A Manual for New Mexican Stories: FilmStack Challenge #7

On Lucia Berlin's "A Manual for Cleaning Ladies"

Charlotte Simmons

provided this month’s FilmStack Challenge:

For the seventh Filmstack Community Challenge, I want you all to write about how you would adapt a piece of media — or pieces of media — as a film if you were given the keys to a studio and a blank check.

On a Personal Note, 'I Saw the TV Glow' (Filmstack Challenge #6) + Filmstack Challenge #7 Reveal

So let me tell about Lucia Berlin.

A fun activity to do to get to know someone is to go to a bookstore and each buy a book for the other person to read. This idea went viral for some first or early dates, but I applied it for a while to just general hangs as well, for anyone who was interested. Thus, one time I went to The Strand with my friend Natalie, and she bought me the short story collection A Manual for Cleaning Women based off some reviews she had recently read.

I had never heard of Lucia Berlin, but her short stories sparked recognition for me hard.

Here’s the thing. I was born and raised in Albuquerque, NM, and part of growing up there includes being taught local literature in English class. However, most of what was taught as New Mexican literature wasn’t really my experience with New Mexico. You have the fantastic Rudolfo Anaya, who exquisitely covers the small town Chicano coming of age story in Bless Me, Ultima. The Adults in My Life all liked Tony Hillerman, who populated frontier mysteries with native Hispano and Indian characters. My nerd friends were aware of New Mexico’s attraction to sci fi and fantasy writers, especially around Santa Fe and Taos, like George R.R. Martin.

But Lucia Berlin described the parts of New Mexico I lived in. Herself an alumnus and later professor at UNM, she was college educated but not MFA / prestige. She was an alcoholic who found herself surrounded by alcoholics. She lived in Albuquerque’s exurban communities — the sort of casitas carved out of what used to be ranches along Rio Grande Blvd, which could also have been Carñuel heading into the East Mountains or the hippy libertarian amalgam off-the-gridders on the West Mesa or my own Tijeras community, where poor people in humble but affordable houses and worked full time at Wal-Mart lived right next to upper middle class people with three story McMansions and huge plate windows who worked at Sandia Labs, but nevertheless barbecued together and groused about politics and bankers.

In the short stories of A Manual for Cleaning Women, you meet kind Diné dry drunks with delirium tremens who get you chatting at Angel’s Laundromat with dark but hilarious jokes, working artists with domestic issues that make the sort of Southwestern bleached-cow-skull-on-brown-and-orange-landscapes paintings the populate local gallery walls and sell enough to pay rent, long walks and chats along the Bosque del Apache while looking at the herons, and women in jeans and cowboy boots who fall for their abusers. These are my people. Some of them are dumb but they care. Most are quite smart but lack ambition and don’t really develop potential. They get along with each other, despite their drama and gossip. Berlin cuts to their hearts and souls concisely, and without any pretense to showcasing wit. It’s all observation, not observation humor.

My beleaguered, much read, faded and stained copy of A Manual for Cleaning Women

It’s not all set in New Mexico: she’s also lived in LA and NY and Idaho and Mexico, and in a couple of short stories she talks about her experiences from a few years in her teens living in Chile. Other than Chile, she has weirdly been to places connected to me through my own experiences or family. She also worked as a nurse and has a healthy sense for body horror and the material dimension of the human condition.

Berlin and I vibe, then, on the same spectrum. When she writes its as if she’s talking to me on a patio overlooking the foothills, while we drink and she smokes. Her words smell like my father on a fall night.

A Manual for Cleaning Women sparked my first feature-length script. I didn’t even think about it, or consider it, or plan it. After reading the short stories, I was particularly attracted to one called “Strays,” about a community of alcoholics sent by a recovery program to an isolated area of the desert (I believe south of Los Lunas) where they are put to work rebuilding the abandoned military derricks they live in and eventually take over management of the program themselves, as if subtly abandoned and reborn. I set that story at the center and filled much of the rest of the script with details and plot points from either other parts of Berlin’s stories, or my own memories and knowledge.

I blasted out 81 pages in a week. I workshopped those pages and got notes, and then I figured if I am to finish this script, I should get the rights to the stories.

This was in 2019. My friend Pablo helped me out and called around to find the rights. The publisher said some production company holds the option but couldn’t tell Pablo which. I was told to contact them again in April, which I did. Still not available, call next April (2021). I did, still not available. Meanwhile, it didn’t seem worth it to develop a script I do not have the rights to. I moved on to writing two other feature scripts based on my own original concept to avoid that issue.

Then the news hit that Almodovar, of all people, was signed on to develop a feature based on A Manual for Cleaning Women with Cate Blanchett.

Picture from here

I had mixed feelings hearing this. On one hand, I love his work and can see what he sees in Berlin’s writing. In shorthand: women’s stories, with community and financial struggles. I see it, I definitely see how he could make an excellent movie from that source. I could even see how the movie might come out of the short story “Strays” instead of maybe one of the Mexican, Chilean, or possibly LA-based stories.

On the other hand, there’s no way Almodovar’s movie would be anything like mine. It becomes a sort of, “Could we both do it?” Even if we used the same stories, the results would just be so different I don’t think they’d even really compete with each other. I feel maybe people would enjoy comparing them, but the only people who would be like, “You can’t have both movies” would, unfortunately, be the people who finance such things, and of course they’d go with Almodovar before they went with me, on a sheer marketability basis.

Also, Cate Blanchett is perfect for the role. Spectacular casting. I would kill to work with her on this movie.

Well, it turns out Almodovar dropped out of the development, and that it’s Cate Blanchett’s production company Dirty Films that holds the option on the book.

So this is to put out there, publicly: if anyone knows Cate Blanchett or anyone at her production company, and would be able to put me in contact with them, I would love to pitch this script!

As for the script itself, I do know what work it has left to do. I need to develop a little bit more of the ‘Satellite Stray’ community that I created and how they build out the barracks from recovery center to self-owned commune. I have to pull out Belinda, a character completely of my own invention and not from the Manual for Cleaning Women stories, by the roots and redevelop her completely, but I have some clarity on how to do that. And there’s a structural / pacing pass. I have room for more story development: the script is roughly 20 pages short. But it’s a script I can certainly finish.

So that’s my answer to Charlotte Simmons’ challenge: what work do I want to adapt? I want to grab a crew of New Mexican filmmakers and invite Cate Blanchett to shoot Satellite Strays near the VLA in New Mexico, based off the writing of Lucia Berlin. That’s my dream adaptation.

---

Previous FilmStack Challenges:

Want to Watch Some Good Movies?:

Movie Recommendations: 3 Wordless Features

Send me a Venmo tip!: