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In pursuit of self-knowledge, Tumbleweeds screenwriter Angela Shelton found more selves than she anticipated.

by Cari Beauchamp

Long and lean, Angela Shelton strides into the beachside restaurant still looking very much like a model, the career that veered her off one life road and deposited her on another 15 years ago. Now an acclaimed screenwriter, Shelton has squeezed several lives into her 30 years, and she continues to plumb them for stories that explore, celebrate and examine idiosyncratic characters, including herself.

With a quick smile and an easy, frequent laugh, Shelton radiates contentment, sureness, and positive energy. Although those characteristics run deep, they have not come easily. She can tell the usual array of horror stories associated with being an attractive woman struggling to be taken seriously as a writer, producer, or director in Hollywood. Because of her early life, these are mere frustrating hurdles to overcome. Her wounds, while healing, were first inflicted when she was three years old and her father left her mother for her mother's best friend. Her 'free spirit' mother announced she was moving to California and asked Angela if she wanted to come with her or live with her father and his new wife. 'I chose my father because my stepmother made Kool-Aid,' Shelton says with the wry smile that underscores both her acute memory of the episode and the sad irony of asking a three-year-old to make such a life altering decision.

Her childhood, brief as it was, ended soon after. Her new family came with a stepbrother and a stepsister, both of whom her father sexually abused. After several years, during which Shelton was a fellow victim and witness, her stepbrother finally spoke out. He told his biological father, who not only believed him but acted immediately. All three children were taken out of school that day and placed in foster care. Angela's mother, Joann, was summoned from California to take custody of her eight-year-old daughter. So began the saga of Tumbleweeds, traveling across country and eventually landing in Los Angeles.

Shelton was 16 and had just started college when her mother visited an astrologer. Joann was told that her daughter's chart prophesied a lucrative modeling career, so open calls were sought and a contract with the Nina Blanchard Agency was the result. Modeling took Shelton to New York, Munich and Milan as well as Paris, where she lived for more than a year. After moving to Manhattan at 21, she met Gavin O'Connor, who cast her in the starring role of his film, Comfortably Numb. They married after the film was completed in 1995.

Shelton's talent and tenacity, combined with her finely tuned survivor's sense of humor, turned her traumatic early teen years into a humorous mother-daughter buddy film that captivated both audiences and critics. Tumbleweeds, which she co-wrote with O'Connor (they divorced before it was actually made), won the Filmmaker's Trophy at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival, where Fine Line purchased it on the spot. The film and its star, Janet McTeer, were bathed in praise, with McTeer going on to earn the Golden Globe for Best Actress and a nomination for Best Actress by the Academy, the Screen Actor's Guild, and numerous festivals.

In the three years since Tumbleweeds was released, Shelton has adapted Kaye Gibbon's novel Charms for the Easy Life into a Showtime movie and written a television pilot, Chocolate Gravy, as well as an original script, Fake, a dark comedy about plastic surgery, which she will direct later this year. In between, she has written, directed and produced a powerful documentary on the epidemic of sexual abuse, now titled simply, Angela Shelton.

Just as Agnes Varda picked up a camera to go looking for The Gleaners and Marina Zenovich did the same to discover Who is Bernard Tapee, Shelton found herself with a passion to tell a story and packed an RV with equipment and a small crew to do Searching for Angela Shelton. Her intent was to take the pulse of American women at a moment in time, but the story she found was very different and much more personal than the one she set out to tell.

→ Cari Beauchamp: Tell me about your documentary.

→ Angela Shelton: It started out being called Searching for Angela Shelton. My idea was to see where women are now, what we had been through, where we were going, our similarities just from the nature of being women. I searched the Internet and came up with more than 75 Angela Sheltons and just started cold calling them. Some lines were disconnected, but a lot of them called me back, and we shared stories. Many of them were so open with me because they felt safe telling a stranger with their same name their stories. Then I drove around the country and met every Angela Shelton who would talk to me. In talking to them, I realized that rich/poor, black/white, young/old, the common denominator for so many Angela Sheltons was abuse.

