1.
In November 1991, Sassy Magazine named 25-year old Adrienne Shelly as an up-and-coming actress to watch. In the feature’s accompanying photo, Shelly reclines with her arms raised above her head, her gaze equal parts seductive and skeptical. The article compares her to Rosanna Arquette, and she seems to exude some of Chloë Sevigny’s cool, but the overall effect is something different, something unique. Adrienne Shelly has (or had?) it, the ineffable quality of a natural-born star, plus the work ethic to make it all happen. Consider Waitress (2007), the off-kilter romcom starring Keri Russell and later adapted into a Broadway musical, which Shelly wrote while pregnant with her first child and directed to critical acclaim. The movie premiered at Sundance, a few months after her husband discovered her body in their West Village apartment, staged to look like a suicide. Shelly had just turned 40. Her daughter was two years old.
2.
The untimely death of a movie star is a specific kind of tragedy, one that aches with the melancholy of a dream cut short. We mourn, perhaps selfishly, as an audience, grieving culture’s loss while posting thoughts and prayers. Left only with the tabloid’s retelling of the coroner’s report, we speculate about what could’ve been. Alongside this imaginative impulse to look forward comes the morbid desire to look back, rewatching old movies like a detective hunting for clues. Is there something in the script, the delivery of a line, a glance at the camera that can illuminate the mystery of a star gone too soon? What could an actor’s beginnings, captured on film, tell us about their eventual end?
3.
The Unbelievable Truth (1989) represents the convergence of several beginnings. The debut feature of Hal Hartley, whose black comedies would become emblematic of American independent cinema of the '90s, the movie also marks the debut of Shelly, whose headshot had been unearthed from the slushpile on Hartley’s desk. “It was kind of incredible, what happened with that movie,” said Shelly, “considering what we expected out of it, which was nothing.” Shot in 12 days on a shoestring budget in the director’s hometown of Lindenhurst, New York, the movie follows Audry, played by Shelly, a suburban Long Island teen whose nihilism puts her in conflict with her aspiring finance-bro boyfriend and aggressively penny-pinching father. Granted acceptance to Harvard but unable to pay the tuition, Audry skips school, reads critical theory, and contemplates the end of the world. Enter the sullen and mysterious Josh, recently returned to town after several years in prison for manslaughter. Audry falls for him immediately, but Josh has reservations: if he’s capable of murder, is he capable of love? This is the movie’s guiding moral quandary, unsettling in hindsight, given the fate of its star.
4.
The first installment of what would be dubbed the director’s Long Island Trilogy, The Unbelievable Truth features the ironically soapy premise, stylized dialogue, and deadpan delivery that would become Hartley’s hallmarks (“Less less less,” the director reportedly told his actors. “I don’t want to see anything on your face at all.”) Some critics compared his sensibility to David Lynch, but Hartley’s concerns are less surreal and smaller in scope, with focus on the twinned themes of suburban ennui and the pathetic violence of white masculinity. The Unbelievable Truth is set in a world of crumbling autobody shops and roadside dinners. It’s a world in which a fight is always about to break out, men beating their chests while their girlfriends roll their eyes and light another smoke. From this world comes Audry, bright beyond her limited opportunities, the prospect of the apocalypse more promising than anything in her immediate future. With Josh she softens, and here we see Shelly’s dexterity as an actor, her physicality shifting from defensive into something more goofy and grasping, a kid with a crush. After Josh rejects her, she wheels her bike into the side of an overpass, a halfhearted attempt to assert control over something, anything. When the bike bounces back unscathed, she awkwardly picks it up and tosses it, then gives it a feeble kick when it hits the ground. In the following scene, she announces that she’s moving to New York to pursue a career in modeling, her eyes covered by dark sunglasses, her face betraying nothing.
5.
Like Audry, Shelly grew up in the suburbs of Long Island. Like Audry, one can imagine her desperate to escape. Unlike Audry, Shelly’s father passed away suddenly when she was 12 years old, leaving her with, “this feeling that life could end at any given moment.” So she seized the day, dropping out of film school and moving to New York as soon as she could. “Probably the rush wasn’t necessary,” she said, “but I finally had gotten up the courage to do it, so I wanted to do it right away.” This sense of urgency continued throughout her career, almost as if she knew her time was limited. After The Unbelievable Truth, which enjoyed a successful premiere at TIFF followed by a bidding war for distribution, Shelly starred in Harley’s follow-up feature Trust (1990), another Long Island love story centred around a pair of misanthropic misfits, this one with a significantly higher budget. An indie darling by the early '90s, she eschewed the allure of Hollywood in favour of New York, where she could work at her own pace. She founded a theatre company, appeared in several off-Broadway plays, and padded her resume with bit parts on Law & Order and Oz. She also began writing and directing her own features. In Sudden Manhattan (1996), her directorial debut, Shelly stars as Donna, a flailing 20-something who inadvertently stumbles across a murder scene. “A writer friend said to me ‘Look, Adrienne, it’s your first feature. It might take seven years to get produced,’” she said. “And I thought, ‘That is not acceptable to me,’ because in my way of thinking I might not live another seven years.” She took her stage name from her father, making his first name her last.
