Arts & Entertainment

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Film aims to tell tale of Poe's heart

By: Randall King

Posted: 10/15/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

Brent Fidler took his one-man play and made it into feature film, in which he stars as Edgar Allan Poe. (SUPPLIED PHOTO)

MOVIE PREVIEW

Poe: Last Days of the Raven

Cinematheque

Screens at 9 p.m. Thursday and Friday, and midnight Saturday.

DEATH followed Edgar Allan Poe like a shadow through his life, and it was death that first inspired a film about Poe's tragic life.

Prior to the Winnipeg première of his film Poe: The Last Days of the Raven at Cinematheque, Winnipeg-born actor-playwright Brent Fidler recalls how he turned to the works of Poe for solace after the death of a friend "threw me for a loop" in 1981.

Fidler eventually wrote a one-man play about the celebrated American writer, co-produced by Manitoba Theatre Centre's artistic director Richard Ouzounian at the Warehouse Theatre in 1983. When he performed the play years later at the Poor Alex Theatre in Toronto, no less a Poe specialist than Vincent Price (The Raven; The Pit and the Pendulum) surreptitiously caught a matinee performance and told him it had movie potential, hooking Fidler up with a Hollywood agent.

Fidler subsequently performed the play at the Hollywood Court Theatre, where notables in the audience included Kiefer Sutherland and Drew Barrymore. A feature film version found a champion at New Line, but stalled even as another Poe enthusiast, Sylvester Stallone, unsuccessfully attempted to launch his own project on Poe. ("I have his script and he has mine," Fidler says.)

Fidler took matters into his own hands and decided to make the film himself with his life savings, getting the most from a meagre $100,000 budget during the writers' strike of 2007-08, shooting the film in and around the disused Raymond Burr Theatre in New Westminster, B.C. Completed in 2008, the film won the top prize last year at the Cinema City International Film Festival in Los Angeles, just a few months shy of the 200-year anniversary of Poe's birth in January 1809.

Fidler, who now divides his time between Vancouver and Los Angeles, says the film may act as a corrective to the film adaptations inspired by Poe over the years.

"Roger Corman (producer of the aforementioned Vincent Price thrillers) and other Hollywood producers didn't really get Poe's core," Fidler asserts. "They emphasized the Stephen King-like horror, but Poe was a master of psychological storytelling. He was the first transcendentalist."

Poe's fantastical stories and poems were products of a grim reality, Fidler says, which included the deaths of his mother, father, sister, brother, foster parents, wife -- and eventually Poe himself -- by tuberculosis or "consumption," a plague Poe poetically described in his story Masque of the Red Death, Fidler says.

Fidler will introduce this week's screenings of the film at Cinematheque with question-and-answer sessions to follow.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 15, 2009 D3

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