→ You hadn't planned to focus on sexual and physical abuse?

→ No. It is very different than the film I thought it would be in many ways. First of all, it took much longer than I expected it would from start to finish, but the biggest difference was that I didn't realize it was going to be about me. I guess I was in denial. Denial runs in my family.

→ What was your process in writing this script?

→ I started out with an original concept, and then when I got home and watched all the footage and wrote a script as best I could. But really we were just putting everything together and finding the story. Then we reworked everything and massaged the story out. I wrote it like a long poem almost, off all these Angela Sheltons telling one universal story that funnels into a girl talking to herself. That was the third script.

→ When you are writing a documentary, particularly one without narration, so much of it is done in the editing room.

→ That's for sure. And I work with a fabulous editor. We worked and reworked. Then I'd go off and write, and we'd rework it, or she would have this awesome idea about something. It was great. Editing was the hardest part for me, partly because my father was in my face everyday, not to mention I had to realize I was making a film about myself. I worked with all the Angela Sheltons' lines so they're all meeting my lines and we're all telling the same thing. It has a lot to do with hope, and it's littered with metaphors. My favorite is when the anonymous Angela says to me 'I don't know who you are.' The picture fades into a photo of me and Angela Shelton Michigan, who is an African American Woman. And that's one of my favorite parts because no, you don't know who I am. I could be any of these women, and any of us could have the same story. I love that. That was my editor's little gem.

→ Your work, certainly Tumbleweeds and Angela Shelton are solidly feminist, yet contrary to stereotype, they are not anti-male. In fact they have true empathy for men.

→ I love men and have some great men in my life. Gavin and I are close friends, and I have a great relationship with my brother. He is so incredible. The men who helped me with Angela Shelton, no pun intended, were fabulous. There are so many men out there ready and willing to help women. It was never, 'Hey baby, what do you need…' either. They were more like, 'You're cool. What you're doing is cool, and I want to help you.' They believe in the issue, and they believed in me and thought was just nuts enough to pull it off.

→ You're just starting to show the film in small groups, nut what has been the reaction so far?

→ One of the people who saw it came up and said, 'This movie is a Survivor's Guide Book.' That puts it perfectly. It is like a guide in the sense that it breaks it down. It's sparking a conversation and getting people talking about incest, rape and abuse. It is letting people know that they really are not alone. It's incredible how many people come out with their own stories after seeing it. First, you have to say it out loud and confront it however you can. It doesn't have to be like me showing up on my father's doorstep on Father's Day, but somehow, even if it is writing a letter you don't ever send, you have to confront it. Then you come to terms with the fact that abuse does not define who you are. That's the big one for me: What someone did to you does not define who you are.

→ The scenes of you and your father are absolutely devastating; you look straight ahead with your teeth clenched and him staring at you, begging you to forgive him without ever admitting a thing.

→ I didn't realize how powerful and horrible that was until I got into the editing room. Seeing it over and over was probably the most difficult process for me in making this movie. I was near the end, going over the sound bites, and putting in where he says, 'I'll swear on 10 Bibles.' Then for the first time, I heard him say, 'I swear on my love for you.' That was such a punch in the stomach. Somehow I hadn't heard it before in all the times I'd seen the footage. That sent me into a spiral of hell.

→ Had you thought you had dealt with these issues before you started making this film?

→ I thought I had, but I had only started to chip away at it. I had sort of confronted my father years ago. I was 16 and leaving the country to model, and he called me. I hadn't talked to him for a few years, but he said he wanted to tell me to 'keep my clothes on over there.' I didn't respond to that, but then he said, ' I just don't want you growing up too fast.' That I just couldn't resist. 'Dad, I grew up when I was eight' just jumped out of my mouth. He quickly got off the phone, and that's as close as I came to confronting him until I was making Angela Shelton. On the road in the RV, I was dealing with a lot of it with humor, but I slowly realized, especially in the editing room, that this isn't funny. I realized I was angry, and I should be. Through the process of writing it and editing it, I found the movie and essentially myself, although that is an ongoing process. That's when I changed the title from Searching for Angela Shelton to Angela Shelton. There's a scene when I cut out the 'Searching' from my T-shirt and say, 'I am no longer searching for me.' But I also know I am still searching; I laugh and realize it's called post-production.

