Christopher F Reidy
Christopher Reidy
  • Home
  • Blog
  • 83 In the Shade
  • Artwork
  • Videos
  • Writing
  • Contact
  • Product Information

CFR BLOG PAGE

The thoughts & Musings of Christopher F. Reidy*

NOTE: Apparently this webpage has some glitches. It tends to randomly switch out visual material.  Why?  Don't ask me.  So, if a pic doesn't match the text...it doesn't!  Rest assured I am trying to amend this problem.  When I get around to it.

*(may contain misuse of apostrophes, miss spellings, overabundance of semi-colons,  wrong word usage, etc.
Please pardon our appearance while we create a new blog experience for you!)

​ALSO: 
Please find an in-complete (or if you prefer; "ongoing") index of blog posts on the homepage, for your convenience!

AND YET ANOTHER NOTE:
The visual switcheroos on these blogs have reached a point where there's no way I can correct them all, so I'm just going to leave them be.  If they don't match the text, just think of them as whimsical funsies decorating the text.  I will continue to supply pictures; but I cannot guarantee their context: much like my mind.
Thank you for your patience!

A FURTHER NOTE:
I try to keep this website relatively free of anything truly morally reprehensible or obscene.  However, in the pursuit of honesty; I will be quite frank about sexuality; as I feel one should be.  To  wit: this website is not for children.  It is decidedly "adult"; although not necessarily not "childish."  I do not feel it is suitable, in some instances, for anyone below the age of 17.  Or maybe a very mature 16...or 15 even.  
THIS WEBSITE IS RATED: PG-15

Product Information

The One That Got Away (thoughts on Adrienne Shelly)

3/7/2022

0 Comments

 
Picture
I've talked about "murder shows" on my blog page.  And last night I binged some Forensic Files.  I mean, at least Forensic Files gets into the science of solving murder cases.  It's not just a show that's solely about people murdering one another.  Perhaps that's a rationalization; for I can't help but feel somehow guilty--perhaps complicit in the murder itself--by indulging in these shows that, let's face it; now actually glorify murder.  I mean, is Keith Morrison not the biggest ghoul on the airwaves?  Bill Hader really nailed it with this sketch:
But, full disclosure: I am often lured into the depths of deathly DATELINE depravity by the dulcet tones of Mr. Morrison.  That absurd folksiness of his delivery actually works.  I have found myself creeping to bed at 5 in the morning after having spent the wee hours with Crime Daddy Keith.  I'm not proud of it.
On a serious note...
So, after last night's murderthon; I got to thinking about my own experiences with murder.  Had I known anyone that had been murdered.  Had I known anyone that had murdered anyone?*  Did I know anyone that knew anyone that had been murdered? (Just for the record, I personally have not ​murdered anyone). The answer to all of these questions, was, unfortunately yes.  And in the case of the first question, it was someone famous.  I deplore name-dropping and at the risk of doing just that, I want to write about Adrienne Shelly.  I knew her.  We went to film school together.  We were in many of the same classes.  We weren't friends: in fact, barely acquaintances.  We were class-mates; no more, no less.  But my memories of her are quite vivid.
Adrienne was murdered in 2006 by a young man named Diego Pillco, in New York City.  He was a construction worker from Ecuador, working in the Greenwich Village building where Adrienne had an office.  I won't go into all the details (the crime is well documented on line); he confessed to it.  But he kept changing his story.  Initially, he said Adrienne had come to the room where he was working and demanded he stop making noise; the confrontation escalated and he snapped and killed her.  When I first heard this story, I remember it did not sit well with me.  I had nagging doubts about it.  Would this tiny woman really have gotten confrontational with a man when she was alone.  In New York City? I mean, she wasn't stupid.  It is far more likely that he targeted her and she fought back and then he snapped.  I guess we'll never know for sure what happened.

