Little Girl Blue Read Free

hired to overhaul his script. Morrow was indifferent. “I was busy and happy to do other things,” he says. “Those were heady times for me!” (The screenwriter had also penned
Rain Man
, starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman, for which he won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the Sixty-first Academy Awards in 1989.)
    Even Cherbak’s changes could do little to alter Agnes Carpenter’s hard-edged character once the director cast Academy Award winner Louise Fletcher in the role. Known for her 1975 role in
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
, Fletcher brought a passive-aggressive slant to every line of dialogue. “I had nothing to do with the casting,” Morrow explains. “Sargent comes in and casts ‘Nurse Ratched!’ Louise Fletcher could say a nursery rhyme and give you the creeps.”
    Additionally Joseph Sargent fought to convince the network that a virtual unknown, twenty-seven-year-old Mitchell Anderson, was their “Richard.” The choice for “Karen” was twenty-four-year-old CynthiaGibb, an attractive character actress who had appeared for three seasons in the original
Fame
TV series. The actress came into the project knowing very little about the story, aside from general facts. “I knew she and her brother were a music team, that they were enormously successful around the world, and I knew their hit singles,” she says. “I also knew she had an eating disorder and that she died of it. Beyond that I knew nothing.”
    When filming began in February 1988, Gibb was dismayed by the number of script revisions occurring on the set each day. “On a daily basis we would go to work prepared to do certain scenes,” she says. “We would always have cuts or rewrites. Anything that was controversial at all was either diluted or removed. Because the family was so attached to the project, there was some whitewashing that went on in the telling of the story.”
    Working so closely with Richard, filming in the parents’ home, wearing the Carpenters’ clothing, and driving their cars, the cast and crew quickly came to their own conclusions about Karen’s story. “If you looked from the outside in, you saw exactly what happened to that family,” Mitchell Anderson says. “But from Richard’s perspective and his mother’s perspective, it was completely different.”
    Gibb agrees the family’s intricate involvement made it even more difficult to portray the complex characters they were attempting to channel. “There were some aspects of Karen’s upbringing that I felt had contributed to her illness,” she says, “however, the family never felt that she had an emotional disorder. The family did not believe that anorexia was an emotional disorder that becomes a physiological disorder. Therefore, they didn’t believe that Karen had anything other than a weight problem. It was difficult to portray certain emotional challenges that Karen had, because the family did not agree that they existed.”
    Richard has always held firm in his belief that the stress of showbiz and an overprotective family had nothing to do with Karen’s anorexia. “ What would possess a woman like her to starve herself?” he asked in his 1988 essay for
TV Guide
. “Some people blame it on career pressures or a need to take more control over her life. I don’t think so. I think she would have suffered from the same problem even if she had been ahomemaker.” Richard felt anorexia nervosa was something “ genetic, the same way talent is,” as he explained to Susan Littwin in a piece for the same publication. “I have no answers. People have been trying to get that out of me. If I had it, I’d give it.”
    The filming of a watered-down version of one of Barry Morrow’s original scenes, set in 1982 in the New York office of Karen Carpenter’s therapist Steven Levenkron,