6.
In New York, Audry doesn’t thrive the way that Shelly did. She ends up posing nude in Europe and then crashing at the apartment of her predatory manager, dodging his advances and reading nihilist philosophy. She returns to Long Island and reunites with Josh, who, through some convoluted final-act twist, turns out to be totally innocent of the crime he was alleged to have committed, and the couple, now unencumbered by the moral scruple of murder, are free to live happily ever after. This ending feels like a cop-out, an easy way for the lovebirds to conveniently circumvent the burden of their choices. What if Josh had murdered someone, and Audry decided to love him anyway? The ambiguity of that hypothetical is more resonant with the realities of life, where bad things happen to good people and love offers no absolution, but The Unbelievable Truth is a movie, and expecting a movie to perfectly mirror the realities of life is a fool's errand. From the very beginning, Adrienne Shelly’s filmography mobilized murder as motif, plot point, moral conundrum; it would be a stretch to claim any connection between these thematic concerns and what happened to her in real life, but the parallels between on screen and off feel too unnerving to ignore. Maybe there’s no causal link between the movies of Adrienne Shelly and the circumstances of her death, no meaning to infer upon the incident beyond its violent and tragic randomness, but one can’t help but impose significance in retrospect, revisiting her oeuvre while hunting for clues. What can the beginning tell us about the end? Maybe nothing more than a series of cliches: life is cruel; the good die young; time is of the essence.
7.
Police initially declared Shelly’s death a suicide, but her husband insisted otherwise. The day he found her body, he had come home to find the door unlocked and all the money missing from his wife’s wallet. She left no note, and besides, she had a baby daughter and a movie set to premiere at Sundance, wasn’t that enough to live for? But perhaps more convincing than any speculation about her mental health was the sneaker print found at the scene of the crime, on the toilet seat, its tread pattern matched to the shoes of a construction worker who had been renovating the building where Shelly had a studio, the noise from which, Shelly complained, made it impossible for her to work.
Stay tuned for Notes on Adrienne Shelly, Part Two, coming soon…
1.
In November 1991, Sassy Magazine named 25-year old Adrienne Shelly as an up-and-coming actress to watch. In the feature’s accompanying photo, Shelly reclines with her arms raised above her head, her gaze equal parts seductive and skeptical. The article compares her to Rosanna Arquette, and she seems to exude some of Chloë Sevigny’s cool, but the overall effect is something different, something unique. Adrienne Shelly has (or had?) it, the ineffable quality of a natural-born star, plus the work ethic to make it all happen. Consider Waitress (2007), the off-kilter romcom starring Keri Russell and later adapted into a Broadway musical, which Shelly wrote while pregnant with her first child and directed to critical acclaim. The movie premiered at Sundance, a few months after her husband discovered her body in their West Village apartment, staged to look like a suicide. Shelly had just turned 40. Her daughter was two years old.
2.
The untimely death of a movie star is a specific kind of tragedy, one that aches with the melancholy of a dream cut short. We mourn, perhaps selfishly, as an audience, grieving culture’s loss while posting thoughts and prayers. Left only with the tabloid’s retelling of the coroner’s report, we speculate about what could’ve been. Alongside this imaginative impulse to look forward comes the morbid desire to look back, rewatching old movies like a detective hunting for clues. Is there something in the script, the delivery of a line, a glance at the camera that can illuminate the mystery of a star gone too soon? What could an actor’s beginnings, captured on film, tell us about their eventual end?
3.
The Unbelievable Truth (1989) represents the convergence of several beginnings. The debut feature of Hal Hartley, whose black comedies would become emblematic of American independent cinema of the '90s, the movie also marks the debut of Shelly, whose headshot had been unearthed from the slushpile on Hartley’s desk. “It was kind of incredible, what happened with that movie,” said Shelly, “considering what we expected out of it, which was nothing.” Shot in 12 days on a shoestring budget in the director’s hometown of Lindenhurst, New York, the movie follows Audry, played by Shelly, a suburban Long Island teen whose nihilism puts her in conflict with her aspiring finance-bro boyfriend and aggressively penny-pinching father. Granted acceptance to Harvard but unable to pay the tuition, Audry skips school, reads critical theory, and contemplates the end of the world. Enter the sullen and mysterious Josh, recently returned to town after several years in prison for manslaughter. Audry falls for him immediately, but Josh has reservations: if he’s capable of murder, is he capable of love? This is the movie’s guiding moral quandary, unsettling in hindsight, given the fate of its star.
