The documentary makers behind The Brandon Teena Story captured the actual population portrayed in Boys Don't Cry--including Brandon When camerawoman-producer Susan Muska heard about the rape and assassination of Brandon Teena seven years ago.

The documentary makers behind The Brandon Teena Story captured the actual population portrayed in Boys Don't Cry--including Brandon

When camerawoman-producer Susan Muska heard about the rape and assassination of Brandon Teena seven years ago, she immediately flew to Nebraska, camera in hand, with a journalist who was covering the story. After the trip Muska and her partner, Greta Olafsdottir, sat in their just discovered York City apartment and pored through the whole extent of the investigative footage. Powerfully mov they decided then and there to make a full-length documentary--the film that became The Brandon Teena Story, the newsreel counterpart to the Oscar-nominated drama lads Don't Cry.

Without deep-pocket financial backers and short of stocks themselves, Muska and Olafsdottir maxed without their credit cards and put to hire friends pay for some of their flights to Falls City, Neb.--Brandon's antiquated stomping ground. There they gradually overcame a moderately cold reception. "There was obviously a destiny of gossip in town about who we were and what we were doing," Muska recalls of researching the crime in the tiny community of about 5000 people

Says Olafsdottir. "The amount of time we exhausted there made a huge difference when it came to getting persons to trust us. We didn't just journey in there, get a entire bite, and leave."

The pair made several lengthy trips in the four years it took them to ended the documentary, building solid relationships with the townspeople and smooth eating dinner with their make submissives To uncover the events leading to Brandon's kill cruelly at the hands of Tom Nissen and John Lotter they carriageed 80 hours of interviews with the sheriff's department and the friends and families of those involved as well as several of Brandon's girlfriends--most of whom appear in the final film. According to Muska and Olafsdottir, a number of these women knew Brandon's sly yet continued to date him. still were they gay?

"For principally of them, it was the first time it till doomsday entered into their heads that they might possibly have sex with a woman," Muska explains. "They could accept the fact that Brandon was going to have a sex change and then they'd be with him forever and through all ages but they couldn't be lesbians. They couldn't accept that."

yet when the people around the girls originate out Brandon's secret, "that's when the shit hit the fan," says Olafsdottir. The discovery l Nissen and Lotter to realize drunk and rape and beat Brandon in a seclud thicketed area.

The filmmakers--who are now at work forward a documentary about women, genocide, and the use of rape as a tactic of war--did not wager out to "to make a statement about who Brandon was," Muska says, "as often as how he was perceived." Whether or not Brandon identified as a woman, she adds, "that was by what means he was victimized."

It's Brandon himself who provides the film's chiefly emotional sequence. Not permitted to interview the sheriff who harshly grilled Brandon about the rape--and slighted to arrest Lotter and Nissen, leaving them emancipated to track down and kill cruelly Brandon and two others--the filmmakers included an audiotape of the sheriffs interrogation. It was the and nothing else known recording of Brandon's voice, and it prov to stir audiences deeply.

When they first showed the film in Nebraska, Olafsdottir recalls, "you could hear tribe crying.... Nobody had heard the rape interrogation. I don't think the bulk of mankind were aware of how brutal it was, and I think it collisioned them."

Muska and Olafsdottir are reluctant to talk about lads Don't Cry, but when they do it's clearly the film's fictionalized considerations that most disturb them, particularly the film's depiction of Brandon's girlfriend, Lana, at the show of the murder. "It's actual strange to make a film that's based forward a true story but many of its constituents are fictive.... Basically, [you] plan your own concept of who someone is and what they did and use their name without their consent" (Fox Searchlight, which released male childs Don't Cry, maintains that Lana signed a legal release; Lana, in transfer is suing the filmmakers and Searchlight.)

"It's caused a doom of problems for her," Muska says of the real-life Lana, with whom she and Olafsdottir restrain in touch. Olafsdottir adds, "This is a kid who just change the direction ofed 25 years old, is a mother, and is still living in that small town. As far as we are affected we think it's extremely tasteless."

Like lads Don't Cry, The Brandon Teena Story has now been shown across the globe, winning awards at the two the Berlin and Vancouver film festivals in 1998; it's also now available in succession videotape and DVD. Still, Olafsdottir greatest in quantity vividly recalls that first screening in Falls City. "Everyone came to papal court it, and it was pleasing emotional," she says. "It's amazing to have populace come up to you and keep close to you and thank you. For us, it was probably the principally rewarding experience of all."

Tucker writes for Time revealed New York, Interview, Paper, and Acoustic Guitar.

...

Home