→ I was blown away when in the film, after revealing what you and the Angela Sheltons have been through, the words ' FORGIVE YOU' appear on the screen.

→ That's important to explain because I do not forgive the act. The act is unforgivable. I forgive for myself. I forgive because I want to live. Because I don't want to be strangled by my anger and resentment anymore. And I am talking to myself. I forgive myself for defining myself by the abuse that was inflicted on me and feeling so unworthy as a person because of it.

→ Your first experience in independent filmmaking received an incredible response. How did Tumbleweeds come about?

→ I wrote it when I was living in Paris. It was a novel first, but I never published it and eventually my then-husband, Gavin O'Connor, who is an incredible filmmaker, said, 'This needs to be a movie.' So we wrote the script together, which was so much fun. Blood, sweat, and tears. It became one of those classic independent movie stories: We had the money, we lost the money, we had the star, we lost the star, and on and on. After almost five years of that, everything just fell into place. When it finally came together, it was incredible. I believe everything happens for a reason anyway, and Gavin and I were meant to meet and make that movie; it's our baby. I learned so much about filmmaking in the process. I really rode his back during Tumbleweeds, and we had a great time.

→ And the title?

→ I was already toying with calling it Tumbleweeds when my mother sent me a postcard with a picture of a tumbleweed on it. That confirmed it. I was thinking of that title not just because they roll along so freely but because of a specific incident: I was about 13 and we were leaving one of her husbands - I don't remember which one - and we were driving across the desert and these tumbleweeds blew across the road. My mom was always doing things like stopping to pick wildflowers and making these fabulous arrangements out of the craziest things. So she jerks the car to a stop, gets out, and goes running down the highway after this tumbleweed. I'm watching this, thinking that my mother has definitely lost her mind, when she catches up to this tumbleweed and grabs it up into a big bear hug. She lets out a holler because she didn't realize that tumbleweeds have thorns. I started laughing so hard, and she comes back with this defeated look on her face. I thought, This is just like her running after these men. They sure look good, but when you get a hold of one, it's loaded with horns.

→ Speaking of laughing, was it difficult to put a comedic spin on what had to be fairly traumatic events at the time?

→ No, because I've always dealt with problems with humor. If I couldn't laugh, I'd been dead a long time ago. I still use humor all the time in my life, but I realize now that I was using it sometimes as a way of dealing with sadness and anger. I think actually I was attracted to angry men for a long time because they were acting out the anger that I wished I could. I got to be angry vicariously through them. Now I use a lot of physical activity to deal with anger and emotion, some visualization, meditation, walks, all those things. I've certainly dealt with a lot of things over the years, but now I'm using humor more honestly. And I still laugh a lot. Everyday,

→ How much of Tumbleweeds happened the way it was shown on screen?

→ There were a lot more men and a lot more road trips. We molded several into one and got rid of some. In our first draft, there was a man who was loading a gun to kill us as we packed up and literally jumped in the car to escape. No one believed that could happen; it was too dramatic. That made me laugh because it was the absolute truth. But the scene with the sanitary napkins, us dancing around and laughing, really happened like that. And I did play Romeo, and the girl who was cast as Juliet didn't let me kiss her.

→ What's your relationship with your mother like now?

→ Great. She's incredible and a really good mother. She's very supportive of me and thinks I'm great. She's my biggest booster.

→ Besides your mother, were there other important influences in your early years?

→ Oprah Winfrey saved my life. I was probably about 13 and all this self-hated and suicidal depression was hitting me, and I didn't know how to cope. Then Oprah came out in public and talked about being abuse as a child. I was floored. I thought, Wow, here's this amazing woman who not only survived but thrived. It game me hope I could do that too. On top of it, she was a black woman. Ever since I was a kid all I wanted was to be a black woman. I went to a school for a while that was mainly African-American, and I always thought back women were it. The ones I met were strong; they didn't take any crap, and I always wanted to be like that. Oprah and the movie The Color Purple were huge influences in my life.