4.
The first installment of what would be dubbed the director’s Long Island Trilogy, The Unbelievable Truth features the ironically soapy premise, stylized dialogue, and deadpan delivery that would become Hartley’s hallmarks (“Less less less,” the director reportedly told his actors. “I don’t want to see anything on your face at all.”) Some critics compared his sensibility to David Lynch, but Hartley’s concerns are less surreal and smaller in scope, with focus on the twinned themes of suburban ennui and the pathetic violence of white masculinity. The Unbelievable Truth is set in a world of crumbling autobody shops and roadside dinners. It’s a world in which a fight is always about to break out, men beating their chests while their girlfriends roll their eyes and light another smoke. From this world comes Audry, bright beyond her limited opportunities, the prospect of the apocalypse more promising than anything in her immediate future. With Josh she softens, and here we see Shelly’s dexterity as an actor, her physicality shifting from defensive into something more goofy and grasping, a kid with a crush. After Josh rejects her, she wheels her bike into the side of an overpass, a halfhearted attempt to assert control over something, anything. When the bike bounces back unscathed, she awkwardly picks it up and tosses it, then gives it a feeble kick when it hits the ground. In the following scene, she announces that she’s moving to New York to pursue a career in modeling, her eyes covered by dark sunglasses, her face betraying nothing.
5.
Like Audry, Shelly grew up in the suburbs of Long Island. Like Audry, one can imagine her desperate to escape. Unlike Audry, Shelly’s father passed away suddenly when she was 12 years old, leaving her with, “this feeling that life could end at any given moment.” So she seized the day, dropping out of film school and moving to New York as soon as she could. “Probably the rush wasn’t necessary,” she said, “but I finally had gotten up the courage to do it, so I wanted to do it right away.” This sense of urgency continued throughout her career, almost as if she knew her time was limited. After The Unbelievable Truth, which enjoyed a successful premiere at TIFF followed by a bidding war for distribution, Shelly starred in Harley’s follow-up feature Trust (1990), another Long Island love story centred around a pair of misanthropic misfits, this one with a significantly higher budget. An indie darling by the early '90s, she eschewed the allure of Hollywood in favour of New York, where she could work at her own pace. She founded a theatre company, appeared in several off-Broadway plays, and padded her resume with bit parts on Law & Order and Oz. She also began writing and directing her own features. In Sudden Manhattan (1996), her directorial debut, Shelly stars as Donna, a flailing 20-something who inadvertently stumbles across a murder scene. “A writer friend said to me ‘Look, Adrienne, it’s your first feature. It might take seven years to get produced,’” she said. “And I thought, ‘That is not acceptable to me,’ because in my way of thinking I might not live another seven years.” She took her stage name from her father, making his first name her last.
6.
In New York, Audry doesn’t thrive the way that Shelly did. She ends up posing nude in Europe and then crashing at the apartment of her predatory manager, dodging his advances and reading nihilist philosophy. She returns to Long Island and reunites with Josh, who, through some convoluted final-act twist, turns out to be totally innocent of the crime he was alleged to have committed, and the couple, now unencumbered by the moral scruple of murder, are free to live happily ever after. This ending feels like a cop-out, an easy way for the lovebirds to conveniently circumvent the burden of their choices. What if Josh had murdered someone, and Audry decided to love him anyway? The ambiguity of that hypothetical is more resonant with the realities of life, where bad things happen to good people and love offers no absolution, but The Unbelievable Truth is a movie, and expecting a movie to perfectly mirror the realities of life is a fool's errand. From the very beginning, Adrienne Shelly’s filmography mobilized murder as motif, plot point, moral conundrum; it would be a stretch to claim any connection between these thematic concerns and what happened to her in real life, but the parallels between on screen and off feel too unnerving to ignore. Maybe there’s no causal link between the movies of Adrienne Shelly and the circumstances of her death, no meaning to infer upon the incident beyond its violent and tragic randomness, but one can’t help but impose significance in retrospect, revisiting her oeuvre while hunting for clues. What can the beginning tell us about the end? Maybe nothing more than a series of cliches: life is cruel; the good die young; time is of the essence.
7.
Police initially declared Shelly’s death a suicide, but her husband insisted otherwise. The day he found her body, he had come home to find the door unlocked and all the money missing from his wife’s wallet. She left no note, and besides, she had a baby daughter and a movie set to premiere at Sundance, wasn’t that enough to live for? But perhaps more convincing than any speculation about her mental health was the sneaker print found at the scene of the crime, on the toilet seat, its tread pattern matched to the shoes of a construction worker who had been renovating the building where Shelly had a studio, the noise from which, Shelly complained, made it impossible for her to work.