presented by Cheryl Eagan-Donovan at the Ninth Annual Shakespeare Authorship Conference in Toronto on October 18th

TorontoPresentation

SHAKESPEARE NEWS NOV2013

Thanks to Carol Patton and Hartley Pleshaw for this great article in Imagine Magazine.

SHAKESPEARE DOCUMENTARY AWARDED GRANT

Nothing is Truer than Truth, the Controversy Films documentary project about Shakespeare, has been awarded a grant by The De Vere Society. Based in England, The De Vere Society is dedicated to the proposition that the works currently attributed to Shakespeare were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Nothing is Truer than Truth is currently in post-production and scheduled for release later this year. The film trailer and excerpts may be viewed at: http://www.indiegogo.com/NOTHINGISTRUERTHANTRUTH?a=289012&i=emal

Controversy Films also announced the addition of new members of the production team and the formation of an Advisory Committee to assist in developing outreach, marketing and distribution strategy for the project. The committee includes many prominent Shakespeare scholars and film industry professionals. Mark Anderson, Roger Stritmatter, Earl Showerman, Richard Whalen, Richard Waugaman, Bonner Cutting. Carole Sue Lipman, Ben August, Al Austin, Sara Rubin, John Lindsay, and Lyda Kuth have all agreed to contribute their expertise to the project.

Meredith Crowley has joined the Controversy Films team as co-producer. Crowley’s credits include 40 Million Strong, a documentary about children affected by HIV/AIDS in Durban, South Africa, and a documentary for the non-profit organization “Tremendous Hearts,” about housing for children affected by AIDS in Capetown, South Africa. Meredith has edited programs including Lessons From Little Rock: a National Report Card; Knock First, a reality series on ABC Family; and Au Revoir Expos, a documentary about the Expos baseball team. Her most recent locations department credits include the television programs Rescue Me (FX), Person of Interest (CBS), and Ringer (CW); and feature films Arthur (Warner Bros), Friends With Kids, and Rabbit Hole.

Nothing is Truer than Truth co-producer Steve Maing’s new film High Tech Low Life about citizen cell phone journalists in China, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in April. It screened at the Sheffield Docfest, and at the Frontline Club and Open City Docs Fest in London in June, and will air on PBS in 2013.  The film’s producer, Trina Rodriguez, joins the Controversy Films team as editor for Nothing is Truer than Truth this month. Rodriguez works as a freelance editor and producer in New York City. Her work has appeared in festivals and museums and her documentary Our Lady Queen of Harlem screened in 2009 at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight and is being distributed by Third World Newsreel. She holds a BA in Anthropology and did graduate work in Documentary Studies at The New School.

Composer John Kusiak will write original music for Nothing is Truer than Truth. Kusiak has written music for many award-winning documentaries, including programs for PBS and the Sundance Channel. John’s score for Errol Morris’ film Tabloid won the 2012 Cinema Eye Honors award for Best Original Music Score.

Nothing is Truer than Truth focuses on the fourteen-month period when Edward de Vere escaped the confines of life at Elizabeth’s Court and traveled the Continent from his home base in Venice, gathering the material for the great canon that would become known as the works of Shakespeare. The film provides a behind-the-scenes look at the cities and landmarks referenced in the Shakespeare plays and visited by Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, during his continental tour in 1575-76.

The film features interviews with world renowned Shakespeare actor and scholar Sir Derek Jacobi, Tony award winner and former Globe Theater Director Mark Rylance, Paul Nicholson, Executive Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Richard Paul Roe, author of The Shakespeare Guide to Italy, Michael Cecil, 18^th Baron Burghley and descendant of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and Tina Packer, Founder and Artistic Director of Shakespeare & Company.

Last year the crew filmed interviews with scholar Roger Stritmatter, on his seminal research on the Geneva Bible owned by Edward de Vere, and psychiatrist Richard Waugaman, whose article on the Shakespeare allusions found in the Whole Book of the Psalms is currently ranked 4^th among the most read list in the journal Notes & Queries.

Most recently, director Eagan-Donovan and co-producer Steve Maing filmed an interview with the acclaimed and controversial Artistic Director of The American Repertory Theater, Diane Paulus, whose “Shakespeare Exploded” series includes the innovative disco interpretation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Donkey Show, and the Punchdrunk co-production of Sleep No More.

