Lizzie Borden Had an Axe and More Press
Tonight’s the night. We will all get to see for ourselves just how awful or wonderful the Lifetime movie is on the case. There is one event scheduled for those interested in going out on the town. The Taphouse Grille will be broadcasting the movie with sound on all of their televisions. I plan on going (you need reservations) so I will report back about it tomorrow or later tonight.
Today’s New Bedford Standard Times had two articles on the movie. One is an interview with Clea DuVall, conducted by Phil Devitt.
The other, by Phil Devitt, shares the thoughts and opinions of a few Lizzie Borden folks, including me!
Enjoy!
More than a century after she was acquitted of killing her father and stepmother in cold blood, Lizzie Borden is about to face a new jury — on Lifetime, in a made-for-TV movie.
As part of a social media blitz to promote “Lizzie Borden Took an Ax,” which premieres tonight at 8, the network is asking viewers to use the hashtags #LizzieisInnocent or #LizzieisGuilty to cast their votes. People still wonder what exactly happened that fateful day in August 1892. They still speculate; not much has changed.
The film tells the story of what might have happened, assuming Lizzie was guilty. Christina Ricci, who has made a career of playing troubled women, has the starring role. Nova Scotia doubles as 19th-century Fall River.
In the real Fall River, anticipation is high, especially at the Lizzie Borden Bed and Breakfast Museum, the 92 Second St. home where Andrew and Abby Borden were done in with a hatchet. The house is decorated to appear the way it did 122 years ago.
“We’re excited for the movie. I can’t wait to see what they’ve done with it,” said Lee-Ann Wilber, who manages the home. “I will be watching it at a friend’s place. We don’t have cable at the house. It doesn’t fit with the theme.
“We see a lot of TV shows filmed here and there’s always a peak in phone calls and emails from people asking questions. There’s been buildup for the movie. Hopefully the phone calls will turn into customers in the summer.”
Another Fall River resident sure to watch the movie is Stefani Koorey, editor of “The Hatchet: A Journal of Lizzie Borden and Victorian Studies” and cofounder of the Fall River History Club.
“I watch anything Lizzie: operas, ballets, plays, one-acts, musicals (rock or otherwise),” Koorey says. “I love seeing how they each take the story and make some sort of plausible tale. I even watch the campy slasher films where Lizzie possesses someone and starts killing people.”
Koorey says she doesn’t mind when artists take Lizzie in a creative direction, so long as they make it clear they’re not claiming their story is the truth. The Internet Movie Database page for the Lifetime movie bills it as the “true story,” however, and that has Koorey a little concerned.
Ricci said in a recent Los Angeles Times interview that the movie tells the story of a guilty Lizzie who was perhaps driven to kill by jealousy.
“One of the main theories is that the father was living for a long time with his two daughters as wives, so that was disrupted when the stepmother came in,” Ricci told the Times. “With the amount of rage directed at her you have to wonder why. So the theory is that Lizzie hated her for replacing her role with her father …”
Koorey says Lizzie was 5 by the time her father remarried, which would have made the “daughter-wives” scenario highly unlikely.
“The whole story of Lizzie is surrounded by myth and rumor,” Koorey says. “The people who knew Lizzie loved her, kept their mouths shut and were very private about their relationship with her and what she did for them. The people who didn’t know her made up stuff about her and she became a scary person.”
“Parallel Lives: A Social History of Lizzie A. Borden and Her Fall River,” a 1,000-page book authored by Fall River Historical Society curators Michael Martins and Dennis Binette, shows evidence of a thoughtful, gentle woman who showed affection for children and animals.
“As it turns out, she seems to have had a loving relationship with her father and spent a lot of time at the cemetery tending his grave,” Martins told The Fall River Spirit when the book was published in 2011, adding that Lizzie often had the Borden plot shoveled after snowstorms so she could visit. “How many people visit the cemetery in the winter?”
Wilber, at the bed and breakfast, said Lizzie, in her later life, was by most accounts a “very kind” woman. “But who knows what her true personality here at Second Street was?”
Wilber said the Lifetime movie is the first television feature movie about the case since 1975’s “The Legend of Lizzie Borden,” starring Elizabeth Montgomery.
“I hope for accuracy,” she said. “The more accurate the movie is, the less cleaning up we’ll have to do when people come for tours. I look forward to seeing what Lifetime has to offer us.”