Soldier's Girl premieres May 31, 8 p.m. on Showtime.
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Not many love stories end with one partner's head being bludgeoned—especially when the love was pure, functional, and healthy. But that's how Barry Winchell and Calpernia Addams' all-too-short romance was cut short. Their real-life story is depicted with aching honesty, sublime performances, and immense respect in Showtime's original movie, Soldier's Girl.
Winchell (Troy Garity), a soldier stationed at Fort Campbell, Ky., becomes romantically involved with Calpernia Addams (Lee Pace), a beautiful—and transgendered—performer. When Winchell's fellow soldiers find out, he's ostracized for being 'gay.' Eventually, thanks to a mentally unstable roommate, Justin Fisher (Shawn Hatosy), and an impressionable, homophobic new recruit, Calvin Glover (Phillip Eddolls), Winchell is murdered on July 5, 1999.
Glover, who wielded the bat that bashed Winchell's head in, was sentenced to life. Fisher, who egged him on, was sentenced to 12-1/2 years. Addams was left alone, robbed of the one true love she knew.
Soldier's Girl's trip to screen began when producers Linda Gottlieb and Doro Bachrach read David France's powerful New York Times Magazine story on Winchell and Addams (it was published in May of 2000). Horrified and captivated, they approached Addams to discuss the rights to her story, but it turns out they weren't the only party interested—many producers, both Hollywood and indie, had also come knockin'. 'There was some talk like 'we're going to talk to Ashley Judd about playing you,'' Addams recalls of one Hollywood outfit's approach. 'I'd be flattered, but Ashley is this petite little beautiful elfin girl and I'm more amazonian and unusual looking, so I don't know. Plus people would have been thinking 'there's Ashley Judd' and not paid attention to the story.' At the same time, Oscar-nominated, openly gay screenwriter Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia) began independently researching the story, and eventually teamed up with Gottlieb and Bachrach.
For Addams, several concerns arose immediately when it came to how her story would be told cinematically. 'Number one was to honor Barry's memory because he was an amazing man and he deserves that,' she notes. 'Number two was that most of the time transsexual women in film are a punchline or gross-out or burlesque caricature and I just hate that. I was afraid they were going to have a finger-snapping, head-bobbing 'your dress looks fierce' kind of girl. And I'm not! So I'm happy they didn't do that. It depicts a sexy showgirl, that was really what I did, and doesn't exploit that or make it ridiculous.'
Nyswaner contacted and began a rapport with Winchell's mother, Patricia Kutteles, and stepfather, Wally, and also spent time with Addams, who was officially brought onto the production as a consultant. 'They kept me really involved in certain areas,' Addams recalls. 'I had nothing to do with the casting, but I got to talk to the director and cast members. I went to the set. I even let them read chapters from my life story, before it was out, so they got a sense of things.' Addams' life has been anything but conventional, gender issues aside. She grew up in a fundamentalist cult, separated from almost all popular culture. At 18, desperate to liberate herself, Addams joined the Navy and served as a combat medic (during Desert Storm, she ran a field hospital). Four years later, during which time she wrestled with gender-identity, she left military service and moved to Nashville, where she began her transition and became a performer at a gay club, The Connection. Which is where Winchell met her in 1998.
To direct Soldier's Girl, the producers approached Frank Pierson, the gay-savvy screenwriter of Dog Day Afternoon and director of HBO's Citizen Cohn (biopic of loathsome gay Roy Cohn) and Dirty Pictures (about the Mapplethorpe exhibit controversy in D.C.). Pierson, who served in the military during W.W.II, was initially intimidated by the project and, as a result, declined it. 'The script was fresh, original and exciting, but I thought 'oh God, where am I going to find the actors who can do this honestly and truthfully, and will Showtime have the guts to let me?'' he confesses. 'So I turned it down.'
Over the next few weeks, Pierson was haunted by the script nonetheless—'scenes would pop into my head and I could see ways they would play out,' he adds. 'I thought most screenplays, like a chinese dinner, two hours later [after consuming them] you can't remember what they were about. But two weeks later it was still in my consciousness and I thought why is this?'
One he returned to the fold, casting the parts of Winchell and Addams became Pierson's first daunting chore. Aspiring to bring 'marquee' value to the project for Showtime, the filmmakers approached a number of young 'name' actors (whom Pierson declines to name), but 'I couldn't get any of them to commit,' he admits. 'They were either afraid of the gay sex angle or their managers or agents were. Finally I got Showtime to agree to get the best actors for the roles [regardless of name].'