Director Eagan-Donovan studied Shakespeare and wrote poetry as a literature major at Goddard College, has a BS in Finance & Business Administration from Boston University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. Her debut documentary, All Kindsa Girls, screened at art house theaters and film festivals in London, Toronto, and throughout the US, is featured in Paul Sherman’s book Big Screen Boston, and was short-listed for the PBS series POV. The film’s theatrical screenings included the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, and the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Boston.

She served as President of Women in Film & Video/New England for several years, and is the 2012 Judge for the Annual Screenwriting Competition. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Next Door Theater in Winchester, Massachusetts. Her credits as publicist include the award-winning features All the Rage (Roland Tec 1996) and Could Be Worse! (Zack Stratis 2000).  In addition to poetry, she has written narrative screenplays, stage plays, and short stories, and published articles about Shakespeare, screenwriting, and film. She currently teaches screenwriting at Boston University’s Center for Digital Imaging Arts, and Northeastern University. Cheryl has been a lecturer at several Shakespeare Fellowship & Shakespeare Oxford Society Joint Authorship conferences. Her new ten-minute play, Veritas, a send-up of Shakespeare academia, had its first staged reading at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in January.

The project is sponsored by The Independent Feature Project New York and funding received to date has been generously provided by individual donors and by a grant from Shakespeare Fellowship Foundation. For more information about the film, contact Producer/Director Cheryl Eagan-Donovan at eagandonovan@verizon.net.

Thanks very much to everyone who attended the “Shakespeare Goes to Hollywood” event and contributed to our Indie Go Go Finishing Campaign! I look forward to seeing many of you in Pasadena at the Eighth Annual Shakespeare Fellowship Shakespeare Oxford Society Joint Conference.

Thank you to everyone who helped make it possible for us to get to post-production. We are thrilled to announce that we have launched a new campaign for finishing funds. As key members of the NOTHING IS TRUER THAN TRUTH team, you are vital to the success of the project. We need your help to expand our audience. Please check out our new project: NOTHING IS TRUER THAN TRUTH Finishing Funds and join the team, forward, post and tweet!

NOTHING IS TRUER THAN TRUTH t-shirts are on the way! We hope to see you all at the wrap party at Oberon later this year. Can’t make it to Boston? Let’s plan a screening in your city.

Your generosity, support and enthusiasm mean so much to me. I am very grateful for your contributions to the project.

Vero Nihil Verius

Cheryl

SHAKESPEARE THE WRITER

By Cheryl Eagan-Donovan

With this week’s release of Roland Emmerich’s biopic Anonymous, audiences around the world will get their first glimpse of the Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, also known as the Elizabethan poet and playwright Edward de Vere.

The most controversial thing about the film is not that it presents Edward de Vere as Shakespeare, but that the haphazard fictionalization of certain aspects of British history, in a story about actual people and events, will allow the Shakespeare industry to dismiss as entirely untrue what is an otherwise valid premise for the study of the canon.

As a writer who has studied Shakespeare for many years and as a filmmaker who has produced a soon-to-be-released documentary film about the life of Edward de Vere, I am thrilled that Shakespeare the writer is now the topic of discussion every morning at my local Starbucks.  Nothing pleases me more than experiences like the one I had recently, on an airplane bound for Italy, when I sat next to a young couple who had seen an advertisement in a magazine and wanted to know more about the man behind the mask in Anonymous. The media buzz today is palpable thanks to Sony’s impressive marketing campaign. The daily postings by orthodox Shakespeare scholars in defense of their man Will Shaksper of Stratford are both amusing and revealing. It appears that the keepers of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust fear most the prospect that students will now be asking questions about the author of the plays and poems. James Shapiro, Columbia University professor and author of Contested Will, in his rush to prevent the film from “encouraging students to search Shakespeare’s works for ‘messages that may have been included as propaganda and considered seditious’” likens Anonymous to Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, and in doing so, makes an indirect yet nonetheless offensive reference to Oxfordians as Holocaust deniers.

