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An Interview with Dorothea Petrie
Making movies is similar to writing a novel. They are both creative endeavors. What is it like to combine these two art forms for a film such as
The Song of the Lark? To find out, teachers have posed questions for Dorothea Petrie, the producer for the AMERICAN COLLECION movie. Below is a transcript of her remarks.
Question: What does a producer do?
Dorothea Petrie: The best producers find material that they really feel passionate about and then they select their writer. Next they must find the place where that
material can best be shown, and often that's very difficult.
A producer needs to gather the very best people around her. I try to interest people who are over qualified in every department. Then I can
learn, as a producer.
Q: If you want really good people, isn't there a lot of competition for their services?
D: For The Song of the Lark, I had phone calls from very established
people. We had several directors who put in bids. Because it's public television (non-profit), this isn't a film that pays nearly what most of these talents command; however, they still want to work on good material.
It's rare.
Q: How would you characterize in thumbnail Thea's journey in this film?
D: Willa Cather wrote that she was not interested in after somebody became a great diva or a great
star, she was interested in the struggle to become a great musician, or a great actor, or a great anything—the struggle was what interested her.
Q: How would you describe what Thea went through in the course of the book?
D: She didn't know what she was becoming because she was stuck in a little town, so she made herself be something
better. This was Willa Cather's partially autobiographical story. Cather was a journalist until a publisher told her that talent was really writing. She listened to that and worked hard. Her first novel was not
particularly successful, and she had to write short stories to earn money.
Now, Thea had trained as a pianist, but her piano teacher told her she had been going in the wrong direction, that she had a natural,
great voice. This, for Thea, was like saying, "You can't do what you've set out to do."
Q: So this is parallel to Cather being a journalist and abandoning that to be a novelist?
D: I
think so. Willa Cather's high school graduation speech made references to Plato, Virgil – authors that I was never even approached with. That's why I'm so delighted about what Masterpiece Theatre is doing and what
the teachers and students are working on today.
Q: When did the production process start?
D: I was first approached to do The Song of the Lark
in May of '98. We started interviewing writers in early July, then chose a writer, Joseph Maurer, who started his work July 28th.
Q: Was Joseph Maurer your first choice among those that you talked to?
D: Yes, we all decided on Joseph. When he turned in the first script in September, he had done a great deal of research on it, including working with a teacher about how one trains a soprano
Q: What happens between now and May 3 (1999) when you start filming?
D: We are looking at a board of our script. The board will tell us how many days we have to work, whether the days' shots will
be exterior or interior, night or day.
Q: At this point, you don't know how many cast members you are hauling from major location to major location.
D: Every scene the family is in has
to work together. The scenes with Fred will go all in one piece because we'll only keep Fred for a certain amount of time. Dr. Archie will be what we call "drop and start;" that means he will be dropped out of the
picture for a certain amount of days and then brought back in. Thea, however, will be working every day in this film.
Q: How are you going to handle the trains in Colorado?
D: We have a
problem because they're very expensive. We're trying to see how little we can do to shoot with a train. We found trains in Sonora that we plan to consider when we go on a location scout.
Q: What can you tell us about a location scout?
D: On a location scout, a producer goes with her director, and perhaps others. For instance, when we went down to look at the Ambassador Hotel in
Los Angeles, the director said he could use two of its rooms—one for the interior of Thea's piano teacher's studios, and another for the opera Thea goes to. So within an old hotel, we will build the sets that we need
for those scenes.We're looking right now at three locations here in Los Angeles. By filming as much as possible here, we don't have to pay for traveling or living expenses, or per diem expenses (what
people on location are paid for their lunches, their laundry, and all incidentals).
We're hoping that we'll be able to film at Mesa Verde, although it's very difficult to film there. We may have to substitute
another place and try to duplicate it as much as possible. |
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