancing isn't just a social icebreaker -- it's an ice pulverizer. As Henry Rich, a young man from Connecticut, pointed out, "you might dance with 20 strangers in 10 minutes." Some might find this therapeutic; for others it's a great way to meet people. For most, it's a bit of both.

Contradancing is aerobic, social, cerebral and cooperative. Though the prospect of learning and memorizing steps, executing them with grace, keeping in time with the music and keeping track of your partner may initially daunt newcomers, the support of advanced dancers makes the challenges surmountable. As long-time contradancer Anna Seeger put it, "It doesn't matter if you don't know what you're doing -- everyone helps you out."

One might be tempted to view contradancing as an archaic, Old World holdover, a dinosaur dance. This Montpelier contradance is 20 years old, but the activity -- derived from dance traditions that predate the "discovery" of the New World -- has a long history. For the last several hundred years, contradancing percolated in New England, where it has achieved a distinctly American flavor that sets it apart from its earlier incarnations. It has persisted in the face of societal sea changes and has recently begun to catch on in the Pacific Northwest. If the potpourri of people at last Saturday's event is any indication, contradancing is alive and literally kicking here in Vermont.

As the Grange dance wound down, I sat on one of the benches lining the hall and tried to take stock of the folks on the dance floor. A surprising cross-section of society was dancing to the same beat. Among the faces that surfaced and submerged in the froth of the dance, I spotted a woman with an eye patch and a girl with piercings in her cheeks. Graying men and women joined hands with flush-faced teens; well-groomed yuppies promenaded with colorfully attired college students. It was impossible to generalize about the crowd, except that they were all dancing and seemed to be having a hell of a time.

Now that I'm a seasoned contradancer myself, I can offer sage advice to anyone who has yet to try it out: Be flexible, not shy. Bring clean, soft-soled shoes. And don't be fooled by that simple calendrical direction, "Move your feet." It really does mean a whole lot more.
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Published in Seven Days 7 May 2003