It was my own discovery of Edward de Vere, in a history class taught by Harvard University professor Donald Ostrowski, which led me to question everything I had previously been taught about Shakespeare. For students to become great writers, I reasoned, they must understand the process of writing. They must be exposed to great writing by other authors, they must learn first by imitation and then later by mining their own life experience for deeper, often subconscious, emotional truths, and finally they must commit to a lifetime of revision, the real work of writing.  My own passion for writing inspired me to seek out the true author of the greatest works in the English language, and I found the definitive biography of de Vere in Mark Anderson’s book Shakespeare By Another Name. I acquired the documentary film rights to Anderson’s book and began writing my own nonfiction script.

Oxford was a man quite unlike any other. His was an extraordinary life.  Rich with adventure, passion, tragedy and controversy, it was the life of a scholar, a spendthrift, a scoundrel, a venture capitalist, an athlete, and an intellectual. He was a rebel, a romantic, and a poet. He was a fatherless son, an absentee husband, a reluctant father, a capricious lover, a dandy, a courtier, a royal favorite, and an accused traitor.  He was witty, temperamental, prone to jealousy, vain, and resentful. He had all the markers for genius: loss of a parent at an early age, travel to foreign lands, exposure to many languages, and access to the greatest books and teachers of his day. “Above all,” author Joseph Sobran wrote in Alias Shakespeare, “his brilliance made him a magnet even to other brilliant men.”

Unfortunately, audiences will not see this de Vere on screen in Anonymous. The Earl is presented as a dolt and a madman, despite the best efforts of Rhys Ifans. Edward de Vere’s legendary razor-sharp wit is nowhere to be found. Instead, the nobleman hears voices that compel him to write.

As a screenwriter, I felt quite strongly that many of the characterizations were rather flat and one-dimensional. The Queen is portrayed as simply infatuated with Oxford. As with the depiction of de Vere, there is no trace of the complex personality and fearless power that characterized Elizabeth I. Again, this cannot be attributed to the superb acting by Vanessa Redgrave as the elder monarch, and her daughter Joely Richardson as the young Elizabeth. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was Elizabeth’s most trusted advisor, and de Vere’s guardian and later father–in-law. Burghley is recognized by Elizabethan scholars as a brilliant and complicated man, and the model for Hamlet’s Polonius. In narrative terms, he is both a worthy rival and antagonist for de Vere, and also capable of being a strong ally. Burghley was truly influential in shaping the man who would become Shakespeare, but here he is reduced to a caricature of evil. In Anonymous, the queen is cast as a helpless pawn in the grand scheme of the Cecils’ bid for control of the throne.

The film includes plenty of costume-drama, romance-novel sex but no hint of the bisexuality and homoeroticism that can be found throughout the plays and the sonnets, and can also be found in contemporary references to de Vere’s life. I had anticipated that, at a minimum, the scenes with Essex and Southampton together in the tent in Ireland would reveal their rumored relationship, but this was not to be. In Emmerich’s Elizabethan London, not even Marlowe was gay. Lord Burghley’s daughter, Anne Cecil, whom de Vere married against his will, is nothing more than a nagging housewife. Much of the dialogue is pure exposition, and many of the film’s plot twists are simply over the top, such as when Shaksper kills Marlowe. Suspension of disbelief becomes increasingly difficult as the story races to its explosive conclusion, the Essex Rebellion.

It was quite clear to me that Orloff’s original premise was to write Ben Jonson as Salieri to de Vere’s Mozart, in an homage to Amadeus. The Jonson character steals the show literally, opening and closing the story within the story with the Holy Grail of the play manuscripts in his possession. In his attempt to incorporate the Prince Tudor theories, the conjecture that de Vere was Elizabeth’s son, and then as her lover, fathered Southampton, Emmerich has transformed Orloff’s original screenplay, Soul of the Age, into a crash course on a the hypothetical justification for the author’s anonymity touted by a faction of Oxfordians. The idea that Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, was actually the love child of Elizabeth and Oxford, has been around for a long time and is offered as a convenient explanation for the one hundred and twenty-six Sonnets by Shakespeare that seem to be passionate love poems addressed to another man. There is no historical evidence that any version of the Prince Tudor theories is true. Trying to compress de Vere’s truly epic life story for the big screen, even without including his imaginary royal lineage and claim to the throne, is a monumental task, and the director resorts to a series of flash forwards and flashbacks, devices screenwriters generally try to avoid. The technique succeeded in confusing even the audience with whom I saw an advance screening of the film, a group of Shakespeare scholars and enthusiasts who know the chronology of de Vere’s life backward and forward.