→ After Tumbleweeds your next project was writing the screenplay for Charms for the Easy Life for Showtime. How was adapting a novel different than writing your own original material?

→ It was similar for me in the sense that the novel was about three generations of women in the South, and they resembled my family, so it wasn't a stretch. Kaye Gibbons is such a good writer that it was a pleasure to work with her words. She had been displeased with other adaptations and when I saw her at the premiere she said that Charms was one of the best she's ever seen. To hear that from the novelist was the best compliment I could ever receive.

→ And writing for television?

→ My mother did a really great thing with TV. She used to make me go through the TV Guide to pick what I wanted to watch. If I could giver her the lesson I was learning or what I was getting out of a particular show, then I was allowed to watch it. Otherwise it was head candy, and I had to turn it off. In part because of that and also some of the shows that are on, I don't really watch much TV. So I decided to write a show that I would want to see. It's called Chocolate Gravy, and it's set in the South but it is a universal story. My log line is sex, drugs, and Christian rock. There is racism, abuse, split families, and communities coming together all with a through line of faith. I love the characters.

→ What's your next project?

→ It's called Fake, and it's a dark comedy about plastic surgery. I was in Africa of all places in 2000, out on the plains where there was nothing for miles. I was sitting in one of those canvas bathtubs next to a zebra, looking out, and the whole movie just came to me: beginning, middle, and end. All in that bathtub in Africa. I came home and feverishly wrote the script in 17 days. I wrote it before the documentary. I was planning on doing it then. But it turns out to be a great thing that I worked on Angela Shelton first because I have a journal full of lessons. I feel pretty confident going into Fake.

→ What was the most important lesson?

→ The most important question I learned was to ask was, 'Why are we shooting this scene?'

→ You clearly are going to be busy for a while, nurturing Angela Shelton into release and making Fake, but what else would you like to do?

→ I'm just a girl who wants to do cool things. I'd love to write a one-woman show. I secretly love dance. I love to travel, to be with my dog and my friends. But I am happiest when I am writing.

→ What is the biggest surprise so far in regard to Angela Shelton?

→ The majority of the people coming to me to tell their stories have been men. It's shocking. One guy's soccer coach, another's stepfather, and of course, priests. It's crazy. It's great that it's coming out. The door has been opened a crack, and I hope that my film helps bust it off its hinges. I put up a website a couple of months ago, and there have been more than 20,000 hits on it. It's international too. Abuse is not just in this country, that's for sure. There have been hits from China, Iran, Croatia, France, England, Hong Kong, and of course a ton from America. People are telling their stories.

→ What would you like to see happen?

→ I just want to change the world. Abuse of women and children is an epidemic in this country. It makes me crazy that you can rape a woman or molest a child and go to jail for no time at all, but you can sell or buy drugs and go to jail for more than 10 years. Seems to me we've got our priorities messed up. I'm not the first person to stand up and say that abuse must end, but I want to say it loudly and powerfully. I want to provide a platform for people to speak out and a safe harbor for victims, and above all to let people know that they are no alone. If a little girl doesn't kill herself because she is inspired by how far I have come, then I did my job. That allows me to go even further and address more issues.

→ Is that where your fearlessness comes from?

→ I know that it must sound as if I have a huge ego to just go do all this stuff and put my name on it, literally, but it is all mixed with a feeling of unworthiness as well. Sometimes my ego and my self-depreciation do a little dance, and I sit back and wonder what the hell I'm doing, and who the hell am I to think I can do this. But I know now that everyone has a little demon on their shoulder. Some people are just better at kicking him off. My fearlessness, when it is there, comes from faith and from the idea of doing it to help someone else.

This article first appeared in the August 2003 issue of 'Written By' the magazine of the Writers Guild West

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