Troy Garity, handsome son of Sen. Tom Hayden (he portrayed dad in Steal This Movie), perfectly embodied Winchell, according to Addams. So much that she consciously needed to resist developing a crush on him. 'Troy is a very handsome, sexy man,' she admits. 'But it would be too damaging a psychological game to let myself feel anything like that, considering the situation.' Fresh from graduating Julliard, Oklahoma-born Lee Pace was brought to Pierson's attention by casting director Douglas Aible for the role of Addams. 'He had done one little off-off Broadway show which he played entirely in the nude,' Pierson recalls. Following some conversation and successful makeup/costume tests, Pace landed the part. 'I didn't think I'd be able to pull it off,' Pace proffers. 'Thank God they were smart enough to do a costume test, they had a guy design a look. It kind of put everyone's heart at ease.'
To prepare, Pace (whose father was a Green Beret during Vietnam) was told to study female manner from actual females: not drag queens or transsexuals. He also spoke extensively with Addams herself, who visited the production's Toronto set (10 days following the completion of her sexual reassignment surgery!). As for the role's physical aspects, deep-voiced Pace took vocal lessons (to feminize it) and was outfitted with uncannily realistic prosthetic breasts and hips, which took anywhere from four to eight hours to apply daily.
'It cost us just about as much [for the prosthetic breasts] as it would have to give Lee the operation,' Pierson laughs. 'But I don't think Lee was interested in that. The irony is that they did the original 'fitting,' which involved making a mold of Lee's body and legs, several weeks before we shot. Lee then began to exercise and diet to take a little weight off, to change his body shape a bit. The result was on the first day we were going to shoot [the prosthetics] didn't fit [since his body shape had changed so much]! So we had to do it all over again on a very fast emergency basis.'
Pace, who sprouts facial hair rather quickly, also required midday shaves and makeup reapplication.
Playing the killers: Sexy Shawn Hatosy, who played a gay man's reluctant love interest in last year's drama Borstal Boy, brought a charm to the ultimately damaging person of Justin Fisher. 'Shawn's an enormously rewarding, intelligent actor to work with,' Pierson proffers. 'That character is so full of inner contradictions and complexities—half the time you don't know why you're doing the things you're doing but you can't stop doing them. That's a real complication neurotic people have.'
British-born Phillip Eddolls, who portrayed one of Matthew Shepard's killers in NBC's The Matthew Shepard Story, embodied the equally intolerant Calvin Glover. Addams admits she steered clear of these two for a while—'it was too sort of weird and painful to interact at first with the actors who played Barry's killers,' she acknowledges. Addams testifies to the film's realism—both in its depiction of Winchell, herself, and their relationship. Eerily accurate sets of the club she worked in, and her apartment also brought the memories flooding back. 'Troy Garity's performance, just looking at the love in his eyes and the fearlessness of those actors,' she marvels. 'The love scenes and the kissing was dead-on passionate and real. Some parts of the movie I had my eyes closed or covered during ... . It's incredibly painful, difficult. I probably won't watch it again for a very long time, if ever. But walking around those sets, it gave me a little bit of closure. It magically let me go back in time and revisit those spaces and say goodbye to Barry. I didn't get to do that in real life.'
Since the events depicted in Soldier's Girl, Justin Fisher (who, according to some accounts, may be a closeted queer himself) came up for parole eligibility. He was denied clemency by the military court. 'It's nice that the government is acknowledging he was part of a motivating factor in a hate crime,' Pace nods. Winchell's mother and husband have devoted their lives 'to get the military to deal with these issues,' Pierson informs. 'She's using Soldier's Girl for that purpose.' And Addams has relocated to Chicago 'to go underground a little bit and finish up my transition,' she says. 'I got into hospital administration for a year, I've written my memoirs of growing up in the South, it's called Martin 947. I started a little production company to publish and promote that and some videos to help transgender women with issues like voice and makeup. I also help run six or seven free Web sites on transsexual issues. Calpernia.com, and tsroadmap.com, the No. 1 info resource for transsexual women.'
While the military's policy regarding gays—and its soldiers' behavior—is brought into question by Soldier's Girl, Pierson sees the film first and foremost as a story of 'two people falling in love with each other.' Regardless, it's undeniable impact pushes the 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' question into even the most quintessentially Middle American homes.
'The people who could really be affected by this film wouldn't have access to it in arthouses—here it will be broadcast in the homes of people who could really learn something,' Pace opines. 'I think [the military's policy on gays is] a shame because nobody is happy with it. Neither side. That said, I also find it's really vague. 'Don't ask, don't tell.' There aren't to-the-letter consequences, to-the-letter rights granted. There's no protections for either side. It's not a thorough policy at the end of the day.'
See www.sho.com for more information/schedule details.
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