It is possible to overlook the preponderance of historical inaccuracies and inherent story structure problems because the production value is fantastic. The film looks beautiful, if dark, by candlelight, and some of the best actors in the world appear on screen, including Sir Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance. It’s truly exciting that many people who have never heard of Edward de Vere will now be exposed to a small slice of his life. I am indebted to the director, the writer, and everyone at Sony Pictures Classics for leading the way, opening the floodgates of inquiry, and creating the opportunity for other writers to tell more of his story. Anonymous makes only a brief reference to De Vere’s travels, when the Earl tells Elizabeth how much he enjoyed the Italian women. My documentary, Nothing is Truer than Truth, focuses on the fourteen-month period when De Vere escaped the confines of life at Elizabeth’s Court and traveled the Continent, making his home base in the cosmopolitan city of Venice, and gathering the material for the great canon that would become known as the works of Shakespeare.

De Vere’s life story is perhaps the greatest story ever written. Above all else, he was a writer. It is not without irony that scholars who have championed de Vere as Shakespeare, after fighting for years to reveal the absurdities of the Stratford man’s story, are now being asked to endorse a new myth about the life of the writer. There is a significant amount of groupthink in the Oxfordian camps these days, centering on the premise that if Anonymous encourages viewers to rethink Shakespeare the writer, then it will have achieved success in spite if itself. As a writer, I must admit that I feel compelled to agree. As a filmmaker, I hope that the movie leaves audiences wanting more.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: September 29, 2011

(Boston, Massachusetts)

Contact: Cheryl Eagan-Donovan (781) 729-6204

SHAKESPEARE IN ITALY ON SCREEN

Director Cheryl Eagan-Donovan recently returned from Italy where she and her crew were filming on location for the new Controversy Films feature length documentary, Nothing is Truer than Truth. The film is currently in post-production and a preview screening will take place at the 2011 Shakespeare Authorship Conference on October 15^th in Washington, D.C.

Nothing is Truer than Truth focuses on the sixteen-month period when Edward de Vere escaped the confines of life at Elizabeth’s Court and traveled the Continent from his home base in Venice, gathering the material for the great canon that would become known as the works of Shakespeare. The film provides a behind-the-scenes look at the cities and landmarks referenced in the Shakespeare plays and visited by Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, during his continental tour in 1575-76.

Deborah Cesana, location assistant for the films The Tourist and Merchant of Venice, served as Production Coordinator for the seven-day shoot, and Emmy Award winner Paul Sharpe served as Cinematographer.  On screen, Alberto Toso Fei, Italian television personality and co-author of Shakespeare in Venice, shares his extensive knowledge of his native city and its history. Toso Fei has written several books on Venice and a new book on Rome.

Locations in Venice included the Palazzo Ducale, the Church of Santa Maria Formosa, the Church of the Greeks, La Frezzeria, the Rialto Marketplace, Titian’s studio, and the Jewish Ghetto. The crew traveled to Brenta to visit La Malcontenta, Villa Foscari, the inspiration for Portia’s Belmont in Merchant of Venice, and then on to Padua, Mantua and Verona, where they enjoyed exclusive access to many historical sites that remain virtually unchanged from the time that de Vere encountered them. Last year, Eagan-Donovan interviewed Richard Paul Roe, whose book The Shakespeare Guide to Italy will be released by publisher Harper Collins in November.

The film features interviews with world renowned Shakespearean actor and scholar Sir Derek Jacobi, Tony award winner and former Globe Theater Director Mark Rylance, Paul Nicholson, Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Michael Cecil, 18^th Baron Burghley and descendant of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, and Dr. Charles Graves, author of the forthcoming book Edward de Vere and William Shakespeare, about the family ties between the Earl of Oxford and the man from Stratford Upon Avon.