Adrienne was in my screenwriting class during my junior year at Boston University.  Her original name was Adrienne Levine. She was Jewish.  A lot of my classmates were Jewish.  I didn't know this until I matriculated there, that B.U. had a high ratio of Jewish students.  One of the school's nick-names was "Be Jew."  That's true (and I got that from other students, presumably the Jewish ones).  A lot of kids from Long Island and the New York area.  Adrienne was from Queens.  Of course, I didn't know all of this at the time.  All I knew is that this girl I had in some of my classes stood out.  Her appearance was ethereal .
Picture
Here's my yearbook picture from my college days.  I remember being miserable the day that was taken.  I had undiagnosed OCD (that's a whole other blog); and I may have been hung over.  Remember when you could be hung over and still take a good picture?  Ah, youth.
Picture
Adrienne was not in the yearbook.  This is how I remember it...
She had left at the end of the first semester of our junior year.  I vividly recall that too.  She sort of made an announcement in class that she wouldn't be back.  She was leaving school to go to New York City and pursue her dreams of becoming an actress.  People who knew her were rallying around her and wishing her well and so on and so forth.  Like I said, I barely knew her.  I'm not sure we ever even had a conversation when she came up to me at some point (maybe in the student lounge) and said good-bye to me personally.  She told me she was leaving. That's all I remember.  I'm sure I wished her luck.  What I do remember is her standing in front of me in such proximity.  Perhaps a foot away, directly in front of me, beaming up into my face (she was extremely petite).  Her look at that time was not the look she had in her movies.  She wore no make-up.  Her skin was so pale as to be translucent.  She often wore her hair piled haphazardly on her head with little wisps hanging down.  She was always in flowing, diaphanous outfits with super dangly earrings: an even more elfin and gamine sort of Edie Sedgwick, by way of New Yawhk.  She shone like some sort of otherworldly being.  She was unforgettable.  Clearly, as I have not forgotten.
Picture
Arresting as she was; I never thought she was a great beauty.  Her features were huge.  But often, people with exaggerated features that you wouldn't first construe as "beauty" have that thing that a movie camera loves.  Adrienne had it.  Once she committed to a hair color and put cosmetics on that skin...kaboom!
We had a mutual friend; Amy.  Amy and I partnered up for a final film project in one of our classes.  We both moved out to Los Angeles around the same time and kept in touch for a while.  One day we were talking and she said, "Did you hear about Adrienne Shelly?"  "No," I replied, "what about her?"  "She's a movie star!  Well, indies, anyways.  She's in Hal Hartley's movies!"  I had no idea who Hal Hartley was.  "They're saying she's like, "The New Brigitte Bardot" of America!"
Picture
"Really?" I asked.
"Really!!!" Amy exclaimed, with three exclamation points.  I was surprised; but I wasn't.  What I was surprised about was that she went and did it.  She said, "I'm going to go be an actress in New York..." and she did just that.  Son of a bitch she did it.  And a rising movie star no less.  She'd beaten the odds.  That odd looking girl from my film class who inexplicably came up to me and said farewell.
At the time, I was working in a video store in Silver Lake.  It was called "Videoactive" (like "Radioactive"? Get it?).  It was the "hip" video store.  I must've been "hip" because they hired me.  Videoactive catered to film geeks.  One whole wall was the "Directors" section.  Hal Hartley must've been pretty hip, too; because he had his own niche.  There were only like two movies in it.  So, after I heard Adrienne was in these movies, I played one in the store.  I recall thinking Adrienne looked great and had that certain je ne sais qua...but I also recall the movie being stultifyingly boring, despite her presence. It was deliberately arch, dry, slow, dead-pan to the point of dead.  I guess that's "mumblecore."  So, Adrienne was one of the pioneers of the genre.  Just looking at that trailer though, you can tell she's wasted in that kind of story.  She literally jumps off the screen.  She needed to be in an Indiana Jones movie or like a quirky Bond girl.
So, she makes this splash and then sort of disappears.  I'm guessing to raise a family.  But then, she returns on the other side of the camera as the writer/director of a little movie called Waitress.  
Waitress was released a year after Adrienne was killed.  It cost 1.5 million to make and it grossed 22 million at the box office.  I'm pretty sure, creative accounting aside, that qualifies it as a "hit."  I went to see it with my husband.  He loved it.  I admired it.  Being cleared eyed and looking at the movie from a business angle; I could see that Adrienne (who both wrote and directed the film) was going for something solid and commercial.  You might say "safe."  But that's not necessarily not a good thing.  She was trying to establish herself as a viably commercial filmmaker and she certainly achieved that with flying colors.  In all honesty, I thought that it was a little derivative.  Kind of Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore meets Mildred Pierce (without the murder stuff).  Hey, if you're going to derive, derive from the best! 
Picture
Don't get me wrong.  I enjoyed and admired the movie.  But I could see that Adrienne had a lot more promise.  I could tell that she had a whole bunch of stuff up her sleeve when it came to filmed entertainment.  Her days in the halls of B.U.'s College of Communication were ones well spent.  And she didn't even complete the course yet!  But then, FATE intervened. That is, if you believe in FATE.  I do, to a certain degree.  But I also think some things are random.  And then, I think some things are a bit of both.
In Adrienne's case, I hope that it was fate.  I hope that it was God calling her back for some reason.  Because if it's not, then what's the point?  What's the point of being born and dropped on this planet?  A husband lost a wife.  A child lost her mother.  The world lost a talented artist.  All because someone wanted the money in Adrienne's purse.  How much could have been in there?  Not a lot, I'm guessing.
​Here's Adrienne's daughter:
Picture
Clearly, Adrienne lives on in her beautiful child.  That's some comfort.

But still, I wonder.  Why did Adrienne say good-bye to me personally, all those years ago?  Maybe it was to cement herself in my mind.  Because perhaps the stars are aligned; for better or worse.  And it would lead me to write this blog, that someone who didn't know about Adrienne might read and then they might create some Art about Adrienne and that would lead to something else.  Something that made sense.  Something that brought some good into the world.

*I do not directly know a murderer (as far as I know); but I do have loved ones who know both a murderer and his victim.

​CFR 3/9/22
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    March 2025
    February 2025
    January 2025
    December 2024
    November 2024
    October 2024
    September 2024
    August 2024
    July 2024
    June 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    March 2024
    February 2024
    January 2024
    December 2023
    October 2023
    September 2023
    August 2023
    July 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    September 2020
    June 2020
    August 2015

    AUTHOR
    Christopher Reidy is from the Boston area.  He attended Boston University where he studied TV and film which eventually led him to Los Angeles.  There he did the Hollywood thing (which he wasn’t particularly good at) and eventually met his partner Joseph.  He was one of the co-founders of the short lived Off Hollywood Theatre Company which staged several of his original plays.  83 In the Shade is his first novel.  He also dabbles in screenplays, toys with short stories, and flirts with poetry.  Life brought him to bucolic Southwest Virginia where he now resides and is very active in community theatre. It may interest you to know Chris is officially an Irish citizen as well as an American. He also enjoys drawing and painting and looking after a passel of 
    ​
    housecats and two turtles.