Last month the crew filmed interviews with scholar Roger Stritmatter, on his seminal research on the Geneva Bible owned by Edward de Vere, and psychiatrist Richard Waugaman, whose article on the Shakespeare allusions found in the Whole Book of the Psalms is currently ranked 4^th among the most read list in the journal Notes & Queries.

Information on the 2011 Shakespeare Authorship Conference can be found at http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/conference2011/. Funding for the film has been generously provided by individual donors and by a grant from Shakespeare Fellowship Foundation. Tax-deductible donations to help fund the project can be made through the Independent Feature Project at www.ifp.org. For more information about the film, go to www.controversyfilms.com.

We are very pleased to announce that we will be screening a PREVIEW of NOTHING IS TRUER THAN TRUTH at the Shakespeare Authorship Conference in Washington D.C. on Saturday October 15th. For more on the conference, go to http://www.shakespearefellowship.org/conference2011/

Join the discussion and show your support for Brunel University’s MA in Authorship Studies Program:
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=417586&c=1

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 2, 2011
(Boston, Massachusetts)
Contact: Cheryl Eagan-Donovan (781) 729-6204

SHAKESPEARE IN VENICE
A fundraising preview party, Carnivale in Venice, will take place on April 13th at Oberon in Cambridge, MA. The event will include a Venetian Carnivale celebration and masque, guest DJ, dancing, clips from the work in progress, and a rare live performance by Boston’s rock aristocracy The Upper Crust.

The Upper Crust, Boston’s most controversial band, have thus far, in the modern age, released four recordings, “Let Them Eat Rock”, “The Decline and Fall of the Upper Crust”, “Once More Into the Breeches”, and “Entitled” — a catalogue that exemplifies their quest for perfection in the field of Rocque and their quite natural preoccupation with the travails of a life of privilege and the many misunderstandings — at times humorous, at times tragic, but always infuriating — that invariably accompany it.

The party celebrates Controversy Films’ trip to Venice in May to film on location as production of the new feature length documentary, Nothing is Truer than Truth, continues this spring. Director Cheryl Eagan-Donovan and crew will visit the neighborhoods and landmarks referenced in the Shakespeare plays and visited by Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, during his continental tour in 1575-76.

Nothing is Truer than Truth focuses on the sixteen-month period when Edward de Vere escaped the confines of life at Elizabeth’s Court and traveled the Continent from his home base in Venice, gathering the material for the great canon that would become known as the works of Shakespeare. Deborah Cesana, Location Assistant for the films The Tourist and Merchant of Venice, will serve as Production Coordinator in Venice.

In addition to filming in Italy, this year’s production schedule for Controversy Films includes interviews with American Repertory Theater Director Diane Paulus, scholar Roger Strittmater, author and psychiatrist Richard Waugaman, Stephen Greenblatt, author of Will in the World, Tina Packer, founder of Shakespeare & Company, Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, and Academy Award winning actor F. Murray Abraham, as well as a visit to the Folger Shakespeare Library.

In January, Controversy Films was invited to The Century Club in New York, where Broadway producer Edgar Lansbury and scholar Gerit Quealy hosted a lecture by Mark Anderson, author of the Oxford biography Shakespeare By Another Name. In September, Eagan-Donovan spoke at the Ashland Authorship Conference and filmed interviews with Paul Nicholson, Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Michael Cecil, descendant of William Cecil, Lord Burghley.

OBERON is Boston’s exciting new destination for theater, drinks, and nightlife on the fringe of Harvard Square. Based on the belief that opportunities create artists and through its marriage of theater spectacle with the aura and energy of a nightclub, OBERON seeks to provide local and itinerant artists with a professional and supportive ‘access venue’ in which to develop and present new theatrical works for its community. OBERON is home to the international smash hit, The Donkey Show, a pulsing disco fantasy based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Funding for the Venice production has been provided by individual donors and by a grant from Shakespeare Fellowship Foundation. Tax-deductible donations to help fund the project can be made through the Independent Feature Project at www.ifp.org. Sponsors for the event include AV Presentations www.avpresentations.com and Women in Film & Video New England www.wifvne.org.

Oberon is located at Zero Arrow Street in Harvard Square, Cambridge. Tickets are available online at www.cluboberon.com.

For more information about The Upper Crust, go to www.theuppercrust.org.